It was long time coming. Our apparent Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had to announce it at some point. He didn’t want to do it, it was an aknowledgement of failure to his Brexit Gammon voters, but finally he had to do it. There was no choice. The projections about the virus were obvious. I knew this before he did, or publically wanted to say it. But this afternoon, he admitted it for real.

The Pubs have to shut down. Tonight. Officially. The Police are going to check this and everything.

I knew this was going to happening for some time. As usual, the Scottish Government were warning about this for the past couple of weeks, way before Westminster did. And, as usual, the Gammons on social media were shrieking that First Minister Sturgeon was doing this way ahead of Hay Hair Boris PM, blah blah, getting uppity. Who would I rather trust? Hmmm…

I trusted the First Minister, and my local pub.

My local pub is, at this point, Redmonds. When it first started, I wasn’t sure of what to make it. For the twenty years I’ve lived in Dennistoun, it’s always threatened to gentrify, but, somehow, never got there.

Redmonds was an example of this. When I first went in there, it seemed like an archetypal Hipster pub, but it wasn’t. It had table service, and really great pub food (eg steamed/Bao buns, and cracking pizzas). They even played vinyl records, and invited regulars to submit vinyl albums to play- one time, I sumbitted U2’s “The Joshua Tree”, and I remember someone saying to me: “So, you’re bringing U2 Back?”, unironically, and I said, also unironically, “Yes, this is a really good album”, and it happened again when I submitted albums by Haircut 100 and Janet Jackson.

Eventually, I even did some DJ spots on the Saturday nights, which you can hear below. My favourite is when I did Hallowe’en, when I followed The Young Gods “La Fille De La Mort” with Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes”. The director of the DJs at the time thought my mix was “fucking good”.

Redmonds became my favourite local pub. It looked possibly pretentious, but it wasn’t really pretentious, it was friendly. It served a purpose in Dennistoun for those of us who didn’t care for the sectarian pubs in the rest of Duke Street. All were Rangers apart from the Crown Creighton. But to be honest, what if you don’t want to go into either?

The irony of course, is that a lot of Celtic supporters went into Redmonds before a match anyway. They were told to hide their Celtic tops, of course. But I don’t blame them. A whole street of Rangers pubs, with only the Crown Creighton as alternative? Which had no meal options? Redmonds was a fantastic chill-out alternative, and I don’t blame them.

By this last Friday, the usual chalkboard outside the front door, which previously announced games, quizzes, brunch on a Sunday- now announced the new social distancing rules: stay 2m from each other, table service only, payment only via contactless.

It was just after 6PM. Word has spread around. All of us regulars know the news now. We’re all here together to say goodbye- 2m apart of course. The chief barstaff Iggy is noticing all the police cars running up and around Duke Street, and is getting ready to shut at 8pm. Sensing the dying moment, I request a last single malt. The shutters are going down around the windows. I say goobye to Iggy, take my last guest albums in a poly bag.

Will I be back there? Will they back there? I hope so.

And if they’re not… There are a whole bunch of people such as myself who will never forget the Dennistoun legend that was Redmonds.