I suggested to my editor recently that I should visit lots of pubs and he said “nice try, do it in your own time” but I said “no really, I want to see what’s going on with pubs, some of them are in trouble” so he said Ok (but no expenses) and I thought about it and decided the best way to do it was to go on the sub crawl in Glasgow (sober of course). So that’s what I did: I bought a ticket for the subway and off I went.

In case you don’t know what the sub crawl is – and if you live in Glasgow, that’s unlikely – it’s the tradition of getting on the subway with a group of friends and getting off at as many stops as you can manage to have a drink at the pubs near the stations. Some of the sub-crawlers do it in fancy dress; it’s not uncommon these days to be sat on the Inner Circle next to Iron Man or Captain America. The rugby players seem to like to dress up as women; I’ll leave them to explain why.

Anyway, off I went on my own version of the sub crawl, on my own, johnny-no-mates, and I stopped off at every kind of pub. The big ones were in there, like Wetherspoons on George Square. The famous ones were in there, like The Laurieston which has been on every TV drama ever. There were working men’s boozers like Brechin’s in Govan. There were studenty West End places like Kitty’s. And there were Rangers pubs. And there were Celtic pubs. I did 12 in all, and I hope I got a good impression of what’s going on out there.

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