My passion and yearning for a way of life I never experienced is shared by many others, sick of the obsessed modern culture of insular living and celebrity.

I’m almost certain that I was born 40 years later than I should have been. I’m not sure whether it’s the constant yearning for the past or having zero interest or affinity with modern popular culture but my face, interests and outlook on life don’t fit the year of my birth.

A regular dream and desire is to be transported back into the past. Particularly the pubs. Perhaps I’m just an old romantic, a fantasist or have been watching too much Peaky Blinders but modern pubs and society lack a certain class and mystique. Maybe that’s why I never stop trawling the backstreets hunting for old school boozers, perhaps even that one enigma, unchanged and ruined by time and somewhere to find a place where I can just fit in.

In my dreams I long for smoke filled saloon bars, resplendent in dark velvet, thick lush carpets, bronze foot-rails and blokes wearing suits. Every bloke. I mourn the loss of standards now and going to the pub isn’t the event it used to be. As recently as the mid-late 80s (with the Yuppie boom) men still wore suits to the boozer on a Saturday night. People made an effort and looked the business.

I enjoy a good gastro pub but crave wet-based drinkers that just had small snacks and sarnies on the bar for the locals (Millie’s at The Old Duke of Cambridge in Bow springs to mind). Very few of those traditional establishments still exist, sadly because they’re not sustainable. People standing around shouting the odds and actually interacting with strangers or familiar faces is also a miss as most places now are sterile and lack an authentic atmosphere. Trudy Barry, a barmaid from Poplar, commented to Reuters in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic that: ‘In the trendy places people go to the pub to meet friends. They don’t go there to make them’ In 21st century London that rings very true now.

I wish things were different but alas they’re not, you simply can’t recapture the past. However, I do comfort myself that I’ve ticked off plenty of proper boozers before they closed and at least sampled a slice of that way of life before it’s gone forever and either the pub(s) close or it’s £15 burgers all round. Because, like the sands of time, when I was busy and wasn’t looking, they faded away.