I almost ended up living there, for a time at least. And when I go back to visit with my wife, who I met there and with whom I ‘did long-distance’ for 18 months, I sip beer and wonder what my weekend world might be like. What suburb? What park and café on Saturdays? Who would we socialise with? What pub would be local?

I think of all this a lot as two friends, who live in London, and I, plan to go out for a few in central London in on a November Saturday night. To my surprise, despite both of them first moving there almost twenty years ago, neither have any clear views on where we’d go. At the eleventh hour, one of them suggests a pub near Waterloo. We converge at 8. There isn’t even standing room. We abandon it. Funny, in all my decades living in Dublin, in all the pubs, be it a weeknight, Thursday (the new Friday), a weekend night or a long weekend, it’s rare that I’ve entered and waved the white flag of surrender.

We walk around the corner and find ourselves on a quiet street of terraced, two-storey brick houses. We can hear the pulse and pull of central London in either direction: on one side, the pubs and nocturnal fever around Waterloo; on the other, the masses near the sprawling towerscape by London Bridge. Yet here, all is quiet, all houses firmly curtained/blinded for the night, garlanded by cars, some of which remind me of the vehicles you’d find in a 1970s British spy drama.

For a moment, the night is hanging on a knife-edge. The lads have no ideas. We’re not bothered wandering around the metropolis searching for a watering hole for an hour. We walk for a minute, all unsure where we’re headed. A pub presents itself on the corner of Roupell Street: the Kings Arms. A quick walk around it is ominous. All the low, tiny, circular tables are occupied. The bar is fully populated. The restaurant at the back of the pub, with plenty of tables, isn’t full, but we’re told there are more reservations, people to come. This is it then: here or nothing. We resign ourselves to standing, and resting our drinks on the tiled mantlepiece of a gas fireplace.

All the beers on offer are exotic sounding and for the first time I’ve realised that no matter where I’ve drank in Britain (and I’ve been out a good bit in London, Manchester, the Lake District, and holidayed in many other places), this is the case. People complain about the fact that British pubs are ‘tied’ – that the conglomerates who own the majority of pubs limit the offering of drinks – but in truth, there’s a stronger element of choice than in Ireland. It feels like 90% of the draught brews in Britain are warm. My advice: identify the type of beer you like (e.g. ale, lager), choose one and hope for the best. I choose an amber ale and hit the jackpot.

An hour into the conversation a small group abandon their table near the door. We grab it and tell our forty-something year-old bodies that it’s downhill from here. I sip my pint, listen to my two friends argue the toss over something, and observe.  A few tall men wearing England rugby scarves are leaning into their tables to quietly discuss something, possibly still the repercussions of the England game they attended at Twickenham that afternoon. There’s a couple in their sixties sitting by the bar talking casually about this and that, pausing between topics, occasionally looking at and sharing information from their phones. They look like native Londoners. It is uncosy here but not cold. It is loud but not vociferous. It is civil. It is benign. I’ll be honest, I don’t quite have the word for it, but it’s different to home. This would have been my Saturday night out, as it is for my two friends: rare; away from the suburb they live in; a trek to get to; nice but not the same.

The last big difference from home is the brutal ending. The bell rings for last orders. My friend is in the gents. When he returns, I suggest a final one though we neither need it or will be glad of it tomorrow. Are you, he asks. It’s only 10.55. The barwoman (no lounge staff in most pubs in Britain) warns me I’ll only have ten minutes to drink it. I’d forgotten about their closing time period. At ten past, she comes over and hands us two plastic glasses to decant our drinks into, for the road, literally. Two minutes later, she is back with our marching orders. Our night is over and suddenly we’re on Roupell Street in the November cold with plastic glasses of spirits. I make a note to self: before going out in London again, search online for pubs with a late licence. Surely there is somewhere in the centre of the old British Empire that serves a pint two hours after one’s kids have gone to sleep. But if there isn’t, it’s worth another shot in the Kings Arms.

Happy Christmas.