After a busy week, and after we’d just had our annual Holiday Party at work (my belly filled up with hot chocolate), I popped downtown to have a festive pint in honour of the dearly departed Shane MacGowan, as it was his funeral that day in Dublin. I never drink Guinness, but I felt I should have some Guinness to mark his memory (MacGowan being famously fussy about what he drank), and I don’t like whisky. I went to the Bull’n’Mouth, the bar that was formerly De Vere’s Irish Pub. It’s not Irish any more, but the bar itself is, having been brought over from Ireland in 2011. I found that spot I like in the corner and wrote out some Christmas cards to friends in England before sketching the bar. There were quite a few people out that night; one of my work colleagues who’d been at the party was performing a brief gig with his band and his red Rickenbacker in the plaza across the street, I had just missed it. One of the professors from work, who’d also just been at the party, was having dinner in Bull’n’Mouth with his family and a group of students from his summer course in Cork, it was nice to bump into them. My wife and son were out at an orchestra concert at the High School, so I had a couple of slow beers and got on with the sketch. I overheard a man nearby at the bar ask a woman how to spell “fascist” which was an interesting chat-up line, I probably heard out of context. I was thinking of Shane MacGowan’s funeral, and caught some of it on YouTube. Singing and dancing and music and a priest holding up a box of Barry’s Tea, that’s a great funeral. I loved Shane MacGowan. When a famous person dies and they’ve meant a lot to you, even if only at certain times in your life, it can definitely touch you, and with MacGowan it was that whole thing of being London Irish in the late 80s, all the music and people and that was like our voice right there. And not just London Irish of course, the Pogues weren’t just from London, but all over Britain where Irish people had come and settled. It wasn’t always that great in the 80s for Irish communities in England, but voices like Shane MacGowan’s definitely made it ok to be who we were, at least that’s how I felt when I was a 13 year old listening to this hundred-mile-an-hour band with folk instruments and a drunken frontman from London with missing teeth and a Tipperary-twisted singing voice singing songs about my London, Soho and White City and being down by the Thames. So I have definitely been feeling sad about his death, and he was unapologetic about who he was, and his huge flaws, and I always admired that. His funeral showed how much he was really loved, and the impact he had. Would that any of us get a send-off like that. Slainte, Shane!