It’s the nostalgia that’s hard to swallow

HAVING a drink on Christmas Day used to be fun because you were banned from doing so.

It was one of the two calendar days the authorities had long deemed sacred, and they required the shutting of all pubs. That made the quest to beat the rules a challenge. If they said you couldn’t drink publicly, then you were going to exercise your constitutional right to free expression. With said expressing done from a high stool.

There were a few pubs in my orbit in Cork City that opened for a few hours, but you’d want to have ‘heavy regular’ stamped to your forehead to get in to them. I never made the cut.