"TARBUCK IS RUBBISH", "TARBUCK MUST GO".
It was only a short distance, along narrow alleys that were part of a still existing medieval street plan, now opened up, with car parks on the levelled rubble of wartime bombsites; but the messages were repeated many times.
When I arrived at my destination, a long, narrow, cavern-like pub in one of the curiously-named Heys* (Tempest, in this case) called The Liverpool Tram, it was dark inside, in sharp contrast to the bright early evening sunshine outside, and my light-adapted eyes had difficulty making things out, but I saw there was only one other person there apart from my friend Keith: a shadowy figure hunched over the bar seated on a bar stool at the far end of the room, some thirty feet away.
"Did you see someone's chalked graffiti everywhere about Tarbuck; 'TARBUCK IS RUBBISH', 'TARBUCK MUST GO'?", I said. Before Keith could reply, the man at the other end of the bar burst out: "Tarbuck! Don't talk to me about that bastard!".
On another such occasion in the same part of town, this time in the Yates's Wine Lodge on Moorfields, which would become the subject of Richard Wilson's kinetic architectural installation 'Turning the Place Over' some thirty five years later, I witnessed something I still have trouble believing myself. This Yates's was in a modern building in the brutalist style with, as is the way with Yates's decor, much tile work, with the bar floor, walls, and the face of the bar itself covered with heavy-duty matt finish slab tiling, with a shallow gutter running the length of the bar, presumably to facilitate swilling the place out after closing time.
While my friends were in the lavatory, I saw a man standing at the bar get his cock out and piss against the bar, at the same time as he was thirstily tilting his pint to drain it - 'in one end and out the other'.
No-one appeared to notice apart from me, or if they did, the sight was unremarkable enough to attract no response. The man left shortly afterwards.
When they returned, my friends at first refused to believe what I told them, and suggested the urine that I pointed out in the gutter was spilt beer.
* A hey is a piece of land enclosed by hedges, cf hague, haag (Dutch), hage (Norwegian).
