My Beautiful Sports Bar

To the Red City on a Friday night to see the wonderful Tsotsi, an absolutely enthralling South African film. Wandering down Warwick Road before the show I passed by one of the city's burgeoning designer pubs. Readers with long memories may recall My Beautiful Laundrette, in which a run-down washeteria, populated by deadbeats, social inadequates and a schizophrenic arguing with a phone-box, is given a radical high-end makeover and transformed into the gorgeous, pouting, eponymous laundrette. Within two minutes of re-opening it is once again populated with the same cast of deadbeats, schizophrenics and inadequates. The designer bar in question was clearly trading under the same franchise. The jeunesse doree of the Red City seemed to constitute a score of hairy-arsed, overweight 40-somethings sporting coups sauvages Sundance moustaches and Newcastle United football shirts. Clearly the style revolution that is contemporary Carlisle has passed me by . . .