If King Arthur had the Round Table and Obi-wan Kenobi had the Jedi Council, then nine graduates from the University of Southampton had the Portswood Crawl as their base; an annual reunion in which a meticulously planned 13 pint pub crawl would bring these dazed and confused veterans back to their old stomping ground to embark on a liver-annihilating odyssey that begins on the fringes of Highfield, weaves its way through Portswood (it is a straight road but the drunkenness causes weaving) and then passes south through Death’s Corridor before culminating at Southampton’s centre. It is a true epic; not least for the painful reminder that few of us had retained any of the exceptional drinking ability we had so gently nourished from our time at university. What follows is a tale of clinking pint glasses and a belly ache of merriment, but it is also stained by a spillage of bittersweetness; the two years we had stolen from us at uni by Covid-19 often rears its head to remind us that this group met too late. Considering the overlap in the group’s shared interest and mutual friends, this team definitely could have transpired far earlier than it did. What we discovered in our last few months of Southampton was unconditional brotherhood that never got the chance to flourish into anything more than a fleeting summer fling. This Portswood Crawl is the remedy to catch-up and to drink in a day what we might have had in three.
We few, we happy few…
The Players of the Portswood Crawl can be split into two core groups. The first side consists of the Film students: alongside myself there is Harry (the man whose astonishing drumming ability at the gig the night before may have something to do with my morning tinnitus), Josh (the undisputed heavyweight of sinking pints) and Louis (the man who masquerades as a loveable golden retriever in the day before a few lagers thaw open the frozen demon inside him at night). Then there are the Physics students: Ed (our gracious host whose PHD studies have based him in Southampton with a suitable house for us to crash at), Ethan (who dips in and out of innocuous David Brent or Mr Bean-isms), Angus (who instantly set the drinking pace at a frightening rate), Tim (most highly regarded for his consumption of the possibly illegal Dragon Soop drink) and Guillaume (actually a student of Aero Engineering but belongs with the others for actually doing a proper degree with a lot of hard work involved). This nine, this fellowship, had been out of the booze loop for too long. It was time to dust the cobwebs off the liver, to lubricate the throats and to start the constant flow of contactless payments.
Like most good pub crawls, it began with a hangover. Not quite a nasty hangover, but I had a splitting headache and ringing ears from the gig the night before. This was coupled with a belly full of five pints that had not rendered me drunk, but were now definitely making themselves known to my body. I peeled my face off from the sticky air bed I had slept on without a pillow, and began the mental preparation to face down 13 pints. The journey would start at 15:00, giving me a few hours to clear off the headache.
Pub 1: The Drummond Arms
15:00 came. Our bellies were filled with Ed’s terrific curry and energy levels were high, but a feeling of dread whispered into our ears ‘12 pints to go’. The Drummond Arms was quiet save for the locals reading the newspapers and a couple of burly men talking about Ian’s new apprentice on the site incorrectly mixing the cement. 12 Doombars were placed before us. This amber ale, a dirty jewel in England’s cultural crown, was a fine first drink. Smooth and light, it sailed down Angus’ throat first and we all played catch-up. In the words of King Theoden: so it begins.
Pub 2: Brewhouse & Kitchen
It was still light when we got to Brewhouse after a pretty long walk. The cold air did its part in cancelling out the alcohol in our system. Pint two was an IPA that came in at 4%, a tactical move at this point. We nine sat in the garden with discussion points already entering the levels of crass and vulgar. We were off, and Guillaume was first to break the seal.
Pub 3: The Mitre
Perhaps the most disappointing of the pubs was The Mitre. Despite its powerful placement on the Portswood crossroad and its proud, fortress-esque exterior, its unfriendly staff and hybrid atmosphere of retired alcoholics and family meals make it a pub of two halves with an atrocious beer garden. Everyone feels overly serious at The Mitre. Coming into the warmth made me extremely drowsy, but I had to break the seal quicker than I expected. My two toilet trips at pub three bookended an insipid pint of Carlsberg that, like any lager on tap at this Greene King establishment, had an irritating, overflowing head. I had already flushed out a good half-pint in the toilet so, when I left The Mitre, I felt like a blocked pipe had been fixed and the worst was now behind us. Reinforcements arrived in the form of Ayla, partner of Ed, who sunk a pint and politely humoured whatever ludicrous conversations were happening.
Pub 4: The Broadway
The Broadway may be the most visited pub in Southampton for the film student part of the group. It is a truly evil place of atrocious staff rumours, drunken fights, shattered windows and grizzled pool tables. Louis and I hopped onto a pool table immediately after getting a pint of Foster’s each (going for the lighter beers kept the wallet intact for a little longer). Playing pool was brilliant for sending fresh blood around the body: pacing around the table and the adrenaline rush from winning distracted me from the pint so much that I was surprised how quickly it had gone down. It was fair to say that everyone was, by now, well into the tipsy phase. A virtual reinforcement came courtesy of a FaceTime call with Minh, our tenth brother currently working in Prague. We bade Ayla and Minh adieu as they rode off into the cold gusts of Hampshire and Hungary.
Pub 5: The Gordon Arms
I ran to the Gordon Arms and headed straight for Wee 3. We were all back on the Doombars here, and we were all outside again for a game of fives. Disappointingly for such a loved, crummy pub, it was pretty empty for an early Saturday evening. It would not be the only pub that I thought looked worryingly low on business. The Doombar was liquid treasure after two naff lagers and I gobbled it down. I was really starting to enjoy the challenge of having seven pints to go. Poor Tim lost the game of fives and ended up being the only victim of the night who had to embarrass himself in a forfeit.
Intermission: Dinner
From Gordon’s we backtracked to the KFC for dinner. This is one of the many chicken shops on Portswood Road, and probably the only one as nice sober. The £7.99 wrap meal was my selected champion to fight the millions of ethanol-based atoms turning my blood into Swiss cheese. The Pepsi Max rocketed sugar in me too; an essential for the faster decomposition of those thick yeasty amino acids in lager. Louis had two KFCs – this seems pretty inconsequential to mention but Tom Cruise once had two curries back to back in Birmingham and The Daily Mirror ran a story on it, so I’m including it anyway.
Pub 6: Dhaba 59 Sports Bar & Grill
Turning off Portswood Road onto Lodge Road, we stumbled with full stomachs into Dhaba. This fine institute had, in years passed, done us some pretty good curries. But we were not there for curry, we were there for a pint of nectar and to begin the first round of our awards ceremony, The Fosters. Voting and cheering took precedent over the beer which, despite being Australian water, was proving hard to get on top of my disintegrating chicken wrap. But the beer did replenish our tipsiness and we rolled out from this Base Camp and onto the Crawl’s Everest: Death’s Corridor.
Pub 7: The Hobbit
In The Odyssey, the eponymous hero must sail his boat through the Strait of Messina, known for housing the two monsters Scylla and Charbydis. Sailors had to choose between a rock and a hard place with which route they would take – either would lead to casualties. Or, like Odysseus they can find the sweet spot in the water and sail just between the two monsters without sustaining too many losses. Such is Death’s Corridor on the Portswood Crawl. This valley houses four unique watering holes and is the most vibrant, most fruity part of the trip. Bypassing any of the four could be fatal; mixing your drinks between all four could be even more fatal. The first stop is the legendary geek capital of Portswood, The Hobbit. Offering a slew of cocktail pints with more copyright friendly names than they had a few years ago (the ‘Aragorn’ became the ‘Ranger’, the ‘Gandalf’ became the ‘Sorcerer’), this pub now has the nerve to charge £2 entry! Inside, beer was no longer an option, instead it was time for a sugary boost. I opted for a ‘Druid’ which was gin-based. I do not like gin but I like druids, and I do not think druids would like gin. But I drank a ‘Druid’ regardless. It went down easily, unlike Stonehenge, ironically. Tim’s poisonous green ‘Behemoth’ was left unfinished due to its proximity in taste to vomit.
Pub 8: Clowns
Clowns is to Southampton locals what Parliament was to Guy Fawkes: a terrible institution in need of a good blowing up. Clowns is to Southampton students what the bridge is in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: a dangerous obstacle between them and endless glory, guarded by braindead bouncers easily tricked into free entry. It is a risky place to enter due to the lethality of their signature cocktail pints which use a delayed kill switch to turn your world into a whirlpool of images and fuzz as you lay spinning on the floor of your uni halls two hours later. Here the pool table came in handy to keep moving and concentrated as I took on another gin drink, here called the Darcy Larcy. The team was still going strong but at this point our interactions were becoming more physical than verbal as Louis tickled Ethan on the sofa.
Pub 9: The Shooting Star
The sister pub to The Hobbit, this likewise has self-serious bouncers and a whacky array of cocktail pints. I had to go for gin again, choosing one called the ‘Phaser’. Time was now immaterial and how long it had taken to have each drink was lost on all of us. More awards came in the Shooting Star garden, with our beer armour in full power. Death’s Corridor was actually more funny than it was intimidating when sober. Wee Seven by now.
Pub 10: Five Rivers
It took about 13 seconds to walk from The Shooting Star to Five Rivers, our final stop before the Grim Reaper would appear with a breathalyser, only letting us pass out from the Corridor if we showed up ten pints of booze on the device. Another game of pool but here I detected vulnerability in the group: Guillaume sat in a corner watching the game with glazed over eyes, Louis was sobered up by an uncomfortable bathroom interaction, and I lost track of where Angus, Ed, Tim and Ethan were at this point – talking about space probably. Pint of lager down the hatch and the Grim Reaper, who took the form of the legendary Portswood Crawler himself, let us pass out from the Underworld. We were safe! For a while…
Pub 11: London Road Brew House
The distance between Five Rivers and London Road Brew House is far. Haziness masks much of my memory here but all I recall is running through the bushes of a nearby park with Ethan. It is a staggering achievement in drunken control that neither of us twisted an ankle or stacked it on the rocks and trees we galloped over. We arrived at the Brew House sweaty. I opted here for a double rum and coke to start the process of beating the hangover by stocking up on sugar. The others joined and by this point Ethan was as pale as Edward Cullen, staring at the table and quickly brushing off any remark made his way so he could go back to internally shouting at his brain to focus. Guillaume and Tim played air tennis with exceptional hand eye coordination. It was now midnight however, and we had overran.
Pub 12: Not The Giddy Bridge
In terms of volume of alcohol consumed, we did complete the Crawl, we just did not finish at either The Giddy Bridge or The Scholar’s Arms for the twelfth and thirteenth pints. Instead we U-turned in our anguish back to Bedford Place, a slightly more elevated place for drinking (less degeneracy). Harry and I made a raucous mess of Taylor Swift’s ‘Cruel Summer’ en route. We found a place that was closing in 20 minutes. “We just need two drinks each then we are out.” Amazingly, that worked, though Angus, who had somewhere on the way thrown up, was denied a drink. And so we sat on our final table, two drinks each, as Louis went through the last awards. Those too drunk got their vote over with without any explanations; those still capable stammered their way ineloquently to a conclusion. Louis’ round of Tia Maria shots was a final nail in the coffin for our livers yet, by gaslighting my brain into thinking it was a strawberry Yazoo, I felt alright. We were hurried out of the bar (still unnamed) and left to wander the wasteland of Southampton in search of a 02:00 curry at Manzil’s.
Epilogue
The aftermath of the Crawl was a blur of flung rice, frisbee-sized garlic naans, poorly aimed high-fives, a unique take on Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ from Louis that had a greater focus on dairy products and, unrelated, mayonnaise spreading. All of this means little to those who were not there, and to those that were it is a fusion of painful regret at drunken behaviour and the happy closure to a heck of a day.
The next morning we sat in Trago Lounge for a medicinal brunch and a post-match analysis to piece together last night’s drunken jigsaw into a tapestry of youthful achievement. Curiously I found myself noticing that we were the only people sitting outside at Trago. It was a cold day, so it was expected. But it reminded me of Brewhouse and Gordon Arms’ empty beer gardens. Then the more I thought about it the more it felt like the nine of us were the only ones out in Southampton the night before. Sure, we had had a few fleeting conversations with strangers but I could not recall a single face from any pub from Drummond to Bedford Place. There were bouncers and bar staff, there were even musicians at The Hobbit apparently, but the only people in sharp HD in my head were my eight accomplices. Southampton may have been halfway through a zombie apocalypse and none of us would have noticed. I guess that is the beauty of The World’s End and its portrayal of a 12 pint pub crawl against a robot invasion. On the other side, it also shows how committed we all were to the Crawl and to maximise every precious second we had together. It took a lot of planning for the nine of us to have the weekend off and to travel from the four corners of southern England, and every word mattered. The beer was not even necessary; it was just a challenge forged by Josh and Louis in a common night of lunacy many moons ago. If anything, it was not a gateway to getting drunk but a long road to helping one another out. It promoted more teamwork and equality than a group of young lads having 13 pints might normally do on a Saturday night, because we all understood the assignment: savour every second.
For A Few Thoughts More 