Sorry I'm late - I've recently come back from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Glasgow (and other places in Scotland) and am only now catching up on the longer threads you've come up with in the last six weeks.
The Scotia is indeed a great place. I particularly liked the night a couple of years ago when I turned up in the snug, found a few familiar faces and was greeted - 'Haven't seen you for a while. What've you been doing wi' yersel'?' To which I could only reply - 'Yes, it's been about a year. I had to go back home, earning money for my holidays.'
My other favourite pub is in Hamburg, Germany. It used to be 'Die Zwiebel', right on the quay in Altona, a dark, dingy and very homely place. It's still there, but turned into an Irish 'theme pub' and, no doubt, given a thorough scrubbing. The guy who ran it and who was its heart and soul, Uli Panknin, got another pub, called it 'The Onion' and carries on as before. I'm glad to say that most of his regulars followed him to the new venue. It's like an extended family! He normally closes on Sundays, but about once a month he opens for a folk gig. (Well, sometimes it's blues or boogie or whatever takes their fancy.) The next few months we're having Brian McNeill & Iain MacKintosh, Allan Taylor, Mike Silver and Roger Sutcliffe. A few months back we had Australian lady Ronnie Taheny and Vince Weber, Germany's leading boogie piano player. Iain MacKintosh and Hamish Imlach even recorded a live album there twelve years ago - in the old place, of course.
If you ever find yourself in Hamburg, this is the place to go. John James (the Welsh guitarist about whom there was another thread not long ago) once described Uli as 'looking like the last relic of the summer of love, the ultimate hippie'. He's right! - Susanne