Bob Servant by Bob Servant Read Free Book Online

the Internet 25 and Stewpot went shaky, called them ‘faceless cowards’, stormed down to the cellar and, rumour has it, kicked the living daylights out of a sack of lemons.
    All in all, Stewpot is one of life’s diamonds and I’ve had forty-seven years of good times in his pub (his dad gave him Stewpot’s for his 21st birthday and went off to run a bed and breakfast in Carnoustie that I would infamously attack with an airgun during The Gin Crisis) but even then I must admit there’s days when I wonder if Stewpot’s bar is one of the reasons I’ve not made the big time. Going there pretty much every day all these years must have cost me a bit of time if you add it up and there’s no-one who goes to Stewpot’s every day that’s really made it at an international level.
    On the other side of the coin I’ve got great memories of the place and I suppose I’ve made some alright pals from going there. But on the other side of the coin 26 I could argue that those forty-seven years have boiled down to forty-seven years’ worth of stupid jokes from Chappy Williams, Tommy Peanuts moaning about Sally Peanuts and Frank asking Stewpot if there’s ‘any surprises on the sandwich menu’.
    Still, back in 1963 we were pleased enough to find it and we celebrated Frank’s 18th birthday there shortly after. Not that he remembered.

    Frank’s 18th Birthday 27
    _________________________
    23 See
The Dundee Courier,
17 January 1963 – ‘
Pub Marooned On City’s First Roundabout
(Dundee City Council’s Planning Committee today denied that there had been “serious gaps” in their knowledge of the country’s new roundabout system.)’.
    24 See
The Dundee Courier
, 26 March 1963 – ‘
Inverness Couple Delighted With Roundabout Trip
(“. . . everything we hoped for and more . . . it’s like being on the moon.”)’.
    25 See TripAdvisor.com’s sparse Dundee section for an April 2004 review written by
Dusseldorf1976
entitled
The Worst Day Of Our Lives Yet!
(‘We thought that this place was a traditional Scottish cafeteria but this was not the case. The people were not like people that we expect to ever meet again. The men were angry and had faces red not from the sun and shouted even when they stood close. There were not any women we do not think.’)
    26 I hope Bob has kept this physics-defying coin in a safe place.
    27 Photo courtesy of Bob Servant’s private collection, all rights reserved. Inscription on back of photograph reads: ‘Frank ruins his own 18th birthday party, 1963.’

11
Chappy Williams and Tommy Peanuts
    I remember the first time I met Chappy Williams very well. He walked into Stewpot’s wearing a golf jumper and looking like he owned the place and me and Frank sat there and thought, ‘Look at this prick.’ And you know what? Nearly fifty years later, if you were to come down Stewpot’s bar, you’d find Chappy walking in there wearing a golf jumper and looking like he owns the place and me and Frank sitting there thinking, ‘Look at this prick.’
    Chappy was fairly well known at the time because he was a champion schoolboy golfer so he was always in the paper holding up trophies and doing the old Look At Me routine. We spoke to him a bit that night and to be fair he wasn’t too bad with the talking and the jokes and from then on we’d always have a bit of a To And Fro when he came in. That’s not to say he wasn’t a pain in the arse from the start. He’d practise his swing at the urinals which was both annoying and dangerous and when you shook his hand he’d say things like ‘Don’t steal my grip’ or ‘You’re crushing the moneymaker’.
    Because of that nonsense I wasn’t too bothered when Chappy’s golfing career came to a sudden halt, though I have to say I did feel sorry for him on a man-to-man level.