You could write a novel set in this place. So much history, stretching back into legend, one that tells of a Spanish sea captain and his mistress, who became its first landlady. Unchanged seemingly for decades, but morphing of course with its ever-varying clientele, so that on any given night, it’s always the same, and always different.

Unexpectedly work takes me to Newcastle and late one night I wander past its half-open door, and sense those hints of history emanating from the light inside and what little you can see from the outside. The next evening I persuade a trio of colleagues to accompany me to the pub, not that they need much persuading. A round is bought and we take our seats at the end of the long, narrow stretch of bar, and talk as you do over beer, alternating between slivers of life story and shit. Above us on the walls are caricatures of men we imagine to be famous Geordies – ex-managers of United, comedians who worked the club circuit, or folk heroes about town.

The answer is simpler, and it comes from an entirely random query that one of our number makes of a man standing momentarily at her elbow. Turns out they’re regulars from back in the ’90s, and the man of whom we’ve asked the question just happens to be the son-in-law of the larger-than-life character with strawberry blonde hair, an oversize set of replacement teeth, and a red-collared shirt.

The son-in-law brings over his wife, and gladly she tells us about her father, whose haunt this was. The landlady thirty years ago commissioned the caricatures, inviting her favourite regulars to sit for them. ‘He looks like he was the life and soul,’ we say, and of course she avers. Then she tells us that she and her husband wouldn’t have been there to answer our question on any other night, as they live elsewhere now, and are only in Newcastle for the day. But whenever they are in town, they always make a point of visiting the place where her dad had clearly been happiest. We toast his memory in her presence, and thank her for the story.

Not a bad fate, to be immortalised in pen and ink on the wall of your favourite boozer. It sets me to wondering if there are perhaps pubs in either Suffolk or Sussex where my own father is likewise immortalised with an equally exaggerated portrait, prompting the drinkers of today to wonder just who was the faded Sean Connery lookalike wearing a peach-coloured polo shirt. I wouldn’t be surprised.