"...Gettin' anxious to close"

The melancholy charm of the Last Seat

I love eating and drinking alone. Sure, a guest, a date, a ‘companion’ as reviewers primly call them, is a lovely thing to have, so the entire event is a collaborative celebration, coloured by conversation and interaction. But go solo and all that is stripped away. You have no choice but to concentrate on what you’re consuming, on your thoughts and on your surroundings. I’ve come to understand that a review written alone has an entirely different timbre to one where someone else was present. Meditative, forensic, inward- looking, maybe too focussed. An accompanied review is emotional; a solo one analytical. But once you get adjusted to the solitary vice, there’s only one place you want to sit. And that, without wishing to sound like some gin-ruined barroom existentialist, is ‘The Last Seat’.

It’s a function of their design that most bars are L-shaped. The main run faces outwards, an open space for conviviality. With barstools for dates, or standing space for maximum ‘crush’ service. One end of the bar must be open, so staff can get in and out. But at the other end, usually furthest from the door, there’s the short-run, the ‘return’ to use the architectural term. It’s usually three seats long. Unsuitable for couples, too small for a party, the last place the owners felt they could slam in a few extra seats and fill them with the loners. God’s own corner.

The Last Seat is at the end of the return, right against the wall, so it has a unique, comforting physicality. You sit, half turned and feel your back totally protected. You’re touching the bones of the place and you can let it embrace you, if that’s what you want.

Floating around the Internet, there’s a very low-fi, black and white sequence of Sinatra on one of his many TV specials. The set comprises, if memory serves, a cardboard ‘bar’ and a bad gobo projection. He’s singing ‘One For My Baby’ - possibly the definitive performance of his paean to lost love.

He sits, of course, in the The Last Seat - even though there are no others. It’s the perfect shot. We the viewers, are placed in the position of the regular drinkers. Happy, probably with a date, probably with somewhere to go afterwards, but we’re looking across the corner of the bar, full into his expressive, tortured face, past the impassive bulk of the barkeep’s shoulder… “Set ‘em up, Joe”… and a million Bobby Socksers melt, screaming at his yearning, heart-torn, weltschmerz, to clutch him to their collective bosom.

Of course, the Ultima Stool has plenty of opportunity to lean for support if the evening progresses the way you secretly know it will. But it’s also an absolutely ideal spot to be seen. Calm, enigmatic, romantic and fascinatingly self-contained. If you’re the kind of arse who packs a performatively intriguing volume in the jacket pocket as bait and conversational prompt, then there’s no better spot than The Last Seat from which to subtly flash it.

Then there’s the geometry. Every time the barman spins away from the hustle of the seething herd, there’s a 50% chance you’re in his field of vision. That’s the weird maths of sight-lines; why it never takes more than the first drink to be on friendly terms, when that’s what you need. But you can be thoroughly ignored too. I still have no idea how we telegraph this need. Some subtlety of body language, some coded physical signifier. Maybe I’ll ask the barman next time. I have a theory is that it’s about the qualities of my ‘slump’. Just a couple of degrees of angle change in the shoulders, a nano-shift in weight forward onto the elbows. A second longer focussing on the garnish in your cocktail and a professional can tell you’ve entered the meditative phase. But that may be the drink talking

I had a friend, years ago, an American with a colourful, possibly imagined history in ‘Covert Ops’. He swore that The Last Seat provided ‘tactical advantage’. He reckoned you could fade into the background for surveillance, you could see under the bar by the cash drawer to check for weapons but most importantly you could ‘cover all the PIEs’. I loved him for his acronyms as much as his weird paranoias - he meant ‘Points of Ingress/Egress’ and I could only see pork, jelly and a hard-boiled egg. Secretly, though, I was thrilled how much it resonated. That seductively powerful feeling of slipping a little down the buttress of the wall and into the collar of the jacket, lowering the eyes, tucking a little closer in behind the drink and disappearing from the world. Even if, for me, ‘covert’ simply meant that if, rendered shabby, I was the last to leave, nobody noticed.

I guess that’s my favourite thing about it. Drinking with someone else makes me gregarious and expansive. Alone I become introspective and considered, but slumped in The Last Seat, I get new context. My internal script is rewritten by James Ellroy or Le Carré …and that’s infinitely more entertaining than reality.