In the title story of Neil Campbell’s new collection, Licensed Premises, an unnamed man applies for a job as a creative writing tutor, aware that none of the people on the panel interviewing him is a published author.
So unmoored is he by this that when he finds himself afterward at the bar of The Oxford pub – famous watering hole of Ian Rankin’s fictional detective Inspector Rebus – he winds up getting pissed with the locals, sacking off his Manchester home train and turning back in order to see the session through.
“What elevates this pub to Masters level?” he asks of the room. “How does this pub situate itself in the contemporary field?” 
For Campbell – possibly the closest thing Manchester has to a James Kelman, albeit with sales to match – the pub has always loomed larger than the academy as the writer’s real alma mater. An encounter with the author in his own local, then – in that stout temple to post-pandemic gastronecessity we know as the Elizabethan in Heaton Moor – is attended by a bittersweet plot twist.
“Think I’ve written my last novel to be honest with you, chief,” the Tamesider confides over a pre-Christmas pint. He’s a short story specialist, but still. His trilogy of feature-length works about Manchester’s gig economy (Sky Hooks, Zero Hours, Lanyards) are among his best.
He seems happy enough.
It’s just that to me, it’s like a fellow rent boy proposing we come off smack.
“I don’t think I can justify going through all that again just for…you know…three hundred pounds,” he says.
He’ll stick to the shorts. Missus writes for Hollyoaks. She won’t stand for work that doesn’t pay properly and she’s right.
It isn’t worth the effort.
“I’ve said all the things I wanted to say in those three.”
I nod.
October
Across the water the lights of Galway City are like baubles glimmering on a bough. The West Ireland enclave, with its Claddagh and its , sits in darkness, the ocean idling in the pre-dawn breeze.
“To see the sun go down on Galway Bay…” Bing Crosby sang in the one of the two songs to go by that name, which The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl reference in Fairytale of New York.
Between the photographer’s golden hours, though, I choose the dawn. Sunset last night was a mist of ions settling to a blanket of grey…which was nice but difficult to work with. It’s the dawn which fires my belief that this thread of port light strung across the night can be captured as a beautiful thing.
The reason I think this has much to do with the fact it’s what I can see at 6am from the back of our rented house.
“I want to spend some time watching this bay,” I told my girlfriend after we arrived. “That’s actual Galway Bay.”
If the NYPD choir does not exist then the song it was singing that fictional Christmas Eve – in Shane MacGowan’s tale of brokedown Broadway stars squabbling in a drunkard’s reverie – lives on, stitched even into the fabric of the ‘80s Christmas classic itself.
You hear it in James Fearnley’s accordian as the record picks up after Shane’s intro, just before Kirsty comes in: “They’ve got cars…” It’s a counter-melody from the Tin Pan Alley tune which Crosby popularized – as opposed to a snatch of the older ballad better known back in Ireland.
Happy Christmas
Watching the dawn is like waiting for God. The wind could thrash a bedsheet into a picture of Barnsley. Yesterday, an old drinking buddy of Shane’s from the days of the Foundry, Bill Drummond’s playpen, showed us the pubs. He said he was in flight from London, looking for where the sun goes after it disappears beyond the horizon, down beneath the sea, here at the western edge, where long ago the ancient world was born and a long time later Yeats came looking for it.
That’s what he said. We climbed the hill to scope out the land and saw a raincloud unloading on the Atlantic.
Now, with plastic tripod and mission unlear unclear, I stand shivering with a shutter button clicking off exposure after exposure at slower and slower speed: three seconds, five 
seconds, ten…until the lights of the town appear in my camera view screen.
What I produce is transitional and preparatory to definitive work, Neil. My plastic tripod, bought in haste from Argos up the road upon discovery of the quality bay view, knocks its knees before the power of the elements.
But it’s Galway Bay…sky a-smear with colour, lights still promising land. Check it out. The ghost of frost on pine. The shore leave we would wish for our deepest winter. I hope Santa Claus brings me a better tripod. And that this picture might be equal to the purpose of saluting you for what you’ve written and wishing you and Naomi the very best for the holidays.
Licensed Premises is out now, published by Salt, and available HERE
@dannyxmoran
