An Irish bar in West London. Early evening. We have just heard that Shane McGowan (singer, songwriter, founder of The Pogues) has died. A friend wants to raise a glass to him. My son and I meet him, and one of his neighbours. We have met before, many times, here and in places like this. Memories are shared. Songs are sung. Pints of Guinness are drunk. Time passes slowly. We check the time and find that it is only 7pm. We arrived before 5pm, in darkness, but the night is still young. It feels so much later.

My friend is sad at the passing of McGowan. He gets the people behind the bar to plug his phone into the speakers, so we can hear a playlist of Pogues songs. We are not far from where my friend went to school. The pub is now busy and at least half the people there went to the same school. They all know each other. I only know a handful of them.

I look around and notice that there are no women on our side of the bar. Dozens of guys, no women. The same was true just over a year ago, at a different Irish bar less than a mile away. My son was not with us then, but these two drinking companions were. I said the same thing then that I say now. “Do you remember that bit in ‘The Magnificent Seven’?”

In case you haven’t seen it, “The Magnificent Seven” was a 1960 Hollywood western adapted from the Japanese film “The Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa, 1954). For people of my generation the Hollywood version would count as general knowledge. Anyone who grew up with a TV in the house would have seen all or part of it many times in the decades after it was first broadcast. Ask any guy my age to name all seven actors and he will probably get four or five easily. If he gets stuck it will most likely be trying to remember the names Brad Dexter or Horst Buchholz. The rest: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn. Yes, I typed those names from memory. There was a brief interruption while I double-checked the spelling of Buchholz.

Some movies are filled with memorable lines. “The Long Good Friday” comes to mind. There are at least 30 lines that I have repeated often since I first saw it over 40 years ago. They could fill a separate Blog post quite easily. “The Magnificent Seven” doesn’t have so many. There’s James Coburn saying, “You lost” in the scene where we first see him, for example, and Brad Dexter’s scene at the end, where he’s about to die. He wants confirmation that he hasn’t given up his life just to save some impoverished villagers. There was gold there, right? Chris, played by Yul Brynner plays along with this and tells him that, yes, there were, untold riches. But the scene that comes to mind tonight is Steve McQueen observing that there are no women in the village. They have all been sent away. From what I recall he says, “I’ve been some places were the girls weren’t very pretty … I’ve been some places where they were downright ugly … But I ain’t never been in a place where there weren’t no girls at all”.

That’s what I quote, and I look around to see if I’ve missed anything. Nope. My drinking companions make references to a “Police Academy” movie that I have not seen, where the cops end up in a gay bar by the sound of it. This is not that kind of bar, but for the rest of the time we spend there, it’s men only. We head to the kebab shop next door and it’s the same thing: no women at all. Just like that village in “The Magnificent Seven”.

When I get home I check on IMDb to see if the quote is there. Here’s how it appears:

You know – I’ve been in some towns where the girls weren’t all that pretty. In fact I’ve been in some towns where they’re downright ugly. But it’s the first time I’ve been in a town where there are no girls at all, ‘cept little ones.

I was close enough.