Can you use a pub up? This question seemed urgent and key last night, sitting in the All Bar One in Edinburgh’s Exchange Plaza. The point being: is there a limit to the number of times you can visit a pub (especially such a notorious compromise choice as an All Bar One) after which you cannot even enjoy the simple pleasure of sitting in it with a drink, and friends? I was trying to remember a number of the times I’d ended up in that pub – mostly with members of the same group of my friends, as it turned out: meeting someone I was staying with after work some time before I moved back; a neutral rendezvous with food during the Festival a few years back; a couple of birthdays; and now after TF’s viva. Lunches with a now-ex girlfriend; a shared bottle of wine with same shortly after our break-up as we mulled things over; a lunch for a friend returned from Canada. But sitting there last night, I felt I’d reached the limit of my tolerance. The mirrors, the high ceiling that seems only to push up the noise levels, sofas so far apart that you can only speak to the person next to you and the group conversation breaks up. Has this pub been worn out? Have I used up my allowance of this particular drinking point? But as my companion, as ever much wiser than me, pointed out, perhaps it’s just that being an All Bar One, it’s a RUBBISH PUB.