Quick Note: An Hour At The Portsmouth Tavern, Kingston, Ontario

An old friend from work is joining me in the ranks of we, the gratefully unemployed and idle pensioners. To mark the event, I was invited on a small pubcrawl the other day playing my role as, I suppose, the ghost of retirement to come. A happy time out sat at long tables filled with glasses and pitchers of beer beside friends and former co-workers. We ended up at the Portsmouth Tavern, established circa 1863… which is pretty early for Ontario. Pre-Confederation. Once upon a time, I wrote about the drinking spots in my fair city including the older Queens Inn (est 1839) and Royal Tavern (est 1851) both of which have had breaks in operations in recent years. “The Ports” continues to serve beer after 163 years. Me, I grew up in Nova Scotia, that eastern province that is almost entirely encircled by the Atlantic. The common word for public house back there back then was tavern or “tav” for short. Like the old Midtown Tavern in Halifax. Tavern is the same word used by Thomas Raddall in his…