Swifts

Picture a nightclub where, if you go, in one night, the muscle mass in your thighs will grow by 15% from the pure effort of lifting your feet off the sticky nasty carpet all night and where a load of off duty soldiers get wallopped sideways by continuously guzzling pints of vodka and redbull and jaeger bombs.
Welcome to Swifts of Newbridge! On the other hand though, during the week and at lunchtime, the pub itself is actually quite nice. When you walkl in first, it looks a bit small and dingy as the front bar is a long, low-​ceilinged room as the place has been bought and built in stages. But walkning through the front bar brings you to another 2 bars which get better. The back bar has bands in at the weekend and a mad DJ who roars along with Galway Girl 3 times a night and I have to say, the craic is 90!
breakfast is served from 10 – 12 daily then they put on, quite frankly, the best carvery I have ever tasted in my life (a mountain of delicious bacon and cabbage drowned in white sauce at about € 11.00), and then an evening menu which is also quite nice. One drawback here though, aeven though the three owners (one from Newbridge and two brothers from Dublin), are absolute gentlemen, the manager and his counterpart are greasy little power-​trippers who scowl at you from a distance and hover over the doorstaff handpicking people they want to let into their club as if it’s Chinawhites of London.
The only reason I have given 2 stars is because of the quality of food and that the staff themselves are actually lovely but I’ll never darken the doors again

My friends tell me I’m useless at flirting. I only flutter my lashes when a foreign object’s lodged in my eye and I leave sexy pouting to the Keira Knightleys and Victoria Beckhams of the world. To be honest, I think they look ridiculous. Crack a smile, for Christ’s sake! Maye thinking like this is my downfall…
So despite my previous bitching session about Swifts, I take my Naas friends there. Mainly coz there’s nowhere else to go and partly so I can hone my flirting skills.
The clientele is young but my mates convince me that I can practice on these poor innocents so I can put my newly-​acquired talent to good use on someone I actually fancy in the future.
I’m dared to approach two guys. The first looks like he should be part of the cast of «ER». He’s a non-​practicing Muslim from Kosovo and he’s alone. He’s lovely to look at but a terrible conversationalist. He’s obviously taking the afore-​mentioned Posh Spice approach. Personality is suddenly very attractive to me.
Next, I sashay up to a hairy, T-​shirt clad man. Not my type but I need the experience. «Nice beard,» I begin. He’s clearly shocked. You’d swear I’d told him he could pass as Colin Farrell’s body double! He puts himself down in several different ways. I tell him he should take a compliment and quickly lose interest.
And that’s when my fleeting flirtation with flirting comes to a shattering halt. I guess I’ll just continue talking to fellas like they’re human beings and if the chemistry’s there something will happen.
Often after being in a «bad place», you learn a lot about yourself. And that bad place is Swift’s.