The last thing I remember clearly, sometime around 4 a.m., was wondering how many people had fallen down the vertiginous back-hallway stairs that are the only way in or out of the Railway Club, the oldest continuously operating bar in Vancouver, British Columbia, a drinking and former gambling establishment that has seen its share of idiots and drunkards since it opened in 1931.

A lot of whiskey has been swallowed — and spilled — in those 83 years. The smoke from all those ancient cigars and cigarettes and who knows what else still permeates the un-air-conditioned rooms — of which there are several, dark and slightly musty, all of them decorated with white Christmas lights and a model train that loops around on a track just beneath the ceiling. It would be enough to make you woozy, even if you (by which I mean me) hadn’t been downing pint after pint of Fat Tug IPA in the midst of a bellowing mob.

We’d started drinking, the mob and I, when there was still a trace of light in the sky. They were not — in spite of their screaming, their stomping and a stunning assortment of skull-related tattoos — as dangerous as they looked. Well, some of them might have been. But most of them, in their regular lives, had jobs and children and sensible shoes.