A toastie and a toast to bygone days make us glad we braved the storm

The conversation had turned to chicken in a basket in the 70s at a social club in Linwood.

Pub Spy’s old man did a turn building Hillman Imps in the famous Renfrewshire car factory before getting behind the bar himself for 30 years.

“They were good nights: table service, the lot,” he said, remembering nights up the road with his fellow motormakers. His companion, known as mum in these parts, nodded approvingly over her chicken and rice soup.

We’d called in to The Coach House in Bridge of Weir on a day when the rain suggested “fireside”.

Weathering the typhoon, we were fully expecting to be the only ones daft enough to head outside to the pub. And we were. But the adjoining restaurant was bursting like the nearby River Gryffe.

In the bar, though, not only is the menu different, so’s the vibe. There’s a rustic feel, low roofs, cottage windows, wooden panelling, exposed masonry. And cheese and ham toasties with big juicy slabs of both, like they’d been cut with a rusty saw, wedged between chunks of sourdough and toasted up a treat.

Aside from us, and one solitary soaked soul in for an afternoon pint, the bar was empty, so why Sky Sports was booming out of two giant tellies was anyone’s guess.

Maybe that’s why our order of chips didn’t come with the toasties and soup – the server probably couldn’t hear us over Jurgen Klopp’s press conference. But that aside, The Coach House ticks a lot of the village pub vibes.

There’s a wee terrace out the back, too, but it was beginning to look more like an octopus’s garden than a beer garden as a rain teemed down.

The design of the loos evokes Doctor Who’s Tardis circa Tom Baker, with huge, crater-like circles on the wall. No such bending of space-time dimensions out in the car park, though, where the idiotic

4x4 brigade abound.

The only rough terrain these things are truly built to navigate is that of the status anxiety so many of these suburbanites succumb to.

One of them in this car park and the game’s a bogey for everyone, as the woman next to us realised when pulling a 300-point turn to get out. It’s not just social club chicken in a basket that some folk miss – pub car parks were easier with Hillman Imps too.