Here is a footnote to yesterday’s blog about Liz Truss and the economic chaos unleashed by her nasty neoliberal leanings. This addendum isn’t really concerned with any of that, as it’s about a once-favourite pub.

The Richard the First in Royal Hill in Greenwich, south-east London, was a hang-out for Goldsmiths College students in the mid-1970s, an affection that continued into the 1980s, when it became a hang-out for young journalists, or at least a few of those known to me.

It was known as the Tolly or the Tolly Shop, a name dating to an earlier time when part of the pub was an off-licence that sold beer from Tolly Cobbold, a brewery in Ipswich. Why Suffolk and why Greenwich is one of those mysteries. The brewery closed in 2002 after 256 years.

In my memory the pub sold Youngs beer in those days, and certainly seems to have become a Youngs house later, long after those brilliant young people (well, who could say for sure at the time) had left to discover what life held.

I loved that pub, and still do in memory, even if it is said to be much changed, more of a gastro pub these days, if the website is any guide. Members of Squeeze hung out in the pub sometimes in my early reporting days, or so hazy memory attests. Mostly I remember happy student drinking, then later days of a pint or two and a Hamlet cigar with a reporter friend. Haven’t smoked for more than 40 years, and never really smoked cigarettes, but did like an occasional cigar.

Now it seems that my student haunt, and the place I hung out while spending my days interviewing all sorts for the South-East London Mercury, has become a haunt of a different, and unkinder, generation.

I’d heard that Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, and his prime ministerial pal Liz Truss like to hang out in that excellent part of London and were informally known as the Greenwich set. It is unclear what Greenwich – ‘Grinidge’, to the locals – has done to deserve this dubious blessing.

Ah, dear Greenwich, early Sunday morning jazz in Greenwich Theatre, often from the South African saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, then early Alan Ayckbourn plays on the stage. Comedy and music at the Albany Empire in Deptford, with Billy Connolly never to be bettered. Runs around Blackheath and Greenwich Park, beer in the Tolly.

An old university friend, and we are all getting on a bit now, sent me a link a story in today’s Guardian with the headline, “Near the Greenwich pub where the mini-budget was born, Londoners share their fears”.

It turns out that Truss and Kwarteng reportedly trashed out plans for their disastrous mini budget in that very pub.

How dare they trample over my student past like that; how dare they tarnish mildewed memories of a tatty but beloved pub like that.

Time soon to pop to the Crooked Tap in Acomb, just to check there aren’t any neoliberal vandals lurking in there, plotting to ruin the country and spoil my present favourite place for a pint.

Some habits never change, even if the amounts consumed do.