The Mouse
The Mouse is, was, a bar.
It wasn’t just a good bar, it was a great bar, and likely the stuff of legend.
With any luck anyway.
Good bars are hard to find in Helsinki.
At the time of writing this, I think The Mouse is on its last legs and likely to be consigned to the sort of history people don’t know about.
Great bars are harder to find worldwide.
Truly legendary bars…maybe one or two a city, difficult to call…
Not everywhere gets a Medicine Bag (Amsterdam)
Not every city gets to have a bar like The Welcome Inn (Dublin.)
Actually, almost nowhere does, as The Welcome Inn probably existed as a statistical anomaly and due to some accidental fold in the fabric of the bar towel of time and space.
The Welcome Inn is/was/will be one of the few bars to have its own Erdős number.
Somewhere past amphetamine square*, past stab street* a bit past *wanderbucket lane and down a side street that translates to something violent involving shovels and when questioned elicits “Russians…” there’s a small bar that has the right side of dusk, shadow and dinge.
It was not a commonly known about bar and Helsinki inhabitants had either never heard of it or never been there. As those born in Helsinki seemed to be in decline, knowledge of its whereabouts gradually became lost but to the most ardent of Helsinki booze lore and a motley collection of immigrants from all over the world. This tended to be done on an introduction by introduction basis and no one amongst the immigrants knew which of them had been the first of “this lost” to be there and if they did, they weren’t saying. Money was between the largely silent yet always smiling Eritrean, Tesfalem whom we knew as the mispronunciation Tisval. Adolf the Czech, and The Russian who only spoke to the owner, Tisval, Adolf, Sullivan and Jeff.
Between a few Cubans, Swedes, one very belligerent Norwegian, two Dutchmen, two Scots and one intermittent Japanese scientist. Many of the other regulars were Irish who had sought a pub to not be forced to accidentally drink with Irish people in an Irish pub and as such often ignored each other until such time as the alcohol forced them to talk or one of the very rare after hours late drinks happened. Many is a vague number, but there was at least four or five.
It was a quiet place that bore its own Omertà.
The owners were two Corsican brothers, the eldest of which used to say he had been a psychologist in the military. It was hard to argue with him as in the entire time I went there I never saw even a hint of violence from the rowdiest drunk. Whatever he said and however he said it, seemed to be enough to quell most people to allow themselves to be shown out.
They played a mixture of the blues, reggae, afro-beat and the more obscure musical end of the 1980s. It was twenty-five years old when I found it and neon signs almost permanently turned off hinted at different rowdier times long gone. Traffic lights told you where to go and the aquarium had been replaced with a toy aquarium that had partially dried out. There was no television, no internet and they rarely let the sun inside.
As you walked in the door it had the head of a mouse mounted as if it was a lion, caught in mid-roar. It was also the size of a lion. Which made it decidedly fake. If, unnervingly realistic. Beneath it, there was a much smaller mounted head with a more regal poise. This, my mind and the regulars, assured me, was a real mouse.
It had another name, but we referred to it as The Mouse.
- Roughly Translated from the original Finnish slang names
- Due to all information about The Mouse being scattered across several phones, many people and bar mats, receipts, torn notepad pages. This piece is a living piece that will be updated as we get new information.
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You can support the struggle through this bigots fraud and death threats and the maybe asbestos poisoning and the rest, if you like, by buying Mooseville99 a ko fi or three or more ;)
Thank you for reading.
