A Guinness shandy? The request that stunned my favourite pub into silence | Adrian Chiles

I love my local pub in west London. It’s very Irish, which is how I like my pubs. You can’t move for gastropubs round me, and while they have their place, I’ll take my very Irish local any day over any of them. Unless of course I want something more substantial to eat than Tayto crisps. It’s generally rather quiet in there, outside your rowdier weekend evenings, and quiet time is what I tend to want from a pub these days. There are a few screens showing various sports, but the volume is usually unobtrusively low. I love this place.

But last week something happened that may have damaged my standing in this establishment for ever. I popped in early on a Friday evening with some old friends, a couple about my age who were down from the West Midlands for the weekend. One half of this happy couple is a very enthusiastic drinker; the other hardly takes alcohol at all. My favourite bartender was on duty, a lovely woman from Dublin. I ordered a couple of pints of Guinness and asked my non-drinking friend if she would like her usual, a still mineral water. “No,” she said. “I’ll have half a Guinness shandy.”

“A Guinness shandy ?” repeated our barmaid. This exchange, as luck would have it, coincided with a simultaneous lull in every conversation under way in the pub. A Guinness shandy? The question hung in the air. The silence deepened. Time stood still. It was like the scene in Deliverance minus the duelling banjos. Jaws dropped. Eyes widened. Pints were suspended halfway between table and mouth. I swear a horse race on one of the screens froze, as did a golfer’s backswing on another.

Eventually, mercifully, my Dubliner broke the silence. “I’ve never made one of those before,” she said. And it turned out that a Guinness shandy isn’t a straightforward pour. You have to agitate the lemonade first, to remove some of the gas, otherwise the black stuff foams up like nobody’s business when it’s introduced to the mix. In the interests of moving things along, I took charge of stirring the lemonade, with a straw. The Guinness was added without incident. Bar the odd despairing shake of a head, normality returned. The horse race continued; the golfer played his shot. The Guinness shandy was rather nice, if a bit on the sweet side, but never again. I just want a quiet life.

• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist