EVERY Thursday night my dad went off to his local pub, where he played dominoes with the same gang of pals for years.

They’d meet up in the tap room at 9pm and chew the fat between rounds of dominoes. In his final months, when his health was declining, Dad still managed to walk down the road to the pub and I went along at last orders, to drive him home.

The domino gang diminished over the years. There were only four of them left in the end. The little pub has been turned into a house now. I drove past recently and thought of the old chaps sitting in the tap room.

The local was a big part of my dad’s life. When I was a child he went every Friday night (it later changed to Thursdays) and often Sunday lunchtimes too. He was of the generation of pub regulars from the 1950s and 60s; I have photos of him and his pals crowded round bar tables, larking around as young men. He had funny stories about their daft pub bets, like the lad who’d eat anything - including a playing card and a dry teabag - if there was enough cash on the table.

I thought of my dad when I heard the lovely story this week about a group of six men who have met for a pint in the same pub every week for the last 56 years.

Thursday night is pub night for these south Yorkshire pals, who began meeting in 1968 and have barely missed a week since. Now in their eighties, they started going to the pub together as young men after a weekly round of golf. The friends have met up at the same pub, The White Swan in Sheffield, every week since. These days they sometimes vary the pubs, between Sheffield and Rotherham, to accommodate everyone.

Back in the day the pals chatted about “soccer and sex” - now it’s “pensions and prostates”.

There is something endearing about the long-lasting friendship of these men who have taken the effort to meet up in person every week, same day, same time, same place.

My colleague, Helen Mead, has a 95-year-old neighbour who meets up with her friends every week for a pub lunch. They’re all in their late eighties and nineties, and still enjoy a tipple. And I know a bunch of retired T&A colleagues who get together in a pub once a month for a catch-up.

But, while many of us enjoy a night in the boozer, the concept of ‘the local’ is largely a thing of the past. Pubs, of course, have sadly declined over the years, due to various factors, and there are so many demands on our leisure time now that meeting up with the same old gang in the tap room every week isn’t really a thing anymore.

Last year I started going to a pub quiz and liked the idea of being a regular at quiz nights. But it tailed off, mostly due to feeling too tired after work to make the effort. It just didn’t become a routine.

With so much social interaction online now, we often miss out on meeting up in person. Yet you can bet that the pals who meet at the White Swan every Thursday don’t sit gawping at their phones all night.

Pub historian Dr Paul Jennings says reasons why the ‘the local’ is a thing of the past include: “interiors opened out so no snugs or tap rooms, pubs ceasing to be largely male, and the decline of the industrial working-class and their neighbourhoods”.

In photographer Ian Beesley’s excellent exhibition, Life Goes On, at Salts Mill, he highlights lone pubs left standing when surrounding streets were demolished. These pubs were all that remained of old neighbourhoods. The regulars were moved to housing in other areas but returned to their ‘local’ until the pubs finally closed. “Football and darts teams still played, the pigeon men met, the Sons of the Desert wore their fezzes the last Friday of the month,” recalls Ian, who documented the final days of one such pub.

Says Paul Jennings: “We still like the image of the local, as in the Rovers Return or the Queen Vic, as some epitome of the English way of life, even if most people don’t live it.” But, he adds, it hasn’t entirely disappeared: “Many have pub quizzes and charity events, instead of darts and doms.”