Especially should enough chronologically-challenged persons be around to scratch heads, rattle dentures and start every sentence with the terminally boring words: "In my day . . ."

An extra degree of difficulty would be occasioned because not only have so many hostelries disappeared but name changes have done their best to confuse researchers.

Good example? Tamar Street's prestige City Park Grand Hotel launched in the 1850s as The Dorset Hotel, changed its name to The Terminus when the railways opened at Inveresk in the 1870s and then became the Prince Albert.

Another one?: Brisbane Street's redubbed The Plough Inn was formerly the Galaxy and, before that, the Billabong.

Built around 1840, The Plough Inn started out as, (how's this?) The Plough Inn.

It was a query concerning the name of a now-demolished Lonnie pub that saw this columnist's hop-driven grey cells engage a higher gear and ruminate on former hostelries.

Most of this historic recall has admittedly been learned at the ragged-trousered knee of ancient imbibers who have supped copiously at hostelries of what Sir Les Paterson gloriously termed "the foaming article".

We heard, for example, of the National Hotel, on the north-west corner of the city's Charles and Paterson streets.

Demolished in the 1950s, the space was asphalted to become The Examiner's car park.

A male of a certain age, a life-long Lonnie resident, recalled the old boozer but couldn't remember its moniker.

There were so many other traditional hostelries where mine hosts pulled the last pot before slamming shut the creaking doors on parched punters.

Was there ever such a place as Launceston for pubs and breweries? Dozens of public houses, hotels, drinking establishments spread across the city where the drinker could wile away the odd hour.

The ritzy plush-carpeted variety, the "sawdust-and-blood on the floor" sort, and everything in between, all catering for lovers of the amber fluid.

In the class-conscious olden days, everyone knew their place and wandered to the particular joint where friends, and workmates, gathered when day's work was done.

The aforementioned long-in-tooth (and dry of throat) would recall such flashy establishments as the Brisbane Hotel, the old Launceston Hotel, the Metropole and the Criterion where the squattocracy settled in for Launceston Show week.

Alas, the pub numbers are now diminished as they became offices or shops or were demolished.

The Hobart Town Gazette of 1850 lists the Jolly Anglers, in Bathurst Street, the Scottish Chief, in Wellington Street and the Horse and Jockey in York Street, the Cross Keys in York Street, the Bird in Hand in Elizabeth Street.

Some have changed their names a dizzying number of times over the years.

The current day Cock 'n Bull in Wellington Street was, of course, the Trades Hall Hotel — yet built as the Black Horse Inn in 1850 — where thirsty unionists would gather after deliberations at the trades hall across the road.

The St George and St James, both on York Street, have rebadged but remained drinking establishments as has the Cornwall Hotel renamed the Batman Fawkner Inn as a tribute to Melbourne's founders who planned their mainland tracts at the pub's bar.

The number of historic city hotels has disappeared as quickly as a sherbet down a thirsty journo's neck.

Best we look after those surviving historic hotels.

Especially in memory of that greatest of all late Lonnie pubs beloved of scribes and legal eagles on the Wellington and Paterson streets south-east corner, now also shut.

Vale the Courthouse.