A Good Day

It begins like this, settled at the bar, the first drink in front of you; you pay and take your first sip as the barmaid takes your money to the till.  You watch her over the rim of your glass until she turns to bring you your change.  She smiles as you thank her, and you smile back.  You hold her gaze for a moment, before she goes to serve another customer.  You take another sip.  It’s begun.

It isn’t crowded for the time being, but there are just enough people to make it feel convivial.  Fluttering voices come together with the subtlest air of expectancy; the evening has yet to arrive, but it will, and you’ll be there to meet it.

I always think it’s a good idea to get there early, to be there already when things begin to happen.  In a sense, you stake your claim on the evening, make it yours, you contribute to the shape of it and are already a part of it when you find it has arrived.  Rather than having to adapt to an atmosphere (and with that, perhaps, risk a delicate sense of exclusion, of not quite belonging to it), you are part of the atmosphere, part of the swirl of events upon which you and everyone there are borne.  You glide into the evening, find you are already there when you find it has already begun, when the flutter of voices has become a benevolent storm, when anything can happen.

But all that is ahead of you.  For now, you sip your beer in anticipation, smiling to yourself, smiling at the barmaid.  It’s begun.  

The barmaid excepted, there is no one here yet with whom you are on much more than nodding terms.  That, in itself, is a source of discreet pleasure.  Expectancy, yes, but also a time to settle into yourself and the environment.  It’s another reason to get here early, there’s no rush, no hurry to catch up, to match drink for drink your companions for the evening.  You set your own pace, you relax, better equipped to enter into the reckless torrent when it cascades over you.  This is the time, these first few drinks, that when you share it with a friend, the philosophy of life is discussed and solved and the world is a beautiful place; or when by yourself, like today, you are suffused with serenity and a love of your fellow man which, as time passes, translates into expansiveness and the desire to embrace the world in all its manifestations.  Or at least, all its manifestations as they manifest here in the pub, which by that point means much the same thing.

You finish your pint, you smile again at the barmaid to let her know you’re ready for another.  She brings it to you, and you chat for a while.  Not for too long because the place is slowly, slowly beginning to fill up.  The people who have left work early to get here the sooner are starting to arrive.  She’s a pretty girl, you watch her work.  She’s young, the job here is a stepping stone to the world of proper jobs.  She’s just passing through, but she has something about her that makes her belong: she adds to the place.  She talks to those she knows, to those who want to know her (she is, after all, a very pretty girl); she talks to those who offer her a chance to relieve what is, for her, the monotony of the afternoon.  An irony, that, that for those of us who drink here, the pub is a place to escape the monotony of the quotidian, while for her it’s exactly the monotony that she wants to escape. 

The view is always better from this side of the bar, to those of us for whom the pub is an oasis, or rather, its precise northerly analogue.  In summer, it may spill over onto the streets, spreading out with its own expansive embrace of long afternoons and gentle nights, but perhaps it is in winter when the pub is most itself.  Instead of coolness away from the desert heat, it embodies warmth on these long winter evenings, a place to meet other refugees from the cold.  It glows in the mind as you walk hurriedly along the grey streets to get there, and it glows as you open the door and walk into a warm room full of happy, drunken people.  Your drink glows in its glass, and makes you glow as you drink it down.  The English, they say, are cold fish.  Well, this is where we come to warm up.

It’s an alchemy, of sorts.  The transformation of base ennui into a glowing, golden euphoria; and as it was for the alchemists of old, it’s a transformation only available to the pure of heart.  If you go looking for it, you won’t find it: you have to sit back and let it happen.  Or, if you want to put another way, it’s not about the beer.  It’s inconceivable without the beer, of course, but that’s not what it’s about.  It’s about the pub, and the logic of the pub, and if you get that wrong, you’re in danger of finding only obscure and grotesque compounds, the twisted amalgams of secret desires.  The logic of the pub is reduced to the logic of drunkenness, and there’s no euphoria to be had there.  Another reason to get here early, then, to appreciate the slow transformation, and to give it the chance to work its wonders.

And so it’s begun, and there you are, drawn along through the evening and the marvels it presents.  Tomorrow, perhaps, you’ll be sober, and the world of sobriety will demand retribution.  But until then, cin-cin.