You drink because you want
to, or perhaps because you must.
You drink for pleasure, you drink from boredom, and you drink to ease
the pain. You drink for company and
to lubricate the wheels of social interaction, and often enough, you drink to
get away from everything and everyone.
You drink. And that’s a
good thing.
Because you drink, you
frequently find yourself in pubs.
Because you’ve been drinking for a long time, you find your relationship
with pubs more fundamental than your relationship to booze. Your relationship with the pub is, as I
may have mentioned before, clearly inconceivable without the booze, and
naturally it is the booze that draws the two of you together in the first
place, but once you’re there, your relationship with the particular pub in
question can blossom into existence.
Now clearly there are pubs
that, having been once, you’d never go back to again. Theme pubs, gastro-pubs and the like, where the gastro has
so overtaken the pub that the honest drinker is pushed into a corner and left
feeling that his simple need to consume the establishment’s massively
overpriced beer is an inconvenience.
Where any semblance of someone having fun is to be frowned upon. If you drink amongst people for whom a
second glass of wine is viewed as risqué, then what chance do you have?
Then there are pubs that
simply happen to be convenient, neatly positioned for you to pause and regroup
on your journey from A to B. They
may be perfectly pleasant in their own right, you may even find that you tarry
a little longer than you had anticipated.
Quite possibly to the extent you decide that whatever it was you were
going to do at B is not worth the bother and perhaps you will just stay for
another one after all. The chances
are, however, given that for your everyday peregrinations it’s a little bit out
of the way, you won’t go back.
But once in a while, you
stumble into a pub for the first time, and something clicks. It answers a need in you. Perhaps it’s a particular calm, or then
again, a particular vivaciousness in the atmosphere. Perhaps it’s the ease with which you fall into conversation
with the gentlemen at the bar.
Perhaps it’s as simple as the barmaid being pretty and open to
distraction. Or perhaps it’s
something more intangible. It
would be easy to overwork the psychology involved, but there is a sense of
recognition when you find a pub to which you immediately know you will return,
a sense of familiarity, a sense of felicity, a sense of yes, right here.
That said, no relationship
is always plain sailing, and even that initial sense of rightness can be
misleading. You can go back to a
place at find the atmosphere gone, twats at the bar, and a superfluity of boorish
barmen. Even then, though, on the
strength of the initial encounter, you are inclined to give it another chance
or two, and if like me, you are still bereft of a proper local to call your
own, a few more after that. At the
very least, you come to an understanding.
While it may not be The One, it is at least there, and fulfilling at
least some of your needs.
Thus I find myself without
a local as such, but with at least a couple of pubs I enjoy and that I’m seeing
on a regular basis. While I may
have moved on, I have perhaps not yet fully let go of the old pub, and am still
looking for something of that in any new pub I chance upon. And that is perhaps in part because
something deep within me is longing to hear those three little words that can
change the world, three little words that make the whole of that mess we call
existence make sense. Those three
little words that at the very least ensure a night of magic: “on the
house.” Cin-cin.
