Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
Saturday, 7 December 2013
In a Bad Mood
It gets to you
sometimes. It really does. It starts with the perennial shortage
of money, and ends with a long walk home, half-cut and seething, wondering why
you’re doing this to yourself.
When money’s tight and your opportunities for distraction are thus
limited, if your chosen pub lets you down, it’s going to be a long time until
you can give it the chance to make things right again.
And in the meantime, you
seethe. There is a lot to seethe
about in this world these days, most of it to do with childish faith in
bankrupt economic theories and the shocking disregard in which our “elected”
representatives hold us. And I
confess, I seethe about these things on a regular basis. But (and I suspect it is by this and
similar mechanisms that the powers that be manage to get away with their
bullshit), they don’t make me anything like as angry, or trouble my sense of
well being half as much as being disappointed by an excursion to the pub.
I blame the particular pub
for this, and more than that, I blame the drinking culture in this town. In this I am justified. The fault lies squarely on an inability
to accommodate Bacchanalian excesses on a weekday. But as an individual within this localised society, ones
perception of oneself is coloured by that society’s perception of one. Given
that ones post-excessive, hungover state of mind is likely anyway to be touched
by the hand of guilt (for no good reason, or at least, no good reason that you
can remember), the perception of others – others who, it must be emphasised
again, are absolutely in the wrong - weighs heavily upon one.
It’s not enough to touch
your core beliefs, of course, but it saps the joy that surrounds them. Without that joy, without the lift that
the thought of going to the pub gives you (and this is all the more true when
your financial situation curtails the opportunities to actually do so), you
lose the sense of consolation, the sense that there is another way of being
which you can attain. If not right
now, then tomorrow or next week or next month. The pub, in any worthwhile context, smiles at you, it urges
you on through the quagmire of the quotidian, and basking in that promise
you’ll find a way to reach it. If
the pub frowns, then you’re lost, trapped in the festering, bubbling, seething
morass of other people’s misplaced – and misguided – morality.
The absence of a healthy
drinking culture means there is no community of drinkers that can be relied
upon and among whom you can take your place. You may, by chance, run into a few pleasantly inebriated
people at the bar, but it is a situation that cannot be relied upon to manifest
itself regularly. Bad nights
happen, of course, wherever you drink, but if there’s money, and a place where
your brand of merriment is more commonly appreciated, then one bad evening will
disappear in the alcoholic tide of other evenings. As it is, you’re beached, stranded on the polluted shores of
other people’s sobriety.
The truth is, under normal
circumstances, I could probably drink my way out of this impasse. Throwing alcohol at a problem is a
failsafe solution to most things.
Let down by the pub, though, the question arises of where this course of
existential therapy would take place.
That pub doesn’t appeal, and if that pub - which hitherto has come
closest to satisfying your socio-alcoholic needs in this town - isn’t working,
then the chances of any of the others doing so is small. When the symbiosis of pub and punter
has broken down, what is there that one can do?
Like getting back on a
bike after you’ve fallen off, you have to get back in there. A line must be drawn, a stand must be
made. In any relationship, a time
comes when you have to say, up with this I will not, cannot, put. And that time is now. So, as soon as money permits, I will be
there, drinking heavily for my beliefs, consequence be damned. I have right on my side, I have faith
in my heart. So cin fucking cin.
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
On Relationships and Their Manifestations
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.
Wednesday, 23 October 2013
Opening Time
It never completely leaves
you, the thrill of going to the pub, no matter how many times in your life that
you’ve been there. Once the
decision is made (and in truth, once you’ve posed the question, it’s a decision
that has already been made), it shakes you free of inertia and lifts you to a
higher plane.
So it was, after giving up
on an unusually fitful night’s sleep, I found myself outside very early in the
morning to clear my head, and the promise of a lunchtime pint was the
motivating factor. I found myself
outside rather too early, with a head so clear that the urge to cloud it again
settled early upon me. Rather too
early, as the pubs would not open for quite a while to come.
There is very little on
this earth as pathetic as a grown man staring folornly at a locked pub door at
eleven o’clock in the morning, wondering why it won’t unlock until twelve. The loosening of the licensing laws has
been of clear net benefit to the country, but when eleven o’clock is seared
into the mind of every drinking man and woman as the beginning of the day, this
tendency to twelve o’clock starts seems designed to confuse the already very
confused. I resolved I would not
be caught out in this way (God, not again), and decided to find something else
to do until the hour of my deliverance arrived.
Thus resolved, the problem arose of what that would actually
entail. The early morning is not
my natural habitat, and whilst there is a certain pleasure to be taken from
seeing a familiar place from this unusual perspective, the novelty had already
worn off by the time I was wondering what to do with it.
Being somewhat short of
funds (and replete with enough self-knowledge to realise that a lunchtime pint
is more than likely to become a teatime pint, a suppertime pint, and quite
probably a nightcap as well), my initial reaction, to prepare the ground by
indulging in God’s gift to the all day drinker, namely, the Full English
Breakfast, was right out. In a
town such as the one in which I find myself, this cornerstone of British culture
has become something of a luxury item, and whilst in the city, there are many
places where it can be had for less than the price of a pint, the thought of
sacrificing two or even three was too much to bear, and would anyway leave the
projected economics of the day in tatters.
Coffee, however, remained
an option. But although it is the
friend of those, like me, who find the very idea of morning too much of a
challenge to contemplate unaided, once it leaves the confines of ones own kitchen
and establishes itself in its public form, the cafè, it becomes an altogether
more insidious liquid. Overpriced,
and generally speaking a watery memory of what real coffee should taste like,
it can hardly come as a surprise that as parasitical a practise as insurance
(and so ultimately, the stock exchange) was born in the places
of its sale.
Unwilling to risk adding
to the sum total of human misery, and in any case distinctly uninspired by the
visions of corporate blandness that revealed themselves to me as I walked past
their windows, I dismissed the idea of coffee, and continued to walk.
Coming to a park, the
thought struck me that, if my way to the pub was blocked by the vagaries of
time, then perhaps I could, in some small way, bring the pub to me. Parks have benches, and park benches
have a proud tradition of being sat and drank upon. It would, of course, involve me finding an off license of
some description, one willing to be charmed into selling me booze before eleven
o’clock in the morning (the concept of twenty-four hour drinking seems not to
have yet filtered down to the retailer), and further, risk the opprobrium of
the kind of sober folk who pass their mornings in parks, but the promise of a
can or two to pass the time and fortify my resolve was enough to help me rise
above such mundane concerns.
And so it was I wandered
off in search of an offy, and so it was, as I wandered and searched, I beheld a
sight that brought joy to my heart.
An open door, and attached to the door was a pub. I checked the time. It was later than I had thought. It was, give or take, eleven
o’clock. I approached gingerly,
afraid that this, my oasis, may yet turn out to be a mirage, but a word to the
man behind the bar confirmed to me that these were indeed the gates of paradise
thrown open in the welcome it behoves the just to embrace.
And so it was, amidst the
gentle sounds of a pub in the process of opening, of people popping their heads
around the door to say a quick hello to the barman, of the one or two who came
in for an early lunchtime pint, of the rustle of a newspaper, of the clink of a
glass and of bottles being prepared for the day; amidst these happy noises full
of promise my salvation was vouchsafed.
My day had finally begun.
Where it would end, I couldn’t say (and to be honest, even now looking
back, I’m still trying to piece that one together), but closing time was a long
way off, there was a pint full in front of me, and with my heart full of
happiness and glorious anticipation, it struck me a day doesn’t start better
than this. Cin-cin.
Sunday, 29 September 2013
Off the Leash
Booze never fails puts me
in a good mood, and I often marvel
at its capacity to do so. Walking
into a pub and carrying with me all the petty annoyances of the day, it still
strikes me with epiphanic force when, usually about half way down my third
pint, a transformation occurs. The
miserable git who was sitting there a moment ago has disappeared, and in his
place is a cheery soul, propping up the bar with a grin on his face. This, it seems to me, is an innate
property of drink, its capacity to induce merriment and release the good mood
lurking beneath the foetid crust of quotidian concerns.
It’s a noble state of
mind, and one I’m always happy to be in.
But there are times when it’s not enough. There are times when the pressures of life have built up to
such an extent that you really need to cut loose; and to enter the realm of
unfettered euphoric Bacchanalia, there are other contingencies which need to be
addressed.
First amongst these is,
inevitably, money. Bar-propping is
an expensive business at the best of times, but to allow yourself off the leash
you must be able to forget entirely the financial consequences. The need to count pennies is a force
that runs counter to the full expression of the euphoria you are hoping to
achieve (and in fact, runs counter to most that is good in the human spirit),
and will always undermine it.
Second is time, and for
very similar reasons. If you have
to worry about getting up for work tomorrow, or even worry about calling in
sick, then you’ll be hard pressed to really embrace the course of therapy upon
which you have embarked, and following the evening through its labyrinthine
twists and turns, often into the next day and often into the day after that,
becomes deeply problematic.
Finally, and perhaps most
importantly, it’s the company you keep whilst on your merry way. It may come as a surprise, but there
are certain circles, certain pubs even, where drunkenness is frowned upon. This is not where you want to be. If you cannot fully commit to the course
you have chosen from the very beginning, then you may as well go home. If you are, tacitly or otherwise, on
the defensive, amongst people for whom drinking is a polite pass-time rather
than the highest expression of the human spirit (civilisation begins with
fermentation, after all – beer, wine, and bread*), then the essential
gregariousness inherent to the project is opposed, its freedom crushed by the
weight of staid disapproval.
It should be remembered,
however, that this is a spiritual quest, and not a case of mere mechanics. Like Eckhart’s dark night, the ground
may be prepared, but the Spirit may yet choose not to descend. That said, when I found myself on the
receiving end of a small piece of financial good fortune, it was only ever
going to end one way. A trip to
the city was what was needed, and an unfettered, euphoric, three-day
Bacchanalian binge.
And that was exactly what
I got. Off the leash and in good
company, chasing through old pubs and new, feeling the sense of liberation that
only undiluted alcoholic folly can bring.
A return to the fold, touching upon the divine.
All good things must come
to an end (or so we are led to believe), and now I find myself back in the town
of my self-imposed exile. Having
reconnected fully with my inner Dionysus, inevitably it is screaming at me to
keep the party going. But for all
the reasons outlined above, I cannot.
I must betray the god within, quiet him until the next opportunity
presents itself. This saddens me,
but at least I’ve enough money left to pop to the pub. It will all seem a lot better after a
pint or three. It’s a noble state
of mind, cin-cin.
*What Faulkner actually
said was, “civilization begins with distillation,” and there is a good case to
be made; for myself, however, I prefer this amendment, pointing as it does to
the moment we as a species raised ourselves above brute survival.
Tuesday, 13 August 2013
On Virtue and the Sober Mind
I have written before that
one should embrace the possibility of the pub at any opportunity that presents
itself: there will always be another chance to be bored and frustrated at
home. Penury, however, twists your
thinking to the extent that even this self-evident truth is thrown into
doubt. I’ve got a little money
spare, and am wondering if spunking it in the pub is the right thing to
do. Of course it is, but the
longer you allow such doubts to linger, the more they prey upon your poor,
alcohol-deficient mind.
The question you have to
ask yourself is, what exactly do you want to save this money for? The answer to that question is easy: to
spend at the pub another time. The
corollary to that question is, therefore, is your burning desire to be in the
pub now greater than your burning desire to be in the pub will be at some
unspecified time in the future (probably tomorrow)? The answer to this secondary question is obviously going to
be predicated on pure speculation, but one can say with a degree of confidence
that it is in the nature of burning desires that they burn now, and demand
satisfaction immediately. So the
short answer to the corollary can only be yes, the burning desire to be in the
pub now burns hotter than any other possible desire to be in the pub could ever
burn. Problem, if ever a problem
it were, solved.
Or so it would seem. A doubt is still lingering, and will
have to be analysed before it goes away.
It will have to be analysed if only because a lingering doubt can
severely curtail your enjoyment of an evening out. From somewhere, a little voice masquerading as reason is
insinuating that the money would be better left unspent.
There is of course a degree of security in
knowing you’ve a night out in your pocket, that you won’t find yourself
stranded in sobriety without hope of escape. But this is not what the voice is really telling you. This observation fails to address the
issue that sobriety is exactly where you are stranded right now. What is actually happening here is that
the devilish voice is telling you there is some virtue in holding onto money for
its own sake.
A revelation like this
goes far enough against your nature that it will shock you back into something
resembling your right mind (insofar as a mind deprived of alcohol can ever be
right). Poverty is making a miser
of you, and that cannot be healthy.
Money is a means to an end, and if a shortage of funds is beginning to
transform your personality, is beginning to rob you of that aspect of yourself
that helps you rise above circumstance and so keep you sane, then it becomes
imperative that you get down the pub right now. The consequences of not doing so are unthinkable: this is no
longer about saving or not saving money, this is about saving your soul.
The spiritual shackles of
poverty are thrown off, and a spring has returned to your step. It is time to embrace the glorious
insanity of it all. I’m off now. Cin-cin.
Sunday, 7 July 2013
A Few Words on Smoking
Summer
may have just arrived, or perhaps this is just another mocking preamble
to another dismal washout. Summer is, let's face it, a dream
we've been dreaming for a number of years now. Whichever it turns
out to be, though, I can at least say I've made it through another
winter without dying of pneumonia. Whilst it wouldn't ever be enough
to consider voting for those mendacious incompetents for whom it is a
campaign platform, I do miss smoking in pubs.
It
was a July, if memory serves, when the ban came into force, and
otherwise rather a pleasant day. I had been out the night before,
locked-in, late for work and was decidedly the worse for wear.
Stumbling out of work and into the pub, there was still something of
a party atmosphere (these were the glory days of the old pub, when
come-down Sundays were so much fun, the Monday and often the Tuesday
were needed to come down from them). The Landlord, with malicious
irony, had replaced the customary bar-bowl of generously over-salted
popcorn with those sweet cigarettes for children which were somehow
still legal.
There
was a party atmosphere, but it was, for the most part, all happening
in the garden. The interior of the pub was curiously deserted. Not
smoking was a novelty, and just as the night before had been spent in
a carnivalesque celebration of the last day of legality, so today,
released again by the novelty of the situation the carnival
continued, as if a rolling party were merely looking for something to
which to attach itself.
The
novelty of the situation wore off very quickly, but that summer, such
as it was, was passed outdoors. The pubs (and I think this was true
of most pubs), remained deserted inside, the rumour spread of a
possible extension of the ban because the young were seeing smokers
having too much fun outside, and an echo of carnival remained. It
was winter when the ban took on its final form.
On
any evening, in any pub, the universal expression of memory lapse
would punctuate proceedings. At random times and at random points
around the pub, the cry of “oh, fuck” would be heard, and to the
accompaniment of ironic cheers, someone with a lit cigarette in hand
would make an embarrassed dash for the door. The last time I was
caught out in this way was a full three years after the ban was
introduced. Old habits die hard, but the most disturbing thing was
not so much the ban itself, but the speed with which it became
normal.
Normality
breeds the rituals of the normal: you adapt, for better or worse,
your ways of being to any situation into which you are thrown. An
etiquette emerges, and the smoking ban became a way to manage ones
social obligations. On entering the pub, if there was no one at the
bar you recognised, you would buy your pint, have a few sips, and
then pop into the garden for a smoke. You would, however, leave your
pint at the bar, so that if there was anyone in the garden you knew
but didn't want to speak to, you had an excuse to leave their company
after a relatively short period of time. An unattended pint is
universally recognised as overriding any other obligation, thus no
breach of etiquette has been committed and you can depart an unwanted
situation with honour intact.
Similarly,
if you found yourself stuck at the bar in one of those conversations
that are the occupational hazard of the pub-drinking man, you, your
pint, and your cigarette could all decamp to the garden, in the hope
that by the time you needed to refill, your interlocutor would have
wandered off in search of someone else to annoy. Of course, wherever
there is etiquette, there are breaches of etiquette, but in the end,
being followed around by a nutter with an agenda is at least no worse
than being cornered by a nutter with an agenda.
And
this is how the dance of the pub plays out, flitting from garden to
bar, to friends and from nutters, from pint to cigarette and back
again. The dance was always there, of course, made of groups and
their offshoots and the solo-drinkers joining together with each
other or other groups before spinning off again into the evening.
Particles and their compounds at play to the music of chance. The
ban just made clearer what had been happening all along, it
underlined the movement and clarified its articulation. And the ban
did one other thing, which I think its architects didn't have in
mind. In the dancing and spinning and moving from group to group and
from place to place, I'm smoking much, much more than I ever used to.
Anyway,
for now at least the sun is out, and I'm tempted to call it summer.
I'm also tempted to while away the afternoon in a pub. And as a wise
woman once said to me, the best way to deal with temptation is to
give into it. Cin-cin.
Thursday, 16 May 2013
Skint II
Now, the pub is a long way
away, but you might scrape together enough for a discounted six-pack or a
bottle of wine to drink at home.
Less than six quid, which you’d push to make last two pints at the pub. Drinking alone at home gives you a more
philosophical outlook, but only insofar as you are aware of, and thinking into,
the absence of the pub. The pub is
a long way away, and as you drink from a tin, you are made increasingly aware
that it is not, solely, about the beer.
Better this than nothing, but the more you drink alone (even if it’s
true that you’re able to listen to your music, able to smoke when and where you
want), the more you are aware that you are drinking as a surrogate for the
pleasures of the pub.
Or put it another
way. Whilst drinking is fun (and
also both big and clever), and something you enjoy very much, what you’re
craving in these moments of restlessness isn’t the booze. Or at least not only. What you’re craving is the sense of
possibility. What you’re craving
is the sense that anything could happen: the pub is just the starting point
from where an adventure can begin, be it a psychological journey where the
night-time city seems to mirror the states of your mind as you play the pinball
of chance encounters; or be it finding yourself waking up in a hotel room in
some foreign city with no idea how you got there, or indeed, where it is that
you have got.
This is not to say that
any of these things will happen.
It’s only that they have become possible, and with that possibility, a
fundamental freedom is articulated.
What the pub represents,
in its ideal form anyway, is an escape from the quotidian. An escape from the mundane, an escape
from what is being sold to us as reality.
By embracing the sense of the possible, by embracing the aleatory nature
of the pub and the avenues it opens, one rises above the drudgery of keeping
your head above water in a world where subjective reality – the actual business
of being human - is being increasingly dismissed as an irrelevance.
Viva la revolucion, my booze-soaked
comrades. Oh, and cin-cin.
Thursday, 11 April 2013
Skint
It’s a terrible thing, to
have time and no money on a beautiful morning like this. You throw open the curtains and the day
calls to you, invites you to share in its possibilities. Blue sky and sun, and the slightest of
hazes that makes the world outside your window seem to shimmer with
expectation. It’s been a long
winter, after all. You prepare
yourself to meet the day with a growing sense of excitement. You sing to yourself in the shower, you
are suffused with goodwill as you sip your coffee. And as you sip your coffee, you make your plans for this
perfect day.
This, of course, is when
it hits you. Your options are
severely curtailed. Your initial
response was, inevitably, to flit
from pub to pub for a while, basking in the atmosphere that only a sunny day
can bring, letting what will happen, happen. The pub on the brink of summer is
the embodiment of exactly that sense of freedom that you long to embrace. The pub, though, at any time of year,
is an expensive proposition, and its freedom does not come cheap. In your mind you run through some
economic gymnastics, but no matter how many financial somersaults you perform,
there’s no way to square an embrace of the day with the more prosaic pecuniary
necessities of living.
Your longing, your desire,
is turned back on itself, your cheerful mood is frustrated. There are other options, of course,
some as simple as going for a walk.
But a walk for you is always a walk to the pub, and if it isn’t it only
serves to emphasise that the day you wanted is not to be yours. As the sense of freedom fades, any
other course of action loses its flavour.
The sense of possibility has no way to express itself, and the sunny day
becomes dead weight to be suffered.
You draw the curtains, and pass the day in shadows.
Friday, 15 March 2013
Don't Look Back
Don’t look back. That’s what they say. God knows, I’ve said it so many times I
might qualify as one of them myself.
The ease with which you can become mired in the past, that you can, even
whilst you think you’re ploughing forward in life, catch yourself one day and
realise you have been burying yourself in the memory of the things you thought
you were leaving behind, is frightening.
That said, when you have,
as I have, left a life that was comfortable if not entirely satisfactory - and
for reasons more of duty than desire - it is perhaps inevitable that in your
idle moments your thoughts, which are never far from the pub at the best of
times, will drift back to the pub you left behind. I’ve even found myself contemplating hopping on a train to
go there rather than the local establishments on one of my forays into the
depths of the bacchanalian.
Contemplating it, wanting it, but not actually doing it, because the
cost of a train would be my beer money gone, and the object of the exercise
would thus be defeated somewhat.
The bond with your local
builds up over years, for the most part without your being aware it’s
happening. Circumstance leads you
to a place, a few good nights lead you back. After that, it’s time and commitment, good nights and bad,
but it’s always the first place you think of, the most natural place to
be. Perhaps the old pub wasn’t the
best pub in the world, perhaps it was a bit tatty and perhaps the beer wasn’t
always the best, but it was mine, and it knew me, and it looked after me. And now, here I am in a new town,
actively looking for a new pub, wondering why none of them is the old. Here I am, unable to commit to any pub
which, however congenial, is lacking that one basic characteristic of a pub I
might chose to spend time in: the exact relationship I had with the pub I left
behind.
Still, you have to let go,
you have to move on. They say that
too. It’s a daunting proposition
after so long in a stable relationship, but you do have to get on with your
life. The search continues, you
play the field, and whilst there are some good times to be had that way – some
very good times - you still find yourself remembering how easy it once was to
sate this restlessness. You still,
on occasion, find yourself in a bar looking for a familiar face where you know
there are none, looking for recognition where nobody knows who you are. And sometimes you’ll wake the next
morning, or perhaps the next afternoon, with no testament to the evening you’ve
spent besides an empty wallet and a vague sense of regret.
All this is to say that,
when a little personal business took me back to the city after however long
I’ve been away, there could be no question about my first port of call.
Word had reached me in my
exile that the place had changed.
I’d heard it had renovated and it had changed its name, I’d heard it was
pitching itself at a new demographic.
I’d hoped that it wasn’t my fault.
But still, it was my pub, how different could it be?
The bus ride from the
station was uncomfortable enough to distract from a certain mounting tension,
so when I got off in the old neighbourhood I was surprised to find my heart was
racing. The walk from the bus stop
is a short one, but time enough to realise with some excitement that this
memory of a place which had lived so vividly in my mind, that had exerted such
gravitational force upon my thoughts and my judgement, was just that, a memory:
here, now, was the real thing, here was that strange and particular intimacy
that had never been exhausted, that had always held the promise of something
more. Here was my pub, waiting for
me.
Then there I was, crossing
the threshold into what was clearly not my pub anymore. Clean, bright, and completely devoid of
customers. Unsmiling staff and, it
quickly became apparent, massively overpriced drinks. All the good times gone. It had become a cash generation machine which looked (an
observation confirmed by friends) as if it were losing money hand over
fist. I finished my drink and went
off to have an extremely pleasant evening elsewhere.
So it’s gone, and there is
no way back, just another pub that has turned its back on drinkers. Perhaps this will be the impetus to
give another pub a chance on its own terms, perhaps now I can let go and move on. Perhaps, but then, even though it’s no
longer there it casts a long shadow.
The past, you see, will always haunt the present. Back in this new town, there is only
the hollow sense of loss that comes from the realisation you were, despite it
all, clinging to the possibility of return. Instead, your bridges have spontaneously combusted, and you
are cast adrift. You stand alone
now, and that’s a terrifying revelation.
Only one thing can salve this tragic situation, only one thing can ease
the pain. I’m off for a pint
now. Cin-cin.
Tuesday, 29 January 2013
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.
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