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.
