Skint II

    There is a pub just around the corner from me, one of many within ten minute’s walk from where I sit.  In reality, though, the pub is a very long way away.  Once again I find myself short of funds with the sun shining outside and loudly proclaiming that the only sensible course of action is to decamp to a beer garden somewhere and seize the potential of the day.  Time and space may be relative to each other, but without money, your access to any given space is severely curtailed, and time, she passes so very, very slowly.

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.