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.