On Economics

 

Imagine, if you will, standing at a bar.  Not difficult, but I hope I haven’t put the idea in your head in such a way that you will now depart before having read what is to come (although in fact, your time is probably better spent that way than this.  Off you pop then, if you must, but when you get there raise a glass to me).  Imagine now (if you are indeed still here) that you get talking to someone at that bar.  A stranger to you, someone you’ve not met before as far as you can remember, but perfectly affable.  You chat for a while, perhaps about football, or the state of the nation, or perhaps about nothing at all.  One of those rambling conversations encompassing the world, and everything within it, that the bar of a pub will engender.  Imagine, finally, that at a certain lull in your talk, said stranger hands you a few pounds.  You accept gratefully, but acknowledge inwardly that in fifteen minutes or half an hour, you will have to reach into your pocket and hand him an equivalent sum, and that this back and forth could go on all night.  Imagine it.  Go on.  It’s insane.

And yet, as any seasoned drinker could tell you, this is, in a certain sense, what is going on all the time in pubs up and down the country.  Except, as any seasoned drinker could go on to tell you, that it’s not.  This is important.  Let me explain. 

What the scenario above demonstrates is that money and beer are not directly equivalent, that exchanging pints is not the same thing as exchanging money.  Or in other words, economics, as it is commonly sold to us, is bollocks.

It is true that money, in our current system of social organisation, acts as a kind of tax on the pleasure principle, that when one is poor the evening is measured by the amount of time it takes to consume the money one has.  Money thus operates as a means of imposing a degree of restraint on pursuits that would otherwise get out of hand very quickly (this, it pains me to say, may not actually be a bad thing).  The fact remains however that the pint occupies a different space than the money that allowed it to be purchased.

If I buy you a beer, it cements a friendship and, further, exhibits solidarity towards the environment we both joyfully inhabit.  And if you take money out of that equation, it will still mean basically the same thing. 

Giving cold cash rarely means anything at all, and if it does, it expresses – as it creates - a power relationship.  If I give you money, I’m basically patronising you.  I’m saying I have something you want, and in my infinite goodness I deign to bestow it upon you.  Money is patronising, but beer is respect, and if a beer is allowed to become totally divorced from its price, then the power in money, insidious and unnatural as it is, is neutralised.  At least in any situation that counts.

Granted, the connection to cash makes the buying of beer a sacrifice, but it is, in most cases a sacrifice that will be returned.  I buy you a drink, you buy me one.  There is, it’s true, an obligation involved, but it’s an obligation that is not rigorously enforced: occasionally, by the necessity that money imposes, one half of the equation is out of balance.  Over time, however, these equations will find a way of balancing out.  If it’s not me tonight, then it will be somebody else some other time.  Ultimately, as long as you don’t give in order to receive, then things will find a way to work themselves out.  It’s only people who keep accounts who lose their bar room karma.

In other, more succinct words, you could take money out of the equation, and the beer would still mean the same thing.  You could not take the beer away and leave only the money, because the entire point of the exchange would disappear into a meaningless vortex of paper and coin.

And this, I think, is the point.  In any society that rewards the rich and punishes the poor, there will inevitably be an attempt to justify and make natural the structures which support that system.  The attempt to make any exchange that isn’t based on the idea of accumulation and naked self-interest seem unnatural reflects a structural desire to reduce human fellow-feeling, to atomise society and isolate the individual, such that he has no point of reference save the dogma transmitted through advertising and economic policy.

Enough has been said about potlatch and similar systems amongst students of anthropology for it need to be repeated here; but the pub – at least on the side of the bar I habitually frequent – is another example to add to the list of functioning, spontaneous, and existent alternatives to the basic social structures we are forced to inhabit.

Right then.  Enough of the theory: I’m off to quaff for the salvation of mankind.  Cin-cin.

To the Seven Billion

 

They say that as of Halloween last year (or perhaps it was the year before.  Tempus fugit, and all that) there are seven billion people in the world.  That means there are six billion nine hundred and ninety-nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine people who aren’t me.  Much as I love being me, and much as I love spending time with someone I hold in such high regard, when I go to the pub a significant factor in my reasoning to do so is to have some degree of contact with some of those people who aren’t.

Think of it this way: I love beer, and that’s what I do when I drink away from home.  That’s who I am.  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t also love wine, and rum, and gin, and pretty much the whole gamut of human ingenuity that looked at grapes and various grains and thought, “very nice, but I bet we can make it better.”  Humanity, and its dissatisfactions (and its methods of distraction, for that matter), is truly a marvel to behold.

And that is why I drink.  Or at least, that is part of the reason why I drink.  To bask in the marvel that is our magnificent species, and to have as much contact with them as I can.  That is also why, in this the city of my exile, I occasionally get very wound up by them.  Pubs are a social location, they exist to facilitate social interaction.  They exist to enable social interaction.  And thus, if one goes to a pub, one is – or at least one should be – leaving oneself open to be socially interacted with.  It is the tragedy of the gentrified pub that the customers it engenders are people who completely fail to understand this.  Granted, the kind of person who habitually haunts the gentrified pub is not necessarily the kind of person one would automatically want to talk to as one flows through one’s evening, but the point still stands.  As marvellous as mankind is, it does still throw up a few duff ones.

That is, perhaps, unfair.  And in fact is a thing that should be remembered: simply being uneducated in the ways of the world (the pub, in this instance), is not the same as being a bad person.  And to be fairer still, there are an awful lot of nutters in the world, and a fair few of them like to pass their time in pubs.  Whilst they may be very interesting from an anthropological point of view, you wouldn’t necessarily want to get stuck in a conversation with one.  Still, I would count this as an occupational hazard, and as I have mentioned elsewhere there are ways of avoiding these encounters.

The point here is that the pub is, and has to be to function, fundamentally a democratic institution.  If a cat can look at a king, then a habitual barfly can talk to whomsoever he chooses.  Whomsoever he chooses may choose he does not want to have that particular conversation with that particular barfly at that particular time, but then we are into the messy business of human relations.  One should, however, be open at all times to the possibility that your interlocutor, as you sit at the bar (especially if you sit at the bar), might be a person worth knowing.  And, should you not be aware of the fact, I’ll tell you: if you sit at the bar, you are telling the world you’re up for a chat.

Right, so here’s to the health of the Seven Billion.  I’m off now to bother some strangers.  Cin-cin.

Decisions, Decisions

There are many reasons to drink, and “just because you can” ranks highly amongst them.  There will, however, always be consequences arising from having that drink, and although most of the time we dive in headlong and heedless (and quite rightly so), the fact that there will be consequences can be harnessed, by the experienced drinker, to suit his own ends.

More specifically, having that drink may clarify what it is that he wants, and make the actions which would make whatever it is come to pass more likely to happen.  In other words, drinking facilitates the making of what, to the sober self, may appear to be bad decisions, and in general I have found that one should always defer decisions until one is not in a fit state to make them.

Now, in positing a distinction between drunken and sober selves, I should make clear that I am not speaking of that massive change in personality indicative of a problematic relationship with the gods of grape and grain.  Rather, I am merely drawing attention to the fact that the drunken and sober selves see the world, and the self within that world, in very different ways.  The drunken self tends to see things more clearly, and certainly more intensely than the sober, and is less likely, perhaps less able, to foresee complications.  It is a world where between the conception and the action, the desire and its resolution, no shadow falls.  Or at least, not a very big one.

Many times I have woken, broken in the morning and desperately hungover, and found notes I have left for myself about what is to be done that day.  These are directions from the drunken self to the (nearly) sober, aware of the problems it will be facing at time of reading, and doing its best to help from its vantage point of clarity.  (That is the respect my drunken self shows to my sober self: it suggests, it advises, and on occasion it cajoles, but it doesn’t commit.  And since to “call her” would be such a phenomenally bad idea that even my drunken self has its reservations, it is a respect for which I am grateful.)

The sober self, however sensible it may perceive itself as, is not a fool.  It is aware of the nagging desires that assail the human soul, but has the advantage over most in that it knows it has a (fairly) reliable handmaiden with which to realise them should their nagging become too much to bear.

For instance, when money is tight (and for the drinking man, money almost always is), but you really want that bottle of expensive rum, a few pints in the pub (which you will justify as a legitimate pit stop on your meanderings about town) will break down the resistance between you and it.  You may wake the next morning anxious and regretting the money spent, but you will be aware that when evening comes and you have your philosophical nightcap, that that bottle, and the pause for thought it enables, will make you happy in a way that the mere presence of money – or more accurately, the absence of quite such a degree of debt – never can.

Even the agonised process of writing, hampered as it is by the strictures of hangovers and the inertia of sobriety, can be facilitated by strong drink.  The trickle, the slow drip of words can be transformed into a mighty torrent, a process I am watching happen now, as I write, a couple of pints down in the hushed stillness of an afternoon pub.  It is, it must be admitted, a torrent often in need of a good editor [Editor’s note: in dire need], but that is a service the sober self is happy to perform, out of gratitude if nothing else.

Alcohol is the medium through which two ways of being can reach each other, through which the cold world of reality and received wisdom, and the world of the heart’s desires, can mingle and mix.

Right.  I’m off to buy an expensive bottle of rum now, and maybe, who knows, I might just call that girl.  Cin-cin.

Hangover II: The Anatomy of a Hangover

I’ve never understood those people who, after a binge of greater or lesser proportions, can wake up and say, “never again.” To me it smacks of rank amateurism and a level of self-delusion I can’t even begin to contemplate.  To me, no matter how bad, the hangover must be embraced as part of the drinking experience: a souvenir of the night before, a memento mori forming a more extreme layer of sobriety.

That said, if there were a way to avoid the things, I would.  Although I have had some limited success on this front by taking half a Valium before bed, as a system it fails in two important regards.  First, Valium is expensive, and that money would be better spent on drinks; and second, it requires organisation: not only the purchase of the pills, but also the wherewithal to actually remember to take the things.  Any hangover prevention strategy that depends on the organisational capabilities of the drunk in question is ultimately doomed to failure.

So, in the ordinary scheme of things, one is left hungover, stranded, in exile upon the island of sobriety’s revenge.  Broadly speaking, I find they can be broken down into one of three kinds:

1) The Common or Garden Hangover.  Symptoms Include: an “oof” upon waking, dryness of the mouth, a slight tiredness behind the eyes, an acute awareness of the membrane around the brain.  Almost indistinguishable from the simple fact of being alive.  Treatment: water, coffee, orange juice, toast.  Tea with sugar if symptoms persist.  Distinctive Activities: checking with trepidation your wallet to see if by chance you have any change from the night before.

2) The Proper Hangover.  Symptoms Include: “oh my God,” “oh fuck,” or in certain iterations, “oo ma heed.”  Akin to waking up into a brick wall.  Extreme dryness of the mouth and throat, difficulty swallowing, shaking of the extremities, sense of brain collapsing in on itself.  Low-level guilt, paranoia and fear, although often tempered by a naughty schoolboy’s sense of mischievous pride.  Treatment: either, strong drink, Full English Breakfast, more strong drink; or cowering indoors with the curtains drawn, hoping the world doesn’t find you.  Distinctive Activities: checking with trepidation to see if there is anything left in your bank account; desperately trying to remember to whom you now owe money.

3) The Post-Bender Psycho-Physiological Crisis.  Symptoms Include: stunned silence on waking, perhaps a sigh of relief as one realises one is, probably, still alive.  Tremors in the body and usually in the soul as well.  Uncertainty with regard to whom one’s brain belongs, as any thoughts one has tend to detach themselves from the inside of one’s skull and take on a life of their own.  Fear.  Guilt and paranoia begin to emerge once one regains partial ownership of one’s head.  Treatment: none, as suicide is beyond you.  May decay into other forms of hangover over time, and therefore be treatable as such.  Distinctive Activities: a remarkably sanguine acceptance of the economic freefall one is now condemned to, a sanguinity dampened only slightly by the realisation one’s internal organs are now worth significantly less on the black market than they were before one started.

As I say, it’s just a part of the life we’ve chosen.  Cin-cin.

In Memoriam Peter O'Toole

Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hangover

Let’s begin with a hangover.  Let’s begin in the existential badlands where the night before wakes up, looks forward to the day ahead, and then curls up and cries.  It’s a day begun with what Hemmingway was wont to call a Mastodon Hangover, and inevitably, your thoughts turn to the pub.  Nothing quite so quaint as the hair of the dog that bit you, because for one thing, it wasn’t a dog that gave you the once over last night, but a whole pack of wolves.  Rather, where hair of the dog is conscious decision – manifestly more than you’re capable of this morning – this is deferring a decision.  This is deferring your hangover until tomorrow, or perhaps next week, by when it will have become something altogether more sinister.

The best that could be said is that you are continuing with the logic of last night, that your body, unable to engage your mind (which is clearly absent without leave), is carrying on from where it left off.  Or perhaps this is merely your body, denied the guiding light of mind and so of experience, refusing to put up with the pain in which it finds itself.  Resolving, of its own accord, to do something about it.  In any event, it’s happening regardless, and you resign yourself to spending the day somewhere between drunk and hungover and completely insane.

And there you are.  A pint in your hand and a brick in your head, and oddly enough, a smile on your face.  Whence the smile, amidst the pain that inhabits you body and soul? You’re in free-fall, and you know it, and there is something glorious about it.  There is something life-affirming about this headlong chase to oblivion, something ennobling in this decent towards spiritual and financial insolvency.  All fetters have been released, and you are in your element.  At one with yourself and the world, no doubts, no guilt, just the possibilities inherent in the day stretching out ahead of you.

There will always be time to sit at home, clutching your head and counting your pennies.  The will always be time to be bored and frustrated.  Tomorrow, perhaps, or perhaps next week; but until then, cin-cin.