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.