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.