A musing on menace
no nice pics here
Menace is an easy state of mind to drop into, perhaps accentuated by the fall of night in an unknown neighbourhood or even a hungover day in which every noise, shadow, shove or look from strangers seems to bring a world of badness into sharp focus. I think about menace now and again, try and elaborate it to myself and understand it. So when it comes to the pub I often remember how I felt as a young guy walking into a backstreet boozer in North London where the regulars knew each other and this guy, me who did not belong, was at the bar asking for a Guinness. The TV was on, lounging on a brace of brackets in a corner of the bar, racing being shown, greyhound perhaps I seem to remember, and a man with his tongue hanging out like a lozenge asked me what the time was. In my head, the phrase, time to go, came along, but I told him, quarter past one, and he seemed happy enough. I stayed for a couple of pints, studiously reading through the pages of Kerouac’s On The Road though I seem to recall not making much sense of it, even though it was then my passion. I never went back.
A pub is about a welcome, it is about, as one brewery owner (which has a decent estate of pubs) recently said to me, the ‘offer we deliver’. This is a thick dollop of corporate speak perhaps, but I have known this owner for a few years and respect him a lot and know what he is trying to say. When you walk into a pub and get a vibe that is unfriendly and you feel stared at and valued-judged as you approach the bar you wonder why the hell you are there (and god knows how it is for someone who is not male, white, middle-aged and middle class like myself).
Sometimes, as long as physical danger or out-and-out discrimination isn’t involved, perhaps you just have to take that chance because I don’t know how the issue of menace in a pub can be resolved without turning those classic pubs we love into something homogenous and hurtful to the soul. For after all, the pub is someone else’s place, not necessarily a home, but it is the regulars, like the guy with a tongue like a lozenge, probably long dead and forgotten and perhaps the pub is even shut now, who call it their home. It was that guy who looked at me on that long ago summer’s lunchtime in North London who decided I could belong for a bit.
I remember other occasions of passing the test of belonging in pubs: a fella from school, older than me, who wore leather trousers (the Jim Morrison of Llandudno we always said), who nodded to me on an early sojourn to the Royal Oak. Or the woman, from a squat next door to a Cambridge pub where my 21 year old self was once carried out of after a ferocious night on the beer, who, once she’d knocked some of my youthful cockiness off its block, became a good friend.
At other times though the menace is not an intellectual exercise, or a cheap thrill to be written about, it is a very real threat, a red flag for a danger sign and that is when you know to leave, as I have done several times long ago. But for others who don’t share my identity this is a normal occurrence and we need pubs to be as safe as possible, which comes down to making sure that they welcome everyone, whoever they are are and wherever they come from. Pretty simple really when you think about it.