A Pub For All Seasons
What on earth is it all about?
What on earth is your book about? A question I hope I will be asked a lot in the next few weeks when my book is published on September 12.
What is it about?
Deep breath, then: A Pub For All Seasons is a narrative non-fiction travel book about my journey through the UK over the four seasons in search of how pubs change organically, unconsciously, without fanfare, almost with nobody noticing. It is about how pubs echo the seasonal drinks and dishes we fancy throughout the year — as they change a pub also changes. A cosy, snug country inn with a log fire in the winter will be different when spring approaches as its regulars tentatively start to take their drinks outside before being defeated by a sudden, sharp-as-needles shower of rain and back inside they will go to stand by the fire that the licensee lit earlier on, just in case.
It is about how a cosy pub becomes a hideout from the hot sun during the summer, and about how sometimes the ghost of smoke hangs in the air, a memory of fire during the winter and part of spring, and perhaps a memory that it will be lit again sometime soon. I experienced this in a pub during the early part of autumn when the sun was hot and bothered drinkers in the garden and I sat in the parlour sniffing the remains of wood fires earlier in the year. A fire in a pub is elemental in its appeal, a fire in the pub also makes it a refuge. Do we feel safe in there, do we feel sundered apart from the world outside, for sometimes the pub is (and perhaps always has been) an escape, a bolthole to which we can wander down to and for an hour we are in the midst of people but not with them, in the company of a glass of intoxicating liquid? Wine, beer, a spirit, a cocktail, cider, even a non-alcoholic beer, which might not be an intoxicant in the recognised sense of the word, but still it provides company to the needful nature of a busy pub.
The book is also about the voices of those go to the pub, the different voices and the different stories, the ghost stories, the local legends, the tall tales, the sad tales, the whimsy of the drunkard, the loud ones, mainly being arguments about who said what or who in the public eye shouldn’t have said that. This is the pub as an amplification of our daily lives, something I believe James Joyce recognised in Ulysses and which Patrick Hamilton also noted in some of his London novels. The voices tell us everyday stories of their lives, the cross-connections that people sometimes make, as happened to me in the Oxford in Edinburgh whilst talking with a couple of workmen in high vis jackets. They knew an antique place in my home town of Llandudno, which is located in a former primary school against whom mine played football (I was captain BTW but at the age of 10 I don’t think I knew many tactics). The snippets of gossip, the slices of lives well- and not-so-well-lived, the homeless man in The Grill in Aberdeen who was angry and uncontrollable in the grief he felt as he told me about the death of his daughter. The beautiful dog in the Castle in Inverness, the furthest north I have ever been in this country and the barman who told me how busy the pub became during the summer when the tourists flocked to the town and walked about with their mouths open and their cameras clicking away. In my mind I also think of the local legend of the lion in the sidecar before World War II I was told about in a Suffolk pub and its subsequent death due to a lack of meat for its hungry mouth when war came. All these stories and memories are part of the frame of reference a pub gives to the world.
What voices can be heard in pubs when the last members of staff have closed and locked up and the place is now silent. Or is it? I think of my local, the Topsham Tap, which was a warehouse built in the 1830s (I think) and was also the city’s maritime museum, it was also a bar or a nightclub of sorts I think I was once told, but whatever its role it has been full of people whose shouts and voices and thoughts and loves and working practices inhabited the space. Did the walls soak up the voices, does the night sometimes have a shout or a cheer somehow reaching out from the past, something mysterious or is all still?
The book is also about travel, about how I took trains and coaches around the United Kingdom (and cycled too) and enjoyed meandering through cities I both knew and were new to me. It is about the richness of local accents, the gift of local nature, the pints that changed and some that didn’t, about the people that I met and the pubs that I visited. I recall the voice of a singer in a Liverpool street rendering a bittersweet version of George Harrison’s Something, whose words were a direct spike into my heart. It is about the man whose mobile message from his wife was ‘happy St Valentine’s Day my love but don’t come home bladdered!’ The book is about the small things of life as opposed to the gigantic historical movements that trace their way in the sands of time. Our lives are miniatures of existence, which are sometimes dwarfed by great events, births, deaths, matrimony, break-ups, friends’ birthdays and parties, holidays and death once more, waiting in the wings, waiting for its call to action, waiting for its moment to stalk the stage and deliver an address to an audience that cares all too much what it does.
The book is about people who perpetuate the existence of the pub, not just those in the book, but the angry man on the next table in a Liverpool pub that I did not feature, who spent all the time I was there haranguing his friends about the Americans and their support for Ukraine and how the latter country was a construct and that Putin was right. I thought about how this angry man was probably unhappy and always haranguing his friends on the inequities of it all. I thought about Ipswich and how the pubs I wanted to visit didn’t seem to exist and then I thought about the downfall of life I thought I saw in Lowestoft before I got a bus to Southwold. All this is what my book is about.