A sparrow in the mead hall

The enrichment of pub timelessness

In a pub in a Devon town I hide from the world on a benign afternoon, the sun outside splashing its strokes and notes of glee on the street, up which a man with a grey beard is walking, battered rucksack on his back, seemingly shouting insults to nobody in particular. A yellow mini-bus, Bob the Bus, a hail-and-ride instrument of transport, passes him followed by an elderly woman, boho in her style, on a bicycle. In this pub, which brews its own beer, I loot from the working day a sense of freedom and timelessness as I sit there with a pint that was made on the other side of the room in a compact space behind the bar. The aromatics of a new mash — breakfast cereal — flit through the air like bats at sundown taking me back to childhood and the morning smell of Weetabix and warm milk before I walked a couple of miles to the railway station for school, because thanks to my parents’ toxic divorce we didn’t have a car for some time. The smell also reminds me of the spoonfuls of malt extract I was given around the age of 12, a sweet, sticky dollop that was supposed to be good for me, the taste of which returned when I started to think about beer rather than just drink it.

In this wooden womb of a summer’s day pub I am happy in my solitude, observing and listening while enjoying the crisp, floral nature of the beer. I experience a glorious sense of timelessness that a couple of hours in the kindness of a pub can bring to one’s life. It is timeless, time has no meaning, unless you want it to. Some, stern and ascetic in their dislike of the pub, would call it wasting time, wasting your life, but everyone finds their own way to the devil, and this is how I often spend my time. I look out of the window, watching people coming and going, kissing each other, hugging and generally including themselves in the great fellowship of friendship; I recognise a sense of melancholia within but this is not about feeling sorry for myself or reaching into a black hole and hoping there will be good fortune in there instead of the usual feelings of dread, instead it is about looking at the passage of these lives, these fuzzy shapes of energy based on love. Within these wooden furnishings of the pub, which I am part of for a brief time, I suddenly have a faint memory of a long ago TV programme from childhood of a tree whose eyes blinked and then its lips smiled and that animate tree was alive and all was well. 

Another sip of my beer, a long glance at the road outside, and then I think about the Venerable Bede’s parable of the sparrow flying through the mead hall and about how my time in this pub is akin to the flight of the small bird on a cold winter’s night, which takes it briefly through the warmth and the light of the hall. Life. Yet there is nothing sad about my feelings. It could be worse. Remembering some of the most dire pubs I have had to spend time in over the years I imagine the purgatory in which the same dismal pub is visited night after night and the same dismal beer is drunk and the same dismal conversations are had, the purgatory of a failed life, the collapsed star of the only pub in town.

The enjoyable and pleasing pubs to which we repair to hide and hold our head up high are an escape, a holt, a bolthole, a fen in which Hereward the Wake awaits, and sometimes we hear the legends told of pub denizens of the past no longer visible except in the minds of those who remember them: Tony Tin, Milkshake Mary, Pie Dave, names on a roll call of intoxication. There is romance in the timelessness of the pub, romance in a gleaming glass of beer, its magnificence slapping against the harbour walls or the ramparts of the palate, waves crashing against the shore,Dover Beach perhaps. There is romance in both solitude and the company kept, the good-natured tales told, the exaggerations, the memories and the moments of hearsay and don’t-say-that-I told-you, the indiscreetness of and the industry with which confidences are exchanged amid the silence in which I sit pen in hand, jotting down secrets and the lies and lives of those who needed a place to come in from the hot sun. This comfort and timelessness that I feel is similar to the one you find in the darkness and stillness of a forest and, thinking of how that calmness in the woods can have a soothing effect on the soul, I recognise and welcome the same sensation in this sacred grove of a pub on this beneficent afternoon in this small Devon town.