Going to the pub for me is often about a search for calmness in the company of a beer that speaks to me with the authority of a prophet who has spent a long time on a hill pondering about the wold ahead of them. It is about the need to be becalmed on a metaphorical smooth millpond of the sea, a ship with its sails slack and limp, no breeze to rustle the cloth, no movement to hunt down the ennui that I feel, ‘nowhere’ the name on the destination board. With the wound of insecurity that I fell into many years ago it is something similar to working out on a treadmill in the gym. Not going anywhere but I am still moving.
For me, sitting in a pub in Norwich, an old favourite of mine, on a hot Wednesday night where the sound track is some lively assemblage of country hard rock complete with electric fiddler, the quietness of being at a tall table at the back of the pub, while everyone else is outside or at the front of the bar, there is a sense of calmness.
‘Pint Jack.’ ‘How you been?’ ‘Yeah, good.’ ‘You’ll have to put these on my tab Jack.’
The rolling words of pub conversation, the urgent conversations the laughter like a kookaburra in a tree, the sharp rap of a coin on a bar-top whilst waiting for service, the reasons for being, the ‘really nice girl’, and how she is going to rock up tomorrow. The heart is exposed in the pub when we are all becalmed.
‘I’m not used to this.’
Neither am I.