Funeral pints

The contemplation of mortality in the pub

I’m in a Wetherspoons on the outskirts of London. It is 11am and I have a pint of Jaipur. The funeral is in an hour. One man photographs his breakfast, while three men discuss the changing names of pubs, then I hear ‘I went to school with a guy called Dave Reed’, while two men sitting at a round table in front of me, next to the fruit machine, are mainly silent as they take sips from their pints, bald and middle-aged, seemingly from their expressions worn and washed-out. They look into space, occasionally exchanging words, then their breakfasts are brought over. The two men chew, chomp, gnash, while others watch the street, play the fruit machine; the style of the morning is short sleeved shirts, cargo shorts, trainers, tattooed legs, the latter watching a man in high viz jacket and cap water the plants outside. Laughter. ‘It’ll be raining in a couple of days, he’s wasting his time.’ A chortle and then back to the chewing, the mastication of slices of black pudding, bare-leg-pink sausage, flattened gleaming bacon, a tumble of baked beans, clean plate, brushed clean with the crust of a toast and then the two men are back to their silence. Roofing Solutions on their t-shirts, three men come in, for breakfast perhaps? Hollow-eyed men with lanyards dangling like pretend nooses and sticks grasped firmly to hand progress through the space in front of the bar. ‘You alright mate?’ ‘Yeah, not bad.’ ‘Stop winning money!’ The clunk of loose change as it goes into a pitcher, ‘thank you very much William’, ‘not a problem’, a stooped man with a face that reminds me of a thinner version of WC Fields.’ ‘Here he is.’ ‘He ain’t got a jacket.’ ‘What’s it to you,’ comes the reply. ‘He was dressed up as a boy scout yesterday,’ says another voice. The man with the long face who photographed his breakfast is having a talk with himself, while elsewhere pints are piling up on tables. Tattoos, chewing, chomping, swallowing, gulping, laughing, ‘listen mate’, finger pointed without malice. We’d better get to the funeral.

Next day I am back in Exeter, in another pub.

Dislocation. Hot heat, sun bearing down on the street, t-shirts, no shirts, long dresses, shorts and skirts, the shadows on the wall of a departing figure, Plato’s Cave, pale skin ailing, an afterthought of dislocation, my son growing up and moving away, the noise of traffic, pulling up to each bumper, the newly borns and the pre-schoolers with their mums and small dogs sitting in the cool of a chain cafe, ‘oh look a bus!’, the excitement of a little girl, the human condition of noise, children intoxicated, but not drunk, a different meaning, the innocence of intoxicated children, the similarity of excited children to drunken revellers, so alcohol brings out the child in us until it decides to throw a tantrum and bash its fists on the ground and kick the dog.

Death, coffin, the crem, burnt remains, what’s left of the lonely hearted, what remains of ambitions, the death of the soul, how we vanish, how we live on in the dark, we live in the dark. We give ourselves fear in the dark and when we are awake at 3.30am it’s the most dislocated time of the day. Dislocation — photos of young versions of you, me and her and now one of us is no longer of this earth. We are on the earth but not in a form that consoles us and those who love us, who have fond memories, will soon see us fading away from the room of memory as much as the all consuming sadness that briefly causes those left behind to collapse in a semblance of mourning. The bulletproof container of memory. RIP. Life and death is contemplated in the pub.