Hello darkness my old friend. November is a richly embroiled cloak that swivels around the broad shoulder of the year. It croaks in the way of an urgent crow the impending demise of the year with a voice that mixes the dry rustle of dead men’s bones and the hustle and bustle of the approaching Christmas season. This is a time that sometimes creeps up on the unwary with the stealth of a fox bearing a beatific grin carrying flowers in its paws and then they, the unwary amongst us, including me, realise that the string of lights hanging on the rafters of an ancient Cotswold pub in which I gulp pints of a green-hopped beer, is perhaps a declaration of wares to be sold.
This is a consume-at-all-costs war, but is also an undemanding slumbering conflict into which it is easy to fall, as in the mall that one has uneasily and warily come to in search of goods that slam the cost of living crisis into a wall, with the ease of Joe Marler tossing aside Faf de Klerk. Yes, when you were young and the world seemed as bright as the light that lit up the family lounge and your parents were alive and still married, you really wished it could be Christmas every day and now your dream has come true and from early November it really is. But it is too late and love left on a boat without even a farewell sometime ago.
I am in a pub in the Cotswolds, in the company of a sheer drop of precise flavour that the Dark Star Green Hop beer is, earthy, green, the pith of orange skin, bittersweet and suave in its impact on my palate. Even though this is a brewery that sits beneath the umbrella of Asahi and last year had its home base closed down and moved to south London, I have suspended my love of authenticity and the capacity to feel passion for independence just for one night, and I think that this beer is a wonderful beer that soothes the soul and shoals within the ocean of my well-met heart.
I sit below a spotlight of lights, Christmas in their intention but pagan in their shunning of any iconography that makes us unbelievers feel cold, though there is warmth in their reflection, while the solid beam on which the lights are affixed, smoulders and cold-calls its intention to everyone in the pub: I am old and ancient and venerable and an important part of this pub says the beam, the dream of the rood in its attention, perhaps? Voices roll and rumble around the bar, elbows rested on the glazed wooden counter, ‘right, I was like’ and the story continues, while to my side an ancient stuffed badger, or perhaps a dog otter, stands forever looking upwards on a silent piano. My table is unsteady, short-legged and as wobbly as Long John Silver on the lash, but in a corner, cosy and hidden, childlike in its blanket comfort, and I write (or tap) beneath the frilled, Auntie Blanche-era of a lit lampshade (a great aunt who brought up my father when as a babe he was abandoned by his mother after her father Owen absconded to Birmingham). I am divine in my contemplation.
Shall I take a selfie, shall I put myself on the screen, shall I try and think about the great arc of the sky above me, I think? I do and the result is as ever subject to the severity of my criticism. Why take a selfie for a start, senseless and in the context of a pub verging on the narcissistic, perhaps? No one is interested and I return to my beer, oh beer, to which a senseless decision many years ago saw me change the route of my work and decide that beer could be written about in the manner that I once wrote about music. The pub is this comforting swell of voices and comfort, in my corner I could imagine I was somewhere else, perhaps a long time ago when life stood in front of me, not exactly full of promise but with a premise that said perhaps you will be surprised. Now though, in a pub, at my age, youth flushed down the pan of years, perhaps the pub is now the place for contemplation and examining my station in life rather than stating the steps I should take to a nice house in the country.
Time for another pint? I think so and I will fall upon this beer like a wolf on the fold.