I still keep asking myself…
What is A Pub For All Seasons about?
On a train, aligned with the journey to London and onwards to Suffolk. An early train, not yet 8am, some passengers try to sleep, others work, while a woman with gently waved brunette-coloured hair and glasses on a chain around her neck looks out of the window, perhaps hoping for a sign that the day will go well. Ahead of me a long day and a conversation about my new book A Pub For All Seasons in a hotel bar in Southwold tonight.
I still keep asking myself what is the book about?
I think that it is about the triumph of exploration, the dilemmas of which journey to take, the grit of remembrance and grief and the ease with which beer can be sunk into and drunk with demonstrative joy. It is about the people who populate the pubs I visit, the drunks and the dreamers, the jokers and the redeemers, the soaks and the scholars and those who are determined not to go too quietly into the night.
It is about my dreams that take place on the page, the stories I carbon-capture and bring struggling into the light, an attempt to articulate the essence of the pub, its vitality and its history and its mobility in the way it changes and ranges throughout the year.
What else is it about? It is about the romance of the social space aligned with the intoxication of beer and other drinks, about the unconfined and sometimes confined behaviour I met on the journey, the lives into which I caught a brief glance, that drawing aside the curtain, that glimpse behind the scenes, that brief encounter with someone’s life, someone who you will never see again. In pubs we are wholly joined with a stage upon which the actors at the bar all play their parts, sometimes scripted and other times spontaneous in the mixture of delight and despondency living a life in the pub can sometimes bring.
The pub as a metaphor for life perhaps? The loud voiced man or woman at the bar, the quiet recluse with a book in the far distance, the couple cornered in their see-saw of a life that once held so much promise and now has turned to ashes in the mouth. The comedian with pretensions and a pint of Stella, the taskmaster ready to ask questions and govern with a view to a kill, the miller, the butcher, the baker and the candlemaker all gone into the dark and no one knew how many had crossed the bridge into the pretension of Valhalla.
What else is the book about? The history of the pub, the history of an individual pub, the way in which its locals boss and bootstrap the space, arrange their lives within its many walls, desire their dependence on an alcoholic mist of dismay. Are you happy, you might want to ask the man with a broken memory of his dead daughter, are you happy you might want to ask the round-faced man who had been drinking since the sun came up, are you happy you might want to ask the man with his head in the palm of his hand looking through the opaque windows of the small city centre pub, glad he cannot see outside for who is that who is not coming. There is a melancholia in the book, a creative melancholia I would like to say, how melancholia drives me to create, to form word associations and build up worlds and universes into which I co-habit if only for an hour.
Are you happy I might want to ask the invisible woman on the end of the phone who is ready to pick up her inebriated husband from the pub. Are you happy I would like to ask Val in the Globe, serving her regulars with a steadiness and easy humour, the daughter-in-law in the Vine who drove a pony and trap, the manager of the Black Country brewpub, the manager of the seaside local, my dead mother, grandmothers and great aunt, the muscular barkeep in the Grill who showed the drunken grieving father the door, the young woman who served me in Edinburgh and told me how regulars gave the pub a swerve in summer as the tourists crowned themselves with festival frolics and no doubt others whose memories I can bring to the fore.
Finally, what else is the book about? It is about the passage of time, of how sometimes beer and being present in the pub can put a brief halt to the dread that I (and maybe others) feel about the passage of time. Time is elastic in the pub, it stretches out and we don’t know how we feel when the knock on the door might be a prescient note of death. The dead men’s shoes on the window sills in the Lowestoft pub, a photograph of a man who loved this pub before he died, the tat and tack of Halloween and the packing down and performance of the rollers, the half-hearted, slack-jawed, give-us-a-chance arguments about music and politics and who did what and what time is it? Time goes too fast, what was that I might say as the sound of a train whistling its lonely call in the distance reaches me? Your life mate, comes the reply, that was your life that somehow just passed you by. Sometimes the men and women who sit alone in pubs, waiting perhaps for the dust to settle on their lives, are happy with the passage of time, now it’s the pub as a waiting room, the waiting room for God as the man in one pub told me. But then there was another pub I once visited where I was told that the back room was where the village parliament met, for here the issues and missives of village life were battered and bartered backwards and forwards until a resolution of sorts was reached. The best of pubs have all these things, the communities, the communes and the cronies and the false broken kings devastated by the loss of a realm but still determined to press on regardless. And what I always say when I think of what went through my mind when I wrote A Pub For All Seasons is what will survive of us is love.
A Pub For All Seasons is published by Headline and available both online and at all good bookshops.