Let us be always out of doors

Spring in the beer garden

Inside the cloistered confines of the Beer Engine in the Devon village of Newton St Cyres there was a warmth and snugness that seemed to me to be a sign of winter hanging on within the pub, even though the first week of March had passed with the certainty of a funeral procession. The mood was one of comfort and consolation, especially as outside an east wind blew, a persistent hangnail of gloom. The year had shifted and it was spring, but the weather hadn’t budged one bit and winter had left a dastardly booby-trap of an easterly that gusted through these western lands with a dismal stretch of the soul — however, bundled up like a parcel of joy I had cycled five miles to this pub so that I could have my first pint of the year outside. 

Inside the pub, where I went to get my pint of Heavy Sleeper (brewed in the cellar beneath) it was log-fire warm and, as I looked about while waiting to be served by the genial licensee, I could see an elderly man warming his posterior against the fire, reminding me of a friend doing the same on an icy December day over a year ago in a Belgian bar. Elsewhere, a young couple with their slumbering baby sat talking quietly, a wine glass (white if you must know) and a beer glass (something golden in colour) on the table in front of them — from my own experience many years ago, I presumed that they were grateful for a brief escape from the rewarding yet tiring rigours of parenthood. On another table several adults and their school-uniformed children sat and rumpled the air about them, the light tinkle of laughter as the kids jigsawed and colour-booked away and their parents laughed and told tales of what the weekend held in its maw. I had also noticed, as I walked into this womb of winter, three village elders surveying their empire of dreams and I wished them long life and plenty of pints. At the bar, the landlord indicated to a server who had just come on shift who she should serve next, while a local (I assume) asked the other barman for a couple of Rail Ales and whatever Roge H drank and could they be brought outside. Of course came the reply. 

‘Let us be always out of doors.’ This is probably the only quote I recall from the 19th century nature writer Richard Jefferies, but it ha stayed with me for over 25 years, especially when I lived in the untrammelled wilds and occasional wastes of Exmoor. Now, embedded in a city, where nature and its reasons for being could be often as muted as the distant sound of a train I often hear as it rattles its way eastwards to the rational thought of London, the writer’s words remain pertinent in the context of the changing seasons and the need to take my beer outside when spring comes along. This desire for drinking outside doesn’t always work in the early days of the change of season: last year I recall dodging showers of brittle needles of rain in a beer garden in Totnes, while after the ending of the final lockdown in 2021, when pubs were open only for outside drinking, April proved itself to be the cruellest month as sleet and cold battered the hardiest of us as we longed to get back to a normal pub life (I even recall a photo on social media of a snowman at a pub table somewhere in the northern lands). 

So here I was, sitting at a table on the outdoor decking to the side of the pub. I was alone. I was also still warm from my bracing cycle along both busy roads and slapdash lanes, but I could feel sweat already cooling and no doubt ready to emulate Jack Frost in its effect on my body. Inside the pub it was still winter but out where I sat there was light amidst the chill, as birds chittered and twittered, and I looked towards the west, where bands of pale daffodil yellow shone faintly amid the otherwise dirty white clouds. The sun was starting to sink and visit other lands. 

There was the smell of woodsmoke in the air, sweet and herbal, accompanied by the drone of cars coming into the village, the day’s work done for the drivers and passengers. Despite this, I also felt that a silence seemed to hang over the village or maybe to be more precise it drifted over the space where I sat. Suddenly I realised I was starting to feel cold as the light continued to recede into the recess of night with the confusion of an army slow to realise its defeat. I finished my pint and took my empty glass into the wintered warm of the bar, where people talked and thought and kept themselves in the vale of sociability, and I was ready to face the iron-like cycle home.  

Let us be always out of doors.