Memories flitter like bats at twilight while I sit in a country pub

The melancholic nature of autumn

Autumn means the hop harvest as well as melancholia (hop sacks at a Herefordshire hop farm I visited a few years back)

My theme is memory and the iron grip it can sometimes have on my soul especially when I lose track of time while sitting in a pub. So there I was in a country pub the other day and after my second pint was struck with a memory from over 30 years ago, a recollection of the short time I once spent at the Angel in Grantham, a venerable coaching inn in a county town, whose most famous resident I can’t be bothered to mention. I was there with my then girlfriend, we had taken the train from London for the wedding of a relative of hers and, as usual, when in another town and with time to kill I suggested an early beer. As we sat there I watched people come and go and the next day I wrote in my journal of how I had briefly experienced the feeling of distancing myself from my life, of putting myself, imagining myself, in another life. 

I lived in Grantham, I was a local and this was my regular pub and I spent time there, comforted and cosy. My home was a Victorian three-bedroomed terrace house in a nice street, with a garden and I had a well-paid job in journalism that I enjoyed and was also forging ahead with my fiction writing, being driven forward by my passion for telling a story and knowing about the world. In the real world, however, I had come up from London with my then girlfriend for a wedding and I think I had asked her to marry me by then, something which deep down I had doubts about. We never did marry and split up a year or so later. In my journal I wrote about shoppers coming in with bags, mainly women, perhaps they had been to a market, the kind of market I wished we had in my part of North London. 

My flight of fantasy continued. I was one of the locals, projected, as if in a film on a screen, out of time, imagining a different life, wanting a different life — and this is what I believe pubs in the autumn can do, take you out of your life, something perhaps I have always wanted. And to further overthink things, maybe that is why I chose, first, music and then turned to writing as my day job. I wanted to be taken out of my life, possibly because my life was disrupted and taken up and down by my parents’ divorce when I was 10. Perhaps that is why pubs call out to me, they provide me, however briefly, with a dreamscape, an installation of the imagination, in the same way others escape when wandering through a medieval royal forest, foreseeing and foretelling what life was once like. Then I began to drift with the memories once more. Cooler evenings were starting to come in and the smell of an autumnal bonfire had hung about in the air as I cycled down a lane to this country pub. I wondered how many seasons I had left. I couldn’t guarantee that I would be here this time next year, but I recalled walking from Regents Park to Camden Town in 1988 and wondering how many autumns I had left.

Back in the country pub, I shook myself free of my reverie and returned to a world of people talking across tables, the minute ephemera of their lives, listening to and talking with and I felt like an interloper — ‘Have the Chandlers been in recently? I understand he’d been poorly.’ ‘A bag of six doughnuts were reduced to buttons and he’d eaten them all.’ ‘Meat hips you have meat hips.’ I suspected that others in this country pub could tell you how Tipsy Lane got its name, why those in the next village were deemed simple and why cockerels in another village always crowed at midnight. One man, sitting at the bar, looked lonely, withheld from the world, though I heard him say he was waiting for a lift, a glass of white wine on the counter, white beard, quiet, was he the man I overheard on the phone to his wife some months ago asking when she would be picking him up when I went in there and mourned the death of my mother? He finished his glass, said goodbye to no one in particular and left the pub. I would soon be gone as well. 

The country pub, this country pub, that country pub, even though it might have been gleaned and cleaned, and exorcised and painted and changed and made melancholy and phoenix-like had risen again, represented part of a community, a community of dreams and for me a community of memories, even if only for the duration of the two pints I spent there. 

My latest book, A Pub For All Seasons, is now out (Headline) and available from all good book shops