On loneliness and the pub

Aspiring to understudy a tempest

On a late afternoon during a Thursday on which the boisterous northern wind was gusting outside as if aspiring to understudy a tempest, I sat in a somnolent pub, alone apart from a small dog, whose lead was tied to a heavy wooden bench the colour of the late and unlamented chocolate bar Caramac. I lifted my head up from the notebook in which I had been writing the first draft of these words and counted four groups of people scattered about the broad, long, well-wooded territory where drink could be taken with ease, and friends would exchange confidences, throw jokes about in gleeful abandonment while the best-selling stories of the day were trotted out like prize horses in the ring. Silence could also be embraced, a stillness within, the choir of keeping quiet, which is what I was doing (even though, as the hour wore on, the multiplicity of voices grew and twanged and let loose with the slickness of a well-rehearsed radio show). In this elemental space, a stylish and familiar expression of the implacability of wood — its sturdy furniture, the well-planed floor, a long multi-planked bar, two rows of thick, blackened y-shaped timbers that held up the sky of the rafter-stitched ceiling all reporting for studious duty — someone perhaps looking my way might have speculated that I was lonely, solely in the company of the small dog, but I was not. I took another gulp from my creamy dark lager, brewed just over 10 miles to the north of the city (Utopian Brewery if you are interested) and revelled in the isolation, and dipped my little finger into the foam and let Dante (the dog that is, not the long dead poet) enjoy it. 

Some days later, thinking about loneliness and being at the still, quiet centre of my own universe, I asked myself: what was loneliness and how did we experience it and, more pertinently, how did we experience it in pubs? Looking back, I was on my own and perhaps could have been seen as being lonely but I wasn’t. So what was loneliness? Was it a demand on — and a drain of — the emotions, perhaps a sump pit for feelings and a bargain basement for the low listing in the water that disembarking from sociability could bring? Or could it be a freedom, a force of nature that was creative, life-giving and even a boon to the health? When alone in the pub, I sit there and watch other people’s lives and — sometimes, just sometimes, when morale is low but loneliness is now — I think of how much richer and fulfilled other people seem to be as I sit at the table, silent and socially unengaged. Or are they?  

Before I try to answer the question, let me mull on loneliness a bit longer. There are certainly times when I have been lonely, a state of mind desperately endless it seemed, alone in a flat that once held someone else’s voice and still contained some of her items, the lack of promise petering out and the slowness of the tick-tock of the clock stifling — anxious times as I thought then, when I thought I wanted to sleep for a long time, even though not long afterwards I realised this feeling was an indulgence. That was many years ago, at the start of a journey involving many miles, countries, jobs, people, experiences and emotions (and pubs and bars of course) and somehow along on the way of this sainted pathway there was the creation of a solution to deal with loneliness. Now though, if I feel I am lonely what am I really asking myself and how do I deal with it? 

Maybe it is a case that the loneliness I feel can be assisted, as well as resisted, by the imagination and the memories of friends, past lovers, family members and that small island of delicious and decadent solitude I experience when in a crowd, sitting in a pub that is slowly being filled with people for instance. They bring with them their lives, their voices and their happiness (well at least I hope they carry the latter in a manner of a knapsack in which a Field Marshal baton’s resides). Maybe, this loneliness I have identified with, is comparable to the ease that I thought was depression when young and hungover and miserable about the woman I thought I had fallen in love with who just happened to be more interested in heroin than anything else. Maybe it was just a slice of time, a diced segment of hours during the day when the emotion of loneliness came trundling along in the head with the dread sound of the tumbril on the way to the scaffold. The click-clack of the needles of the tricoteuses sitting around the guillotine during the Terror in revolutionary France, and during this period the loneliest person in the world would have been the man or woman making their way to having the head detached from the body. Then the moment passed away, lifted and vanquished into the higher spheres of forgetfulness and diversion. A blah kind of moment perhaps, the dead end of disillusionment, which happily was gone as soon as a spark of joy lit up the room. Melancholia, regret, loss, unattainable love, which was also joined by a sadness of reality that the person you thought you were in love with was only that person half the time. At other times she was a totally different person whose views and egotism were driven by the drugs and anyway you were young in those days. 

So in the pub I never feel lonely, which is why I missed it so much during the various lockdowns when the spectre of loneliness haunted me with devilish intent, despite the closeness of family, but that is another story for another time.