As was common with many of her generation who had lived throughout most of the 20th century, my long-dead maternal grandmother had a collection of sayings, homilies if you will, inoffensive, Patience Strong-like in their blandness, but sometimes effective during the disruptive times of my childhood. ‘Sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt them,’ she said to me once when I mentioned a particularly nasty thing a ‘friend’ at primary school had uttered. Another was this, which is pertinent to what I am going to write about: ‘Cry and you cry alone. Laugh and the world laughs with you.’ It is something that I have always remembered during the ups and downs of adult life, even though sometimes the laughter can seem a little hollow, the hiccup of giggles of being on the edge as I once witnessed when my mother began laughing hysterically on the morning of her father’s funeral as the coffin was taken from the house.
Let’s lighten the mood. Laughter in the pub is an essential accompaniment to its soundscape, unless there are only a couple of you and the mood is sombre and the rain outside hisses down with the insistence of a gas leak. You can sit in any half busy pub and chances are you will hear eruptions of laughter breaking out in different spaces as stories are told and legs pulled and bad jokes thrown about with abandonment. At the bar (where you won’t be queuing remember), there could be the chime of a chuckle from a regular and one of the servers, nothing too forced, a brief anecdote about the day or a comment on a football team’s failure perhaps, smiles eliciting a flurry of heh-hehs from someone, who unlike you, is at work. It is wise not to linger though, otherwise a frown might be the result.
I was in a pub a couple of months ago, a place that was busy, which was such a thrilling sight to see, and tried to analyse the kinds of laughter I heard. Some of it, I thought, had the high frequency of the sound of a hyena in the dark as it prowled somewhere beyond the perimeter of your camp. Or maybe it was the jungle at night, where all kinds of cries murdered sleep in a manner that Macbeth would have been familiar with. Then there were the cheeky chuckles coming from a table of four guys, late 20somethings, who seemed several pints into their evening. Here, laughter was scattered about like coins thrown on the pavement for a member of the wretched of the earth by a particularly wasteful plutocrat. The laughter then changed and had a hint of the hearty, a deep, pirate-like rumble, but also a suggestion of that aforementioned hyena, a hearty hyena perhaps. At another table ahead of me, six people were standing up and wrapping themselves in scarves and jackets, slipping on gloves, placing and pulling down hats on their heads, and a deep guffaw from one of them, a man, was almost baritone in its depth. Bryn Terfel in the pub, perhaps?
Another pub, more recently though.
‘My first CDs were by Peter Gabriel and Chris Rea, remember when we used to call them LPs?’
A couple of friends in their early 60s, pints of a local bitter on the table in front of them, the slow rat-a-tat of laughter as memory made its way forward. Elsewhere, other voices simmered in the atmosphere. I wrote in my Moleskine that the soundtrack of the pub was that of four different collections of voices laughing in conjunction with the low thump of a passing helicopter. There were discussions about the Who and Roger Daltrey giving it all away from a corner and a deep-throated rattle of laughter from a man with a white beard who had placed his sense of humour on a pedestal of joy. Meanwhile, at another table beneath which a Labrador lay quietly, three friends, refreshed and revitalised by their afternoon pints, seasoned their tall tales with raucous bursts of laughter.
Now the musically inclined friends were discussing the classic Deep Purple line up and one of them let loose a short chuckle whilst declaring that he saw them at the Roundhouse. It started to feel as if there was an atonal feel to his laughter, Schoenberg perhaps. Voices and laughter emerged at different pitches and speeds, with those who had drunk more being the noisiest and fastest, accompanied by short shutter boxed-in exclamations of laughter. Then there were softer tufts of laughter, short and billowing like clouds being shoved across the sky.
‘I saw the Pistols when I was 15 down at the 100 Club, and on the tour called SPOTS.’
Meanwhile elsewhere in the pub more hyena laughs in the middle of the night split through the air, along with the slap of a palm on the table, as the anecdote was all too funny. Then on the table with the musical friends, there came a well-judged comic remark and yet another aspect of laughter in the pub made its appearance with the spitting out of beer as the other man was caught out in the middle of taking a deep draught from his glass. A ripple of laughter elsewhere as a man at the bar said to his server that he had been coming to this pub for years and that whoever selected the music (a very twiddly jazz track was being played at that moment) should be shot.
We go to the pub to laugh and our laughter comes in many forms. We don’t go to cry and instead save that for when we are on our own as my grandmother said, who obviously knew a thing or two and for that I give much thanks.