You’re paid for being a piss-head aren’t you, said the saggy-faced man holding a pewter tankard of whatever he was drinking and I smiled and said that the last person who had accused me of that was my late sister-in-law. She was a chronic alcoholic. I continued to smile and ordered another pint. I don’t follow the government guidelines on units and probably drink far too much, but a piss-head I haven’t been since my early 20s.
My weight is reasonable, I go to the gym every two days, alternating between cardio and weights, and I eat very little processed food. I also meditate and take supplements. On the other hand I might die tomorrow, as a colleague of mine did a couple of months ago (as well as my mother but that is another story). Life is a game of roulette, which incidentally I have never played, in fact I have never gambled. I don’t see the point.
I make all of these points for not much of a reason except perhaps I want to make these points, but in my experience it seems that wine writers don’t get accused of having port-wine faces and getting bladdered on Merlot and Beaujolais Village, but beer, sadly, seems to be down there with the street drinkers at times.
And yet, when I think of the man who accused me of being a piss-head (and he was a lovely guy, full of insights about pubs and the wisdom of the accustomed drinker, though he did have a face like a rumpled tablecloth), I can’t help feeling that beer gets the seal of a raw deal when it comes to the various drinks that make up the British republic of alcoholic pleasure.
Lager louts, beer bores, beer geeks, nerds, CAMRA types, but where are our descriptors for the lovers of gin, whisk(e)y, brandy, bourbon or chartreuse? They are connoisseurs, possibly crumpled, often impossibly fresh-faced and yet full of the finest knowledge about whatever drink they chose. On the other hand, perversely, such is the paucity of knowledge about beer amongst the public that journalists like myself become labelled as beer experts when all I would say is that I am a writer on beer as well as travel and pubs (the latter is perhaps the most important at the moment, given the book I am embarking on).
Beer is the currency with which I navigate a way through my working life. It is a passion, some would have said in the past an obsession (but not now), while beer’s most longstanding ally the pub is also my Vitamin D throughout the year, especially at the moment when the sun is getting higher, even though the North, or is it the East wind, doth blow. Besides, at this time of year sunshine’s many blessings are dispensed with alacrity, as another bank of raincloud comes in.
The pub is the portal of pleasure, the place where we go to entertain ourselves or just entrain ourselves of life’s cares and running hares. In the course of researching my current book I have travelled to pubs in the north of England, Scotland, Wales and my home region of the Southwest — there are still many other places to go but one of the most central aspects of pub life I have discovered is the conversation, the libations, the interiors and the peculiarities and the furious breast of independence that still exists in the best British pubs. The walls of many pubs may be tumbling before the tides of economic mismanagement and local indifference but there are plenty of places that I have drunk in during my travels that still make me want to visit them, engage in conversation and drink some of the finest beers known to humanity, even it makes me a beer bore.
For me the past six months’ pub visits have revealed a still potent and powerful world, a vibrancy that continues to draw people in even though money is becoming too tight to mention. There are still voices out there in the pub, stories to be told and heard and beer to be drunk. I am a romantic when it comes to writing about the pub, of the many moods each pub I visit seems to cloak itself in, the people who come and go and to and fro, the beers that I drink and the home from home feeling that a good pub always seems to possess.
I am thinking about the universal pub, the one pub that stands for all pubs, even though each pub, like each human being, is different and unique, and I am unabashed in celebrating this difference. However (and there is always a however), there is romance, an idealisation, a fiction even, and then there is the reality.
I once made a recording a pub that I used to visit three to four times a week and so could call it a local. It was 21 seconds of people’s voices, a mass of voices, no melody or separate voices, just a chorus of those who visited the pub one Friday afternoon and took shelter from the rain.
If you listened carefully you would have been able to pick out individual voices, but there was a lack of meaning in what these voices were saying. During the recording I heard a dog barking outside but there are no dogs to be heard here. There is just a mass of sound, a bumpy journey of voices, the up and down of cadences, the tone-deaf and the warp and weft of humanity’s sound when visiting the pub.
And yet, there was also a romance about the sound I recorded — this was the sound of a busy pub, the sound of a pub open to all, the sound that said to me why the pub is so important in our lives. A romance that we shouldn’t do without.