The seasonal rhythms that echo in a pub
…and the shift starts
It is the last day of February and, as I write, the bright but brittle light of a sunny day reaches into every shabby, dust-ridden, shadowy corner of my mind, an illumination that lifts and gives out a gift of hope and god knows I have needed hope in the past two months.
I feel that there is change in the air, not least within the pubs that I have travelled to over the winter and sat in like a benevolent Buddha waiting for his pint to settle and watched those in need of warmth, both material and immaterial. The pubs I have visited in Scotland, northwest England, Wales, Devon and London can now move to a different seasonal rhythm, slowly at first, imperceptible, but gathering acceleration as the days of light grow longer. The best of pubs can be living, breathing beasts, chameleon like in the way the passage of the year touches and changes their moods.
This doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed my winter in both country and city pubs, listening to regulars telling tall tales or jokes best left in a Christmas cracker, whilst watching another log placed on the fire and being bewitched by the orange sparks of eternal flame. In one pub I recall a local’s friendly young pug trying to get on my head as I sunk deeper into the comfortable old sofa. I have enjoyed malice-free pints of dark and strong beer, slowly sipped and muttered to myself gosh-is-my-glass-empty-again and wandered back to the bar for another. There has been solitude as well as sociability in the pubs I have visited, the slow tick-tock of time in a quiet afternoon bar in Glasgow where winter was a gentle ghost that took you by the elbow and led you to pastures green. The traditional pub in Liverpool, within a parlour like space, where I joined in with a conversation about music and the role of music papers and ‘sorry lads I have to butt in, I used to work at the NME’, and the laughter and the memories of music in the 1980s flowed like a celebration of beer.
Now though, spring is imminent and work on my next book, about the four seasons of the British pub, is halfway through its seasonal cycle and I must search out the changed moods of pubs as lightness (but not necessarily sweetness) shows its hand and tentative steps are taken to drink outside. This was something I did attempt a week or so ago when I cycled the undemanding five miles from my Exeter home to Topsham, where the Bridge Inn is a favourite pub of mine. This was my first pint outside in 2023, a glass of Salcombe Brewery’s Island Street Porter, a ravishingly full-bodied Porter, a modern take on the style that has a creaminess and a bitterness, coffee, chocolate and a carnation cream-like smoothness before it finishes dry and bittersweet. Sitting on the picnic bench outside this venerable pub, I looked north over fields wearing a coat of various shades of green, the silver of a river snaking its way to join the Exe Estuary, bare trees, almost shivering in their nudity, and the unintelligible gurgle of the rushing waters of a weir and the passing slap of tyres on the road alongside the pub.
There seemed a lightness in people’s manner as I chatted with a couple of women who had come to the pub by bus from Exeter. One of them was adamant about the necessity and value of the pub beyond just drink, and then went to show me a photo of her as a teenager with Steve Strange in 1982. The Camden Palace I think, where I once saw the Clash. On the table next to me, two pugs (they seem to be resident inhabitants of Devon pubs at the moment) were being made a fuss of by a family group who evidently thought the world of them. Walking past tables to get another pint it felt that there was a lightheaded and intoxicating sense of about being outside again. On the way home I stopped at the Topsham Tap on Exeter Quay, my local, and all the tables outside were taken and so I sat inside. The shift had started.