Version by the wayside

My Jaipur was a gleam of sunlight off a farmhouse window on a distant hill

What is the wayside? You fall by the wayside, it is the act of decline or of becoming a pariah within oneself. The wayside is where you will find me, said the man with the jocular grin and eyes like bullets and a life shattered into pieces. There can be two interpretations of drinking by the wayside. The first one is the act of falling through the cracks in the society in which you live and spending your time drinking and drinking until alcoholism sprays its pestilence over you. This is the wayside in which sobriety is a stranger and intoxication a hand-holding broken angel.

Then there is another kind of wayside drinking, the act of surprise and choosing spontaneity and spinning the wheel and taking a chance and coming upon a pub you have never seen before and going inside without much hope that you will find something to drink that makes you wish upon a star. However, you choose well for this wayside pub is gorgeous in its reality and earthiness; the locals growl with friendliness rather than aggression and the staff help themselves to your custom with pleasant ease. There is a beer that you adore being served and so you settle down for an hour or two, occasionally joining in the conversations and laughing with the rest of them or you are left alone to take your book into the corner and now and again lift up thine eyes and hear a selection of joined up words that speak of the assurance of the pub. This is the kind of wayside drinking I will always pick, the choice of chance and of course you do know that you will never come to this pub ever again. 

What have been my examples of wayside drinking? I think back to the Hook Norton pub out in the countryside I was taken to last year whose landlord went by the name of Mick the Hat (and yes he did wear one). The beer was cool and came straight from the cask, a delightful assemblage of malt sweetness and hop earthiness and bitterness, Hooky, brown bitter beer at its very best and a sign of confidence in what breweries like Hook Norton can do. The bar was a feng shui nightmare, a clutter of photos, books, signs, beer mats and what ever took Mr Hat’s fancy, but it all worked. He was an ebullient storyteller, names bandied about of locals who would come in and drink their fill, strangers who came in for one and left saying it was the best pub they’d ever been in and a tale of how he used to drink with Colin Dexter. I wanted to stay longer but there was another pub to visit and another whirl around the taps to consider and this too was a drink by the wayside, this time Old Hooky, slightly stronger and still a study in brown or maybe mahogany, that lapped on the palate with the eloquence of a well-versed poet whose words conjured up images of long ago cities and the romance of journeys that you would never take. Then there was a knock on the bar-top and my reverie was shattered and I thought I could never go home again. Though I did.

The dog in a pub in Sheffield, whose name was Rocky and he spent the time I was there roaming the back bar making friends with everyone and if truth be told hoping that he could cadge a crisp or two on his way. My glass of Jaipur was a gleam of sunlight off a farmhouse window on a distant hill, a sudden flash of light that acted as a kind of beacon for a weary traveler. The chime of fruitiness on the aromatics and the palate was of the lustrous kind, a radiant mixture of citrus and tropical linking arms with a bitterness at the finish that worked like a wish upon a star dream and made me want more. The pub took its mid-afternoon serenity with a nonchalance that reminded me of a shrug and I felt like staying there for the rest of my life, but there were other pubs to visit and more wayside drinking was demanded of me. 

This looks like a good place to have a beer I thought when I went into a small bar in Brussels a couple of years ago. It was one room, some tables dotted with drinkers, a rockabilly barman, quiff adrift and the tattoo of what looked like a skull climbing up his neck. An Orval please if you don’t mind, and he deftly poured this iron duke of beers into the glass. I sat at the far end of the bar, drifts of conversation wisping through the air and thought about love and its consequences, but then decided to think no more. The beer had my full attention, a bite of bitterness, an earnest conversation of earthiness, a tinkle of broken glass sweetness and light soft hand-held citrusiness, a perfect sphere of gladness and sooner rather than later my glass was empty and it was time for another. 

Drinking by the wayside opens up new horizons and opportunities; it enables us to break free of the dictation of tradition and clamber ever upwards into the sunny uplands of exploration and woe-free drinking. We don’t always get it right though, as I recall one moment of wayside drinking in a pub in North London into which I slipped one Saturday lunchtime because I liked the look of the building. The racing was on a TV perfectly perched above the entrance, which meant that the regulars all stared with blinkered bemusement at myself wandering in, leather biker’s jacket, Sonic Youth t-shirt, battered jeans and big boots and a copy of Kafka’s The Castle in my hand. At the bar the middle-aged male server asked me what I wanted and I pointed at the Guinness. Got the time mate asked a man with the girth of one about to give birth. Afraid not, I said, conscious of a clock above the back bar. I sat in the corner and quickly drank my Guinness, scanning my book and not reading it. I handed in the glass at the bar and left. I never went back, afraid of falling by the wrong wayside.