When The Stars Align
In a regular haunt
Sometimes in a pub there are occasions when everything is complete to one’s utter enchantment: the surroundings, the mood, the comfort, the company (or lack of) and, naturally, the beer. If you regularly visit the pub as I do it is all too easy to enjoy the beer but ignore the environment, to drink beer without purpose, to look around and not register, to chuck words and phrases about to strangers or bar staff like a shore leave sailor on the spree, meaningless words, as if all I want is to hear the sound of my own voice (silence is a virtue sometimes). However, when the stars align in the heavens of pub-going, whether I am in the company of friends, garrulous and easy-going, laughter and tall tales being told, or alone in a luminous universe of my own, a serenity occurs that lifts the everyday experience of pub life into something transcendent.
A Saturday lunchtime outside at Topsham’s Bridge Inn, a regular haunt of mine, five miles from Exeter by bicycle and five miles back. On a wooden bench I sit, words carved into its surface that Dave loved to drink here, a memory, kind and considerate, of someone who could call the Bridge his local. The air is warm, a vaulted sky of darkish indigo with light, flimsy patches of broken cloud drifting along with the ease of Sinatra on the croon. In front of me, a border of hedge and bush traced with the trumpet shaped flowers of bindweed, with a bee idly drifting along as if on an invisible wire going from flower to flower to drink its fill.
Beyond this border, the River Clyst, low and slow as the tide is out, keeps company with several mallards, who rest on the exposed, stone scratched, reed-fringed beach. A crow joins them, looking for food, but one of the drakes rushes towards him its beak half open, a territorial advance. Bucolic the scene may be, but the last time I was here a duck was drifting on the river with two ducklings, there is a duck here, but no ducklings but perhaps they are further down the river out of sight rather than being victims of fox, rat or hawk. Beyond the river and its skirt of reeds, fields of several shades of green stretch towards a wooded hill in the distance. No cows do graze today just a solitary dog walker cutting along a field’s edge.
The stars align once more when I take a sip of my beer, Salcombe Brewery’s Island Street Porter. It is as dark as the plumage of the crow perched upon the faded red corrugated iron roof of the pub’s former maltings, which on this warm and sun-blessed day is open for those who want to escape within. The beer is perfect in its condition, creamy and full-bodied, an assembly of mocha coffee, cooking chocolate, roasted espresso coffee beans, a crackle of dryness, the merest hint of vanilla and once again the old saying that has served me well for years, ‘dark beers are not just for the colder months’, resonated within my head.
‘Sopwith Camel,’ says a man on the table to my left, ‘Red Baron,’ says someone on a table behind me. I want to say SE5, but don’t. We are watching an approaching biplane whose engine is an insistent drone, a lazy but regular light drum stroke of busy bees as it passes over. A few minutes later a two-engined airliner passes over, lazily turning in the air, insouciant and without effort, taking a couple of hundred souls on their way to a few days in the sun.
I have finished my beer but such is the mood of completeness, that serenity I mentioned earlier, the tranquility that bathes my soul, I decide on another pint of the same beer. Once again there is a dance to the music of time on my tongue as I take deep sips that are almost transformed into swigs from my glass. There is a sense of mindfulness as I sit on this wooden bench that acts as a living memory of someone called Dave, moments of calmness and reflection as I look out over the river and the landscape stretching away, aware of the high canopy of blue stretched with fluffy white above me. Everything is in order, the beer, the views, the slow susurration of voices behind me, and even though this outdoor space at the Bridge is bordered behind me by a road I don’t even notice the passing traffic.
In my last book, A Pub For All Seasons, I wrote of how the moods of pubs changed with the seasons and The Bridge Inn was almost like a Greek Chorus as I visited it throughout the year (as I still do) and it told me something about this organic, unforced, unconscious change. On this Saturday, on the cusp of summer (it was May 30), the change from the let us all huddle around the fire of the colder months to this outdoor exclamation of joy was complete. It was time to rejoin the outside world and with the reluctance of a schoolboy creeping like a snail unwillingly to school I finished my beer and got ready to cycle back to Exeter, the mood of this lunchtime pub session remaining with me, a heady, mindful memory of how when the stars align in the pub there is one of the finest experiences in the whole wide world.
