Where does the time go?

When we lose track of it in a pub

I was looking at a website about a Devon village pub, somewhere I once wrote about, currently closed but there seemed to be a positivity in the community that it would soon reopen. I hope so, for I went there a few years ago and liked it. My eye was caught by a faded photo of the pub, sometime before World War I. Outside the pub stood a line of long dead regulars, men, standing still, a couple smiling, the rest sombre and holding themselves stiffly as if on parade, which several years later many of them would be, ready to march off to war. A long ago day, the sun shining maybe, though given the quality of the photo it was hard to say. Bowler hats, cloth caps, none of them bareheaded for that was not how they presented themselves to the world then. I’d like to think that once the photographer finished, off the men went into the pub, glasses of ale and cider purchased and amid the hubbub there would have been little time for reflection. Time has rushed ahead since that day and the names of the men are forgotten except by those who have dug into the trenches of village history and brought out the identities and memories of these time-forgotten. 

I have been thinking about time and the pub, or perhaps, to be more precise, timelessness, and I recall a recent afternoon in a pub, quiet and reflective, where time was a currency with which I bought space and silence, as I studied the amber coloured beer in front of me. There was one other in the bar, a man upon whose face time had ridden, every mark and crease jockeying to be the one that told the story of his decline; he ordered another pint of a locally brewed bitter with a voice that seemed to have the satisfaction of someone for whom the long working day was now over, time called, and all that remained was the prospect of rest and eventually darkness, the absence of light and the disappearance of sensation. This time spent in the pub, which was frisked and whisked by the brief fingers of sunlight reaching into the darkest recess of the bar, was a precious time of timelessness, where time was stopped, time stoppered up in a bottle and left well alone. Time and the river well and truly banked. 

Did those men on that long ago day in another century, know that they too could stop time by sitting in a pub, nursing a pint of ale and just letting their thoughts drift along like a leaf cruising down a stream? Was time different to them, did they have an alternative concept of what time was compared to what we feel these days. For us, it seems, time is an impatient child in the back of the car wanting to know if we are there yet; or perhaps it’s the ringtone of a phone telling us that time is up and that it is time to get out of bed, time to stop your spell of meditation, answer the knock on the door, the tyrant of time. But, when you go to a pub that is quiet during a time of the day when many are at work, this is when its timelessness is most apparent. 

It also doesn’t need to be a silent pub, as I discovered once in a busy bar in Brussels in late 2022 as I sat there working on a chapter for my new book and totally lost in a reverie of timelessness while families and lovers and friends shepherded themselves into the space, escaping the cold of the Christmas gift-wrapped streets outside. Then my bubble of timelessness was burst as a thin young man with a spotty complexion slid, it seemed, into the chair opposite me. In French he asked me something, I replied in English, then he spoke the sort of English that makes someone like me embarrassed at the paucity of languages learnt. ‘Can I have your beer?’ ‘No, mate,’ I replied with a laugh. Then his hand started creeping towards the glass and I completely left time behind as I told him harshly to va te faire enculer. He stood up and was about to go deeper into the bar when a member of staff came over and with a burst of French ushered him out of the door. I got the feeling he was a regular pest. 

Another instance of time halting, stopping, grounding to a halt, like the train in Edward Thomas’ Adlestrop, occurred in a northern pub about 10 years ago. It was the middle of a beneficent afternoon in early spring and I was visiting a traditional pub for book research and there it was with its engraved windows, a Victorian structural solidity about it, an old Boddington’s sign picked out in stone, cream and green paint elsewhere, doors done in red, bunches of grapes carved above the windows and painted purple. Above it there was a massive railway viaduct and in the air the constant drumming sound of a motorway just over past the junction. Yet, I stepped inside and the soundtrack morphed into the murmur of voices at the bar and the ticking of a clock, while the landscape was chestnut-brown wood, fitted benches, old photos of both the viaduct’s construction and brewery memorabilia. I took my pint to the room around the back of the bar, which could have once been a private place, where meetings of clubs and committees took place. The wall featured several panels, perhaps through where beer was once served; the bells that remained at the backs of the benches were no doubt there to call for service. Now, the door that closed in this private world was gone but the room still offered a nook-like sense of seclusion, a place where secrets between friends might be spilt or a quiet place with a newspaper sought a warming log fire. Or where time might stop, which it did for me for a couple of hours and several pints.  Time, was, time is.