It’s that moment that never leaves you; it’s the memory that
itches, that demands to be scratched; the memory that you also use as a
security blanket, a warm comfort against whatever assails your day-to-day life.
It’s memory as a motivator: George S Patton with a speech that emboldened his
guys to go up north after Normandy. It’s the memory as a firecracker sparking
off a spitting, hissing, fizzing firework display of light, fire and noise
within the cranium; it’s Marcel Proust dipping his biscuit into a cup of Rosie
Lee and being brought back to his childhood.
For me, tonight, today, tomorrow, memory is the cold clear
day, the crispness of the air, the big sky, and then the glass of Orval in the
pub, but also the sight of Westmalle Dubbel in the fridge at the back of the
bar, all of it taking me to one destination: Bruges. Which is where I was two
years ago this week, researching the bars for an article for the Sunday TimesTravel Magazine (paywall I am afraid).
There is one bar, amongst the many I visited, that plays
with me, that remains with me; not because it had great food (Cambrinus); not because it had a
delightful crepuscular sense of seclusion (’t Poatersgat); and not because you have to go there when
visiting Bruges (’t BrugesBeertje). This bar somehow takes me back to an imagined past, a
mythical (in a personal sense) past, a past that I feel I might have briefly
experienced back in the 1980s, but perhaps I didn’t.
It’s the Black Cat, a small corner bar at the folklore
museum close to the Jerusalem church, one of Bruges’ hidden treasures. When I
visited there were six beers, both bottle and draft, and I chose what was
called Trappist Steenbrugge, a dubbel that was rich, dark and chocolaty. Even
though it was part of the museum I felt I was drinking in a bar that would have
been part of old Bruges as the large clock ticked away, reminding myself of
mortality and time’s fleeting passage. The bar displayed bits and bobs of
Bruges’ past, had wooden tables and chairs and a 100-year-old music box that
worked if you put half a Euro into it; there was even a colourful vision of
Gambrinus on a barrel raising a toast. A couple of men sat quietly in the corner as if meditating on their beer. Something about the bar (and the museum)
gave me a false memory of the past, the feeling that I used to visit bars like
this in the past (whereas in reality I was in school) — it’s a museum bar for
Christ’s sake and yet it’s playing havoc with my memory.
The clock ticks, voices hum, the glass of beer on the lips
revives and once again a bar takes me somewhere else in time, to somewhere I
might or might have not been. As Yukio Mishima wrote at the end of his amazing tetralogy
The Sea of Fertility, ‘memory is like a
phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes
it shows them as if they were here’. For me that is the great, magical,
enchanting strength of a bar or pub — it can sometimes make time fade into the
shadows and let reality becomes a confusion of memory. And all with a glass of
beer to hand.
Lovely stuff. I'm there...
ReplyDeleteCheers Leigh, I’m fascinated by memory especially when it comes to pubs, many is the time I have sat in a pub and thought of how it has taken me back to another time when I was in a similar place or was I?
ReplyDeleteI get that on occasion too, or pubs that take me back to my first pints, sometimes its the pubs that seem nondescript at the time that come back with full clarity at a later date that most surprise me.
ReplyDeleteor alternatively there’s always the disappointment of going to somewhere that you remember lovingly and discover it’s no longer the same.
ReplyDeletefar too many instances of that unfortunately
ReplyDelete