Beer fashion

And so I start thinking about the fashion of beer amid the spaces in which it is drunk with a deepness that is beyond all human understanding or dissected and a love of delivered with a joy and a rattle and a hum that can shake all numbness…the baseball hat and the big woolly beard and the shirt that a lumberjack would love and the mustard-yellow work boots with their child-friendly, artfully designated scuffs and cuts and then there’s the shiny suit that did service on a wedding day and the nice dress from the sort of shop that mymumyourmum.com likes and the glad-rag handbag in which there used to rest a packet of Lights but now there is a mobile with a message from a grown-up son out on patrol somewhere or other in another part of the world and-I’m-fine-mum and then there’s the flat cap, country style, hitched up trews half-mast, Nelson’s dead, Churchill’s passed, gran’s gone, above the nice canvas shoes, which really need to be on the deck of a three-master but are really at home on the tearless, brutal hard concrete of whatever quarter we are in and let’s say hail to the parka, the scuffed anorak and the roomy, Aldi-blue denims and the big woolly jumper that could engulf a nation in its warmth and by the way there’s the sharp suit and the quiff and the man bag and the ironic look that says I’m ironic and gathering apace there is the dirndl and the lederhosen and the hat with the feather in it and those funny thick socks that start halfway up the leg and finish below the knee and ooh look over there at the cargo shorts and the box-fresh, egg-white trainers and the messaged t-shirt and the bunch of keys in the company of a bottle opener on the belt but then you realise that everyone no matter how they dress drinks beer, there is no code, no fashion for beer and oh yes, while we take breath, to our surprise there is more: the sloven straight out of Life on Mars, palm down on the shiny caramel-brown counter, the cove-like, cheeky-half, half-wit booze-hound, the found gear second-hand hand-me-down beer iconic, the we’re-all-in-it-all-of-us-together-even-you-mate preppy sports hall look and at the end of this thought process I realise that everyone drinks beer in all manner of spaces, apart from those that don’t and those that don’t drink it don’t understand it…