When you go to the pub

I think they’re open

You go to the pub to meet people or get away from people, but when you cannot go to the pub you sit in the kitchen, or in the back garden or perhaps in the front room, where shelves and shelves of books might be your only company. But the ambience still works as you pour yourself a glass of something from Duration or Lost and Grounded or Thornbridge or whoever’s beer you have in front of you and the characters from the books emerge from their word-ridden hiding places and begin to chatter and charm and put a balm on the harm that being locked up in at home can inflict on your soul.

You go to the pub to try out beers from breweries whose ethos or output is appealing to you, whose judicious mix of hops and malt and well thought out regime of fermentation is a wonder and worth spending money on. But when you cannot go to the pub, you go online and find the beers that you like and love and spend some money and hopefully bring a smile to a brewer’s face. And as you sit there with a book and the characters spring out of the pages with the agility of acrobats you say to yourself softly, that this isn’t bad, but you still miss the pub.

You go to the pub as a home from home, somewhere soothing and comfortable and whether you’re on your own or with a band of like-minded souls, you are home. But when you cannot go to the pub and you’re stuck at home, you try your best to give your home a comfort zone similar to the pub, whether it’s getting stuck in on Zoom or crunching out the words on your laptop with those who want to talk or shout or rave or just pretend to clink glasses with the object of sociability in mind. Or maybe you just listen to the stories and tales and histories that emerge from the books and characters you are spending your time with.

But when you eventually return to the pub it’ll be good not to forget what it was like when you couldn’t go to the pub and maybe, just maybe, you’ll not take things for granted again and give thanks to those invisible folk who kept you company during these trying times. 

The Nag’s Head

And how shall I recapture, recast, rejoin that sense of voices and life that I walked into on a Sunday evening whilst briefly marooned in the Mars that is Reading? A corner pub it was, the Nag’s Head, Tudorbethan in vision, black and white, white and black, with colour provided by a Morlands of Abingdon ceramic plaque embossed onto the wall. A large room it was, knocked into one and if you look carefully, if you look very carefully with some hint of an idea of what has passed, you can imagine the pub as a division of snug and public bar, but that was long ago and those that remember such Berlin Wall divisions are dying off, swapping their beer for a bier.

So what brings folk to this pub apart from a need to indulge in a spot of communitarianism? It’s beer. On my visit there I counted 12 hand pumps, while high up below the ceiling a coloured lantern-like joyfulness brightened the view as a line of pump clips led a conga around the room, Old brewery posters and beer guides and a sense of well picked beers (W&E, Dark Star, Red Squirrel, Humpty Dumpty and Triple fff) also added to the gaiety of the nation within this pub.

As it was Sunday evening I was perplexed as I look around the room at the drinkers tucking in — was this the final drink up at the end of the week or merely the start up when all sins are absolved and all sense of guilt at the weekend’s excesses is banished back into a box that no one opens until the end? And while I ponder these great philosophical ideas and pull on my pint of Dark Star’s Coffee Pilsner the voices within the pub are like cushioned tectonic plates all struggling and stroking against each other.

‘I just tell the truth and then no one trusts me.’

Characters. There’s a man at the bar whose head lopes on his shoulders like a feral teen wandering about a shopping mall, he’s had a good day. Another man comes in, his eyes immediately sweeping the room with the professionalism of a bodyguard; he stands at the bar, right foot forward, hands grasping the counter as if on a bridge cleaving through the high seas. Yet another man sits on a stool his legs tapping up and down with the regularity of a shiver. I’m also enraptured by a serene greyhound who comes in with its owner, serene in the sense that this is not one of those dogs that wages its tail and wants everyone to love it (I’ve got one of them).

The evening wears on and the feeling grows that this pub belongs to the people who come here and who feel a part of it. This pub thrives, is alive, cocks a snoot at the prevailing head winds of economic depression. So as ever there’s time for another before going back into the Mars that is Reading (and discovering sadly the disappointment of the town’s Zerodegrees, but that is another story for another time).