Inarticulation

What was it that stirred within me? What was the feeling that was brought to the forefront of my mind, a memory, an indication, a window sill on which I felt a brighter, sunnier time, a less stressful (or was that the filter that the brain always installs?) time, a time when my world was young, a place where it didn’t matter what went into my glass as long as it refreshed and occasionally stimulated a night out with friends. The past.

I was in the large barn-like expanse of the Fat Cat Brewery Tap, early doors, 11.30am, Saturday morning, a space that was already occupied by a brace of drinkers, their newspapers flattened in front of them, like maps, a guide to the internal landscape of their views, interests, prejudices and what they favour when it comes to switching on the TV. From the outside it looked unpromising, a youth centre from the 1960s, a slice of red brick, a short slope of roof on one side, a longer one on the other, utilitarian, an upside-down V shape with one side longer than the other.

Once inside, though, I was brought face to face with a collection of inn signs and tin plate brewery signs — Lacon’s Yarmouth Stout and Dinner Ale; Kops Stout; The Fusilier. On a chalkboard above the bar, which ran along the side of the room and behind which was the brewery, there were beers to be served from cask (both hand pump and by gravity), keg and bottle. There was cider and for those who eat there were pork pies, but it wasn’t the food that I was interested in that morning.

I wandered about the room, neck craning, looking at the signs, recognising something within me that was young, not child-like, but something going back to the 1980s perhaps, when I lived in Cambridge, Paris and London (not at the same time). I cannot articulate this feeling, cannot articulate the reason why I felt the way I did, it was like when you dream and then wake up and know that you’re dreamt but whatever it was that you dreamt about is over the horizon of known vision. If you could only concentrate enough you might know what it was you dreamt about but it is tantalisingly out of range, out of sight, out of the mainframe of everyday life.

So on that Saturday lunchtime, I tried to understand, to work out, to articulate why it was the way I felt like this, and through the prism of a couple of glasses of Fat Cat Marmalade and Beavertown’s Bloody ’Ell, I continued to consider memory and beer and pubs and inn signs and how the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the beginning and start all over again.

Black Cat blues

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.

In this Wetherspoons…

This is a Wetherspoons in Llandudno in North Wales. It is the Wetherspoons which was once a cinema. At the age of 14 I sat in the first tier of seats, possibly to the right, and watched Clockwork Orange (along with most of the 4th and 5th and 6th form). I also sat there and watched the Exorcist (twice in a week) and had a crafty bottled Guinness in the cinema bar, that was when I was in the lower 6th. I think my parents saw films here in the 1950s — certainly not Bergman but I would like to think they queued up for Wilder (that’s the director by the way). The last film I saw here was an Austin Powers one, possibly the first. Nowadays when I return to Llandudno (as one must, but it’s hardly we’ll always have Paris), I go there to get the free WiFi and remember the movies I saw over the years (I have a pint as well, it’s got better over the last couple of years). The other cinema I used to go to (I saw a lot of Bond and Carry On movies there) was pulled down and is now a fortress of warden controlled flats. Cinemas, like pubs, have their own memories and like the Proms audience currently acclaiming a rather excellent performance of Listz’s Faust I acclaim Wetherspoons for their sensitivity in adapting somewhere that was so important to me when I was growing up.

How time flies when you’re enjoying yourself

On the walls in the bar of the Duke of York hang several framed collections of black-and-white photos of locals enjoying themselves in the past. Next to the dart board, to the left of the massive fireplace capped with its brace of ancient shotguns, the collage comes from the 1950s perhaps: flat caps and pipes for the seniors, the young with a hint of Brylcreem in the hair, most men in a tie, a handful of women on their own table; meanwhile well polished cups and trophies are handed out, possibly by the licensees of the time. Elsewhere, on another wall, there’s a fading sepia-tinted photo from 1911 that shows a column of men in suits, battered bowlers and starched white collars, some hands in pockets, others with their hands swinging purposefully as they take part in the Iddesleigh Club Walk (something that continues annually to this day) — three years later a line of men like this would be khaki clad and marching off to war (you can’t help but see the dreadful progression). Pubs are for people and these framed photos depict those that enjoyed the Duke of York in the past and in a fanciful moment you imagine that by some miraculous transformation their voices, laughter and songs are ingrained in the very fabric of this old assemblage of four cottages that was originally constructed for the masons who built the neighbouring church in the Middle Ages. 

(Oh and the King’s Head in Laxfield gets my vote in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph, but you can read it here)

The men of Iddesleigh marching as if off to war