5.972 sextillion tons

It is Friday night and I find myself at a corner table in the pub, as if by accident. I look up and there I am staring at a freshly pulled beer anticipating the extraordinary first mouthful. I don’t drink very much but what I do drink I enjoy. It is interesting that drunk is a past tense of drink, as if it is an inevitable consequence of drinking, but I can’t remember the last time I was drunk, probably because I was drunk. Beer and alcohol are not the same thing. Beer is wondrous, true this is partly because it has ethanol in it, but beer is much more than a drug delivery system, it is discourse delivery system, why else would I pay five pounds for a pint of the stuff in a pub when I could buy three pints for a fiver in Sainsbury’s? In England we have always communed in pubs, we are an island of drinker thinkers, in every beer there’s an idea, admittedly a lot of those ideas are rubbish, or forgotten or potentially illegal but occasionally a great one comes up. I proposed in a pub, no hold on, I was proposed to in a pub, if you met my wife you would understand, anyway I said yes in a pub. I write in pubs, eschewing the cafe and the dreaded flat white, I will not become a coffee botherer. I am writing this in a pub, in a theatrical allusion, the Bottom’s Rest, previously the famously convivial Conqueror, but on this occasion the beer I am staring at is alone, for want of a babysitter the company is lost.

Friday nights in the Conqueror used to mean something, the gathering of a loose coalition of the self opinionated, well met men and women of undetermined age and profession, making noise about nothing in particular. We were the very definition of half full or half empty vessels, conversing on everything from the corporate body politic to how much the Earth weighs. We would raise our heady beers with orbiting ancillary shot glasses, laughing and pouting blue smoke, voices thrown overhead like school cap frisbees. But things change. I am the last of my tribe that comes here to imbibe, we drifted away, our ranks thinned by time. The Conqueror is now conquered, renamed, sweet-smelling and occupied by the fleeting, the ephemeral, the passing through, their uplit faces waxing and waning, conversations polite, contrite, screen centric. The few odd regulars that remain exchange furtive glances, we share a history but were never friends, rather veterans from different regiments of the same defeated army.

None of this is necessarily bad, I still love the pub but for new reasons, the rhythm of the waves, the human flotsam, the murmuration of the pebbles, and on those nights that I come here by myself I wait to see if anyone I know gets washed up. More vigil than ritual. Sometimes I return home having spoken only a few words to the bar staff but other times my patience is rewarded and tonight it is the turn of the tall man. Closer to seven foot than six he spots me from the door, his head bobbing towards me upon the swell. He stops at my table and looks down and down. ‘Hello Rich,’ he says. ‘Fancy a pint?’