05 November 2004
old men and pubs...a good thing
[Note: By 'old' I mean older than me, by 'men' I mean anyone willing to sit in a pub and drink beer for several hours without pause or melancholia].
Sunday afternoons in amiable Wiltshire countryside, sitting in the beer garden of a pub that was eventually to be set on fire by the owner in order to collect insurance money (he never got it, his petrol-footprints all too prominent), I listen to my father's jug band ('Hokum Focus') perform an array of old-time folk and Steeleye Span covers....thus a monster is born - the real-ale supping, old-men-smiling-at child of shambolic musical distraction (may I never have to dance with my mother to 'all around my hat' again).
Sometimes I even got to play the tambourine.
Years later I find myself inexorably drawn...the hour-eating allure of solid wooden tables, dusty old velvet curtains and beers with names like 'Dark Furnace'. And old men! The ones who drink to warm themselves up, who argue to pass the time (but would never think to smash their glass on the solid wooden table and jab it in the face of their interlocutor). The wisdom of these pub heroes, these champions of reasoning in even in the wake of five pints of 6X. I like their gentleness, their sexless kindness and complete lack of flirtation ('well, if she wants to come home with me, well she can, but there'll be no need to press her'). It's a solid life, the hours spent with old men in pubs discussing everything via the honey-coloured ocean of alcohol - the real great equaliser - men, women, who cares? All just peaceably drunk and sitting around an old oak table. There is no need to dress up for the pub, but never be without your stock collection of interesting facts: blood bounces on ice; The word 'Mrs.' Cannot be written in full; The face of a penny can hold thirty drops of water.
All together now:
All around my hat I will wear the green willow
All around my hat for a twelve-month and a day
And if anyone should ask me the reason why I'm wearing it
It's all for my true love who's far far away
