There is always a point where something gives way to something else. When the pendulum swings accurately for the last time and the equilibrium shifts, as if it was merely a sole breath of air on an otherwise still summer day. When that happens, things cannot behave as they did before. Over the last few strange years, time itself has changed, and perhaps it is a mistake to think that things will retain their elasticity within a continuum that has been interrupted. I feel like the world is being composed in an unfamiliar key, and we are all subject to cords and melodies that do not strike as we should hope. If I was a Dr Who fan, I might add that Russel T Davis would have us alongside a Doctor with a Tardis, who stands at a door and wonders at a postmodernist parallel universe, complete with its unknown and unfounded possibility. While we aren’t living a second life in a utopia, we may well have stood on a threshold, watching normality end in one place and come alive with a different face in another.
Perhaps then, its not surprising, that I find myself looking inwards, as if introversion will bring external creativity. Note to self – it won’t. Not only do I have writers block, I can’t remember where my writers initiative was taking me. So, I do what any half decent artist does, and I look back to find a time which will always now seem golden and unreachable, and I ask myself what was so different about it. Just to stem any doubt, as for me, the covid years have been bittersweet, I hark back to the time before. The time when the pendulum was still plodding along vicariously, the time when I was a young teenager. Where the best part of the week was a pint or two of bitter, a pickled egg and several games of pool in welly boots. Always followed by the morning, when your room smelt like a smoking whore’s boudoir. I remember on those mornings sidestepping the pile of clothes on the floor and swiftly making my way to the kitchen for milky tea and saffron buns. Before being thrust into the fresh, clear calm of the first light, where the morning air smelt of life, and I would scrape the heal of my boots all the way across the concrete, down to the yard, to feed a lamb or sell someone a sack of spuds. There is an element of a rose tinted glass, but still, I wonder now what became of those simple aspirations and that stubborn, bright teenager.
I can wind the timeline closer still, as the clock slows and drags, in recounting the years of a less encumbered twenty something, where I once worked alongside a chap called Alf. I won’t tell you his last name, he was sort of famous, but he sticks in my memory, and not because he was Glaswegian, but because he was a boy sized man, who somehow retained the persona of a charming lion. Those were the days when riotousness outplayed sensibility. When common sense was, well, common sensical. Alf would say regularly, “it takes 21 days to form a habit”. I would smile at him and humour his sentiment, but today it doesn’t take a lot of thought to realise that we have had a lot of 21 days, thanks in no small way to covid. Whether you want to call it 19, 20, 21 or just ongoing, its been dogmatic, this virus, and so I presuppose – no I don’t – I know, that consequently there has been a lot of new habit forming. A lot of supermarket drinking, TV binging, home schooling, lie ins, makeshift offices in the dinning room, virgin dog owners, staycations, mad house moves… and the world of the pub, the proper old fashioned boozer – that’s changed too. Good old Alf, he knew quite a bit about things after all…
Today, as I am constantly reminded, in my 40th year, I stand at the bar alone, a new veteran of the old pub days. The days when a pub was a pub and a community was a community. I don’t think, looking back on it, there was a lot of difference. People always need something to congregate around, be it religion, a club, a pint, or an innate sense of bonding over place. Things, some inanimate, draw people together, or at least they used too. There seems to be a fermata, followed by a coda to the score, where I stand here at the bar turning my glass in my hand, staring at a warming pint, contemplating an existence that I’ve outlived. But it brings a resolve that I can do something else. I don’t need to sip warm beer while waiting for the world to find a defibrillator, and for you to remember who you are, because this is my time continuum too, and I want to service the motion and restart the pendulum. The game may have changed, but the rules are still comfortingly accurate.
There is a 5’o’clock club in all of us, all you need to do is remember that…
