by Robin Cowlyn
What is a pub?
It’s not just a building that serves beer.
A real pub is a place of gentle contemplation that changes as the day passes, sitting as you swig your drink, not necessarily thinking of anything. It is a place where people meet, whether friends or not to pass the time, to chat, to celebrate, to commiserate. It is a place where love is found or lost but always it is a community with all its strengths and its faults.
It changes as the day passes, as people come and go, the noise swelling and dying down like the tide, the atmosphere becoming livelier until it reaches a swelling crescendo which then lulls as the evening draws to a close.
We may not see again those packed spaces, the windows steamed with hot sweaty humanity but where people are and are engaged in the moment, whether that is in savouring a drink or deep in a conversation, then that is a pub.
A pub also changes with the seasons and by that, I don’t mean just as the beers rotate.
It is innate, Spring brings an expectation with periods of sunshine engendering feelings of hope as the darkness retreats. The prospect of being outside in the clean, crisp, clear air.
Summer is all gardens, people spilling out of the pub or coming in to escape the heat or the showers. Warm evenings spent with friends and family, watching swallows and swifts screeching on high and later if you’re lucky bats flitting above.
Autumn brings the last of the gardens, wrapped up warm against the nipping cold. Then there is the retreat to the warm, a fuggy haze upon the windows.
Winter sees the gathering in round the warm light and the fire flickering in the grate. Dark outside, dark in the glass, porters, stouts, impys and barley wines, to warm the insides as the fire warms the outsides.
A pub has the feel of home, unlike a bar, a feeling of friends, found family, a warm welcome into its bosom, enfolding you in its atmosphere.
A pub is a conversation, chats that start between strangers that open the world to friendships. Now this is something important to me; as one who habitually drinks alone, neither wife or so care that much for alcohol and that’s what they see pubs as, incorrect as that is.
So the chance conversation, the stupid shared jokes, they are the things that bind, that give a pub life.
More difficult now that circumstances make us more alone but this just make pubs all the more
important. As humans, we crave connection, community, a feeling of belonging and it is talking that brings us together, this is the essence of a good pub. A place where you can feel comfortable in your skin, where acceptance is given, where you are welcomed.
Guest blog post by Robin Cowlyn. You can check out more from Robin over on Twitter at @BombGirl