Let’s meet these men seated around the stove, who get here early to secure the spot and occupy it with proprietorial brooding:
Malcolm takes pride in his appearance and looks very like the late Sean Connery; so much so that he frequently attracts comments from strangers, which he rebuffs with a single raised eyebrow. He is a man of few words, none of them wasted on civility. He is a contrarian who claims to be ambivalent about Marmite. He hides his deep kindness in a gruff wrapper. At home, he makes fine art and declares it to be crap.
Donald is lean and dour; he always buys his own pint and hauds his wheesht. He sports long white hair and untrimmed Spike Milligian eyebrows and just occasionally he offers a witty observation that sets the company, including himself, to wheezing tears of mirth. He mends old cars and eats sliced white bread. Donald lives alone.
Archie could be mistaken for a creature of the wild woods, when he emerges from his mostly untended garden to get his coat to go to the Inn. He is a romantic; he has his own truth and he presses it upon us vigorously, with waving hands. There is no denying him his Brythonic, Pictish, Celtic, Apache heritage and his resentment of the Sassenach. Archie grew up in London.
Jose-Enrique is elegant, well dressed, Latin American, a professor; everything he encounters for the first time is new to human understanding and worthy of wonder and enthusiastic elucidation to others, even when they groan. He wills things to be as he wishes them to be, and because of that, they mostly are, for him. Jose-Enrique is also a terminal hypochondriac.
Robert is fit, well-kempt, balding and mild. His eyes sparkle. He lives obligingly at the service of his extended family and their needs, a situation that he plaintively resents after the few beers he is allowed to share with us before his wife comes to pick him up. He draws beautifully and with great concentration. Robert and his sketchbook once nearly got stranded by the tide at Cape Wrath.
Francis is a small, strong, weathered, leather-skinned horticulturalist. He designs other people’s gardens and can identify anything infused with chlorophyl by both Latin and Greek names. We take his word for it. He has a couple of pints before his bus. Sometimes he misses the bus and has a couple more.
Roger, tall, curly haired and verbose, was a Yorkshireman. He had a loud laugh and a way with words. He died ten years ago, having still never bought a round. We all went to his funeral in our best clothes and sat feeling sad at his loss and our own mortality. Never buying a round is what we remember him for.
Handy Andy verges on the spherical, like a pink snowman, and is unpopular. He knows this and presses himself on our company regardless. A generous thought is that he is harmless but Andy has been warned several times about his inappropriate behaviour towards other customers. At home, he has a workshop where the spanners are hung up in size order on the wall.
Sometimes, we don’t get served; not because we are unwelcome, but because there is nobody there to serve us. It is “a pub like no other”, according to the painted signage on the wooden beams.
So let’s turn to those occasionally standing behind the Bar, who tend to shun efficiency in favour of an affable muddle:
Harris, the landlord, is large and convivial; every barked observation ends with a loud laugh. He has been trying to sell the pub since he bought it fifteen years ago. Recently, he stopped complaining about that and started taking weekend breaks. Harris has probably won the lottery and not told anyone. Or he has a huge pension. Harris once worked in a bank.
Rusty, the young(ish) assistant barman, is just Rusty; he likes dungeons and dragons and electric guitar music. He has only ever left the village either to go snowboarding or to fetch a McDonalds from the trading estate in the next town. Rusty smokes half cigarettes rapidly and sometimes stays up all night. Rusty lives with his parents.
All these men are my friends. I am younger than most of them, except Rusty, but happy to be old before my time in conversation with them, if it means being welcome in their company. My performative self enjoys living up to the sign behind the bar that says “drink beer and talk shite”. When silences tend to be awkward, I lob something in, like casting another log on the stove. Sometimes I have wondered whether this is expected of me, my price of admission, my role in the group. However, once I get going, I can lose the thread or realise halfway through that the anecdote is not worth the telling. Then I am mocked. For some people, teasing is considered disrespectful; for men in the pub, it is part of the bond that holds us.
One night, twenty years ago, four of us had a well-lubricated conversation in the pub about cycling from Scotland to Spain. It was the sort of fantasy conversation that seemed unlikely to outlive the next day’s hangover. Now and then, still, we sit around the glowing stove and remember our pilgrimage ride across Belgium, France and into Spain; the long days in the saddle, the hills we climbed together, the evenings spent passing around a bottle of wine at the campsites. Stories to tell and re-tell around the stove, to polish and embellish over time. Stories of friendship and shared experience. Stories of love, perhaps, but among men that goes unspoken.
Anyway, whose round is it?