Last night in the pub:
Actually, my headline is a fib… there were no cigarettes in the pub tonight! There were some young kids at the bar who went out for a quick fag (cigarette, for American readers) tonight, and the lady sitting next to us who went out to vape, but I promise you, no-one was smoking in the pub!
However, cigarettes do play a part in what I am about to write, because that is how we got into conversation with the couple sitting beside us in the pub. We had drifted down, just after ten; for once we were wearing sweaters, we are going through a chilly patch in this glorious summer. Our usual preferred bar, the one as you come in the door was rather crowded so we went through into the cross-benches, greeted Terry who was sitting at the bar, ordered a couple of pints and sat at an empty table. On the next table were another couple we didn’t know…
Well, we didn’t know them when we arrived, but by the time we drifted out at about 12:15, three-quarters of an hour after closing, we did know each other! Such is the power of pubs; we made a few casual comments to each other in the usual friendly way, and then before too long we were comparing notes on families, jobs, education, honeymoons, weddings, first dates, children, pubs, Elvis, gigs, music…. but what started us off was cigarettes.
We somehow got into conversation about how different pubs are since the smoking ban which was in 2007. We talked about how pubs used to be, with a pall of smoke hanging across the bars, and cinemas with films viewed though a blue haze, and the smell on our clothes and hair, and the types of cigarettes we smoked – No.5, No.10, Peter Stuyvesant, Silk Cut, Pall Mall, Embassy, and how ordinary it was and how accepted…
And from cigarettes we moved on to talk about every sort of thing you can imagine as I mentioned above.
What a very pleasant evening, and what a very typical evening! This is what it is like in a good pub – you meet all sorts of very interesting and nice people!!
… and you have interesting conversations with the bar staff:
“Sorry I didn’t see you waiting to be served, I was in a world of my own.”
“That’s alright, I’m often in my own world!”
“It’s great, isn’t it!”
“Yes, there are so many interesting people there.”
“Yes, lovely people, not like those in the other bar!”
“Yes… but there are some of them too… weird folk….”
Lois Elsden 