This is an older piece from this time last year.
14:00/Monday/March
Pint: Chinook, 4.9% Hoppy £3.50
Memories of summer ’16 sound engineering a music festival in Suffolk.
Music: La La Land (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Good film, average singing, excellent composition
Fits aesthetic (sun come out, blinds me for a second) of the pub
Walking bass prevalent, makes me think of the wood surrounding me.
By which I mean wooden tables everywhere, rickety wooden chairs, wood beams, banisters, flooring.
Good bit of song comes on and I shake my head to and fro. I look insane, I think.
I imagine dancing to A Lovely Night (the track currently playing) in this room, the tight spacing, choreographing tap on this board floor, the pub-laughter emerging from the surrounding tables. Pub-laughter is, of course, laughter reserved for within the warm, window-steaming confines of a public house.
This is where I realise the metal radiator is on beside me, I feel comfort. Not comfortable, but the sensation of comfort itself, from the heat, the wood finish, the hushed talk, the bebop coming through my right ear.
Sound: Pausing the music, taking the earbud out. The music had become sombre, as the album was on shuffle, and some parts of La La Land are pretty sad (flash of light. Sun goes back behind cloud).
I realise there is music playing ever so faintly in the background. Muzak. Lounge jazz, but, upon a closer listening, training the ear to cut above mumbled conversation, I identify drum breaks, trombones bopping. This is full jazz turned down painfully low.
Imagine the change in mood if the music took centre stage. If the band were live before me, on the slightly raised wooden stage which houses only a pinball machine and a man sat beneath a blue shaded light.
Would the mothers abandon their bottle of Pinot Grigio and dance? Or merely shuffle in their seats and smile at the younger men?
The sound of a coin hitting the floor, a familiar sound, but it lands side-on and begins to roll. Rolls. Rolls further, towards me away from the hipster couple with tea and bitter and a four-pack of cacti. I pick it up and the girl with the bangs comes to collect it in her faux-fur coat. These human interactions make a place like this. My heart rate increases by a few beats per minute. I am not used to communicating with strangers in bars. I am not cut out for this. I write it down. The forced smile fades from my lips.
Drink: I take a few gulps of the Chinook. I was lost in thought and this centres me.
Run my hands through my hair. Get my fingers locked in battle with a knot in my fringe. No one wins this game.
The woman in front of me finishes her glass of wine. It was full when I sat down with this hoppy brew and I’ve drank a third of my pint.
I wonder if she does this often? Is this a treat, a catch-up with her friends on a Monday afternoon or is this routine, ritual, habit?
Only one of the women still has some white left in her glass but — oh, the first to finish has topped everyone up. The bottle’s empty but she still replaces the lid; courtesy.
They talk in hushed tones and no one picks their glass up for some time as they discuss the intricacies of social media: “Snapchat? I barely get, no I’m not on it no.” “Why do [posts] never come up when you want to see them?” (my stubble is beginning to itch, I’ve been growing it out for five days and the edges are irritating me).
Break: I go to save this document, but cannot remember if Beerwolf Books is Beerwolf Books or Beerwulf books. I go to pee.
I peed. I sit.
Toilet: The back of the cubicle door contains multitudes. It is a blue painted wood. More wood.
The wood is dull, similar in colouration – beneath the paint – to the table.
I know this because of the messages carved on the door. (more light flashing)
QUICK POO? in the bottom left and underneath that NOPE THIS HAS BEEN AN EYE OPENING JOURNEY
Elsewhere, not scratched in the door but topically applied in a blue pen: Pretty Girls Make Cakes, but some other miscreant has scratched a line through Make Cakes and scribbled beneath crudely COOK.
Apparently it is important to make the distinction between cooking and baking, as ‘pretty girls’ do one and not the other.
Beard: The hipster boy with the enviable beard has finished his pint. He is sitting on a wooden chair at a table with the pretty girl who dropped the coin, but she is sitting on a leather sofa which dumps her gracelessly below him, to his right. They are both to my left. I can barely see her over the table at which she sits sipping her tea she is so low. She looks at him knowingly: he is facing away from me, towards her, so I can only see his ear piercing and the clean cut of his luscious facial hair.
Light: The light from the window directly in front of me, as you’ve noticed, keeps changing.
The sun goes from open to hidden frequently.
When I look at the window I see how dirty my glasses are.
I clean my glasses on my green polka-dotted shirt.
I look back up at the light and see it hasn't helped. I try on my coat sleeve but that does naught either. I’m simply moving smudge from one side of the lens to the other.
I hadn’t noticed before but a woman sits in the window the light shines through.
I can’t see her when it’s too bright, she becomes a silhouette, but when the sun hides she is fully formed with her hair tied up messily and glasses perched above her hairline. She’s beautiful, mirroring my movements typing away at her Mac and sipping her coffee.
I envy her.
She has a better seat than me and her cheekbones are highlighted by the sun.
She is everything I am not: illuminated, angular, lit.
Hands: The hipsters are holding hands.
I say holding hands, I more mean playing with each other’s hands.
He takes her hand in both of his and kisses it. I cannot help but smile.
He holds her wrist delicately, as if he might break it, and she lets her hand flop, flicking her fingers against his curled palm.
They are comfortable in each other’s presence.
I want a hold to hand.
Nope.
I want a hand to hold.
They’ve gone.
Looked around to see if the hipsters had left. Bartender catches my eye, leans his head down. He looks like a sitcom character staring direct to camera. He looks insane. I look insane.
Task: Someone else from class walks in, sits down, begins this task forty minutes behind me.
I try not to think of this as a task, as an assignment, or to discuss it.
That would make this piece more meta than I want it to.
The piece should be organically commenting on the process of writing about place.
Bugger.