Wild Man
I see them regularly, but the lingering light of summer evenings draws the eye and their almost silent passing still leaves a Mexican Wave of branches across the road.
They are taxis, and they are both state of the art and deplorable. Calling them city cabs might add a certain raciness for the occupants, but for me they will always be home too soon.
I am usually here until the small hours. Never earlier than ten but always until after the witching hour. Drinking beer I can’t afford in the pub and listening to my vast collection of music CDs on a battered player with massive cans.
The headphones serve two purposes. They have reinvigorated my love of stereo and they prevent passers by asking what I am up to.
What I am up to is preserving the night.
It started with the lockdowns. In the unlamented early days, it was more of a training regime. I thought it would be a short lived folly so I would leave the house around ten pm and walk up to my local and touch the wall , then walk back again and drink a couple of cans of lager on my front door steps.
As these are behind a gate they both satisfied my need to be out of the house , but kept me on the right side of whatever that week’s law turned out to be.
Week followed,dreary, week,but I managed to maintain my motivation and by the summer , a kind of normal returned , and so did I.
I reluctantly accepted the socially distanced tables and the perspex screens , but the ten p.m. curfew was a step too far.
Against my better nature, and at my wife’s suggestion, I tried going out at eight …
Inside the pub , once I had signed in and caught the eye of a barmaid to bring a pint to my table , the atmosphere was pretty much the same.
Somehow , though , returning home before News At Ten had finished , and gentle souls were taking their dogs out for constitutionals seemed completely alien to me.
Luckily , I only had to do it once. For reasons I can’t quite remember , the North agreed to enter the second Lockdown in October 2020 and pubs were closed to all for a full six months before steadily returning with a lacklustre drizzle of further restrictions…
For a longtime, enthusiastic consumer of the night economy, the blow was almost physical.
My earlier training regime became my focus.
I set out to replicate , as closely as possible , the things which were most important to me about a night out. This was not just about beer. It was about music and ,very importantly, about time.
I didn’t realise at that moment , but each of these weighed more heavily on me than the actual closure of the pubs.
The element you might think was missing from my mix above was idle chatter…but I soon found that the mixture of beer and music led to all sorts of idle thoughts in my mind , particularly when I introduced the Saturday Disco Light…
The decade prior to the pandemic, had seen a huge erosion in the quality of the pub experience for me.
In the wake of Tony Blair’s shake up of the Licensing Laws in 2005 , my local could serve until midnight most of the week and 2am on Friday and Saturday. Other pubs in the area had similar opening times and a lot of people enjoyed some very late nights.
It started to go pear shaped around 2010. Landlords came and went , and each new broom curtailed the hours a little more. Disco’s finished earlier and Jukebox music began to be turned down after eleven o’clock.
By late 2020 , my doorstep disco running from 10pm to 1am was starting to look like the raciest gig in town… For a few silent lockdown months , I think it really was.
But I’m still here.
Perhaps now, those quiet taxis look at me in passing and think I’m weird.
To me though ,changing CDs and opening another Bud around midnight is not weird.
It’s wild, man.
