You Can Blame the BBC I-Player for This One

I’ve been told on two separate occasions by two separate people (each of whom you all know very well and will have varying degrees of respect for their insights and opinions), that when I ask a question of someone I do so only to, respectively, argue with the answer that I’ve been given, and to use it as a platform from which to wax lengthy and dull on the subject myself.

And to those charges I can only say: it’s a fair cop Guv. Slap on the old silver bracelets and haul me away to the clink. Won’t ‘cause no trouble, Mister, honest.

(That’s how I talk)

Anyway, I bring this up because….

Do you guys know what morphic resonance, is?

No?

Oh well then, allow me to explain. Some scientists (by some I mean one, and by scientist I mean Dr Who) postulate the idea that, through a telepathic effect or sympathetic vibration, an event at one point in the world (or anywhere within the field) or act can lead to similar simultaneous acts occurring somewhere else in the field then, or in the future, that an idea conceived in one mind can then arise in another – or more – people’s mind at exactly the same time somewhere else within the field.

Which is to say that human beings share a kind of low level sub-harmonic psychic field with one another in much the same way that we take for granted animals (e.g. migrating birds) do.

Cool stuff, no?

Ok, only me.

Anyway, I bring this up because I was recently talking to an old friend of mine and she mentioned that last Thursday night (in Hackney) she was absolutely and unaccountably hammered – and this got me thinking, because last Thursday I (in Enfield) was also absolutely and unaccountably hammered – as indeed were my brother, Charlie and Gareth.

Unaccountably.

In general things aren’t normally unaccountable. They’re improbably or implausible. They’re coincidental and pernicious.

But they’re not unaccountable.

They’re just…well they’re just difficult to explain.

And so, following Sherlock Holme’s famous aphorism, ‘when you have eliminated all that is impossible, then whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth’ – why then naturally the only possible explanation for different people who were all drinking in different pubs to all be more drunk than they’d originally intended, had – HAD - to be morphic resonance.

I mean it’s obvious innit Guv’nor.

Think about it.

Thursdays have taken on a lethal will of their own.

Like Skynet or Herbie the Love Bug (which we now know was actually an allegory about Aids).

This idea that ‘Thursdays are the start of the weekend’ has taken hold across the country even though Thursday is quite obviously not the start of the weekend.

Friday evening is the start of the weekend.

It’s like saying celery is the start of the weekend.

Or Bob from marketing.

Just saying it doesn’t make it true….what makes it true is people acting like it’s true. And all it takes is enough people somewhere within the field to act as though it’s true and to believe it to be true, and that idea will resonate all across the morphic field.

A quite literal self-fulfilling prophecy.

So my friends, next Friday morning when you roll into work at 9.50am, stinking of flavoured vodka [and shame] and wearing last night’s lamb kebab on your shoes, and your boss asks you what on earth you think you’re playing at, well you just look him straight in the eye and you reply: morphic resonance, boss, morphic resonance.

Geronimo

Ladies and gentlemen I give you our very own Charles Curtis.

Just how he rolls, I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtppczPfBtA&feature=plcp

Dread

I once read that the overwhelming compulsion which people who suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) feel to do what they do, is mainly one of terrifying incomprehensible dread.

A dread that, for instance, if they don’t wash their hands ten times every half an hour, that all of their family – every single person they love - will immediately and inexplicably fall down dead.

A dread that if they don’t turn the light on and off three times whenever they enter a room, the earth will be hit by a giant meteorite and all life on the planet immediately extinguished.

A dread that…well you get the idea.

They know it’s illogical, improbably and deeply damaging/debilitating to their lives…..but…well… it’s just there nevertheless.

They feel it in their bones, to their core…and goodness it’s difficult to change the way you feel.

They live caught in a perpetual dichotomy – a nightmarish cognitive dissonance in which they both know that their compulsion is illogical and a product of their own rebellious consciousness – but they also feel absolutely and entirely convinced that their dread is real.

Frankly it must be bloody awful and I feel for the poor blighters, and…you know what….I sort of get it.

With me – as most of you know – it’s sitting at corners.

I’m nowhere near suffering what those poor buggers have to daily endure, but I do sort of understand where they’re coming from.

In Taps I have to sit at the corner of the bar; whether that be behind the hatch, at the hatch or in the Perryman.

Anything else and I feel like I have ants in my brain. An unreasonably rage – a back of the neck burning, ears ringing, rage.

And of course I know it’s unreasonable – I really do. Contrary to all evidence I’m only half as stupid as I look. But it is what it is. That’s just me. That’s just it.

It’s undoubtedly my own fault of course; for letting it get so far I mean – for not squashing it dead and flat when those feelings first arose, but…well… it’s done now.

It is. It had become. It has manifested.

The ridiculous thing is that I can sit anywhere in the Kings Head. Obviously I much prefer to sit near the hatch – but I can live without it – but when it comes to Taps all bets are off. Whenever someone – someone who isn’t Barry that is – is sat in the corner or at the hatch, I just can’t enjoy myself.

For all the time that I’m in there all I’m doing is waiting for them to go. That’s it. I’m waiting, I’m worrying, by God I’m worrying, and minute by minute I’m becoming more and more enraged.

You might think we’re having a moderately interesting conversation about your day, or my day, or your holiday, or my….well, your holiday, but that isn’t what’s happening.

What’s happening is that I’m eyeing the corner and plotting blue bloody murder. I’m chopping up limbs in bath tubs in my head. I’m wondering where I can buy limestone. I’m bludgeoning some poor aged motherfucker to death with his own walking stick.

And I really wish I wasn’t like that – genuinely I do – and I know it’s immensely annoying to many people, but as I said, it just is what it is.

So all I can ask is that you continue to indulge me…after all, who knows, maybe it really is all that stands between us and planetary destruction. 

LEGAL

Our little boozer has been going through some strange days. They’re not over but it feels like they are at least beginning to draw to a close, and not a moment too soon. It has been exhausting.

Ever since some mystery bastard made the conscious decision to actively try and ruin someone else’s whole life, it’s seemed like we’ve been lurching from one crisis to the next. OK, maybe that’s a little dramatic - we’ve been trudging from one mishap to another.

But as I said it’s been exhausting. Particularly for me and the rest of the staff, because in our position (i.e. behind the bar) people expect us to have some sort of inside track on what the hell’s going on. I rarely do. However, that doesn’t stop the questions from coming…

Where’s the Russian? Why is she gone? Where’s my pint? Who’s the new manager? Does he only have one shirt? Why is he being a knob? What do you mean no lime? Is it a boycott? Where did the new manager go? Where’s my pint? Have you got the Celtic game on? What’s your problem? Didn’t I give you a twenty? How much!? Where did Des and Terry go? Do you want a crisp? Can you turn it up a bit? Can I have a crisp? Can you turn it down a bit? Who’s in charge here? Where’s my pint? As I’m sure you can imagine… It’s been a living hell.

On Tuesday phase one of the recovery was initiated. With any luck, by Christmas everything will be back to normal and The Taps will rise from the ashes like a sausage that’s fallen through the grill. I, for one, couldn’t be happier for The Taps’ newest British citizen. And the sooner she stops skiving off the better – it’s been 10 months, already… GET BACK TO WORK!

Goodbye Brains, it was shit while it lasted.

Pubs change all the time. And by pubs, I mean the people that make them. Staff and customers leave with very little notice and usually very little fanfare, but more often than not there’s someone else around the corner ready to take their spot at the bar, whichever side it may be. As a result, most pubs are in a state of perpetual change, maybe not always for the better but they always seem to find their equilibrium. 

Of late, our very own dingy watering hole has had some pretty seismic shifts (if you don’t know about them by now, then you don’t really deserve to) but we had found some semblance of normality. Well... Normality might not be the word but it'll have to do.

Then it happened. Brains landed. 

Yeah... Me.

Gareth

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

                                                                                             --------  L.P.Hartley

We all know Gareth’s qualities as a friend and a person, such, I think, that it’s enough to say that he wouldn’t be the former of so many of us if he wasn’t so much of a quality latter.

But since I have, to coin a phrase, come here to praise him, I’ll also say that when it comes to the tricky everyday/day-in-day out business of being a well rounded decent human being [which God knows can be a difficult enough job for any of us] I consider Gareth to be one of the most successful people I know at doing it.

He also has an enormous enough head as it is. So enough of that.

What I really want to write about today is Gareth the barman. And I’ll say this to begin: Gareth’s the best barman I’ve ever seen.

And believe me, I’ve been drinking in pubs for the last ten years (with some small amount of time off to sleep and go to work), and so when I say that, I think – I hope - it means something.

In my time I’ve seen some truly great barmen (Scottish John and Travis from the Enfield Arms and Ed and Bang Bang [it’s a long story] from the 3 Tuns, particularly spring to mind. And they were all very, very good. Great even). I’ve also seen barmen who could have been great – who had all the technical expertise you could possibly want – but were missing that last single elusive edge.

Well actually, that isn’t true. It isn’t a single thing/edge; it’s an elusive nebulous cocktail of things that you rarely see in one person.

It’s wit and humour – the ability to throw jokes back at people as fast as they come – and the ability to do that in the 6^th hour of a 7 hour shift at 1 in the morning.

It’s patience – good God, it’s infinite patience – listening to the boring, the mundane, the ridiculous, the prejudiced, the retarded, the repetitive, the racist, the wrong headed and the downright tedious [and that’s just talking to me on a Monday night], for hours on end, and making the person saying it feel like you give a damn.

It’s sympathy at hardship (whether that hardship be real or imagined)

It’s charm to the charmless.

It’s courage in the face of the drunk, belligerent and implausibly stupid.

And it’s decency in the midst of scum and villainy.

I’ve known Gareth for eight years now, and although I know that he might (for all the reasons above) be persuaded to do the odd shift if he’s ever really needed, I refer you back to Mr Hartley’s quote at the top of this post.

It will never be the same. It can’t be the same.

Good luck, G.