Picture Perfect

Look away now if you find my sad, melodramatic, cheap over-sentimentality too vomit [or indeed coma] inducing, because this one is likely to be a real doozy.

[well I suppose that’s probably everyone gone then]

On Saturday night, at around quarter past nine, I was standing outside of the pub with Sarah (Terry’s Sarah) smoking.

And we were standing looking directly into the open window – and what struck us both at the same moment was how - dark as it was outside, and the scene inside lit brightly in gold - perfectly the pub was framed like a framed portrait or widescreen aspect ratio bars on a David Lean epic.

And it was a perfect picture of a pub – of a nice pub, a local’s pub – caught and encapsulated in a microcosmic moment. In fact what it immediately put me in mind of was Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (which you can probably see why I've always loved).

Gareth and Jade were behind the bar – and Gareth was gently throwing a mock ‘atta-boy’ punch at Jade’s chin. Mark was stood in the hatch and had thrown his head back in laughter at some joke that Len, who was standing beside him with his hand on his shoulder, had told him. And then sat a long the bar a row of people stood or on stools quietly talking, and before them a row of pints glasses, and finally in the regulars corner, Adam and Vijas in the middle of an animated conversation involving expansive hand gestures and laughter.

And in my head, at that moment, I’d taken a picture. An image transmuted through a lense of everything that I find beautiful about the bonhomie, warmth and familiarity of pubs.

[Now, of course if some arty type, perhaps one who did actually regularly take pictures, had've been there, I wouldn’t have had to imagine snapping a mental picture on my Kodak mind stood on the pavement like some kind of lunatic].

It was Sarah, after the moment had passed, who eventually called it a Study in Conviviality.

And it was.