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.