We have lost the first of the ebb

SEVENTH DATE REPORT - 03/08/09

The husky, mid-shadows of the East End boozer, a place neatly straddling modern excess and faded decency, was as snug as any other place for our group. The landlord was an affable sort, if a little coarse, and we always found the other clientele too busy in their own business to notice ours.

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of sitting about in pubs. It held our hearts together and made us tolerant of each other’s yarns. Each fellow was good enough in his own way, even Romeo, though he had the habit affecting thoughtful poses (you know, like a prick).

‘And this also’ said Romeo suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He was the only one of us who had ever ‘followed his heart’. The worst that could be said of him was that he was a short, whinging Welsh hedge-botherer. His comment, unremarkable to us, was met with silence. Not even a grunt. After all, we hadn’t the foggiest what he was biffling on about.

He continued without need for invitation. He does that.

‘I was thinking of the very old times, when man first went in search of Love. Man’s course to the centre of the heart, from the caveman’s club to it’s pinnacle, Kenneth Williams’ performance in Carry On up the Khyber, has been littered with casualties. But men still went, oh yes, though they fell like flies.’

We knew this would be the beginning of a great yarn, equally as long as it was impossible. How did we know this? It was his round. ‘I’ll get them in then’ sighed someone, sadly but not really as any one of us would have gladly taken a nail-gun to our perineum at that point to avoid hearing the torrent of bullshit that would soon be filling the pub, slowly but horrifyingly surely, until we were all mere sailboats bobbing about in a wild ocean of utter shit.

‘But these men were nothing but brutes, grabbing what they could, regardless of anyone else’s feelings. And we’ve done the same of course, of course! But what sets us apart from these philanderers is our honesty. Taking advantage of the weakness of others does not constitute strength. The conquest of others is not a pretty thing when you look at it. What redeems it is the idea only. Not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…’

He broke off. Of course he did. His pint had arrived.

‘As a youth it captivated me. Mills & Boon, Blind Date, even the insufferable Chris Tarrant vehicle Man-O-Man. From those first stirrings of desire as I became irrationally and confusingly obsessed with Jet from Gladiators, to one failed relationship after another, I kept looking. But I never found it. The heart. The one place I longed to go, the one thing I longed to possess. As I mapped my life there was always one blank, one huge uncharted territory. But as I grew others filled in that blank, charted the maps, replaced my ignorance with scraps of knowledge and half-truths. I swore I’d never go, its reputation now sullied to me.’

‘But I found myself one day sitting in front of my computer, staring, yes staring! like a madman! at a website that had captivated me. I tried to fight against it but it all that desire came flooding back - Jet, late night soft porn on Channel 5, Khyber - and, dash it all!, I couldn’t help myself. The snake had charmed me.’

‘Forgive me, gentlemen, I was young, I still had dreams and, damnit, they promised me the earth; meeting new people, new experiences and excitement and, yes that one that I had so long craved yet fought against - Love. In six months. Yes, fellows, in just 6 months. I should have known it was doomed to failure, fated to be one galling blow after another. One particular incident happened just up the road from here.’

He took a pull on his lager and stared down the long expanse of the eastbound road, towards another over-priced fuckshack that calls itself a pub when it is, in actual fact, a meeting hall for cunts.

None of us looked with him. We had completely lost interest.

‘I met my companion for the journey not too far from here, a small young lady, named Nadine. She was somewhat younger than I but I had been assured that she had charted these waters before and would be a befitting attendant for my quest. Plus, she was quite fit. The road was long and straight and relatively tranquil but as we neared our destination I felt uneasy. It was a gradual change. I don’t know when I first noticed the trousers getting skinnier, or the haircuts becoming more and more asymmetric, but I suddenly found myself, with a jolt, an alien. They had warned me to expect this so I felt some comfort in a familiar sense of uncertainty.’

‘We chatted amiably but I couldn’t help thinking about the words of the website, nagging away. After all I was promised Love. We were a good match. I was to believe that I would find Love on this very journey. My companion, of course, did not know this. Whilst we were, in a sense, aiming for the same destination, we were taking very different routes. I had had my orders. Find Love. As soon as I saw the pub my hackles rose. All around it the natives sprawled, some sitting on the floor, yes!, even in the gutter. They seemed possessed by something entirely unearthly, something I did not, no, could not possess. They had a togetherness, a clan identity and mentality. It chilled me to my core. Most of them looked like Agyness Deyn. Even the men. In fact, especially the men. Love, I had been lead to believe, lay inside. I was to find it. I had gone on far enough, I had been promised, and I was to seek out Love here. Some of the natives had taken to worshipping it, coupling off into duos of androgynous terror, all hips and collars, unaware of the fact they were being tricked. You may be here now, I muttered, already embittered by my surroundings, but mark my words in five years time you’ll all be accountants or regional reps for a telecommunications company. Some of them lolled, eyes glazed with aching cool, others were simply twats.’

‘Yet, emboldened by my companion’s ability to fit in with these curiosities and her touching enthusiasm for the edifice, I strode through the door with renewed vigour. The sight I was greeted with will live with me until my dying day, gentlemen, until my very dying day. Once my eyes had adjusted to the repressive gloom, the room lit waveringly by only four Ikea tea lights, I realised the scene outside was nothing more than a precursor for the desolation and inhumanity that lay inside. The chairs were scattered at seemingly random angles (some were not chairs at all but bean bags - BEAN BAGS), carpets hung from the walls in some kind mockery of normal societal rules, things dangled from the ceiling, it was impossible to tell who was staff and who wasn’t. If this is what Love had done, I had to find it, and quick, before it’s terrible influence could be exerted on any more recent graduates.’

‘We sat at what I suppose was meant to be a table and I ventured, stepping over limbs and on fingers (teehee!), to the bar. Gentlemen, in our days together we have seen some torrid things. Things we shall never reveal to our wives and children. But this bar, seriously, took the fucking biscuit. There wasn’t a soul behind it. Three of the impossibly young ghouls hovered nearby, to one side, waiting, I assumed, for service, like souls stuck in purgatory - only in this case purgatory looked like the menu screen of a Mighty Boosh DVD. I inspected what was on offer. Oh these poor souls! Only one decent beer and selection of spirits that I suppose seemed funny at the time. I stood for what seemed like minutes but was only, I later realised, minutes. Eventually one of the small children in a cheque shirt enquired to my health. Extraordinarily, when I told him I was waiting for the bar staff to return he informed that he and the other two from Skins that had been desperately louching (yes, I’m using that as a verb) to one side of the bar, were, in fact, the bar staff. I responded in the only way that I’ve been trained to under these circumstances. Oh, I said, and ordered my drinks.’

‘If I was to find Love here, I understood, Love must be in a very bad way indeed. In fact, I soon became concerned for it’s welfare. Perhaps Love was not responsible for this debacle, perhaps it had been rode roughshod over, trampled into submission by winkle-pickers and limited edition Converse. I made conversation with my companion but I understood that she too was lost. She, like the rest of them, were in thrall to whatever captivated them. Whenever we made contact with one of the natives, she responded naturally and, occasionally, warmly. At one point I thought I may have incited a deadly riot when I asked if the lights could be turned up a little as I wasn’t sure whether I was actually dating anyone at all. Did Love crave this atmosphere? Did it demand the darkness, the half-light into which we were plunged? I decided to accept it, to let it smother me, let it take me away to another place, like a holiday in Geneva.’

‘I did as they do and tried to think as they think. I tried to imagine they were free-spirited, open-minded, unfettered by the usual conventions of society. Perhaps they had, with or without Love, found another way of being, a better way of living. Was it possible that I had been living in the dark all along and that these people, so strange to me, were actually right? As I embraced what their idea of life, of Love, might be, the closer I got to it. The barrier between my companion and I fell and, even though I couldn’t actually see her, a warmth, engendered by mutual understanding, developed. I had been wrong all along to judge her by her choice of surroundings, her possible choice of friends, the cover of her book. And, hey, maybe my jeans could be a little tighter.’

‘Feeling rather grand that I had opened my mind to new, younger, cooler avenues, I bounced off to the toilet, suspecting that Love did indeed live, and wield power, within these gloomy walls. I even began to think that the wearing of ironic NHS specs was not only acceptable but desirable. But as I weaved my merry way through the building I was grasped by a sudden realisation. Love was not in this public house, this once proud East End local. The new settlers, these invaders, had set up their own law. Not Love, no, but Youth. The New. The Future. This was their Idea. This is what they had set up, what they bowed down before and offered a sacrifice to. The belief in this idea was what redeemed them. Inside the toilet, just in my eye line in the mirror as I peed, someone had written two words on the wall, repeating them twice.’

‘The horror, the horror.’

‘No, seriously, they had. Do you think I started this pathetic pastiche for a laugh? The point being, this was not my place, my heart could never be found here. Love was found wanting, it couldn’t survive here. The excess of cool and studied indifference and mass-produced individualism had made any level playing field for Love impossible. It was a status battle which I could never win. This was her place, not mine. It wasn’t Nadine’s fault. It wasn’t mine either. We went on a completely impossible journey together, the surroundings simply serving to further highlight the gulf between us. The pub was, in fact, a handy architectural marker for how badly suited we were. My efforts to cross this chasm had merely allowed me to look down into it; and as I did the chasm seemed to me to lead to an immense heart of darkness.’

And with that Romeo said his goodbyes, taking his weak, overlong and, frankly, unworkable literary allegory with him.

As we made a start for home later that evening I looked back down the road towards the place that Romeo had spoken of. And it struck me that he was right all along. It is a shit pub.