“And I suppose deep down that’s why I want a top-of-the-line smartphone, a good pair of Palladiums and just the right second-hand coat…because at some level I think if I’m dressed for the dream, I can at least walk in its shadow for a little while.”
-10 Sept 2012
It’s spellcasting. No point in lying. It is an attempt to draw a circle made out of music, flavors, distractions, and project myself onto another plane of being – or at least off this one for a while. It’s why the loadout for London looked like it did – I had my Rancourts, those were always meant to be the everyday boots abroad, but I also had the Aldens, because a chunk of the dream has always been my bootheels on the cobblestones of a foreign capital with my sweetie. And sure enough, there in a mews alley somewhere around Kensington, it transpired just like that.
The M-65 was brought for protection against rain and cold, because it can actually layer over a travel blazer. But it also dovetailed nicely with that Madness lyrics – in your second-hand coat, happy just to float in this little piece of liberty – and sure enough, there I was in my new-old-stock surplus Alpha field jacket, in the back alleys of Shepherd Market or on the bricks in Southwark or emerging from a tube station.
I actually needed the things that I’d wanted to need. A sturdy field jacket. A passably respectable travel blazer. An innocuous flat cap that didn’t scream “American tourist” louder than bombs. An iPhone, unlocked, with a foreign SIM in it to feed back Citymapper directions and be tapped against the Oyster reader to board a bus or a train. A tweed carpetbag made of recycled soda bottle plastic, fit for carry-on and able to carry a weekends’ worth of wardrobe itself alongside all the battery-based things that couldn’t go in checked luggage. A respectable pen and a Field Notes black notebook, suitable for logging every pub visit and every new beer in a way that using Untappd just doesn’t capture. Even the iPad and the Apple Watch, neither of which had ever been used for international travel ever – the Watch to monitor steps and provide an innocuous view of where to turn, the iPad to do the sort of things that usually call for a laptop or at least a Kindle and do so in a size that could (and did) fit into the travel blazer’s interior pocket as needed.
And the elements of setting worked. Sometimes, you can go abroad in a big city and feel like it’s not that different from New York or San Francisco. Santiago seemed nice enough but it felt like Chilean Los Angeles. London, for the most part, always felt like London, and always felt like Somewhere Else – whether the ubiquity of pubs and light-alcohol cask ales, the constant smoking and even regular vaping by people who didn’t remotely present as dirtbags, the ease of getting a cab with just the thrust of an arm at almost any time of day or night, or something about the signage – the signs in Heathrow feels decidedly Not American, somehow, and I can’t explain it. Walking off the jetway to customs doesn’t feel like it does at SFO or SJC or LAX.
That’s what so much of Sunday night pub night has been for the last decade – spellcasting. Trying to take myself out of a weekday world of work that has been a constant misery from about the time I turned 40. Have the right sort of ale, the prickle of a different flavor on the tongue suggesting somewhere else. Put in the earbuds and let the Irish trad, or just an incomprehensible Gaelic voice in the background, suggest somewhere else. Open the book and read yourself into another time, another place, and not think about the here and now and present for a bit. And the frustration and dissatisfaction always emerges when the spell doesn’t work, and you don’t get to step out of the world for a while. Being confined by the pandemic only made it trickier, which probably explains how the assortment of YouTube video became a key background element (if not always particularly effective).
And this weekend, for the first time in two and a half years, I’m going for it in person. And we’ll see if the pub is still the pub.