This is an indulgence and it is pleasure squared. To find time, room and the right pub is a rare and giddy enchantment. A charmed moment presents itself – something is cancelled, an evening while working away from home needs filling, a spare holiday hour pops up – and you escape two or three times over. Push open the pub door, and flood your eyes with both darkness and enlightenment.
Your choice of pub is critical. This spell cannot be cast in a bar where music has stepped from the background into the limelight. Neither should the pub be in a bustling, jubilant frame of mind; a smattering of ruminative denizens is ideal – any conversation should be of the idle, afternoon type. An older place with snugs and side rooms is preferable, a large chair and crackling fire greedy perfection. Cunning is needed to choose your berth. A spot behind a beam or unloved piano declares that you are not to be interrupted, that you have come to this most social of places to withdraw from humanity. You are not to be sidled up to and your wellbeing checked upon, nor engaged by the rambling bores who roam bars seeking people to detain with weather observations that turn into sprawling monologues. For illumination, dimmed lighting and even the odd candle offer enough glimmer, lending the page a treasure-map bronze.
Something about the pairing of pub and book quite simply works. A paperback in one hand and a pint in the other (and possibly a packet of crisps clinched between the front teeth) is earthly perfection. Those shapes fit together and feel like a prayer ritual. It may, for you, be café and book, of course, or even meal and book – there is far worse dinner company. Whatever the place and the drink, a few lines read and the first sip taken tingle together. Shoulders drop and feet uncurl like a time-lapse film of spring. A second glug and eyes galloping across lines bring a dynamic, positive fizz. Two beloved chemistries are making alchemy. Before you know it, you are deep in the story, its performance enhanced, its pages whizzing along. You are removed from time and reality until each drink ends, at which point any new and building noise must be somehow mentally swerved. There is an amble to the bar, though your imagination remains at the table and a sense of being maladjusted prevails.
Such a feeling lasts until, with the reluctance of a schoolboy traipsing home for tea, you leave and re-enter normal existence wondering when next this double refuge will beckon.