Let us begin ... at the beginning. A white page, ahead of
you, one of those days. Although to say 'One of these
days' is to invite comparison with Pink Floyd channelling the Doctor Who theme,
incorporating it, just as it's too easy these days to use The Lick in a piece
of music, just for jolly, wouldn't you?
Here is what I wrote in 2018 about the 'flaneux' idea, about
the philosophy behind The Solitary Review.
To step outside your door can be an achievement. Home is
(reasonably) safe. I’ve made it that way. Despite being hauled over the coals
by threatening builders who made off with my entire life savings for a job of
work that should have cost a third of what I paid them, and despite a desperate
attempt to claw back money via AirBnB guests who very often made me feel unsafe
instead, I achieved a level of security.
Of course that making home reasonably safe has come at a
price. I don’t entirely understand the word ‘lonely’ – I’m a massive introvert,
ISFP if you believe Myers-Briggs and heavy on the ‘I’ part of that four-letter
acronym. The whole family thing is anathema to me – too dangerous and not in a
way I like the sound of. I have my own things to do.
I don’t collect things. Mostly. This might surprise people
who think I’m some kind of geek – my book collection is dwindling as I get rid
of them and rely on the local library (a marvellous underrated resource), my tiny house is almost
empty of knick knacks and tchotchkes. I do however have a database of pubs.
Public houses, drinking establishments, watering holes. First visit dates for
each one, name, address, postal area (that’s for example the W8 in W8 1AA),
some notes on the visit (who with, etc), a note on its history or name changes,
and for a while its rating out of 10 on the Beerintheevening website – which if
not actually defunct is now somnolent, unmoderated, beset by spambots, and of
less use than the Campaign for Real Ale’s excellent Whatpub site (which also
does let you add ratings, but only if you’re a CAMRA member). At the moment the
number of visited pubs is somewhere over 1,520 [edit: over 1,660 by November
2021]. But I don't, or very rarely, drink alcohol these days.
It’s the very quiet places you have to beware of and yet it
is those very quiet places I am drawn to. Empty cemeteries like Brompton with
its colonnades, and its loitering youths like something cooked up by Jean Genet
and Samuel R Delany – whether it’s Delany or Burroughs depends on whether you
want bodily secretions or centipedes. Burroughs’ south-of-the-border
drug-fuelled hallucinations include gigantic centipedes rearing above fastened
sacrificial victims atop great grey stone pyramids, creatures with the fangs of
the rain god Chac and an endless, mindless red-eyed thirst for blood. I dream
of those grey brooding stones, and the cave-dwellings of the Pueblo peoples,
and the rose-red walls of Petra, and the way their forms are repeated in our
modern-day apartment blocks and factories. Long ago (until barely into the
present century) I lived in a complex in the West Kensington area of London, an
intricate place in red brick that one of my friends said looked like ‘a
prison’. I suggested that he should know – and besides I later worked in a
residential scheme whose walkways and security doors put me far more in mind of
a jail. For me the flats were a fortress, but in a good way – a safe place, a
small but warm community planted with trees and flowers. And if the trees, as
is their wont, kept growing, they would enfold and overshadow the blocks
themselves and the result would be cliff-like buildings hidden in the shadows,
quiet, patiently waiting, like their occupants living their contented lives.
I suspect the pubs are like that for me – a safe place, or
supposedly, a shelter from the screams and the light outside. There are times
when all sound for me becomes undifferentiated screaming – a PTSD holdover, I
am told. That the pub sells beer is a plus, but the beer is not the point very
often – the word ‘pub’ is short for ‘public house’, as in, house, public. My
first introduction to the Campaign for Real Ale was the London Pubs Group,
whose concern is mostly history and architecture; their pub walks would involve
a half pint of beer in each pub, possibly a soft drink if there was no decent
beer choice. It was only when I got involved with local CAMRA branches that I
was introduced to the idea of having a full pint per pub, the focus being far
more on drink, and this was not so much to my liking. I preferred to keep
moving, pub to pub, six or seven or eight in one day even. Constant movement,
not exactly drifting – a nomad does not just wander; Not all those who wander
are lost. (JRR Tolkien, “The Fellowship of the Ring”).
The public house is a semi-public space, the public are
allowed in at certain times and with restrictions. You, dear reader, may never
be able to afford to stay in St James or Mayfair but due to the miracle of the
pub you can go there and sit and read the paper and eat and drink. It’s perhaps
hardly surprising that in the present day with its shady interests who want to
snaffle everything up and stop the public from gathering and using the public
space, the pub is under threat. It is democratic, it is vulgar, it is
libidinous, it is not controlled. It is everything Tory Brexit Britain hates,
though the traditional Brexit voter will swear they love their old pub.
So you’re saying … you flaneur from pub to pub, growing
steadily drunker like one of the minor adventures of Ulysses? Pretty much – or
I did. In St James I entered a pub with a flurry of snow and asked ‘Where is
the snowman?’ said, ‘I am the snowman,’ for I was.
[This part updated on 26 November 2021 and again in December 2022]
These days I travel by bike into the small town I've moved
to, and go places by train, and take pictures and videos, and go to cafes. I
sit with my back to the wall or at the bar and write, or draw, and hope that
the world in this moment will leave me alone, surrounded by people who,
themselves, are minding their own business, and by etched glass and stained
wood and the low gentle murmur of the outside world, when my own tinnitus, like
a roar of traffic inside my head, allows it.