I went to the pub last week (I think my American readers might call it a bar). For most people, this might not be something worth blogging about but, for me, it's something of an annual event. And I remain bewildered as to what people are getting out of it.
I think pubs are a bit like Christmas. Christmas celebrations are popularly blighted by stress and unwanted but must-invite relatives that you know are going to get drunk and start an argument over who got grandma's good cutlery. But we do them because every modern Christmas celebration evokes racial memories of that perfect gathering of yore in which the children were happy, the meal perfectly cooked, the presents interesting and distinctly lacking in sockishness and the fire delightful. Pubs are like this. We take with us to the pub the dim recollection of the perfect English pub where the company was excellent, the windows were little diamond patterns and the affable barman knew us and our order.
Modern pubs are strange menageries of humanity, each enclosure populated by distinct and incompatible sub-species, each in it's own world.
In one corner we have the Gollums. Denizens of the dark, huddling protectively over their gleaming precious as it teases them with dreams of wealth - if only the five rings of power would all line up and show a row of aces. And like their Tolkien-esqe forebear, they are deeply and unhealthily obsessed with their treasure; devoting their whole health and life to its possession.
Less disturbing but equally solitary are the Pretenders - the men, mostly men, who are sitting with their imaginary friends while they drink beer and watch sport on the television. It would have been a better experience in their lounge room - at least they could have heard the TV and the beer wouldn't have quite so ridiculously priced - but at the pub they can pretend they're not drinking alone.
Even a good percentage of those drinking with real, tangible people are apparently alone. There are always one or two in every group, underwhelmed by the behaviour of their spouse who is ignoring them or unable to hear a damn thing over the industrial levels of noise in the place - and therefore unable to participate in the conversation - who are sitting, sipping a large Designated-Driver-And-Bitters and staring off in to space.
Behind the bar, in the place of a rosy-cheeked man with a towel and a cheery greeting, are the harangued backpackers trying to juggle six glasses, three straws, a packet of chips and a chainsaw all at once and bleep their little wrist ID thing on the checkout at the same time, without spilling any or all of the above on their fellow cagemates. One cannot help but think that the female bar staff are tired of having the attributes for which they were almost certainly employed admired by punters - who have to keep reminding themselves to add "of beer" after their order of "jugs" - and that the male staff would really rather go and lay paving bricks in the rain than stay stuck behind the bar like dead deer up a tree; bait for cougars.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned cougars are stalking, camouflaged in tight jeans with waistbands well beyond their safe load limit, tottering precariously on glitter-clad stilts masquerading as high-heels as they carry ice-buckets containing bottles of the house white back to their little tables. At least if they go home alone again, they'll be drunk enough for it not to matter.
Even outside the misfits - and who less fitting than I, who less suited? - the pub seems to many to be an overpriced sofa from which to watch Race 5 at Randwick or the Melbourne under 15B football grand-final; anything to fill all those TV screens and give us another flickering, gleaming mesmeric that means we don't have to interact with our fellow human beings - even those sitting so close that we could spill the beer they bought us down their shirt sleeve.
But there is little choice. Between the TVs, the band, the juke box, the kids' playground, the poker machines, the kitchen noises, the drunken laughter and the bar staff screaming to be heard over the din you couldn't hold a conversation anyway. You'd be lucky to hear the fire alarm if it went off.
Yes, daddy took us to the zoo but we'll be lucky to stay an hour - let alone all day.
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