Old Tricks

I might just have taken a step backwards. I haven’t decided yet.

The thing is, the formerly a deposit on a flat money is running low and the course isn’t over yet. Actual hours in college are limited, but I want to get a first draft of the novel finished by September (do I really want to give myself a public deadline like this? Oh well, too late now) plus I’ve a 20,000 word portfolio to hand in. I need paid work, but I also need time to do the fun work.

So, I’ve gone back to working behind a bar.

Those who know me reasonably well will no doubt be aware that I used to tend the pumps at a pub very close to my heart in Birmingham.

(Well, you should be, I tend to go on about it enough).

In Sally Maclennane Shane MacGowan sings of “the pub where I was born” and the Railway Inn feels, in many ways, like that for me. It was one of the first pubs where I got served, it was one of the first places I got drunk, it was the place Beck and I had our first date, at one point I seemed to pop in virtually every single night. I worked there for two years during University holidays and then full time for a year after I graduated. This sort of pub is such a fundamental part of the community that I really enjoyed my time there (athough after a year it was definitely time to move on).

Even if at one point I did have to put up with being nicknamed Rodney*.

I once looked it up on beerintheevening.com once and it doesn’t get very good reviews and this is because the people who writing just don’t get it. The main joy in a locals pub is being, well, local. Of knowing the names of ninety percent of the people in the bar and a drink of what the staff know you want on the counter before you’ve even reached it.

Yes, okay, I have an incredibly over-romantic image of pubs. I’m in love with the idea of the perfect boozer.

But I think the Brockley Jack’s got the potential to be as full of characters as the Railway was. It’s been there for years (although has recently undergone a major refurbishment); I first went in there in 1998 when down to visit Beck. There’s a little theatre upstairs. It’s allegedly named after a highway man who used to roam the south London, north Kent borders.

I like that.

I could go and temp, I could even go and get a proper job which pays decent money. But the pub’s at the end of the road. It’s a five minute commute. I tend to do most my writing in the morning, nice and fresh, come the evening I’m running out of steam from that part of my brain. Might as well go and earn some money. I’m standing up, rather than even more hours sitting behind a computer, I get to talk to people.

I’m not drinking - which is probably a good thing.

Plus I don’t have to clean out any ashtrays these days.

Short term solution, probably, but what’s wrong with that?








*: All right for those of you who really want to know why. Beck also worked there for a while and it was know that she’d moved down to London. One of the regulars found out that she lived in New Cross and that New Cross was down the road from Peckham. Peckham’s then most famous fictional residents were of course Only Fools And Horses. Trigger, who mainly features in the pub scenes, always called Rodney Dave. Invert that and there you go. Hilarious, no?