This is what I said to our friends yesterday
Do you ever have a moment, a feeling, that makes you momentarily terrified to ever move back to the states?
They asked me to elaborate, and so I said
When I go out to dinner on a Friday and drink wine, baby in tow. When I sit in the back garden of a pub all day on a Saturday or today when we have been drinking wine all afternoon at an outdoor cafe. And I can bring the baby to both. And no heads turn.
I always mean to post about pubs.
Pub comes from the term Public house and the word and the reality are rooted in the idea of a community meeting place. They are different culturally from a “bar”. You might find a couple spending a lazy Sunday in a pub reading the newspaper. It wouldn’t be strange to see dogs. I am not the only one with a baby carriage. But the biggest difference might be the age spread. I was once at a pub in Soho and there was a group of older gentlemen, one had brought his son, and then there were the rest of us. And I realized that if I was in the U.S. I would be creeped out. I would assume that older people at my bar meant that they were alcoholics or had some type of predatory aspirations for the evening. And at the very least it would just mean the bar I was at sucked and it was time to move on.
I like that here you can use pubs for anything. An after work spot, a meet-up of new mums or fathers and sons, a birthday party, a navigational landmark, a “tea” with a colleague, a Sunday roast, a shelter from the rain, a snack, a Pimms and lemonade on a hot day, a place to hatch a business plan, a place for conversation with anyone you know or haven’t yet met. And the idea that I could live in a place without them- yeah, it gives me pause.
