Back in the Duke, a pub that I love as much as any other. Even if these days it feels like a young person’s pub. Perhaps it always was and I’m just harking back to the old days. But it’s also the football pub and has been for twenty years or so. That kind of continuity generates affection. The existence of constancy make the passing of time more bearable. There’s noise. There’s chat about John McDonnell and the flaws of the Labour party and Mark Grief and Benjamin Markovits and Updike too and being a father for the first time and all the rest of it, because that’s what Thursday nights are about.
The Duke has always stayed open later than normal pubs, back in the day it used to have a 1am license, or maybe it just did lock-ins. At one point, late in the evening, around 10.45, a couple come and sit at the table next to us. They are young and have something stylish about them. Maybe I notice they don’t seem to be talking or maybe I don’t. I head to the bar to get a round and I have to get around the young man, who makes no effort to let me pass. HIs hair is neatly cut and he wears a smart coat. He’s slouched in his seat. He seems to enjoy the fact I have to climb over his bag and his legs to get out. The young woman rolls her eyes. When I come back I ask him to move his bag. He does so, but he seems disinterested in anything.
Shortly afterwards they get up to leave. The woman walks out of the front door. The man goes to the loo. He comes back and he looks lost. He sits down for a while in a chair on his own. He gets up and looks around as though he’s looking for her, but she’s long gone. He sits down again. Periodically he gets up and walks around and then comes and sits down again. As I leave, I see him at the bar, buying another drink.
It makes me a tad sad, to see this couple go through this before my eyes. I imagine all the times I might have been drunk and obnoxious and the night ended badly and this makes me sad too, for the nights that ended badly, and also for this couple, who will have to wake up tomorrow and do that thing that people do as they try to put the pieces back together again.
Or so I thought. Because as we walk to the tube, Phil, who also noticed the couple, says they were probably a Tinder date. He says there was a moment, a couple of years ago, when I was away, when the pub became infested by tinder dates. It is, after all, a young person’s pub. Awkward couples trying to connect. According to Phil, the woman tonight probably walked out and will never see her companion again. Which, oddly, made me even more sad. The idea that the couple in whom I had invested my past errors were not even a couple. Just a random, algorithmic event, which couldn’t even bloom for one night.
