pint

I’m with someone in whose company it somehow doesn’t seem quite right to go into a pub with and not drink a pint so I order a pint of Pride because it seems right it seems like any other form of ordering would be wrong.

We talk about theatre and dance theatre and how to make a nuclear bomb and mutual friends and the things that matter in the world and my pint refuses to go down. We keep talking, about the impotence of protest and that February day was it only three years ago in the park in the cold which happened all over the world and we talk about more mutual friends and some things we don’t talk about because we got them out of the way before we went to see the piece of dance theatre that was more dance than theatre and still my pint will not diminish to nothingness.

So I change to shorts instead and pour nearly half a pint into my friend’s glass and we keep talking and the pub is just as conducive to talking as it rains outside in the narrow streets north of Oxford Street and west of Tottenham Court Road near where the cobblers used to be and probably still is and Pollocks toy museum and it really doesn’t seem to matter that the pint refused to be drunk.