When I first arrived in England, I had the oddest feeling—not that I was in a foreign country, but that I had actually come home. There was just something so comfortable about the trams, and hedges, and rainy tea times. And the English pubs—they were like American bars, but cozier and somehow more genuine. All the life of the neighborhood flowed through the pub—silver-haired couples and families with kids and dogs and doctors and lorry drivers. I soon realized the English had a different attitude towards drinking establishments and drink in general. It turned out that Lancaster University, where I was studying, had no less than seven bars on campus. In fact each residential house had it’s own bar. I start imagining this arrangement at the University of Minnesota, combined with Freshmen drinking (the drinking age in the U.K. is 16), and the word LAWSUIT starts blinking before my eyes in neon. But it worked just splendidly over in Blighty.
I lived in Cartmel house at Lancaster, and everyone socialized at Cartmel bar. That is, unless we went for a lark to one of the other residence house bars. It was rumored that the women’s rugby team would gather at Furness bar and take their shirts off after a game, so the lads often went there. There was also a nightclub in town, a terrible converted gymnasium called The Sugar House; the English should really stick to pubs. The lads on my hall and I, we mostly kept to our house bar, and we spent more time there than in our rooms. Yet there wasn’t that much excessive drinking. I only passed out once—on my birthday, because everyone bought me a drink and all the drinks were different. I remember my friend Dan talking about Labour party politics, and this girl who was also drunk was kind of dancing in front of me, and then it all went dark. Dan and another friend gently hefted me up the stairs to my room, considerately placing a wastebin beside my bed. I didn’t hurl though—just woke up feeling I’d been drug through No Man’s Land. We had classes that day—I had a Shakespeare lecture, which I dutifully limped off to. A young professor, new to the faculty and working hard to make an impression, was giving a Marxist interpretation of Hamlet. I stuck it out for a half hour and left. I still feel bad about it. It was the only English lecture I’ve ever walked out of, and Shakespeare at that. I felt even worse about my missed opportunity with the girl, but the lads assured me that she was not nearly so ravishing as I remembered her!
After I got out to see the country a little, I realized that the Lancaster bars were just plaster imitations of the real thing. There are pubs in England that are older than the United States itself. Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem Inn in Nottingham was a waystop for pilgrims in the time of the Crusades, and last time I was in London I had a pint at the George in Southwark, where the author of Hamlet himself likely quaffed. York, meanwhile, claims to have 365 pubs within its Roman walls, one for each day of the year, and some were probably watering holes since the time of Caesar. The patrons of these venerable public houses don’t act like they’re drinking in the middle of history, though—it’s the ordinary bar world of beer, gossip, pub quizzes and perhaps some cheeky banter.
In England, even the MPs go to the pub (that’s Member of Parliament, by the way, not Military Police). My friend Dan, the same who shouldered me up to my room the night I passed out, has continued on in Labour politics and now helps his brother Tom, who’s an MP in the Birmingham area. The last time I visited Parliament was out and so Tom went out on the town with us. We stopped by a pub, the King and Shield I think it was called, whose owner was Irish. The regulars were Irish as well. A few middle-aged men were singing Irish songs at the bar (this may seem odd behavior, but in England it’s perfectly allowable—who needs karaoke machines?). Being from St. Paul I knew most of the songs, and was soon joining in the chorus to “The Fields of Athenry”. They asked me to sing an American song, and I did Leadbelly’s “Good Night Irene”, and they sang it with me. Then they asked me to do an Irish song. I was considering “Back Home in Derry” when Dan leans over and whispers: “All right Joel, but no songs about the bloody IRA—Member of Parliament, remember!” So I avoided scandal by giving them “She Moved Through the Fair”.
Later on Dan, his wife, Tom and I left to dine on Britain’s national cuisine—Indian food. We dropped the MP off at his house around midnight. He walked up to his door and stood there in the dark, kind of fumbling in his pockets. Dan’s wife said, “bloody hell, he’s done it again!” and Dan whispered, “How can he run the country when he can’t get into his own f-ing house?”. The MP had forgotten his keys. We had to drive back to Labour party headquarters to retrieve them. What a country!
Don’t get me wrong, I think America’s a fine place. In five hundred years, we might have pubs with almost as much character as England’s. Some of our quainter bars, like Nye’s and Forepaugh’s, are well on their way. But until we have kids and dogs and old men singing in them, and politicos like Mark Dayton or R.T. Rybak stopping by for a genial pint and mislaying house keys, I won’t feel quite at home.