The day after I got back to London, it had been arranged that I was to meet up with some acquaintances in a bar in the West End. I had known them quite well at university, but we’d been too lazy to see each other very often since, although we had all moved to London. I got to Tottenham Court Road a bit too early, and made the mistake of deciding to wait in the pub. I’d seen the place before, and thought it looked too fancy for the likes of me. I walked towards the bouncers, hoping I didn’t look too scruffy, gave them a nod of acknowledgement, and went inside. Having done a couple of sweeps of the place to make sure they weren’t tucked away in some corner, I took up a position by a pillar and set about the business of waiting. I hoped I looked like a respectable citizen who was waiting for people rather than some friendless alcoholic. Standing there craning my neck towards the door every time I felt the draft of it opening, I checked my watch again. And again. It was a strange place, shiny wood everywhere, with an expensive menu and a range of drinks that baffled me. I felt uncomfortable there. Even after the others had arrived I didn’t belong. I couldn’t imagine being enough of a ponce to go to the bar and specify which of the nine available brands of vodka I wanted. I couldn’t imagine spending seventy quid on a shirt, which most of the people here apparently could. It seemed that my university friends had somehow become upwardly mobile, or at least liked to think that they had. Stuart was working as an investment banker with some firm he expected me to have heard of, and kept talking about his car and his flat and his prospects. Clare was very excited about the legal exams she’d just passed, which meant that very soon she’d be earning silly money. Ryan had got a job with a record company, and was blagging his way into all the best parties. Chris had just got engaged, Sarah had just come back from New York, and Anna; well, Anna was drunk. She was as drunk as I wished I was, and she began to tell me about her woes. She was, as ever, with some man who didn’t appreciate her, didn’t love her, didn’t respect her, but she loved him, and couldn’t imagine life without him. I’d heard it all before from every woman I’d ever had a meaningful conversation with, and I wasn’t in the mood. I was tempted to tell her why he didn’t respect her. How could anyone respect her when she was as pathetic as this? Didn’t she realise that women like her were the reason that feminism was doomed to failure? I murmured some suitably empty supportive utterances, and she kept asking why there weren’t more men like me around, while I suppressed the urge to ask why she didn’t want to go to bed with me if I was so wonderful. What was so special about this man of hers, anyway? Why wasn’t I the one reducing apparently intelligent women to tears? Why was I in this situation again? An attractive female friend was saying that all men were bastards, practically challenging me to prove that I was either the exception or the rule, and I was meekly offering my shoulder for her to cry on, like I was in the fucking Samaritans. I was too safe even to be the safe option. I wanted to be the kind of man who would sweep her off her feet, and she probably wanted me to be him too. If I had been, the signals would have been there. It was a golden opportunity to take advantage of her while she was drunk, and if I had been the kind of man who did that, she probably would have wanted me to. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I wasn’t that kind of man. I didn’t seduce women, I occasionally managed to gently persuade them that going to bed with me might not be an intolerable way to spend some time. I didn’t go to the gym to work on my abs. I didn’t wear expensive scent. I didn’t wear jewellery. I didn’t use moisturiser. No, I am a man much like my father, a bumbling oaf whose heart is supposedly in the right place. A thoroughly British man, I’m doomed to live in a land of flat caps and steak and kidney pies, of grim pub food and ill-fitting clothes, of football at 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, damn it. I realised that I would never be in touch with my feminine side, and I would never explore my feelings. Maybe things would have been better if I was gay. No, I was too repressed for that. Despite any claims to the contrary, and the odd Bohemian urge here and there, I was as repressed as anyone. Maybe I was gay, and didn’t realise it. No, I wasn’t gay. Even as Anna wept, I couldn’t stop myself from looking at her cleavage. I escaped to the gents. After I’d finished pissing, as I went to wash my hands, a uniformed flunky proffered a range of aftershaves and held out a towel for me. I did what I could to avoid giving him a tip, and went back upstairs. There was something about this bar that I didn’t like. It was trying to be ever so continental, and it felt all wrong. I wasn’t the kind of man who drank in this kind of place, where being seen was more important than being heard, where a DJ played coffee-table house far too loud and stroked his goatee. Stuart probably came here all the time, so he could give the toilet attendant a tip and be reminded of how small a percentage of his performance bonus it meant to him. Maybe it called itself a café bar, but it was still just a pub. It might have been positioning itself for a bigger share of the market in young professionals’ leisure spending, and maybe it had varnished wood floors instead of dirty old carpets, and maybe the staff were all dressed in black and looked like aspiring models, but it was still just a fucking pub. When you went downstairs to the gents, in spite of the glorified cleaner who was overly willing to help you see his tips plate, the piss stains on the grubby wall tiles and the graffiti on the cubicle doors betrayed the reality. Behind the upwardly mobile façade, it was still just a pub, and it retained all the values and lack of them that that entailed. As Anna went to the ladies’, I had the option of waiting for her to come back, or trying to force my way into another conversation. I chose waiting. I gazed at the rows of bottles behind the bar. There were so many of them, so many different ways to make yourself stupid, to become somebody else, of relaxing yourself enough to become capable of more than you thought. Booze can be a wonderful thing at times, but maybe I love it too much. When you’re not sure whether or not you’ve got a drink problem, the worst times are the nights like this one, when you drink yourself sober, and you suddenly wonder what you’re doing there, and why your wallet’s empty. You head home and you’re already hung over. If I stayed, I’d just be chasing intoxication, and when you’re looking for it, it never comes. Or it never comes right, anyway. When she got back from the toilet, I said something about having to be at work in the morning, and there came an immediate chorus of comments about how early people had to get up for work. I had sparked an exodus. The others had evidently been waiting for somebody else to say something, not wanting to be the first to suggest that they didn’t want to be there. I headed for the bus stop, and I was grateful that none of the others lived in the same direction as me. I was spared the awkwardness of the conversation that comes after you’ve said your goodbyes, after you’ve said you should keep in touch, meet up more often, and then you have to think of something else to say to each other.
Be happy for this moment, this moment is your life
The Rubaiyat