A Pint of Beer

Someone brought me a pint of beer. You know, in the great scheme of things; this is nothing at all. Or…means a great deal.

To me, at the moment, in that pub in a London street it was one of the most lovely things that had happened all week.

She stood up in her glass coloured green dress.

‘What are you drinking?’

Emerald green.

There were references to Shelley.

I talk about the English working class; because I have some small idea about this. Much less about the working class experience in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

But those experiences are there, in my vague consciousness.

I feel that presence.

Of the sense of an Irish, Scottish, Welsh identity and how that can become merged into a universal working class identity.

It is not for me to write someone else’s story.

I’ve been reading a lot of Shelley and listening to Paul Foot talking about Shelley.

It blows one’s f*cking head off. If you have the sort of head that is open to such stufF.

‘A pint of….’

There was a lot of stuff going on, and nothing much at all, when that girl (or woman?) in the green dress, leaned over and said, ‘what are you drinking?’ in the end of summer air, in this London street.

I felt a world of working class solidarity flooding the late summer sun. I felt St Pancras come alive., I felt that everything I’d been reading about utopia was here, in this street.

She placed the pint of beer on the table. Shook her hair. Smiled in a way that won the world to a better way.

I raised the glass.

Here we are, there we are, there we might be, potential. Utopia is here. We have the idea of utopia within us.

The destruction of alienation will be through conviviality.