For All Good Things

Tenement Wine. Your exclusive guide to city drinking, urban fucking and the lure of the pub. And what now, now that the English public house has become Patricia Hewitt’s front room? What now, now that you know that these people are literally bred to fuck you over? Do you need to ask why it’s your duty to hate the rich?

The pub fire. It roars orange.

At the back of the pub my love and I are engaged in tiny conversations. Time passes as we intermittently talk the night away. Alternately, we go to the bar to buy our drinks. At the bar, a row of anti-Americanism. We spit on them, they say. We hope their eyes melt, we hope their bodies burn. Whichever band of wretches stands against them we stand shoulder to shoulder with.

Harold Pinter believes his American Football was rejected because it had too much to say, was too close to the bone. In reality, it was rejected on the grounds that it was written by a child. Unbelievably, they give out prizes for this stuff. Read it and you will rot as you deserve to rot.

A head count at the bar. You see them there? They are your enemies. They were always your enemies. The trick is to stand against the fascists, not with them. Remember?

The pub has an everlasting charm that is diminished not one bit by the presence of televisions and football, by the extra people at Christmas, by rugby fans for fuck’s sake. Rugby fans. Tell a lie. Diminished is right. Demolished. They will demolish you sooner than you’d guess. The everlasting charm of the pub is misunderstood and feared and so must be destroyed.

Looking for a real Irish pub? Go to Ireland.

The star at the top of the brewery tower. You could see it from miles out. Shipstones. Nut Brown and Gold Star. There was, over the wall, a railway line that cut through the shrubbery and the grass bits, circled the gas tower, stretched far beyond where most of us could see or would dare to go. The gates of the brewery preserved for, God help us, the grandeur of a business park. And there, on the iron footbridge that took me over that wall, I was attacked one dark early evening and had my watch taken from me. On that same street, years later, I smoked Red Leb with old bikers and stole bottles of cider from the cellar steps.

At the back of the pub I have dreams of tall buildings and wide pavements. Don’t ask me why. I see above, because I’m always looking up, a world that is safely distant from your cretins, your bullies and your despicable allies. You - and Pinter - can fuck yourself with a lightning rod.