Cheers to everybody knowing your name

I’VE never had a local pub. Suburbia offers vaguely tribal choices, so when we were making our pub-going debut we did favour one over others. That was the closest I got to having the Cheers experience — where everybody, including Woody Harrelson, knows your name.

It was the closest I got, but it wasn’t that close at all. A few people might nod because you looked familiar, but know your name? No.

That was a long time ago and in the intervening decades I haven’t been pub-going enough, or indeed social enough, to have even a regular haunt, much less one where I am known. What you don’t know you don’t miss, but now that my life involves less suburbia and more rural town, I can really see the appeal of having a Cheers kind of local.

For all my years in relatively densely populated suburbia there is nowhere I can go and be guaranteed to be greeted by name. Except, obviously, if I pop out for two seconds in a trackie with no bra or make-up on. Then I meet everyone I know. When you go home to a place where you are greeted by name, the unknowingness of others makes few odds — but it can be very different when you live alone.

New Year’s Eve in a rural pub seemed unusual in that it was gangs of women. But as the countdown approached, men — their men — appeared from a door. Midnight landed and the hugging began, everyone of every age knew everyone by name. I imagine that can have drawbacks but loneliness and isolation are so lethal. Company isn’t a solution to loneliness, but it is a start. In a world gone increasingly mad, we need each other more than ever.