Building my own pub for cocktail hour

SUNDAY I know this might sound a bit eccentric, but today I fashioned a pub in the garage. In between the bikes and various crap, I placed two garden chairs. I dragged out the scraps of carpet that were piled in a corner and layered them down. My wife got in the spirit of it and found an old standing lamp from Ikea. We have a plug-in radiator that we’ve been using as an outside heater recently, so we moved that into the garage. And I brought out my good Bose bluetooth speaker.

The background to this is that drinking in the house, with the kids there, doesn’t really feel like any fun. Having a drink in the garden feels slightly more like going out. But the weather right now seems to be nice every day except Sunday, which is party night in our house. So really, I had no choice but to open my own pub.

We start with cocktail hour. Cocktail hour isn’t until five; we’re not complete barbarians. We got an anniversary present of a cocktail kit delivered to the house. It makes four drinks, so we will need to drink two each, unless we decide to give the kids cocktails. We get out the good martini glasses and put on some clean clothes; my wife enjoys following the instructions and making two whiskey-based cocktails. It feels civilised and life-affirming for an hour.

Then a few beers in the pub while chatting on and off and listening to music and making and taking calls and texts from various quarters. For some reason, sitting in the pub in my winter coat with the heater on, drinking, seems to sum up the lighter side of life under lockdown.

The sad part is, I would recommend it. The cocktail kit was by a crowd called Catch and it was bought on Instagram apparently.

Who knew such a thing was possible? You obviously can’t buy the pub: It’s priceless.

Monday

As the day goes on, as cocktail hour comes around, I feel that a little sharpener would go down well before dinner. I resist. That way madness lies.

Tuesday

I sit in the garden, one of my many offices, reading short stories by Richard Ford, technically for work. It is one of those still, hot, dead, suburban days that remind me of my childhood. If you took out all the extraneous circumstances, this could seem like a nice day. What else would you want to be doing?

But that background hum, of all the bad things happening, prevents me from really enjoying it. If things were different and someone gave me permission to sit in the garden in the sun reading a book and snacking on junk, I would jump at it. Just goes to show that context is everything, and the illusion of choice is everything.

On those hot, still, suburban days in childhood, I sometimes had a slight sense that real life, and more exciting things, were happening elsewhere. At least today I know that I am missing nothing, and that a more eventful life would probably be a very bad thing right now.

Wednesday

For a day or two, about once a week, it hits me. I think it ferments away in the dark for five or six days, while I push it down and try to choose hope and optimism instead.

But it doesn’t go away. And then it bubbles up and I don’t want to get out of bed. The future, the damage to children and young people and old people, it all just seems catastrophic. I know everyone says the young and the old are more resilient than we think, but the former haven’t had a long enough life for this not to be a big and influential part of it, and the latter have too little time left for this, and do not want their story to end this way. It’s not all nobility.

I wish for myself there was something to look forward to. Obviously my problems are privileged and first world. We have health and purpose and means in this house.

But as Philip Larkin wrote to Judy Egerton, “Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.”

So what can we do but stop feeling sorry for ourselves and be grateful for our blessings and get up and keep putting one foot in front of the other? And it’s good to have people who rely on you to be positive, which forces you along. And soon you run your way and talk your way and read your way out of it, and it recedes into the shadows again for a while.

Thursday

I’m probably a person who lives in my head more than in my body. In Zimbabwe, the word for depression is kufungisisa, which means ‘thinking too much’. Until the running gets me somewhat out of my thoughts, I think too much for it. So I’m running, and I’m thinking while I’m running that I really can’t see the point of it. It feels ridiculous. I can run for 20 minutes now with a three-minute walk, then another five minutes running. And sometimes I marvel at this briefly, that I couldn’t run for two minutes a few weeks ago and now I can do this.

But then, what’s the point of it? I suppose it keeps the mood a bit lighter. But really, I am only doing this nonsense until I can swim again. Swimming is less ridiculous to me. I thought it was just a habit, but it turns out it’s more of a part of me than I thought. I am, of course, 60pc water — 60pc water and 40pc lockdown.