Daily pints call the Four O’clock Club
You could almost set your watch by them.
As the local pub flings open its doors, they come slowly, some shuffling along, some limping.
One even drives the short distance from home, pulling up in the same parking space every day.
A mobility scooter is abandoned on the footpath.
They’re the group the publican affectionately calls The Four O’clock Club, and they can hear their daily pint calling them.
Well, some of them can, if they have their hearing aids in.
The staff know what to serve them, and their glasses of amber are waiting for them on the bar.
Creatures of habit, they park up at the same spot each day, unless the equilibrium is upset and someone has got there before them. Then they have to move, and talk to someone else, which they don’t really like.
Their slippered feet rest up on the foot rail. There’s no point in dressing up in some of your flash strides to come here.
One sits warming his bones with his back to the fire. Another leans his back against a sturdy pole, surveying his domain.
Another sits at the next leaner, his back slightly to them, dominating the television remote as he finds something to watch that no-one else will enjoy.
He might not be part of their conversation, but he can hear every word and doesn’t hold back on chiming in with his opinion.
And they sit.
There’s no women to interrupt their aging bachelor talk.
Those buggers in the Beehive are off limits too - they just start arguments. It’s strictly rugby, racing and the town’s gossip here, not that they’ll admit it.
They might be old, but they’re not stupid, and they have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on.
That fella around the road, his spuds are flowering already.
That silly bugger around the road had to go down to the hospital for some tests.
Wednesday’s Happy Hour has been cut short by half an hour, the buggers.
Occasionally the conversation gets heated and the language gets bad enough to make a girl blush.
It’ll be over the name of the joker who drove a truck for the transport back in the 60s, or that young shepherd that drove his car into the river a few years back. It was a Ford, one will say. No it wasn’t, it was a Morris Oxford, the other will retort.
Even when they’re arguing they’re repeating everything for the benefit of the one who can’t hear.
They’ve had more members go than come over the years, usually in a box in the back of a hearse, one quips.
Some of them were right bloody idiots, but they’d still share a pint and have a yarn.
Three pints down and the bar is filling up with the town’s workers.
They don’t work as hard these days as they did, one says. It’s the one thing they all agree on.
And as the bar gets crowded, they head off home, ready to get together again tomorrow.