House Husbandry Giles Wood

The greatest joys in life are the unexpected ones: the surprising glimpse of a bee at the end of summer; a turn in the road you have travelled multiple times without ever really seeing the view from the corner; a sudden realisation that your knees may be beginning to go, but you are still alive and the sun still shines upon you.

A few weeks ago my niece reached the grand old age of eighteen, and her close family foregathered for dinner in our county town. While the cousins decorously arranged to meet at the restaurant, we old aunts and uncles decided time spent not in a pub was time wasted and made our own arrangements. Taunton is what it is, an impoverished rural town with a very few good restaurants and a lot of chains. The pubs are mostly everything that is wrong with town pubs – swirly carpets, all-day drinking, bouncers after six (pubs never used to need bouncers, did they?).

But there is one pub that is like a time warp into a past world. Unprepossessing on the outside, inside it reminds you of what pubs used to be, and should still be. Judges and policemen drink side by side with tarmac layers and builders. There is no fancy furnishing – some old sofas in a little parlour up some steps, but otherwise unpretentious wooden tables and chairs. Neither is the food fancy – cross the threshold and you are in the land of pies, not little bits of this and that nestling in beds of the other. If you are a beer drinker, they take real ale seriously, and unlike some pubs in Taunton that ban the local export (cider) because it attracts the wrong kind of punter, that is taken seriously too. Unlike some beery pubs in England which serve filthy wine, the grape is as good (and unpretentious) as the hop. Once I dropped in on the off chance that it might be showing the Grand National (it’s right by the station and I was in a rush), and I found myself welcomed into the middle of the warmest, happiest sweepstake. It was almost as good as being at Aintree.

So it’s always been a bit of a secret joy. But the other night it surpassed itself with its own joyful eccentricity. Always full, the pub suddenly became markedly fuller. A disparate collection of people was beginning to make a lot of noise at the far end of the room. Cheerful noise, purposeful noise, but still somewhat confusing noise. It was hard to see what these people could possibly have in common with each other, there was such a wide range of age and style amongst them, but there was no doubt they were there with a common plan. We continued to talk amongst ourselves, one eye on the time, one on this peculiar, thirty-strong group. And then it happened. With one sudden, beautifully choreographed movement, thirty people pulled out ukuleles and began to sing.

Ukuleles! There’s George Formby and a few other eccentrics, but who on earth would have thought that Taunton could produce thirty-plus keen ukulele players? And who could possibly have guessed the enormous joy that these eccentrics could generate in a small pub in a small town in the west of England? They sang some of the old classics – ‘Five foot two, eyes of blue’, a bit of Sinatra – with such verve, such confidence, such energy that each of us felt as though we had shed ten years in as many minutes. They might have been embarrassing, showing off, off-key, but they weren’t. They were pure unfettered joy distilled by a bunch of strings.

If anyone had suggested to me that I should go to a pub to listen to ukuleles I would have poured foul scorn on the very thought. As it was, we nearly skipped the niece’s birthday we were so entranced. And I was reminded once again that my knees may be going, but as long as I live there will continue to be surprises round the corner.