NIGHT REVELS
Alex Preston calls on his friends to carouse together once again
Friends, I’m going to need you. And I mean all of you. This year has stripped away my loose connections, my once-in-a-while drinking buddies, my theatre friends and football friends, my fastmade friends from under foreign skies. I miss those tangential, happenstance friends most of all, because they’re the ones this year has taken from me. I want friends whose names are on the tip of my tongue, whom I lose in a crowd and never see again, who are dangerous, evanescent, wild.
So I want to go out with friends new and old, night after night. We’ll go to bars where the windows steam up, restaurants where we’ll have to queue and share a table, pubs with sticky floors. I want to have to raise my voice to be heard, I want to lean across to get the bartender’s attention, I want bad service and great food, I want music.
My friends and I are going to go out and hear live music, we’re going to find a club we went to long ago somewhere down a Brixton back-street, where there was art on the walls and a band on-stage playing something with bass lines that hit us deep in our bellies. We’re going to dance until the line dividing us from the music dissolves. We’re going to dance in a West Country field as the sun comes up, we’re going to dance on the top decks of London buses, we’re going to dance down Parisian avenues, we’re going to dance along the tide-line in Formentera.
Friends, I want you to meet me in the bleary-eyed morning at Heathrow, or on the Friday-night Eurostar, and come away for the weekend, for the week, for ever. We’ll go to a beach I know in Corfu, a club I know in Tel Aviv, a bar I know in Rome. We’ll dive from jetties into the sun-sparkled Mediterranean and the sea will be warm with memories. We’ll eat at a place on the Spianada, or overlooking Pigeon Rocks, and the wine will taste sharp and cold as we hold our glasses up to the last light of evening.
So, friends, come with me, and let’s cram all the time we’ve lost into this one long summer. Let’s watch the sun rise. Let’s listen to the call of the nightingale, deep in the woods. Let’s drink as we walk, passing the bottle from one to the next, swigging deeply, quoting poetry, laughing at nothing. Let’s sleep in hammocks. Let’s climb mountains. Let’s feel the weight of a waterfall on our shoulders. Let’s hold hands under skies dense with stars. Let’s dance.