Moving to a new area is very testing. Moving away from familiar people, places, situations, work and landscape is tough, especially when ptsd is telling you that what you need is certainty, familiarity and comfort, reassurance and safety. But after two years of renting we finally got our own place, and having put up a shelf or two my thoughts turned to developing some sort of social life, and meeting other people with whom I might have something in common. At that point I hadn’t met Barry and the networking gang who were to become my buddies, and so my social life in Cambridgeshire consisted almost entirely of dinner with Alex’s and her ex-husband’s ex-friends, who were very kind to me, but to my chagrin showed almost no interest in real ale pubs, narrow boats or cryptic crosswords.
There is a website called MeetUp, which is useful for finding things you might like to do, with people you might like to do them with, in an area where you don’t know anyone (that’s one hell of a tagline). Having signed up and expressed my limited preferences on the site, up popped a group called The Alehouse Philosophers, who it informed me met in a pub in Cambridge once a month and discussed a topic of relative philosophical importance over a pint or two. This sounded right up my street, so one evening I headed over to The Free Press, a historic Cambridge city centre pub traditionally frequented by the academic elite, to see what was what.
Finding the group in the back room of the pub I discovered and was greeted by a few members, and learned that the topic for the evening was “An Introduction to Existentialism”, the talk to be led by the group leader, referred to in hushed reverential tones as Malcolm by his congregation, gathered here today. Malcolm hadn’t yet arrived. While we waited for his coming, a curly-haired plumpish girl in her early twenties sat down opposite me.
“I’ve written an essay on existentialism,” she proudly informed us all. “Would you like to read it?” She thrust it in my direction, but to be honest I didn’t really want to claw my way through a dry twenty page analytical document, I wanted to hear it brought to life. I quickly passed it on, and as others had the same view, it flew round the table at a pace and landed back with its owner.
“I’m sure I’ve got most of the points Malcolm will make covered in here,” the girl jabbed. “I got very good marks for it.” She reminded me of Violet Elizabeth Bott, the female interest in the Just William stories, but without the lithp.
The legend that was Malcolm eventually swept into the room fifteen minutes late, by which time we were starting our second pint. As he began to speak (I couldn’t hear much due to the acoustics in the L-shaped room in which we were sitting, and the general noise from the bar, and what I could hear didn’t make much sense) a youngish guy came to join us, skinny, student, floppy mousy hair, and sat in the vacant space immediately to my left.
After about a minute of also not being able to hear Malcolm the guy was as bored as the rest of us, and the Violet Elizabeth’s folder took his eye.
“What have you got there?” he asked.
“Nothing to do with you, “she replied, grabbing it to her.
“Come on,” the guy said, “You must have brought it for a reason. Let me see.”
She gripped the papers firmly. “I’m not showing you.
“OK, whatever,” he said, leaning back in his seat.
There was clearly some history here.
Two minutes later, as her attention was averted by Malcolm’s inaudible oratory, he reached across the table suddenly, grasped the folder, and held it up to read it.
“Give me that back!” the girl screamed.
The lad tossed back his hair. “I’m just reading your essay on… ooh, existentialism! Appropriate!” He cleared his throat and began to read it out loud.
“Stop it. It’s mine, you can’t have it,” she shouted, lunging forward and clutching the wad of papers. There was some to-ing and fro-ing, but the much sought-after document remained suspended tug-of-war-like in mid-air between the two of them. Letting go with one hand the girl picked up her pint.
“If you don’t let go right now I’m going to throw this over you!”
It was no surprise when the thesis remained tautly stretched over the table between them for another ten seconds, and so the contents of the beer glass were duly released across the table over the lad’s face. At the exact same time I leaned over and put one arm across the guy’s chest and the other hand in the direction of Violet Elizabeth in an attempt to break things up, but a secnd later I was unable to stop Floppy throwing himself across the table and punching Miss Bott square in the face. There was mayhem for a time, during which the landlord swiftly appeared, grabbed the youth by the back of the collar in traditional manner, yanked him to his feet, and marched him swiftly out of the pub never to be seen again.
Violet Elizabeth started crying, not unreasonably. Malcolm was distraught, initially I thought because his discourse had been interrupted, but then, I realised, because there was some semi-romantic sub-plot going on between him and the now hysterical Miss Bott.
Eventually, as things calmed a little, I looked down at myself to discover I was covered head to toe in broken glass and beer. Malcolm abandoned his explanation of existentialism, and instead concentrated on comforting his little darling, or possibly his star pupil, or possibly both.
I didn’t have much sympathy for the girl, despite her surprising ability to take a left hook, and I don’t think anyone else did either, apart from Malcolm.
“Both of them were as much to blame as each other,” I said to the remainder of the table, to a chorus of nods.
“I’m going to have to go home and get changed,” I continued. The lady sitting next to me leaned over, and in a serious tone said “Will you be coming back? It’s not usually like this.” Well that’s good to hear.
I made my way home with the philosophical comfort ringing through my ears that I am wet, therefore I am, surely proof if any was needed that both beer and I did in fact exist, and that my existence in the pub preceded the essence that was poured over me, a rationale that simply and beautifully laid to the floor Malcom’s long-winded attempt to define the subject.
As I opened the front door Alex called through to me “Did you have a nice evening, my love?” I dripped and tinkled onto the hall floor as I took my coat off, and called back. “Yes, very interesting thanks. Just a practical session on existentialism.”
Notes
When I told this story to a philosopher friend, who also studied at Cambridge University, he made me aware of an incident known as Wittgenstein’s Poker, in which the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wielded a poker during a philosophical altercation with Sir Karl Popper, at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club in 1946.
Small potatoes, methinks.