PDA

View Full Version : Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog - ‘Camaraderie is forced on men’, 1988



Blog Tracker
08-02-2019, 07:51
Visit the Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog site (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/02/camaraderie-is-forced-on-men-1988/)

https://boakandbailey.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/stools_at_the_pub_bar_650.jpg

Camaraderie is forced on men. They have little else in life. Forced especially on the desperate, the unimaginative, who must drink the same drink in the same place every day.
How to be alone in the midst of fellowship? One can turn the other stool, try to indicate with the shoulder one wants privacy. One can snap like a little animal. But this breeds suspicion. In the end one is never left alone.
But neither does camaraderie really exist. It is a creation of racists and war-novelists. Rather, there is an erotism about men drinking together.
Come. Come, you must come with us into our happy love cloud. A public bar is the boudoir of a comic-opera seductress…
That’s an extract from a piece called ‘Drinking Men’ by American writer Todd McEwen. He moved to Scotland in 1981 and this story is set in a pub called the Auld Licht. It portrays the relationships between the public bar and lounge, and between the regulars who drink in them.
It’s funny, bleak, and rather sour, capturing a time when pubs were overwhelmingly male, everyone smoked, and the cardboard backings from which packets of peanuts were sold were items of everyday kitsch erotica.
Having recently written about masculinity, beer and pubs for BEER magazine (see the latest issue here (https://wb.camra.org.uk/beer_digital/beer-spring-2019/)) we found plenty to chew on even in these few hundred words, and would certainly consider include ‘Drinking Men’ in that anthology we’re hoping someone will ask us to edit one day.
If you want to read it in the meantime, it can be found in Granta 25: Murder, published in autumn 1988, which comes with an added bonus: Graham Smith’s grim photo portrait of Middlesbrough pubs (https://twitter.com/BoakandBailey/status/1093478984187301888).
‘Camaraderie is forced on men’, 1988 (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/02/camaraderie-is-forced-on-men-1988/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (https://boakandbailey.com)


More... (https://boakandbailey.com/2019/02/camaraderie-is-forced-on-men-1988/)