Absolute Beginners

“I like the way you dress.  Where did you get your shoes?”  I’m never asked this sort of question when I’m on my way home from the pub by a woman, so it figures that recently when I was stopped on the bridge at Airds Crescent by someone who wanted to comment on my outfit, it was by a guy who was so wasted that it was impossible to say whether it was from alcohol or drugs.  He couldn’t stay still, as though he was being operated by a video game controller, and if I wasn’t already dizzy from Aulay’s then I might have been from trying to keep up with him.

My sartorial suitor complained that he can never find a good pair of shoes; that every pair he buys immediately becomes scuffed and eventually the sole falls apart within a few months.  Where he was going wrong, he seemed to believe, was that he wasn’t spending enough money on his footwear.  “How much should a good pair of shoes cost?”  I considered telling him about my experience in Rogersons a few months ago when I approached the counter with the brown shoes he was so admiring of and the saleswoman commended me on my choice.  She mentioned that the shoes had been treated with a special waterproof spray, as though she had done me a personal favour, and I didn’t really pay much attention to it at the time.  But I could see what she was talking about on every rainy day since when the water would disappear from the tops of my feet virtually right away and they would appear as though I had never been outside at all.  Then I asked myself why this guy who was probably high on drugs would care about waterproof spray, and I realised that my idea of good shoes was probably different to his anyway.

These types of characters only ever seem to turn up in my life on a Friday night, and usually they disappear just as soon as they make themselves known.  Like the bloke we met in Aulay’s last Friday night, for example.  I was in a group with the Plant Doctor and some other marine biology types, as usual, when we were joined by an older gentleman who didn’t have anywhere else that he could sit.  This guy had a fluffy goatee that matched the nest of white hair contained beneath his flat cap.  Each ear had a silver ring hanging from the lobe, while we learned that he was originally from the town of St Helens in Merseyside.  Everything about him looked and sounded like a local radio DJ from the 1970s.

Whilst the Plant Doctor and I were trying to organise our gameplan for the Euro 2020 final between England and Italy on Sunday, the would-be radio DJ insisted that he had no interest in watching the football, instead claiming that the true biggest match to take place at Wembley Stadium this year would be the rugby league Challenge Cup final featuring Castleford Tigers and St Helens the following weekend.  He was very proud of his hometown and enjoyed speaking about how much the rugby meant to the place, though I was having some difficulty participating in the conversation since the would-be radio DJ was extremely hard of hearing in his right ear, which of course was the side I was sitting at.  Whenever I tried asking him a question about St Helens or rugby league he would shake his head and say that he couldn’t hear me, before craning his neck and cupping his hand around his good ear, the bar light reflecting off the earring making it look like a tiny fish dangling from the end of a line. 

Most of all he recalled some of the many famous musical acts he had seen perform in the Liverpool area back in the day:  The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie.  Bowie was his favourite, “a real showman.”  The night when he played the song Space Oddity was clearly one of those life events that a person doesn’t forget, similar to your wedding day or the birth of a child – or at least I would imagine it is.  The most memorable event in my life recently was the discovery that I could wear my brown shoes in wet weather without the risk of the leather having an unsightly appearance of melted treacle. 

When the would-be radio DJ returned from placing his second order of the night, he was followed by a barman who was carrying two pints of Caledonian Best.  Apparently this is what he does when he knows that he has almost had enough for the night – he buys his last two drinks together.  I didn’t understand it, especially when the table service in Aulay’s is so prompt.  Leaving one of your drinks to warm to room temperature is one way of ensuring that your pint of Best wouldn’t be at its…finest.  While he was working his way through his pints of dark beer, we learned that the man’s wife had passed away a few years ago, and ever since he has just been travelling around the country to keep his mind off it.  The Plant Doctor had met him on his last trip to Oban, but this was my first encounter, and I was wondering how costly it was going to be when he pulled his phone from his pocket in an act of drunken confession.  He swiped his way through some screens before holding the device out across the table to show us that he had been pinged by the NHS Track and Trace app as a close contact of a positive Covid case five days ago in whichever town he had last been to during his travels.  

It was interesting to see the screen, more as a novelty than anything else since I had never seen what happens when a person is pinged by the contact tracing app.  There was a timer that counted down the days, hours and minutes remaining in your ten-day period of self-isolation, like when you click one of those online quizzes asking you to name all the players who have scored in European Championships finals.  “I can’t self-isolate,” he told us.  “I’m on holiday.”  Somehow in the back of my mind I could almost hear the next words to follow:  “and playing now we have Night Fever by the Bee Gees.”

It wasn’t a conscious decision for me to play some David Bowie the following morning, he simply featured on the most appealing of Spotify’s Daily Mix playlists as I was plotting a shopping trip to Lidl before meeting the rest of my family for breakfast at Roxy’s coffee shop.  Bowie had never captured me in the way that he had the would-be radio DJ, though I usually enjoyed what little of his back catalogue I had heard.  Absolute Beginners, the full-length eight-minute version, was the third song to play from the playlist, meaning that I had made my way around the store and had reached the self-service checkouts by the time the dramatic opening of the song kicked in.  I was immediately hooked.  

As I was scanning the items from my basket – a bottle of orange juice, a pack of four Greek yoghurts, a jar of pickled gherkins – I was beginning to feel overwhelmed.  The line “as long as we’re together the rest can go to hell/I absolutely love you/But we’re absolute beginners” slayed me.  I was on the verge of being a wreck as I made my contactless card payment of £22.36, and by the time I reached the exit I felt as though I could cry.  I was short of breath, my heart was racing and my eyes were welling up.  I loved the song, but I hated how it made me feel, and as I was striding towards the bedding plants in the foyer it was easy to see me collapsing face-first into the Sweet Peas.  Of all the things to have happened in my life, this would be the most difficult to explain.  Fortunately, I was able to make it beyond the Begonias and into the great wide open where I removed my mask like the most hapless of superheroes and everything was suddenly washed away.  It was hard to know why I was affected by the song in such a way, especially when my Last.fm account shows that I have listened to it a further 24 times since the incident and I’ve felt nothing but peaceful enjoyment.  On reflection, the only explanation for the intense reaction seems to be that it was a manifestation of my concern over the supermarket being out of stock of one-pint bottles of semi-skimmed milk thus forcing me into buying the blue-topped variety.  I don’t dislike whole milk, but I’ve never responded well to change.

In keeping with the strategy the Plant Doctor and I had agreed on, I arrived in Aulay’s early on Sunday to make sure that we could get a table for the Euro 2020 final later that night.  He is almost always the first one of us to get to the pub, and he disputed my ability to get us a table when it really mattered, which had me determined to prove him wrong.  It was a game that everyone was going to want to see, and when I arrived at 3.30 there was just one table left by the bar in the public side of the pub, although some opened up in the lounge later and we were able to move.  The Wimbledon tennis final was on TV, so it’s not like I was just drinking to pass the time.  Some guy at the back of the bar announced that day’s Covid numbers in the way of a typical pub discussion where sporting statistics are casually thrown around, like Novak Djokovic winning 79% of his first-serve points, or being successful in 20 out of his 30 Grand Slam final appearances.

It was shortly after the Plant Doctor turned up that we were able to find a seat in our favourite side of the bar, at a well-aired table at the rear of the lounge.  There was quite a haughty feeling from having a position by the door where we could watch people come in, knowing full well that they were going to be turned away.  Around the bar, a palpable nervous tension was rippling through the atmosphere in the hours before the game, entirely different to the buzz of excitement felt before Scotland played England a few weeks earlier.  People were genuinely worried that England might win the tournament.  When we were joined just before kick-off by two young women who had featured in a couple of our recent drunken adventures it was all we could do to lighten the mood by making a wager on the game.  Each of us offered our predictions of what the final score would be, with the winner being given the opportunity to buy a round of drinks of their choosing for the table; sort of picking everybody else’s poison.  When England scored after two minutes, all bets were off.

England were still leading 1-0 at half-time when our group grew in size with the addition of two characters who do the bidding of Her Majesty – a VAT man and a postman.  It was possibly the first time that I’d watched a game of football in their company and we were all rooting for the same team.  Eventually Italy pulled themselves back into the contest, and the final was decided by a penalty shootout, an outcome which didn’t do anything for anybody’s nerves.  I had never appreciated before how watching a penalty shootout is like listening to the David Bowie song Absolute Beginners for the first time.  Even when Italy won, it wasn’t something that any of us could really enjoy; it was more of a relief, like when you have made it past the Begonias and you can breathe again.