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How to Say a Beer

Power, migration and beer in 2019
fisharepeopletoo

The train back to Manchester was cancelled, giving me at least an hour to wait for the next one. So after a long two days of work in London I decided that rather than hang around the station staring at the clock on the departures board, I'd go for a beer.

There was a trendy-looking bar just down the road, its dimly lit alcoves and expensive chairs half full in the early evening at the start of the week. I was he only one at the bar, and the barmaid, a good looking black girl in her early twenties, came over straight away and asked politely, “Yes please?” From her accent she wasn't British, but that's never unusual when being served. The glass shelves and mirrored wall behind mostly displayed bottles of wine and champagne, and I was about to have a glass of red wine when I noticed the wooden hand beer pump on the end of the bar, looking slightly out of place, part of an affectation that everywhere fashionable had picked up for low food miles and traditional produce. I took a step towards it, recognised the Scottish brewery, and asked for a pint by its name, a strange, hard to pronounce word that was a piece of history and local identity as much as the beer itself.

As I spoke there was a peel of too-loud laughter from a group of young men and women, all white, round a table nearby, smartly dressed in suits, with briefcases around them and two bottles of champagne and one of white wine on the table. They carried on the joke loudly enough for me to hear them speaking French, peppered, in a comic-sounding way to a native English speaker, with enough English words and phrases for it to be clear they were bankers who commuted to London each morning on the new high-speed eurostar train from Paris, paying tens of thousands a year for tickets.

I turned back to the bar. The barmaid was holding a glass next to the row of pumps for imported Belgian beers and looking towards me for confirmation of which one. Thinking she'd missed what I said because of the noise from the bankers I gave her the name of the beer again. One word, its name. Just for a moment she tried to replay the sound in her mind to try and catch it but it was too strange. “Sorry?” The bankers raised their voices again but this time I ignored them. I looked straight at her and slowly repeated the name of the beer, pronouncing it carefully, but keeping my eyes on hers, giving no other hint about what or where it might be. Again I watched her replay the sound in her mind, trying to make some sense of it, and then watched the worry on her face as she read my flat, merciless expression as I waited for her to ask me to repeat myself a third time, us both knowing how rude I could take that as being if I chose. Much too rude for a new barmaid in an expensive bar to be to a customer.

But she took her only way out. She gave up. She dropped her hands to her sides, looked straight back at me and said with no more in her voice than being honest “I'm sorry. I don't understand.” and opened her arms slightly to the rows of drinks on either side, for me to show her, for me to help. It brought me to my senses, thankfully. I walked a few steps down the bar and she followed, glass in hand, and I pointed to the pump. “It's this one.” and told her the name again. I didn't deserve any forgiveness but while she pulled the pint I saw her say the word under her breath to try and learn it, and she took half a smile, which she risked letting me see, about how strange and uncommon and difficult a word it was.

I said thank you for the drink with too much politeness, which I thought, as I sat down opposite the bankers, probably sounded like sarcasm. What had allowed me to act like that? Was it the colour of our skins? That I was a middle-aged man and she a young woman? That I could afford to be in there, where there were bottles that easily cost more than her day's wages? Or that I was tired and fed up, and annoyed that the bankers would be back in Paris long before I was back in Manchester? Or all of those reasons and more? With a noisy scrape of chairs and voices the bankers stood up to leave, lighting their cigarettes before they got to the door. Would I have found it as easy to show them so much contempt?

And that was what it was, contempt. What right did I have to do something so ugly to someone else? She was probably a student,paying for herself to be here. And so what if she wasn't? So what if she was one of the tens and tens of thousands of people from Africa and Asia, hidden away in the cities of Europe, hoping to stay unnoticed for long enough, to hang on for long enough, to start, not earning a living, just sleeping and eating. And then maybe, if still no one noticed them, to start sending some money home. And why did that deserve contempt? It just meant she'd been braver and more determined than I'd ever been,me who lived within a few dozen miles of where I'd always lived. But now I'd noticed her. That was the power I'd held over her. That was why it was so easy for me. I'd made her give herself away. Over a word.

I sipped my beer, and hoped that it was worth it.

 

Oct 18
migration local global beer powe


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  • Ruud Dirven
    Oct 14
    Sound very sane to me, as opposed to all that "ZOMFG refugee camps in nebraska, people eating bark from trees, boiling baby soup" nonsense. Life goes on in most places. Things changed, we adapt.
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