living without bars

on club classics, the erosion of community, cows and the city

I am once again finding myself in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, and I am once again very much not thriving. I long for coffee errands, getting lost following the sun across the city, bars crawling and crawling back from bars, meeting friends for a catch-up in a different neighbourhood, taking my book for a date in the park, in a café, in the new cocktail bar, getting swallowed and anonymised by the crowd after 5. I miss the exploration that comes with a big city, the tall glass buildings, the public transport (!!!), the sea of opportunities and possibilities, the melting pot of people that make a city live and breathe.

Bars, like cafés, like restaurants, like bookshops, like library, like independent shops, like bowling alleys, like… are places to meet. Living remotely can be isolating, where do you go to meet people?

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welcome to my new subscribers and thank you so much for reading me! this article is part of the journal, stories and memories closer to me.

Living in a suburb, where all the houses look the same and kids play in the street,¹ is a very sophisticated hell for me. I am familiar with such an environment, I grew up in an actual village. Population of about 200, cows run the street from field to field, there are no street names and half of it is a mud path. I left for Brussels, at the ripe age of 18 and I thought that was it, I would never ever have to live in a small place again. The city life was tailored for me.

But here I am, clinging to that one pub (a Green King, 20 minutes away, by foot, on a muddy path), the overpriced corner shop where everything is expired (walk 30 minutes for an overpriced tesco), and buses as reliant as the sun in Britain (will not show up despite the forecast). And I try to convince myself I don’t need much to live, plus we have a garden and a dining room and an office!

such a brat

complaining about her privileges

I did not choose to live here. No no no. If it was up to me and a lottery win, I’d be knee-deep in the city.

I grew up with sporadic “marquees in a field” parties where beer was the only drink available and the club classics were Narcotic by Liquido and Rammstein’s Sonne.² The only bars in the area were a 15-minute drive (although there was a German-speaking one a 5-minute drive away) but you needed someone to drive you as there were no buses.³ But life was also punctuated by events such as carnivals and fairs and summer games - things that create a sense of community.

now you may think

poor little thing

grew up without bars

so sad

That’s not the point. The point is that I never belonged, I was daydreaming of a life in the city. A place where I wouldn’t have to depend on anyone or anything to do as I please, somewhere full of new shiny things and places to meet.

Now I’m back at the beginning and struggling.

There are no bars.

On pubs, bars and everything in between

No bars means no rich cultural life with exhibitions and book clubs, it means nowhere to explore and get lost, no little coffee place to stop and read, no happy hours to meet new people in the ladies’ room, no concert venues, no seeing your friends at the park or a terrace on the first sunny day, no metro to ride from a neighbourhood to the other, a whole other world next door

figuratively and in excess,

i feel myself dying inside

deprived of so much life

So for now, I will spend my weekends on the bus to the nearby town. 80 minutes back to back, to breathe and walk and explore and sit for hours, from coffee to cocktails.

in the hope of feeling something

to feel less lonely in the undoing of the social fabric

because that’s what living in small places feels like to me. A bored tiger in a fancy zoo,⁴ it’s not the same thing as the real thing. Villages have the advantage of being tight-knit communities, but it’s less and less true when everything that knitted it together is being undone. How do you build community in the sanitised atmosphere of a chain pub?

1. and that’s absolutely where kids should be, don’t get me wrong. there’s a very adult feeling of handing back a lost Frisbee from our garden

2. Connoisseurs know La tribu de Dana was king and narcotic is an absolute hit. Gift for the brave who reads the notes: my ultimate party playlist. You may now lose respect for my musical taste

3. five-minute drive roughly translates to a 40-minute walk, which isn’t an issue in a city but walking home on an unlit, narrow road? There’s no pavement in the countryside.

4. more accurately, a lama.