All the pubs we didn’t go to

I’ll always think of 2024 as the year Dad died. Four months on, it hurts less – but it’s often in the pub I find myself dwelling on the loss.

In the immediate, horrible aftermath of Dad’s death, I wrote something like a formal obituary. Then, a little later, I wrote about how we bonded over pubs and beer.

But of course I’m never going to stop thinking about Dad, or run out of things to say about him.

Last month, the day after what would have been his 76th birthday, what remains of the family gathered in Bristol for lunch. Afterwards, we drifted to The Strawberry Thief, a Belgian-style cafe-bar.

It felt like the right place to go for a couple of reasons.

First, they served Brugse Zot – a fairly unremarkable Belgian blonde beer that was Dad’s favourite. He discovered it on a trip to Bruges more than a decade ago and got a case from my brother for Christmas every year since.

Mum and I toasted him, raised our glasses, and enjoyed every drop of what Dad always called ‘That Zot’.

Secondly, The Strawberry Thief is a reminder that you can’t make assumptions about what people will or won’t like based on their social class. Dad was working class and never became, or aspired to be, anything else. That didn’t stop him deciding he liked citrusy, piney craft beers, or taprooms, or vaguely pretentious bars like The Strawberry Thief.

Equally, he might decide he hated them. That was half the fun of a session with Dad.

This weekend, I braved Storm Darragh to visit Mum in Somerset. “Maybe we can pop round to the pub?” I said and, somewhat to my surprise, she said yes. I was even more surprised when she ordered a pint of Bath Ales (St Austell) Gem, having not seen her drink a pint in years.

The village isn’t cute – it’s one of those collections of former council houses, farm buildings and industrial units along a main road. The pub isn’t cute either, with a public bar dominated by working men in hi-viz jackets and muddy boots who spend most of their time smoking outside the front door.

I’d always got the impression Dad didn’t like the pub much but Mum told me that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, after their first visit, he said he was worried that, in retirement, it might be a bit too easy to end up there every lunchtime spending money they didn’t have on booze that wouldn’t do them any good. So he avoided it altogether.

Mum and I had been there a while, one round in, before we noticed that both of us were bopping along to the jukebox. It was non-stop blues music – not exactly the kind of songs Dad would have chosen himself, but not far off. We shivered. It felt spooky.

The landlord popped in to ask Mum how she was, glancing around to look for Dad. He obviously hadn’t heard the news. Mum told him and, in his gruff, unpretentious way, he expressed his sympathy. He seemed quite moved.

After a couple of pints, Mum began to reminisce about the drinking she and Dad did in their twenties, crawling through Bridgwater, playing euchre in The Cobblestones, Dad being presented with his own glass by the landlord and landlady…

The booze eventually made us maudlin, especially when we returned to a house where Dad wasn’t, but where his bass guitar still leans against the wall.

Another small problem is that every pub I go to in Bristol has either some memory of Dad, or is somewhere we hoped to take him “when he gets a bit better”.

For the past couple of years we’d talked about a taproom tour, even if we had to get cabs between them.

That now puts me in the ridiculous position of feeling faintly melancholy every time I go to Lost & Grounded, surrounded by plastic tubing, stainless steel, and people with beanie hats very high on their heads.

We never took him to The Star in Fishponds, which I’m sure he’d have loved, or to the Board Mill Social Club, with which he was fascinated.

My brother has spoken about feeling ambushed by things that make him think about Dad.

Personally, I’m constantly being emotionally tripwired by posters advertising upcoming gigs by pub blues bands: “Ooh, blues night at The Stillage, I really must tell Dad about tha– oh, fuck.”

Christmas is going to be weird because there won’t be a Christmas Day pint with Dad. There hasn’t been the past few years, to be honest, because he wasn’t well enough to make the short walk.

There was always the promise of it happening, though, even if we ended up drinking bottled beer on the sofa.

Maybe I’ll take Mum to the pub instead, while my brother cooks. Or perhaps I won’t. It might just be another way of pricking my heart and I don’t know if that’s helpful.