A Round for the House

This entry has nothing at all to do with the American education system. I apologize if you came here looking for a classroom war story or a bit of fiscal whinging.

Today I must pass along some sad news.

According to an item on the Hook Norton Brewery website, the old Free House at the top of the village is now under the care of Mel and Sarah Phipps. I imagine they are quite capable and friendly landlords and I will certainly pay them a visit when I next find my way along the M40.

However, the ascension of the Phipps means, for me and probably many others, the end of an age. It is yet another symbol for all our journeys: places and people static and certain in photographs while reality recedes rapidly in the rear view mirror, no longer familiar.

I have an old and dented Ind Coope beer tray on the wall over my wet bar. Deep into Joey's bachelor party I used it to bash Dave over the head as he alternately bashed me with his tray in steady time with a bar full of fellow revelers singing and clapping, "Oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton . . ." crescendoing faster and faster until the pans banged almost in unison and their rims bent on our senseless skulls.

Margaret put on a wonderful meal for my 21st birthday and from then until I moved away my pot, a gift from Joey and Frances, hung over The Red's bar on a hook graciously awarded by Colin. It now hangs sadly over our breakfast table, perhaps thinking of its own days, full to overflowing with 64 pence pints of Hooky's Best Bitter.

If I look carefully in my attic boxes, I might find some cocklebur or bit of barley from my first tramp across the fields from RAF Upper Heyford to the village on the hill, guided by the square Norman steeple incongruently crowned with a red light to warn off low-flying F-111s as they slid downward toward the airfield. Perhaps it came from a place I kayaked a year later, flooded knee-deep with water from the heavy rains and overflowing Cherwell. Perhaps the little seed or weed is there now, as I write, stuck at the bottom of a box or clinging to a forgotten pant leg, knowing it will be needed to stir some distant memory: to bring to life the smell of wildflowers, or wet earth, or burning corn stubble.

Only phantoms now: ghosts of winter fires in the corner hearth, of summer flowers and warm stones out front, of laughing friends, of children grown, of lovers found and lovers lost. The sad remnants of a coming of age, one among billions, flickering now to one day sputter and give out, remembered by no one but burning to the last. I know when I return to The Red I will be given the warm welcome of stranger in a country pub, a stranger whose heart is unknown but stays hidden under the brass and hardwood, close to the hearth, behind the bay window, and pressed against the bar.

Cheers, mate.