The public house has always been the place where time stops. Walk into The Southampton Arms in London’s Kentish Town neighborhood, and it could be any century, if you don’t read the tap handles too closely. With its warm wood paneling, cask beer, and ageless decor, it’s the new old-fashioned pub where all comers congregate to wash their cares away.
Huddled in front of the fire on a cold night with good company, sipping roasty-sweet half-pints of Porter and Stout and cheering the musicians smashing jazz standards on the upright piano, I feel swaddled and snug to my soul. Then she leaves, and I make that timeless, ill-fated choice: “Just one more.” You know you should go, but once you walk back out through those doors, entropic forces will again begin to act upon you.
Instead, I order a half of Bitter and get sucked into conversation with the bloke behind me: a train driver who wishes he had worked in pictures, all narrative arcs and glassy-eyed ambition. He sees me reading “Ulysses,” so we talk about Joyce, films, and the human condition. It starts off like a Linklater movie until it turns all Aronofsky, as the inevitable end of prolonging the experience begins to reveal itself.
He says he’s been parked in that seat for two straight days, and it chills me, triggering memories of times where I couldn’t stand to be in my body, either. He misgenders me and I don’t correct him, and I don’t know why; maybe it doesn’t seem worth it, or perhaps the old-fashioned ambiance is seeping into my skull. Either way, I start to feel that pieces of me are irrevocably slipping into the past.
I’m getting sober as his eyes grow glazed. He wants to stay in the place time forgot, downing pints in pursuit of the perpetually disappearing moment. It’s the best pub in London, he says, and I have to agree—but sooner or later, you have to stand up, claim who you are in the here and now, and walk through that door.
Words + Photoby Holly Regan