Three pints, then home.

It is our weekly ritual. On Thursday evenings we meet for a game of squash. Fourty-five minutes of intense, competitive physicality; repeatedly hitting a small black ball against a wall, as hard as possible. Exercising our bodies and exorcising the frustrations of daily life. We are an even match and both give it our all. Sweat drips and blood pumps.

Once the match is over we make our way to The Oak, a good looking, well run and welcoming thatched roof village pub, of equal distance from our respective homes. The Oak is our local, and we are blessed to have as good a pub as this in our village. There, for a couple of hours, and over a couple of pints and packets of crisps me and my squash partner, one of my oldest and dearest friends, put the world to rights until closing time.

I say a couple of pints, what I mean though is three. Three pints of ~4% cask ale is, to me, the perfect amount of beer. At three pints deep my sobriety has just slipped, but drunkenness has not yet entered the room. Instead I find myself in a state of repose. A point of ease, where todays troubles have quietened and tomorrows problems are of no concern. The first pint refreshes, the second relaxes, the third changes me, just a touch. It is a slight adjustment of consciousness, which allows you to see the world with a different eye. A tinted lens. I find myself at my most creative, imaginative and observant at three pints in. ‘The third pint thought process’ I call it. This lucidity inevitably fades and degrades quickly if the evening takes us into the fourth pint, or beyond.

At ‘time please’ we down the last of our drinks and make our way out into the night, parting ways for our walks home. The Oak is just under a mile from my house, and the bulk of the journey is along a straight, semi-rural road out of the village, with no road lights and clumps of houses dotted between fields and patches of trees. The walk would take me just over ten swift minutes if I was walking to the pub. Head bowed, legs striding, a man on a mission. But in the last hour of a Thursday night my return pace is much slower and I spread this walk out at to least double the time. I love the walk home and I savour every step. This route; the same route walked every week, on the same day, at the same time is constantly renewed throughout the year.

The walk can be silent or ear splitting. Occasionally the snow can muffle the landscape, putting the world into mute, except for the crunch under my feet. A week later the wind can howl through the trees and ring in my ears, it always feels like it whips over the nearby Chiltern hills and crashes down on to us, here in the vale with substantial force.
The walk has been taken in the deepest of blacks; moonless nights where not a single car passes and all the houses are closed in. On these nights it is only my keen senses and muscle memory that keep me on the path. Other times a full moon on a clear night illuminates the way so brightly it feels fraudulent to even call it dark.
It is a good time for nature spotting. I have seen countless owls and bats on the walk home, and have also seen foxes, badgers and roe deers on occasion. I have heard field mice scurry and squeal in the undergrowth as I walk past. After it rains, the path is littered with a huge number of slugs, snails and worms making their way to softer ground. Rarest of all animals to see is another person, I can’t remember the last time I saw a fellow pedestrian on the return jaunt.
But if nature is not putting on the show then it is also a fine time for sky watching; stopping for a couple of minutes to gaze up, to see the distant planes, satellites and beyond faint stars that reveal themselves the longer you look.

These walks act as an almanac to my year. The first frost, noted, time to get the big winter coat out. The first house to have its Christmas decorations up. The last house to take its Christmas decorations down. The last time I have to wear a coat. The warm nights when I wear just a T-shirt and shorts, the couple of weeks around summer solstice when I can still just about see the sunlight’s last gasp in the west. That first week when the autumn jacket comes back out, which usually coincides with the first time I smell woodsmoke drifting from a a chimney. My year is punctuated by Thursday night observations and wardrobe changes.

The road is generally quiet this time of night with no more than a handful of cars passing me at most. During the day it is a busy route with HGVs thundering past. But on these nights I can cross the road at leisure and focus on the soft rhythmic thud of my feet on the tarmac as I do so. I stop in the middle of the road and look half a mile back, then turn to look half a mile forward, there are no pairs of lights charging towards me, just yesterday retreating and tomorrow approaching.

Then of course there is the rain. With no bias to any season it will come as it pleases. Sometimes I know to expect it and dress accordingly, but other times it catches me out. However, there is no point running or cursing it. Instead I embrace it. I’m getting wet whether I want to or not. I pull down the hood and let the water run down my face, dripping off my nose and chin, my clothes cling to me and I feel my feet sloshing around in my canvas trainers. It is only water after all and I am guaranteed a dry towel at the end.

Life is hectic, the noise is non stop and the worry about it all can feel overwhelming. But none of that matters at 11:30pm on a Thursday, as the third pint slows me, the breeze whispers and the night reveals itself. This walk from the pub is twenty minutes of my week where I just am. After my three pints I tune out of life’s daily humdrum, and tune into the immediate, the sensory, nature, the stimulus of simply existing in a time and place. I’ve walked this road hundreds of times in the day. It is just an unremarkable artery between here and there, but after three pints and a packet of mini cheddars it is a retreat, it is a pause, a meditation.

I wonder how many anecdotes of excellent pub visits and nights out have I heard, or shared in my life? Hundreds? Thousands perhaps. I speak to a lot of people about beer and pubs in my career and everyone loves to tell you about their notable drinking sessions. But anecdotes rarely extend to the journeys to and from the pub, but for me these segments of the story can be far more interesting than just what happened in the pub itself. What passed you by on the way there, what caught you on the way back? Who were you when you walked out of your front door and who were you once you’ve returned? Or were you too drunk to care?

At the end of my journey is home, a warm bed and a good nights sleep. I am satisfied with completion of another Thursday night and, as I climb into bed, I allow myself just a moments thought on what beer might be on at The Oak next week, and what I might need to wear for the walk home, before I drift to sleep.