A Beer in the Loire

by Tommy Barnes

  In many public toilets they’ve actually installed machines that dispense paper loo seats for you to rest on the rim and flush away afterwards. Just put a proper loo seat on it. Put a seat on it, for crying out loud. What has the loo seat done to be so roundly shunned by an entire nation? I must ask Damien.

  I spent a day or two in London enjoying loo seats. Travelling on the Underground seemed even more absurd than it did when I had lived there a year ago. It was like being canned with flannel-covered chicken legs in a brine of commuter sweat. It reminded me of the moment several years before when I first realised I had to leave London.

  It was a classic, grey-on-grey, British November day in 2012. The Tube was damp, cold and busy – people sneezed in each other’s hair. I had managed to get a seat for the first time all year after a passive-aggressive standoff with a man in a roll-neck jumper and breath steeped in six-day-old Nescafé. The train slithered and squealed into Oxford Circus station, which was lit by strip lighting so harsh it could peel paint. I watched as the commuters in my carriage who hadn’t been lucky enough to get a seat – pallid, exhausted, their faces squashed against the windows – eyed the sea of people awaiting us on the platform, who were coiled and ready to hurl themselves at the opening doors of a Tube train that was already packed so tightly that it was straining at the rivets.

  Most of the people waiting on the platform wouldn’t be able to get on. They knew that. And yet they knew they had to try. And so the doors slowly opened and it began: one commuter after another hurling themselves from the platform at the mass of bodies in the train like penguins firing themselves out of the water and onto an iceberg to escape a killer whale. Most simply bounced off and back onto the platform, but one or two managed to cling on – a middle-aged, sharp-spectacled, sharp-elbowed woman who was almost certainly a marketing executive and a lofty man in a pinstripe suit – forcing the weaker commuters out of the way, shoving, barking orders, finding space where there was no space, ignoring angry mutters and the odd retaliatory nudge. The doors closed. People shuffled their feet, adjusting to the ever-decreasing space. Annoyance dissipated and a grudging respect for those who had made it remained. There was no sympathy for those who were left behind. And off we trundled to the next station, where this primal battle for survival would be repeated – a battle that occurred every day at every central London Underground station between the hours of 8 and 10 a.m. and 5 and 7 p.m. A battle that I had participated in every weekday for fifteen years. But it wasn’t this scene that made me realise I had to leave. Not directly, anyway.

  If you get on a packed train in London and yet there is one person sitting down with the seats either side of them free, it is because the person sitting between the free seats is a lunatic. This is a certainty. This is one of the first things one learns when living in London. Indeed, one of the few joys of a London commute is when a situation like this arises and the whole carriage, bar one unsuspecting tourist, knows why there are two free seats available. Astounded by their luck, our tourist pushes past the commuters and sits down, only to find themselves, within seconds, forced to field questions from the person next to them about whether they should interpret the current formation of Jupiter’s moons as a sign that they should kill again. A momentary shaft of glee penetrates the carriage before the doors shut like great, squealing misery curtains and everyone returns to avoiding eye contact and grimacing.

  But this day in November 2012, something peculiar happened. Much to my surprise, I realised the empty seats were either side of me. I was suddenly aware that I had been narrating the scene I had witnessed on the platform at Oxford Circus in the style of David Attenborough. Out loud. I glanced around the train. A toddler stared at me with a look of pure wonder. Everyone else made an extra-special effort not to make eye contact. I caught my reflection in the window. My hair was still flattened on one side from my bed and projected out in disparate tufts on the other. For the last five years, while I still spent my days in the office, I’d spent my evenings performing stand-up comedy, at first three or four times a week in front of miniscule audiences of bemused hipsters and foreign-exchange students in London, before graduating to low-level gigs in the commuter villages and towns that encircled the capital, which normally meant getting home in the early hours of the morning and even then not being able to sleep because you were still buzzing from the unmatchable feeling of making a room full of people laugh at the stupid things you said or, conversely, you were torturing yourself by endlessly playing over in your head the fact you failed to think of a comeback at the excruciating gig where you were heckled off by a heroin addict in some run-down pub in Brighton. It meant I was getting at best three or four hours sleep a night and now it was taking its toll.

  I hadn’t bothered to shower. It wasn’t shower day. I couldn’t remember when ‘shower day’ had replaced showering every day, but it had. My eyes were dull. For the first time I noticed how sad I looked. It was the expression I had worn for several years, and for the first time I could see it was an expression of unhappiness. I realised that I hadn’t really thought about anything that morning until I saw myself in the window. I had got up, eaten breakfast, thrown on the same clothes I always threw on, caught the train – and I hadn’t engaged my brain once. And then I realised I hadn’t thought about anything the day before. I had gone to work, I had made the same gags that I made every day, I had looked at the internet, I had done some second-rate graphic design and I had come home, all the time without ever really thinking. And then I realised it was the same the day before that. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d really thought about anything. And I hadn’t really felt anything. I hadn’t felt anything for months. I was suddenly aware that at some point in the last few years I had stopped living. And then, for the first time in as long as I could remember, as people on the Tube edged away from me, I had an actual feeling. A feeling that starts deep in your gut and resonates right through your body. A feeling of urgency. A feeling that I had to escape before it was too late. It was an awakening. A last warning.

  Now, four years later, I looked with pity at the people on the train. I don’t know, perhaps it was just me who wasn’t happy living like that, but I was so pleased I didn’t have to any more, and I couldn’t wait to get back to France and see Rose. And I couldn’t wait to brew more beer.

  Burt dropped half a slipper at my feet, looked at me is if to say ‘You’re a prick’ and waddled off. It was the fourth pair of slippers he had eaten in two weeks. I had decided I would try to build bridges with him by training him to fetch my slippers in the morning. I thought it would bring us closer. I had a vision of us loafing in the study, me in a quilted smoking jacket, chuffing on a pipe and sipping brandy while reading about the East India Company in a giant broadsheet, and Burt, my faithful hound, trotting dutifully to my side, slippers delicately balanced in his jaws. So I started to train him by throwing my slippers and giving him a little treat when he brought them back. Burt realised very quickly that I needed my slippers more than he needed a little treat. He began blackmailing me into giving him more and more treats before he would bring the slippers back. Eventually, he decided that he didn’t need treats at all; the simple pleasure of whisking my slippers off into the garden in the cold, wet February mornings and chewing them to shreds while I chased after him through the mud in bare feet and pyjamas was by far the most pleasure he could extort. It was a welcome relief when March came and the temperature began to lift.

  By the time I had returned from London the cherry trees in the orchard were exploding into blossom. The grass verges on the road that dizzily winds up from Richelieu to Braslou had begun to sprout. Either side of the road the fields were dotted with old red and green tractors. Spring was coming. Farmers were in the fields planting asparagus. I was on the up.

  My plastic fermenter full of beer had been bubbling away under the stairs for three weeks, a cloudy reminder of my errors. And as the weeks went by and I read more on the process of brewing, I realis
ed I had made many errors that could have ruined my beer but, despite this, it seemed to be fermenting. At its peak, it was burping out gases through the airlock on top of the fermenter as regularly as a heartbeat. It had a pulse. I had created life. I was God. I tried to strike Burt down with a lightning bolt. It didn’t work.

  It took much longer for it to ferment than it should have because I had failed to read the instructions on the packet of yeast. There are two types of yeast that are normally used in brewing – lager yeasts and ale yeasts. I was using an ale yeast. Ale yeasts ferment best at around 22–25°C (lager yeasts ferment at 11–14°C). I was keeping my beer at 15°C, so it took an extra week to ferment. But after three weeks it was ready to bottle.

  While Rose showed no outward or indeed inward signs of approval, I’m sure she was on some level deeply impressed with my work. Not nearly as impressed as I was, of course. At one point, when trying to explain to Rose the magnitude of my first brew, I almost compared it favourably to giving birth. However, showing foresight and sensitivity that was most out of character, I realised just in time that this was almost certainly the sort of thing that John Wayne Bobbitt had said to his partner before she lopped off his penis and so I bit my tongue. I did not want to lose my penis.

  I’m not really an achiever. I start things and then move on when they go wrong or they get too complicated. I bail. I don’t see things through. I move from one failed enterprise to the next. I use too many sentences to describe the same thing. I had naturally assumed the beer would be spoilt and taste of brine and then I could forget about brewing and we’d have to move back to England in disgrace and Rose would take the baby and leave me for someone who was able to plan further than twelve hours into the future. So when I tasted the beer after the fermentation was finished, I was fully expecting it to cause me to throw up on one of the dogs (who would then eat it), but to my complete surprise it tasted, well, like beer, I suppose. The process wasn’t complete yet. It was flat. Once it’s fermented, you have to bottle the beer with a little sugar and leave it for a couple of weeks to ferment again in order to get the bubbles, but there was no denying I had actually made beer, and I was baffled. Something was supposed to have gone wrong by now.

  We bottled the beer one stormy night in early March, Rose and I. We spent the evening in the corner of the barn, lit in a greenish-white by an electric lantern, which buzzed in and out of life as the water thudded and panged through the holes in the barn roof into carefully placed buckets all around us. Rose filled the bottles from the fermenter and I capped them. We listened to 1980s power ballads while frogs croaked along in the fields behind the barn. To me it was one of the most romantic nights we had ever spent together. I’d imagine Rose would disagree. Two weeks later, twenty-one litres of homemade beer would be ready to try.

  We met at work. It wasn’t one of those extravagant flings. We didn’t scream our undying love from the rooftops. It was something much simpler than that. A quiet romance, but fundamental, tangible and permanent. I sometimes think those people who are always posting pictures of theirs and their partner’s feet on a sunset-lit beach are trying to convince themselves it’s love. We didn’t have to convince ourselves. Once I met Rose, there were no choices to be made.

  We were in similar positions, although I was much further down the spiral. Rose was a ceramic artist (she made sculptures from clay, not she was an artist made of clay) with a first from Glasgow School of Art. She’d started taking office jobs as a temporary measure to bring in some money while she established herself, but she soon found she couldn’t get out of the cycle of monthly pay cheques and mounting debts. She found herself having to do more and more office work until it took over and she hardly had any time to make things. After a few jobs she ended up at the same place of work as me. I too had taken a temporary office job so that I could save a bit of money while I worked out what I wanted to do, but twelve years later I found myself in the same office job with triple the debts I had started with. I know loads of people who did the same thing.

  Rose was in danger of forgetting she was an artist. I had long ago forgotten what I was supposed to be. But together, like prisoners of war, we began to form an escape plan.

  The plan rested entirely on both of us being made redundant. That was the only way we could clear our debts and start from the beginning. We knew we had to get out of London, and Rose knew she wanted to work solely on her art. Initially I still had no idea what I wanted to do.

  At first we thought about moving down to Cornwall, but the property prices there were nearly as high as London. Then Rose found a cider orchard and cottage for sale in Brittany on the internet. It was less than a quarter of the price of a one-bed London flat. At first, we joked about moving to France to make cider, but the advert remained for several weeks, and we became more and more curious until eventually I phoned up to see if it was still available. It wasn’t. It had just been sold, but it felt like we had glimpsed an alternative reality. One that wasn’t shit. We decided then that, if redundancy came through, we would move to France.

  I had fond memories of France. I spent my childhood summers eating boiled sweets, losing fights with my brother and throwing up in the back of a sweltering Ford Cortina with a boot full of cheese that my father insisted on buying in Calais and that gently warmed and ripened and filled the car with an odour that I would describe as ‘arse biscuit of cow’ as we continued on an endless drive to a mythical campsite in the South of France while my dad played his Best of Tina Turner cassette ad infinitum. Actually, I have no idea why I had fond memories of France, but I did. I’d also recently seen a documentary about TV chef Keith Floyd, in which he seemed to spend all of his time in the garden of his French château drinking the finest red wine under the glow of the Provençal sun to the sound of cicadas and corks popping. ‘That could be me!’ I thought as I sat in my one foot by one foot living room/kitchen/bathroom in central London and gulped on a bottle of the cheapest beer Tesco Metro had to offer. The next day I read in the papers that Keith Floyd had died of a heart attack. ‘That could be me!’ I should have thought, but didn’t.

  We began planning in more detail. We would travel round France for a year. In that time Rose would sell her flat and when we found a nice cottage somewhere in the French countryside we would buy it outright with the money from the sale. We’d use any leftover money to turn a barn or garage into a studio for Rose. We would have chickens, we would grow vegetables and we would leave them in the ground and go and eat steak frites at the local café instead.

  There had been talk of redundancies at work for some time now. People were outraged when they heard, but I wasn’t that bothered. I reckoned I’d probably been there for nine years or so. I couldn’t remember precisely because trying to remember my work career felt like trying to find a wellington boot in a muddy pond, but I thought I’d probably get a decent pay out to tide me over for a month or two while I found another job I didn’t really want to do. But the incident on the Tube train had awoken something in me and so I decided to look into how much I would get if I was made redundant. I was shocked. It turned out that my organisation had a rather generous redundancy scheme. Not only that – I hadn’t been there for nine years. I had been there for twelve years. Somewhere within the big muddy pond I’d managed to lose three years of my life. The good news was those extra three years meant a much bigger payout than I had anticipated. Indeed, if they made me redundant I would get enough money to pay off all my credit cards and loans with money to spare. I could escape.

  Wonderfully, the rumours of a restructure and consequently a number of redundancies proved to be true. Rose was offered redundancy and took it immediately. My situation was more complicated. There was one offer of redundancy for my department, which would have been OK if it was just me that wanted it, but unfortunately a work colleague who did a similar job to me wanted to take redundancy as well. They had to make a decision between the two of us. It was deeply unfair – HR work on the assumption that redundan
cy is a bad thing and people would prefer to keep their job, so to decide whether my colleague or I was given redundancy they scored us based on our performances up until this point, with the lesser performer being given the boot. This meant that the person who had worked harder, contributed more and didn’t spend forty-five minutes a day on the loo learning French would effectively be punished for their good behaviour by missing out on redundancy. It wasn’t a contest. My colleague was diligent, hard-working, creative and punctual. I had been disciplined several times for sleeping under my desk and twice for being caught impersonating the chief executive. Once by the chief executive. I remember my second dressing-down clearly.

  ‘Tommy, the chief executive has complained that you are impersonating him again,’ said my long-suffering boss, Emma.

  ‘Not guilty.’

  ‘You’ve got a sign on your desk saying “Tommy Barnes – Chief Executive”.’

  ‘Ah … But chief executive of what? That’s the real question, isn’t it? Chief executive of what?’

  ‘That’s not the question at all. Please put the sign away.’

  This time it was different. This time when she called me over to the seating area in the kitchen she had a smile on her face.

  ‘Tommy, you are being made redundant. Congratulations! Now, be honest,’ – she winked – ‘have you been deliberately performing incompetently to get redundancy? It’s OK. It was obvious you weren’t happy here. You needed a change.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Right. Sorry about that,’ I lied, slightly taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could influence my chances of being made redundant. I simply wasn’t very good at my job. I probably would have been OK if I’d tried, but I couldn’t take work seriously. That had always been my problem. The meetings. The jargon people used. I watched some people come into the office and shoot up the ranks. They said all the right things, they made suggestions in meetings instead of sketching fellow office members as centaurs, they actually knew what it was our organisation did, whereas I still saw work as a stopgap before I went to do something else that I was actually interested in. There was no reason to take it seriously because I wasn’t there going to be there for long. It was just a stopgap. A twelve-year stopgap.