#32: “Happy Christmas, mate!” - me all week
Death By Consumption
12/10/24 - 12/16/24
I am writing this from a Welsh pub, so this might be an absolute mess. We’ll see! Honestly, I can’t believe I’m getting anything out at all. I was in London for most of the week for a dear friend’s stunningly iconic wedding, and between recovering from a sleepless redeye, the jet lag, and the hangovers, I’m not sure where the week went. What did I even do? So here are the things I managed to jot down on my phone, mostly about the one book I read on the plane, and then an extremely wild night I had. Sorry!
The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham (1955) — paperback
I loved this Cold War-era sci-fi novel that, unfortunately, still feels relevant today. Set in Newfoundland centuries after a vague nuclear apocalypse destroys all civilization, humanity scratches out a primitive life in the few places that aren’t a blackened, radioactive wasteland. Society is authoritarian and religious in nature, with a strict focus on maintaining “God’s purity,” which means rooting out any and all mutations — from crops, from livestock, and from people. A child with a mutation as small as an extra toe is left exposed to die, with neighbors closely watching neighbors, in order to report any hidden aberrations.
The story is a simple one, which makes it all the more effective — our hero is a secret mutant, of course, and when it’s discovered, he has to go on the run, during which time we learn more about the world he lives in, and whether the story he’s been told about the world is the true one. The parallels to today — authoritarian rule, people turning on their neighbors, intolerance — are almost boring to point out, and depressing in their relevance 70 years later. It’s just a simple, slim, beautiful little book, an unexpected piece of early sci-fi brilliance. The ending, while a bit abrupt and not exactly earned, probably felt less cliche back then than it does now, but Wyndham throws in enough hints at the story not quite being over yet that I didn’t feel let down by it. And, after all, the story itself is clearly a vehicle for Wyndham to give his thoughts on modern society, and he is, let’s just say, less than enthused about us?:
“We do know that we can make a better world than the Old People did. They were only ingenious half-humans, little better than savages … When their conditions were primitive they could get along all right, as the animals can; but the more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They learned to co-operate constructively in small units; but only destructively in large units. They aspired greedily, and then refused to face the responsibilities they had created. … They could, at their best, be near-sublime animals, but not more.”
Stop, stop, we’re already dead! Anyway, glad this will never happen in reality. 😬
A pint — at the King & Queen pub, London
Everyone in the UK insists living in New York at Christmastime must be magical, and yet here they are living in an actual Christmas paradise. We went to the pub around the corner from our Airbnb one night and it was completely packed with groups of friends in Santa hats and festive apparel, and not in the Santacon way that strikes fear into the heart of a New Yorker. The pub had an actual wood-burning fireplace, was apparently the first place Bob Dylan played in the UK, it was totally nondescript but cozy and lovely and full of regulars and I got irrationally mad about NYC zoning laws that prevent us from having an abundance of delightful corner pubs.
Terrible meat pies — at some awful pub, London
Why is every city a reservations only city now? It’s impossible to get an impromptu good dinner in a major city on a Friday night, so we ended up at a place that felt like it was doing an impression of a real English pub despite actually being in England, one of those places that are blasting Alicia Keys, of all people, while you pay twice for a pint as anywhere else.
They had menus on the tables, so we ordered meat pies, and the bartender genuinely looked disgusted with us. When the pies arrived, I knew why. The pies were definitely pre-made, possibly microwaved. We may have been the first people to eat there in years. We scarfed them down, and then desperately hoped someone would clear the table quickly. It felt shameful to have those plates in front of us, like we had sat there and eaten airplane food out in public. We finished our Guinesses and slunk out, making sure we didnt lock eyes with the mean little bartender, so he couldn’t gloat.
Tequila Rose — at an unnamed pub
“Let’s take it easy tonight,” we said, tender with hangovers after a devastatingly fun wedding the night before. Desperate for food around 8pm on a Sunday night, when most places in London are either closed or full, a very kind waiter at a corner pub took pity on us and said the chef still had the fire burning in the pizza oven, so we could order pizzas, and only pizzas, quickly. We wolfed them down, ravenous, and were finishing our bottle of wine when the fight started.
A man entered the pub, headphones in his ears, and ambled vaguely around the space, with a vague air of scoping it out. I missed the instigating argument, so all I knew at first is that a couple of men had gone outside the pub, and then we heard yelling. Two women from the table near us jumped to their feet and stood over our table, hands on their mouths as they looked anxiously out the window over my shoulder. I turned and saw two men in the middle of the road, circling each other, their fists raised in a stance that I genuinely thought only happened in movies. People really raise their fists like cartoon fighters? I thought. How cute!
“What’s going on?” we asked the women, and one replied, “He smelled quite bad,” as if that explained it all.
“He’s a professional boxer,” the other woman continued, “So he can’t hit him as hard as he wants, or he’ll go back to prison.” As we processed this information, trying to figure out which one smelled bad and which one was the professional boxer, the other woman suddenly switched directions: “Do you like Tequila Rose? We’ll get you some.”
“What is Tequila Rose?” we asked, but she was distracted by the end of the fight, as a hulking South African man covered in tattoos — the boxer who can’t go back to prison — stomped his way in, a bloodlust in his eyes. The women tried to calm him, forgetting about us, and we drank our wine while listening to him describe just how badly he wanted to knock that guy out, if only he could, while shadow boxing around the room. The way he moved was incredibly professional, I had to admire. He bounced on his heels like Muhammad Ali, jabbing at the air.
The man he had fought, insanely, tried to come back into the pub and continue the fight. “Fuck off!” a shorter man (the pub owner, we learned) shouted at him, with the tone you use speaking to a child being naughty. The boxer paced, desperate to be unleashed, as the women urged restraint.
As if we weren’t in the midst of a potential crime scene, the bar owner came over with the aforementioned Tequila Rose, and poured us each a shot. It had the look and consistency of Pepto Bismol, and tasted like candy. A professional boxer is drinking this? We found that thought strangely endearing.
A man came into the bar on crutches, and spent a long time hanging out with the boxer, the two women, and the owner. He left on seemingly friendly terms, but we later learned he told them his wife was dying, and then demanded cocaine (for her or for him, he didn’t specify). After that, with the other guy still prowling outside, they decided to lock the doors from the inside so no one else could come in.
To apologize for locking us into the bar with them, the owner dropped the entire bottle of Tequila Rose on the table. “Help yourself,” he proclaimed, a gregarious host. We turned the bottle over, and nothing came out.
The women summoned us to their table, and within seconds drinks were practically forced down our throats. They introduced us to the concept of “chugging wine,” in which you — you’ll never guess — chug a whole glass of wine. There was no option to say no.
Quickly, things got messy. The two women seemed straight out of Love Island. Within minutes we were insisting one of the women should come to New York. “They’d be obsessed with you,” we insisted, speaking for 8 million people.
The other woman, though she was from London, felt like a classic Essex girl to me, all makeup and lashes and effortlessly wild sayings. To compliment us, she asked if we had gotten salmon sperm facials, also known as polynucleotides.
“Can I say ‘gay’?” she asked, pausing for our permission before continuing: “All my gay friends get polynucleotides.”
The boxer, I think, was eager to make sure we weren’t competing for her, so he chatted us up and made us look at his Instagram, where he swiped through photo after photo of his bloody, battered face, I assumed as an intimidation tactic. He told us the names of people he had fought, and we said, “Wow,” after each name, though we knew none of them. I wasn’t sure if telling him we were gay would make him relax or if he’d take a swing at us.
Hours later, the boxer and the Essex girl disappeared upstairs to do something that wasn’t my business, and suddenly the man he had fought reappeared outside, pounding on the window with a terrifyingly mad look in his eyes. “I knew he’d come back,” our new best friend said. “Probably went and got a knife.” She seemed considerably less bothered by this fact than we felt, and I called upstairs for the boxer, a tremor in my voice. It’s funny how quickly you get used to having a professional boxer as your personal security. He came back downstairs and the man scampered away again. “Bruised male egos,” our new friend shrugged. We wondered how serious she was about the knife, and not for the first time that night marveled at how fun a bar fight can be in a country where you don’t have to worry about guns.
The owner of the bar was drunk off his ass, forcing more and more wine down our throats for free, while repeatedly saying, “NYC, yeah? NYC!” They all were fascinated with the idea of our exciting lives in New York, asking what it’s really like. This is the enduring mystique of New York City: you can be sitting there, slackjawed, as a professional boxer, fresh off a mid-street fistfight, pours you another glass of wine, in the bar you’ve been locked inside for your own safety, and he will still insist New York is the most exciting place he could possibly imagine.
The girls demanded we request a song, and we of course requested ABBA. The boxer surprised us by putting on “Fernando” instead of “Dancing Queen,” and as we all danced to it, the girls filmed us and tagged me on an Instagram story, which I immediately sent to everyone I knew. “Look where I am,” I messaged, confusing friends with no further details.
Pushed to request another song, I found myself spelling “C-H-A-P-P-E-L-L” to the hulking boxer, feeling like I was definitely about to be exposed as gay now. Two seconds into “Good Luck Babe,” however, he yelled, “Oh, I love this song!” and started dancing. She really is the people’s princess. More Instagram stories were filmed.
Justin and our friend Nora, knowing that I would stay with these fascinating people until I died of alcohol poisoning, nudged me to leave, so we said goodbye, swapping instagrams with everyone except the extremely drunk bar owner, and insisting everyone must stay with us when they come to New York. A fourth free bottle of wine was shoved in my hands, and we were finally released from the bar, where we quickly jumped in an Uber, in a panic that the man with the possible knife would take advantage of finding us without our boxer for protection.
The next morning was even rougher than after the wedding, and as we drove out of London and headed for Wales, we insisted that tonight we would take it easy, knowing all the while we probably would not.