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For our second pint let’s take a short detour to Cork, Ireland, where I lived in the late 1990s. The pub is the Gables on Douglas Street, and it was there, on Sunday nights, that my friend John Neville, of the band North Cregg, would play “sliabh luachra” tunes, the raucous traditional music of Kerry and West Cork.
It had been my fond hope during this London trip to fly over to Cork for a few days, to see old friends and have a glass of Murphy’s at the Gables, and to hear John sing the old songs.
But Brexit was supposed to kick in on Nov. 1, and I’d been warned off traveling to Ireland from London at that time. This was a perfectly groundless fear, but I’d been spooked anyway and like a fool I’d canceled the side trip. Shortly thereafter, Brexit, deal or no deal, was put off yet again.
I’d come to England this November to teach at the American School in London, to talk about transgender identity and writing. After work, Brexit arose in nearly every conversation, and when it did people groaned with exhaustion and fury. Please, they said. Just make it stop.
That would be my second lesson: Brexit has poisoned everything. Whatever Britain has been, it is becoming something else.
Let’s take our final pint down at the Sherlock Holmes, near Charing Cross. My father, a great fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, had loved it there, even though it is a giant tourist trap, almost more like one of those fake English pubs in Epcot Center than the genuine article.
When I’m in London, though, I like to have a lager and lime there and remember the old man. That fellow with the bulldog wasn’t wrong: Everybody dies. But who knows? Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
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