Day 13: The History of the Pub

An experiment.

How I came to be sitting in this pub; a literal history of the people in this pub.

Literally. In an effort to in-absolutely-no-way pass off some of my writing burden I asked the 6 people assembled to write a line on the topic of how they came to be sitting where they are.
In the pub.

1. Once dragged around pubs as a child. Simultaneously "encouraged" to maintain my violin. I appreciate these influences for they have combined so that I can be sitting in this pub with my desk partner and fellow orchestra-ers.

2. Over the hills, further away, around the black ice at the edge of the world, down the bottle and up the barrel.

3. A time honoured tradition of wandering from rehearsal to public house. Tradition became habit and I'm here every week. It's not the impy though.

4. Cheers!

5. Je ne sais pas... J ai suivi la lumiere...

6. Red wine fanatic, what can I say?


It's an interesting thing to think about, how you've come to be sitting somewhere.
It's also interesting to see how people choose to respond to a brief when they have a phone shoved in front of them at the pub and are asked to write a sentence.
I have come to be sitting in this pub due to a series of fortunate events, with a few less-than-fortunate ones along the way.
Life has conspired to make me think about fate and circumstance a lot recently. How the little details of life collide seemingly at random knocking certain things off kilter and surreptitiously sliding others to the forefront of our consciousness.
That one aspect of your life where you can pinpoint the exact decision, one way or the other, that brought you to a certain place, or put you on a certain path. That one person you seem to always see on that one bus you only catch from time to time.
Is it the universe telling us something? Is it fate, or destiny, or some other force of nature compelling us towards certain people, places or things?
Or is it the human condition: the desire for more, the desire to see more, the desire for more from the everyday than we feel we have been assigned.
There's something wonderful in the idea that we're not just clusters of sinew and cells scattering at random across the vast expanse of the universe.
I like serendipity, and circumstance, and the idea that maybe, just maybe, certain things are simply meant to be.
Perhaps sometimes we engineer our own circumstance and find ourselves where we need to be entirely off our own backs, but once in a while it's quite nice to believe in a certain kind of magic.