Low life | 5 November 2011

Before I went to the party, I went to the pub for a pint. The pub was unusually quiet for a Saturday evening. Jay was on duty behind the bar. She leaned across the bar to embrace and kiss me. She had a terrible hangover, she said. I told her to have one herself, and she thanked me and put a pound coin in her tips glass, as she does. I like Jay. There was a stage in Jay’s life when circumstances forced her and her two children to live in a tent for six months. Everything Jay has she’s had to scrabble for. Yet hard times involving tents haven’t politicised her. I’ve never heard her make a moral or a political judgment about anything.

After she’d served me, she resumed her perch on a barstool and continued with her texting. I braced my back comfortably against a pillar, stared out of the open door at the drizzle and the shiny street, and savoured every swallow of my pint.