The meeting venue of choice is an abandoned 16th century pub overlooking the River Adur, for a beer and catch-up with an old mate.
The ‘Red Lion’ of Shoreham-by-Sea has a bygone history of monks and thieves for punters. It was once an old coach house inn on the crooked road between Brighton and Steyning. Previously famous for its frozen fish platter and local banter zone – fuelled by Grade II listed ales around a cosy open fire – today under Lockdown the old inn is a distant derelict shell of its former self.
All weeds, rampant growing ivy, and boarded up windows.
The plan is to bench down outside the ‘Red Lion’ with a few tinnies, to soak up passable memories of nostalgia, from May Day bank holidays of yesteryear, when thirsty punters and the occasional camp Morris dancer would flock to the pub in droves for the annual beer festival.
However, we take the executive decision to abandon the ‘Red Lion’ and pull up a pew on a flaky wooden bench by the Toll Bridge overlooking the Adur, to avoid any incendiary Lockdown heat, potential clowning fines, or fiddling tap on the shoulder from local Old Bill.
Cracking the ring pull on a couple of ice-cold beers, fingers frosting round the tins, snowflakes drifting on the breeze, its more Scott and the Antarctic than another pint of lager, bartender. Missing the glowing coals of the Red Lion, I wonder at how this meet-up passes for a rudimentary socially distanced life, in the endless bite of this Covid winter, as a shivering lonesome couple pull up with coffees on the bench next to ours.
The conversational banter flows with the fleeting flurries of snow and tinnies, as icicles of snot form on the end of the nose and slow grade hypothermia creeps in.
Talk of dried-up work and lockdown lives; fascist great uncles and Boris’s chemical wig; Sam Allardyce’s hidden progressive football and the average resting age of Liverpool’s first eleven; lemon parties and Cliff Richard; and the latest bingeable Narco-style box sets.
Banging the world to rights, the rights to wrongs.
As the sun hangs low over Shoreham Airport, nearly in the departure lounge, it reflects brightly in the River Adur. For a fleeting moment, the weather deceives our frozen minds and bodies that it’s as tropically balmy as a Benidorm sunset.
And, as a knob-head on a hover-board spins around in wanky posey circles on the pathway ahead, our fingers are thawed out enough for an ironic fist pump, as we imagine him going over an incendiary pineapple landmine.
As the shadows grow longer, and the sun finally ducks behind the Airport, we bid farewell and head off in opposite directions, into the cold evening air.
Back home, frostbite averted, another cold beer in hand, the weather forecast is on. It is more Beast from the East, less Blessed from the West, and I tune into some rumours and fake news on the Internet threatening drops to -10 degrees. The orchestra of evening news is rolling out Covid stats for days, as all hope seems to hinge on a shot in the arm of the Lockdown darkness.
And I think, somehow, how we are a stone drunk nation reeling lost in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, with a dying thirst for friendly pub life and banter.