All Day

I have just reached the conclusion

that time is as relative

for a pub landlord or landlady

as it was for Einstein.

 

Last week, I drove past Tewkesbury’s oldest pub,

whose gloriously higgledy-piggledy

Tudor architecture could entice

even the most hardened teetotaller

to abandon their life of sober deprivation

and nip in for a swift pint,

 

swift pints, as any ale-bibber will tell you,

being absolutely the best type of pint.

 

On the pavement outside of the pub,

a black sandwich board proclaims

in its chalky voice

that this centuries old drinking den

now has Food Served All Day!

an impressive dedication, I think,

to their insomniac punters.

 

Who among us, during the

drunkenly misspent years of our long-vanished youth

did not entertain the notion

that what was really needed, right now,

was a slap-up pub meal

to soak up some of the self-inflicted poison?

 

Even when ‘right now’ roughly translated as

‘about three I the morning’.

 

But underneath the hyperbolic exclamation,

the sandwich board sheepishly adds,

‘Between 9-12pm.’

 

I wish I’d known that entire days

only existed between the hours

of midday and nine in the evening.

 

Perhaps I would have used my time on Earth

more wisely had I been taught that days

were fifteen hours shorter

than my maths teachers had me believe.

 

Instead, I have wasted my months and years on poetry

‘twenty-four seven’, as the saying goes.

 

As the son of a former pub landlord,

I should probably add:

that’s twenty-four hours a month,

seven months of the year.