The Pub

Someone shared this photograph on social media a while ago, and yes, it's The Birthday Party, but it's also The Pub. I can't even remember it's name, but for about two or three years, this pub was our living room. I lived in a decaying bedsit in Chatsworth Road, a long road that stretched between Kilburn Tube station and the armpit of Willesden Green. There was only room for my bed and a piano, plus a borrowed colour TV set that only worked in red and green (psychedelic!) and that I used to change channels on by jabbing at it with a long pole from my bed. Around eighteen of us lived there with loads of cats, a dog and a budgie, I believe, and it could not have been a more diverse group of people. The chap downstairs used to watch Ayatollah videos at maximum volume and beat up his wife, so I sometimes had to go and knock on his door and threaten to call the police unless I heard her say she was OK. Paul McGann (the actor) lived upstairs with Annie, who was  stage manager, and his brother Steve lived there too for a while. Treacle and Charlotte lived there, and Ruth, and Marek Kohn (who is now a very successful writer). So did Glen and a whole bunch of other people including Andy, who fixed our electricity meters so we could put the same 50 pence in over and over again.
The Pub was over the road from Ark PR, Claudine, Chris and Gaylene's independent PR company in the basement of an anonymous building on Kilburn High Road. This was where 'meetings' happened (actually, bonding sessions) with their bands. Chris looked after The Birthday Party, but for us up the road, it was where we came in the evenings to hang out because our rooms were barely big enough to socialise in. We laughed, rowed, got drunk, planned, commiserated, and crossed the road with a tide of people at 10.30 to the pubs in Camden, which closed at 11 (this one was in Brent, and they all closed at 10.30).
I could look back on my life and see a senseless pile of disasters and crashes, or I could look back and see a crazy connection of accidental opportunities and extraordinary adventures. It's the latter life that belongs to me; there have been two funerals this year of significant people (not just to me, but to two whole communities of friends), and that makes it feel all the more important to reflect on the past from time to time. I love the way that we intersect with each other's lives, colonise places temporarily, talk, listen and just generally be human beings.
(excuse the mawkish post, this is the first day off I've had for about a month!)