I work in a bar. I know, glamorous right? You should see me in action. The way I can open a bottle is second to none!
It gets quiet around this time of year as people shun thee liquor and wine for Dry January. Along with the fact that January is the poorest month for most of us, this makes light work for a barman like myself.
SO there I was. I was two hours into the dayshift. Time was passing by slow. I’d maybe served 3 customers? I was getting so bored that I’d created a game called ‘coffee bean cup’. Pretty self explanatory really. You just try to throw the coffee bean in the cup and if you get it in, you win. (I’d like to state now that if this game takes off, I was the creator. It could be the next beer pong. Imagine coffee pong. You could play it on a morning with flatmates to get you extra zinged before work. Then the winner gets a mug or something. Maybe engraved. We are getting sidetracked by awesomeness. Let us continue with the story.)
Anyway, just as I was about to sink my fourth coffee bean into the cup from a record distance, a man and woman entered the building and started walking to the bar. They were very pleasant. You know the type of people who instantly make you feel easy and relaxed. They must have been 80-90 years old.
“Hello Kidda” said the man in a thick Geordie Accent. “Pint of bitter and a sherry for the lady”.
As I began to make their drinks, I wanted to know their story. What 90 year old couple enters a bar in the middle of the day and start getting on it?! So the journalist in me sparked up and I started digging deeper and what I found was truly heartwarming.
They were not a couple at all, they were in fact brother and sister. Every two weeks they travel to the city to meet because they live so far away from each other. They spend three hours in each others company then get the bus back to their homes 30 miles apart. They have been doing this for 10 years. They happened to be in my bar because they were running out of places to go and they “didn’t like to go to the same place twice”.
The man then told me that they had each been bought iPads for christmas by their family so that they could FaceTime each other. But, in his words, “There is something about being on a screen that isn’t very sociable. It is nice to be here and live outside of a screen with the people I love most”…
Amazing!
The Happier Generation 