It’s all about the environment. Mine, not yours.

MAYBE, it’s about everyone’s environment, but that’s only if it turns out to be more helpful than I am currently intending.

Also, I’m not talking about the environment in that ecological, greater-crested newt, save the wales, sense.

Of course, I’m all in favour of saving the wales. Unless they cross me, in which case I’m moving to Japan.

I’m talking about the environment in that personal sense. MY environment.

The price of a pint of beer is important for this.

I tend not to drink in pubs on account of the cost. I drink at home, a lot, to the point of not going to the doctor in case they give me bad news and I can’t do it anymore.

However, there is a time (maybe, who cares) and more importantly there is a place in which the tipping of the bank balance is more acceptable, on account of really enjoying the environment.

The pub.

The pub is an environment, and it is very important because it is exceedingly lovely.

But what makes it so lovely, and therefore important?

I think it’s:

holding the glass of local beer after a long morning in town staring at classic cars on behalf of an enthusiast to whom I’m related, in the sun-trap garden with a breeze passing through, and a friendly greyhound coming up to sniff hello whilst children are playing and pleasantly misbehaving with the fish in the pond because of something I demonstrated earlier (“the fish bite if you put your fingers in – see?“), folk nearby talking about things I feel are not fascinating but are still something to which I could contribute in an emergency, another glass of increasingly local (is it? Who cares?) beer, my wife suddenly remembered that she’s stunning and is keen to share that with me, my children ask me adorable requests akin to wanting to sit on my knee or have a peanut, I make a political point to my wife and she responds just “hmmm, yes babe” but I’m still glad I said it, before heading inside to the tiny bar in the cooler darkness that reeks of British tradition, where there is a hat perched on a hook in the wall beneath a plaque saying “DAD” with a degree of loving aggressiveness one really had to be there for, and I’m asked if I’d like another, “No, water please” I counter but add that I’d love a pickled egg to accompany , that sates us both (him – my money, me – his egg), and I wrap said-egg in a tissue and place in my pocket and this is all marvelous, just marvelous, and I’ve spent here on two pints and an egg (that everyone hated) what would amount to much beer and many eggs from elsewhere to enjoy at home, but you’re then basically just at home – drunk with eggs.

That was all environment and also, I’m sorry, exquisite grammar.

Really, the importance of it was that it mattered at the time.

And then I realised I couldn’t escape the concept of environments. Such as the fish in the pond with fingers poking-in for the hope of being nibbled – that’s an environment.

Or the pocket with a parceled pickled egg in it – now I had the choice of pocket environments. One to act as a pocket in the traditional, common-or-garden sense, whilst the other now became an environment in which I could put things that I wanted to become smelly.

Naturally it didn’t end there, as we made our way back to the car park (another environment? No, probably not that one) we noticed a nearby shrine to St. Jude.

Here, in the sanctified silence broken only by the taps of my daughter’s feet as she danced in the kaleidoscope of colours from the stained windows and the summer sun, and of the whispers of my son asking “what’s a shrine?“; we felt another environment.

This one was of the kind with the mix of emotions that often comes when religion really matters to people on a daily level – a mix of hope yet desperation, glory yet pity, endless mercy and love, and a donation box in every possible eyeline, a place to place your intimate prayers, and a giftshop.

That’s what you pay for, much akin to two pints of Spitfire and a pickled egg. Plus a copy of the Catholic Herald that I stole (they’ll forgive me). Anyway, I donate to churches every time I light one of their candles, which I do almost every time I enter one, including this of St. Jude’s shrine.

I do go to church fairly often. Often, but not religiously.

There was a woman who sat alone and away from the shrine, in the chapel, who was fervently seeing-to a colouring book as though it had wronged her and she’d have her vengeance in primary colours. She looked up and asked my 5-year-old son if he’s like to colour-in too. He declined politely* and she looked back down to her traumatic colour-scape and never looked up again.

Her head. That was an environment; a very busy one that I don’t want to visit.

Exiting can be a lovely thing when it is stepping out from the gravitas of a softly sounding, aroma-filled cellar environment that pubs and chapels can share, into the relative outer-space of a blue-skied day. So we did, and it was.

A whole new environment. Stepping out into this, I thought as my son and I peed on a nearby secluded wall, was a matter of perception creating a new environment, whilst at the time of stepping into the shrine – the point had been vice-versa.

We arrived at the car, buckled up and cranked the air-conditioning to as low and powerful as it could be; creating another environment in which we controlled the climate, the radio, the view (depending on where we drove), and all with the feeling of togetherness that comes when a family in a car knows that everyone else is strapped in there with them.

This last one, the environment of the family bubble, I realised was the one that had been there throughout the day, and was the one I was taking home.

My advice is to alter your environment to make it what you want, therein making your self think and feel as you’d prefer – or to at least give yourself a better chance to.

Some might try beer, others religion, some are for summer, some for wherever the air-conditioning is best.

Mine is the lot, all, with varying intervals and different levels of intensity, before moving onto the next as per whatever the hell I feel like. It gets me thinking, appreciating, and moving.

What’s my gift though, that I’ll treasure beyond the wagers of the mercy of saints or the business of a barman, was being able to go home with and to my family.

Cheesy, I know, but that’s nothing compared to that pickled egg. Maybe this blog might have turned out to be helpful after all.

*Much as I have been for the past 20 years; in polite decline.