Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold,
But the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm;
Besides I can tell where I am used well,
Such usage in Heaven will never do well.

My favorite pub in the world is the Wheatsheaf. It’s in a hamlet called Westwood near a village called Southfleet in Kent, England to be precise. It was built in 1414, probably hasn’t changed all that much and was the first in the county to ban smoking. In the winter, there is a fire and in the summer there is an excellent beer garden. They also serve real ale. It’s not fizzy, served at room temperature and a light variety thankfully does not exist. You hear the same conversations in there as in the pubs and bars in Cleveland Heights: people complaining about work, gossiping about the locals and men generally talking about things that happened to them while driving.

The beer garden is surprisingly common in Britain. Our weather is rarely good enough to benefit from them. They are very much a place for families and can provide the perfect day out for a holiday or weekend. There does not seem to be many of them around here, but I suppose an air-conditioned room is preferable given the oppressive humidity of the summer months.

Something that has always intrigued me about pubs is the conversations that must have taken place under their roofs over the years. In the course of the last six hundred years, the locals at the Wheatsheaf would have lived and drunk through witch trials, the split from the Catholic Church, the dissolution of the monarchies, Puritanism, hundreds of years of French conflict, the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars – oh, and of course finding and losing a strange, faraway country called America.

Eavesdropping on conversations in a new country is lots of fun, as is learning new dialects and trying to place the various accents – so far I can generally place east coast (Boston in particular), mid west, and west coast (often sounds like, a question?). I like to justify this by saying that I’m a linguist, but nosiness is definitely a factor.

The one thing in most Heights pubs and bars that the Wheatsheaf lacks is television. I love sports bars, and I love the fact that I can see soccer and rugby in bars here, but my attention wanes when anyone wants to talk with me for any time longer than an ad break. Surprisingly, the best conversations seem to take place outside the pub, where smokers huddle together, united in their status as outcasts. Maybe it is an antisocial habit, but it’s also a good way to make new friends.

I must confess that, as an ex-smoker myself, I’m not entirely happy about the ongoing victimization of the tobacco addict. There seems to be an effort to herd rather than entice them into ever smaller places outside. (The psychiatric ward at MetroHealth even makes its patients leave the building to smoke. I personally consider this cruel and possibly a battle which could be lost to win a war.) I know we’re healthier as a result of this, but has anyone noticed how much more you can smell without the smoke? Fried food or cigarettes? Neither one is particularly pleasant.

So, my fear is that when someone sits down for a drink at one of our watering holes hundreds of years from now, they will wonder what it was like to watch the Cleveland Indians, the Cavaliers or the Browns win titles over the years.

The quotations above and below are from ‘The Little Vagabond’ by William Blake. A man who knew what he was talking about.

But if at the church they would give us some ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We’d sing and we’d pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the church to stray.

Matthew Williams is a professional freelance English language trainer living with his wife in the Heights.