ONE BAR BLUES

You don’t get them any more, those dark, smoke-filled rooms. There has been, quite literally, a change in the air, and we can all breathe just a little more easily when we head out for a night on the town. There was a lot to be gained and little was really lost when the smokers were cast out into the cold and the rain, but something was lost. Something always is when a change is made. The rhythm, the riff, the train of thought can all just disappear when the key changes and the mood shifts on a dark night in a smokeless room.

Some would say that all we really lost was a filthy fug, and a fetid atmosphere, which coated your lungs and your clothes and your hopes and your dreams, but, just perhaps, clearing the atmosphere killed the atmosphere, because there was always something thrilling, something romantic, something dangerous in the air when those forlorn notes drifted across the crisp, still night air as you sat on a cracked leather barstool, gazing into the chromium-plated reflection of your own soul, leaned towards the bartender, rested your elbow on that flaking wooden barrier and ordered the same again.

Whatever places your mind had drifted off to, all those places and faces you never wanted to remember, and all those you were desperate to forget, sometimes one and the same, would drift through the fog in the darkness, weaving and dancing in the air, lit by the harsh spotlights but gratefully muted by those soothing diffusing clouds that dissipated the harsh lines and blurred the hard edges of the brutalities of life, dissolving them like an ice cube in a glass of hard liquor.

The harsh clunk of the glass on that varnished surface would startle you out of your reverie, its shining, gleaming surfaces sparkling and reflecting and refracting, showing you back to yourself as a distorted transparent gargoyle that somehow still managed to improve upon the reality sitting opposite you, reflected in the chrome. That stubby, straight sided vessel, with the wafer thin sides and the weighty, substantial base, now just sitting there waiting to be filled, wanting to transport you away from all this, away from the dark corners of the mind to a place of forgetfulness. You smile a half smile at yourself and the bartender, then make just the slightest casual, almost imperceptible throwaway gesture with a finger, and you know that you’re taking another step towards thankful oblivion.

The haunting melody of a mournful saxophone was always the perfect accompaniment to the satisfying clink of the ice cubes into the glass, landing with a slight whirling dancing motion as if they’ve picked up on the tune. Then the neck of the bottle taps as it catches on the edge of the rim and the soft gurgling that smoky amber fluid begins to pour, and the ice cracks and fizzes as the liquid hits it, shifting and rising as the level gets higher and resuming their dance again as the already melting and misshapen cubes orbit in circles around each other until the pouring stops and they slowly settle and begin the process of bonding with the nectar to take the edge off the bitter taste.

Then, you take a moment to savour the anticipation. The soft aroma rises from the glass and drifts through the night and tickles at your senses, drowning and smothering any and all the other essences and transporting you right back to other nights in other bars. You lick your lips at the memory of the taste, eager to be connecting again but holding off the moment for as long as you can so that you can extend that feeling for another second and another.

Finally, you can’t resist the temptation any longer and you pick up the glass. Now it’s in your hand it has weight, it has substance, it has reality. Your taste buds are just moments away from heaven and yet you take another moment to pause again, swirling the diminishing ice around the glass to release more of the flavour and you breathe in the vapour, closing your eyes for a moment to enhance the feeling.

Then the glass it at your lips and your tongue is exploding at the deep, dark, smoky range of flavours that are stimulating it. A hint of oak, a dash of jasmine drifting across the barley fields on a long forgotten summers day, all kinds of conflicting, contrasting moments erupting in your mind and your memory as the subtle hints of various flavours and chemical reactions and processes divide and recombine and divide again to create something new, something different, a whole new taste to appreciate.

The senses find that it’s too much and you take the glass away from your mouth with the shock of it all, but the raging, swirling maelstrom of flavours remain on the tongue, dancing, singing and burning ever so brightly. You sigh as they start to fade away, but then the warm aftertaste burns for a moment in your throat bringing back the memory of an experience of a flavour that you’ve barely had time to forget. Your senses have never felt more alive. The mournful melodies drift into your mind, the smoke swirls through the suffused beams of light and you drift onto another plane of being, another world where the edges aren’t quite so well defined and surfaces are not so rough and the people are warmer and more friendly, and, as ever, holding it all together, binding all these worlds are those long cool notes from a faraway sax, played by someone you’ve not even seen.

Good whisky should always be drunk alone in a seedy, smoky bar with rich, resonant blues music playing in the background, and somehow it’s just not the same even on a dark night in a smoke-free room.