In London, there are many spaces that are not for you. My reflex is to say that this is different to my experience of Australia, but I have a feeling that the greater instance of physical wealth segregation in Australia has given me only half the picture. Perhaps if I had strayed further from the radius of my wealthy sub-section of Sydney, I would have found myself in more places that were not made with me in mind. I feel like I'm being vague. I'm referring to the feeling of walking into a shop and seeing the intrigue or amusement of the shopkeeper at your presence. It's a class thing, but also a race thing, a gender thing, maybe also a religious thing. It's a familiar feeling, given that most of the spaces I inhabited in Singapore were not for me. If you wanna be cynical about it, I guess you could say I'm used to taking up space I'm not supposed to take up. But this is all very tangential - I only bring it up to say that mine and Lizzie's experience at The Grapes is the first time I have felt an open hostility towards me in an establishment designed almost exactly for my demographic.
Lizzie and I went to the Grapes on my impetus. We were going to Tabby's party, and Lizzie and I wanted to have a couple pints somewhere nearby beforehand to catch up. We didn't know Limehouse well, but I remembered Joel had told me about one he went to with his boys (lmao, his boys) called The Grapes recently. The thing is, Joel had been to a couple different pubs in that time period and given them varying reviews that I couldn't match up in my memory. So all I knew was that Joel had been there, and that it had been either good or bad. Anyway, I relayed this to Lizzie and we decided to go. I was late - I seem to be constantly running late for social events these days, which is curious, because I've noticed my penchant for tardiness usually correlates inversely with my mental state, but I'm pretty good right now.
When I got to the Grapes, I couldn't see an outdoor smoking area, which is where Lizzie would almost definitely have been had it had one. She wasn't anywhere on the ground floor, but I saw a narrow set of stairs. In lots of pubs in London, the upstairs is just a small space with the toilets, so I pointed to the stairs and asked the bartender, who was a tall kinda attractive softboi-looking type, if there was more seating upstairs. He looked at me like I had just said the lamest thing ever, and went, "Yeah?"
I said OK thanks and went up there, but Lizzie wasn't there either. I called her and it was revealed that she was on the outdoor deck (the Grapes is on the Thames), the doors to which I hadn't spotted. I noticed, when I was trying to find her, eyes on me. All the people in the pub, a mixture of middle-aged native Londoners (you can tell by the accent) and London transplant youths roughly mine and Lizzie's ages, were observing my meandering. I felt like a giant dork but somehow also really obnoxious. Anyway, I went out to the deck that Lizzie was alone on and told her about this. She said, "yes, there is a definite air of hostility in this place". That was the perfect abstract noun. She said, smoking a cig, "you're not allowed to smoke on here. Isn't that ridiculous?". It was quite weird, for London, but coming from Australia where you're hardly allowed to smoke anywhere, I didn't find it too odd.
Lizzie already had her pint, so I went in to get mine. The next issue to present itself was that there was not incredibly obvious place to order your drink. The entire bar had people seated at it eating overpriced-looking faux-fancy pub food, so there was no free bar space to stand up at to get the bartender's attention. I asked one of the diners, and she said you just sort of stood behind the people eating. I tried this, but the girl who was working in the bar at that point in time didn't address me at all. It got to the four- or five-minute mark and I was feeling both like an idiot AND a creep just standing directly behind a couple trying to enjoy their meal. At one point, a tall man stood behind the diners at a different part of the bar and served him and then went back to talking to the softboi and I was like??? And then I went up to them and said "where do I order?" and she took me back to where I was standing and took my order there??? I got my pint eventually. I had been narrating this to Lizzie via text, and she made a very sage observation:
Oh, I forgot to say that in the spare four to five minutes I had standing awkwardly "at" the bar, I decided I wanted to know what the goss was on this place, so I went to google reviews (lmao, you can tell I'm a waitress. Hospo people know: google reviews cause DRAMA. I've had to sit through a two-hour long unpaid entire-front-of-house-team meeting about a SINGULAR google review. I mean, my boss there was a fucking psycho, but still.).
Of course, I went straight to the one-star reviews. You can go look if you want but it was basically rude staff, a drunk head "barmaid", and a bunch of locals suddenly banned for no reason. I don't really pay attention to reviews about rude staff because staff are only ever gonna be or seem rude to you if you're a cunt to them to begin with. But the rest is pretty funny.
Also, as I was doing this, I was half-listening to an inane conversation being had at a table of four to my left about kids these days on their tik tok.
I finally returned to the restorative Thames air. Lizzie was smoking another cigarette, which was of course making me anxious. We talked about this - how, despite how theoretically similar Lizzie and I are, within her there exists an innate propensity to flout rules, whereas I am a rule follower. Perhaps I am the problem: perhaps my disinclination to logistically rebel is ultimately at odds with the Lizzie-brand abstraction of my personal morality. I hypothesised that this could be due to my Singaporean upbringing, which at this stage in my life feels a little tired and cliche to say, but that doesn't mean it's not true. Later, at Emmeline's, I told them about the Speaker's Corner in Singapore, the piece of Hong Lim park that is the only place in Singapore where one is allowed to politically demonstrate without a police permit. (If you're going to go to that Wikipedia page, please note that it is quite obviously written by a Singaporean, or Singaporeans. Which is not to say no one in Singapore is cynical of the national narrative, but to say that one must keep statistics in mind. (In fact, I just went through the paratext of the wiki page, and it was written as part of a group project by SMU students.))
An interesting caveat about this smoking rule is that the softboi bartender came outside to vape. Us three were the only people on the deck at this point, so I presume softboi was subject to our squealing about Matty Healy, who at the time was on tour with the 1975 in America, I believe. He had done something controversial, again, and we were talking about it. He was just on his phone, until I guess his break was over, at which point he stood up, said to Lizzie, who had a cigarette in her hand, "you can't smoke here," and then left. I didn't really think this was odd, because vaping in non-smoking places is pretty accepted in London (not sure about the rest of the world tbh), but the next time we were at the Grapes, there were a group of people on the deck with us who were told off for vaping. Thus, we see a theme appearing: the Grapes' internally tenuous opinions on smoking.
Because yes, despite the hostility, we went back, on Lizzie's impetus this time. It was Emmeline's party we were going to this time. Again, I began my patronage with a bad impression: I got there late, and Lizzie was on the deck, and had already bought a pint for me. I only discovered this, however, when I saw Lizzie frantically waving from the no-smoking deck and signalling that she'd already bought my pint. It was, however, all too late - my pint was being poured as she gesticulated. I, in turn,n tried to articulate this unfortunate timing via gesticulation out to her on the deck from the bar inside. She did not understand, and kept miming that she'd already bought my pint. I think an appropriate image is forming here: of two weirdo girls wildly flapping their arms at each other from about a hundred meters away and across a glass-door barrier. Real cool, Sa.
Like I said, some people were told off for vaping, and of course Lizzie was told off for smoking. The lady who did it though, this time, hadn't been there the time before. She said, "guys, I don't care if you smoke, but I have to tell you that you can't smoke here."
We were confused: was she secretly saying we could smoke or not? We decided that to avoid ambiguity we'd go out the front of the bar to stand and smoke and drink instead, but, of course, two minutes into us being out the front of the bar, she came out the front to say we couldn't be there with our drinks. No simultaneous indulgences to be enjoyed at the Grapes, it would seem. Again, she said, "guys, I don't care, but you can't drink out here."
Lizzie articulated the situation well. She said, "this lady seems to have a very strained relationship with the rules of the Grapes. Like a teacher who wants to gain the trust of her students, but is still privy to the strict rules of the school that will antagonise her in the eyes of her students." (Okay, I may have bolstered Lizzie's thesis with my own simile.)
She didn't take our drinks away though, so we stayed out there with our them. We'd sort of said we'd come back in when we'd finished the cigs we were on, and that compromised proved satisfactory. At one point, we bumped into Theo, who was walking past, which was a lovely surprise. And then the lady came back out, told some other people who were out there drinking and smoking that they couldn't be out there with their drinks, said she was new, and asked me for a cigarette.
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