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Half a Guinness, please.

I’ll bring it over to you.

Thanks - I’ll be outside.

Right you are.

He walked past the bar and to the door that led outside. The door was wedged open by a doorstop in the shape of a sleeping sausage dog. There were a couple of people inside, but most were outside. It was sunny and the beer garden outside was in bloom. Bees flickered about, diving in and out of flowers of infinite variety. A butterfly sat serene on a low hanging cone of vivid purple buddliea. He sat by the smallest table he could see and pulled out his copy of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. There was a hum in the air and he felt good. It was nice to be outside again, within the vicinity of company, of other people - just being able to overhear snatches of conversation made him feel human again. He heard someone laughing. It had been a long couple of months; stuck indoors, nothing much to do but twiddle the thumbs, watch TV and wait. Well, the waiting had to come to an end, and normality had to begin again, and here it was. Sort of. The sticky tape on the floor was all a bit odd - as were the arrows pointing this way and that, telling you which way to enter and which way to exit. Like life, he thought. The perspex in front of the bar staff was a bit unsettling, as well. It all felt artificial and unreal. Like the football that he’d watched the other night: a proper game, with proper crowd noise, but it was all make-believe. It was as if he’d fallen into a rabbit hole and was now existing in an alien world where people kept their distance, and anxiety and paranoia was the default position to take. The whole business still had the air of an unreal dream - like he’d just closed his eyes and woken up in another time. His Guinness arrived. He took a sip and felt the creamy foamy head on his lip. Over the tops of the birch trees he watched the sky turn mauve as the sun fell deeper into the sky.