Five thirty on a Friday
and the whole office changed personality.

Ties loosened.
Top shirt buttons undone.
Somebody already at the bar
before everyone else had even stood up from their desk.

By six o’clock,
we were wedged around the same tables again,
talking too loudly
like the pub had been built specifically for us.

There was always one saying
they were taking it easy tonight.

Nobody ever was.

The first pint disappeared quickly.
The second barely needed ordering.

By the third,
everyone had become an expert on something.

Football.
Politics.
Women.
Music.
How life should be lived.

We spoke with the kind of confidence
only young men possess.

The sort that sounds convincing
right up until life proves otherwise.

And God, we were loud back then.

Not cruel.
Not bad people.

We simply mistook attention
for connection.

The weekends always felt enormous.

Birthdays that lasted two days.
Taxi rides that felt like part of the night out itself.
Curry houses at midnight.
Standing outside bars pretending not to be freezing
because nobody wanted to go home first.

And every Monday morning
we dragged ourselves back into the office
half-dead, badly dressed, surviving on coffee,
already talking about Friday again.

Nobody needed to arrange friendship.

That’s the part I miss most.

It simply existed.

Waiting every morning
under fluorescent lights
and the smell of burnt toast
from the office kitchen nobody cleaned properly.

Then five thirty arrived
and we became ourselves again.

Or who we thought we were.

How desperate some of us were
to be the funniest,
the loudest,
the one everybody noticed
when we walked into the room.

I was definitely one of them.

And sometimes,
if I’m honest,
I crossed lines without noticing.

Said things I thought were funny.
Talked too much.
Listened too little.

You only see yourself properly later on,
when the room is quieter
and there’s nobody left laughing.

And because the nights kept repeating,
because the same faces stayed around the same tables,
because every Thursday and Friday
arrived exactly as expected,

we started believing
this was simply what life was.

Permanent.

Same pub.
Same people.
Same stories growing slightly less true
every time we told them.

Somebody always arriving late.
Somebody always trying to leave early
and failing.

Someone feeding coins into the fruit machine
like it owed them money.

And somewhere in all that noise
was the quiet certainty
that everybody around the table
would still be there next week.

We mistook routine for forever.

Now the office is gone.

The pub is different.

Some of the names
would take me a minute to remember.

Some I’d recognise immediately
if they walked through the door.

Sometimes a song comes on.

Or somebody mentions a place.

And for a second
I can still see us there.

Twenty-five years old.

Certain about everything.

Laughing too loudly.

Ordering another round

Certain next Friday
was guaranteed.

Mark Nicholson

When I wrote Closing Time, I found myself thinking about endings.

Opening Time goes back to the beginning.

To the years when friendship required no planning, weekends felt endless, and next Friday seemed as certain as tomorrow morning.

It’s the second piece in my 12-part Closing Time story.

Mark

I’ve been writing for most of my adult life.

Songs mostly.

Sometimes poems.

Usually notes scribbled in notebooks, on phones, on scraps of paper, or on the backs of beer mats.

Most of them never went anywhere.

Not because they weren’t important.

Because I wasn’t ready to share them.

For years, writing was something I did for myself. A way of making sense of things. A way of remembering. A way of understanding moments that didn’t seem important at the time but refused to leave me alone afterwards.

The older I’ve become, the more I’ve realised that the stories which stay with us are rarely the dramatic ones.

They’re the ordinary moments.

A conversation at a bar.

Floodlights over wet grass on a cold evening.

A friend you haven’t spoken to in years.

The smell of chlorine from a swimming pool café.

A text message that arrives too late.

The person you used to be.

Stories, Songs & Second Chances exists because some of those moments deserve a place to live.

Some pieces here will be poems.

Some will be essays.

Some may begin with football, pubs, music, family, business or friendship and end up somewhere completely different.

The themes tend to remain the same.

Memory.

Belonging.

Ambition.

Loss.

Regret.

Second chances.

Not because my life is unusual.

Because I suspect those things are universal.

If you’ve ever looked back at a version of yourself and wondered what happened to them, you’ll probably recognise some of what appears here.

If you’ve ever missed somebody you thought would always be around, you’ll probably recognise some of it too.

The first piece published here was Closing Time.

I thought it was a poem about pubs when I started writing it.

It turned out to be about endings.

That seems fitting.

Because this publication isn’t really about any one subject.

It’s about the things we carry with us.

The stories we tell ourselves.

And the ones we’re finally ready to tell other people.

Thank you for reading.

Welcome to Stories, Songs & Second Chances.

Mark Nicholson

Closing Time

The glass is still cold.

Somebody is laughing too loudly
at the end of the table.

An old song plays through pub speakers
nobody has properly listened to in years.

Someone is already asking for one more
like they always do.

And that’s the problem with closing time.

You never realise it’s happening
until much later.

One Friday becomes every few months.
Every few months becomes Christmas, maybe.
Then somebody sends a message saying:

We should all get together soon.

And the strange thing is,
they mean it when they send it.

Some stop coming out.
Some move away.
Some become faces online
you stare at for a few seconds too long.

Everything has a closing time.

The office where you learned
to sound more confident than you felt.

The mates you saw every day
until one day you didn’t.

The version of yourself
who needed every room to hear him
because silence felt too much
like disappearing.

Anger, if you are lucky.

Jealousy.

Blaming the world
because it was easier
than admitting you were frightened.

Football in the park.

Chips from the swimming pool café
with too much salt
after an hour in the water.

Running home from school discos
convinced somebody might be following you.

And then, sometimes,
closing time is not gentle at all.

The girl you should have believed.

The second you realised
you had broken something
in the way she looked at you.

Not anger.

Worse.

Like the person she thought you were
had disappeared in front of her.

There are things
an apology cannot put back.

You learn from them.
You carry them.
You become quieter in places
where you used to be loud.

Then life goes on,
which is the strangest part.

Bins go out.
Bills arrive.

Someone still asks
if you want another pint
five minutes after the bell,
as if that has ever worked.

I used to think closing time
was the end of a night out.

Lights up.

Music cut mid-song.

Chairs stacked badly
by people trying to help.

But owning a pub taught me otherwise.

I’ve stood on both sides of it.

I’ve been the one asking to stay,
and the one counting glasses,
wiping tables,
turning locks,
letting the silence back in.

Maybe everything has a closing time.

Not one great ending.

Thousands of small ones
arriving quietly
while we are laughing,
or working,
or looking the other way.

Still, things find their way back.

A song.

A smell.

A street name.

Floodlights over wet grass.

Chlorine on a winter afternoon.

And for a few seconds
you are there again.

Not younger exactly.

Not forgiven.

Not fixed.

Just close enough
to touch the life
that made you,

and far enough away
to know you cannot stay.

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