Opening Time
On friendship, routine, and the things we thought would always be there.
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
And some are no longer with us.