By You and your mate are bang on time for your pre-booked two-hour slot at the Dog and Duck. You're led to your table by a PPE-encased member of bar staff around the one-way system, which everyone who doesn't work there keeps forgetting about. It felt a bit weird heading past all the walk-ups waiting outside, like having queue-jump at a daytime club, but it's good to be back. It's the pub! The bloody pub!
The pair of you sit side by side, a perspex screen along the centre of the table separating you from the rest of the pub. You can see someone you play five-a-side with sometimes at the other end of the bar, but you can't pop over and say hello. The jukebox is off, so you don't raise your voice and spray anything on anyone. The wait for the toilet is making you itch. You ask for a bottle of ketchup for your onion rings, and are presented with sad little sachets.
Pubs can reopen from 4 July in England, which should be a joyous moment of national reconnection with its truest and stupidest urges. Plus, and after missing out on Easter, Pride, two bank holidays and the sunniest April and May in forever, the pubs could do with the money. It's one of the more enjoyable ways of propping up capitalism.
Instead, it feels like the pivotal scene in a future Adam Curtis documentary about the great collapse of the 2020s, where B-roll of Boris Johnson fixing his tie is intercut with shots of people going "WAHEYYY" while filing slowly into Wetherspoons, and pints being poured, and coronavirus patients on ventilators, and Monty Don talking about his dead dog.
Partly it'll be the social distancing and enforced separation, partly the unease of being in a public place after more than a hundred days of being bollocked from all directions about staying inside. There's also the low-level thrum of knowing that we're in no way out of the woods yet, and that this is a rather forced way of making it look like everything's been handled so expertly that we're ready to go back to normal.
You might assume that pubs are all rejoicing at the prospect of opening up again, but there's some trepidation too.
Some are opting out of the potential chaos which could unfold on 4 July entirely. Newcastle has a well deserved reputation as a party-loving city, but the city's Ouseburn valley is home to several pubs and bars which don't want any part it. The Tyne Bar, right on the bank of the river, is one.
"We are genuinely concerned that this could be a day of total chaos for the pub trade and, like our mates at The Cluny, we’ve decided it’s not worth the risk," says a message on the bar's Facebook page.
"In all good conscience, there is a very real possibility of absolute mayhem occurring on Saturday 4th, and we don't wish to contribute to that," The Cluny's page added. "It will do neither staff nor customers, or society at large, any favours."
Instead they're waiting. Two other pubs in the Ouseburn ecosystem, the Cumberland Arms and the Free Trade Inn, haven't set dates for reopening. It's a microcosm of the debates that are happening all over the country. How many staff do we take off furlough? How many can we actually operate with? Too few and people will get pissed off waiting for table service; too many and slow weekdays will start to drain weekend takings.
Fundamentally, though, what you're going back to will not be the pub. The pub isn't just the building or the beers or the scampi fries. It's the weird way that time warps and stretches over a long session. It's the unexpected collisions with people you know and people you really want to know. It's hubbub and community.
Those things won't be there. There are still ways of supporting brewers and pubs without sitting in them – try Camra's Pulling Together map of places doing home delivery, or checking where you can get takeaway cartons from.
You want to go to the pub. I want to go to the pub. But frankly, it doesn't feel safe, and this Saturday is only going to tell us how far away the actual pub you know and love is.
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