On Routine (I): Friday Night Swimming

About routines, how you come to them, and flirting with the idea of becoming a café regular

The first of a short series on routines - sticking to them, changing them, and making new ones.

Every Friday evening during the school year, I cajole the children into the bike by 18.40. I cycle them up the hill to the local municipal swimming pool and wave them through the door by 18.50. By 18.55 I’m sitting in the pub around the corner with a beer in front of me and a book in my hand. By 19.45, I’ll have finished the second of two beers, made no headway in the book, paid up at the bar, and be out the door so I’m back at the pool for the end of class at 20.00. Then it’s pile them back in the bike, and cycle them home where my Friday night routine ends and their bedtime routine begins. Lather, rinse, and repeat the following Friday.

As Friday nights go, it’s not exactly riveting. To me though it’s hard-won time out of the house when I can just sit without having to worry about where I need to be or what I need to do. It is, as most routines are, comforting. I go into the café still buzzing from the work week, and cross the threshold an hour later buzzing from the beer and ready for the weekend. But for something that’s now become so embedded in my weekly routine, it took a while getting here.

When the kids first started going to their Friday evening swimming classes, I’d sit upstairs in the swimming pool bar - every Brussels pool has one - rarely if ever buying anything. In 2020 the pandemic put a stop to that; classes eventually returned, but it was longer before the pool’s bar reopened. In those shaggy months in 2021 I went instead on long walks around the neighbourhood. Sometimes I took some cans with me and I would on my walks seek out a bench to sit and drink and listen to some or other podcast for the hour I had. When the swimming pool café finally reopened, their policy had changed. Now it was drink or leave.

I left, figuring if I had to buy a drink, I might as well do it somewhere nicer. About 500 metres from the pool, down a residential side-street, I knew there was a one-room café that might fulfil the brief. It’s a proper neighbourhood Brussels estaminet, one which I’d been to several times before with friends who lived nearby. I knew it had a good beer selection, and that in the early evening it was never very busy so I’d be able to get a table to myself. It had a gas fire in the winter, a dartboard, some nice tiling, Dutch-speaking staff, and room for 20 people across five tables with some stools for more at the bar. As Belgian bars go, the decoration was minimalist, but the large plate glass window was a great portal through to watch the streets outside. It’s a good writer’s pub, because it’s never very noisy or crowded in my timeslot, save for the classic ‘90s music on the radio. But because it was small I also felt like it was an intimate sort of place, somewhere you couldn’t sneak in unnoticed. The kind of place with regulars.

I’ve never been a regular. I don’t have the knack. Growing up we weren’t big pub goers, my single mother having her hands full bringing up three children, and I failed to develop the habit when I got older. It clashes, I think, with what some people might call a pathological desire on my part for privacy - my business is my own, and on-one else’s. Having spent a lot of time on my own as a child, I became very good at convincing myself I was happier in my own company.  If I go to a bar by myself, it is to be by myself. There are times when this has meant that I undoubtedly have come off as rude to other people in the same bar as me, people who go to the pub expressly - if I understand their pathology - to talk to strangers.

Overcoming this attitude is not always easy; with it tends to come odd, intrusive thoughts. Do the bar staff expect conversation from me? What if someone tries to talk to me, what do I do? Do they make a wager between them whether I’ll show up this Friday? What if I struggle with my Dutch and start speaking English? Of course, they probably don’t think any of these things - judging from my interactions, they’re very nice and normal people. 

These are not the thoughts of an ordered mind, and it’s not an attitude that has served me very well; I know I’m missing out on some essential aspect of pub drinking. So part of committing to this routine is to confront this way of thinking and overcome it - exposure therapy, if you’d like. But also, alongside my desire to be left alone I also have a contradictory one whereby sometimes I do want people to come up to me. I know there’s a vanity to this, wanting other people to make the effort but being unwilling or unable to reciprocate. Where that comes from, beyond vanity, I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s a desire to be around people but not among them; to put myself into a situation where the latent potential for talk is there if I want it, but it comes with no obligations. And that’s what this place provides. They are friendly, happy to let me alone if that’s the aura I’m giving off, but equally open to chat about the darts on the TV if I’m up for making an effort.

That’s a lot of psychological baggage to attach to the decision about going for a beer or not while your kids are at swimming class. I’m sometimes still surprised I managed to make it, as there have been many other, similar scenarios in which I have declined the opportunity for exposure therapy. I’m glad I did. Now, that Friday night hour has become so firmly embedded into my weekly routine that that hour in the pub by myself is verging on ritual. I have my preferred seat - the one at the table between the gas fire and the large plate glass window. I have the beer that I always order; or at least I did, until they stopped serving Cornet and I had to switch, after a brief dalliance with Estaminet and Rodenbach, to Zinnebir. 

As the kids have gotten older and I’ve become no longer needed in the changing rooms, I’ve even managed to push that out to two Zinnebir. And like every ritual, I get itchy if I’ve not been able to perform it - if there isn’t any swimming that Friday, or I’m joined by someone else, or the horrifying scenario when I turned up one Friday only to find the pub occupied by a birthday party with my seat taken and I had to sit on a stool at the bar of all places.

There is comfort in this ritual. It might sound boring, evidence I’m slipping into an early mid-life rut, to put such store in a quick beer while the kids are swimming. But I had a pretty tumultuous childhood, and with age has come the slow realisation that many of the decisions I have taken about my life have been influenced by a desire for an uneventful life. Some people might consider this a cowed existence, but in reality it’s just the next step in my long, slow march towards predictability. 

It was Covid that really brought home to me how much stock I put into routine, into the structure that the predictable passage of time provides. Some of this being a parent of young children; they will put order on anyone’s life, with school runs, after-school activities. My Friday night beer wasn’t the only routine I picked up during the pandemic - I started getting up at 6.15 so I had some time alone before the start of the day, and began eating the same thing for breakfast every morning (porridge with a banana and some chocolate granola) - but it’s the one that’s stuck around the longest.

Now, I don’t always follow my routine - there are days when I do choose to do something else on a Friday - but there’s a comfort in knowing I can fall back into it. 

Recently, because of renovations at home, we have temporarily moved out of our house, and my routines have collapsed. But, at least until the school year wraps in June, Friday night swimming remains a fixture in my calendar. And, purely coincidentally, our new digs are on the same street as the pub. Because it’s now so close, I’ve even given thought to the idea of going in for a beer on some other night. I wonder what they’d make of that? They probably wouldn’t think anything at all.

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Miscellaneous notes

• I’ve been a bit coy in talking around the bar in question, but I’m pretty sure they and others will know where I’m referring to - I just worry about spoiling the magic - I value my anonymity!

• It’s Paddy’s Day this Sunday, and for Pints and Panels I drew up a definitive list of what beers to drink with which classic Irish food. Chicken filet roll and DIPA for me please!

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