6. The Pipistrelle

The stage for much of life

Always and forever

And there on the corner of the King’s Way thoroughfare, that two lane riverbed, with its back to the action, is the pub, the watering hole, The Pipistrelle, with its Tudor frontage (mock or not, nobody knows) and door off to the side that looks like the gap in the teeth of a grinning old man. A pub famed for its age – the oldest in the town of New Port, bricks and mortar since 1326 and pulling mugs of booze since the sixteenth century; first off, a chapel or some such place of worship when the town had walls back in the thirteen hundreds. The name, so the story goes, comes from an instance of a family of bats living in the belfry who would not be convinced to vacate or relocate (a cathedral was built on the hill and so the centralisation of Divine adulating was relocated). Because of these bats, the place was not pulled down, it stayed up as it was meant to be, saved by a sentimental old magistrate, a man of nature and a hobbyist of science who ordered the property be made use of. And it was, as a commercial dwelling of various incarnations - it has sold buns and iron and haberdashery over time, until around five hundred years ago it became an inn and then a pub and that was that, and the name was in honour of the temple’s most dedicated inhabitants now a thousand generations down the line.

Nowadays, apart from the fag machine and the diddler, most agree little has changed. Someone — name long lost — said The Pipistrelle, like the bat, is for people who only come out at night and flit about erratically. It’s stood there centuries, in heat and hale, in war and peace, and it stands there now the tarmac is melting from the curb out front of it. It’s open, and it’s cool inside. Beautifully cool and the air is balanced and thin.

And here ends the opening. The opening that ends with an opening. So. let’s go… to The Pipistrelle…

[camera pans slowly from the light to the dark to the light, kind of like Michael Powell might have done]