Westminster culture is one thing to observe, but not, perhaps, as a tourist.
It doesn’t behove many people to enjoy the political ‘culture’ that any nation has, as if politics is enjoyable, or produces moments that are as sublime as our own, in our own lives, that we make with each other.
I suppose any job produces its ‘highlights’ that go down in the history of the office as worth having had, and pockmarking the banal moments and the boring periods worth forgetting is important to keeping things going, in other words.
I suppose Westminster has its own way of marking ‘events’, or moments to cover epochs of its own it would rather forget. It isn’t necessarily easy to make decisions for other people, as if it goes down well that some win, and some loose out.
Imagine this happens hundreds of times a year, and you get the point. People are not happy with the way things are for them, according to their ‘scorecard of democracy’, so to speak, and it gets worse as other people have their time to speak and make a louder noise as a result.
This is gruelling stuff, surely. So, it makes sense to have to deal with it in other ways, in having and enjoying lighter moments, such as this pub I’m in, in Westminster, called St. Stephen’s Tavern.
It’s a small pub, but it sits in a very busy corner of Westminster, and must have seen its fair share of ‘interesting’ characters, both foreign and domestic, who wanted to make their mark on a visit, a tour, or an excursion during lunch, in a pub.
I can imagine it’s worth stopping by in, on a day when work is little more pressing, but then, Westminster has its own bars inside its own walls, so it’s not compulsory. It’s just a part of the way we do things here, as well in other places, but very much our own, too.