18+. A personal account, not advice and not advertising: nothing mentioned here was paid for. Alcohol is harmful to your health.
There is a Krasnoe & Beloe near my building — one of those Russian corner liquor chains.
An ordinary shop in an ordinary residential district. Entrances, parking, a playground, people carrying bags home from work.
And there is Murphy’s and Guinness in the fridge.
For some reason I like the sheer fact that they are here.
Not because stout is some especially high culture. Rather the opposite.
You take a can of Guinness Draught, open it, and a small piece of engineering happens inside — something you could easily go your whole life without thinking about.
Inside the can there is a plastic nitrogen capsule, the widget. When the pressure drops after opening, it releases nitrogen through the beer. A strange motion appears: fine bubbles run through it in an almost solid stream, the drink looks alive and unstable at first, then settles under a dense pale head.
Murphy’s works on the same principle.
Which means someone once sat down and solved an engineering problem on purpose: how to put the sensation of draught Irish stout inside an aluminium can.
And then that can somehow made its way to a fridge in a Krasnoe & Beloe among Russian panel blocks.
That is exactly what I like.
The world turned out to be far less divided than it used to look.
There is this idea that certain things require the right setting.
Guinness belongs in a pub.
Good bread — in a small bakery.
Coffee — somewhere downtown.
Interesting architecture — on a trip.
Life — preferably somewhere else entirely.
And then you gradually notice that most of it is already scattered within a few hundred metres of your entrance.
Nobody just promised to arrange it into a beautiful scene for you.
You have to notice it yourself.
Here is good bread.
This old building somehow looks beautiful in the evening.
In the next courtyard a tree survived the entire new landscaping design and stayed the main object anyway.
Here is the bus stop.
There is the shop.
And in the fridge by the till there is Murphy’s.
Home starts expanding.
First the flat.
Then the landing.
The entrance.
The yard.
The neighbours.
The building chat with its eternal small state.
The management company.
The shop around the corner.
The route you walk so often that you already know where the puddle will be after rain.
At some point the district stops being the space between your flat and real life.
It becomes the life.
I liked Murphy’s even more than Guinness.
Guinness knows far too well that it is Guinness. An enormous image trails behind it: Dublin, the pub, the right glass, the right pour, the right wait.
Murphy’s is simpler.
You open the can.
You hear that ridiculous little capsule go off inside.
You pour.
You watch the stout settle for a few seconds.
And you sit down by the laptop.
No event at all.
More and more I like precisely the things that need no event.
No need to go downtown.
No need to look for a bar.
No need to schedule an evening.
No need to turn pleasure into a project.
Went downstairs.
Walked between the buildings.
Bought a can.
Came back.
There is an unexpected luxury to a residential district in this: an enormous amount of the world has already been delivered here and stands among completely unremarkable things.
Next to the mineral water.
The crisps.
The cat food.
The Russian lager on special offer.
And a small nitrogen capsule inside a can, invented so that thousands of kilometres from an Irish pub the beer would still come beautifully alive in the glass for a few seconds.
Territory probably becomes your own exactly like this.
Not when you start finding it beautiful.
But when you know why to step out of the entrance.