After a year of lockdown, I’ve found a place to belong again

I recently was pleased to learn that my local pub, which I had believed to have closed down due to the pandemic – is in fact well up and running and still doing a healthy trade.

This auspicious place is the Sandton Brazen Head, and I gained the mistaken impression that it had perished due to its almost secretive social media profile, and a fire that affected the premises around October last year.

Then, I happened to have an hour to kill in the Sandown area and I thought, “Let me just make sure that place is actually closed…”

What a joy it was to find it fully operational. English football constantly on the big screens, Thulani dispensing Castle Draughts, and table of friends swopping stories long into the night.

I was welcomed back into the fold like a lost, but repentant family member. I rejoined friends old a new on the long table, and we got back to business.

The staff numbers seem a bit slimmer, but by and large, the place has survived the pandemic. Pleasantly thrilled at the surprise news, I have recommitted myself to keeping the Brazen Head in business.

I have bars nearer to my house that are far more fashionable, with a more youthful and conventionally attractive clientele. Restaurants mere metres from my home offer more sophisticated fare. If I want to hang out with streetwise hipsters and people who are borderline famous, I can always go to Melville.

But the people at that table with its rubber tablecloth and the rickety railing and the décor that hasn’t changed much in the decade I’ve been going there, they offer me something I’ve been unable to find anywhere else on the Johannesburg hospitality firmament: a sense of belonging.

Perhaps I feel that need more urgently these days, after this past year spent largely in the lounge of my modest Morningside flat. Maybe the need for companionship is stronger than it has been before, but being able to hang with my friends again is one of the more joyful things I have experienced in a while.

In Covid times, this kind of companionship comes with its own risks – if not mortal danger – and I do my best to follow safety protocols as far as reasonably possible when visiting the Brazen. I also try to ration my visits, perhaps a fortnightly pop-in where, previously I’d be in there every couple of days.

But I find myself longing to once again belong. It appears that from the utter depths of lockdown, where many of us were forced into solitude and isolation, our rehabilitation has first meant to simply have contact with other humans. The final phase of it is about once again being part of something larger than yourself.

This, sadly, has been the part of our humanity that has been denied for the longest, because it often means gathering in groups. To worship, to celebrate, to bond. To play sport, to go to a club, to attend a mass event… and in so doing to affirm our identity.

In a lot of ways, who we are is tied to the idea of whom we gather with. When “gathering” is suddenly prohibited, we start to drift. Rudderless.

You can survive like that for a while, but eventually it’s an urgent need. Maybe as we return from lockdown we are working our way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Initially, we retreated into our respective holes to focus on our basic, physiological requirements. Our immediate need for safety trumped our higher needs for belonging, for achieving, for purpose.

Now it’s time to start dreaming of that belonging, of being part of something. I have chosen to start dreaming at the Sandton Brazen Head. Just once every couple of weeks, for now.

Hagen Engler.