|
Getting togetherIn the olden days (sounds like the Middle Ages, doesn't it. let's say fifty years ago) when people were still young, the most popular spot was the lawn. It was so popular songs were written about it: "There are heaps of pals on top of the lawn" (which during one of the less popular wars became "There are heaps of lawn on top of the pals"). Those were the days of bonfires, drinking cheap coffee, smoking cheap cigarettes and singing songs. Very Baden-Powelish with circumcision (apart from the coffee, the cigarettes and the sex of course).
|
|
Another meeting place was the universal watering hole, i.e. the dining room in all its
reincarnations. Until a few years ago it was open all day and quite often illuminated - and
wastefully so - all day long.
|
|
And then, as Christopher Robin might have described it, we were rich. Not really, but we had
some spare money and so we built the clubhouse. Opened with blaring fanfares, better coffee,
biscuits, glossy magazines and a tv set, it seemed destined to draw people together forever. Like
many other things, it didn't work out that way.
The older kibbutzniks discovered that they could watch tv in more comfort at home, while the young generation thought a coffeehouse too staid and - frankly - boring. |
|
So they refurbished a former children's house, bought a pool table, two metre wide loudspeakers
and a few other necessaries such as wine glasses and opened a pub. Alcohol seemed to do the
trick for them, for a while at least. But with them getting married and starting families, it
seems the pub's destiny will be similar to the clubhouse's.
|
January, 2000