BIT RANDOM

Friday evening had gotten off to a good start after I bumped into a local poet friend of mine, who recounted how, once, while playing King Duncan in Shakespeare's Macbeth for a school play, the J Man (cast as a Porter) momentarily forgot his lines and spat out the word "Fuck!" in anger, rousing the supposedly dead King from his eternal slumber.

He told the tale because I had it in my mind that the J Man should play Johnny Rooster in a local revival of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem.

"As long as he remembers his lines," the poet said drolly, still suffering from PTSD from his startled death scene as King Duncan.

Talking about Shakespeare in a spit-and-sawdust pub brought to mind My Darling Clementine, where Victor Mature's Doc Holliday recites a soliloquy from Hamlet to great effect.

Standing on the John Ford–like outside porch of the pub, overlooking its distant garden in the evening light, there was a mixture of grime and God: the coterie of assembled locals looked like mandrakes pulled from a mess of soil, while the sunset seemed almost heaven-sent.

Seated on either side of where my brother and I stood, poised with our flopping pints, were two Tibetans, one a heroic-looking warrior, the other a sanguine lama, his face hidden beneath the rim of a feathered hat.

Attempting a conversational opening gambit, I committed a geographical faux pas by asking if the warrior-looking dude was from Mongolia.

Shaking his head, he said, "Lhasa. We're both from Lhasa."

Pointing to his hat-wearing friend, he added, "His name is Dorjie."

I then committed my next faux pas, asking if his name derived from Dorjie Shugden, a demonic deity from the Bon tradition later fused with certain Tibetan Buddhist groups, something about which I had learned from my late father and a close Buddhist friend from school.

They both looked somewhat shocked at this sudden reference, and it fell to my brother to ingratiate himself with what he took to be holy men by glibly asking for the meaning of life.

It only took another round of pints to establish that the man, not Mongolian, was essentially an all-too-familiar party type, dispensing wisdom of the sort found inside a fortune cookie, though expressed sincerely enough to sound important. A spiritually lapsed Westerner will cling to any semblance of meaning, no matter how trite, if it is offered by someone from a far-flung land, especially one like Tibet, home to so many doyens of spiritual enlightenment.

Dorjie (a master guilder), seated next to me, however, seemed to possess an almost unworldly Yoda-quality, and it was hard not to slip into that familiar cliché of projecting mystique onto a man from the same place as the 14th Dalai Lama.

Weirdly, after going off on a tangent about my Buddhist father, I realised it was I who sounded like a seasoned Tibetan, not them. My forays into existential thought seemed to be confusing them, so I decided I'd revert to more typical Friday night pub banter.

My brother and Tenzin (the non-Mongolian), also a chef like my brother, exchanged numbers, before both our newly adopted Tibetan companions headed off to a reggae night at the nearby Brewery.

We, meanwhile, opted for a final nightcap at another pub next to a house we had both grown up in named after Trafalgar.

On the way down, I confessed to my empty-pocketed brother I had forgotten my bank card and left him to rustle up two pints out of thin air while we pretended not to know each other on the way in.

Running into the ex-girlfriend of a close friend, who greeted me with open arms, I couldn’t tell whether the man she was with was her new partner or a gay best friend. We discussed favourite movies while I tried to assess whether he or not he was an adversarial romantic foe to my pal.

My brother reappeared with two magically procured pints and forced his way into our awkward conversation about favourite films by claiming he could guess the man’s choice simply by looking at his face.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?"

The man smiled, recognising it as a solid choice and, unable to decide on his own final choice, settled for it.

Later that evening, my brother admitted he had wanted to say The Birdcage but had held back for fear of causing offence.

"Isn't One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest offensive in its implication?" I said.

The next day, my friend assured me the man wasn’t gay and that my gaydar was broken.

"Damn. That is a worry," I said.

From my lazy grouping of countries in inner Asia to my sudden inability to read people's sexual orientation, I wondered if I had slipped through some portal and become socially inept and reductive in my assessment of people and places.

Staggering up the hill through a darkened cemetery, guided only by the stars, I found myself reflecting that perhaps the next Dalai Lama might be found in the foothills of Stroud.

Hopefully, they won't call upon me to identify him.

With my recent form, I'd probably find him in Stonehouse.