I just came back from my bar, although I am probably going to post this after reading it again in the morning. I have said it before, but I love my pub. I love the people there.

There is K., the geophysicist that my daughter thinks is a miner. The one who claims that his trips to Azerbaijan, where he sometimes teaches about inverse problems, have nothing to do with him having had some mysterious disease that kept him away for 3 weeks. The one with 2 dogs and 3 cats, who at some point spent 3 hours in Svalbard and 3 weeks in Greenland, and keeps raving about Claude. He is looking forward to early retirement, with the plan being to play Irish fiddle and mandolin. His wife, H., is a lawyer, and her friend, who sometimes also shows up, is also a lawyer. Another one runs a clothing store around the corner. Although H. is really small and slight, she is totally into rugby, having played it while growing up near Toulouse.

There is G., the florist from Saint-Malo, the one who knows each and every one of the medieval castles in the west of France. He also knows all the good crêperies near those castles. He is into photography and is still incensed because years ago somebody described his grandparents as fascists just because they bought a new TV to watch De Gaulle’s funeral. G. takes care of K. & H.’s dogs and cats when they are gone, and often stands by the counter with L., drinking sometimes a beer and sometimes a spritz. H. drinks spritz and L. drinks beer.

L. is a grave digger, and today he was complaining about his knee hurting because he had to walk a lot during his job. Maybe also because his legs got messed up when he was a parachutist. In between, he was a bricklayer. In any case, his daughter makes handmade shoes for Chanel, sometimes having to cross the Channel twice in a day to go to London: once to deliver the shoes, and another because there was some unexpected issue. She wants to eventually stop doing that and open a bookstore instead.

There is “il Napolitano,” who looks like a Napolitano, is named like that most famous baseball player ever, but has never been to Italy. He works in the factory producing the bills they use in Venezuela or Congo. Apparently, they don’t transport the banknotes in the middle of the night, when the streets are empty, but rather during rush hour, when all the streets are clogged and a robber would have a hard time driving away. Pro tip if you wanted to rob a money truck: no need to wake up too early.

There is F., who is so shy that nobody talked to her—besides a Swiss guy who might have wanted something more than conversation—until L. talked to her. L. might want something more than conversation, but maybe not. Who knows? Who can read the mind of a grave digger? She moved for love to Rennes, the love dissolved away, and now she is a secretary in the University Hospital here.

There is M., an electronic musician from London who seems to think that math is very important for whatever he does. I sometimes see in the pub another musician whom I know because he does after-school help at the same place I go. Another woman, V., who at some point was a well-known mathematician’s ex-wife’s Ph.D. student but then gave up, also does homework help, and I saw her a few times in the pub. Although that was during the summer, while an Icelander who seemed to have come to Rennes just to sit in the pub was also around.

There is the guy who used to go to the being’s school to take care of that bunch of savages for an hour after lessons. He keeps telling me how nice and smart the being is. I smile politely, with some pity, thinking, “If you knew…”

There is D., the Irish guy, who, like many of these people, is flawlessly bilingual because he grew up halfway between Ireland and France. He likes scuba diving and fishing, and before I go later this year to Dublin, I will ask him where to get the best beer. He will have some sort of discussion with K., the miner, because they both will have very clear ideas about where to get the best Guinness. Listening to them, you could be under the impression that Guinness is handcrafted in each individual pub. You could think that the decisive centimeter is not a reference to height or other physical attributes, but rather to the length of the tube between the keg and the tap. I will listen politely—and amused—and do as D. says because, at the end of the day, he is a bartender and not a miner.

There are actually a bunch of bartenders. There is the Irish guy, who, like all Irish, is friendly and smiley but also vaguely scary. I don’t remember his name. At the end, the only actual names I remember, like for example Pekka Pankka, invariably have the musicality of nicknames.

There is also another K.—this time blond and also a bartender. Crazy and adorable. And she has a sister who speaks Spanish without an accent whatsoever—other than from Central America—and works for something like the WHO somewhere in Africa. Anyway, K. is funnily and adorably nuts. A spark of light. But nuts. In any case, she is friends with a math graduate student who loves category theory and commutes from 100 km away because he had a hard time finding a suitable place in Rennes.

There is the guy who looks like a beach boy and sounds imperial. I guess that this is why I thought he came from Australia, but he is actually from New Zealand and into cricket. He was hanging out today with the British guy from Peterborough—not Peterloo of massacre fame, as I thought—who also used to be a bartender but now teaches English language and American history in a swanky private middle school. He has a mullet, but when he teaches, he ties it into a man bun.

I love my pub.