T he great war correspondent Martha Gellhorn once said, “In England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs.”

So pull up a stool. Here’s a story of London, November 2019, in three pints.

Two weeks ago I found myself back at one of my old haunts, the Rising Sun on Tottenham Court Road, drinking a pint of bitter. It had been my “local” during the “Winter of Discontent,” in early 1979, when the trash collectors went on strike, then the lorry drivers, then the gravediggers. By that summer Prime Minister James Callaghan was out, and Margaret Thatcher was in.

I was a student then. It was the coldest winter since 1963, and I remember walking through the snow, looking for a place to live, the wind howling. One night I called Pennsylvania from one of those red British phone boxes. My mother told me that my father’s cancer had returned. Don’t come home, she said. You enjoy yourself!

Later I thawed out by a gas fire in the Rising Sun. An old man who lived in the flat above the bar offered me counsel. His bulldog lay on the floor. “Everybody dies,” he suggested.