I was chatting on the IM with Stonch about this subject when he was thinking about it and I had to admit that it would be a hard one for me. Like the other bloggers for this edition of The Session, a lot of people go one about beer being a social lubricant and all but that's just not the way it is with me. Others talk about the gang going off beer hunting or brewing together. Not me. Once I had a few beers with the b-b-b-ster Greg Clow but for the most part this beer blogging stuff is a solitary pursuit.

It wasn't always so. When I was a lad the taverns, beverage rooms and other oddly named classes of Nova Scotian bar were a mainstay. Those were the days when me and my pals roamed the streets of Halifax looking for jugs of draught and some place to dance or sing. But I got moved away, married and had kids. And Canadian pub life, outside of a few downtown cores, is not really like that in the UK or even the residual neighbourhood bars you still find in small town American. Bars are for the young and the beer is a poor excuse. No place for a married man on the solitary hunt for that Baltic porter or the elusive Girardin gueuze.

So who is that beer pal of mine? One thing that I can't escape is that when the old crowd gets together whether it's just a few of us or a university reunion, there's plenty of brew around. But there's also that extra thing. It's like that the ringing bell of the extra fifth harmonious voice that makes or breaks a four person singing group. According to Pete Brown in Three Sheets to the Wind the Danish have a related word for the conviviality of the well maintained three beer buzz, hygge. But for a Maritime Canadian that extra thing is more reckless and vital - it's like a guy in the gang who's telling all the best jokes, letting you dance with the best looking girl, making sure you get home in a cab, ensuring there's aspirin in the morning. Except you never see him. Call him the trickster or Loki. Call him Jartleby. But in my pantheon, that's my beer pal - even if we rarely see each other anymore.

Like most of my theories, I assume my particular is actually a fine example of the general - one of the best in fact. I assume that unseen elf that shadowed the gang back then is but one of a great nation of beer elves that help those in need, in need of beer or from beer or due to beer. Who is this creature other than the Green Man? Given my immigrants' kid rearing with whispers of changelings and selkies, trolls under bridges and eyes that cross when the wind changes, why wouldn't any sort of delayed adolesence have its own wee or shadow folk, too? It has to be the Green Man.