Ben Machell takes the Overground back to his childhood

I got drunk in Hampstead the other night. I hadn’t planned to, only I had a longstanding commitment to meet up with a childhood friend for a drink. The problem was that he lives in Fulham and I live in Hackney, so we decided to meet in the middle. And the middle, we concluded, was more or less Hampstead. This whole decision-making process played-out like a scene from a war film, where the generals crowd around a map and eventually one of them prods their finger down and says, ‘Here! Here is where we will make our stand!’ And then the camera zooms in on this unassuming place that is about to become the site of a bloodbath.

The other reason we picked Hampstead was that it meant we both got to ride the Overground. We both love the Overground. I experience a powerful dopamine release whenever I glide around the capital’s arterial rail routes and, having quickly necked a can before leaving the house, I felt borderline euphoric. I glanced at my Instagram and noticed that my friend was also on his way — he had posted a photo of London’s largest crane, snapped as he passed Earl’s Court, so I knew he was as psyched as I was.

We arrived at the pub. I never went to a liberal, co-educational boarding school, but sat in that Hampstead beer garden, I was starting to build a picture. The girls all looked like Joss Stone stunt doubles, and every single guy looked like a brief favourite of Elizabeth I: tousle-haired, charming, but with a quiet air of anxiety about them. I was twice mistaken for a member of pub staff by these people, who would come up and casually inform me that the outside heaters weren’t working or that their food had yet to arrive. I don’t blame them. My aesthetic is, I realise, increasingly that of a weary bar shift manager.

Anyway, my friend and I got drunk, just like we used to, sat in our local churchyard gulping down Malibu. And it didn’t really feel so different. Okay, we talked about our children and the Overground more than we used to. But other than that? It was football, our parents, idiots at school, the future. Same old same old, really. We parted with wobbly roadside hugs. It’s good to keep these commitments, even if it means going to Hampstead. There are worse places in the world.