Friday Night's Alright for Fighting

The pub I work in is a North London prosecco-serving, 16-quid-for-a-steak, riddled-with-children-with-ridiculous-names gastro pub. It is by no means a spit and saw dust affair and often bears more resemblance to a Creche than a boozer.

This all changed last Friday. I pottered off to start my 6-close shift blissfully unaware that the restaurant section was booked for a wedding party. They'd been there since 3pm, and were all getting proper stuck in. Jager-bombs all round. Yikes. So when they were still going worryingly strong at midnight, the landlord decided to serve for another hour. This was a huge mistake.

At about quarter past midnight some drunken oaf pushed into some other drunken oaf and something along the lines of What the fuck did you call my wife/brother/mother/best mate? was just about overheard before all hell broke loose.

One of the 'contenders' was apparently some kind of local businessman, and five of his employees were drinking in the corner. They saw someone attacking their boss, and perhaps with dreams of a pay rise in mind, all jumped in to 'help'. It didn't help. What started as text-book drunk argie-bargie turned into a full-on brawl, that moved en masse around the pub knocking over stools, smashing glasses and most worryingly, at one point reaching over the bar in an attempt to grab the 16-pound-steak knives.

This was when I asked to call the cops. I've never had to call 999 before. It's really weird. Firstly, even though people were stamping on each other and stools were flying, I still felt guilty in case I was wasting police time and stopping someone else getting through - the film they showed us at school about a boy dying because of a hoax fire call is clearly rather deeply ingrained. Secondly, I have no idea how they recruit for call centre staff, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a night-time gig for the HSBC lot. The lady I spoke to seemed completely unable to understand the urgency of the situation, instead just commenting over and over on 'how awfully loud it was'. Indeed. 30 men trying to break each other does tend to make a bit of a racket.

I was shocked at how scary it all was. The Mary Whitehouse cliche of violence being all around us is actually pretty true: in cartoons, in movies, at school, on the news, on the street - everyone's seen a fight or two.
But when a heap of grown men are trying do each other real harm, metres in front of your face, it really is quite different. The noise of a proper punch against breaking skin is really quite sickening, and unlike on TV, if you drop an anvil (or bar stool) on someone's head, they don't get straight back up unscathed.

The police eventually turned up, but the ringleaders had legged it by then and were long gone. No-one needed an ambulance, but the next couple of days revealed two broken noses and the truly-horrible sounding 'pinning-back-on' of someone's thumb.

So, what did we all learn? That Elton is wrong, and Saturday night is no longer the choice night for a ruckus. That violence isn't big or clever.... and neither are the old ladies manning the emergency phones.

x

Thoughts on turning 27...I am not a number, I am a free woman!

So, yours truly is now one year closer to the grave... or thirty - the jury's still out on which one's more scary.

But what may well be even scarier, no jury needed, is the fact that at 27, I am once again working in a pub.

I've never had a career plan, or any other kind of plan for that matter, but after a degree, nearly six years of proper employment, a post-grad journalism thingy, and God knows how many internships I thought I might be doing more than serving prosecco in a pub I can no longer afford to drink in.

All of my friends have been super supportive throughout the entire no job, no money, pub-monkey journey I've been making, but I am very aware that in certain circles it definitely wouldn't have been the same. The university, year travelling, graduate scheme, then job trajectory seems pretty ingrained in my generation's psyche, and even more worryingly, the idea of being completely defined by one's job.

When people ask 'what do you do?' I have come to realise that they don't really want to know what you do, they want to know what you get paid for. I write all manner of music reviews and other waffle for all manner of print and online magazines, but because I don't get paid for the massive majority of it, I am not a writer, I am a simple pub-monkey. Weird, no?

One thing that I have learnt from the pub (apart from how to make a Jager-bomb - just say no, kids..) is that this judgy, linear, career mentality is happily lacking in other countries. I regularly work alongside a Hungarian 30-something lady who is doing her final year on a photo journalism course, a 35 year old Spanish trainee hypnotist and a 28-year old South African who will start a four-year law course in September.

They don't think it's weird that I'm 27 and work in a pub. They don't think it's weird that at 35 they still work in a pub: It's a pretty fun job and it enables them to do what they want to do.

And although things are less than ideal, in a way, it enables me to do what I want to do - write stuff. Yes, it would be lovely if I had a cheque through the door for everything I wrote, but for now, at least I'm writing, and can even afford to buy branded soup. That's living.

So for now, I shall keep calm and carry on. For as the one-time underage plaything of R.Kelly, Aaliyah, once said, age is indeed nothing but a number.

Happy Birthday to me. x