The road to Avalon - Bring the noise

I went on a works night out last night.  If I thought the days where I work were noisy, you should see the nights.

It's not the kind of evening I like really.  Loud music, booze, drinks getting spilled (I had to work hard to override my desire to wipe them up, not really my job last night).

It was a lot like going back in time.  It was pretty much like the nights out I used to go on in the 80s except without the fear of being refused entry for being underage.  Oh, and there seem to be more different colours of drinks now.  Some people were already drunk when I arrived.  The plan seemed to be to get more sober during the course of the evening.  I think it's a recession thing.  Getting pre-drunk. It's cheaper in the long run.

And with the benefit of modern technology, you don't have to rely on hazy half-remembered memories anymore.  Most evenings I went on when I was younger, you were lucky if you could remember them afterwards.  I once woke up in somebody's laundry room on a pile of ironing, I'm not sure how I got there.  Now everything is recorded instantly on digital cameras and iphones, so even if I had been drinking I would probably have been able to track my whereabouts quite easily.  This kind of thing must be useful if you go missing.  It probably helps the police no end in their enquiries.

At one point I went upstairs in Aspire, and there was a 50th birthday party going on.  Loads of people with grey hair.  I suddenly felt quite at home, and I thought I might be able to blag my way into their party, but in the end I decided against it.  I did think it seemed like an inappropriate choice of venue for a 50th, but then Joss told me you could book that room for free, so that's maybe why.  I think having the party upstairs was a bad idea for some of those old guys.  Some of them could hardly get up and down the stairs.  Walking sticks, crutches, arthritis etc.  The people I was with couldn't walk either, but at least their legs would be fully functional again by the morning.

During the course of the evening I kept putting moisurising gel into my eyes, to stop them from getting too sore, and it got me through the night still able to drive home.  I did get some funny looks in the mens' toilet though when I was applying it.  I think a couple of the guys in there thought I was taking drugs directly into my eyes.  They were drunk enough, I maybe should have tried to sell them some.  I should have told them it was the next big thing.

By the time we set off on the walk from Aspire to Avalon I decided it was time to bow out.  The proximity of the car park was too tempting, and there's only so many photos an old sober person can get into the back of, before you start to think maybe you should let the young people get on with it.

But it was a pretty good evening overall.  I tried a hat on, I had a strawberry cider and I got my picture taken about 100 times.  I just felt that if I'd stayed any longer I would have turned into that guy who used to dress up in the different sports kits, and run into the back of team photos, photos of teams that he wasn't in.  The one who got into the England cricket team, and the Manchester United team after they won the Champions League.

This was at least my team.  I wasn't just pretending.  But in the end, I think there's a point when old and sober goes one way and young and drunk goes the other, and I'd reached that point.

I like the people I work with.  They're pretty nice, either when they're sober or when they're drunk.  But if it was up to me, I'd prefer to spend time with them somewhere quieter.  Maybe with tea and biscuits instead of Jaeger bombs.  And I'd like to have some conversations with them where you don't have to shout.

Thank you ferry much - A cautionary tale about drinking

For someone who got into quite a few drink related scrapes when I was younger, I've always been pretty self-righteous about other people's drinking.

Whether this has anything to do with having a drunk for a step dad, who used to pass out in the living room before 6 pm every evening, and who used to spend two or three hours a night shouting out in his sleep I don't know.

This atitude did lead me to almost leaving two unconscious friends on a ferry in a Belgium once, but thankfully some of the other people on the trip were better friends to them that I was, and got them off the ferry onto a bus.

It seems strange now, in these days when teachers are often too scared to take children on school trips at all, that the seven of us (Me, another Jonathan, John, Andy, Paul E, Paul H and Stephen) were sent off to Germany without a teacher at all.  I think it was assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that we were all pretty sensible lads.

Five of us were pretty sensible, but the other two managed to sink a whole bottle of Southern Comfort between them on the four hour ferry crossing from Dover to Zeebrugge (John and the other Jonathan)

I'll never forget finding John face down on the deck of a ferry in the early hours of the morning.  He had a mustardy yellow jacket which he was very proud of, and when I opened the door onto the deck I found him face down, not only with a yellow jacket but with a stream of yellowy vomit coming out from his mouth to one side.  The only way I can describe it is that it looked to me like his head was an egg that had been smashed against the floor and there was a trail of yolk issuing out from his head.

When we got into Zeebrugge at 5 in the morning, with the 2 of them still out for the count, the other 5 of us took a vote about what to do with them.  Leave them on the ferry, was my decision.  I think Paul H might have agreed with me aswell, but there were more votes in favour of dragging them off the boat, than there were for leaving them on it.  Hooray for democracy.

I bumped into Andy about a year ago, and we talked about our decision making process.  He said he would have left John but he and Jonathan had been friends for years, and he couldn't in all good conscience leave him there.

It was lucky for the two of them, that there were better friends than me there, or they might still be there.

A couple of years after this incident I found myself in a similar state of drink related incapacity.  It was my first Christmas at TSB.  I was 20.  We had a drinks party after hours at work before heading off to the pub.  Partly due to my own naivety, but also largely thanks to the stupidity of some of my older colleagues, I became the unwitting victim of some drinking games, which involved drinking paper cups full of mixed spirits.  I don't remember much about it, except I probably broke the world record for the shortest time elapsed between a pub opening its doors and one of its customer's being ejected for drunken-ness.  I almost got thrown out on the way in.  Being sick on my new boss wasn't the ideal way to kick start a career in banking either.

My lovely new colleagues, having had a good laugh at my expense, then left me propped up outside the pub and went back in to enjoy their evening.  Thanks guys!  Somehow my homing beacon still worked, and I managed to get on a bus and get home, although I scared my mum half to death when I got in.  She thought I'd been run over, and I was then sick some more, narrowly avoiding being sick on the cat's head.

Not only have I never had much tolerance for drunken-ness, I haven't got much tolerance for alcohol either.  Now I mostly avoid it, especially since the hospital put me on some drugs which most definitely don't mix with it, and which could kill my liver all by themselves.

It seems strange to me, that we are so alarmed by other forms of drug taking, yet we think getting smashed out of our skulls on drink is in some way just a great big laugh.

I've never found it very funny.