All Along The Watchtower.

No matter which way the trade goes, it would seem there is always something out to get the alcohol trade - a few years back it was underage drinking, then it was binge drinking, now it's a strange combination of the pair as there is whisper of the legal age requirement being raised from 18 to 21 (as things are in America). Personally, I don't think it will change a thing, but it means that once again, people are talking about underage drinking. Underage drinking has become the gaunt, omnipresent spectre that haunts the alcohol trade - the mere mention of her name is quite enough to chill a bartender's spine to temperatures that come close to knocking on Kelvin's door and anybody who looks like they were born this side of 1989 is more or less the enemy. There is nothing to be done to get rid of the merciless ghoul of youthful pissheads, you can only fight off the advances on you on a day-to-day basis. Although something of which I certainly was not aware is the law that holds licensees ultimately culpable for any underage drinking that occurs on licensed premises. I had wondered why there was a tense, uneasy air among the staff this week, along with the instructions that from now on, all cans/bottles that we suspect were brought onto the premises from outside were now to be left in a box in the cellar.

I had never really noticed this phenomenon before - I've always thought the idea of going to the pub is to get out of the house, but apparently the pub is some sort of sacred ground on which any and all alcohol must be consumed with gusto, regardless of the point of purchase or your actual age. I've noticed cans and stuff in the hedges before; bits and pieces thrown out of car windows, one or two that people have snuck into the beer garden to avoid paying our prices (something for which I both admire and resent them at the same time), but I think almost every pub has people that do that, there's nothing to be done about it, really, except to eject people when you catch them. But this week, I could feel a storm brewing as - on Monday morning, along my usual walk through the beer garden and round to the front door - I found approximately nine discarded, crumpled cans blocking my way. I took them inside, catalogued them (as instructed) and put them in the box in the cellar. Except I would have if the box hadn't been full. And the box next to it. Each box must have had about thirty discarded cans in it, all of the same brands as those I attempted to introduce. I left them in a bag next to the boxes and went back to the front of house; there was evidently a pandemic in action here.

"Here's my two cents," said Eddie, who had found twice as many cans as I had in the car park. "I reckon it's tramps."
"It's hardly going to be tramps, Eddie." I can't remember the last time there's been a homeless person in this village - either the local police are extremely unfriendly to drifters, as they are in Rambo before he literally beats up an entire police station, or (what's more likely) not even the very bottom of society's barrel (the extraction of which requires such rigorous scraping that fingernails crack and fingers become rife with splinters as the dregs become sparse and thin) want to be here.
"I dunno, there's been a weird smell in the beer garden for a few weeks." He was right, there had been a weird smell, but that's always been there in one way or another.
"Wouldn't they be sleeping there though? Tramps doing usually adhere to the hours on the license." I could just picture these vagrants all being mindful of the faint sound of 'last orders' from within the pub.
"I dunno. Tramps or, like, gypsies or something."

No, it couldn't be - I was certain of it. This had to be something bigger, something else; tramps and gypsies don't hide in the beer garden, demolish a case of Special Brew (in a reasonably short timeframe, to evade definite sightings as our mystery guests had) and then vanish into the ether, presumably in a state of intense inhebriation. I wasn't sure who or what was causing the influx of foreign receptacles, but apparently Henry did - a team meeting was called the same day for the next morning; it had to be important, as mid-week meetings are practically unheard of. The next morning, a brew was made as we all settled down around the lounge's main table - Henry assumed his position at the middle of the table, giving us the look of the last supper. Except the last supper was not interrupted by Jesus producing a blue plastic bag full of empty booze tins and spilling them out all over the table (or perhaps he did - perhaps the thirty pieces of silver were actually cans of White Lightning or something).

"Hard week?", enquired Eddie, too tired to vet every single comment that his brain threw up, which allowed us a brief insight into what Eddie actually thinks but never says.
"Very funny, fucko - this is just a sample of what I found in the car park last night," Henry replied, scattering the cans as if trying to create an even spread, the same way you would apply filling to a sandwich. Among them were Strongbow, Magners (a company I never associated with tins, probably because it's a bit harder to seem like a jumped up yuppy with more money than sense if you're swigging out of a black tin, as opposed to a gold-lined bottle adjacent to an ice-filled glass, which beautifully bounces the light off your membership card for the Gullible Prick Society) and, of course, Special Brew. "Listen up, and listen good; this isn't some self-catering holiday camp." Henry is very fond of the term 'self-catering' when it comes to people smuggling in their own goods - he often boasts of the amount of 'self-caterers' he ejected from some event or other, as if it is a badge of distinction to catch anybody sensible enough not to pay us 60p for a bag of fucking peanuts. "And this almost certainly isn't some fucking nursery. Looking at this, I'm almost a hundred per cent certain that this is kids." I felt my heart drop a little at the notion that Special Brew is making inlays into the underage drinking market - I had hoped that even this generation's wayward teens would have the good sense to realize that Special Brew is designed - and marketed - for...
"Kids or homeless people." Eddie simply wouldn't let this idea of tramps slide.
"No, not homeless people," - hopes, dashed - "these are kids. They all turn up with a few tins and within a few minutes they've downed them and moved on. I've spoken to Gerald from Village Watch and he gave me this."
"This" turned out to be an A3 map of the village covered in black flags, joined by a series of red lines - the flags represented the location of emptied alcohol tins and the line was the route the drifting drinkers had probably taken. I've always been fascinated with bird's eye views - even though you have probably never seen an area from that angle, if you're familiar with it from the ground it doesn't usually take long to ascertain the area you're looking at. We were on there, as was the playing field, the Fox & Hound, Rhod the Farmer's cow field and other places that provide an area for drinking under cover of darkness, all littered with tiny black flags. Naturally, I assumed he was joking, but the production of a laser pointer put a very clearly defined red dot on the fact that he was, in fact, for real.

"Here we are, and as you can see, the drinking tends to make its way from the Fox, down to the school, then us, then the playing field, and then across the road to Rhod's cow field. So the Fox has got Kevin out on lookout -" And I decided to interject here; I've become far more proficient than I once was at spotting bad ideas waging their way across the horizon, ready to run roughshod over us and reduce us to the kind of place that once attempted to start a football team or offered to cater a wedding of three hundred people by erecting gazebos in the car park. The booking was cancelled after somebody drove their car into Alpha Gazebo and Beta Gazebo buckled under its own weight (the fact that each gazebo was issued a letter - which we had to stick to, rigorously, when discussing said gazebos - was proof of two things; that the gazebos were a stupid idea and it's not just me that absolutely loves to say gazebo). After Gazebogate and the returning of twelve football uniforms, you really need to be on your toes when the shit starts to make its way to the surface.

"Sorry, 'lookout'? Is this for real, now?"
"It most certainly is. I can be fined ten grand for underage drinking on my premises and I'm not chucking my license down the pan to the tune of ten grand because some kids are taking the piss." I don't think it is ten grand, you know, but Henry's nothing without hyperbole so I let the ever-increasing fine slide in favour of the matter at hand. "So someone needs to be on lookout tonight. I've set up a post in the car park and we need to be ready and waiting for when those little fuckers bring the party to the car park." With that, all eyes around the table fell on 'someone'. Of course.

"Right, so it's going to be me, isn't it?"
"If you wouldn't mind." Roughly three milliseconds passed before Henry moved onto the next order of business. I was later instructed, between protests and the urge to just run away screaming into the woods to become a hermit (hermits don't have to go on lookout for drunk children), to return to work at half nine to try and fit yet another feather into the bulging cap of my fairly ambiguous "bar staff" - this time, night security and night watchman, two altogether new skills for which I would presumably not be compensated (the metaphorical "skills cap", stuffed to the brim with assorted feathers since the day I started, is now beginning to resemble a rather plump bird, which is quite amazing considering I am still completely and utterly useless at anything and everything to which I turn my less-than-able hands).

"But what if they don't do it again tonight?"
"Don't worry, it'll be done on a rota. Somebody else will be on duty tomorrow." With that, 'somebody else' got up and was barely out the door before he had the lighter to the cigarette in his mouth. I was somehow glad that Eddie was being dragged into this, as was everyone else - I mean, I would have been even more glad if this whole stupid idea had been dropped like a greased hamster before it even had the chance to be put into practice, but it was crucial at this point to make the best of an absolutely absurd situation.

At quarter past nine, I decided to get ready for work - I was halfway through putting my bartender costume on when I stopped; I wasn't going to be on the bar, I thought. But actually, it turned out to be perfect - black from head to toe; invisible to the juvenile drunkard, like a big Welsh ninja hiding in the bushes, watching a bunch of kids (yes, I had wondered how exactly I was going to explain this to any passing enquirers or the authorities). Making two subtle adjustments to my usual attire (I fished an old black hooded top out of the wardrobe and put my black Converse shoes on; chasing down underagers is a bit difficult anyway when you're a man of my dimensions, but with my usual work shoes - which are not unlike a pair of diver's boots - it would be damn near impossible), I packed a bag full of essentials (a book, a torch, and a sandwich - I had no idea how long I was going to be there, but I was hoping it wouldn't be long enough to make that much of a dent in my book) and sauntered down to the pub, under cover of darkness, ready to sit outside in the freezing cold all night waiting for some people (who we have merely assumed are kids; they could well have been some loitering, loutish bodybuilders or a group of alcoholic heavyweight boxers, who drink Special Brew to forget the horrors of a life in the ring, waiting to be confronted so they can relive their glory years by pounding a pile of fuck out of a pouncing bartender) who might never show up anyway.

When people ask where the car park is (and a lot of people do) they're almost always surprised to hear that the large patch of cracked, aging tarmac covered in gravel - over which they have just noisily trampled - is, in fact, the "spacious car parking facility" detailed on the company website (the company website ought to be more honest with people - we have petitioned long and hard to have "friendly, approachable, hard-working staff" replaced with just "staff" so as not to set people up for the fall that is inevitably forthcoming, but our requests have fallen on deaf ears and time and time again people leave underwhelmed in a car covered in grit and dust). Our "spacious car parking facility" is surrounded by a large amount of shrubbery and hedges, and it was in one of the corners that Henry had set his outpost - as I made a concerted effort to fit myself into the tiny plywood shelter Henry had constructed (it was invisible to anybody in the car park of course - would that be because it is directly under one of the floodlights and therefore in total darkness? No, of course not, it's obviously because Henry stapled some dead leaves and twigs to the plywood to give it that Tony Hart camouflage look and feel), I was then handed a set of binoculars from the bag at Henry's side..

"What in the name of Christ are these?"
"You need to get a good view of these people."
"Are you taking the piss? How the hell am I supposed to explain this if somebody sees me? How am I supposed to put a positive slant on the fact that I am hiding in the bushes waiting to watch kids with a pair of binoculars? They string people up for this sort of thing, and then the Daily Express starts a campaign and boom, that's the end of it. They'll find a way to deport me somewhere, I know it." It's a sad age we live in that a legal adult can't spy on children in the dark without the whole thing assuming a somewhat sinister air.
"Don't be silly, just tell them you're on surveillance." Somehow I found it difficult to imagine this holding its weight in court. I was almost certainly going to jail. Jail, then hell.
"Yeah, pubs don't usually have surveillance, and when they do it almost certainly doesn't consist of some dude hiding in the bushes with a pair of binoculars." I applied for a surveillance job once - lots of monitor-watching and sitting down in the comfort of a control room, that's what was described. Or at least that's what I inferred from the description - maybe that's why I didn't get it; perhaps they were expecting me to demonstrate bush crouching skills that never came and eventually went with somebody a little more Irwinesque.
"That's not all," chuckled Henry, reaching into the Tesco bag once more. I was genuinely terrified; what could he possibly produce to make things worse? No, I resolved, this can't possibly look worse - unless he gives me a stack of animal porn or a pint of heroin or something, this situation has reached the ceiling of "how bad does this look". That's what I thought until he produced - I shit thee not - a walkie-talkie.

"Give me a buzz when you see them."
"Whoa, hey, what?"
"You get up and confront them, but get me on the walkie and I'll come running." Confront them? Jesus.
"Will they not hear the walkie talkie?" The walkie talkie that was, incidentally, making swooping, screeching radio noises in my hand without me pressing any buttons (or even having the power on from the looks of things).
"Nah, shouldn't do. Any questions?"
"Why are we doing this again?"
"I can be fined twenty grand and lose my license -"
"Right, sure."

And with that, I was left alone. Now, as is the custom with the lowest level of the service industry (well, not quite the lowest perhaps - although I'm sure the only people underneath me at this point are car boot salesmen and people who sell potatoes in bags for a quid on the motorway), I am sometimes expected to go above and beyond my contractual obligations - sure, I could leave that word smeared in shit on the wall of the gents' toilet, but that means the cleaner will have to do it in the morning and all I'll hear all night is "hey, you, somebody's pulled some shit out of their ass and written 'fuck' in the toilets", and nobody wants that barked at them more than a couple of times a night, tops. So sometimes I have to just bite the bullet, glove up, put on my chemical mask and get the steam cleaner. And coming into a job like this, I sort of expected it - y'know, this is a low paying job where we are essentially renting food and water to people; they usually give it back to us in one form or another, and sometimes they don't make correct use of the "return" facilities that we are legally obliged to provide. So with positions of this nature you know you're sometimes going to have to face the unexpected and deal with it, even though you don't technically have to. That said, if you had said to me one year ago, "where do you see yourself in your job a year from now", I would have said a number of things (probably "I'm still going to be there in a year? You're kidding me, right?"), but I don't think I would ever, ever, ever have predicted that I would be compressed into a plywood shelter, freezing my nuts off, in the dark, in the corner of the car park with some binoculars and a walkie talkie, ready to observe underage drinkers from a distance like a low-budget Bill Oddie (it will truly be a sad day when Bill is reduced to hunting out teenage alcoholics from a plywood shed in a car park). Nobody wants or expects this from their career. Nobody who isn't mentally deranged or sexually perverse, that is (I don't think I'm giving too much away by revealing that this entry does not end in me being hounded from the village by a placard-weilding group of nonce-bashers, but all throughout this exercise, the back of my mind was rehearsing one question and one question only - "What seems to be the problem, officer?"). Before I could begin mentally preparing for my seemingly inevitable dialogue with the authorities, the walkie talkie scared the living hell out of me by suddenly bursting into loud, tuneless song.

Phhhhzzzzbloop - "Come in, Moon Unit."
"Fuck off, Eddie."
"This is Panzer... Ed, what is your position Moon Unit?" Tit.
"Car park. What kind of a name is Panzer Ed?"
"Come in Moon Unit. Alpha Station to Moon Unit."
"What the hell do you want?"
"Do you want a cup of tea?"
"Yes please."
"Yes please what?" Eddie had obviously gone to great lengths to commandeer the walkie talkie from Henry's militaristic grip and he would be damned if I didn't humour him - I was earning my cup of tea.
"Yes please, Alpha Station."
"Right, good stuff." I heard the kettle begin its preliminary rumblings as Alpha Station decided to have a bit of a chinwag. "Any sign of them yet?"
"No, not yet."
"Bah. Still, must be exciting out there. Must be just like James Bond."
"James Bond didn't have to sit in the shrubs like a knobhead waiting for Odd Job to drink Special Brew outside MI5."
"They've all got to start somewhere." And I think Eddie genuinely meant this. I honestly think he was being sincere in his likening of Oddie-esque kiddie-catching to a career as an international superspy. "Over and out."

Two minutes later, I was brought a cup of tea to my exacting specifications. James Bond had Moneypenny and a bit of sexual innuendo, I have Eddie and cups of tea.

"Come on then, budge up."

And with that, I had backup. I soon realized that I was an extremely poor choice for the first night of surveillance - Eddie was infinitely more into it than I was. Keeping his eyes firmly latched on the binoculars in the hopes of spotting the enemy, he was quick to measure up my skills in the art of subterfuge.
"So what's the plan if we see them?" I hadn't thought of this - I had only thought as far ahead as radioing into the pub to announce they had arrived; I soon realized I would need to actually do something until the cavalry came running.
"I don't know."
"How about I sneak up on them round the back and you jump them?" This sounded alright - Eddie's usually the man when it comes to suckerpunching a gang of pissed children, so I decided to go with his plan.
"Fine."
Phhhhhhhhzwoop. "Hello?" Henry had evidently found the deserted bar and the walkie talkie.
"Incoming message from Alpha Station," Eddie announced down the walkie talkie. "This is Moon Unit, what's your position?"
"Eddie, get back in here now, I'm not paying you to piss about in the bushes." No, he was paying me to piss about in the bushes. Eddie very carefully considered his response.
"Ssh, you'll give away our position to the enemy."
"Are the enemy out there at the moment?"
"No."
"Get in here now or I'm taking the walkie talkies away."

No sooner had I been sent backup, Eddie returned to Alpha Station - however, I was much amused to see him return to the pub around the circumference of the car park, crouched as if avoiding overhead gunfire, sticking to the shadows like he would be rounded up by the Gestapo at any moment.

After what felt like a lifetime, the walkie talkie once again got back into the swing of things, this time with interesting results. An audibly excited Eddie took the line and I soon came to terms with the fact that this was probably not the offer of yet another cup of tea.

"Come in Moon Unit, Moon Unit are you there?"
"I'm here Eddie, what's going on?"
"Kevin from the Fox called Gerald a minute ago to say he'd found some cans outside the porch -"
"How many?"
"Four. Gerald went out to check the schoolyard and there was already cans there. They're on their way dude. Let me know if you see anything."

And with that, I was on my own, in the dark, trying to catch people so illusive that Houdini himself couldn't slap the cuffs on them. So I did what any grown man did - I began to completely brick it. The air began to feel cold in my nostrils, the taste of the cup of tea became louder and louder in my mouth as the adrenaline sharpened my senses to the point that I actually gave myself a papercut just thinking about it. And then from the other side of the car park, a rustle in the bushes; somebody was in the beer garden. I gave it a few seconds; maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's just the wind playing tricks with my mind. However, I had to relinquish my vice-like clutch upon those straws when "the wind" let out a burp and made the sound of a hollowed tin being crumpled and dropped to the floor. The clatter couldn't have finished echoing before another can released its first gassy breath and the bush-obscured source of the noise continued to drink. So what do I do at this point? Can't pretend I haven't heard it - they'll know I've at least seen something because the cans are extremely visible. Without really thinking about it, I began to jog slowly and quietly towards the beer garden. I turned the corner expecting to be thrown onto the set of a Dizzee Rascal video, and instead I was treated to some sort of grotesque imitation of The Last Of The Summer Wine, as I ran directly into the path of an old man with a carrier bag full of canned beverages. This could be a tramp, I considered - do tramps carry knives? The floodlights, however, had given my pupils ample time to contract and I was now looking deep into the face of one Richard Alexander Dixon.

Yes, it would seem the two-week ban had hit Dixon especially hard - all of a sudden, this made a lot of sense. The pubwatch scheme means he can't go in the Fox either, so if he has been working evenings this week, he would finish around an hour ago, giving him time to stroll from work, down to the village with an assortment of tins from the adjacent town's off license, finishing them off as he makes the long, liver-crippling journey to his house the other end of the village. It suddenly all slotted into place like an episode of Jonathan Creek (the one where Alan Davies has to use his experience as a magician's technician to solve the mystery of the wandering pisshead, all without the assistance of Stephen Fry). This should have been something of an achievement, albeit one of a slightly off-beat nature - I had caught Dickie Dixon, so good they named him fucking twice, at his lowest point; drinking Special Brew out of tins in our car park/beer garden, lowly and defeated, dribbling into his coat. But I didn't feel proud, or elated, or any of the things I assumed I would feel as my eyes and my mind finally agreed that the person before them was indeed Richey. Instead I felt a sharp pang of pity - I was embarrassed for Richey, but not nearly as embarrassed as I'm sure he was at this moment. And this is why I felt intensely bad for him. Don't get me wrong, Dixon is a genuinely awful man - treats his children as if they were the bane of his very existence, belittles and bemoans the staff, complains, whinges, and everything else that has made me hate him with a rich, undiluted passion over the months I've been here. But for all the trouble and grief he has caused people both sides of the bar, I had caught him in a vulnerable state and decided to handle the matter as sensitively as possible.

"Richey? What are you doing?"
"Guuuurgh." Ah, the burbling gurgle of a drunken lout. A deep, gutteral noise that is a body's attempt to say "no more booze" when the mouth is incapable of doing so. To tell the truth, I was greatly relieved that Richey wasn't, in fact, a troop of teenage ne'erdowells on an alcohol binge, but in a way I was sort of disappointed. Disappointed that I wouldn't get the chance to see a group of knife-weilding youngsters, or get the chance to run away from them. I helped my disappointment to his feet, and after one or two initial lashings out (he didn't even know who I was at this point, I was sure of it) I began to walk him towards the loading bay - the bright, fluorescent lights of the cellar would give me a chance to see if A) his condition would improve under closer scrutiny (or if he realized he was, in fact, back in the pub) or B) he needed medical attention. As we hobbled towards the back entrance, I noticed a flash of black zip from left to right - I swung around to look, but saw nothing. Oh Jesus, what if there's more of them? I've banned a few people over the years, what if they're all meeting outside at night like some sort of ASBO-baiting vigilante group? Suddenly I longed for my imaginary group of knife-weilding teenagers as opposed to the real scumbags I've evicted over the years. Then I heard a sharp, concise collection of footsteps - somebody was running, going absolutely hell for leather, and then I felt Dixon being viciously pulled out of my grip as the sound of running was replaced with the sound of Dixon hitting the floor like a sack of shit. I couldn't see a thing - we were in the shadow of the pub and it was essentially pitch black. Then, emerging from the shadows, Eddie popped up like a bizarre rendition of a Jack-in-the-box.

"What the fuck?" I gasped, grateful beyond measure that my mystery assailant was, in fact, "Panzer Ed".
"I thought he was attacking you. Jesus, is that-? Ho ho! Well!" Eddie's volume increased tenfold, as if Dixon were extremely hard of hearing (not as if he would remember any of what was said). "Oh how the mighty have fallen, you fucking -"
"Attacking me?" We both looked down on Richey - he was now snoring, crumpled in half on the ground. "He could barely walk. I'm serious, Eddie, stop kicking him."
"Right, sure." Eddie decided that this wasn't important, and the fact that he had just blindsided a man who was so drunk he could barely think was now something of a side issue to this whole ordeal (that said, we weren't exactly falling over eachother to pull Richey's mud-stained and dribble-glistened face from the dirt).
"This is really bad - he gets banned from the pubs and look what happens. He lives like a bloody tramp."
"And?"
"Well, I think this is probably punishment enough." And I meant it - I had these images of him being stuck in the house like a caged rabbit, seething at the idea that he couldn't come down to the pub, not wandering the streets like a Dickensian rogue, drinking tins of industrial strength liver crusher from a blue plastic bag. Eddie knew what I was thinking.
"There's no way Henry will lift the ban. Once a ban's in place, that's it."
"We'll see. Pick him up and get him sat up, he might choke on his own tongue or something." Such vague medical assertions are why my career as a doctor never really took off.

After a quiet word with Henry, I saw his face soften and his heart open up to the plight of Richey, who needs us far more than we need him. Henry went out and immediately dismantled the lookout post. As he came back in with armfuls of plywood and leaves, I suddenly realized that Henry wasn't such a bad guy after all.

"So that's the end of that then?"
"Of course it is," said Henry. "We know who's doing it now. You can head on home now, Eddie can give a statement when the police get here."

I was too tired to argue at this point. A result is a result - and regardless of Dixon's fate, I wouldn't have to sit in that box any more. Besides, perhaps a night in the cells will do him good - and I kept telling myself that as the police car and reinforced van hurtled past me on my way to my unbarred windows and metal cutlery, two privileges I suspect Dixon would be denied for the next few days.