A Punch Up At A Wedding.

"Do you have an outlet for this?"

Wedding receptions are the holy grail of this industry; it's absolutely everything you could want. From a business perspective, of course, it's phenomenal - you get a few hundred people in who are just cutting completely loose and do not care one bit about their emotions, livers or wallets because it's just an honest-to-goodness party with very few repercussions. From a staff point of view, the people who are usually grateful to work for peanuts (in a job so unsatisfying that the walk to work feels like voluntarily sticking your hand in a blender) are even more motivated, because the money stays exactly the same, but the work gets a hundred times harder. You have to have somebody upstairs in the prison - otherwise known as the Rupert Langer Memorial Suite, previously known as our function room before old Rupert Langer sipped his last pint of bitter and stunk the gents' out for the last time and died in the night a few months ago, called "the prison" because if you need anything, good luck going to get it because there's no phone to call downstairs and you can't leave the bar unattended when it's packed out - plus another guy downstairs to run the pub's normal end of business which will be way busier than usual. Of course these tasks should be divided fairly between all staff, but lo and behold, a cursory glance at the rota reveals:

EDDIE: FRIDAY (WEDDING) - DOWNSTAIRS BAR - 7PM-1AM
[ME]: FRIDAY (WEDDING) - RUBERT [sic] - 8PM-1AM.

Right. However, the fun of a wedding party is that everything needs to be planned way in advance, which is why at 1PM on the day - coming into work as a gesture of goodwill to an ailing establishment that most likely will not survive more than a handful of winters without the warmth and dosh that the smokers bring with them - Eddie and I spent a good forty minutes looking for a spare wall plug for the inflating machine for the bouncy castle they hired for the children. We went through the motions of testing every single socket to see if its current inhabitant was actually essential to the running of the pub (the first one we tried was the cellar coolers, then the gas regulator on the wall - we put that one back quick enough - we thought we were onto something with the third until we discovered that Coke doesn't come out tasting so nice if the water isn't carbonated, so we ended up feeding the extension cord into the kitchen and unplugging one of the three microwaves). Before long, the bouncy castle began to take shape and the sizable number of children piled onto it, being thrown around violently in a roofless PVC cage, almost instantly after they had all been exposed to a gargantuan finger buffet back inside the pub and had all been thoroughly watered with all the Coke their irritatingly small stomachs could comfortably handle. Now, I'm no scientist, but I know a little sumthin' 'bout what children are like; I have had them running around the pub on a semi-regular basis since I started, and for a while back a few years ago, I was one myself (before I developed my sense of cynicism, my heart turned to stone and I discovered the internet). See, children are quite simple beings; if you stuff them full of buffet snacks, sugary sweets and coke, then shake them up on a bouncy castle, you don't need to get Stephen Hawking down to tell you the outcome, as chances are they will have puked their guts up before you've even installed the wheelchair ramps. What should have been a harmless act of parental negligence soon turned to a marauding disaster as the kids were still being pelted from pillar to post, half-digested appetizers and coke gushing out of their mouths; this set off a chain reaction, and before long, the whole thing was coated in a swill of partially metabolized snacks and carbonated drinks.

"Not to worry," snarled the operator as he looked on at the carnage that had sprung forth from the gullets of the young to engulf his aerated edifice. "I'll get the sick box." He ventured out to his car, returned with a gigantic black case and removed from it a hosepipe. Cue yet another ten minute search for a suitable attachment, before the makeshift carnie stripped down to his briefs, cleared all the children off the impromptu gastric paddling pool and waded around, hosing down the walls and floor so that a putrid array of watered-down vomits came billowing from the entrance and onto the grass of the beer garden. A few children made a token effort of repatriating to the castle, but it was no use. The bouncy castle was clearly off limits now.

The operator stepped off the ride, smelling like a wet dog that has just thrown up on itself, and the first thing he did? Congratulate the groom by giving him a great big hug, something by which the groom seemed strangely unfazed. This was later cleared up when the groom turned around to Eddie, beaming from ear to ear (and smelling like guts-to-mouth).

"You've met my brother, haven't you lads?"
"I was meaning to ask you boys, can I leave this here overnight?"
"You what?"
"I'm going to be too bollocksed to drive it home. I'll deflate it later, I promise, and I'll be back for it first thing in the morning." Naturally, the bouncy castle - which now smelt like a Wetherspoons toilet on a Friday night - was not only ill-used after Vomitgate, but it was also not deflated before Stella Artois put up an alcohol-induced barrier between the operator and his primary motor functions. Still, his honesty must be admired if not his low threshold. Which is why I noticed the bouncy castle, wavering in the distance, fairly early on in my short walk to work later on in the evening. Before I could ask Eddie about it, I noticed something strange about the pub; it was absolutely dead. Eddie had broken into a sweat, but I couldn't see why; spare a few glasses and plates, the place looked untouched. Before I could establish the reasoning behind the pub's sudden synonymity with the Marie Celeste, Eddie turned to me and violently announced to me, through grated teeth:

"You're fucking late!"

I turned to the clock on the wall; it was 8:01.

"What, so they all went home because I'm a minute late?" I asked as I adjusted my watch. "Fuck off Eddie, I'm only late by a minute. Who can't wait a fucking minute?"
"Oh no. Ho ho. No. Best of luck up there buddy," and he threw me the keys to the Rupert Langer Suite.

I went through to the stairs that led to the function room to see that everybody who had attended the party had evidently, at 8PM on the dot, attempted to access the function room and were now queueing on the stairs. All 150 of them.

"Can I just get past, please?"
"I wouldn't bother," burped the operator from the castle/best man, who - from the smell had him - had been left to simmer in a fine paste of vomit and Stella since I left him earlier in the afternoon. "It's locked and the barman isn't here yet." He had obviously managed to forget me in the six hours I'd been away from him (which is why I write this up without fear of reprisal from an angry bouncy castle operator), so I then peeled back my hoodie to reveal the company logo, and jingled the keys. It took him a little while, but finally...

"LET HIM THROUGH. HE HAS THE KEYS."

This was cause for much murmuring in the queue, yet not cause enough for movement, as they remained packed like sardines in a crushed tin box. I soon saw the conclusion before me; I would have to climb up there myself. Climbing this particular mountain was like climbing Everest; except it was the part of Everest that has extremely densely-populated forestry. Forestry that will make snide remarks at you as you attempt to get past.

"Well, I've heard of Fawlty Towers, but this is ridiculous."
"You've got some nerve, boyo."
"Get that fuckin' door open, we're gaspin' out here," said one with a pint already in his hand.

As I finally got through the door and behind the bar, I noticed two things; the till was extremely light on change and there seemed to be some sort of podium set up very close to the bar. I later discovered this was not for the purposes of some sort of executive keynote, but was actually a DJ booth. I wondered who would be taking to the decks as the punters piled into the room, and I knew as soon as he walked in.

You know that men's hair gel advert that's doing the rounds at the moment, detailing the assorted looks of a preening twat called "Mickey" as he applies his animal magnetism all over London? If you don't, then you may be one of my overseas readers (in which case count your lucky stars that one of this nation's many indigenous buffoons likes this advert enough to film it off the telly and slap it onto the internet here) or you're probably reading this some time into the future after the reprehensible shitmunchers at both the company and at the advertising agency (before their venture down the merry road of voluntary liquidation) decide that while they were initially correct in assuming that "everyone knows a guy like Mickey", what they didn't count on was everybody's undying hatred of Mickey and everything about him, from his much-maligned hairdo to his astonishingly open lack of any and all substance. They also didn't count on the reaction Mickey inspires in the average man; the overpowering urge to "muss up his hair" with a few swift swings of a rake to the bonce, the secret bloodlust that grips even the most secure gentlemen and presses them to kick Mickey to the floor and demolish his very being by literally making him eat his own chemically-stiffened hair, wrapped up in his freshly-peeled scalp like a furry burrito. No, the idea to actually buy some of this scientifically-proven Moron Cream and lather it into your locks is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind, so in that respect the advert can be summed up in two very simple words; epic fail.

But anyway.

So the DJ - an insufferable twit known as Martin - was almost certainly "a guy like Mickey" in that he was so heavily engrossed in his own image it's a miracle he had time to do anything else besides find the nearest reflective surface and thank the lord on high for low-cut jeans, meticulously-planned "scruffy" hair and ironic T-shirts from the 1980s (that make you look like an absolute numpty for being in your thirties and still banging on about the power of sodding Grayskull). Unfortunately, he did have time for something else, and that was his peculiar brand of multi-instrumentalism. With a guitar slung over his back (that spent more time being violently slammed into the wall behind him with every shake of his scrawny hips), Martin spent the night rattling a tambourine. Every song, no matter what, the ear-splitting jingling would be brought in for reasons I found harder and harder to understand as the minutes turned to hours (and each of the minutes seemed to be accompanied by a tambourine). Perhaps Martin's sheer, unadulterated arrogance went as far as assuming that he is in a position to improve classic songs; Johnny Cash's incendiary I Walk The Line, a beautifully-constructed and infectious piece of country music? An absolute classic, a genre-defining masterpiece? Needs more tambourine. As did Prince's "Raspberry Beret", each of the seven times that Martin played it before the night was through. Everything - from No Surprises to Hips Don't Lie, from Suspicious Minds to I Wanna Be, from Boys Of Summer to Aqualung - was given the Martin treatment, and each was played two or three times a piece. But not only did he have a habit of repeating and ruining records...

"YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO SPEAK UP, THE DJ IS EXTREMELY LOUD."
"FIVE PINTS OF STELLA," YODELED - sorry - yodeled a deafened customer into my ear, and even then I had to be assisted by such noted "deaf barman" tactics as over-exaggerated mouth movements, pointing, and finger counting.

"CAN YOU TURN IT DOWN A BIT MATE," I bellowed into DJ Martin's ear. My point that the music was a bit loud was proved when Martin evidently misheard my request, gave me a look that said "go for it mate!" and handed me the tambourine, giving me a thumbs up. I shoved the tambourine back at him a little harder than I perhaps should have done and went back to stemming the flow of customers in the darkness, resigning myself to a lifetime of crippling tinnitus. I thought I had been spared when the tambourining fell silent only to discover that Martin had slung the guitar over his shoulder - which was now horrendously out of tune due to the several knocks it took on his back - and had begun to play tunelessly along with The Pussycat Dolls. Suddenly, it's a folk song as Martin really lays it on thick - not that anyone can hear him, or really see him. But as I watched on in horror, I soon saw something else to chill my spine; a classic, my number one nightmare of the job; a large-scale ID case.

Gigantic groups of sort-of-twenty-year-olds are a nightmare, because you have about ten to fifteen seconds in which to make an intensely complex profile on them - both individually and as a group - to decide whether or not the ID hammer needs wielding. It's like a police line up, except it's a hundred times harder; you not only have to figure out of any of them need checking, but your mind has this awful rush; a mixture of panic and uncertainty, you are all of a sudden trying to place the ages of a group of people. Hmm, he looks a bit young, but - no, he's talking to that one about coursework and he looks about twenty so they're probably university students; but he looks a bit like him, perhaps they're related; no, because he just - but before you can really get stuck into it, they're there and it's crunch time. This was even worse, because it would seem this was the first wedding in history where nobody was related to anybody and everyone was a friend of a friend. Perhaps - with social networking websites slowly taking over the world - this is what weddings will look like from now on (instead of a guest book, you can write something on the couple's wall and instead of drinking too much and storming off in tears, you can simply deactivate your account). It was extremely odd though. Plus, to top it all off, the only light I had to go off was being reflected off a spinning mirror ball as the night was just beginning to kick off. Brilliant.

OK, here they are, ten young women, dressed identically but with a vast array of faces. I now see why burglars and thieves adopt a uniform, because when everyone looks the same on that kind of level, "the individual" disappears and you wind up trying to assess the group as one entity rather than ten people. I used to be pretty lenient on the ID thing with functions - it was usually a regular having a christening or something, so the chances of getting picked up if one or two of the guests have a few toes over the line, so to speak, are minimal. At least that's what I thought, until the day the police started doing spot checks on functions in the area. Five pubs dealt fines, and the company spend the next few days firing off e-mails to every Tom, Dick and Harry on the payroll to make sure people are getting checked and checked properly. So now you actually have "CHECK ID" written on the lid of WKD. The customer never sees it, but you always do.

"NINE BLUE WKDs PLEASE."

I did my best to assess the group, and asked for six people to produce ID (eventually - once we had agreed that talking over Gnarls Barkey was an exercise in futility, I simply wrote "ID?" on the palm of my hand and showed it to them; unsuspecting onlookers may well have believed I was inviting them to "alk to the hand", as it were, possibly due to the face not listenin'). Two of them were clearly in their thirties, but the third?

"WHY DON'T YOU WANT MY ID? I'M THE SAME AGE AS THIS LOT!" This is a common joke whenever somebody is IDed - a 70-year-old at the bar will say "do you want to see mine as well?", somebody inevitably says wahey and we all go home a little bruised by it. But the difference was, she wasn't joking; I had clearly offended her by not asking to see some sort of legal documentation.

"WE HAVE TO CHECK IF YOU LOOK UNDER 21, AND I DON'T THINK YOU ARE." This was the edited version of what I actually thought; she looked like the oldest young person I had ever seen, and when she threw some ID my way to prove how young she was I couldn't believe she had been born during the Reagan administration (she looked more like a Taft baby). It all felt extremely bizarre, as this is the first time this has ever happened - somebody once accidentally gave me their real driving license that proved they were actually seventeen, but nobody has ever tried to give me ID to prove how young they are. I was surprised to have a driver's license thrown at me proving she was, indeed, the same age as her peers; for one because I couldn't believe she was actually offended, and secondly because I half expected to be shown a bus pass.

"THE FUCK YOU WANT ME TO SAY? YES, FINE, YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH TO DRINK HERE. BRILLIANT. PLEASE REPORT TO THE DOWNSTAIRS BAR TO COLLECT YOUR TROPHY, THE MAYOR IS WAITING" But of course she didn't hear me. Old Mother Hubbard put her ID back in her purse, gave me a dirty look and the bridesmaids peeled away. Sooner or later, everyone came to the bar, but as is the usual with big groups of people, a few key people spent a bit more time at the bar than they perhaps should have, as they didn't actually leave the bar the whole time they were there. The party was getting underway but they wanted none of it - they were all about the alcohol. All the wedding criteria had been checked - the retarded kid tried to breakdance and got a piteous ripple of applause from the adults before being piled into the car and taken home for getting overexcited, some girl had too much to drink and had started crying about the fact she would never get married and she was doomed to live the life of a singleton forever (she looked about 25 - I've no patience), and My My My Delilah had been given a full-room accompaniment. No, I don't know why a song about a man murdering his ex is so popular at weddings either. Only one song could have been more inappropriate in the context. Only one.

"OK, this next one goes out to the happy couple, Chris and Ruby," Martin gasped into the microphone, obviously exhausted - do you see where this one is going? - before he silenced his own microphone (which elicited a small cheer from me) and handed the floor over to Kenny Rogers' "Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town". You know, about a crippled husband putting a bullet in his cheating wife's head. That song. However, nobody seemed to notice or mind, as people were still up and dancing at the gut-wrenching moment at the end where Rogers implores Ruby to, for God's sake, turn around. Everyone except the three at the bar, who were slowly but surely making their way through our collection of spirits and back-bar liquors that would have knocked Brendan Behan on his arse. But slowly, these pedestrian efforts - drinking quadruple Drambuies and pints of wine - fell from their favour and they had their eye on something else; the bottle of seldom-touched Sambuca on the back bar caught their eye. They put a wad of notes totalling over £100 in my hand and asked me to pair it out evenly. They wound up with fifteen quadruple shots on a tray and a £95 bill. They then took this tray away and began the next natural activity when you've got more money than sense and a negligent barman at your disposal: drinking games.

As everyone knows, without drinking games, alcoholism would be robbed of its childish innocence and would instead be recognized as a serious chemical addiction, and lord knows nobody needs that. Working behind a bar, you will see more or less every drinking game known to man. There is a drinking game for everything. I've seen people come in at four in the afternoon and get rounds of Smirnoff Blue Label, knocking one back every time a "blue" number is revealed on Deal or No Deal. I've seen people attempting to run around broomhandles attached to their foreheads. What I had never seen, however, was the little-known drinking game called Sambucaroo, where the idea is to grab your freshly poured quadruple Sambuca and then jump on the back of some poor unsuspecting bastard, the object being to down your drink before the understandably annoyed patron bucks you off. This was first tested out on their close friends, but before long it moved onto friends of friends who seemed a little annoyed. I decided to go over and have a word.

"IF YOU DON'T STOP DOING THAT I'M GOING TO HAVE TO ASK YOU TO LEAVE." Due to the blaring rendition of the most recent Smashing Pumpkins single (making vocal communication a futility), I was evidently not understood, so I pointed at him, shook my head, and then pointed to the exit. I thought this would be perfectly simple to understand. Point to him ("you there"), shake the head ("are behaving in an unacceptable manner"), point to the exit ("and if such shenanigans continues I shall be forced to request your immediate leave of the premises"). But when alcohol is involved, charades is often a difficult game to play, as he evidently thought I had meant something completely different by pointing to him ("I bet that you"), shaking my head ("can't down a Sambuca"), and pointing to the exit ("on the back of that extremely frail-looking old woman standing by the door"). I assumed I had been understood until I saw almost everyone in the room turn to peel the slack-jawed imbecile off Granny, whose spine had probably lived through a number of wars and didn't need an overexcited accountant on it drying to pour a drink down his neck. The three - the cowboy and his two compadres - were ousted, and the groom's father, a man who was already extremely annoyed because the DJ wouldn't let him get on the microphone for Delilah, took chase. At this point, everybody was doing their own thing and it was two minutes to closing time so I decided to shut the bar down a little early and make my way outside to see how this would progress. However, I was sad to step into the brisk night air and see sight nor sound of the chase. That is, until my mobile phone began shouting and rattling my keys in my pocket. Caller: Ed (Pub).

"You might want to get over to the castle mate."
"I'm on my way," I said, like a policeman on high-speed pursuit. I got the siren ready and took flight, running as fast as I could to the wobbling mass that had engulfed one half of our exterior area. I found Eddie, doubled up giggling, sitting on the glass bins opposite. I pulled up a seat.

"Ssh," he began. "Are these two of yours?" I looked within the castle to see the groom's father and the wannabe-bronco, duking it out on the bouncy castle (the other two had evidently been run out of town by the sheriff). The original bronco had obviously thought a good place to hide would be a large enclosure with only one entrance and exit. This decision wound up costing him, as the two were now, in between inebriated bounces, attempting to slap eachother mid-air. The Matrix this most certainly was not but John Woo himself would have been hard-pressed to find stunt people so willing to recreate such reckless feats. The two, whose current state was partially my fault (I did not consider the obviously real possibility that two of my drunks would begin fighting on the bouncy castle in a morbid reworking of It's A Knockout), were bouncing off the walls and I really had to assume culpability for them.
"Yes."
"You sure can pick 'em," nudged Eddie, offering me a crisp. And a can of Pepsi. In fact, from what was left over from the downstairs buffet, me and Eddie had quite the moonlit picnic, which could have been construed quite the wrong way had we not been watching two grown ASBO-baiters deck it out on a bouncy castle. We must have watched the fight ensue for about five minutes - while we may have been expected to actually get in there and stop it, neither of us were prepared to ruin our work shirts by intervening in some sort of gravity-defying moon-fight on a bouncy castle that smells like rotten puke. Boing... smack. Boing... smack. I couldn't help but feel that boxing would be a far more entertaining sport if it were conducted on a bouncy castle. Boing... smack. Boooiiing....

"Bloody hell," gasped Ed, as the buckaroo hit a particularly bouncy area and went flying into the air like a pissed dove and clearing the side wall of the castle (which was a good ten feet tall) with room to burn, before coming hurtling to the ground with a sickening thud. His gracefulness was really something to be admired; most would have attempted to break their fall, but as his sweat-drenched shirt went over the wall and glistened in the brilliant moonlight, he made precisely no motion towards self-preservation and instead hit the ground like a ragdoll, managing to land on his side in a heap. It was at this point that Ed and I put our drinks and crisps down and decided the picnic was probably over as we helped him up, dusted him down, pushed his liver back in, and piled him into an overcrowded taxi, safe in the knowledge that we had exercised all possible precaution in making sure nobody died on the premises.