This is bar work.

Part II - Last Christmas.

2007-12-24T21:25:00.005Z

Previously: Part I: Have Yourself A Bitter Little Christmas.

Eddie and I checked our coats, scarves and hats (it's bloody cold out, and seemingly colder in Edward's car) in at the door and descended the small flight of stairs into Dionysus' main club area. It took my eyes some time to adjust to the low lighting, but once they had, I kind of wish I hadn't bothered, as what I saw was literally my idea of hell. At first I thought I had walked straight into the middle of some horrifying dystopian future where the only people who exist are the under thirties, like Logan's Run, or even worse, Skins (speaking of Skins - perhaps I'm not their target audience because I have a brain in my nut, but is this genuinely how young people are perceived on television these days? And more worryingly, is this program even being given the time of day by the general public? If that's the case, I hope you're all looking forward to my forthcoming, equally horrifying teen drama "Precocious Little Arsehats Who Came Down With The Last Shower Of Rain Think It's Well Cool To Take Drugs And Act Like The-Big-I-Am", because this blogging lark is quite clearly a mug's game - Channel 4 have probably already contacted me by the time you read this). Although the truth was actually more troubling - the DJ was blasting out some horrendous pop-punk number at a volume that made me feel as if Blink 182 were performing a stadium concert in my ribcage, and the sizeable dancefloor was packed to bursting with disgustingly vibrant young people. To tell the truth, if not out-and-out fearful, I've always been at least cautious of large gatherings of "young folks". While these people may well be my age, if not a little older, there's something I find genuinely disconcerting about massive groups of young people having a good time. I've never been able to explain it properly, I just find your garden variety "young people" to be extremely tiresome to be around.

Scarface invited us into his office and once our eardrums had stopped resonating with half-baked pop-rock from 2001, he asked us what it was he could do for us.
"We need a barrel of bitter." The baron looked at us, his face as confused as it was greasy, as if we had asked him for a barrel of Tintizzle Bosh or however much Bosty Old Ring-A-Ding he had lying about. We might as well have been from another planet.
"My friends, this place is a nightclub... we have never had the facilities to care for cask ales."
"But you're a managed house," said Eddie, who for some reason was already filling out a transfer paper (as if filling out a bit of legal gumph would make a barrel of bitter appear out of thin air). "You're required to keep the company's face products." Face products are the things you are meant to be able to order in any managed house; brands that are synonymous with the company. They are to us as Ant & Dec are to ITV.
"Hold on, you see the kind of people we have out there? How many of them do you think are throwing cask ale down their necks?"
"What's wrong with cask ale?" Eddie seemed a little affected by this - he was the same age, if not some years younger, than most of the people out on the dancefloor that we'd pushed and shoved out of our way, as was I, and he regularly drank cask ale.
"Nothing my friend, it's just inappropriate for a place like this. The brewery don't come running to me telling me I have to have it because they know as well as I do that it wouldn't move here. This place is aimed at young people."
"So you can't help us?"
"I'm sorry my friends." He offered us some drugs to cheer us up but even a ruddy good line of coke couldn't raise our sunken spirits. "I can go on the company's internet map and find you a place with a surplus of bitter, if you like? Save you a few trips I suppose." We thanked him for that, as Henry's computer doesn't meet the specification for the company's new software.

"Go to the bar with these vouchers, have whatever you like while you wait, my treat." A most kind and generous offer, I'm sure you'll agree, but one that came with a slight catch - we had to go and sit down in amongst all those bloody young people. The ironic Public Enemy and Iron Maiden t-shirts, the hair that is carefully engineered to look like it isn't carefully engineered, the frivolous abandon, the reveling in being young. It all made me sick to my very core. "I shall come and find you with the results."

We wedged ourselves among the hordes of jiggling sweat-sprayers (incidentally, I too am of the opinion that the smell of cigarette smoke is preferable to that of sweat, farts and stale beer) as we queued for the grossly understaffed bar. The staff were just getting on with it, however - throwing shots into plastic cups, mixing them up, taking (far too much) money for them (when I saw it was £4 for a double Vodka you could've knocked me over with a feather - or the five pound note it would take to get a double vodka and coke). No hassle. The DJ was now serenading us with an old Alkaline Trio single (to which I must profess a fondness when I can listen to it at a sensible volume in my own home, where some charming if slightly tipsy red-haired girl isn't flailing her arms like a mad woman and hitting me in the back of the head unapologetically in time to the music) as we tried our best to converse over the wall-splittingly loud music.

"CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THAT GUY SAID?"
"WHAT?" The chorus came to a close and brought with it the jarring picture of a gang of fetus-faced hipsters, waving their hands in the air and singing in unison "I won't have to quit doing fucked up shit", one of the band's less radio-friendly lyrics, as if chanting at a football match.
"HE THINKS HE KNOWS WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE ARE AFTER." Eddie had obviously been quite hurt by the assertion that he wasn't in touch with "da yoof" - personally, if being in touch with "da yoof" entailed flopping around in some overheated dungeon to the tune of tacky pop-punk crowd-pleasers with an alcopop in one hand and the tattered shreds of my dignity in the other, I could do without it. But Eddie was clearly feeling alienated, which wasn't hard to do when you looked at them against us - our jeans were unripped, our shirts without ironic daubings of any kind (I considered tearing the clock from the wall and wearing that around my neck, but then I realized the people with Public Enemy T-shirts wouldn't realize I was mimicking Flava Flav, because none of them know who Public Enemy were, they just liked the design when they saw it in Foppish Gent or H&M or wherever it is they buy their bloody clothes) and in that respect we must have appeared a right pair of "narcs". If kids are still saying "narc". Probably not, the fickle little bastards. Anyway, I decided to attempt to reason with Eddie.
"YOU CAN'T HOLD A -"
"WHAT?"
"I SAID YOU CAN'T HOLD A GRUDGE AGAINST HIM, HE DIDN'T INSULT YOU PERSONALLY. THIS PLACE JUST DOESN'T GO FOR CASK ALE, IT TAKES TOO MUCH TIME FOR ONE THING."
"HOW LONG IS IT GOING TO TAKE US TO GET TO THE BAR?"
"ARE WE EVEN IN THE QUEUE?" It didn't matter, apparently, because before the queue could become any more stationary, the man from Del Monte came back with the search results, revealing a part barrel was available at a slightly "rougher" establishment down the road. We thanked him for his generosity, kept the coupons at his insistence.
"in case you ever want to come back", he said - which we will do, right after we pull out all our teeth with rusty pliers, push piping hot needles through our fingernails until they crack, sizzle and fall away, and use a Manilla envelope to put papercuts in our eyeballs.

We hopped into Eddie's car and made our way over to this "other" pub. Now, this pub has something of a reputation - this is the kind of place where the police admit they have absolutely no control and they "deal with their own". Mostly by introducing the more troublesome punters (and "troublesome" in this sense means whistleblowers, grassers, witnesses and "narcs") to the business end of a beatdown. So we entered the pub with caution - being careful not to disturb the congealed blood on the doorhandle, we made our way past the rows of extremely sinister-looking gentlemen (several of whom had fingers missing - I hoped it was simply caused by frostbite, but soon realized that unless Frostbite was the name of the horse that came last one fateful day, that probably wasn't it). The barman was a weasely young man who looked like he'd be better suited for a game of "find the lady" on an Egyptian street corner than pulling pints in the Welsh valleys, but not wanting to point this out to him, we simply announced our business and asked if he could help us.

"Oh yeah, yeah, wicked, right this way." We were led down a corridor and into a ground floor cellar, something of a rarity I'm led to believe, and before us sat the holy grail - a barrel of bitter. It was three-quarters full, apparently, due to a shortage at the brewery, but it was here, and it was ours. We were delighted, and the barman looked pleased as punch to give it to us. We soon found out why.

"Oh, that's fantastic, if you could just sign it over -"
"Fifty quid." At first I thought I hadn't heard him correctly. He looked me square in the eye and I soon realized that perhaps I wasn't mistaken.
"I'm sorry?"
"Fifty quid mate." No, it turns out I'd heard him correctly after all. Better nip this in the bud, I thought. I assumed my best radio voice and relayed the quote from the back of the transfer forms.
"Um, no. You - the house - will get stock credit from the company when the transfer is declared -"
"Nah nah nah mate," rasped the slick-haired little weasel, shifting about on the spot as if selling knock-off DVDs down the covered market and having to constantly maintain a lookout for the rozzers. "I don't get fuck all off that, does I? That's company-boy bullshit. Where's my dollah, eh? What's in it for me?"
"Look pal," I negotiated - I decided to attempt to 'out-dodgy' him, which subsequently failed. "We're not giving you a monkey for a three-quarter barrel of B, you know what I'm saying?" Upon my proud retelling of this story later on, I was informed that a monkey is £500, not £50. Nobody seemed to notice so in future retellings I simply omitted the fact that I'd gotten my cockney denominations wrong. That kind of thing gets you chucked down the apples and pears around here, I'd imagine.
"Well what am I gettin' out of this, mate?"
"What are we getting out of it?" Eddie enquired. Eddie's far better at this sort of thing than me, I should probably have just sat in the car. "You think we're that fucking desperate that we're gonna give you fifty quid?"
"I got what you need, bruv, I got -"
"You haven't got fuck all, mate," Eddie corrected him. I suddenly felt my face become extremely hot as the horrible feeling of conflict came to the fore. "You're on the same level as us. Alright? We're just floor staff, just like you. In fact, why the fuck are we talking to you? I'm going to get your manager."
"No, Eddie, I'll sort this out." I said this with a decidedly authoritative bark, but in reality it was because I didn't want to be left on my own while Eddie, Bribery Bill and his manager duked it out. If the manager said no, he said no, and we hadn't lost anything. At least I could try and do it diplomatically. Eddie went out into the bar and sat down as Bribery Bill escorted me upstairs. "Anyway, I'm sure your manager will want to discuss the fifty quid service charge this place has inexplicably -"
"Alright mate, alright, alright," stuttered Bill, turning on his heel. "Okay, look, we don't need to get the managers involved in this."
"Yes we do, I need this paper signed to say we've taken stock from you. And your manager will need a copy."
"Nah, I meant the fifty quid. We can... twenty?" I simply turned my face to the wall and laughed.
"Let me see your manager."
"Aw mate, nah, nah," at this point Bill seemed to be getting agitated. Before he could fall to his knees and sob into the hem of my trousers, Eddie came barging up behind us.

"We're going."
"What?"
"Henry called us back. We won't be needing your bitter anymore mate." Eddie patted him on the back of the head a few times in a way that suggested a full-on slap was coming, before he grabbed me by the arm and led me away.
"Ah, okay, okay," Bill said with a decidedly calmer air this time around. I daresay this was the first time he'd even seen a stock transfer and - wrongly - decided it was a means of supplementing his income. Now, a long, long time ago I decided that this blog would never feature the real name of anything - no real names of breweries, pubs, people, nothing. This was not just to protect me from the company's legal jackhammer, it was also to protect the people on the receiving end of my abuse, and now I sorely, sorely regret that I can't name and shame the little bastards in charge of that pub. I can, however, say that the people running that squalid little shitshack shouldn't really wonder why their clientele seem to swap class-A drugs around the car park like football stickers in a playground - if I had to stay there for any length of time that wasn't absolutely necessary I'd have my belt around my arm faster than you can say tenner bag.

Anyway, I got in the car, as did Eddie, and neither of us could really believe what had just transpired.

"Can you believe -"
"Do you think he'll remember which pub we're from?" Eddie had his hand on the ignition and his eye on the rearview mirror, never breaking eye contact with the pub's front door.
"I have no idea. Probably not, he wasn't listening to a word we said until we mentioned the fact we needed a barrel, I -"
"Okay..." Eddie began to reverse the car out of the car park. He stopped to turn, and I heard something roll and thud in the boot behind us. Something large and heavy. I didn't quite know how to ask, but luckily Eddie answered the question for me. "Plus you didn't give him the transfer papers, did you? So this one's a freebie."
I went to protest, but the morality of it soon subsided when I realized we'd landed a free barrel of bitter on a day when bitter looked to be rarer entity than photos from the Pope's Bar Mitzvah.
"When did you -"
"When you were arguing on the stairs. Fucked if I'm sitting with the crackheads, man."
I can't explain it, but as we drove back to the pub, with 14 gallons of stolen bitter in the boot of Eddie's broken old car (which is only slightly safer on the road than the notorious bathtub on wheels from every single episode of Last Of The Summer Wine), listening to Mike Oldfield on repeat, I truly felt like Christmas was upon us. The lights shone brighter, the cold air felt more wintery as it came in through the cracks in Eddie's windshield and doors, the ice on the road felt less dangerous, it all felt alright. Because we were thieves. Proper, honest to goodness thieves. At Christmas no less - we were way worse than the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge put together. And if that isn't the spirit of the season then I really don't know what is. Nor do I ever want to.

---

This concludes the This Is Bar Work story. Thank you for reading.

Merry Christmas.

Part I - Have Yourself A Bitter Little Christmas.

2007-12-21T19:19:00.002Z

Plenty of people these days lament the loss of the traditional Christmas - it's too bloody commercialized now, the dissenters howl; just another excuse for big business to flog their wares on us. A big bloody con devised by the bosses at Hallmark to grope the last few pennies out of us at year's end before they hit us again six days later with the cost of a new calendar, and the whole sordid cycle begins again. In the words of the world's biggest cock-knocker Richard Littlejohn, you couldn't make it up. Yes, to some of the more cynical among us, Christmas now is little more than a Coca-Cola-sodden husk of its former self, long since expired, despised by all and sundry as it lies face down in the snow, a mangy old dog urinating on it for good measure. And while that may appear to be a solid point, here's another - piss off, you perpetual humbuggers, Christmas is the tits.

Now don't get me wrong, there's plenty to dislike about the overwhelming commercial aspect of Jesus' annual birthday bash - if, for example, you only know it's Christmas when the advert breaks on Coronation Street assume a waifer-thin veneer of festive spirit (for example, Martin Kemp is pushing sofas with a Christmas hat and a sleighbell-tinted rendition of "Gold") then the meaning of Christmas is probably lost on you as it is - but as with anything else, Christmas is what you make of it. It can be a time for misery and general ill-will to all men, but it can be so much more. It can be a snow-covered hillside on a racist farmer's land. It can be unwrapping a present from that really rubbish uncle to discover he thinks enough of you to give you one of his old jumpers for Christmas (complete with a large plaster stain on the front because he refused to pay a plasterer good money for something - he thought - he could do himself). It can be a robin caught under the wheel of a gritter and popped like a cheap, feathery balloon. It can be sitting around the table with the family, trying to eat in peace while your newly-converted Jehovah's Witness of an auntie condemns you all to a lifetime in hell and an awkward Christmas dinner like the pious old prune she is (while you silently resolve to refuse to offer her second helpings, dessert or a blood transfusion). And, if there's time, it can also be compassion and a sense of festive cheer.

So what's been happening in the pub? Well, nothing has changed - there was a little speculation that maybe I'd got another job, been paid millions for my story or had been rumbled locally as a pseudonymous net-based ne'erdowell (sadly, the former two are not true and thankfully nor is the latter) but the truth is I'm still there, festering away behind the bar as I ebb slowly and inevitably towards a position of seniority. The main reason for this? Henry's incompetence, which is becoming a bigger and bigger scourge upon my time with each passing day. It's not that I want a position of seniority, far from it - but it's the small differences between Henry and myself that often put me in a more favourable light. Take, for instance, the gentlemen who was becoming agitated that - despite there only being eight people in the lounge eating - we were not taking any further orders for food.

My response: "I know it doesn't look much, but we've a very small kitchen and they've booked the full Christmas menu which requires our undivided attention for groups larger than four. I'm sorry if this is an inconvenience." Looking more or less appeased with what I'd told him, he asked to speak to the manager - possibly to just get it from the horse's mouth. However, he probably didn't expect the horse to come galloping down the corridor, hooves covered in brandy sauce and brandishing a butter knife threateningly, open his big horsey mouth and spew shit all over his face. Needless to say, Henry had somewhat misread the situation.

"We work damn hard in that fucking kitchen," Henry snapped with all the airs and graces of a punch in the mouth. "And I'll be damned if I'm going to take that sort of shit from the likes of you..." Henry wiped his nose, and, with a final sprig of insult atop the Christmas pudding of injury, added: "...and your fat wife." Quite the assertion, considering the generously-portioned lady that Henry assumed to be his wife was, upon closer inspection, the property surveyor for the brewery who had come to discuss the repairs to the window frames. Needless to say, we didn't get our windows looked at that day and the gentleman went home to his wife - about whose size we are still none the wiser - with something of a sour taste in his mouth. Two complaints against the pub for the price of one. Quite a spectacular feat.

So most times, if people want to discuss something of any importance, they will oftentimes come and talk to me about it rather than deal with Henry. This applies even to the people directly above him, creating this absurd atmosphere where the crew know more about the ship than the captain does. It was this bizarre situation that left us without a single drop of bitter for the week before Christmas. Now, any of the regulars at our pub will tell you that bitter is far and away the most popular item on the menu, and if it's not on then you might as well leave the doors locked. Normally, we order a little more than we need. And when I say that, I mean I order a little more than we need, because Henry refuses to deal with the brewery's (faultlessly polite) stock people. However, due to a rather pesky bout of glandular fever, I was knocked out of action for a few days. And while I thoroughly enjoyed my time away from work, slobbing around on the settee watching DVDs of Peep Show and turning the stereo up to the point where the neighbours could well have assumed Tim Harrington was actually living with me, I knew there would be an unpleasant surprise awaiting my return. I wasn't sure what it would be, but there was a general feeling of unease that gripped me and made me very nervous about returning to work.

And lo and behold, there it was, a cellar fit to bursting with all the old shit we can't sell, and not a single bitter barrel to be found. The company's "continental lager", their foray into mainland European-style beer, that couldn't be any less popular if the pump was shaped like a massive dopper with Ian Huntley's face on it? We had that to burn (and we may as well have done just that, because we sure as hell can't sell the sodding stuff - if you live in Cardiff and have been inside a pub belonging to a certain company recently then you almost certainly know what I'm on about, and if you don't, imagine somebody's taken a barrel of Stella and decanted it through a filter made primarily of raw onions and cancerous sheep livers and then ask yourself whether you'd pay somebody £2.75 for the privilege of drinking it). Bottled cider, a fashion crutch that recently experienced a downward spike in popularity so sharp you could cut your Pogs on it? We had enough to drown a cider festival. But did we have a drop of bitter? No, we did not. Why? Because rather than going out the back to check our stock levels himself, Henry decided to just assume that the stock list I'd prepared the week prior (when bitter was plentiful and joy was unconfined) was good for another week's use, and phoned that in. Didn't check the date on it, didn't even check it was right. Just phoned it in and hoped for the best. Resulting in a particularly harrowing dilemma.

I discovered the problem on a quiet Tuesday evening when Eddie and I were putting the final festive touches up around the pub. Every year we're given a little less to work with and this year our budget could barely stretch for the wrapping paper we use to wrap the pictures on the walls (to make them look like presents), much less anything particularly seasonal behind the bar. Eddie, who I think is something of a frustrated fashion designer at heart, spent quite some time trying to affix battery-powered fairy lights to my shirt in the hopes that if everybody brought their own fairy lights in, a few modifications would mean the festive cheer would be physically attached to us (and more importantly would draw attention away from the sparsely-spruced back bar). As I was pouring a round of drinks looking like a human Christmas tree, the bitter spattered to a halt. No matter, I thought, until I noticed our complete and utter deficit. I wondered first what I had done to be punished in this way, before realizing who was to blame.

Of course, with the festive time of year comes the national compulsion to rise from ones seat and devour everything and everyone within a five mile radius, including your recently vacated seat, your entire family, and every last damn thing in the kitchen of the local pub. Christmas meals are something for which we prepare very carefully - we put out pre-prepared menus months in advance that some people have seen fit to utilize, which means Henry is in the kitchen by himself, trying to cook mince pies and bellowing to nobody in particular about nothing in particular, occasionally collaring one of us to give us a pep talk about commitment, as if we needed to be reminded that working over Christmas is a jolly unpleasant experience. The advice I give to him - and now to you - is this: don't fancy working long, hard, thankless hours over Christmas? Don't be a landlord in a shitty pub. That's probably good advice anyway, but especially if you're not down with busting a nut in December. This is advice Henry singularly failed to heed and as such he was confined to the kitchen of a dying pub that will more than likely get boarded up in the next three years. So naturally he wasn't really in the mood to be beaten around the head with his faults by Eddie and myself.

"We don't have any bitter," I murmured gingerly to him as if attempting to wake a sleeping child after a long car journey.
"What!?"
"You didn't order any bitter," Eddie blasted, opening the door of the car at sixty miles an hour, pushing subtlety out into oncoming traffic.
"Am I expected to do everything around here - what the fuck are you wearing?" I solemnly switched off the battery pack for my shirt-lights.
"Generally the landlord's expected to keep an eye on the stock," Eddie noted correctly.
"We'll need to get a transfer from another pub... but I've got this to do."
"I'll go and get it."
"You can't go on your own," barked Henry, wrist deep in mince pie filling. "You'll need somebody else."
"Who?"

I didn't even wait for the answer. I silently zipped up my jacket, grabbed my iPod from behind the amplifier and got in Eddie's deathmobile.

"Right, sorry about the mess - just grab that A to Z and sling it in the back... oh, and the heating's a bit patchy... you got any Christmas music on that thing?" I handed over my iPod and Eddie began carefully reviewing my taste in music. "In Dulce Jubilo - which versions are these?"
"There's one by a band called Swimming that -"
"Got Mike Oldfield?"
"Yeah, there's the Mike Oldfield version on there."

So that was the Christmas music on our way to our first pub - one of "my" tunes, followed by Mike Oldfield's "In Dulce Jubilo." Sufjan Stevens' melancholy "That Was The Worst Christmas Ever!"... followed by In Dulce Jubilo. Paul McCartney's ham-fisted attempt at proving he was still worth a damn creatively after Wings turned out to be a load of arse... In Dulce Jubilo. Swimming's "In Dulce Jubilo"... Mike Oldfield's "In Dulce Jubilo". After a while, the tune felt like a bit of Christmas dinner that just wouldn't stay down. It became like a word that has been repeated over and over again - it lost all meaning entirely as I became intimately, almost biblically, knowledgeable about every last nook and cranny of the song. The missed note in the solo at 1:48, the gentle crooning wheeze of the oboe, the sound of Oldfield's assistants begrudgingly wheeling the tubular bells out of the studio (after being informed on a moment's notice that the next installment in that little "masterpiece" was being recorded the next day). After a while I probably would have taken Moonlight bloody Shadow rather than another spin of In Dulce Jubilo.

"Are you sure you don't want anything else? I've got the lot here, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Wizzard, Slade..."
"Nah, you're alright, I only really like that one. And Moonlight Shadow. Have you -"
"No."

So that one we stuck with as we pulled up outside the closest brewery-owned pub - a ghastly little nightclub-type joint called Dionysus. In the 1980s it had been a truly horrendous Greek-themed wine bar, but then rock became king once more and now it's a painfully fashionable club. How do you know it's fashionable? Well, for a start, you have to pay two bloody quid to get in. And this was at six in the evening on a Tuesday, it's not as if we were trying to gatecrash at midnight on a Friday.

"Cover's two quid mate," the doorman informed me.
"No, we're here to see the manager," we said, flaunting our stock transfer papers as if this somehow got us A-list privileges. "We need some bitter, we're from the pub down the road."
"Oh yeah, what's it called?"
"It's called The -"
"Actually it doesn't matter," the doorman proclaimed. "I'm not just letting you ten-a-penny jokers waltz in here without paying cover."
"Aw fuck off," Eddie snorted derisively. "This isn't Stringfellows mate, it's a shitty little club way out in the sticks."
"Now it's four quid." I felt Eddie's involvement in negotiations had hindered us considerably.
"It was two quid a minute ago, this is mental!"
"It was two quid before your little mate told me to fuck off." Before Eddie could bump the price up any further by turning the air blue, a gentleman in a rather fetching drug dealer suit (white, rolled up sleeves, black shirt, top buttons undone to reveal farmer's tan and gold chain) asked what the problem was.

"These two lads are from - well, they claim to be from - hang on, where did you say you were from again?"
"We didn't," I said, turning to the nice drug dealer. "We're from The -"
"I know you!" the man squealed giddily. "You're Henry's boys, aren't you?"
"Steady on mate," Eddie snapped. "We're not his 'boys', we're his staff. Boys implies something wholly untoward." Brilliant, I thought, now we'll probably have to buy some drugs off him to make him happy, and if Eddie thought I was going to start doing crack because he didn't have any manners, he had an entirely different think coming. Luckily, Senor Drug Mule just laughed.
"Hahaha, yes, I was at - what's your pub called again?"
"The -"
"I was there a few weeks ago for a manager's meeting. You did me a bowl of chips when Henry wouldn't." This is a task I will perform for people when business is quiet and the kitchen is technically 'closed'. You would be amazed the gratitude it gets you. I've had drinks bought for me, offers of nights out in other pubs, the works, all because I know how to fry some chips.

"Come with me to my office, please, I don't make a habit of conducting business in the street."

To be continued... (part two will be posted December 24th)

The Getaway - part II.

2007-08-31T01:56:00.000Z

I turned up at my place of work bright and early this Tuesday morning; I clambered out of bed, ready for work, and went to my pub. There, I was to be picked up and taken to a pub way out in the sticks called the Carpenter for a day of live cellar control - last week I did a course in the brewery and was offered the placement, and what's the worst that can happen, I thought? It's a day away from my pub and it's two days paid holiday from the company's already overstuffed wallet. Plus, it can't be any worse than dealing with the cellar at my current gaff - considering how much beer we actually shift per week, we're actually a pretty small pub, and now that business is inexplicably on the up and up (despite my best efforts to the contrary) our cellar is beginning to feel somewhat claustrophobic. It's not uncommon now that we actually have to stack barrels one on top of the other, and apparently the Carpenter is a little quieter than we are, so... it can't be worse, right?

Ha.

Anyway, my instructions were simple; go to the pub and await the company pick-up; I was to be escorted by the company both there and back. Not too shabby, it must be said. As I awaited the limousine that the company had undoubtedly acquired for me, I decided to give Frances a hand opening the pub up. Seeing as my status as both -

1) nocturnal, and

2) the pub's go-to guy when the night shift needs covering (and it always does), I'm usually never there to deal with the wreck and ruin I leave in my wake - well, that day I was, as I helped Frances put the pub back together; in that I put the pub together and Frances mopped the same patch of floor while giving me a thorough analysis of the state of the British pub. Frances took her licensing course a few weeks ago and despite failing it the first time round, has since passed and therefore has a lot of extremely interesting things to say about the state of the alcohol trade in this country. Remember last week when I said I could relate to any licensee on some level because of the nature of our trade, making it difficult to find a licensee I couldn't at least hold a conversation with? Frances soon put that theory to bed and smothered it to death with a pillow as she waxed philosophical about the drinking age, before providing me with a carefully crafted impersonation of what an ill-educated buffoon may say on the subject after receiving a lobotomy. At least I think it was an impression - if it wasn't, then she may want to consider handing that license back pronto. Here's why:

"I think you should be 25 to drink." That's absolutely ludicrous and a fie on you for polluting my mental space with your fetid notions, a fie I say. But why say you this?
"Well, these kids don't know what's what. It's a binge drinking culture and if the legal age is brought up then they won't be able to binge drink until they're old enough to drink responsibly." So if it is in fact a culture, does that not suggest that what needs changing is, in fact, the way young people perceive alcohol, rather than the age at which they're allowed to purchase it themselves? Because that's not going to change -
"There should be tougher sentences for people who serve underagers." Wow, I agree, that's -
"Minimum prison sentences." Ooh, you've slipped up there. Better luck next time, why not peel an opinion out of a half-decent newspaper next time?
"Nah, I'm serious! You know the tories are bringing back prison ships? Good on them." Yet my laughter was not because I doubted her sincerity - my laughter was, if anything, because I could not have been more certain of her sincerity.

I was putting the nozzles on the taps as I feared for the safety of my sanity when a figure appeared in my peripheral vision.

"Alright Judas, your escort awaits." Henry stood there, stock clipboard in hand, half-moon specs gliding down his nose and giving a wry smile; most people know by now that Henry is one of the better managers we've had, and when he's not attracting accidents and catastrophe much in the way metal filings will go hurtling towards a magnet, he's actually pretty supportive of anybody on staff trying to 'climb the ladder', as it were. The Judas statement was in jest; he knew this was not a permanent arrangement, but I still got the impression he wasn't keen on me being away for the day. Perhaps he would genuinely miss me; maybe my hard work and dedication was such that seeing another pub become privy to my expertise was simply -

"C'mon, it's bad enough I've got to work the night shift because you and lazy-arse [Eddie is on holiday this week] are off galavanting," chuckled Henry (chuckling despite having to actually come downstairs and do some bar work, something to which Henry has a bizarre aversion). "I don't want to have to see your ugly mug around here any longer than is necessary. Get in that van."

Right. But wait a second...

"What do you mean, van?"

"I'm not down with all these modern gastropubs," bellowed Dai into my ear. "If you're going to a pub, you're going for a drink, not some focking spaghetti in a bap. I was in the Potrero Hill the other day - you know it?" He had to shout, because there was a lot of equipment rattling around in the back of the van and the engine made such an ungodly racket that I was half expecting to get out and see a Rolls Royce jet engine taped to the rear that I hadn't seen upon first climbing in. Yes, my company escort was, in fact, the cellar services van, and Dai, the cellar services technician who was obviously at a loose end that morning and had been roped in by the company because of his expert navigation skills. Not only did we get to the Carpenter in record time when you consider how far away it is, on the way, Dai had time to discuss every single pub that has ever existed in Wales. Now, this is not uncommon - you work in any pub and you pretty soon become familiar with the pubs in the surrounding area if only because you hear them being discussed by the customers. But this guy had been around the block a few times as he knew everyone (this was made evident by the fact that he had found a pub so backwoods that it is run by people who serve spaghetti in a bap). And let me tell you something; he had some strong views. He was obviously not indulged by anyone recently, as I got his entire career's worth of opinions. On everything.

"I was in the Seven Swans the other day - you know it?" I quickly racked my brain for anything that matched, c'mon, c'mon, anything will - oh, yes! I do know it! I was on a course with somebody who worked there! Ha!
"Yes! It's in Aberdare!"
"That's the one!" beamed Dai, seemingly thrilled that somebody else had heard of the Seven Swans, as if he once had reason to believe it had all been a figment of his imagination and my corroboration proved he was not insane. 'Lovely drop of bitter in there; mild's not so hot though, they're not treating them barrels right. If you want a lovely pint of mild, you know where to go?"
"Where?"
"The King Edward in Port Talbot. They used to call it the Deadward because no fucker'd go in there for love nor money but they got Jack out of the Goch, you know him? Ran the Ddraig Goch for a bit?"
"No, I -"
"Anyway, Jack got the mild going in there, lovely. The old landlord - Dave, you know him?"
"No." Keeping up with Dai was an exhausting proposition; it was the mental equivalent of walking between all these pubs on foot.
"He was a lost cause. A real psycho. Spent half his time wishing he was a landlord rather than being a landlord, you know what I mean?"
"No."
"Anyway, he started out at The Shoreline in Pontprennau back in '74, and..."

And just like that, I was back out of the conversation; amateur hour was over and I handed the baton back to Dai, who treated me to a further hour or so of monologuing on the topic of company politics of the last forty years. This continued as I was taken further and further away from the village, and I realized how civilized my place actually is as the van went hurtling out to the murky middle-ground of Wales - the tarmac would often just stretch for the "good" roads, resulting in long dry patches of dirt, the street signs went from embossed metal to painted wood and the houses and roads became further and further diluted by the vast expanses of green grass with a few wooly dots on the hillside. I was a long way from home, and we finally screeched to a halt outside the Carpenter - a lovely stone-wall place that didn't look too dissimilar to my own pub. Suddenly I didn't feel so lost.

I stepped out of the company-sponsored deathtrap - with the assurance that I would be picked up again - and was immediately mauled by a gigantic bear that came running up out of nowhere. After a few seconds of having the very essence squeezed out of me, I soon realized that the bear wasn't roaring, it was laughing, and it wasn't trying to kill me, it was actually hugging me. Once I had been released from this titan grip and allowed to pay off all my oxygen debts with a few deep gasps, I soon discovered that the bear was, in fact, Tony, the landlord. Now, I myself am quite a large fellow; I have to have that seat on the back of the bus that sits into the aisle and I am always ducking and diving my way through doorways to ensure that I do not suffer any superfluous brain damage as I go about my business, but Tony was something else altogether. Standing an easy seven feet tall and probably weighing in somewhere around the thirty stone mark, I didn't know whether to shake his hand or to quickly implore the other villagers to subdue this Gulliver-esque monster before he can devour us all and muck about with our stuff.

"Haw haw haw, you must be..."
"Yes, you must -" Gasp. "Be - " Gasp. "Tony." Wheeze. Chunk of lung.
"Haw haw, yes, come inside!"

Tony was one of those people you describe as "larger than life", in that he is larger than the sum physical mass of all other life currently inhabiting the planet. With a belly that had obviously seen more beer go through it than the brewery gates and a voice that was extremely rich in timbre (much the aural equivalent of squeezing play-doh through a very small hole), Tony was the kind of landlord I expected I'd be working for before I really knew anything about pubs. I was both shocked and relieved that men like Tony are still alive, kicking, and running pubs - there was once a time when to be a landlord, you had to be at least Tony-esque. Henry is, I suppose, in as much as he holds a vaguely similar "old-school" manner, but Henry doesn't look the part. Tony did.

"Ere, I've been on the phone to Glen Christie about you. He says you're one of Henry Ginn's boys - I've not seen Henry for years! How is he, the miserable old bastard?" I had a quick think and indeed confirmed that Henry's status as a miserable old bastard has not changed in the intervening period between the last time he saw Henry and seeing me. "Haw haw haw! I knew he wouldn't, the miserable old bastard."

I was ushered into the pub and I was taken aback - the Carpenter was exactly the same as my pub, down to the crusty old regulars flapping their gums and the patterns on the cushions of the furniture. The company bought thousands of pubs just like this one in the 80s and 90s - the company realized that property was the way to go and now has a portfolio of pubs, clubs, bars and buildings that must be worth a fair chunk of change. So as renovation after renovation rippled through the land like a shockwave of cheap paint and gaudy furniture, the country's pubs were, one by one, held at gunpoint for everything that had made them unique. What makes pubs unique these days is the atmosphere, as the visual differences are becoming fewer and further between. The Carpenter was a great deal different to my own pub, however, as there was the succinct impression that there were substantially fewer people on staff. At around mid-day on a weekday, there can be anything between two and half a dozen people milling about - chefs, management, bar staff and the like. This was evidently a much smaller operation - I had once thought that the only "smaller operation" than our pub (a 'cosy' pub at the best of times) was those six-can boxes of bitter, but evidently not, as I had found the only pub

With this, I was grabbed by the arm and thrust into the cellar. I saw four things waiting for me - three of them were barrels, and one of them was a human being, smiling at me as if I had brought him the antidote for a rather unfortunate snakebite.

"This is Luke," wheezed Tony. Luke beamed at me before attempting to shake my hand clean off. Once I had been allowed to settle from his absurdly volatile greeting, the reality of the situation gripped me - there was only three barrels. The bar, I remembered correctly, had been kitted out with the full compliment of taps - Guinness, Strongbow, Carlsberg, Fosters, the full selection of the company's cask and keg offerings.

"You've only..." I pointed at the barrels in disbelief. Guinness, bitter and Carlsberg. No cider, no other lagers, just bitter, stout, and one lager. That was it. The equipment was on the walls, so they obviously do have all this other stuff - the lines were there, but they were laying dormant. What gives?
"Well, it's Tuesday. We only sell the other stuff on the weekends." I looked at Tony with the kind of incredulity I usually reserve for people who think creationism should be taught in science classes. I brought out the measurin' devices (for kegs, it is an extremely clever little clamp that you apply to the edge and pull back on, the force pushing a little needle that tells you what remains in the barrel; for casks, it is a stick with some lines drawn on it - if it ain't broke, I suppose...) and ascertained that there was a full barrel of bitter (~140 pints), half a barrel of Guinness (~40 pints) and about two gallons (~16 pints) of Carlsberg left.
"What if you get a bus load of builders? Or a gang of cyclists? Or some sort of amateur Russian photography society?" These were all examples from my own past where unexpected passing trade can absolutely zap your stock.
"What passing trade?" Tony chuckled, with the kind of laugh you could easily mistake for somebody throwing a tuba down a foghorn. "I'm not sure what you're used to, but we don't get passing trade. We know almost to the pint what we need for the week. We're getting our delivery in shortly." I threw open the back doors to see the courtyard absolutely full to bursting with exhausted barrels, ready for collection; this is obviously a very busy pub, just not today. I began to wonder just why the Carpenter had offered this position up in the first place; it's a barren wasteland of a place where they can guess their stocks down to a pint. For a course on cellar control, short of helping the drayman with their plethora of empties, there really wasn't much cellar to manage at all.
"So... what do you want me to do until then, Tony?"

"So where are you from then?" enquired the captain of the pub darts team as Tony and I concluded our four hours of more or less uninterrupted preparation for the doubles tournament in the evening. Yes, that's why my services had been plundered from my old post - because darts is obviously serious business at the Carpenter, and you can't really ask the company for a doubles partner. I asked why another member of staff couldn't do it, until the painfully obvious hit me in the back of the head (much as I feared my darts would hit people in a similar fashion) - there were no other members of staff. It was just Luke and Tony. Jesus, talk about cabin fever. If all I had day in and day out was the curmudgeon old pricks propping up the slab and Henry for company, I would certainly not be as cheery as Luke was; I would have more or less lost my mind by now, to tell the truth. However, I couldn't help but wonder as the pub's darts players slowly waddled in, deposited their assorted paraphernalia on the tables and reported to the bar, how the three remaining barrels would fair against twenty people who didn't seem to understand the meaning of the word "pace".

"Pint of bitter please, Luke."
"Pint of bitter please, Luke."
"Bitter please, Luke."
"Guinness please, Luke."
"Carlsberg Luke, if you would be so kind." On and on and on - I was pretty sure the bitter would last, but the Guinness didn't look too hot and there was only enough Carlsberg for a few more rounds on one table.

Anybody who has had the misfortune of watching me play darts will tell you that my game leaves quite a lot to be desired. There's ample room for improvement - so much room, in fact, that I'm actually renting it out to a rather pleasant student couple to supplement my income. But that's not to say I'm in the minority in that respect; darts is a cruelly deceptive sport. When I started my stint as barman-in-residence back home, I stood behind the plank of wood that separated "them" from "us" and watched with a mixture of intent and honest-to-goodness amazement as grown men stood around, attempting to throw little arrows at a large circle from a laughably minimal distance. What nonsense, I thought, making the fatal assumption that darts is easy. It's not. I came to the same conclusions as everyone else - it's the only sport where being a bloater is a recognized boost as opposed to a hinderance, so it's got to be easy. The fact is, darts looks easy from a distance, but you get closer and closer and before you know it, your goals in life become as compact as the small, red treble-twenty for which you so hopelessly strive, and then you're hooked. I have been trying ever since. "Can I get some service over here?", the queuing masses bellow as they watch me abandon my position to throw darts until my elbow snaps in two. No problem, there in a second, I - oh, three more at the board won't hurt. Dnk, dnk, dnk. Forty-one. Dammit. Three in the twenty then. Dnk, dnk, dnk. Twenty-six. Dammit. Oh, hi Henry, closing time already is it? Boy, the time flies. No, I won't do this again tomorrow, I promise. Dnk, dnk, dnk.

"C'mon, let's really give these tossers a pasting," guffawed Tony as I fluked a lucky ton-forty. "Haha, don't show 'em too much!"

With that, hands were shook and the night was underway.

"OK, game on - Tony and [name removed] up first against Barry and Clive. 501, away we go."

I picked a strange way to show Barry and Clive I meant business; one dart went in the twenty, another went in the five, then the other went in the one. Twenty-six. Rubbish. At least it was rubbish until the last dart's forceful atrociousness managed to knock the twenty out of the board, making my initial score of "rubbish" look like some herculean feat of brilliance by compare. So, six it is then.

Tony wasn't doing much better, but luckily, Barry can't play darts for shit, leaving Clive to rack up the big numbers. Paltry arrows were thrown and eventually we got down to it - seventy-six for them, thirty-two for us. In case you're not familiar with the sport, you have a score of 501 and the first person to slim it right down to zero wins. However, the last score has to be a double - there's a very thin coloured ring on the outside of the scoring area approximately two centimetres wide; that doubles the score assigned to that segment of the board. So let's say you're left with thirty-two - that's double sixteen. You can't win on anything but a double. Brilliant, I thought - double sixteen is easy, it never usually takes me more than - what's that? Oh, right, Clive just gave us a pasting (treble twenty, double eight). God dammit.

Despite commiserating with Tony as he shook a few more hands and went to get the food prepared (for some reason, the darts players command enough respect to have free food provided every Tuesday - our pub team, despite their ability to go anywhere in Wales and walk out with the opposing team's dignity in their back pocket, is lucky to get a chip butty when they return to the castle lauding their latest victory), I was quite relieved to have been knocked out of the running - and in a relatively graceful style that at least got me a few approving nods, instead of being labeled some sort of darting pariah who didn't even deserve to know Jim Bowen's name, let alone Phil Taylor, Bobbie George, Old Stoneface, and a countless cast of other darting greats, most of whom more than likely left a bloated corpse that had to be buried in a piano box or incinerated in a volcano - because I was allowed to join Luke in the real event of the night: meeting the draymen off the van. Mike and Dennis are the draymen who go around on a giant truck and replace your old, empty barrels with new, full ones, and they work damn hard, because my pub is a fair distance away from the Carpenter and - albeit on a different day - they are our draymen too, so they must do a hell of a lot of pubs in between.

And finally, with the night set in and a day spent almost exclusively throwing sharp things at a circle, I was getting down to some honest to goodness cellar management. And not before time; the Guinness had but a dribble left inside and the Carlsberg was looking considerably worse for wear. Right, I thought - we'll get these empties on the truck, bring the cask stuff in first, get these lines back up and running (Tony had wisely filled them with water once they had run out, something that saves on waste) by pulling the water out and getting this place back up and running with a full compliment of beer. Get the casks in first, tap them, then spike them in the morning, then I can begin actually assessing the line situation.

Mike approached me with a clipboard - I signed off all the barrels to the custody of the Carpenter, and gave Luke a rough outline of my plans. He tutted, still beaming, and then pointed behind me; I saw that Mike and Dennis were still there. Usually, once they've got a signature, they're so quick off the mark to get out of there that your signature falls clean off. They never stick around.

"Yeah?"
"...Come on then. You're coming back with us."
"What!? I haven't had a chance to do anything yet! We've got all this beer to sort out!"
"Cheers mate," said Tony, evidently notified that I was about to be whisked out of his life. "Luke and I will take it from here. Thanks so much for coming down." With that, Luke and Tony began to execute my best-laid plan as I was forced to head off with the company's equivalent of Lennie and George. I climbed into the truck and waved goodbye to my other pub - I decided I would go back there if I ever went over a hundred miles out of my way again on a company-sponsored whimsy. The pub disappeared over the horizon, as did Luke, Tony, and the job I'd been sent to do - I made sure they were actually doing it before turning my attentions back to Mike and Dennis.

"Hey," Dennis chuckled to Mike, pointing at me. "You know who he reminds me of, Mike?"
"Go on."
"You know Jack from the Ddraig Goch?"
"Ho ho, yeah! Didn't they put him in Deadward in the end?"
"Lovely drop of mild in there."

With this, I instead decided to let the conversation progress without me as I watched the cool moonlight become infused with the harsh orange glow of the motorway lights, my hood up and my head back as I rode an eighteen-wheeler - driven by two more brewery historians - back to civilization. Back to cellars full of unevenly-distributed barrels, puddles of water and blockages when there's twenty people waiting and the light in the cellar is on the blink. I wouldn't have it any other way.

The Getaway - part I.

2007-08-24T10:37:00.000Z

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that not every pub out there is like mine; out there in the vast expanse of the Welsh countryside are pubs just like mine in some respects, but sadly with no captain at the helm. Nobody to steer them through murky waters, stormy seas, and cloudy bitter. Luckily for these lost vessels, if the company gets their way, they will be shuttling me off to try and run one of these Dickensian hellholes sooner rather than later. Yes, it would seem the regional management are extremely keen to train up existing staff for management positions rather than nabbing licensees from other breweries and chains, who may not be familiar with our way of doing things. And as far as essential qualifications go, I had been looking pretty damn hot, it must be said. Except for one niggling detail.

Personal license? Check (I greatly enjoy using it as a form of identification when asked to prove my age in pubs - luckily, I still look young enough to be asked - "why this, my fellow? This is my license to sell alcohol on licensed premises. Don't you have one?"). Teambuilding & Human Resources? Check. Conflict management? Fucking right, wanna fight about it? Food Hygiene? Check. Fire Safety? An everso slightly singed check. There was but one space on my admittedly impressive CV - cellar control.

Cellar control - previously called cellar management - is the brewery's refreshed course for making sure you can step into their pubs' back passages without blowing shit up or wasting their hard-scrounged money. As daunting as a cellar looks to an untrained eye, most cellars are the same in essence - the same technology powers them all, the barrel caps are not proprietary so they're a standard wherever you are, and only subtle differences remain (e.g. the storage of the cask stuff, be it standing or rack - and even that is becoming standardized as the five-day nightmare of properly tapping, treating, ventilating, pegging, de-pegging, re-pegging, spiking and draining a racked barrel is thankfully being shown the door in favour of vertical barrels which you just tap two days before expected use, slap the spike into, and away you go). The previous course was very much a "rack barrel" approach, as it took way too fucking long to accomplish what could be handled in one day with only a smidgen of common sense. There were training manuals on cellar management and lots of them, as well as some vague details on the the farming of hops (a predominantly German activity, apparently) and a load of other stupid bullshit that wouldn't be worth a wank if your cooling system's ice wall has melted and you have twenty people waiting on a hot day. Noting that the course was producing a new breed of booksmart landlords that couldn't manage their way out of a paper barrel, the brewery decided to - and this is from the pages of the preview book I was sent - "spice things up", condensing "the time-tested traditions and wisdom of centuries in the trade" into an "action packed day of multimedia learning, peer-based activities (including managing a real live cellar) and a free lunch with a pint on us".

Without sewing too glamorous a button on it, it was quite simply the most strenuously insipid day of my entire life, that passed by as slowly and laboriously as a slowboat being dragged along a mile of grit road by a half-dozen aging cattle. Watching paint dry seems like a truly high-risk venture compared to the rigorous boredom we had to endure on cellar control - it was more like watching dry paint.

I turned up on the day and made my now-familiar way to the conference room to discover that I was part of a visible age rift - half a dozen in the room were my age, nippers being groomed by the company to climb the ladder (despite the fact that this particular ladder is up the side of a burning building, there is an obese, sweating, naked man waiting at the top, smiling at you with a toothless smirk and a bloodied knife in his hand, and the ladder is covered in extremely angry bees) and the other half was the company's elders, people like our Henry who run proper pubs and know their hops, barley and yeast, let alone their onions. I got around to talking to a few of the elder people on the course and I (along with the other young'uns) was extremely lucky - we chose to attend, everyone else was there against their will. It would seem that cellar control is a course that the company will stick you on if your pub has "stock issues".

While at first I thought this meant wastage - an unavoidable part of the job when you consider the shit that is left in the bottom of the barrels (shit that we are expected to put in a glass and sell to somebody) - it is also applied to people that are returning too much stock. So let's say your pub is in a bad area; you have a few slow weeks, or the smoking ban put its foot up your business' arse (the Wetherspoons up the road has a better environment for smokers but because your pub isn't a JDW gaff, you've had to put up one poxy umbrella and hope for the best as the smokers take their fags and dosh elsewhere). Somebody with half a brain could look at that and say they need more money for advertising, or a drinks promotion, or something to get business moving - not (and I repeat not) that these people, who have often been in the game since Watergate, don't know how to manage their cellar. But evidently, this company is not run by people with a modicum of intelligence. It is run by the kind of people who will employ a man like Benjamin, the veritable Mr. Motivator of cellar control that the company paid (with money, I remind you) to stand up - in front of a room that mainly consisted of people who had been pulling pints for years, in some cases for generations in their family - and patronize the living shit out of them with a straight face. Something, it must be said, he did extremely well.

"OK gang," Ben 'hollered' - his terms, not mine - before whistling by sticking two fingers in his mouth (something he would do throughout the day at ear-splitting volumes, often directly after lecturing us on the importance of clean hands). "Welcome to the show... ha, not really. It's more a presentation than a show. It's literally just a bit of a video to begin with and then we're heading over to the Reproba Inn." Ben had already cemented his reputation with high-pitched whistling and incorrect use of the word "literally". I could tell this would almost certainly be an interesting day for all concerned.

The first part of cellar control was particularly gripping as we were welcomed into the conference room by a man who had the physical and mental properties of an overexcited puppy, and then asked to sit down and shut up while the lights were extinguished and a "short film" was shown. Made in approximately 1842, it was a triathlon of tedium consisting mainly of the trials and tribulations of "our man behind the bar" (dressed to the hilt in ruffled whites and a bowtie as bar staff have a habit of doing; I love training videos that show bar staff in these immaculate outfits that haven't seen a spillage or vomit stain in their freshly-pressed lives) as he addressed a number of cellar- and bar-based complaints. The video was clearly aimed at all those people who win the lottery and dream of running a pub, but haven't the first fucking clue on the magical process involved in making it so that when you pull the tap, some beer comes out that you can drink - because showing it to anybody who has so much as seen a crude crayon drawing of a cellar is an insult to their intelligence (it is, in fact, more the equivalent of kicking their intelligence to the floor and beating it to death with a sack of potatoes). Three concerns were addressed:

Good conduct in the cellar.

The world's most distinguished bartender (with whom I felt a strange affinity, as I do with any and all bar staff, fictional or no - I feel their pain, even if it has been scripted) - who could only have appeared more distinguished had he been sporting a top hat, a monocle, and a photograph in his overstuffed wallet of his gigantic plastic hotel on Mayfair - has apparently had a spot of bother in the cellar; his cask ale has stopped pouring, and we were then invited to pause the video and discuss the probable cause of this. We were even offered a selection of potential answers - could it be down to the cellar being the wrong temperature? Well, unless the video was so old that it heralded the coming of the ice age, resulting in the beer freezing in the lines, I'd imagine not. Or - and here comes the gigantic spoon to feed us the conclusion - could the barrel have run out?

"Barrels can run out at any time," boomed the noble barman with an expression of sheer wonderment, as if the finite nature of a sealed metal container was a revelation of Darwin-esque proportions. With this, he then went about changing the barrel. Anybody who has worked in a real, working pub environment will be vaguely familiar with the process of changing a cask - take the spike out of one and put it onto the next one (there should already be one that is tapped so that you're not - excuse me - putting the spike in too soon). Simple. The process is only dangerous if you are some sort of monumental cretin, which our host certainly was. We all watched with mouths agape as the barman put on a white laboratory coat, goggles and gloves, and then changed the barrel as if any sudden movements or sounds would detonate some sort of beer bomb. It was in stark contrast to the last barrel I changed, which involved clambering over a heap of empties, falling into a pile of promotional Kopparberg umbrellas (it was very kind of the folks at Kopparberg to send us these to break my fall, considering we have absolutely no intention of ever stocking their product - so Kopparberg, if you're reading this, thank you very much and I hope you send us plenty more free shit for me to land on) and sticking the spike into the new barrel with the kind of force usually only seen in Dracula films, where the villagers peel off the lid of the coffin and drive the spike into the beast by flaming torchlight. I then ran it through at the wall, fell on the umbrellas again, and resurfaced looking as if I had been trying to put the spike into the rear orifice of an already-disgruntled gorilla, who had extremely strong views on the whole situation.

Good conduct with glassware.

Just when our intelligence's wounds had begun to heal, it was once again called a fat jessie by the markedly elementary tape as we were then shown - in no uncertain terms - how to do a job that we had all been doing for what was easily a collective century or two. And let me tell you, they left nothing to chance, they covered absolutely everything.

"Never," began our barminding compadre, "use a dirty glass..." But before we could quite finish shaking our heads in disbelief, he decided to kick us once more while we were down. "...especially if it's somebody else's dirty glass." I think you'd be hard pressed to find a pub in the land that would give you a pint in somebody else's dirty glass (not one with a valid EHO certificate at least), but it must be a pressing concern for good old Admiral Mental Disorder to deem it relevant enough to mention. After this lecture, we then cut to a transitional shot of the barman drying glasses with a bar towel, something inherently worse than serving something in a used glass. Swing and a miss.

Good conduct with the pumps.

"When serving cask products after a barrel has been changed," announced the barman as he placed a pint of what appeared to be sewage on the bar, "check to see if you are experiencing clouding issues." Clouding issues was perhaps too generous a term for the problem that afflicted the pint that we saw before us. I've had moaning bastards in my time - people who think they can see a slight haze on the glass and will refuse to drink it even after the science of condensation has been explained to them in all its wondrous, glass-chilling detail. But even if Richey Dixon - the veritable bishop of moaning old sods - brought that back to the bar I would have to ultimately concede defeat and apologize for my mistake in rigging up the best bitter line to the sceptic tank. There was actually stuff floating in it, that warranted a collective squirm from all in attendance. We've all served dodgy pints, but that really took the biscuit (then vomited on the biscuit and put it in the glass with the rest of the unidentifiable crap that was supposed to be "beer sediment").

After our man had safely disposed of his pint of shit, urine, pus and bits of old shoe put through an industrial blender, we were then taken so far back to basics that even John Major would have said it was taking the mick. Yes, we were shown - in shakey, 1980s taped-from-the-TV VHS quality - how to pull a pint of everything on the bar. However, this time, we had the added bonus of the "NO" siren. A time-tested learning technique, the NO siren was the sound of a brash siren followed by the word "NO" plastered across the screen using the best technology the 1970s could buy. Our man tried to pour two pints at a time - NO. That's generally a bad idea. Our man tried his absolute damnedest to put a gallon in a pint glass, resulting in a drip tray that more closely resembled a public swimming pool. NO. I began to feel sorry for the barman, as this life of siren-blasted depravation was clearly getting to him. Everywhere he looked, there waited the gigantic digital super-imposed NO (and the siren, which I had not heard used sincerely since the original rave movement) to bring him into line. So what if he wants to throw an ashtray full of burning cigarettes into a plastic binbag? For God's sake, when the Beer & Pub Association find out which pub he works at - where modern practices are apparently not welcome and they season their own repugnant produce using raw chunks of human excrement - he's a dead man anyway, let him have a bit of fun. Oh look, he just put a pint of cider in a glass with a lightning bolt crack down the side of it. NO.

We were all absolutely aghast.

I genuinely wondered what we would be shown next; possibly how to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide or put our underpants on in the morning without sterilizing ourselves. Luckily, before the barman could attempt to dispose of a broken glass by taking it to a nearby playground and leaving it on the swings, the lights came up and we were granted our freedom. If there's one job I never want - besides the poor bastard who had to go into the pub in which that video was set and turn things around, a task of equal enviability to making the Nazis seem like a great bunch of lads - it is trying to follow that video. Benjamin, for all his be-boppin', hip-hoppin' youngster style, did remarkably well by offering us something as a means of recompense for our wounded egos and battered brains.

"OK, if we're all ready to go, that's lunch." We were each handed a lunch voucher and told the directions to the canteens. We were also encouraged to discuss the day's events with our colleagues. I pulled up a chair and found a great mix of experienced managers and up-and-comers alike, all with a similar outlook to myself.

"What a load of fookin' crap," belted out Alan, a brash, burly Northerner who has since established dominance in Cardiff city centre by offering a combination of fierce drinks promotions and live sport. However, his Sky license ran out and the brewery forgot to renew it - while he waits until next week for business to resume its previous supersonic pace of business, his cellar stock got a little out of hand. Hello cellar management, and a day away from the pub for one of the most talented landlords under the company's belt. I have noticed something on these courses - people who make it to this level of bar work all, typically, get along. I am yet to meet a barman or a manager in training on a course that I haven't been able to get along with on some level. Much as Freemasons can often tell if there is another Freemason in the room, people who run pubs for a living have a kind of unspoken bond, an intangible connection that links us all like a macaroni necklace. And this is how a room full of people from all sorts of backgrounds and ages could bond over a free lunch in a large brewery.

"Yeah, it is a bit patronizing," I corroborated as I tucked into the (actually delicious) chili that had been prepared.
"Let me tell you, this course is not for winners." Alan did not mince his words. "Let me tell you something else, if there's any more of those cellar management books left on the course order form, I'll buy 'em and burn 'em." Alan was by far the most incensed of the group.

As the complimentary chili and rice was masticated and stored away for later, we had our tables cleared and were invited to leave the office building to head over to the Reproba Inn. We wandered across the road, unlocked the doors of the large red-brick building, and wandered into what was easily the creepiest pub I have ever been to. The Reproba is a pub that the company bought and maintains as a training facility - it is a real, honest to goodness pub, though. And this is what's weird about it - it is beautifully decorated, has a pool table, a dart board, an amply-stocked bar, toilets, the works. But there are no tills. No evidence of any wear and tear whatsoever - it is like walking into the dentists' waiting room, the Reproba has absolutely no atmosphere. A few games of pool ensued and a quick game of darts (which I am happy to report I won with a fantastic two-dart eighty-point out - treble sixteen, then double it. Oh, snap) before we were dragged into the cellar to be educated on what a cellar looks like.

Well it certainly took me by surprise, as I had no idea that cellars were supposed to be so clean you could eat off the walls and floors - our cellar has pools of crusty old bitter congealing on the floor from where we run the lines through on a new barrel, but this place was freshly painted white and stung the retinas. It looked like the shrinking room in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. What didn't help this image was the white laboratory coats we were issued, as well as the protective goggles as we played 'can you top this' with the glowing beacon of stupidity that had been the film we saw not two hours prior. I was half-expecting to be filmed and later added to an amended version of the original film, with a new bit in the "cellar conduct" piece in which they suggest it's not a good idea to take off your laboratory coat and attempt to strangle your instructor with it. While my primary reaction to Ben was "prick", I secretly envied him - anybody who can be as passionate about correct glassware and drink temperature as he is must live a life of unparalleled joy, thanking the lord on high for every sip of every pint in every pub across the land as he looks in his cupboards to see little translucent receptacles of happiness shining back at him. The only thing I care about is being a grumpy sod on the internet, and I don't get to do that for a living. That is something I do for my own benefit. This man loves his job and is paid to love it, as insufferable as he was.

"Who here wants a go tapping a barrel?" Before anybody could volunteer, Ben literally sprinted to the wall, grabbed the mallet, walked cautiously back as if handling a pair of scissors, and then showed us the correct procedure of barrel tapping. Maybe we had been doing it wrong - I was of the impression that you put the cap on the tap, turn the valve shut and just hammer it in, being careful not to turn your digits into pancakes as you work. No, apparently our method of "get it done within half an hour" is tantamount to suicide, as Ben crouched down by the barrel, leveled up against the plug as if squaring up for a putt, placed the tap in, timed the shot, and then after three, two - oh, hang on, half of us have nodded off, now he has to do it again. Fuck.

We were then invited to put the spike in the barrel (instead of the natural conclusion of shrink a gigantic bar of chocolate or express concern for the German kid who was probably shredded into bits by the factory's rather vigorous chocolate sewage refinery). Again, clearly missing the mark, I was shown that the correct way should not take any less than one minute - I used to think it was simply "take the spike out of one barrel and put it in another then level the pressure on the buoy on the wall" (a small plastic tube on the wall that has a plastic buoy inside - the tube has to be full of beer and the buoy must be at the top for the line to be fully operational). Apparently not. No, evidently this is a far too quick and efficient way of doing it and we simply aren't doing it slow enough. What I will say is I know why the Reproba is closed to the public; it's because there is absolutely no way you could ever apply these "ideal standards" in a real working environment. Yes you may get a slightly better experience if you do it the "proper way", but there isn't time. It's that simple. There is not enough hours in the day to "gently sink the spike into the barrel" as if we were scared of waking up the gorilla. The cellar fell deathly silent as the spike nudged its way into the barrel, millimeter by millimeter, eventually being driven all the way to the end of the barrel with a miniscule "dunk", pulled through at the wall and then pulled into a perfect pint in the bar.

Six weeks later, after we had all taken a turn in showing that we too could pretend to run a pub like a gang of drugged-up turtles, we were all signed off, given a free drink from the Reproba bar and allowed to go on our merry way. As a flurry of coats and jackets were hurled on and everyone made a move for the door, Ben whistled us back, holding a clipboard.

"If anybody wants an extra two days of paid holiday, we're offering a cellar control placement scheme at The Carpenter. Get to work in a real life pub, run the cellar with an experienced landlord? Opportunity of a lifetime, this one."
"The Carpenter? Where the hell is that?" enquired several of the elders, which led me to believe this was going to be slightly off the beaten path.
"It's in [name of town removed]." I was not wrong; this was so far off the beaten path that it's a miracle the company found it to buy it when they went property crazy back in the 1980s.
"Fuck that," guffawed Alan. "I run the busiest sports pub in Cardiff. Why would I want to be holed up in some horseshit field pub?"
"Well, this is more aimed at the younger -" But before he could finish, the room had emptied - the majority had spoken. Although that said, I was secretly glad that I would be getting the placement all to myself, as I strolled over to Ben to put my name on one of the numerous available dotted lines.

"Great, we'll be in touch." And with that, I caught up with the group and went for the traditional post-course analysis and drink at the amply-located Wetherspoons across the bridge.

To be continued...
---

This entry is dedicated to Yourcodenameis:milo.

A Punch Up At A Wedding.

2007-08-17T15:24:00.000Z

"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.

At War With The Mystics.

2007-08-10T22:31:00.000Z

Saturday morning at the pub; the perfect way to start any weekend - the sun rising over the glistening piles of vomit, the smashed glass casting a sparkle over the beer garden, and the postman bringing the usual assortment of absolute crap informing us that new company policy is that we must now get ten pints to a gallon (in between sessions of squeezing blood from a stone and piling straw onto a camel's back), or that we may already be a winner in the Reader's Digest draw. When I started, part of my extended job description was vetting the "useful" post (letters from the brewery) - I'd been doing this more or less since I started, but since Henry came along, he picks up the post in the morning (Stephen was never awake in time to get the post first-hand and never wanted to read it anyway); so in the past, when people would send out a cover-all letter to every pub in the area offering an act or service, that would be diverted straight to the waste-paper basket. We don't really have the facilities to put on live entertainment and make a profit - we were offered "the best" of the four current Boney Ms doing the rounds (I believe this one is the Boney M that was set up by one of the women, not the dancing lunatic who would often sweat it out in full Russian tsar getup - if he had been involved we would have said yes quicker than Rasputin got his end away), and we were once given first refusal on "a Kraftwerk-style tribute to the musical genius of Abba" - and we used that refusal for all it was worth. But now that Henry's the gaffer, he's very keen to get this place up and running as a venue, despite the fact we don't have a stage, we don't have lighting, we don't have sound and we don't have customers. Finding performers is the absolute least of our worries.

That was all set to change with Henry's first proper booking - yes, William LeForte, mystic to the stars, was offering us the opportunity of a lifetime. Or at least his agent was. William LeForte's agent (Emily LeForte) was in the process of booking a tour of pubs and clubs in Wales. The cover letter was almost enough to win him our custom:

"William's powers have not once been questioned, leaving respected scientists and other mediums alike baffled."

Yes, it would seem that William's ability to cold-read a room full of gullible old women reduces scientists and other mediums (whether this implies that science is on par with mediumship I'm still not sure) to mind-blown wrecks as they cower in blubbering deference to William and his vice-like grip upon the leash of the supernatural. The letter went on in this fashion, positively goading us to book him, daring us to invite such a paranormal powerhouse onto our premises (because I doubt our building insurance covers the roof against being blown off by acts of awesomeness) - and it wouldn't cost us a penny. Yes, it was this part of William's letter that most interested Henry - William asked for a £3 fee to be paid on the door by each gullible prick, all of which went straight in his satin-lined pocket. Oh, I almost forgot to mention - his letter accompanied a photo, which won around the rest of us to the idea.

"This is fucking sick," I proclaimed as I piled a set of darts into the board and Eddie caught up on a discarded copy of OK Magazine. "Getting somebody like that in here to pray on the fears and superstitions of people. It's not right." Skepticism doesn't even come close to what I feel for these various psychics, mystics, spiritualists and other such morons who seem to take some kind of perverse delight in spitting in the face of science and common sense. I absolutely abhor anything with even the faintest whiff of "the paranormal", especially that which attempts to play on the hopes and fears of grieving relatives in order to spin a quick buck. These people have no more idea of what happens to people when they die than anybody else, but because they can spin a series of guesses and assumptions into a "message from the other side" they're suddenly an authority on what becomes of your relatives once their clogs have popped. These people don't have any idea - Houdini wrote a fantastic book called "A Magician Among The Spirits" in which he debunked the whole notion of spiritualism, yet these people are still allowed on daytime TV to make blind assertions based on people's appearances. It's a fucking guessing game and it shouldn't be permitted.
"True," nodded Eddie, peeling his eyes from the page as he went rummaging in the ream or two of paper that coats the back bar. "But have you seen the picture he sent us?"
"No?" Eddie pulled a glossy photo from the pile with a wobble and handed it over, and I immediately changed my mind - get him in, I thought, because there is absolutely no way he can top this promo picture. The picture, set on a fog-laden moor, showed William - in a velvet purple suit with a Clockwork Orange-tastic single fake eyelash (sadly no codpiece or criminal record, because that would've been interesting) - holding a sword in the air, which had obviously been somebody's final project in a Photo Manipulation For Dummies course somewhere, as the sword was on fire and had lightning coming out of it. Horrible, pixelated lightning. Everything about William screamed "class", from the long, yellowy-gray hair (complete with slight bald spot) to the extensive metalware adorning his fingers. William looked more like the kind of person who runs an "alternative lifestyle" clothes stall down a covered market (flogging knock-off Fall Out Boy hoodies and cheap eyeliner to confused teenagers) than a psychic.

And this is why I loved him - this vague sense of gender confusion (and evident misunderstanding of the fundamental differences between "psychic" and "Jonathan Ross Meets Gothic Merlin, The Mega-Magical Super-Pimp"), plus the fact that he was obviously going to be a heap of festering turd. I practically leaped over the bar to consult the staff holiday manual to discover that the date he was set to arrive was already fully booked off, leaving muggins here to fend off the paranormal alone. Henry, Frances, Christine - even Elaine was ducking out of the kitchen early to watch Superfly Psychic cast his slightly seedy magic on a pub where the average punter has both a bus pass and a prosthetic joint or limb. Oh, and...

"Eddie!? Don't tell me you're into this nonsense!" He said nothing, and simply tapped the picture. I understood. What red-blooded male wouldn't sit amongst a group of menopausal women to get so much of a glimpse of a man so thoroughly immersed in his own hype that he is willing to take pictures of himself wielding a flaming sword of lightning?

One week after Henry had confirmed the deal, we received a gigantic brown envelope from Mr. LeForte. Now, I wish I could show you the promotional pack William LeForte sent us. William has clearly put a lot of effort into his act, and therefore relies on his heavily-guarded mystique to create a sense of wonder. This is probably why he sent us:

- Twelve autographed copies of the original sword picture, "to distribute to interested parties". Before they could be swept up and promptly flogged for a small goldmine on eBay, I kept one, and intend to keep it indefinitely (I have put it in a box in which I put all significant job-related items, including every nametag I've ever had, the cork from the first bottle of wine I opened here, the letter I was sent detailing why my seasonal position at a large department store was not to be made permanent - which was not so much a constructive criticism as a poorly-punctuated punch in the mouth - and now, "Who knows what the future holds? All my love, William LeForte x x x").
- Four A2 posters of him, on horseback, in his magical superpimp outfit, peering into a crystal ball. A mixed message at best.
- Four T-shirts, intended for the staff, with "William LeFort" on the front - the extra "e" had been taken care of thanks to the magic of iron-on transfer paper. Henry wore his with gusto, but seeing as three of the four current bar staff are rather generously portioned - except for Christine, who is so very thin that she most likely halves her body weight every time she wipes her nose - these medium-sized shirts were kept by medium-sized Henry.
- A set of tarot cards. We were not instructed on what to do with these, but I sincerely hope to whatever God is out there (perhaps it's William LeForte) that he expected us to provide impromptu tarot readings to punters in between hosing the vomit off their crotch after one too many pints of foul ale and shoveling horse shit into a gigantic sack. We've been doing this for some time now - the horse riders never clean up after themselves, so we're going to keep hold of it until we have about twenty sacks and then we're going to barricade the main offender inside his home under cover of darkness by piling the bags against his front door. William, luckily, did not turn up on horseback.

As soon as the tickets went on sale, there was a frenzy - we put one of the posters up on the village noticeboard, and before you know it, every single woman in the village wanted a slice of the action. I was at a loss to explain the estrogen-heavy nature of the ticket purchases - some of the male punters were dragged along by their spouses, but the night soon came along and all I saw were a troop of late-middle-age women willing to trample over their mothers (whether they were dead or not) to get themselves a nice fat slice of psychic pie. They say ignorance begets ignorance, but let me tell you something, that's bullshit - ignorance begets money. Big, gigantic, burlap sacks, so packed full of moolah that it's a wonder LeForte didn't do his back in half carrying them out to his car. His brand spanking new car.

Before the punters were allowed into the lounge (the function room was off limits due to "technical difficulties", our cover-all term for when we don't want somebody reporting us to the EHO - this time, it was an apparently abandoned Tesco bag full of rotting steaks that actually required real health and safety officers, not just me and Eddie with tongs and a binbag), William LeForte requested ten minutes to prepare himself - the spectacle was set to begin at 8pm and William was still nowhere to be seen at 7:55. At 8:06, William LeForte stumbles through the back door (he insisted on not mingling with the punters beforehand to "keep the mystique alive"), into the cellar, and before I could open the door and welcome him in, he knocked a barrel of bitter off the rack. Kablump, the 100Kg container hit the deck and the remaining sixteen gallons piled out as fast as it could while LeForte attempted to put the cork back in the barrel - unfortunately for him, those things are pressurized; that bitter's been trying to get the fuck out of that barrel for days and his limp-wristed efforts will not dissuade it. Approximately eight quid's worth of awful felt suit was ruined, as well as a few hundred quid's worth of stock. William paddled over to me apologetically, his entire lower half drenched in the company's best barely-alcoholic barley-strained booze.

"I'm Will, y'alright butt?" This may also be a reason why William didn't want people to see him beforehand; he had one of the strongest valleys accents I've ever heard, which I correctly guessed he would put to one side when it was time to perform (when he finally did get out there he spoke in a manner that wouldn't be unfit for Radio 4). He let out a hand; I shook the bitter off it and decided to just carry on with it, and mention the bitter later (we get spillage allowance and that gets reset at the beginning of the financial year, so if anything, Will probably did us a favour).
"Alright mate. You got a spare suit in your car or something?" I was concerned for William - there were easily a hundred people out there expecting to see a psychic, and that image may be tarnished somewhat if he goes out there looking and smelling like he did.
"Nah, this is my only one." Oh dear. "...you haven't got one, have you butt?" Have I got a spare felt suit that's about ten sizes too small for me? No I haven't, but just let me give my friend Eddie Izzard a call, maybe he can sort you out.
"I haven't I'm afraid."
"Have you got anything at all?" I looked him up and down. I decided to hazard a guess at his size and weight and ruffled through my mental picture book to see if I knew anyone who vaguely matches the description. And I did.

"Why does he need my trousers?"
"He knocked over a barrel and soaked his."
"Fine," said Henry - who had now returned the wheelchair to the hospital (wheeling it into reception while nobody was looking) and was simply walking on the cast with the aid of a single crutch - going so deep into his closet that it's a wonder he didn't find R. Kelly in there, Beretta at the ready. "Take these. Does he need a shirt too?"

"I apologize for the late start... and my slightly clashing wardrobe," announced Will in a completely false middle-English baritone, gesturing to his khaki slacks, navy staff polo shirt (which actually matched the slacks reasonably well) and scarlet felt jacket with some slight flood damage around the base. I never really understood women going crazy for the likes of William - I was way too young to experience Beatlemania first-hand, so I've only seen girls going mad for pop stars of my youth, and what an uninspiring bunch they were too (say what you like, but The Beatles changed music forever; East 17's only claim to fame is being led by a man stupid enough to run himself over with his own car). But the seemingly universal fawning from the predominantly older female audience was a strange thing to watch - I felt two things; a deep disgust for people like William and an intense pity for the likes of Daniel O'Donnell, who apparently doesn't get away from a gig until 2AM because all the old women want to touch his nice soft face and give him nice soft jumpers for singing nice soft songs. I wish I could explain the affinity I have with Daniel O'Donnell but I am afraid it is likely to remain a mystery.

At half past eight, Will looked ready to read some minds.

"OK, I'm getting a female figure... you there, has your mother passed?" A fantastic observation considering the person to whom he was talking looked like she was practically cut out of the obituary page herself. The walking cadaver confirmed that her mother is indeed dead, and the "medium" goes from his original stance of having a foot in the door, to kicking the door clean off its fucking hinges, dropping his trousers and proceeding to shit all over the carpet.
"I'm getting a T... Ti... Ta...." When the subject quite rightly kept their mouth shut, William made the move onto the blatant questioning. "Is there a T connection to this person, or a T in your family?" Obvious proof that this person has psychic abilities - only a psychic could know that somebody is related to somebody with the letter "T" in their name. Of course, in the hopes of maintaining a contact to a dead relative, the victim (and they are victims) throws caution to the wind and blurt out the name - they should only answer yes or no to really catch these fuckers out, but they can't help it.
"And have they passed?" Of course, this doesn't matter, because this is essentially one gigantic riff on this poor person's entire family history - and if it doesn't go well, hmm, does anybody else here understand these messages? Right, there we go - so you see, the basic premise of being a medium is assembling a gigantic room of people, picking a letter and relation at random and finding somebody to whom that makes sense. It's such an easy gig that if I didn't have a conscience, I'd be doing that instead of this, because frankly, writing is an absolute mug's game compared to the cash these cheeky bastards are walking away with night after night (after tax, of course - heaven forbid these people should just pocket the entrance fee without engaging the proper legal process of declaring it) for essentially laughing in the face of grieving people for a solid hour. It makes me feel genuinely ill. Now, some will tell you that the medium isn't supposed to ask questions. People like Frances, for instance, who submerge themselves in this kind of arsewater so blindly it's a wonder they haven't drowned in it - she came to the bar at the first break with a raging bonk-on for exploitative charlatanism, her boyfriend in tow. Frances' boyfriend for this month was one of the better ones she's had; level-headed, so Northern that he could be located by compass, and as far as I could tell he wasn't a pervert, two novelties as far as Frances' courters are concerned. Oh, but he looked a bit like Bluto out of Popeye.

"Oh, it's brilliant, isn't it?"
"What is? His blind fumbling for answers? Oh, aye, magic."
"No, but it's more than that, isn't it?" wondered Frances, eyes to the roof. "It all feels so spiritual."
"What a load of shit," mutter Bluto (real name Dave) as he took another exasperated sop on his pint.
"What do you think?" enquired Frances, all eyes on me.
"He's just cold-reading, I think it's mostly guesswork myself!" I exclaimed in disbelief as the Carlsberg popped and spluttered to an end. I waded into the cellar and changed the barrel, but by the time I had resurfaced, only one person remained at the bar and that was Ed - even the man who ordered the Carlsberg decided to abandon it rather than miss another gripping minute of William's appalling selection of stabs in the dark.

"This is shit," announced Eddie, tucking into a bag of peanuts.
"Yeah, it is."
"Thing is, during the first bit, he started getting a bit..."
"What?"
"You know. Touchy feely." I had wondered about this, but decided not to say anything - nobody wants to be the guy who thinks the psychic is a pervert so I said nothing. But it must be said, he was using his apparently magnetism to his own diabolical ends rather well. Eddie and I watched the second quarter (there was to be three breaks in his "extended reading") with intent, and sure enough, he zoned straight in on Annwyn, one of our older punters - you know those women that sit in pubs drinking double whiskeys, smoking like chimneys (before the ban of course) and they never seem any worse for it? Annwyn was the original - liver failure? Not an issue. Lung cancer? She could probably smoke used tyres and feel no ill effects. Sadly, her husband - who lived an extremely similar lifestyle - evidently couldn't keep up with the wife and died a while ago; nobody's sure how old Annwyn is but Chris (her husband) was eighty when he died and they were the same age, so she's got to be coming on for ninety. And while her health hasn't suffered from her lifestyle, her face certainly has - skin that looks like old boots sewn together by a blind man, teeth that have slowly but surely wriggled free and escaped their daily rigors, and a glass eye that doesn't even attempt to look real as it swims around the socket, making half her face appear extremely inquisitive indeed. Quite a looker. But it's good to see that William saw through her superficial stresses and saw the goodness inside her, as he was cracking onto her without mercy. Part of the act perhaps, but if so, extremely convincing.

"I'm getting the impression that you're a bit too kind, and you're a creative soul - would that be correct?" Annwyn nodded; she is kind to a fault and what she doesn't know about cross stitching isn't worth knowing. "I'm getting a strong male to your left?"
"Yes, me husband!" She spluttered.
"He's passed."
"Yes!" Exclaimed Annwyn, becoming flustered.
"He said that he still loves you, but he wants you to move on with your life." Yep, move on, out of your gigantic house that the insurance paid for and into William LeForte's shanty shack in Blackwood, where he will reunite you vicariously with all your friends, whose only crime was attempting to drink and smoke as prolifically as you do. Annwyn, at this point, was obviously shaken, but was hooked - straight up, took the bait.

"I understand this must be extremely hard for you," whispered Will into a pair of ears that looked as if they'd heard the original Marconi broadcast.
"It is, yes."
"Sssh," said William, putting a cheeky arm around Annwyn. After what can only be described as the sensual caressing of a pensioner's face, he then kissed her on the hand - before he could channel Annwyn's father to ask for her hand in marriage, he was obviously getting a strong message for somebody else. It was such a strong "message" that he had to lean over a bit so he didn't take somebody's eye out with it.

"Eddie, look!"
"What?" Eddie pulled himself out of his daydream and focused just long enough to catch the look in William's eye.
"Look! He's reading her palm!"
"Who? Oh God."

"What's your name, darling?"
"Frances."
"Such a beautiful name..." Will put his hands to his temples, as if to suggest he was calling upon the spirits to guide him. "Is this your partner?"
"Yes, it is." What an incredible deduction considering Bluto had his arm around her.
"Good, good," muttered Will. "Would you be interested in coming to the front for a tarot session?"
"Oh, absolutely!"
"Let me just fetch my deck," said Will patting down his jacket. He approached the bar and asked, under his breathe, for me and Eddie to follow him.

"Corr, she's not a bad fucking piece, is she, eh?" muttered Will in his natural, vile accent as he removed the tarot cards from the inside of his jacket. It was at this point I realized that he made an excuse to get away and collaborate with Ed and myself. I saw the next question looming over the horizon like Frances' ample backside.

"So... you know if she's got any dead relatives or anything?"
"I thought you were the psychic mate," Eddie wearily blurted out with a puff of smoke out the cellar door.
"The spirits work in mysterious ways, they need something to grab onto."
"You'll have plenty to grab onto with her, mate." Eddie's bad moods are incredible and a pleasure to behold.
"Right, can't keep the good lady waiting - sure you've got nothing?"
"Sorry."
"Never mind." He cleared his throat, adjusted his testicles, and strutted back into the lounge.

Will whipped out the deck and began shuffling the stars, the moon, the joker, the thief, the manipulative bastard and the big barmaid, before laying them out and urging Frances - by placing a hand on her wrist and guiding it - to pick a card. She rather unfortunately turned over "the lovers" and things went from bad to worse as Will made his voice deeper, more sultry, and went for broke.

"I'm getting two strong females to your right, do you have sisters?"
"Hmm, no." Frances clearly put a lot of thought into that one.
"Cousins? Anything? I'm getting two very strong women through."
"My grandmothers have passed."
"Just as I thought - and were they both married?" Frances gasped; what man is this that can know such things? Only a psychic could know that somebody's grandmothers had been married!
"Yes!" Here it comes...
"To men?"
"Oh my God!"

Will was in there. In more ways than one.

After another two hours of this behaviour, Will exited via the cellar (with Henry's trousers, although he had gotten a bit excited during the reading so I doubt Henry would want them back anyway) - the general consensus amongst the punters? Shit, absolute unadulterated shit, and "he wouldn't leave that tart behind the bar alone for ten bloody seconds". But who cares - Will made about £200, the pub made an extra load of business as a result, and the customers will hold it against him, not us. As we closed the bar down, I saw something make a zip through the bar - a flash of green lightning, funnily enough the exact same shade of green as Frances' dress. The cellar door opened, it closed, then the loading bay slammed behind her. Two minutes later, William's car went careering around the corner with an additional passenger. I bet William hadn't seen that in his crystal ball(s). Eddie and I, sufficiently amused for the night, took in all the drip trays and and washed up. Twenty clean trays and several jokes at Frances' expense later, we blazed through to see Bluto standing at the bar, looking ready to beat one of us to death with a tin of spinach. We had forgotten to check the toilets for customers before locking up, so we went to let him out. As we unbolted the side door, Bluto turned to us with a fury in his eyes.

"You two haven't seen Frances have you?" asked Bluto. Yes we have, she's gone back to a psychic's house for a night of spiritual wonderment, so you're left with your hand down your dungarees trying to remember what Olive Oyl felt like when she put up a struggle.
"I haven't Dave, sorry."
"Yeah, well when she comes over tell her it's over. She can come around to my flat and pick up all her shit, David doesn't play second fiddle to anybody, especially not somebody like that." By flat, I assumed he meant "boat".
"OK then."

Bluto departed, luckily missing the discarded tarot card on the bar with Frances' mobile number on it.

Small Children In The Background.

2007-08-03T16:51:00.000Z

Isn't is funny how fast the time goes? We're already into August - the summer (all two days we've had of it) will be coming to a close and soon we will be back to glorious Autumn. Then it'll be Christmas again, then - if the last few years are anything to go by - we'll probably have Spring sometime after. It is particularly hard to believe that an entire week has passed since our manager broke his leg - in an astonishing demonstration of brainlessness, Henry Ginn broke his leg after falling through the flimsy roof of our exterior loading bay (ironically, this happened as he was demonstrating its robustness). Now it should probably be noted that Henry is not a young man - he has been smoking and drinking for fifty years as if the two vices (or, indeed, his pulse) could be rescinded by some higher power at any moment; his liver works overtime almost every weekend, and he smokes unfiltered cigarettes as if trying to turn his lungs into such an uninhabitable environment that not even a tumour would dare set up camp in them - the man's not exactly the poster boy for a healthy lifestyle; he's old-school, so much so that he predates the fairly aged misspelling of "old-skool". No hangovers, no coughs, the man could probably breathe comfortably in a distillation column, but his bones are evidently not immune from his own tomfoolery, as his shinbone got snapped like a twig after he fell through the loading bay roof.

Although he wasn't exactly crippled - we didn't even need a relief manager; the leg was put in a cast from the knee down and he was sent home the same day with a pair of crutches, ready to resume his previous position. He promptly handed these in at reception; his heart belonged to another mode of transport. You can imagine our surprise when Frances called us at the hospital (much to Henry's consternation, she jumped in the back of the ambulance at the last minute and accompanied him for the entire exhaust-scraping journey to the infirmary) to tell us he was more or less fine, only for her to push him into the lounge on four wheels.

"Bloody hell, Christopher Reeve." Eddie despises staff gatherings of any sort so this dramatic roll-in entrance was just more fuel on the fire.
"Very funny Edward," grumped Henry, getting out of the wheelchair temporarily to remove his coat, leading us to believe he probably didn't need this wheelchair (but had probably commandeered it from somebody who actually did need it all the same). "But you're all going to have to do a lot more around here now that I'm disabled. So you'd better get used to it."
"Are you kidding? It's a break, you can still walk on it!", interrupted Christine, who is still not really 'down' with our way of doing things. It's considered bad form to interrupt Henry when he's giving one of his speeches, as more often than not he loses his place and is forced to start over.
"No I'm not kidding," said Henry, proving his pain and suffering by grabbing his pen and whacking his cast with it repeatedly. "See that? I can't be running this place like this. Now, where was I..." and he started over.

The jist of his long-winded exposition was that now he had been disabled for life (e.g. injured for a few weeks) the entire body of staff would now have to bend so far over backwards to help him that, ironically, we would probably all wind up crippling ourselves. However, in a stunt pulled clean from the pages of Nineteen Eight-Four, Henry would not be relinquishing executive authority over the premises - he would execute his will through the newly-installed intercom system and the forthcoming CCTV system.

CCTV is something that has been considered for this place before; however, if our infamous 2006 robbery wouldn't convince the company to get a bit of surveillance on the go, I doubt Henry's bumbling incompetence is going to loosen the purse-strings, hijacked wheelchair or no. The reason we don't have a CCTV system in place already is simple - the company absolutely positively refuses to spend money on this place unless failing to do so will result in a death. Robberies? Whatever. We've even been instructed on how to open the till in the event of an armed robbery so we can hand over the takings with a minimum of fuss/bullets (which is just as well, as I was planning to do that anyway; it's good to know that they realize we're not paid quite enough to consider taking a dose of gunpowder surprise in order to protect a few measly coins). But apparently, Henry needs the place to look like a reality TV show (in which case the next order of business is to hire a pack of sniveling, dribbling wretches, a handful of 'weirdos' to spice things up, and then sell the pub to Endemol so that people can text into a premium rate service in order to vote me and Eddie out of a job - Davina McCall can host it, we'll make a fortune) so he'll be popping in to plead his case ASAP. Best of luck to him.

"Right, if there's no further business, you and Ed are on the bar, Elaine's in the kitchen, alright?" He enquired. I assured him this time-tested arrangement - which has covered hundreds of mornings in the past - is unlikely to fall down just because he fell through a sheet of plywood.

"Good, because I don't expect to be disturbed now that I'm disabled. You two are more than capable anyway," Henry then hit his makeshift gavel (his coffee cup) on the desk, wiped the coffee off his hand, and wheeled himself out, leaving us to begin the day. Shouldn't be a problem, we thought, but of course it wasn't to be that simple. Let me tell you something, if there's only one pub in your area and you fancy popping down for a pint and a pie, why not give them a ring and book a table? Because unless you are the only person who ever uses that pub, a hundred other people may have the same idea, as they did on Wednesday. Before you know it, every fair-weather punter notices that the weather is, actually, fair, and decides to march to the village pub to eat and drink their own body weight until the clouds begin to encroach across the sky once more, at which point they up sticks and piss off quicker than you can say "can I take your plates?". It's the only village where every house is a life-sized weatherhouse, and the little people only venture out of their doors if the sun is out.

Naturally, when Henry is down on the floor, getting in our way and dicking about with the punters, things couldn't be better, but now he's hobbled off into the distance (once more throwing his legitimacy as a wheelchair user into disrepute as he got out of it and carried it up the stairs to the flat with ease when he thought Eddie wasn't looking - the first thing I did upon getting home was to get on the computer and order a Stannah brochure to be sent to Henry, which I hope he will enjoy perusing at his leisure) the place is packed out, two barrels need tapping and would you look at that, the bar till has no pound coins in it because everyone's paying with fucking notes. Ed and I have experienced true horror; we survived the Christmas Eve massacre of 2006 and lived to blog the tale. So stress isn't the word I'd use, it was just the annoyance of every possible minor inconvenience ganging up on you all at once. It happens every once in a while, but seemingly only occurs when I'm stuck behind the bar like a lemon, explaining that the spike is stuck in the old cask so there'll be no more mild until we can dislodge it, and apologizing for our shortage of sliced lemons.

It's strange - you can walk the same tightrope every single day without a hiccup, but the day you take the safety net away you realize how much you depend on it. And Henry is a safety net around here - I wondered if this was a good thing or a bad thing. As much as Stephen had been a fuck-awful manager - whose presence couldn't have had any less effect on the day-to-day operations of the pub had he been replaced at some point with a life-sized cardboard cutout of himself - he taught us something (as a result of teaching us absolutely nothing); how to run the pub on our own. But as Henry came in and asserted dominance, we all fell out of the habit of running the place. Henry came along, and before you know it, things are getting done. You go in the cellar to tap the barrels and sure enough they've all been pegged and the empties taken out. You go to paint over that unfortunate graffiti in the toilets only to discover that Henry has beaten you to it, long before half the village could be informed that Bonzo Shagged Donny's Missus Behind The Fox & Hound. Soon enough, we all fell out of the habit of fending for ourselves, as the wolves that raised us had a tranquilizer dart blown up their ass by head office huntsmen, and a human was sent to liberate us from our barbarian past. But before I really had the chance to really consider my long-lost skills, we had run out of change and I didn't have the keys to the safe. Time to buzz Big Brother.

"HELLO?" The new telephone system makes everybody's voice approximately seven octaves lower than its natural pitch, meaning Henry sounded like some sort of omnipresent Barry White (although the connection, for some reason, isn't the best in terms of quality - if you buy your internal telephone system at a shop called "Everthing's [sic] a Quid" you get what you pay for, unfortunately - so it's omnipresent Barry White, on a mobile phone going under a tunnel that just happens to be completely submerged).
"Hello, I need some change, we've got sod all down here."
"I'll go to the bank tomorrow."

I had to take a step back and think about this. We need change... so he's offering to go to the bank... tomorrow. It took me a while but eventually I realized that a difference of opinion had emerged regarding the severity of the change issue. This was hardly a satisfactory answer, I felt. In fact, it wasn't even an answer - he may as well have just rattled a tambourine and burped down the line for all his answer helped me. We were now at the point where change of a £20 note (for a £2.10 pint of Bitter) came back to you with a tenner, a fiver, two fifty pence pieces, and so much copper you could quite easily melt it all down and attempt a pretty adventurous metalwork project (I intend to build a statue of myself on the village green wearing a crown and a cape to signify my sovereignty over the village's alcohol supply). So naturally, this situation could not go on indefinitely; we needed change, and lots of it.

"Henry, we need change now."
"We don't have any." This was close, but it wasn't the answer I wanted. Now I know how Roy Walker felt.
"Well then what, might I ask, am I supposed to do?" I asked. At this point, Eddie quietly leaned over and put him on speakerphone. The bar abandoned the television and the dartboard in favour of the home-grown entertainment on offer from the staff.
"Oh, I don't know," Barry White spluttered. "I'm about to go in the bath. I tried to have a shower but the cast got all wet." Henry may have guessed by now that he was not speaking exclusively to us, as the bar went up with a roar of laughter.
"Hey, Darth Vader," called the captain of the shooting team. "Get them some change for fuck's sake, if I fall in the river on the way home with all this change in my pocket I'm a fuckin' goner." The green light on the phone disappeared; Henry had turned the intercom off, conceding defeat in the face of insurmountable lumps of common sense.
"Fine. Take a twenty out of each till and go and get some change from Mike the Shop." I plucked Edward Elgar and Adam Smith from their respective clips and within two minutes (ten seconds of which was spent attempting to wake Mike the Shop, who has actually operating a "knock if you want something" policy, such is the nature of his business - or lack thereof - hence why I spent a few seconds hammering on the glass to awake him from his slumber, perched on a stool with his head balanced on a mop) we had pound coins to burn.

But I came back to a pub that seemed eerily quiet - the pub had lots of people in it, both inside and out due to sunshine and cigarettes, but there was just this feeling, this intangible something that led me to believe we were still waiting for the guest of honour. Some real premier league arseholes, gold-standard cock-knockers whose mere presence in a pub is enough to cloud the room in a dusky hue of pomposity and arrogance. Then I realized what it was; the bar had its usual pricks in it, but the lounge was relatively free of irritants. The bar was currently housing the village's resident BNP fanclub, a group of older gentlemen who pore over the Daily Express and express frank and utter dismay at the state of Britain ("look at that Trevor - 'Gordon Brown burns Queen Mother's deathbed using petrol bought off gypsy asylum seeker queers' - country's gone to the dogs, I'm moving to Spain"). These people blaze a red, white and blue (you know, the other red white and blue) trail into the pub every day with a copy of the self-proclaimed "best newspaper in the world" under their arm, shocked and appalled by every sordid tale of political correctness gone mad and foreign imposition. If you take some time to study The Daily Express, as I have, what strikes me as most interesting is the picture of a crusader, in full chainmail getup, looking off into the distance in the paper's top logo - presumably wondering in disbelief why political ideas from his day and age are still being given a sincere audience in modern civilized society. I would ban them all, but that would be a kind of fascism, albeit on a smaller scale, so I decide instead to suffer their presence. They don't come in all that often.

And anyway, I had bigger fish to fry, as our bar-to-lounge prick ratio was soon settled.

Luckily for everybody, the kind of people who next crossed our doorstep don't come in all that often either - I turned to see a couple, in their early thirties, standing at the bar in the lounge. How did I know they were there? Luckily, the "gentleman" - who, between evening classes on how to turn repugnancy of character into a skilled art, clearly spent all his time pickling himself in a bath of cheap aftershave, because the stuff absolutely stunk the room out - had decided to inform me of his arrival by picking up an empty glass off a table and hammering it on the bar.

Dnk dnk dnk dnk dnk dnk dnk, it went, each tap putting a dull thud in my ear and a small dent in the bar. With that, I assumed my best diplomacy face as Eddie and I advanced on them. It's so satisfying coming to work every single day and dealing with people who assume we are so dangerously incompetent that we are physically incapable of regular verbal communication, so the only way to get your needs attended is to keep your instructions simple - bang a glass to get our intention, and when we hobble over, hunch-backed and slobbering, point at what you want otherwise we will almost certainly misunderstand you. Somebody once asked me for a pint of Carlsberg and a bottle of Corona (with a fucking lime in the neck!) and I spent several weeks in hospital.

"Cut that out," Eddie instructed Glassbanger, but I could see from the get-go we could have trouble on our hands. Not that our hands weren't big enough, because Glassbanger was approximately two feet tall (OK, maybe not, but he was pretty short - Ronnie Corbett might have been able to comfortably stand behind him at a concert). Sadly for him, he was also four feet wide, going a bit bald on top but decided on a rather stylish combover, had the top two buttons of his shirt undone to reveal a rather lovely combination of gigantic gold chain on farmer's tan, and had obviously spent a considerable amount of his fortune (the bulk of which had probably been leprechaun gold that he inherited from his parents) pumping his wife's face so chock full of botox that she was left with merely one expressible emotion - slight constipation. And I've seen this configuration a million times before - short man complex, tries to drink his own weight in Guinness and then goes off on one, causing trouble before somebody has to pick him up be the scruff of his arse and flick him back to the end of his rainbow.

"Have I got to sit out there all fucking day or is somebody going to come and take our order?" Apparently Glassbanger had seen this little old-fashioned village pub in the middle of some inbred, flaming-torch town and had brought unrealistic service expectations to the table (once wifey had helped him onto his chair).
"No Vez, leave it," screamed his wife as if fearing for our lives, all the while her face cosmetically paralyzed into a state of perpetual disinterest. The contrast was jarring.
"Do you want to watch your language, mate?" I enquired of Glassbanger.
"Oh aye, not good enough to come outside and take my fuckin' order, but all of a sudden I've got to watch my fuckin' table manners is it?"
"Well," I began, my conflict management training leaving me sorely ill-equipped to deal with men like 'Vez'. "First of all, we don't take orders from tables, if you want to order food you have to come to the bar to do it. And I was only asking you to be mindful of your language because this is a family establishment and you have your kids with you."

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention - he had his kids with him. I didn't notice them at first, because they had zipped off into the lounge and were putting their fingers in somebody's lasagna while they read their paper, yelling, running around, and generally making the place look like a creche (I can't remember what their names were - some reprehensible modern Americanism like Tyler or Bubba no doubt - so I simply referred to them as Grotter and Mucus). Grotter and Mucus were everywhere - they made so much noise that I think even the dumb waiter would have told them to can the yapping (had Mother Emotionless not curbed her walking Ritalin prescriptions with a clout that seemed perhaps a bit too sharp for a "warning shot"). I'm still not sure how I feel about kids in pubs - on one hand, I'm all for showing children that it's an adult activity that must be approached sensibly, but on the other grubby, sticky hand, that never happens. Ever. People like Glassbanger see pubs as yet another playground - this is a place where old men come to drink cask ale and complain about how everything these days is so expensive and (despite polio and the like) the life of the 1950s was that of a king. If you're bringing your kids to a pub and you yourself are an irresponsible prick with a wife who looks like she stared Medusa herself square in the eye and won, then naturally you're going to get questions like:

"Dad, can I have a Fosters?"

I looked at Vez, intrigued at what he'd do next. I didn't think Grotter was joking - I doubt Grotter even had the capacity to joke, he had probably traded that in, alongside his ability to love, in exchange for a Nintendo DS and the cheek of old Nick.

"Ho ho... kids," he chuckled, suddenly giving the impression that he didn't hate us after all, giving us the cue to laugh it up. "I'll have a pint of Fosters." He then turned to Grotter and Mucus so that his face was completely invisible to us, and asked in a very deliberate manner...

"What would you like boys?" Me and Eddie began to smell a rat, but thought nothing off this peculiar behaviour at the time.
"Lemonade," came the general consensus.
"Fair enough. Two halves of lemonade, and a small house red for Julie." Well, you can hardly afford to turn your wife into something out of the Madame Tussaud's B-sides catalogue if you're splashing out on large wines, or anything with a shred of reputation or brand identity (you can't fault the company's house offering, simply called "Le Wine" - "Le Wine", despite the French connotations, is from South Africa and is apparently, in terms of the taste sensation, halfway between drinking pure antifreeze and being punched in the face by an angry South African vineyard keeper, presumably angry because he has had to squeeze more pennies than grapes to meet the margins). "And to eat, we'll have more or less everything you've got." (Well, he didn't say that, but they were big orders - the nippers were given no head start by daddy as they were given a pair of steaks so big that you'd be hard pressed to believe we got them from a land mammal, and not, say, a blue whale).

The order went through, and we parted ways. We heard Elaine swearing vehemently at the printer - I would truly hate to be a full-time cook because I'm yet to meet one who actually enjoys cooking - and then we forgot all about it, leaving it in her more than capable hands.

Elaine buzzed through to the bar to signify the food was ready - I was busy trying to write a dirty word in the head of somebody's Guinness, so Eddie decided to ferry the scolding hot plates of food over to the mewling little bastards, who apparently missed the episode of Sesame Street where Big Bird tells them not to play "let's jump around in an erratic and unpredictable fashion" when there are plates overheard so hot that one slip of the hand could result in an impromptu Junior Simon Weston Lookalike Competition. However, Eddie maintained a firm grip on the blazing hot plates and got them to their destination without a single singe. He did, however, have a concern.

"Might want to come and have a look at this."

I went over, expecting to see Vez had grown tired of waiting for his meal and had simply cracked open Grotter and Mucus' ribs, feasting on their vital organs like a vulture in a bad suit, but no, the concern was more table-based. As Vez, the mannequin and the nippers all looked at us, Eddie pointed at the drinks in front of the young guns - Vez's lager was empty, but the two boys' lemonades had taken a slightly golden yellow hue. That, and they each had a gigantic head on them from where Vez had poured the beer in without thinking. Eddie and I took the drinks - Vez nearly choked on his own disgust (and a bit of the whole rotisserie chicken he ordered and was, at that point, eating with his bare hands).

"What the fuck d'you think you're playing at?" sputtered Vez, clearly completely and utterly oblivious to why we might be confiscating the alcohol he had sneaked over to his prepubescent scrotes.
"We're not having underage drinking in this pub, if you don't like it you can go somewhere else."
"What, you think I can't buy my kids a drink do you? They're allowed alcohol if they're eating." And there it is, that age-old misconception. There seems to be a bit of confusion around the law in this area - if you're over 16, a parent or guardian can buy you beer, wine or cider with a table meal. The law does not cover supplying lager to an eight and ten-year-old. But it's such a gray area with so many interpretations and pitfalls that I think you'd be hard pressed to find a pub that would do it (that loophole was aimed mainly at restaurants who do drink as a secondary item to the food, not pubs like ours who do the complete opposite). It was not designed for the vertically challenged to turn his boys into men via the medium of flat, piss-weak shandy while they feast on a veritable sackful of what had once been majestic Welsh farm animals. Eddie gave me the nod; it was time to go and get Ironside. Sadly, I was left to engage in a dialogue with Vez and co, which pretty soon fell into the gutter in terms of content and tone.

"You lot have got a fucking cheek," blurted Vez, coating me in a very thin layer of spit and the roasted, spiced carcass of a farm hen.
"No Vez, stop! Stop!" shrieked his wife with a face full of nothing, as if any minute he would remove the tent that he so tastefully converted into a jacket, roll up his sleeping bag sleeves and invite me to step outside to settle this with the time-tested exchange of opinion known as fisticuffs. Grotter, clearly innately troubled by the incident playing out before him, began to pick his nose.
"Look," I began, at this point bored of remaining civil and now just wanting to end this fucking mess as soon as possible. "If you don't like the law, write to your MP. Don't fucking take it out on us."
"Mind your language," snided Vez.

"What the hell's going on here?" And here comes Henry, being wheeled into the circle of conflict by a visibly shaken Eddie. I wish I could tell you at this point that we came out with a tirade of put-downs and witticisms that would make the cumulative efforts of Churchill, Wilde and Fry look like half-wit internet messageboard exchanges. But OMFG, no such thing happened - the argument was not won with words.

"What's the problem here?" enquired Henry.
"Well, I've been trying to explain to -" at this point, Vez turned to Henry and fell silent. His wife let out a shocked gasp, Grotter pulled his finger out of his nose and I thought Mucus was going to weep into his meal.
"What? What part of the age laws don't you get, mate?"
Vez said nothing.
"If you fancy crossing swords with me pal, I'll have the rozzers down here before you can say blink, alright?"
"Fine."
"What was that?"
"Fine, sorry, fine."
"I think you owe my boys an apology."
"Sorry, sorry. Look, are we alright?"
"We're fine mate. Don't make me come down here again."
"Believe me, I won't."

With that, Vez - evidently just wanting to get rid of Henry as soon as possible - turned and resumed eating, as did the rest of his posse, the children quivering slightly (you could actually see the moment they became scarred for life; their faces sort of crumpled a bit and stayed that way, and they made this little whimpering noise that sounded like thousands of pounds being handed over to a therapist in later life). Although how they managed to eat another bite after seeing a bath-soaked Henry wheeled in front of them - wearing nothing but a (loose-fitting) bath robe and a slightly soggy cast on his leg - is something that has escaped me to this day.

Under My Umbrella.

2007-07-27T01:14:00.000Z

Every summer you can count on the temporary emergence of two things; flying ants and the village bowls tournament. Bowls, much like darts and chess, is a sport popular with the infirm, the elderly and the bloated due to the lack of physical assertion required, and that is why it's such a winner around here - it's a nice relaxing sport for the vast number of pensioners around here with bad hips, gout, and other medical complaints that stop them getting involved with the village's other more active sports such as bear baiting, knife throwing and banger racing. Every summer the village green is cordoned off and before you can say cotton jumpers, the village's elders turn out in force to throw some large side-weighted balls at a small ball some way into the distance. This is one of the village's long standing traditions - it's been going on for longer than anyone can remember, it's something the whole family can enjoy and it's transcended generations (much like the incestuous antics up at the farm behind the fields).

That said, it's not all tea and crumpets when bowls season rolls around - I mean, there is tea and crumpets (sandwiches too) but the village, without giving too much away, is on a slight slant; and the village green itself isn't level either. And seeing as the village green is the flattest of all the village's grassy areas (the worst of a bad bunch), the players play against the grain of the slope, hoping their bowls don't roll sideways down, which they almost always do. The result? The infirm, elderly, bloated, sick and inactive that have come out for a relaxing game of bowls find themselves running hell for leather towards the main road after their bowls as they tumble downwards. Fair play though, they're incredibly persistent, most people would have just acknowledged that this place wasn't built for bowls and given up. But you see these pensioners running like the wind as if recreating something out of Logan's Run and you know what time of year it is. It's a wonder nobody's been seriously injured or killed in pursuit of these rogue bowls. Any attempts to put up a barrier results in an argument about the regulation size of the pitch so they no longer bother, choosing to risk life and (undoubtedly plastic) limb with the road rather than argue the toss with Roy.

Roy will come in on Wednesday nights for the quiz, and is a notoriously fierce gentleman - the last person you would ever imagine gently rolling a bowl across a lawn. Every Wednesday he comes in, knocks back a couple of double Scotches on the rocks as if they were going out of fashion, and then plays the quiz, with his freakishly hairy wife, as if his life depended on the outcome. And then, when the answers are called out at the end of the night and he has invariably been wrong more than right, he will slam his glass down, rip his answer paper to shreds and storm out. Roy is such a sour loser that merely watching one of his tantrums in progress is like sucking on a hundred lemons; losing is not an option for Roy, which is unfortunate, because he tends to lose quite a lot. Darts, backgammon, poker, you name it and Roy is terrible at it. As opponent after opponent sinks the double, turns his cards over or gets his bowl closest to the jack, Roy will launch into a tirade of anger and vitriol, a fie on all and sundry before he gets in his car and fucks off home, probably to berate his wife and kids or punch one of his cats, who are rather disturbingly treated like children when Roy isn't raging his way through the village. There are several schools of thought as to why Roy is as angry as he is - some believe it is because somebody obviously swapped his human fiancee for a gorilla at the altar and he failed to notice until the vows were done and dusted, he whipped the vail back and caught a glimpse of King Kong puckering up for a smooch. Others, however, say it is because he himself looks like some sort of manatee, and is actually angry because his relationship with a land mammal flies in the face of Darwinism. However, I belong to the school of thought that believes Roy's innate hatred of anything and everything stems from the absolutely appalling toupee sitting atop his bald, perspiring bonce that looks more like something you would see dead in the road than parked on somebody's scalp.

I myself have never seen the point of wearing a wig; they're never convincing and serve only to make you look like a vain, bald man, as opposed to just a bald man. However, I especially don't see why Roy wears a wig, as he openly acknowledges that it is not his genuine hair - he doesn't go around saying it's a wig, but he seems to treat it the way you would treat a hat. If he has an itch he will actually lift the wig to scratch it, he adjusts it openly and often, and - my personal favourite - when he becomes frustrated (which is often), he pulls it off his head and slams it on the ground in disgust, sometimes even going as far as to stamp on it as if it could somehow rise from the dead (probably as the animal it obviously once was; I reckon it was a squirrel, Eddie thinks it was some sort of otter) and bite his ankles. He then picks it up, beats it (much the same way you would beat the dust out of a rug, which isn't far from the truth) and replaces it on his head a disheveled mess before storming off into the sunset. The strange thing about this is Roy's wife is hairier than some gorillas - a quick shave of his wife's arms would provide ample source material to craft Roy a wig, a beard, a ponytail and a fur coat. The amount of hair that woman has is criminal - I'm waiting for the day Roy forgets to buy razors at their weekly shop, to see if she comes in sporting a five o'clock shadow. Actually, his wife's abundance of hair compared to his critical shortage may be what drives Roy to stamp on his toupee in slapstick disgust every time his life is dealt another crippling defeat.

Henry had never seen the bowls tournament before so Eddie took him along to this year's - well, of course, the first bowl hadn't even been thrown before Henry saw his chance. Henry has been charged by the company to get the pub known around the village which includes whoring it out to every single organization, gang and group in town. If they had branches here, Henry would probably discuss function room rates with the Crips or the Ku Klux Klan (not on the same night, obviously). So in a gang of exhausted pensioners, chasing their bowls as they tumbled towards Henry's feet at the base of the slope, Henry literally saw bags of money running towards him.

"So what did Henry actually say, Eddie?" enquired Frances as we waited for Henry to grace us with his presence at the team meeting.
"He asked if they would consider a more appropriate venue for their proceedings." Which basically means, would they consider it here.
"But what the hell have we got to offer? Our beer garden is just as slanted as the village green, and it's not long enough."
"No, true," sighed Eddie, obviously pained by merely recalling what was said. "But what have we got that's long enough and level?"
"Oh no," I stuttered; surely not. No. Nobody could be so stupid. I know this place has a reputation for bad ideas but surely this kind of thing was the area of professional morons, not just amateur idiots like us.

"Which is why," Henry concluded as we watched with jaws slackened and eyes widened, "our loading bay is the perfect venue for the village bowls tournament." He had prepared a flipchart with a picture of the loading bay, but he needn't have bothered, as we all knew damn well what the loading bay looks like. It looks like crap.

Every Friday we get our deliveries - a gigantic truck pulls up, drops off enough alcohol to sink Noah's ark then fucks off to do the same to every pub in the area. But they can't park out the front (due to the fact that all of the village's roads were built back when people rode around on horses, not gigantic eighteen-wheelers full of booze), it wouldn't be allowed, hence why we cordoned off an area of the car park as the loading bay and had a proper docking area built especially for the purpose, so the deliveries could be made away from the main road. It's essentially a long tunnel with a ramp at the end (it has a wooden roof), we keep all the beer in this before it's brought into the cellar - it's slightly below ground level, and that's why it's completely flat (and therefore immune to the village's natural incline). Apart from it being a fucking tip (as well as the unofficial smoking zone and the place me and Eddie go to play keepie-uppie with a football we found in the car park six months ago) it is, apparently, the perfect length for a regulation match of bowls. I don't know how much you know about bowls, but...

"How do you propose we have a game of bowls on a gigantic concrete runway, Henry? Bowls is typically played on grass."

Yeah, it's a gigantic concrete runway.

"We're going to lay down astroturf." This brought about two questions:

"When is this tournament?" The answer came quickly; the tournament was the next day.
"What do you mean we're going to lay down astroturf?"

That answer also came quickly as Eddie and I put roll after roll of astroturf in a wheelbarrow (Henry had apparently driven his car through an astroturf factory, as he had the stuff in places that I didn't even know cars had - boot, back seat, dashboard, glove compartment, even a few rolls under the seats) and wheeled it over to the runway, ready to turn an outdoor corridor of slops and mess into a competition-standard bowls pitch. Plus, it was raining pretty heavily at the time, and the roof provided paltry cover; it was apparently the last part of the loading bay to be built, and from the looks of it the remaining budget could only stretch for a thousand boxes of matches and some glue. In fact, the only way the "roof" of the runway could have provided less protection from the elements would be if it were simply a sign on the wall that said "imagine a roof over your head". At least my imaginary roof would have been painted.

As Eddie and I made our measurements and cut the astroturf to length, Christine - who is still not really familiar with how things are done around here - had some questions.

"So what, did he just say he'd do this before he knew if we could or not?"
"Yep," we said. Eddie handed me the Stanley knife as I cut more of the horrible astroturf to measure, wondering exactly how many fingers I'd have to lose in order to get the company to pay out big in court.
"But what if this hadn't been suitable?"
"S'best not to think about it."
"What the hell would he have done though? Just fucked them off?"
"Probably not. He would have come up with another bullshit scheme."
"It's absolutely chucking it down, are they going to even be able to play?"
"It doesn't matter to Henry." And it didn't; it's almost as if, by continuing to build this ridiculous pitch, we were engaging in a game of chicken with them, seeing who would back out first. Except the only losers seemed to be Eddie and I, soaked to the skin and hands feeling the burn from laying astroturf.

We inspected our work, tried rolling the football across it to check for bumps/uneven parts but luckily found none. The rain was coming down thick and fast but we went home certain it wouldn't last, and that it would certainly be OK in time for the game the next morning, an assumption that turned out to be so laughably off the mark that even Michael Fish would have laughed in our meteorologically-mediocre faces.

I don't know whether you've spotted this yourself, but we've had a bit of rain lately round these parts - I'm aware it's a very British thing to talk about the weather but when entire parts of the country are submerged and people are dying of thirst due to a lack of access to drinking water in some areas, I think a brief chat is probably allowed. And not to put it too bluntly, Britain has been fucked this week. Cars submerged, festivals cancelled, houses soaked, lives wrecked, up and down the country the weather has been laying waste to everything. Luckily, thanks to the village's slope, we're never flooded, it just doesn't happen and for that we're all truly grateful; however, if the rain's particularly heavy such as it has been this week, two things - and two things alone - in the village get flooded, and they are:

1. Our cellar.

I unbolted the door on Monday morning and entered the cellar with a splash. As I waded further in, my socks and shoes becoming entirely saturated in the process, I feared the worst; a barrel leak. I checked around before discovering that the pool of liquid on the floor was actually rainwater - it hadn't occurred to me that perhaps we'd been flooded out. Then the penny dropped (with a splash as it landed no less); I threw open the loading bay doors, squelched outside to see Henry, trousers rolled up, standing in the water-logged pit that had once been...

2. Our loading area.

While it may seem like an obvious place to hold a bowls tournament if you're a senile old landlord with both hands up his arse (frantically scrambling for an ounce of common sense but sadly coming up with little but shit), it does not benefit from the village's natural lack of balance when it comes to things such as rainwater. But it's never that bad, because in the middle is a drain - if a barrel goes bad, it doesn't make fiscal sense for the company to take it back so they take our word for it and tell us to dispose of it before returning the barrel on delivery/collection day (they collect the empties on the same day as delivery). So luckily, that drain would take care of - oh, hang on, not it wouldn't, because it was covered by fucking astroturf. Good work Henry. If he had set out with the intention of retaining as much water as was humanly possible then he could have held his head up high because he had successfully negated all the anti-flooding measures put in place when the loading bay was built. Hence why I saw him in about three inches of water, with a vacuum cleaner, trying his absolute damnedest to hoover the water up. Considering the cellar was filling up fast and the rain was still coming down at a rate of knots, I had little faith in the hoover system, especially as I saw Eddie, standing off to a corner under an umbrella as a grim spectator to the whole ordeal, next to a couple of vacuum cleaners that had presumably failed to stand up to the task (one of which was one of those pansy hand-held Dirt Devil things, confirming my suspicions that this pub is actually being run by fucking monkeys).

"You alright Ed?"
"You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh..." Eddie mumbled, completely oblivious that I had already taken up his offer. For all that Eddie claims popular culture has no effect on him, a combination of a catchy hook and a relevant situation meant that my time under Eddie's umbrella (ella, ella) featured Eddie as an acapella musical accompaniment. Which was great, if the only piece of music you like is the chorus of current chart whirlwind Umbrella (ella, ella), which (eh, eh, eh) can become (you can stand under mah) grating (um-bah-rella) after a while (ella, ella). "...Sorry mate, did you say something?"
"Yeah, you alright?"
"Yeah, yeah.... ella, ella, ella..."

Before Eddie could get to the bridge, the situation went from bad to worse as the bowls crowd turned up - they had been promised a pitch in exchange for their business for the day, and they probably hadn't expected to see some sort of paddling pool waiting for them. Roy took one look at the situation, beckoned Henry into a corner and had a word, his pet gorilla looking on in disgust. The rest of the bowls players decided it'd be best to just get on with it. The jack was thrown, their trousers rolled up, and it was game on in the lake.

I began to wonder what other job puts people in this situation, as I stood next to a six-foot-something, white, male tribute act to Rihanna, watching pensioners attempt to roll weighted balls through seven inches of water towards a moving, floating obstacle. The jack remained at the surface, rendering the whole game completely and utterly fucking useless; something the bowls team were surprisingly slow to notice. I got the feeling they persisted with their entirely pointless game to humour Henry (apart from Roy they're generally a nice bunch), but after several attempts at this ridiculous farce they soon grew weary of it. A game of bowls where the jack moves - when the whole point is to get the bowl as close as you can to the jack, a pointless exercise if the jack's position varies of its own accord - is akin to a game of football where the goalposts move, or a game of ping-pong where a gigantic man grabs the paddle off you mid-game, kicks you to the floor and beats you to death with it (at least that's certainly what it felt like to watch these horrendous matches in progress).

As tempers escalated around the corner, Eddie and I decided to go and see how Henry was fairing against Roy and his missus, if only to protect Henry from being torn apart by Slaphead McGee and his silverback spouse.

"This is absolutely out of order, Ginn."
"What? I offered you something better than the village green, and here it is. Just because it's a bit waterlogged..." Henry has several bad habits, but by far his worst is his absolute inability to admit fault. Even when it's three inches deep and he's standing in it.
"A bit waterlogged!?" interjected Kong, beating her chest and snorting. "The village green is wet but it's nothing compared to this."
"We provided a solution." Henry was absolutely intent on digging himself a particularly watery grave on this one. As we stood in the runway - which due to the cover of darkness and smell of stale water had all the appeal of a sewer.
"What solution?" began Roy, scratching his wig. "What solution have you provided Henry? Where can we play? We lost the village green to a bunch of fucking hippies and we can't play here." By 'hippies', he means some of the Women's Institute had decided to set up a gazebo and have a picnic. Fucking hippies indeed.
"Of course you can." And here comes another of Henry's faults; his insistence that everything is fine and dandy when the evidence to the contrary is both abundant and soaking through his shoes. "The car park -"
"It's slanted and covered in gravel. This is bowls."
"Alright," bellowed Henry, at this point greatly angered by the insolence of the bowls players, "well how about the fucking roof then?" How dare those people come down here, demanding a service we said we'd provide! The bloody cheek of it! Infuriated by the apparently absurd demands laid down by the bowls players, Henry began to do something extremely silly; he put his cigarette out on the sole of his shoe, put the butt in his shirt pocket (this is another one of his habits that drives me absolutely berserk) and began to scale the roof of the runway, Roy and his wife looking on in shock (with a hint of melancholy in Roy's wife's eyes, presumably as she reminisced about her trip to New York all those years ago).

"Henry," called Eddie, attempting to coax him down from the roof as if he were about to jump into a small watery heap at any minute. "This is silly, get down from there."
"No, they can play up here - we've provided a solution. That's what you wanted, isn't it Roy?" cackled Henry with more than a hint of madness in his eye. I felt bad for Henry, who had obviously been driven so completely round the twist by the bad weather and lack of sleep (due to his seemingly week-long mission to find all the training grounds in the UK and rob them of their astroturf).
"Get down from there, you silly bastard," shouted Roy.
"No. You can quite easily play up here. I'll go and get a ladder, and -" Snap. Henry didn't actually say "snap", that was just the sound his leg made as the roof split like a bit of wet newspaper and he came tumbling to the floor with a sickening thud, his shin sending out an absolutely appalling "crack" sound, barely muffled by the thin layer of skin and flesh, like somebody snapping a branch wrapped in beef.

Eddie ran inside and called the emergency services as I got to work propping Henry's head above the the water with a crate. I looked down to see his left leg with two bends in it where there had previously only been one (we often forget that Henry isn't a young man anymore, and as such is particularly vulnerable to eight-foot drops onto concrete, even with a thin layer of astroturf and a few inches of water to break his fall). The bowls players slowly filed out of the runway, seemingly disappointed by the fact our landlord isn't the Iron Man; Roy turned to look at us with such inexpressible rage in him that he did the only thing he could in such a situation; removed his wig, stamped the living shit out of it, and then topped it all off by kicking it into our lake, turning his back on it as what little sunlight made it through the clouds bounced off his gleaming cranium. The lifeless lump of lanky brown nylon began drifting calmly like a dead yeti in a lake as Eddie came running back out.

"Ambulance'll be here in a - what the fuck, is that a rat?"

As the ambulance was summoned, we all had to wait for it as Henry suffered his final indignity. His clothing soaked, his leg evidently in a tremendous amount of pain, and having just suffered a severe embarrassment for both himself personally, the pub and the company, Henry was left with his one remaining arm (the other holding his leg) to bat off the advances of Roy's wig, which was floating very close to his face. I saw what appeared to be some sort of ogreish beaverskin make its advances on my manager as he lay writhing in a flooded, underground, makeshift bowls pitch (after he had just fallen through the roof and broken his leg) with Eddie still humming a few bars of Umbrella in the background, I soon realized the next few weeks would perhaps be a little out of sorts. Even by our standards.

Careful Now.

2007-07-20T02:13:00.000Z

As you may already be aware, a few weeks ago, somebody on staff served alcohol to an underager in an undercover police investigation. We were closed for the weekend and the people involved were fined because of it. To stop this happening again, the company sent a team of suits down to the pub to analyze our situation. Each of us had our day-to-day activities monitored and the company had a report made up on everyone, with information ranging to our punctuality to our chances of killing somebody. So for a week, every pint of bitter I poured, every bucket of ice I retrieved, every preschooler I asked for identification, it was all noted by a clipboard-weilding suit and assembled into a twenty-page indictment. The findings?

Everybody on staff is an idiot. Retrain them all.

Now, personally, I took this as an insult to my intelligence, until I discovered this was just an average; it turns out my own personal risk was "minimal" (there were concerns about my darts skills, or lack thereof, and the chances of hitting a customer with a rogue arrow, but apart from that, it's good to know I'm not going to be killing anybody). The real risks, it would seem, were Eddie and Christine. Christine because of her absolute lack of common sense when it comes to the licensing laws, and Eddie because he treats the pub - which is full of extremely pressurized gas cylinders, twenty-gallon barrels and knives that could turn a human hand into five sausages and a burger with surprisingly little effort - like an episode of Fun House, standing on barrels and climbing over ten-foot fences as if Pat Sharp was going to jump out of the bushes and give him a goody bag at the end of it.

Naturally, this kind of revelation had implications. The first move was crucial - would the entire pub be coated in Nerf to stop us from accidentally tripping over our own hideous stupidity and smashing our overly-thick noggins open, our teaspoon's worth of gray matter dribbling to the floor and causing another slip? Would the obviously lethal metal cutlery be replaced with jugular-safe plastic? Would more competent, less-dangerous staff be drafted in? No, apparently the first step to take when you discover that you've let a gang of morons take control of a tightly-regulated and extremely dangerous establishment is paperwork. Hours and hours of paperwork. Whole fucking forests of paperwork. Disclaimers of all shapes and sizes, but with a common theme - fuck up on the job and it's your problem. We could go out on horseback waving the company flag, burning out cars and wreaking havoc the likes of which the village has never seen, and we'd incur the full legal bill. Seriously, unless it can be proved that there's been a serious failing on their part (which will be very difficult to prove seeing as we pretty much signed over every single legal right we have, plus our houses and the houses of any children we may have) then the buck stops with us. Although my real sympathies went to Henry, who not only had to get his name on the same amount of dotted lines as we did, but had to countersign all of our signatures, a process that took him all day.

We were handed our group timetable; for the first time ever, everybody on staff would be on duty all day, and we would be watched over by a designated company representative to ensure we were re-educated correctly. The timetable went accordingly:

11:00-14:00 - Health & Safety/Fire Awareness with Craig B. McNeil
15:00-19:00 - Operating Within The Law with Glen Christie

"Hang on," I said, checking twice to make sure I wasn't seeing things. "Glen Christie's coming down?"
"Yep," Henry said, as he continued with his paperwork. "He's the guide for the licensing course."
"But he's the regional manager now, he doesn't need to do the guide work anymore."
"He still does it, because he's the best man for the job." With that, we parted ways, making a mental note to check on Henry the next morning to ensure he had not been crushed by a tower of envelopes.

Craig B. McNeil arrived the next morning approximately an hour early and quite frankly, it's a miracle he gets out of the door every morning, such is his fear of the danger inherent in everything. Attaching safety goggles and gloves before even stepping foot in the building, I would kill myself if I was Craig - if I spent as much time living in fear as that man does, there would be nothing worth living for. And believe me, I'd not be hard pressed for methods, because no matter what you do, whatever activity you engage in, no matter how pedestrian, Craig's got a horror story for you. Another reason Craig is a suicide case waiting to happen is that if he is to be believed, all of the victims of his outlandish tales were personal friends of his who died in vain. "This one guy I knew" was the same starting point to about a thousand stories of severed arteries, broken necks and immolations - perhaps Craig really did have a vast legion of friends at one point, and went into Health & Safety to avenge their deaths, because it would seem the ruthless culling of his social circle was down to simple things like opening doors correctly and switching off plugs at night. Craig's first task - after depressing the living shit out of us with a dozen tales of deadly workplace negligence - was to watch us set up the bar. The process goes something like this, and I have added Craig's commentary for your own benefit. Who knows, maybe you will live a slightly safer life with these bits of information to hand.

1. Take the chairs off the tables and put the beermats on the tables.

"You definitely want to be careful moving those chairs, you slip and land on that, boom, punctured lung. Believe me, I've seen it happen; this one guy I knew..."

2. Collect ice from the ice machine and put it on the back bar.

"Watch what you're doing with that scoop - pick that ice up, if you fall on that I can pretty much guarantee you'll break your neck and die." With this, Craig rushed to the ground, picked up the ice cube as if it was a lump of glowing uranium, flung the door open and threw it so forcefully outside I feared the pub was somehow under attack. We must have been under siege somehow, because there is absolutely no need to throw anything as hard as that if you're not returning fire to a hostile opponent. With the life-threatening ice cube eliminated, Craig removed his gloves, replaced them with new ones, and gave me the nod - I was now clear to walk back to the bar now that the rogue ice cube had been thrown halfway back to the polar ice caps. My hero.

3. Take the nozzles out of water and put them back on the taps.

Craig didn't say a word. The pairs of medical gloves we were issued spoke volumes.

4. Put the washing machine back together.

As Eddie knelt down and did the same routine we've all done a thousand times - put the filter in, screw the plug down, replace the spinning water jets, turn the machine on - Craig hovered mere millimeters above him with a torch as if preparing to forcibly penetrate him from the rear, pointing out the countless blunt plastic objects that, "in the wrong hands", could take an eye out or leave an abrasion. The apocryphal "wrong hands" appeared to be a concern for Craig; he was very much the James Bond of needless health and safety regulations and had to stop small pieces of spherical plastic and miniscule ice cubes falling into the "wrong hands". Personally I'm all for "the wrong hands" getting hold of these items, if only to see how they would be transformed from a harmless nuisance to something that could dislodge eyeballs, bruise organs and all the other mad assertions that led to Craig making an absolute mess of his life.

I'm not one of these rabid "political correctness gone mad" types who buys the Daily Express and thinks we should still be sending ten-year-olds down the mines (until their faces are blackened enough to get them on stage in a bloody good minstrel show - what was wrong with them, eh?), but I don't think it's worth anybody's while to bubblewrap the universe. I can see why businesses are concerned, as it would seem that personal injury claims are a bit too easy these days, to the point that if you so much as think about becoming injured, somebody should give you lots and lots of free money for all the anguish you might have suffered. Put the television on for ten minutes and chances are some smug young lass in a suit will invade the screen, asking if you've suffered a personal injury in public or at work that wasn't your fault. Can't blame them for trying, but the downside of this (ever-expanding) industry is people like Craig, who live in constant fear of cuts and scrapes - businesses have become the overprotective mothers at the playground, pumping you so full of safety warnings that the world seems like an extremely dangerous place. That is, until you actually do hurt yourself, at which point they become the slightly dodgy uncle at the playground who had to babysit instead of going to the bookies, in that they run a mile - "hey, that's your problem, we have the legal documentation to prove it". Whatever happened to the happy medium?

It wasn't long before my question was answered, as the doors were thrown open and the morning rush began - three little old women through the lounge door.

"Could we have three coffees please?"
"That's absolutely no problem," said Craig, and gathered us around the kettle to ensure we were all able to make a few cups of coffee without breaking our necks. First, I filled the kettle.

"Turn that tap on slowly! There could be a spillage!"

Then, I boiled the kettle.

"Don't stand so close to it."

Then I went to get the cups and saucers.

"You should really only be carrying one cup at a time; if you feel you need to stack them you're not thinking safety. This one guy I knew..."

I had evidently been grossly misinformed on the dangers of coffee making; every step of the process is a hazard waiting to happen. Craig, disgusted by the blatant disregard for safety he had witnessed, took over. But not before going to his car for equipment.

What followed was each of us carrying one coffee - that had been allowed to go slightly cold due to Craig's ventures to the Twatmobile - with (and I wish I were making this up) a pair of flame-resistant safety gloves, the kind you would be issued if you worked in a furnace, or you were training to be a flame juggler.

"Oh, thank you very much," exclaimed the old dears, a little taken aback that the pub not only runs on coal, but evidently pulls the furnace shovelers out of the basement now and then to make and serve the coffees. Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm stranded in the wrong time. I'm pretty sure there was once a time that making coffee for some old biddies didn't require the use of hazard suits and a flame-retardant blanket, helpfully provided by the flame retard himself.

Once we had safely cleared the plates and cups and apologized for the bizarre circumstances, we were given a rush down on the fire safety policy. Now, the company's fire safety policy differs a little from my own personal policy. The company policy states that in the event of a fire, all staff must be familiar with the exits and usher all customers off the premises through the nearest available exit. However, the demonstration pictures - a set of faded 1980s shots of bowtie-laden barstaff ushering women (who all looked like Cheryl Baker and the woman from the Charlie advert) away from their crème de menthes - showed a "fire hazard" so laughable that laughter itself would probably provide sufficient wind to extinguish it; a very small ashtray bonfire, the kind of thing for which Fireman Sam wouldn't even have bothered getting out of Bella's bed. I know that if a fire breaks out here, it's going to have to be a damn site more lethal than that to get people to stand outside - away from their drinks - for any length of time.

Now, it doesn't take the likes of Craig to tell you that the place is a deathtrap - I realized very early on in my employment here that at some point somebody's probably going to wind up being at least singed, if not full-on cooked to the consistency of boot leather. And seeing as I'm usually at work down there at some point in the day, over time I've had to develop my own fire policy. Basically, my fire policy is, if both doors are blocked (or are on fire themselves), I'm making short work of the window with the business end of a Bulmers bottle and getting myself out. The only way this plan would fail would be if the window was locked (it never is), the bar itself was on fire (it never is) or if somebody threw a stack of flaming tyres behind the bar between the window and myself (they rarely do). Then once I'm out, if there's time, I'll try and help the customers and maybe phone the fire brigade. The only thing I may do differently in future is keep this plan to myself, and I probably won't divulge these window-smashing, ledge-jumping, customer-forsaking plans to the likes of Craig, who - while everybody else seemed impressed with my heroic plans - was, now that I think about it, actually taking notes as I talked (or quite possibly making a crude pencil sketch of me throwing a barrel on somebody and squashing them flat out, so that I may use them as a fleshy, bloody runway in my mad dash to the window).

"Have any of you ever been here for an evacuation?"
"I have." I decided to refrain from mentioning the fact that it was due to Henry nearly burning the pub to the ground a few months ago.
"So if I set the fire alarm off now, you could deal with it, could you?" I then noticed that Craig's face had gone so red that, funnily enough, I actually began to feel it burning me. I then noticed his hand hovering over the fire alarm.
"Well, I don't think that's a good idea, is it? I - " but at this point my voice was drowned out by a high-pitched siren as Craig pushed the button. He then pressed a button on his watch; we were evidently being timed.

"Oh come on, this is silly."
"Is it Eddie? Is it silly? Is it funny?"
"Setting off the fire alarm when you don't have to isn't funny," interjected Frances. I began to feel a little bit bad for Craig; we had evidently broken his spirit single-handedly and I couldn't help but feel as if he could have lived a relatively happy - if fear-dominated - life had he never been assigned here.
"Right, well I'm going to stand outside. Some of us respect the fire alarm code. Doesn't matter if it's a drill, we all have to get outside." With that, Craig stormed outside, waiting for us to make a break for the fire assembly point.

Ten minutes later, he stopped hammering on the door and we heard a car zoom into the distance, at which point Eddie unbolted the doors; which was a shame, because the lunch we had with the pub to ourselves was superb - ham and mustard sandwiches just taste better when there's a health and safety officer trying to invade your fortress. Anyway, with Craig probably doing thirty miles an hour on some not-so-distant motorway, we re-opened the doors and all eagerly awaited Glen Christie's imminent arrival.

Glen - whose reputation as the company hardman tends to precede him - was unknown to the group at large, so word began to spread of what he would actually be like. Eddie and I have met him before; Glen and I have bumped into eachother here and there, and Eddie managed to throw up in his car once. But while I will not contend that Glen's a delight, his professional reputation paints a slightly more sinister side. Glen started as a doorman, and one day decided to apply his stomach-turning heavy-handedness to the white collar world - and he got his way. He is now the regional manager for this area, and is only five or six steps down from the throne, as it were. He is very much a hands-on kind of person, a trait he got from all the time he spent with his hands on the lapels of raging drunkards as he grappled them to the floor, so he still visits all the pubs in his area on a regular basis and will help anyone with any problem. Countless tales have surfaced of his willingness to jump behind the bar if a place is busy; as have countless stories of Christie - not as young as he once was - dragging ne'erdowells out of "his" pubs by the scruff of their neck, regardless of size or social stature, removing his jacket and giving them the same treatment he gave Irish troublemakers back home twenty years ago.

Drama follows Christie wherever he goes, evident from his first words on the premises; he stepped into the bar, and as Eddie and I pointed him out to the rest of the group, he announced to the room:

"Whose is the white Citreon outside?"
"Mine," piped one of the builders. Christie then pulled out a wad of notes from inside his jacket - easily the value of the car, which looked as if it should have had an old woman in a rocking chair tied to the roof - and thrust them into his hand.
"I just smashed into the back of you. Sorry about that. Right, you lot don't look all that fuckin' busy, let's get started."

That's Glen. He spent approximately ten minutes introducing himself, then spent the rest of the time regaling us with his war stories - he knew we weren't stupid, and promised to help out on the bar and alert us to anything remotely educational. In the meantime, he decided to go over the intricacies of being a doorman, one of the only jobs in the world that requires you to guard a place of business from people who use similar businesses too much. And there were some stories that would have made Craig's eyes bleed.

"Sure I've been glassed. If you're a doorman in Ireland," called Glen to us over his shoulder as he handed some horrified elderly women their wine. "You're gonna get some fuckin' prick come up to you and shove a fuckin' glass in yer face, but the best thing you can do is drop 'em straight away, one punch, no fuckin' about. Right, is there anything else my lovelies?" The women shook their heads furiously, thrusting the correct money at Glen as if waiting for change would put their lives in imminent danger. As the terrified old women drank their wine and made a break for the door, it was held open for them. Glen nodded to us and we gathered around.

"Look at this one," nodded Glen. Through the lounge door walked two people; one a man in his thirties who instantly picked up a menu and stood to one side as the other person - a young woman - walked to the bar and waited. We quickly hid around the corner as if we were in the trenches. And the woman was young too; I would've said she was about twenty, but Glen had his doubts.

"Take a look, does she look twenty-one to any of you?"
"I'd say she's about eighteen," Christine guessed, being careful with her estimates ever since the fine she received. But this was irrelevant; if you look less than twenty-one, we have to ask.
"No, in other words. But take a look at the situation; the man is looking at a menu away from her. Who might he be?" Glen's mind was really ticking over here; this was a man who evidently knew this business inside and out and I was astonished at the psychological profiling going on.
"Her dad?" Nice work, Frances.
"Or, the policeman who has to be witness to test purchases in order to prosecute." Talking in hushed tones now, I half expected Glen to hand us all a pistol, a radio, a helmet, and instruct us to save a bullet for ourselves.
"You think she's a stinger?"
"Could be; if the police think a place is a soft touch they'll be back, it's a good money-spinner. But let's find out..." And with that, we left cover and went out, guns blazing.

Obviously flustered by the sudden influx of staff all swaggering towards her, she composed herself, smiled sweetly and asked for a Bacardi and coke. Glen turned to us, gave us the nod, cleared his throat, and proceeded.

"Can I see some ID please?"

The man with the menu looked up. The young woman looked extremely confused. Bloody hell, I thought; caught them in one. He actually managed to catch a sting in progress. Christ he's good.

"I'm thirty-five."
"...Sorry?"

OK, maybe he's not that good. The man put down the menu and walked over, at which point all eyes were drawn to one thing; his hand in hers, with two wedding rings present amongst the ten weaved fingers. Oh dear.

"I'm thirty-five... this is my husband..." Glen went extremely quiet; this couldn't get any worse. He had to drop it, of course; the thing about police sting operations is the testers can't lie; so already she has proved she is not a tester. Apparently this didn't matter as Glen proceeded to dig his own grave so deeply that it's a miracle he didn't strike oil.

"I'm sorry, but I've already -"
"I've got two kids... I can show you the cesarian scar if you want." But before we could protest, the girl lifted her shirt to reveal an absolutely revolting set of gigantic scarlet lines, evidence that her children had been forced to make their own way out with a butter knife before the wound was sewn up by Dr. Boxing Gloves.
"Jesus, can't we give her the fucking alcohol? Look at that..." Eddie was mortified; his neck tried to pull him away but he was transfixed. Technically, once you've been asked for ID, you have to provide it or you cannot be served. She didn't have anything on her; however, we felt that we would be willing to make an exception in this case. So, for future reference, you need one of three forms of ID to get alcohol from us; a passport, a driving license, or physical evidence that your offspring had to punch their way out of the sunroof. That's fine, that's worth a drink to us. Glen looked as if he'd taken a bullet; he sat down, evidently shaken that his eye could have deceived him so.

"Listen man, she looked way younger," began Eddie. He was right, she looked like she'd been plucked out of an Enid Blyton book, with elfish ears, a child-like face and a hat with a small bell at the tip.
"I know, but thirty five..." Glen seemed to be in disbelief. Before we could get him a blanket and some hot chocolate, a gentleman coughed at the bar. Coughed so loudly, in fact, that it probably did his throat more harm than good, and was obviously designed to get our attention. Dicky Dixon stood there, so good they named him twice, my absolute favouritest customer in the whole wide world, holding his half-finished pint to the light as if trying to read through it. He met our gaze and then began.

"I don't know what you're trying to do to me by serving me bad beer," he began, "but if I were to get a bad stomach from this, I don't think I'd be taking the brewery to court. So you'd best be changing this." Glen let out a long sigh.
"Beer can't give you a bad stomach," he muttered into his lap, his head in his hands.
"I'm sorry?" Dixon rasped, evidently regretting his cough decision as he looked on in shock.
"Beer? Y'know, the stuff you claim to know so fuckin' much about? It can't make you sick. It's not possible. I know what I'm on about pal, believe me."
"Well, look, you're wrong," stated Dixon, eyes agape - Glen looked up. "But we'll let that go for now. I want this changed. Or a refund. Either's fine."

Glen marched over and picked up the half a pint of dribble-lined beer that Dixon had slid across the bar. He does this all the time; he will drink half a pint, pulling these strained faces as he goes as if drinking it is like drinking a pint of pus scraped from the sceptic innards of a diseased otter, and then have the bare-faced cheek to turf the other half back, trying to get another full pint out of it. Glen, however, was having none of it.

"And what exactly are you giving us back? This?"
"I don't follow," growled Dixon. Watching the pair square up was like watching two dogs fighting over a string of sausages, except one dog had a long and varied past of beating up other dogs and the other only had experience of eating too many sausages.
"You know what a refund means pal? The return of faulty goods or services in exchange for your funds? Well, you're not giving us back £2.10's worth of best. You're giving me back £1's worth at the most - the other £1.10, well, we can only get that out of you one of two ways and I'm not accepting either of them."
"Now you listen to me -"
"You're Richey Dixon, aren't you?" Richey stopped for a minute.
"Yes I am."
"Right, hold on." With that, Glen picked up the glass, instructed us to give Richey the replacement of his choosing, and went out the back.

"What's he doing?" enquired Richey as I poured him a Carlsberg.
"Probably just checking the barrel," I hypothesized, a hypothesis that soon proved to be entirely incorrect when I heard the bright, brilliant, sparkling sound of glass shattering into a thousand pieces. I looked through the window to see that Glen had gone out through the cellar, through the loading bay, out to the car park and had smashed the glass over Dixon's van, beer and glass forming glorious, chunky pools on his windshield and bonnet. He motioned me to be quiet and came back inside. Glen returned inside, gave me his business card to give to Dixon should he want to discuss the nights' proceedings, signed us all off his training book and promised to post our certificates off the following day. He then got back in his Merc, beeped the horn twice and sped off into the night as we all stood aghast at the mess he had made of Dixon's van (who never uttered a word about the incident for reasons we're not sure about, although we got the feeling that Dixon may have heard a thing or two about Christie, in which case Dixon definitely didn't want to say anything more about it). We waved Glen off with sincere gusto before returning to our jobs, all the better for his imparted wisdom, intent on IDing the odd thirty-year-old in his honour. Glen is just the right person for this business, if only because he is an absolutely inimitable character.

The following day, we were asked to rate Glen's performance on the company website. As of this writing, Glen Christie is still the company's highest-rated training guide.

A Song For The Deaf.

2007-07-13T02:10:00.001Z

As I'm sure you're already aware, karaoke is of Japanese origin - however, did you know what the word karaoke actually means? You may be shocked to hear that the word karaoke itself, when translated, literally means "to inflict misery and suffering upon anybody within earshot of your booze-fuelled yodeling as you, a modern day Brutus, stick the final knife into the slumped almost-corpse of the once-mighty Money For Nothing as it bleeds to death beneath a statue of yourself, microphone in hand, with your tie around your head in an attempt to both pay maximum homage to Knopfler and hide the receding hairline you are so gracefully sporting these days"? Didn't know that? Well then, did you know that all it takes is two pints of lager, a cheap instrumental backing and a microphone to turn The Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy For The Devil' into something in which Satan himself would probably immerse himself with glee, getting more and more frenzied by the minute until the climactic moment where Donny (an Australian technician who, by day, fixes photocopiers and by night sings "with a Rhea-esque gruff quality" that more closely resembles something from the back catalogue of strepsilcore-scream-a-thon group Converge) attempts to sing the guitar solo in a grotty, whining tone - at which point Satan would more than likely be forced to excuse himself, using a strategically-placed folder over his crotch to conceal the raging, serpentine erection with which he would undoubtedly be lumbered at the sound of such suffering being inflicted on innocent human beings?

I certainly didn't know any of those things until last Saturday, when we were punished - I assume we were being punished, I can explain it in absolutely no other way - with a karaoke evening. It was one of those things that just happens at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with all the wrong people - all these elements of the damned, brought together by fate, unite as one to chew away what paltry meat was left on the bones of Do The Strand. An Australian business apparently bought a local Welsh firm, whose chief executive at the time of the sale - who, despite now being rich enough to build a house out of solid gold, has decided to keep his house in the village (whether he will have it gilded at a later date is unclear) - is a member of the Village Watch. To celebrate the unexpected obesity of his bank balance, he decided to invite them all to the semi-regular Village Watch party, which just so happened to be karaoke this month. So Henry was asked if we could cater for an "enlarged" gathering (with the Australians) and karaoke. We certainly could, said Henry. Hence why last Saturday, our function room was twenty parts Village Watch Association, ten parts Australian superbusiness (from what I could glean, the firm were more interested in the patents held by the company for servicing machinery than the company itself), a hundred parts alcohol and two parts annoyed bar staff.

It went without saying that Eddie and I would be manning the bar, but who would be providing the karaoke? Henry had promised a karaoke service in with the price and a quick look at the maths - which didn't include a karaoke/disco rental - soon pointed to the fact that something didn't add up (especially when you consider that the event was less than six hours into the future and apparently nothing had been booked). Looking over our budgets for the week, I decided to ask Henry how we would be providing a karaoke party without a karaoke machine. I looked up in the flat; no, he wasn't there. I peered in through the function room window, a small pane of glass that provides an insight into the Pub Of Functions Past, as nothing is ever cleared away afterwards - the remains of a wedding cake were barely visible, but no Henry. I went everywhere in search of him until I checked the shed outside, where Henry sometimes finds solace and plans his impractical schemes (like Inspector Gadget after he lost all his money on scratch cards and had to make all his gadgets in a dilapidated old shed). Although, to be fair, it answered my question - I opened the door to the shed and saw an extremely surreal vision, so bizarre in its appearance that it hit me like a ton of bricks.

It was Henry, standing on a podium made of wine boxes and cases of Magners labeled for return, with a gigantic flashing sign behind him reading "DJ HENRY". In front of that was his computer rigged up to two ridiculously gigantic speakers; pumping out through it was a rib-rattlingly bass-heavy mix of Ring Of Fire. However, it wasn't the Ring Of Fire we all love; not the fantastic San Quentin rendition, nor was it any rendition featuring Johnny Cash's haunting baritone. It was, in fact, the karaoke-ready instrumental version that Henry had downloaded for the occasion, which was constructed with synth sounds so cheap that - for all the realism they managed to summon - they may as well have recorded a drunkard on a street corner slobbering into a kazoo between swigs of White Lightning and the occasional soiling of his pants.

I had some reservations.

First of all, the sign had evidently been made on the cheap - in fact you would have to pay somebody handsomely to dispose of it. It was a wooden box, painted back, filled with fluorescent lights, with the letters cut out with a jigsaw and covered with different coloured light filters in front of each letter. While this may sound good enough, Henry was obviously not a carpenter; or indeed somebody with enough common sense to know that if you only get one shot at permanently making holes in some wood, it's generally a good idea to make some sort of outline in pencil or something. But no, this is Henry Ginn we're talking about, who had obviously just gone for it, and had suffered as a consequence. The first three letters were opulently spaced, but as Henry obviously realized around the "E" that space was limited, he began to make the letters narrower and narrower, the letters so thin you could slice cheese with them, and he had compressed it all to the point that the last two letters are very nearly touching. It looked like somebody had ordered this piece of stage lighting from a payphone, and left it to the very last second of the call to tell the carpenter what the box should say, resulting in a mad scramble to fit everything in before the end. Not great.

My second reservation was Henry. Henry, obviously a frustrated DJ at heart, had obviously missed the meeting where everybody decided that the era of the zany DJ is one that should die a quick and dignified death as soon as is convenient, before the Musical Justice Committee puts a bullet in its head. Henry thinks that being a DJ is some sort of martial art, not just the ability to stand in front of a computer pressing buttons like a chimp. I've always hated DJs like that - the ones that feel they deserve some sort of undying adulation for their ability to stand in front of a pair of turntables or a computer and play other people's music. But I've especially taken a dislike to Henry's brand of DJing, which mainly involves two or three minutes of one-liners and prop comedy between each song. Which is why I was alarmed to see a hat with corks on strings placed firmly on Henry's head.

"There are no words."
"Good eh? I'm seeing about renting a kangaroo costume."
"A kangaroo costume!? That thing will be..." not funny. "...really hot, and..." not funny. "...really uncomfortable." And groin-achingly unfunny, but I couldn't bring myself to say so.
"Hmm, you might be right. I might just stick to the hat. Oh, get this though..." Henry slapped a few keys and the track abruptly moved to something else. I didn't recognize it at first.
"What's that?"
"It's the Stingray themetune." It took me a second, but when it hit me...
"Oh no, Henry, no, you need to wait at least a year for shit like that." While Steve Irwin's death at the hands of a dangerous animal seemed like a Pope-Catholic-Bear-Woods scenario to the rest of the world - an inevitability, a forgone conclusion - it apparently hit the Australian people quite hard; all they have left now in terms of national heroes is Russell Crowe, so you can understand how they feel. That'd be like the only remaining Welsh hero being that bloke who sings into a toy microphone on Queen St in Cardiff. Not ideal.
"C'mon, it's good stuff this." As the opening octaves of Led Zeppelin's epic Immigrant Song kicked in (but with the added twist of being performed on what appeared to be a toy synthesizer somebody found in a bin outside Keith Emerson's house), I soon realized that Australian wailing would tarnish quite a few of the records on my shelf, possibly forever, and my minimum wage payscale provides disproportionately small recompense when you consider how many songs I truly loved would be tainted forever by drunken businessmen.
"If you say so. Listen, have you got the keys to the function room? I think we'd better get the biohazard team in sooner rather than later; you know, seeing as this function is tonight." Henry went fumbling into his pockets and produced a set of keys.
"It's -"
"The key that looks like a castle, I know." I think sometimes Henry forgets that I've been here longer than he has; I left him to his own devices, closing the door on the sound of a comedy springboard with an Irwin-voiced "CRIKEY!" over the top.

In preparation for what would turn out to be one of the worst nights of my entire life, the function room was unlocked, and the biohazard team went in. The problem with the function room is "out of sight, out of mind". When you combine this with our other problem - e.g. passing the buck so fervently that it's a wonder the buck hasn't disintegrated to a heap of buck-scented dust from the amount of time it spends being viciously manhandled, as it is passed from person to person in our magical circle of "hey, it's not my problem" - it often means that 48 hours before a function, the biohazard team has to go in and deal with the oft-rotting remnants of the previous engagement. But who's on the biohazard team, I hear you ask? The elite squadron of cleaners who storm the function room when needed and get it back to its natural grandeur (well, not grandeur perhaps, but to it's natural state of not-quite-grotty-enough-to-be-condemned)? Who on staff is willing to step up to the plate and harden the fuck up against hardened stains and fucked-up leftovers?

As Eddie and I got our marigolds on and loaded a tray with industrial disinfectants, we got to work sanitizing the area - I treat it as a rather unpleasant part of the job that needs to be done in order to ensure the pub is not shut down and therefore we don't lose our jobs. Eddie, on the other rubber-gloved hand, pretends that we are the cleanup team sent in to sanitize a zombie outbreak.

"Did you see 28 Weeks Later? It's sort of like this, cleaning up the mess that people left when the zombies came and ruined their shit."

I don't care; Eddie seems to be immune to the smell of rotten pineapple-and-cheese cocktailers if he thinks they were stuffed down the back of the sofa due to an imminent zombie attack, so if that's what gets him through, so be it.

We broke the attack down into three areas. First, the bar. The bar is the lightest part of the job, in that there isn't much behind a bar that can go off or rot. Except, of course, for the stagnant water in the ice bucket, or the dried-out lemons on the back bar, or the piece de resistance, the glasswasher, which - due to it not being emptied out for a month - had apparently been inhabited by frogs in the meantime, as the water had developed a strange sort of mouldy frogspawn thing at the surface that, upon my attempts to reach through it to get to the plug, proved itself to be more like a skin that I wound up removing in one gigantic piece. This goes into a special yellow bin bag - we don't have hazardous waste collection so we simply put anything weird or sick into a yellow binbag to give people some warning of what's inside. It's a sort of sadistic lucky bag - you look inside, you take your chances. What'll it be this time? Glasswasher frogspawn? Bloodied bandages from where Eddie accidentally threw a dart in Dave's back? A soiled adult nappy from our semi-regular visits from a local mental hospital? Who knows! Put your hand in and find out. I dare you.

Next was the buffet; a long runway of mold-laden food, snacks for relatives and friends of the happy couple that had gone extremely bad with time (as the couple's marriage is sure to do if their in-pub dialogues are anything to go by). The appropriate procedure for food that appears to be reproducing asexually is to put it in two bin bags (it's double-bagging, just not how you may think of it); nope, we put it in the first hazard bag with the frogspawn and hoped against hope that we hadn't accidentally played God. If we suddenly found ourselves overrun with a bizarre mutant race of frogs made of twiglets, we'd deal with it when it happened, but at the time we were more concerned with what was at the end of the table.

And then came the big daddy; the boss at the end of the rotten runway - the discarded wedding cake. The festering, apparently-sweating tower of icing and sponge that made Miss Havisham's wedding cake sound positively scrumptious by compare. This was literally pushed into a fresh hazard bag, taken to a far corner of the car park and burnt. I'm serious, we took that out the back and burnt that shit, no messing about. I don't care if it's bad luck to burn a wedding cake, as Frances so ridiculously suggested (how the hell does somebody discover that it's bad luck to burn a wedding cake? It can't be that common an occurrence, surely; I don't know anybody - besides myself - who has even considered burning a wedding cake, but apparently it's 'bad luck' anyway), that shit was not hanging around in our Biffa bin for a whole week. Plus, Eddie and me like to burn things. But let me tell you something: burning, rotting cake smells super bad. Realizing we had probably made a fatal mistake in burning it and stinking up the whole carpark, we simply mixed it in with gravel and muck so that nobody would guess it was a wedding cake and went home. We absolved that the rain would wash it away, somebody else would be blamed, and that we had to go home to prepare ourselves for what lay ahead of us so we didn't have time to clean it up. Although unless we had gone home to the sound of cats being skinned alive to a synth backing, nothing - no amount of physical or mental prep - could have had us ready for what we wound up witnessing.

I will say one good thing about the standard of the performances, and that is that I no longer fear death. Seriously though, the only way I could experience a night more harrowing would be if I went to work one night, only to discover I was working the bar at a special Kick The Barman In The Balls night, where the objective is to get behind the bar and literally try your absolute damnedest to kick my balls off. And even then, that would only be one area of my body suffering, not both my eyes and ears.

The first to get up there was Mr. Mullet, an Australian businessman who evidently made his millions by psychologically tricking his clients into taking pity on him; with a mullet ripped cleanly from a 1980s football sticker book (business up front, party behind, but evidently nothing in the middle) and a personality so wet I very nearly put it in a glass and charged him for it, I have to believe Mr. Mullet has greatly used 'whoyouknow' to his sop-faced advantage, with either an uncle on the board of directors or a father with a stock option, anything. Because as he slowly began to get more and more shitfaced (along with the rest of his team) on pints of Fosters shandy (with the added instruction to make it "weak" shandy, asking for 2/3rds of the glass to be filled with R Whites), I really couldn't see him being important enough to be flown around the world to have a go at singing You Can Go Your Own Way in front of a gang of drunken businessmen and several disdaining Welshmen, possibly the boldest thing he has ever done. Now, not everybody was lucky enough to grow up with decent records; I realize that in that respect I was very lucky. However, for the first time in my life I wish I'd never grown up with Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, or anybody with an ounce of credibility and a popular album; as Mr. Mullet whipped out a revolver and put bullet after bullet into Fleetwood Mac in front of my very eyes, I began to wish I had never known the stack of LPs under the stairs. Before I reached boiling point, DJ Henry took to the decks to regail the Australian crowd. First out of the gate? A piece of traditional Australian music; a tasteful selection if I may say so, seeing as I thought he would - oh, hang on, my mistake, it's actually just the didgeridoo intro for the Skippy the Bush Kangaroo theme tune.

"You having that, eh?", cackled Henry, unable to believe his own comic powers. The tune was laden with overdubbed comedy "boink" noises; it's a well-known fact that if you're having trouble winning over a room full of Australian businessmen and eldery villagers (who just wanted a quiet, dignified round of karaoke before a quick dance and a chat), it's usually best to whip out the comedy "boink" noises, that usually gets the crowd moving. But this was truly a tough audience, and Henry was dying a death - it was obvious to everyone besides him, of course, as yet another comedy "boink" dragged the room, kicking and screaming, into his next selection, "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport". Henry was then forced to sit down, overcome with convulsions of body rocking laughter. It's not often you get a room of Australians around here, but to then take that opportunity to literally laugh in their face for ten minutes solid is really quite an achievement. As Rolf Harris' wobbleboard solo was just getting underway (tastefully undercut with the sound of Henry roaring with laughter), Gerald - the head of the Village Watch - came to the bar. Gerald is known for his interesting assessments of situations and his absolute refusal to take prisoners on any matter whatsoever.

"I'll tell you something, and it's not often I say this," began Gerald, taking an elongated sip from his pint as though Henry's charade had dehydrated him. "But this is genuinely abhorrent. And I mean that in the strongest way possible."

With that, he took his seat - but would occasionally look over at me throughout the night to shake his head at me in wonderment. I returned the gesture. Of all the village's elders, I think Gerald is probably the one with whom I have the most in common. Because I have no doubt that in fifty years' time, I will still be in this village, where the inmates run the asylum and hold mock-xenophobic karaoke evenings. And I will walk around the village with the look of mild contempt and disbelief that Gerald has worked down to a fine art. Feel free to come by in fifty years and check.

Another round of comedy boink noises brought the next Australian to the stage. "Space Oddity."

Then the next. "Tiny Dancer." Then the next. "Golden Brown."

Australian after Australian, stepping onto the podium and grabbing the microphone as if they were competing for the village's lone car, and therefore their one chance of freedom. Money For Nothing, Bat Out Of Hell, Stand And Deliver, Paranoid - if it's been popular enough that even a coma patient could hum a few bars of it, it was available for selection. But eventually, the Village Watch got tired of this, and were obviously bored. What you need to keep in mind about the Village Watch is that they are not Australian businessmen. They are not Roger, Pat, Donny, Mr. Mullet or any of the other equally annoying suits that got up to throttle my favourite Stranglers song; they are Gerald, Edith, Den and countless others who take no pleasure whatsoever in watching these drunken buffoons get up on stage and take a long, steamy leak onto classic tunes. They do not high five for ten, fifteen minutes at a time because Eddie went downstairs to change the keg of Fosters (Eddie became extremely wary of the Australians and after a while began to leave them hanging on their persistent high five requests). They came to have a bit of a knock about and a disco, and the Australians were seeing to it that this would not happen. Gerald turned to me and shook his head. It was time for action.

"Henry, I think the Village Watch might like a bit of disco now."
"Good call." With that, Pat's crooning was brought to an unamplified standstill as Henry announced - in his best Australian accent, no less - that it was now time for the disco. Before the Village Watch could join the Nolan Sisters in their mood for dancing, Pat - the particularly boisterous Australian who never got to inform us that he did, in fact, do it hiiiiiiiiis way - decided this simply wasn't competitive enough for his liking. Pat was ruddy-faced and sweating cobbs from his extremely physical singing a moment earlier, I did wonder just what it takes to run a business in Australia besides an overactive set of sweat glands and a voice like a fucking foghorn (I was later informed, much to my consternation, that Pat owns the Australian company and makes more money in a week than the collective income of all the people in the local phonebook will ever make). Pat then coned his hands around his glistening chops and bellowed to all and sundry:

"DANCE OFF!"

At this point, the Australians - obviously used to this sort of thing by now - formed a tight perimeter around Pat and began clicking their fingers in rhythm to the music as Pat began to dance in Gerald's direction, in an obvious attempt to lure him into a dance-off. With his compatriots clicking their fingers and striding, we had suddenly been thrown straight onto the set of West Side Story, although instead of the Jets vs. the Sharks, it was common sense and decency against ten grown men who wanted to dance-fight with a group of pensioners to the tune of My My My Delilah, a situation I'm sure nobody on our side ever expected in a million years. Eddie opened the door with an ice bucket.

"What the fuck is this?"
"A dance off."
"You've got to be fucking joking, I'm not hanging around for this." Eddie slammed the ice on the bar in disgust. He threw his jacket on and handed mine to me. I was ready to go, but then I remembered; the Village Watch. I couldn't leave them here. Gerald turned to me, but I knew what needed to be done, so I decided to assess our escape options. I turned around to make absolutely sure Gerald wanted out, but I was at first distracted; Pat was tending to a fallen associate who had apparently done his back in, trying to spin around on his head (a move that I felt should have worked when you looked at the shine on his balding nut) like a reject from the "Can't Touch This" video. Gerald was, at this point, nodding so furiously I feared his head would detach itself. Evidently wanting to get the hell out of there before anybody donned a pair of parachute pants, Gerald gave me a very visual all clear. I called downstairs to weigh up the chances of a relocation.

"Frances, are you busy?"
"No, there's only me and two regulars. We're all watching Schindler's List." Yes, it truly was party time at the pub. Schindler's List on one floor, middle-aged trans-equatorial dance-off on the other. Mag-fucking-nificent. "It's about the Holocaust, it is, it's so sad. What's going on up there?"
"Well, luckily the karaoke's stopped."
"Dammit, I really fancied a go at This Town Ain't Big Enough - what are they doing instead?"
"I wish I could tell you a dance-off hadn't broken out," I informed her as I watched Pat attempt the robot; considering the discipline and steady movement it requires, it was perhaps a bad choice of dance move for somebody who appeared to be less a man, more a gigantic water balloon, crudely stuffed into a shirt and trousers that are slightly too small. "But sadly, I cannot do that."
"Do you want to come down here then?" Hmm, Pat's dancing or a faithful retelling of one of the most harrowing events in the history of the entire world.

"Gerald," I began, as I slung my coat on.
"Oh thank fuck, are we leaving? Anywhere will do, honestly."
"Eddie and I are going downstairs to watch Schindler's List." This evidently seemed like a marvelous idea as the entire village watch gathered their shit and ran as fast as their prosthetic hips could carry them towards the door.
"Come on then." And with that, we all migrated downstairs to the bar, where the real party was; by the time we got down there Frances was already crying. I got everybody a drink courtesy of the Australians - who had left their tab ticking over and had foolishly stated at one point "sort yourselves out with drinks on us". "Yourselves", we decided, meant the contents of the pub; eighteen people in all, an extra £39 of drinks. It was the least they could do for the Village Watch, who resolved to try again in a month if Henry promised not to "merge" them again.

In the end, Liam Neeson freed his workers (I don't think I'm giving too much away by revealing the Germans lost in the end) and it was actually getting on for one in the morning; with the punters long since departed, we decided to check on the source of the vague noise that had penetrated the ceiling all throughout the film; perhaps the Australians turned on eachother and danced eachother to death, or perhaps the sheer perspiration flowing from their every pour had filled the room to the brim, pickling them in a particularly disgusting brine of death. Well, apparently not, because as we flung the door open, ready to inform Henry of our impending departure, what we saw was extremely surreal; an aging landlord behind a speaker stack and a laptop, selecting tunes for a dozen hyperactive, drenched Aussies to jump around to like a bunch of hyperactive children. We walked past the various Travoltas and Astaires, only to find Henry was actually in some sort of glaze-eyed trance (his finger hovering precariously over the hotkey on his laptop, to which he had assigned the comedy "boink" noise). Watching a gang of soaked Australians dancing hell for leather must be strangely hypnotic after three hours.
"HENRY," we shouted. "HENRY." Louder still; no use. Eventually, Eddie took the initiative and slapped his gigantic headphones off his head.
"Oi, what was that?"
"It's one in the morning, we're going home!"
"OK, cheers. I'll mind this lot, their taxi should have been here an hour ago."

And with that, we were granted our freedom; freedom for at least twelve hours, until we returned the following afternoon with our hazard masks and yellow waste bags to pick up the slipped discs and pieces of well-buffed scalp that would no doubt be left behind by our ambassadors from down under.

Almost Crimes.

2007-07-06T15:38:00.000Z

Last week, I went home from work unsure if I'd ever return - I had no intention of leaving, but since the police caught us (read: Christine, one of our "new starters") red-handed passing alcohol to kids, everything has been a bit up in the air and we were unsure if the pub would be closed. You see, if the police had decided we weren't taking the licensing objectives seriously, they can revoke a license faster than Eddie can get out the door at closing time. And then that's it - no pub, no jobs, no nothing. Luckily, the police decided to fine Christine £80 for serving the minor and Henry £200 because he's the DPS (and, in accordance with the law, must therefore be punished if anybody on his staff so much as thinks of breaking the law), and we were told we could reopen Monday. We were all called by the company at various stages on the Friday and told to do what we wanted with the weekend; we would receive holiday pay (and it was good money; next time I fancy a break I might just take a tray of best bitter over the school and tell the kids to go bananas) but we would not lose holiday time as a result. Which is essentially the company's way of saying "thank you for not spelling out our negligence to the fuzz, here's some free money". It shows how utterly relieved the company must have been to get away with a temporary closure (especially when most other stings have resulted in licenses being whipped out from beneath their feet).

Of course, free money from the company is a rare occurrence indeed - therefore, it was very obvious that I needed to think long and hard about what I intended on doing with the small pile of gold that the company leprechaun had shat into my cupped hands before disappearing in a puff of smoke and a splat of stale beer. Eddie bought an Xbox and spent the entire weekend setting it up so he could go on the internet and shout at Americans while he shot at them from across the continent; Christine used her money to pay her fine and saved the rest (presumably for next time she takes a tray of Sambuca shooters to Sesame Street); Henry spent the weekend weeping into his fags (don't feel too bad for him though, he can claim the money back from the company at the end of the year if he's shrewd enough with his book keeping); Elaine tried to carpet her living room, decided against it and removed all the carpet again; I decided to go to Paris for a lovely, relaxing weekend in a modern European city. I was in desperate need of a diversion; the problem with living in such proximity to your job - in both a physical sense and in terms of the community impact - is that when something goes wrong, you can't really get away from it. The police may have shut us down for the weekend but in order to save face, we were permitted to keep it quiet; for that very reason, the party line was that we were "closed for refurbishment". The problem with this: what fucking pub in their right mind closes for refurbishment on a weekend? And believe me, that's not a rhetorical question, people would ask. Even as I waited for the next bus out of the village to whisk me away to the continent for a while, I was grilled on the matter by an "interested party" - e.g. a villager. Everyone's an interested party around here. That's why I had to get away from the village for a bit; we weren't allowed to talk about it - which for Eddie and the likes is fine, they don't live here. This essentially meant I couldn't go outside, and I opted out of a cabin fever weekend.

"Yeah, sounds fun man, France is banging," said Eddie down the phone over the sound of digital gunfire; he had clearly spent his payout wisely. "How long you there?"
"Only for the weekend."
"Alright, but we're having a meeting 9AM on Monday to discuss the new policies and stuff." And with that, I threw my phone in a draw and left for Paris, away from the village, away from the pub, and away from every nosey parker who thought they could glean a bit of information out of me while I went about the seemingly extraordinary act of buying a paper to read on the bus. That's one of the setbacks of living in a place where everyone knows you - most of the people think nothing of trampling into your private affairs and your business with all the grace and subtlety of a kick to the throat. Hence why I went somewhere where nobody knew me; where nosey neighbours and busybodies became struggling artists and onion salesmen. That'll be brilliant, I thought.

As I stepped out of the vast glass chamber that is Gare du Nord train station to a summery Parisian afternoon, I was:

- Sleep-deprived, mainly due to the efforts of a mouthy London couple who simply wouldn't allow me to sleep as much as my eyelids and yawns pleaded. I had been awake since five in the morning, during which time I had ridden five trains and one bus, and was in no mood to hear of the funny things their butler at the chateau gets up to; namely because - even while I was running on empty, with my normal sloth-like sleep requirements going by the wayside in the name of making travel connections - I sincerely doubted the very existence of the butler. It wasn't that his actions were outlandish or extraordinary, but that the people describing these so-called "riotous laughs" were very keen to kick off their well-worn and dirtied shoes and stink up the entire train with the smell of sweat, feet and out-and-out bullshit. Unless this chateau was some sort of refuge for the mentally ill, the destitute or the filthy and the butler was actually a warden, I got the distinct impression that these people were compulsive blagmongers. This schtick may reel in the occasional traveller, but not I - I have been working at the most intense psychology school in the land for over a year and I have since become hardened and deaf to tales of extravagance and riches from anybody with a paint-spattered "Odidas" tracksuit.
- Violated by the security guard at Waterloo, after my now routine move of setting off the metal detector. As the bearded French security officer - whose only credentials were a lanyard and an overly-familiar manner - patted down my groin and inner thighs before running a small blooping metal detector over the entire region for longer than I assume is strictly necessary, I came to the conclusion that he either 1) had a thing for me, or 2) suspected I was the not-so-proud owner of some sort of iron penis. I was eventually allowed to leave and was informed that on the way back I would perhaps like to remove my belt.
- Slightly travel sick from my brief, desperate attempt to escape the Londoners by standing in the buffet car for the entire journey. This plan fell by the wayside as I realized the buffet car was ever so slightly more annoying than the Londoners.

After this cacophonous cavalcade of channel-crossing clusterfucks, my first instinct was to find something familiar after several hours of hectic traveling, including a short spell I spent literally trying to find my way around the rotting, blistered, oozing intestines of Satan himself (this labyrinth of tortures, including attempts on my life by gangs of the undead trying to squash me to death in a small metal coffin buried deep below the surface, is better known as the London Underground, that weird rollercoaster underneath London that sucks all the joy and clean air out of your body and all the money out of your wallet). After three cars nearly struck me dead (prior to my slack-jawed realization that they drive on the right over there) I ran like a frightened rabbit into the nearest café. Why? Because on the outside, it looked like a pub. You can go wherever you like on this increasingly-accessible globe of ours but pubs look the same. There's a layabout outside with a pint in his hand (it wasn't quite a pint; I don't know the standard measure over there), two men obviously discussing politics as they pointed furiously at the likes of me piling out of the train station, presumably to mooch off the state and murder their children for sport (turns out racist punters aren't a Welsh exclusive either) and a woman behind what appeared to be a bar, thumbing through a glossy magazine, half-asleep with her head propped up haphazardly by her arm, whose hopes and dreams in life had quite obviously been crushed like so many discarded croutons. Yes, this is where I want to be, I thought - these are my people. I understand them. While I don't feel at home in this country, I feel at home in a pub environment - it's where strangers get together to hate eachother behind eachother's backs. And that's a feeling that can't be beaten.

I approached the bar, and what happened next was something I'm at a loss to explain even now. Thinking I would endear myself to the French by attempting to speak their language, I took a seat - "bonjour," I began, and saw the barmaid adjust to me; I was clearly not a foreigner and she could speak in her native tongue. She then proceeded to say something to me in French that I did not understand, due to the seemingly overlooked fact that I do not speak French. So - and this is what I'm still attempting to understand - I had to admit, in English, that "bonjour" was among four French words I understood and if she could speak English from here on out, that'd be wonderful. She picked up the English and we continued on along that route. While it's an ugly presumption to make - that everyone in France should speak English - I imagine I would probably have been better off taking the honest approach. I could have walked in there with all the grace and civility of an English football hooligan, thrown one of the tastefully-arranged hanging baskets at the blind beret-sporting gentleman in the corner, called his guide dog a wanker and proceeded to walk up to the bar demanding an English drink, in English, in an accent so vile it actually manages to transcend the five senses and fill the room with a sound, sight and stench so putrid it would make the walls gag. Even then I could have at least said I didn't waste anybody's time. I decided to order a black coffee and an omelette, fully aware that despite the horrible nature of my first impression, I would repeat it ad infinitum throughout the course of my holiday in some vague attempt not to be a "d'you speak English mate?" foreigner-type (at least not in the first ten seconds). And I did. At every possibly opportunity over the course of two days. Every taxi I got into, every omelette I ordered (I ordered a lot), every little French bakery that sold small lumps of undiluted diabetes (I ordered one - whose description, I assume, translated to "insulin-dependency surprise" - and only half finished it before I had to discard it), even the café where Amelie was filmed wasn't safe, despite its best efforts to hide where I wouldn't usually venture (up a reasonably steep hill) - nobody was spared from my hollow greetings, least of all myself.

A frustrating experience for all concerned as I'm sure you can imagine.

I came home bedraggled, violated (this time by security on the other end, and believe me, the British on the French side are a lot more thorough; there was active grabbing going on), full of omelettes and pastries and ready to give Sleeping Beauty a run for her money in the "out like a light" category (and the prince would have to do more than kiss me to wake me up; the prince would have to employ the frisky services of both France and England's border security guards to even get so much as a stir from me). That is, until my alarm clock went off six hours later to get me ready for my return to the pub for our "damage control" meeting. I didn't like the sound of damage control; what damage exactly? I wondered if anything would have changed during the weekend of unease; would our situation have been let out of the bag? Would we be derided as the corruptors of children? Would skinheads come and picket the place? Would The Sun name a campaign after one of the (probably innumerable) children we dragged, kicking and screaming, onto the premises before forcing alcohol down their necks and sending them on their giddy way? Would the Daily Express confuse me for an immigrant and try and deport me back to France, leading to me becoming the most hated barman the UK has known since Al Murray? I sincerely hoped not - I hate Al Murray. And children.

I walked towards my place of employ to see that fear number one could be instantly allayed; the place had not been burnt to the ground by ruthless campaigners. Brilliant. However, my second fear became a violent reality as I stepped through the door, and before we could all begin reminiscing about how great it was to have a weekend completely free of the other's company, I became transfixed on the wall that separates the lounge from the bar - "the poverty line", as some of our more wealthy punters call it, or "the wall separating the bar from the lounge" as it is known to people who aren't total shithouses - that had once been an inoffensive shade cream, but had evidently fallen victim to Henry's demented whimsy in the time I was away, as it was now bright orange. And I mean seriously bright; looking directly into it began to give me a headache.

"What the fuck is that?" I bellowed, averting my eyes from it as if it were some sort of deity of dickheadery.
"Henry decided," Eddie began, squinting in a way that suggested the wall was not news to him either, "that if we told people we were closed for refurbishment, there would have to be notable changes when we reopened. So..." the wall, casting everything in a vague orange tint and burning Henry's unquestionable authority into our eyeballs, began bearing down on us so we had to talk quickly. "He decided on this."
"But why -"
"It was the only colour he had."
"That's mental!" I protested. "He could've said -"
"That is was a cellar refurbishment, or anything, but he decided a visual change would be more believable."
"More believable!?" I could hardly believe what I was hearing, but I knew these weren't Eddie's words - only Henry would so transparently insult the village's intelligence to the point that he saw no problem in an alibi that involves:

A) Closing for an entire summer weekend, and
B) Doing nothing but painting one stupid wall.

One orange wall. A weekend of lost revenue, two days of fervent speculation that gave the pub a Salinger-esque quality of inscrutable mystery (and not the good kind), bar staff disappearing for days at a time... all because we evidently had to get out of the way so the world's slowest decorator could paint a small piece of wall with a paintbrush the size of a toothpick. Too say I was apprehensive about this story was an understatement - it was a pretty big leap in logic.

Before the orange wall could immolate me and forever taint my brain so that all my memories became addled with a luminous orange hue, we were called upstairs for the meeting. Henry had evidently taken his fine particularly badly; he emerged with a face that was hardened, stubbled, and even more wrinkled than it had been prior. Henry's famously "careful" with his money, so in real terms, a £200 fine to him is worse than a prison sentence. I'm amazed he paid it, I thought he would have gladly let them arrest him.

"Thank you all for coming," he began, his hands shuddering as if the loss of a few quid had chilled his very being to sub-zero temperatures. "Now, we all know what happened was unpleasant and largely unnecessary. To ensure that it never happens again, you are all set for retraining." A collective moan emerged; Eddie, Frances and I had done the training in question on our first day and it is based around the principle that people who go to work in pubs are recovering from a combination of a stroke and a lobotomy. An example lesson I learned from such instruction - if a child orders a pint for his father, are you allowed to sell the child the alcohol? The answer, as much as it may shock your very foundations, is no. During the two hour course - that occurs in-house before the doors open - other equally useful wisdom is imparted, such as:

- Beer that goes in the drip trays must be put in the sink at the end of the night, not in the barrels.
- If somebody dies or is seriously injured on the premises, we must stop serving the customers and notify the emergency services.
- Breathing is the process of drawing in air with your lungs in order to oxygenate the blood.
- Tongues are not for swallowing.

We then have the drool wiped from our chin, our nappies changed, and we are given a certificate that states we aren't stupid enough to be considered a risk. Naturally, my certificate went on my wall and took pride of place, but evidently others had not taken the achievement as seriously as they should have.

"Is that really necessary, Henry? We've done it once already, fair enough the new starters should do it but -"
"No, Frances," said Henry, cutting off perhaps the only sensible thing Frances has ever said. "Everyone obviously needs a refresher course." However, in an act of compromise, we were divided into two teams - those who had done the course before and those that hadn't, so at least Frances, Eddie and I would be able to get in there, prove we could work in a pub without accidentally stepping on our own faces and bursting into flames, and get out with minimal turnaround.

"Apart from that, let's put this ugliness behind us and move on - the village watch very kindly moved their karaoke evening to next weekend (dammit, I'd forgotten about that) so we should be able to just get back on track without any problems. Any other questions?"
"Yes - might I ask what on earth possessed you to paint the wall orange?"
"We were closed for refurbishment." There it was, straight from the horse's mouth. However, the horse's mouth offered no further explanation, so I persisted.
"Why didn't you say you refurbished the cellar or something?"
"I'll tell you at half three, you can go downstairs and work the bar with Eddie." That'll teach me to ask questions. We sidled down the stairs and got to work piecing the bar back together. I did wonder if anything would have changed in the time I was away, whether our new status as almost criminals would change the dynamic, on either side of the bar. We unlocked the doors and waited for the advances of the heaving masses outside, before realizing where we were. We were now alone in the middle of a deserted pub.

"What now?" Eddie let out a sigh before coming up with the answer I expected.
"501?"

We pulled the house darts out of the drawer, chalked up the board, and got to work on the real business of the day - our ongoing darts championship.

Eddie and I greatly enjoyed catching up on the last few days' worth of multilingual non-events over a casual game of darts, and as we did so, Christine came over to us with a clipboard. I'm still not sure what I feel for Christine, to be honest with you - on one hand, I want to punish her somehow for putting my livelihood in jeopardy - not in a "poking a bear in a cage with a stick" sort of way, but something large enough to show I meant business (maybe a strongly-worded letter without a signature; that would probably wind her up) - on the other I had to feel bad for her, and the £80 she had to take to the police station. I always wondered what an on-the-spot meant, and how they were conducted, but Christine answered it for all of us - she was given 48 hours to take the money to a police station; after that there would've been a warrant for her arrest. Heavy. I stepped up to the oche and wittled my score down by a mighty 17 points; Christine pulled the sheets of paper off the clipboard and approached me as I removed my arrows from the board.

"Could you do me a favour? I'm contesting the sting." I suspected as much. If you've been the subject of a police sting, you have the right to contest it; you can do this on several grounds, some being more successful than others.
"Sure - on what grounds?"
"I think the person they sent in looked way over 21." This seemed fair; plenty of people have had judges throw the case out, all because the little scrote they send in had been tarted up to look older than 21. In case you're wondering, to avoid any ambiguity, if you look less than 21 then you're meant to be asked for ID; it's hard to judge whether somebody's 18 or not, so the 21 thing gives you a bit of flexibility in the accuracy of your judgement, and that's the basis for ID checks these days. It's not the law, but it's something most companies have enforced themselves, and the police have since gotten behind it - most supermarkets do it if you look at the signage around the checkouts. Anyway, if you're going to get the case chucked out, this is the best way to do it, because obviously the stinger can't look older than 21 (that somewhat defeats the point). Christine had managed to snap a picture of the "perp" (for want of a term that isn't "jumped-up bar-baiting little shitbag") on her phone, and passed it over to me. I was particularly interested in seeing the girl who had nearly cost me my job, if only to see if I would have asked the little ratbag for ID.

I looked up from the array of confusing legal documents, saw the picture... well, she may as well have taken the lighter from her pocket and set fire to every piece of paper in her hand because - as I checked the photo carefully to see if the "stinger" was actually hidden behind the toddler at the bar - her case had just gone up in smoke.
"Is this... the one who asked?" The girl in the photograph looked not a day older than thirteen; small impish face, hair tied back, school uniform (OK, not really), makeup that looked like it had been applied with a battering ram, this was so, so, so obviously a kid. I tried my hardest to empathize with Christine's unfortunate situation, but frankly I was at a loss for words as I looked at the photograph every which way I could, trying to uncover what on earth had possessed Christine to ply the poor girl with alcohol (the only excuse I can think of was if she was attempting to numb the poor lass' teething pains). Even if she'd produced a driving license I wouldn't have even bothered checking it, because you simply couldn't show me a card or license in the land that would persuade me that she was born in Kurt Cobain's lifetime.

"Little slut, she was dressed up to the nines. She looked way older than in the picture."
"Eddie, have a look at this." Eddie pulled his 43 out of the board, chalked it up, and did the most perfect double take I have ever seen.
"Fucking hell Christine, I heard she was young but man alive..." He rustled the paper as if attempting to shake a few years onto the girl's face, but to no avail. "I know they're picking young'uns these days but I'd have thought they'd at least wait for them to get out of nappies before booting them through the door."
"Look, she looked a lot older!" Christine went on the defensive, snatching the photo out of Eddie's hand. Eddie began to cackle maniacally and I had to bite my lip for fear of joining in (and spoiling my aim).
"Older? Fucking hell Christine, you should've just checked the car park," Eddie muttered in disbelief.
"There wasn't a police car, they used a plain vehicle."
"I'm not on about that, I mean you should've spotted the training wheels on her bike." At this point I lost my composure; my last dart fell out of my laughter-shaken hand so weakly it didn't even hit the wall. Christine stormed off; as Eddie and I were crippled by mirth and forced to take seats, I looked to the wall; quarter of an hour had passed since we opened the door. We hadn't had a single customer. It was at this point I realized that nothing had changed around here over the weekend. And I was so, so glad of that.

Cut From The Team.

2007-06-29T17:49:00.001Z

A few weeks ago I was sent an absolute truckload of brochures about cellar management - cellar management is a course the company runs each month that basically gives you all the details you need to run the practical end of a pub. I was then asked to set a date on which it would be convenient to be thrown on a train to London and learn all about the correct way to keep a good pint. So you can imagine my surprise to get the training timetable through the post, only to find cellar management's list completely devoid of my name. I scoured the lists for a sighting of my name and eventually was rewarded with a surprise to say the least. Thursday 28th June, 12pm start, Team-building and Recruitment, or TBR. A mere oversight, I concluded, as I telephoned my way through the company's countless number-based menus and waiting list, until I finally found myself talking to real, live human being. The novelty knocked me for six as I fumbled to explain my plight.

"[Name of brewery removed] Human Resources department, Ryan speaking."
"Hello Ryan, I got my training timetable through and I seem to be on the wrong course. I was meant to be on cellar management, but I'm on team-building and recruitment instead." Ryan obviously took my plight into careful consideration as he let a mighty sigh rumble down the line. Or it could have been a yawn. It was difficult to tell.
"Um... alright, so... what?"
"Well, is there anything you can do?"
"No." Then came what definitely sounded like a yawn, blustering its way down the telephone as if he was literally trying to blow me away. I began to develop a strong concern for the sleeping habits of the HR staff that they would be so obviously cream crackered at four in the afternoon. Perhaps they're all suffering from narcolepsy - I tried to hurry the process along before Ryan fell into an uncontrollable slumber, tumbled off his chair and pulled his computer's power cable off the wall with his foot, erasing all evidence that I had ever existed (or that I had passed my licensing exam with flying colours).
"Don't you need my employee number?"
"If you want." I recited it and was greeted with the muffled sound of several keys being depressed at once. I waited for the sound of snoring, but soon realized this sound wasn't Ryan's comatose noggin slamming to a halt on the keyboard below him, it was, in fact, the sound of egregiously false typing. There's the third yawn. "Yeah, there's nothing I can do. Looks like you're going to have to do cellar thing next month."
"I don't want to do cellar thing next month. I have no use for this course, Ryan." This was something I picked up fairly early on from working behind the bar - if you can address the person whose help you require by their first name, you'll probably get a bit further. I always thought better of those that bothered to remember my name. Although from the sounds of it, Ryan was not to be so easily wooed.
"C'mon mate, it's a paid day out and a free lunch on the company tab." Ryan made a good point - it was a free lunch off the company.
"OK, can you put me in for next month's cellar management though?"
"If you want." More blatantly fake typing - I began to wonder if an infinite amount of Ryans with an infinite amount of keyboards would eventually type something useful, but I was soon interrupted with a low rumble that turned out to be yet another yawn - a doubler that time. I began to feel drowsy just listening to it all. 'Yawn your problems to sleep' must be a reasonably new customer service mantra but it must be said, it works surprisingly well. Having realized that I would get nowhere along these particular lines of enquiry with Ryan at the helm, I decided to ask a different sort of question.
"You don't like your job very much, do you Ryan?"
"Not really mate. Anything else?"
"I'm sorry to hear it. No, that'll do thanks."
"Don't worry about it, I'm leaving next week. Take care." Ryan, wherever you are, I hope you have found your dream job. Probably as a night watchman or something.

And that's how I found myself on TBR.

But to the credit of the human resources department, not everybody got their career training fucked up this month - after all, I wasn't the only member of the team to be bunged onto the TBR list; the other person actually wanted to be on it.

"OK, so shall we carpool to the trainstation?" I don't know why Frances enjoys my company as much as she does. I think she just enjoys human interaction, which is probably why she elected herself for TBR. I'm currently being trained up; groomed for a managerial position one day. The company, should they get their way (e.g. I decide to stay in my current job forever and await their instruction), will train me up to a basic standard and then fling me into a "development" house. A development house is the kind of place where the customers punch you in the face to tell you what they're after; one punch for bitter, two for best, three for creamflow, and by the time they've asked you for Guinness you're out for the count anyway. The kind of place where Saturday night's alright for fighting, as are the nights between Sunday and Friday. The kind of place where
"Probably not to be honest. Henry's already said he'll give you a lift and I've already arranged transport. Why are you going on this course, though?"
"So I can interview people." The prospect of interviews seemed entirely alien - in all the time I've been here, nobody's been interviewed formally. It's been a case of 'when can you start?'. They're then given a few weeks of training with everybody. We are all then asked to write a report on the new person, a measure Henry introduced to reduce his guilt at having to fuck off the helplessly useless among the new starters. Of the three reports that are turned in at the end of a new person's week, only one of them is read and it is taken as gospel every time.

Frances' report is never read because it's always a six-page testament to the human spirit with a post-it note haphazardly slapped on top reading 'P.S. Emily started a fire but she seems rly rly nice'. My report is never read because it's always a six-page diatribe on a subject of my choosing, completely unrelated to the employee at hand (Emily's report was 'If I had a super power') that has to be discarded before anyone besides Henry gets a chance to read it (it is only when I am discussing the merits of invisibility over, say, the ability to spontaneously combust that I realize my whimsies are accommodated far more here than they would be in other places). So that means yes, it is indeed Eddie's report that decides the fate of the upstarts, and for good reason - it's one side of A4 with his brutal analyses in neat bullet points, the last bullet being his personal recommendation. Eddie has no idea that ever since we started doing the report system a few months back, his report has been the word - and it's undoubtedly for the best, for if he ever realized that people have been hired and fired based on his recommendations, he would never write another report. And that would be a shame. Take, for example, his report on Emily:

- Emily lacks skills on the taps. Must get more skills.
- Pleasant manner but needs better way with customers. Doesn't 'get' the place yet.
- Started a fire that was very quickly extinguished due to Frances' quick action with the fire extinguisher.
- Not sure if she can adapt from her last job as a furniture salesperson.

Sure enough, Emily lasted only two weeks and soon went back to her family-run job of flogging sofas. This, to be honest, is probably why the course was a good idea for both Frances and I. To absorb a small piece of Eddie's executive responsibility (the executive responsibility he doesn't even know he has).

I turned up at the train station ready to go - dressed vaguely smart-ish, I felt like a proper businessman; I had bought a cup of tea at a cafe around the corner rather than pay the scandalous buffet car prices, I dodged the press gang of charity muggers and Metro distributors (if only they would find eachother; those poor South African children are in desperate need of piss-poor journalism) and I was now browsing a brochure at my leisure as I awaited Frances. I turned around and you can imagine my surprise at seeing a five-foot tall undercooked sausage with a company polo shirt stuffed over it. Upon closer inspection, this was actually Frances, who had not only turned up in uniform, but was horribly, horribly sunburnt.

"Christ, Fran, what happened?"
"I was out with Derek and I got a bit sunburnt." To say that Frances was a bit sunburnt was an understatement of almost criminal proportions. As she raised her toasted arm and lifted her sunglasses, I could almost hear her skin crackle like crisp bacon. Derek is the latest in a long line of prospective husbands; he was dragged into the pub last week and shown off to everyone, so that he in turn could show off to anybody who would listen. Upon hearing that I was quite keen on music, he demanded I produce my iPod from my pocket and list every single band, and he would then in turn name an album by that artist. There are 600 artists listed on my iPod, so luckily we had hardly gotten past American Analog Set before Derek conceded defeat and went on to tell us about his glittering career as a singer songwriter, which apparently reached its peak the night he supported Billy Bragg in Cardiff. After some scrutiny that seemed a little more intense than he was used to, he admitted that this lucrative support slot wasn't so much a support as a busking session outside a venue that Billy Bragg was playing in. It's hardly on an anecdotal par with the time Billy Bragg got his foot in the door by bringing John Peel a mushroom biryani when Peel announced on air that he was hungry. But nonetheless, Derek's here now and there's nothing we can do about it until Frances realizes how absolutely awful he really is.
"How is Derek?"
"Great, yeah, brilliant, we've really got this connection, it's hard to fathom." I can imagine.
"How's the music career?"
"He's still in talks with a few majors about recording his solo album. He's written a song about me as well, I'm doing backing vocals on it. I think he might be the one."
"I hope so." And I genuinely do; I'd rather have a lifetime of consistently awful discussions with Derek than the current game of boyfriend roulette that we're all playing at the moment. Before Frances could serenade the entire platform with her contribution to Derek's album, the train pulled in and we all piled on.

We arrived at the company's Bristol offices a little early, so we were escorted to the learning centre's waiting room. We were waiting with approximately ten people dressed similarly to myself - most lacked my ardent ability to keep my head down while I walk, as almost all of them were perusing a Metro that had undoubtedly been thrust into their hands before they could run for their lives in the opposite direction. However, in amongst the inoffensive Marks & Spencer jacket and shirt combos was a middle aged woman, of slender build, who looked like she had been dragged out of a 1960s revival festival by the scruff of her neck and then dragged through several hedges. Hedges full of snakes, wolves, and Creedence Clearwater Revival records (not that there's anything wrong with their music but it would be in everybody's interest if the style of that era was 100% eradicated - 99.5% won't do). She had a wild head of scruffy, frizzy red hair, a gown that was the colour of clown vomit and extremely worn-in sandals. I wondered what sort of pub "Theresa" - as her ornately decorated "my name is" badge informed us - worked in, as I didn't know that you could run a pub in some sort of hippie tent. Ah well, I thought - let Frances get chatting with the nutjob. Just stay with the other people who look vaguely disinterested in the whole affair and you'll probably be alright. I maintained this belief right up to the minute Theresa stood up, did a quick headcount, then announced she would be our tutor for the day. She then clasped both hands together and bowed her head to us - Frances turned to me with an excited grin on her face. I too clasped my hands together, hoping and praying for the building to collapse under the weight of my apprehension.

Theresa seemed a strange one to be hosting a course on recruitment; I expected a hard-as-nails businesswoman who had enough clout to give Alan Sugar a black eye, the kind of person who can make decisions that benefit the company without letting their personal feelings get in the way. Instead, we were greeted with somebody who looked like they couldn't successfully manage a wheat farm.

"I'm Theresa, and I will be your guide for the day..." Brilliant.

"...both physically and spiritually." Fuck.

Theresa gathered the group and opened the door to Conference Room 15 and what we saw was one aging hippy's attempt to overthrow the influence of the modern office, and failing. What I saw was the same conference room every relatively new building in the country has inside it - neutral colours on the thin plaster walls, ceiling tiles and fluorescent lighting providing a harsh glare on the wood-effect desks as the sterile smell of office life permeates our foreign bar-trained nostrils. However, Theresa was not one to go two minutes without sticking karma and good vibrations up everybody's arse, so the beige tones had been garishly offset by a few tie-dyed sheets of cloth spread about the place, a dreamcatcher on the wall, a conspicuously mucky Indian rug on the floor and a set of joss sticks that had quite obviously been dipped in water to extinguish their pungent aroma (I hope it really was due to the unchristly scent of must and hippies they give off, and not due to some limp-wristed fire safety policy). The overhead projector, usually a must for any presentation, had yet another dreamcatcher attached to it. All chairs had been stacked to the side - before I had a chance to ask if I had accidentally stumbled onto the Spiritualist Bullshit For Landlords course, we were invited to sit on the rug. In a circle.

So there we were, ten people in office attire and one sunburnt barmaid, all sat with our legs crossed like a primary school class. Theresa kicked off her sandals and invited us to do likewise. All except Frances declined this offer - Frances was the only person in the circle really and truly getting to Theresa's "vibe" as if this was some sort of corporatized Woodstock, and Theresa was Janis Joplin or something (at this point, I made a mental note to pass on any heroin should it be handed around the circle).

"So... what do we look for when welcoming new souls to our work arena?" Theresa wrote "qualities" on the board behind us. We allowed her a few seconds in case this turned out to be a rhetorical question; eventually, somebody piped up.
"Bar experience?"
"Ah ah, no no," tutted Theresa, as if this was an answer so utterly ridiculous that we had all been slightly damaged by even considering it. "Bar experience isn't necessary. At all." I looked around to make sure everybody in the group was thinking the same thing as me; luckily, the confused, exasperated and cautious faces matched my own and I realized I was in good company. Except for Frances, who had her eyes closed and was nodding ferociously, with arms on her knees as if meditating at the temple of idiocy.
"Good people person?", another person suggested.
"No, no, really think now," Theresa had the bare-faced cheek to tell us while she underlined "qualities" on the board, as if emphasizing the word would help us understand her obviously misguided definition. "The most fundamental elements of the human being."
"A pure soul." I don't need to tell you who said this.
"Very good, that is excellent, an excellent answer - what's your name? Frances? You win a star." She then wrote Frances' name on the board and put a star next to it. "That's what you need to look for in new recruits; are they pure of heart? Pure of soul?" Valid questions when recruiting knights for the crusades, I'm sure, but when you're looking for people to sling booze for a living you don't really need Robin cocking Hood. You need somebody with two working arms, two working legs, and ideally somebody with a decent sense of humour and a criminal record that isn't the size of a Stephen King novel (and twice as bloody).
"Is that really necessary? I mean, how are you meant to judge purity of soul?" I feel my question was valid, but from the looks on Frances and Theresa's faces it was yet another dull question from the unenlightened.
"There's a conversion chart in the back of the book, it's measured out of 10." I looked over, then down at the nametag - "Vince" was beaming. I was glad to know that I was not alone in my assumption that I would leave having learnt nothing.

Twenty stars for Frances later, our first exercise was role play - we were asked to team up and interview eachother, one by one, in the middle of the circle. Theresa and Frances went first, and what went on can only be described as the interview process for getting a job at some sort of vegan juicebar.

"So Frances, what kind of aura do you think you would bring to my business?"
"I would bring an aura of tranquility and peace."
"Good, good," sighed Theresa, rubbing Frances' arm in encouragement. The whole thing had the appearance of one of those episodes of Oprah when a bereaved woman is encouraged to just 'let it all out'. We then had to applaud the pair as they complimented the radiance of eachothers' spirit. I managed to forget that I even worked in a pub and began to wonder where the hell I actually did work to be sent on such an absolutely batshit theatrics course.

"OK, next up... Vincent. Who's your partner?"
"He is." I stood up, ready to burn this lovefest to the ground.
"Right, off you go." What followed was an interview for a job in a pub. And as such, Theresa spent the whole process tutting and shaking her head, but fighting her natural instinct to butt in.

"Where did you last work?" Vincent asked me - a sensible question if you're looking for anyone in any job.
"Well, my last pub was the Reproba Inn, where I worked for over a year."
"What kind of experience did you gain there?"
"I became more than proficient on the pumps - I'm a skilled pourer of both keg and cask drinks. I also underwent some assistant manager training - I would have done cellar management had I not been fired for not attending my Spiritual Teambuilding course."
"Brilliant, welcome aboard." Before the applause could kick in, we were disbanded for lunch by Theresa. We all got up before realizing we didn't actually know where we were going - not a problem, because Theresa had brought some of her tofu curry, so we'd be having an indoor picnic. The lid was opened and quite frankly, the stench that emerged from the tupperware dish... it's a miracle that there hasn't been military interest.

"Who's first... Linda?" The woman to her immediate left looked terrified beyond all belief at the thought of not only coming into direct contact with the congealed horse shit presented to her, but actually putting it in her mouth and having to eat it. She fumbled blindly for an excuse, any excuse.

"I'm a vegetarian."
"Well, this is vegetarian, there's no meat in tofu."
"What's in tofu?"
"Just plants and stuff."
"Yeah, I'm allergic to... plants..."

But Linda soon realized she would not be getting out of this that easily. She took a hesitant mouthful, and then began chewing it as precariously as you would chew, say, a mouthful of glass, nails and actual human feces. She made a polite smile to Theresa before passing it to the next person - maybe Theresa's methods were working after all, because I'm pretty sure I could see Linda's soul up sticks and pile out of her nostrils like thick cigar smoke. As satan's own curry did the rounds, I began praying, hoping, for anything. Honestly, anything to get me out of having to eat this curry. Vincent was next - he took a mouthful and looked my square in the eye; his eyes imploring me to get up and run, but I was trapped. I didn't want to eat the killer curry, I think I could see it moving. Luckily, if there is a God, he has an extremely dry sense of humour, because just as Frances tucked into her second mouthful (and the smell came close enough to actually burn my skin), there was a knock at the door. In came a secretary with a small index card.

"I have a message here for the delegates sent by Henry Ginn." Thank fuck, I thought, maybe something dreadful has happened and we have to go back, back to normal people (well, sort of), decent food (well, sort of) and interview processes that actually involve questions about fucking pubs.
"Yes?"
"There's been an emergency, you need to go back to your pub immediately." Oh. Right. Perhaps this wasn't so great after all.
"Well," began Theresa, who was just as sad to see Frances go - her lone disciple at the church of bonkers-doolally - as she was relieved to have amputated one rather strong limb of the collective naysaying beast. "Frances, you have my number, do let me know if you want to join my yoga class."
"I will!" howled Frances as I hurried the pair of us through the door. I grinned at Vince - I've never felt more resentment in my entire life as I did at that moment, as Vince shot my the evil eye (as he shot the contents of his mouth into a handkerchief while Theresa's back was turned). The door closed behind us and I thankfully left with my sanity in tact.

We stepped out of the taxi after a few hours of rush-hour traffic from the train station to find the village experiencing a well-lit evening; the street lights were not lit, and we approached the pub to see the outside lights still hadn't been switched on. We made our way to the front door to find it locked. Well, Frances found it locked - I then made sure it was absolutely positively locked with a gigantic, overblown gesture of grunting and straining as I wrestled with the doorhandle, to no avail. I looked in through the window; nobody in the bar, on either side of it. We reported to the lounge door. Through the lounge window I could make out the shadow of three people. I looked down at my phone, ready to call the pub to get them to open the doors - and that's when I began to suspect something wasn't right; my phone sprung to life and informed me of four missed calls from the pub, ten missed calls from Eddie. Frances checked her phone; six missed calls from the pub, one missed call from a withheld number (that was Eddie; Eddie refuses to let Frances have his mobile number on the grounds of "general principle"). I decided to try and get the attention of the people inside.

"Hey, the idea of a lock in is to have it after time." A deep, unfamiliar voice cut me off almost straight away.
"The pub is closed sir, go away." This, being news to me, was cause for concern. And, naturally, a carefully deliberated answer. Unfortunately, I skipped that last bit and just dove straight in with some gold old fashioned bitter invective.
"Fuck off pal, this is my pub. What the hell's going on? Open the door." A few seconds of mumbling from within led to one of the shapes arising from their seat and reporting to the door. The door flung open and we were greeted with the sight of a policeman. The brief moment of intimidation soon passed as I took a good look at the face of the man before me.

"Alright Brian."
"Alright mate - how's your old man?" I informed him of my father's recent antics. Brian let out a chuckle, as everyone does when they hear of my father's attempts to build his own lawnmower.
"So what's going on around here?"
"You're nicked, matey." He looked at me apologetically, chuckling in an attempt to lighten the mood - attempting in vain considering the mood was so heavy it's a miracle it didn't crush every bone in my body.
"You're kidding."

He wasn't kidding.

"Somebody on staff was caught serving an underager. You're closed until Monday." He definitely wasn't kidding. "Go home, the company will call you in the morning and let you know what's happening." And then from behind him, Henry emerged; he looked like he had been shot. Eddie emerged behind him looking similarly devastated.

"What the fuck happened?"
"Christine gave a Vodka mixer to a Cabbage Patch kid." For all of Christine's experience in "rough pubs", turns out her ID-calling skills left a lot to be desired. About six jobs' worth to be desired, to be exact. "We've got to go home."

So we did, dejected, concerned, and smelling faintly of hippies.

Night Knuckles.

2007-06-22T13:40:00.000Z

I don't often say this, but to tell you the truth, I have been very lucky in my time at this pub. Not just because I managed to find a job within walking distance of my house that required little more than babysitting a group of retirees for a few hours a day, but because of the typical pub nasties from which I have been notably spared - I have not once had to clean vomit from a carpet, I have only had to wipe shit from the toilet wall once, and I was once allowed the opportunity to drag a snoozing drunk outside, call the police, and poke him from a distance with a gigantic umbrella and until Hawaii Five-O - Sergeant Gibson and Officer Chippendale - arrived with a van with a cage on the back (the doors of which flew open on the way to the station, leaving the perp's face in plain view of the entire village like a witch to a trial; this would have been all well and good had he not been our district councillor at the time). But there's one thing I had managed to dodge all the way up to this week, when a full-on fight errupted on my shift.

Of course there's been plenty of near misses - I've been here over a year now and I've seen a fair few fuses fizzle out before they have the chance to reach the end and explode in an earth-shattering (or at least glass-shattering) finale of fisticuffs. This just isn't that kind of pub and I'm thankful for it - I know there's plenty of pubs where fighting isn't so much an event as a side-order to the evening's events, and luckily we've very much policed ourselves; there's usually one or two voices of reason in the bar ready to stand up and say "c'mon now". Unfortunately, our fella who usually sits in the bar and will say "c'mon now" in times of trouble was away; had The Who not been on tour this whole sordid affair could have been very much avoided (but hell, he deserves a break now and again, regardless of how poorly-timed they are - if Martin wants to go and see an aging paedophile swing his arm around in a circle for ninety minutes then the very best of luck to him, and his ten-year-old son).

It all started in a particularly innocuous fashion - every Monday we get a gigantic manilla envelope from the company containing charts and statistics from the week; takings, takings in relation to pubs of similar size, takings per hour, the sort of thing only the upper management really cares about due to their unwavering devotion to their task of making sure the shareholders can afford another yacht this year. Also included is the ever-irreverant company newsletter that takes a potentially sensitive subject and attempts to ply it with puns and whacky clip-art in order to make it seem like less of a blight on the face of the organization. This week, it turns out The Cargo Hatch still has a cocaine problem - "Who nose what they're gonna do about it!", guffaws 'Last Orders Weekly' editor Martin Henford, who decided to simply forget the fact that The Cargo Hatch is only in the news because three people died on cocaine in the toilets there (and good on him, that would have been a bit of a downer on his "nose" pun had he mentioned the deaths). Apart from this poorly-printed waste of company money and time, the weekly envelope contains things that are actually useful, such as our wage slips, and any general information that we need for the week in terms of the business side of the company.

This week's envelope explained that we are no longer serving a rather well-known product, possibly one of the hottest things on the market at the moment (you'll know what I mean when you realize, one day not too long from now, that you haven't seen it in a pub for months). Now, part of the statement we were issued is that we "should avoid - and encourage colleagues to avoid - publicly discussing the decision or slandering the company", so unfortunately I can't tell you that the company wanted to jack up their prices almost 50% and as such a lot of chains/breweries are showing them the door rather than allowing them their selfish whimsy. I also can't tell you that they're a gang of moneygrabbing shithouses who would come to your house and molest the living hell out of your kids if they thought there was a quid in it for them. I'm sorry, I just can't - as you may have guessed, I'm the kind of person who takes non-disclosure agreements extremely seriously. Sorry.

The other part is that we were, effective immediately, starting a new promotion - buy two pints and receive a free bag of pork scratchings. For those of you that aren't aware, pork scratchings are sort of hard to describe; hard to describe, infinitely harder to eat (and subsequently digest) and only British pubs with dartboards and cask ales are allowed to sell them, much the same way only cigar shops are allowed to have people smoking on their premises because they're the only people who would buy them. Nobody sober would eat pork scratchings, namely because they actually taste like despair - real, honest, human despair (with too much salt). Don't believe me? Try them yourself. If you can't find any, you can make them at home. Go and buy some Shredded Wheat, wrap it in bacon, piss on it and then cook it at temperatures approaching the face of the sun until it is the size of your fingernail. Eat this - note that doing so requires such physical assertion that a few meager chews will give you a neck like Arnold Schwarzenegger and a set of jaws that could rip through steel in no time at all. If you aren't sick or dead (or deaf - biting into pork scratching is an extremely loud experience that will both shock you and leave you a lifelong sufferer of tinnitus), then Monday was your lucky day, because two pints wins you a bag of these vile, solid lumps of cholesterol to suck on while you wonder just what in the name of all that is good and holy allowed these air-sealed bags of pure misery to not only make it to the shelves, but to be priced at fifty-five pence a packet. Prior to the promotion, sales weren't exactly good; so bad, it seemed we couldn't give them away.

Naturally, we put this notion into practice (as we do with everything we can't even attempt to sell, with varying success - remember S.A.F.E, that alcohol free lager from a while back that was aimed at people who were the designated driver? No? Here's why - that stuff tasted so bad that it probably caused more deaths than it prevented; anybody foolish enough to try it needed approximately a gallon of Vodka afterwards to scrub the taste out of their mouths), and discovered that when the pricetag is "free", suddenly all the world simply can't do without pork scratchings. Even though you can literally see the hope and joy evaporating into the air above their victims like a puddle of back-alley urine on a summer's day as they are haplessly chewed and crunched, because they're a freebie people have just got to have them. It's a bizarre phenomenon, it really is. But what started as an earnest attempt to get rid of our aging piles of pork scratchings assumed a strange air of trouble; it was almost as if a cult of pork scratchings was taking over. What is usually little more than a back-bar prop - a visual aid to give the impression that we're a proper pub, like the mixing equipment that litters our shelves despite the fact I have never, ever, had to make a Manhattan (nor do we even have the correct ingredients to make one) - soon, with a bit of a promotional push, became a commodity so valuable that everyone and their brother couldn't bare to be seen without a pint and a bag of wretched lumps made almost exclusively of pure human hate.

"Can you take for two pints and leave one over?" became a common request as the ins and outs of the promotion soon became clear; yes the pints have to be bought at the same time, no there's no limit unless you lot manage to crunch and crack your way through the whole bloody lot, no it doesn't matter which pints you buy, yes the promotion will come to an end one day. So "leaving one in" became common practice; it also became a pain in the arse as we had to write down what the house owed everybody. All for the sake of a few pork scratchings.
"Why?" Of course, we knew why they were doing it.
"...Give me my pork scratchings." I would hand them over, but often they would be viciously clawed from my hand before I had even had a chance to put them across the bar. People were forgetting their drinks, trying to combine rounds to maximize their pork scratching gain (I saw a group of twenty - made of four groups of five who normally detest eachother - enter into a £50 a throw round just to get their hands on ten bags of pork scratchings), trying every which way they could to get their hands on something they would never, ever have paid for. There is probably a metaphor for modern society in there somewhere but I cannot bring myself to go rummaging through mounds of pork scratchings to look for it.

"I've never seen anything like it," Christine told me in the corridor prior to our shift on the night of the shift. We had to speak of the pork scratchings away from the earshot of the customers; discussing the pork scratchings with other members of staff ensures mass panic will take hold as all and sundry assume that we are discussing the end of the promotion. The staff corridor has oft provided a trench for us to dive into when we can't talk in front of the customers.
"I know," I said in a hushed tone. Any public discussion of the pork scratchings between staff was reason for suspicion; as keepers of the scratchings, what need had we to discuss our treasures? Perhaps the stock is running low? Perhaps the promotion is coming to an end? Let's rush the bar and find out. I wish I was kidding. "Have you seen Ray, though?"
"No?"
"Count yourself lucky. You soon will." And she did. She was also, as I predicted she would be, inherently sickened by the display Ray put on upon getting his calloused hands upon a bag of the foul cracklings.

Ray is the exception to the rule, in that he would occasionally buy a packet of pork scratchings - yes, buy - before the promotion came in, but now that they were being given away, he went scratchings crazy. Drinking twice as fast (and he was a fast drinker to begin with) to keep his pile of pork scratchings sizeable, Ray - who usually gives the impression that he could drink molten tarmac and suffer little else than a bad stomach and the faint smell of roadworks radiating from his person - got absolutely bollocksed. Ray is from Newport, and worked at a steel mill for approximately a hundred years. After being molded and beaten like the steel he so poorly produced (Ray's steel mills had a bad habit of being closed down for some reason and I've got to believe that's it), Ray - who's hard as nails and as blunt as a hammer - retired to a little village out of the way, but never really adjusted to it. So naturally, we weren't looking forward to telling him he had to leave because he was drunk.

"Have you not had enough, Ray?"

Sensing trouble, Ray scooped his scratchings into a bag and left. He was back the next night, but so were the Princesses for their semi-regular visit to "the local". And this was the source of the trouble.

Drew and Tyler Prince - named the Princesses because they are absolutely insufferable and the only way for the rest of us to express this without confrontation is to simply imply that they're gender-benders, the pun on the surname is merely a bonus - come in once in a blue moon, get very, very drunk and then go home. The reason Drew and Tyler wind everyone up - apart from their perfectly grotesque christian names that were so haphazardly ripped out of the rotting corpse of The Brady Bunch, you spend the rest of the evening waiting for Cousin Oliver to turn up and murder them both in cold blood) - is that they act like the pub is some sort of nightclub, and they themselves behave as if they are a pair of pimps. With a different girl on their respective arms every time they come in here - the sort who always appear to have more paint on their face than Krusty the Clown with a laugh just as grating, and spend the entire night cackling like a greasepainted witch while sucking on a bottle of WKD like their life depended on it - and, depending on how drunk they are, will often get up in the middle of the bar and attempt to 'vibe' to whatever happens to be on the jukebox, their 'bling' jingling around their wrists and necks like a tambourine (while they live the life of a Mack, the pair work as delivery boys for UPS - hardly the vocation of a "gangsta", I'm sure you'll agree).

Now, our speakers pump out a wide selection of bands and artists - from the Welsh National Opera that Henry so fervently promotes to my own ill-fated attempts to get a bunch of sixty-something curmudgeons into a slightly more off-kilter Welsh flavour (namely my personal favourites mclusky, whose hit single "Alan Is A Cowboy Killer" has not gone down well with our punters) - but it is never the sort of thing that you would hear in those frightful city centre nightspots; they may well have tried to make Amy Winehouse go to rehab, and R Kelly may well be a flirt, but the truth is you'll find neither of them on our jukebox (not even the delightful mash-up of "I'm A Flirt" that pits Kelly against Broken Social Scene). In fact, seeing as Henry controls our night playlist (I am no longer to be trusted with the peak hour playlist after a particularly volatile reaction to one of my playlists), there has been more than one occasion where Drew and Tyler have tried to get down and groove the night away to the Werzel-tongued anthem "I've Got A Brand New Combine Harvester" (Henry is in love with novelty records; if a C-list celebrity has spoofed it for Children In Need or the like, you can bet Henry's found a dodgy MP3 of it). The two Princesses will grab their ladies, drunk out of their faces, and will begin throwing their arms in the air, gyrating without care or consideration for rhythm, WKD and Stella spilling as they haphazardly attempt to 'vibe'. All this while the darts team are having a doubles knockout tournament and Dickie Dixon is in the corner burping and breaking wind as if he were auditioning for a job inflating hot air balloons. With this sort of atmosphere on a Saturday night, you see why we decided not to buy a foam machine, I'm sure.

Drew and Tyler came in this week - with a completely new pair of ladies to ply with alcopops - with the added bonus of walking in without shirts; as the girls fawned over the sunken chests and scrawny arms, the pair spent all night showing off their latest impulse purchases; tattoos on their chests. Drew has "Tyler" on his; Tyler, surprisingly, opted for "Drew". Needless to say, they made these well-known to all present (I was genuinely dismayed that Eddie was not present to witness such appalling body art, as he has a bad habit of being away whenever a particularly brutal and poorly-done piece of body art is whapped out in the bar for all to see).

"See our tattoos?" said Tyler, sticking his chest in my face as I put a pint of Stella on the bar and took their money.
"Aren't you two really cold?" But it was a rhetorical question; I could have lit a match on the goosebumps on his arm. I could have, had Tyler not managed to jab me in the eye with one of his stiff, frozen nipples. Ever seen that Madonna video?
"Blood is thicker than water, broseph," asserted Drew through chattering teeth.
"It's not thicker than ice, however," I reminded him, feeling the chill with my thick work shirt on.
"Yeah, well we paid £200 for these," shuddered Tyler as he downed his drink in one - presumably under the assumption that the superchilled lager would somehow warm those frostbitten ventricles of his, "and I'll be damned if I'm putting a shirt over it." I appreciated his honesty; many a time I have seen people walking around in a state of undress in a rather blatant effort to get comments on their latest abhorrent permanent doodle and claim that it's just the weather or the way they dress. Tattoos are strange enough as it is ("can you please draw this picture/write these words on me so it'll never come off ever?"), without the added curiosity of why somebody's kicking it around town without a shirt when it's cold enough to freeze 'em off a brass monkey.
"Two Stellas and two WKDs again please Rick." My name's not Rick, incidentally, but Tyler and Drew made an assumption regarding my name many moons ago and it has stuck. No point correcting them again now. Perhaps I should have it tattooed on my chest.

Several hours passed of this behaviour; Ray become more and more incoherent as the alcohol began to make its dent (as he struggled to make his way through the pile of porkies he had amassed), and Tyler and Drew were now having a heart to heart at the bar. I was getting ready to close the bar down; Christine was dealing with the last few stragglers in the lounge as I was treated to the deep, philosophical yammerings of a pair of superchilled tossers.

"I got this tattoo because... you're blood, man, you're blood," called Drew, becoming slightly choked up at his own touching sentiment.
"Aw man, no, no..."
"No, seriously, you're like a brother to me."
"We are brothers."
"That's what I meant."

At this point, Ray stood up and laughed, spattering the girls with pork scratchings as he sent the contents of his mouth flying.

"Eew!" screamed one. Drew turned to see Ray stood there, cackling at him.
"You think something's funny, buddy?"
"You two gettin' them bent tattoos, that's what's funny," cackled Ray, dousing the pair in a mixture of saliva and partially-digested pork rinds. There was something extremely bizarre about the whole situation - I was putting the nozzles on ice for the night, but the other side of the bar, an aging steel worker was spraying a pair of topless tattoos morons with crystalized pork fat. Deciding not to think about the implications of this image, I decided to take the drip trays into the kitchen to hose them down.

It seemed strangely appropriate that I wound up fishing a crumpled-up pork scratchings packet out of one of the holes in the driptray. As I cast it to one side, Christine came to fish me out of the stale, soapy water in which I had so thoroughly immersed myself and the drip trays.

"You might want to get out there."
"Look, if Rob's complaining about the bitter, I'll deal with him in the morning."
"No, Rob's gone home, it's the lads in the bar, they're getting a bit rowdy." It turns out she wasn't wrong.

"Aw, sit down mate, before we have a problem," Drew was calling from behind his girlfriend, who was attempting to hold him back as if a slight altercation with a steel worker in a village pub was grounds for the death penalty.
"No, Drew, don't!" Drew shook off his woman; Tyler's was too full up of WKD to make much of a fight, but gave a general mumble of disapproval in between belches that were more befitting of a lumberjack than a twenty-something who, in her own words, "pure wants to be a model and that". Quite.
"No Chantelle," Drew bellowed (Chantelle? Ouch), turning his attentions to Ray. "Sit down you silly old prick, we've all had a drink and you wanna sit down mate. And do us all a favour, stop eating those fucking pork scratchings, you're fucking stinking and you don't seem to know how to chew with your mouth closed, so fuck off."
"Oh, and what're you going to go, pal? You want a fookin' punch up?" said Ray, advancing on Drew - how dare he disrespect the pork scratchings! At this point, Tyler leapt out of his chair and it was at this point I realized this was perhaps a little more than hot air.

Of course, standing up like you're ready to get brawlin' means nothing when you're fuckdrunk and can hardly stand to begin with - pupils slipping around like bowling balls on ice, words being manhandled brutally by alcohol-lazed tongues, these 'conflicts' often amount to nothing. But there was something different about this one, it was moving very quickly. These things usually go pretty slowly, partly because neither party really wants to fight but can't be seen to back down, so will just puff themselves up and hope the situation will diffuse itself, which it often does. However, this time, it seemed different; neither side was backing down, neither side looked as if they weren't sure.

And there it was; the first punch was thrown. Ray pulled his arm back and went in for a swift right jab - unfortunately, it was getting on late and everyone had drunk a fair bit by this point, so the fight wasn't exactly Ali-Fraser. It wasn't even Balboa-Thunderlips or Tom-Jerry. What proceeded was a truly surreal spectacle that I shall probably never witness again.

Much like the mixed martial arts of yore, several different styles of fighting were employed, but all can be defined under the cover-all blanket term of "pisshead slapfighting". Pisshead slapfighting is a strange and unpredictable art form, but it either takes extreme bravery or extreme inebriation to even attempt, seeing as most of the art's main moves can be countered by somebody with the reflexes of a sloth. To win a fight against somebody employing this technique, all you need to do is keep both feet firmly planted on the ground, deflect all incoming slaps, and wait for the assailant to tire himself out. However, since both sides were engaging in this, it escalated pretty quickly (however, due to the collective alcohol intake of the three. Before either Christine or I could get out from behind the bar, the pair were making an advance on the door, dragging Ray outside in a headlock; Ray was squirming and getting the occasional slap in, as Tyler and Drew's female accompaniment went to call a taxi (there will no doubt be a different pair of girls walking in with them next time after this particular display - they were probably right to get eachother's names tattooed on their chests, as for either of them to get a girlfriend's name would be akin to tattooing the headline from today's News Of The World on your forehead). Christine and I followed them, unsure of what we'd do when we got there.

Upon reaching the dusky, floodlit front porch, we saw what can only be described as two young men, stripped to the waist, grappling around on the floor with a sixty-something steel worker. A bit like Women In Love without the fire - it could have been vaguely homoerotic had Ray not thrown up down his shirt. The vague smell of indigested scratchings and stomach acid seeped into the night air as Tyler and Drew did their absolute best to wrestle with him without actually touching him, as it would seem the alcohol had not dulled their sense of disgust and nausea. Try and imagine that.
"So what now?" asked Christine, as Drew held Ray face down in a bit of muddy grass, rubbing his face in his own mess the same way you would an errant pet.
"Well, there's no point getting the police out for this, they'll get tired in a bit and move up the road. They're not our problem then."
"So what do we do when things like this happen?" It was a good question, as this had never happened before. However, the obvious answer soon presented itself.
"I'll call Glen."

Glen Christie was made the regional manager a few weeks ago - I met him at our barbeque last week, but he has made it very clear that he will be a lot more approachable than the previous regional manager. In a boardroom coo, the previous assortment of feckless Brents were sent packing and replaced by Christie, who was headhunted from a security firm for pubs and clubs. Christie started as a doorman in his native Ireland, and quite literally pummeled and headlocked his way to the top, so he's not one to fuck about. Knowing this, I decided to leave him a message. Perhaps he could give me some advice on how to stop fights in future - perhaps he would teach me how to "slap a sucker in a headlock", or reveal to me the secrets of his famed scowl, a glare so intense that he uses it to light cigarettes.

"Glen Christie's office," came the voice down the phone.
"Oh, hello?" I wasn't expecting this.
"Aye, and who the fuck's this?" Glen was in his office. At midnight. I informed him who the fuck it was. "Ah, y'alright there fella?"
"What are you doing in your office at this time of night?"
"Negotiating some contracts with our bread suppliers."
"At midnight?"
"Them fockers'll chat when I tell 'em to." He wasn't wrong; Glen Christie is not the kind of person you wait until the morning to call back, much as he wasn't the sort of person who would wait until the morning to call you back. "What can I do for you? Are you having another barbeque?"
"Not exactly, but things did get a little hot in here this evening. We had a code red tonight."
"What's that? Is that a murder?" enquired Glen, in much the same way you would ask a neighbour if they had seen the footy last night.
"No, Glen, a fight."
"Oh, right, gotcha," mumbled Glen, recovering remarkably quickly from the seconds-old idea that one of his pubs had seen a murder occur inside it. "What happened?"
"Well, somebody was eating the pork scratchings really loudly and messily, somebody had a word and a punch was thrown. It was all over pretty quickly, to be honest, but these things have to be reported," I informed him; these things do need to be reported to give the company an idea of how dangerous their pubs are, and whether some pubs need assistance in the form of door staff or the like.
"You have my word that measures will be taken," bellowed Christie down the phone.

The very next morning, the company placed an all-house recall on the Pork Scratchings promotion.

No Reservations.

2007-06-15T02:47:00.000Z

One of the most invaluable pieces of advice I received in this job was given to me on my second week; I noted that although our last manager Stephen would rage and storm behind closed doors, out front he was all business; the second he got through the door that separates them from us, he managed to shake off all trace of the man who just spent twenty minute stabbing the spaghetti with a steak knife because his life was a mess (and it's generally considered bad form to stab the staff), and he was then Stephen Ross, debonaire manager of the pub, who looked so neat you would be forgiven for thinking his entire being - from his hair to his accent - had done some serious time inside that most gentlemanly of inventions, the Corby Trouser Press, giving his whole look the kind of distinction you only get from common hotel room appliances. Looking at him then, he had confidence by the bucketload, a cut-glass accent and the conflict resolution skills of a saint, and you would never have guessed that the very same man was to be caught two months later with his hand in the till. When I asked him about it, he said:

"You need a switch."
"What do you mean?"
"You need to be able to turn on the charm at will. You know me," he said, smiling and waving to people at assorted tables, "these pricks don't mean a thing to me. They could all fuck off and die alone on a mountain face for all I care." This all sounded particularly strange coming from somebody whose facial expression gave the distinct impression that he was so pleased to see these people he could break out into uncontrollable fellating at any moment.

While Adolf Hitler was generally a better role model than Stephen, this is fantastic advice to anybody working in a fishbowl, where all eyes are on you and you're on the front end of the business. There was once a very clearly-labelled switch in my brain that decides how I act and respond to customers - one is "barman", the other is "waiter". The Barman is very much a slightly condensed version of myself with the conscience dial turned ever-so-slightly down and the exclusive feature of being able to mop up vomit without adding to it in the process, but "The Waiter" was a facade I began to erect to disguise my undiluted hatred for the food side of the business. And it all began with a less-than-glowing mystery customer report, which wasn't so much a review as a three-page report on how my skills with the food side of the things were so blatantly lacking that it's a miracle I managed to get the food onto their table without suffering some sort of debilitating brain damage on the way over, collapsing in a heap of beans and salad garnish, swallowing my own tongue and shitting my pants as my meager pint-pulling brain struggled to process the earth-shattering request of "salt and pepper please". Salt... and pepper? I only understand "pint of bitter", and even then you're chancing it, pal. Needless to say, my food-serving skills left a lot to be desired.

We have mystery customers turn up now and again to rate our performance - company-sponsored plain-clothes spies, sent to infiltrate our ranks, check our customer service, then inspect our toilets with the sort of scrutiny that you would usually only get with a chalk outline of a body, a chemical contamination suit and the sound of evidence being photographed and zip-locked. They then fill out a questionnaire, with questions like:

Was toilet paper readily available?
Were the staff tidy and presentable?
Was the cutlery clean and free of bends?
Were all staff polite and well-skilled?

That sort of thing. Now, the first time they came in on my watch, the answer to that last question came in looking something like this:

"[The waiter] served my food within the designated time limit. He then asked if I needed anything, before returning to the bar where he began to talk to a customer at length. I received no courtesy check. [The waiter] had an overall unpleasant manner and lacked confidence. Needs training to grade 4 service specifications."

And with this (and a quick skim through the grade 4 service manual, a guide the company issued in an attempt to turn their entire roster of barmen into a gang of knuckle-dragging, soup-spilling, waistcoated gimps), The Waiter was born and I had my "switch". Loosely based on Basil Fawlty, I would approach a table, hands clasped, to make sure that their meals have met their expectations and to ask if I can get them anything; anything at all. Go on, anything. I'm serious, whatever you want, I will get it. Tomato sauce? No trouble at all, madame, no trouble at all, I shall return in a couple of seconds even if I have to infiltrate Farmer Smith's tomato patch myself, mush the tomatoes up with my bare hands and slit Farmer Smith's throat for attempting to hinder my divine mission for the world's most famous fruit-that's-not-really-a-fruit, you shall have your tomato sauce, I swear on the honour of my family. Should I be killed on my journey, another shall take my place, and he shall deliver your tomato sauce. You wait here. Won't be long. Honestly. I seriously won't be a jiffy. The eponymous jiffy will seem like a millennium compared to the lightspeed delivery of your tomato sauce. Wait. OK. Thank you. OK.

Then, on the way back to the bar, the switch is flicked across, my airless waiter glide becomes weighted and brutish once again as I swagger back the bar, pull my usual scowl out of the bag and go back to being myself. As I slap the pot onto a little saucer, my clasped hands become independent of one another as I rummage around cupboards with all the care and consideration of a tractor on the motorway.

"Where's the fucking tomato ketchup?"

Once the absurdly small pot has been filled to the brim with rich, crimson tomato sauce, the lid is screwed back on and on the way down the corridor I flip the switch and I'm back to being the waiter who can never do enough for you. This all started as something I did to amuse the waitress, a harmless persona I could evoke at will - it went through a week-long development process in which time the waiter lost his French accent and the deliberately badly-emphasized (and even more awkwardly-pronounced) "MON-sieur". But soon enough this harmless persona became something more, something sinister. At first, it began following me home - at first maintaining a distance and busying itself when I would turn around, but after a while I became aware of the waiter being around outside of standard pub hours. When making cups of tea for Pa back at the shack, I would find myself delivering the mug with an overly-effette waiter flourish before realizing what I had just done. I am very similar to my father in manner but my father really is not the sort who takes nonsense lightly - growing tired of the next door neighbours' cats getting into our garden, he bought a military-grade catapult and asked me to bring a bag of ice home from work one day. He spent the rest of the evening shooting the cats from his bedroom window with extremely hard lumps of ice. I don't think I've ever seen him so happy.

"Why ice, Dad?" I asked as I handed him yet another chilled projectile.
"Simple. Shoot the cat, melt the evidence. 'Oh, officer, look, somebody shot my cat, here's some water to prove it, it used to be ice' - nah. Doesn't happen. I'd say you're more or guaranteed to get away with anything if you can melt the evidence. Just don't tell your mother."

That's my dad.

"What's that," he asked, "is that your waiter bit?"
"Yeah, it's just something I do for a laugh down the pub."
"Sure," said Pa, taking a concerned slurp. "Careful though. You might get one of those split personality things. Like Dr. Jekyll, or Bono and The Edge." He then tucked into a slice of cake.

He had hit the nail on the head - much as he hit Mr. Tibbles on the head with a lightspeed lump of frozen water, again and again until the mog retreated back to his home territory, dazed and confused (and never quite the same to this day - I never thought a cat could be moon-faced or cross-eyed but that's Pa for you) - but by then it was probably a bit late. I could sense the waiter taking hold whenever any table service came into play. Behind the bar, I was fine, but my table service "bit" was very heavily reliant on The Waiter. It didn't help matters either - I wouldn't have been bothered if I could suddenly turn on this customer satisfaction Superman, but the fact is, underneath it I was still me; the same lazy, incompetent and foul-mannered me who has been so consistently bad at serving food in the past. The only difference now is that I was acting like some Bistro-baiting prick. I had begun to fear The Waiter would never leave, that he had set up something of a squat in my psyche and would be there forever, like some sort of hippy (albeit an extremely well-mannered one). I took this concern to the one person I trust inherently, my lone confidant within the walls of the pub.

"You what?"
"Eddie, I'm serious. It's like I'm compelled to do it."
"What, act like a prick?"
"Yeah." It's that kind of insight that will someday make Eddie his millions, of that I am certain.
"Alright, no problem, just... I dunno, stop it?"
"It's hard, I've gotten used to acting differently around the food orders."
"Alright, leave it to me, I'll deal with the food end of it. I'll go and see if we've got any Magners out the back and then I'm all ears. You're a fucking nut though."
"Thanks, Eddie." Although no sooner had Eddie gone, my barman sense began to tingle - the sound of a car pulling up outside and all four doors opening made its way through the flimsy glass and I immediately began to assess the situation; probably a family, maybe businessmen, but certainly not out for the evening as it's two in the afternoon. But I could sense, with every fibre of my being, what was about to happen, and I quite accurately predicted the first words out of their mouth.

"Are you still doing food?" enquired Julie, a middle-aged woman with an astonishing head of blonde hair.
"Absolutely," began the waiter, muscling his way in front of me before I had a chance to take control. He didn't ask if they had a reservation; nobody ever has a reservation at that time of day. "Would you like to see a menu?"
"Oh, lovely," and with that she went outside to answer her mobile, menu under her arm. Eddie was taking his sweet time - I thought of going to get him, but it was too late. She was back.

"OK, I think we'll have..." and with that, she rattled off a four-person food order, in instruction to hold the fourth person until their final member arrived, as he was stuck in traffic. Eddie walked in through the door, box of Magners under his arm (as well as the green breakage clipboard - Eddie usually breaks something when he goes out to the cage; it's become so commonplace that we have considered an automatic lock-in policy like the Crystal Maze, e.g. if you break another case of Budweiser you have to spend a month in the cage) and obviously dismayed; I had somehow failed him by offering to take a food order. She then rattled off a drinks order - only one alcoholic drink, a brandy on the rocks, and three cokes. An elderly woman - Julie's mother, probably - came in and took a coke. Eddie got to work on the rest of the drinks as Julie beckoned me to one side. I went over and pretended to listen intently; I knew what was coming - some absurd dietary concern. If you're allergic to nuts, then be a man and take a gamble, maybe we use nuts and maybe we don't. Let's spin the wheel, for once.
"Could you do me a favour?"
"Absolutely," said the waiter. Eddie let out a sigh as he put together the drinks order on a tray.
"Ah, here he is - could you take my father to the toilet?" And with that, I looked behind her to see a man relying on two walking sticks, dribbling slightly. He gave me a wink. Eddie nearly choked.

With that, the waiter put on his coat and literally sprinted out of my head, spats and cummerbund falling to the floor as he made a break for it. I was very much on my own as the waiter went running hell for leather out of my consciousness, and out of my life forever. I cursed him as a traitor, but secretly envied him. As I began to adjust back to life without a split personality, I suddenly became aware that several seconds had passed since the original question had been posed and I was now giving the impression that I was both disgusted and deaf, two traits you certainly don't want if you're taking senior citizens to the shitter.

"Hmm?" That's the way, pretend you haven't heard them. Nice going, idiot.
"Could you take my father to the toilet? He's ninety four years old." Quite an achievement by any stretch of the imagination. "I know this is a big ask but his carer is stuck in traffic - he'll be here in two minutes. All I need you to do is maybe give him a hand getting in there and then just listen out for any problems."

Problems!?

"Right, right," I said, secretly fumbling for any excuse - any at all - that would get me off this potentially sticky hook; I turned to Eddie but he had gone, and from the sniggering in the bar I realized that I was now not only in hot water, but I was the entertainment for the next few minutes. Right, OK, think, complete the sentence... sorry, I cannot help your elderly father take a shit because... nope, nothing. There's literally no nice way to say "sorry I can't help your elderly dad take a dump". While the boys in the excuses department got to work, I had to think on my feet. "Sure, um, what if there is a problem, should I -"
"In that case come and get me and I'll sort it out. His carer will be here in a second, don't worry, it's fine." And like an idiot, I believed her. I genuinely believed that this would be in no way weird or permanently scarring. Hey, if there's some sort of problem when the century-old man is having a crap, I'll just go and get his daughter. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

"Actually," began my excuse department, making a wild stab at the jobsworth card, "I'm not meant to leave the bar, Eddie here wouldn't -"
"I don't mind," said Eddie through a grin that made the Cheshire Cat look positively glum. "You take as long as you need." Julie beamed. As did I, but I swore revenge on Eddie. I often wonder exactly what people think when they think of bar staff - I'm almost certain that they think we have some sort of doctor-patient confidentiality thing going on. We are asked our opinions, often on topics we know precisely nothing about (such as medicine) and therefore we are somehow bound to keep the conversations secret. The fact that you are reading this is proof that we are under absolutely no obligation to keep our appointments private. If I can give you one piece of advice, please watch what you say and do around bartenders. Especially if you're in Wales. You never know...

"I'm Dai, nice to meet you," said Dai, thrusting out a hand for the shaking; after all, we were both men, and if one man is going to help another take a dump it's only polite to go over the formalities. I shook it for as long as I could before Dai crushed every bone in my hand with his titan grip; this man was obviously once frighteningly strong, and obviously still had a great deal of strength, and I could only imagine how disheartening it must be to go from being as mighty and powerful as he obviously was in days gone by, to requiring the help of the bar staff when you need the loo on a day out. He was a very pleasant man, in that he was aware that I was slightly uncomfortable with the whole thing, and was generally very smiley and chuckled a lot, a warm, wheezing chuckle that matched his Valley-boy baritone. We're not far away from a "home" - the villagers just refer to it as "the home", leaving unsaid the part about it being a home for mentally unstable old people. So we get a lot of them come down - at least the ones who are allowed out, so I'm quite used to dealing with them. But Dai was sharp as a tack, and noticed I had apprehensions.

"I bet you didn't sign up for this, did you boyo?" chuckled Dai as we went into the toilet. He began to unbuckle.
"Ha, it's fine," - it fucking well wasn't, but I realized soon enough that Dai was very kindly offering to meet me halfway on this and the least I could do was be alright about it - "What do you need me to do here?" Fearing the worst, I was cautious when Dai simply put his hands out.
"Just give me a hand down."
"A hand down where?" I asked, mortified; I immediately put my hands up as if Dai had just pulled a gun on me.
"Haha, no, I mean give me a hand getting onto the toilet."
"Oh, of course, sorry," I fumbled, extremely embarrassed. I offered my arm out as a support; Dai put one tweed-clad arm around it, dropped his trousers with the other (I looked away, as you do), and then told me he was alright; I retracted my arm as the door shut behind me. As Dai lowered himself onto the toilet, I secretly longed for The Waiter to return. The Waiter wouldn't have had a problem with any of this - The Waiter would have been practically sweating decorum, standing to attention with a stoney face, giving that impression of autonomy that people require in order to be comfortable when they're being lowered onto the toilet with their trousers in an undignified bunch over their shoes - if the other person involved doesn't give the impression that they are somehow dehumanized, somehow mechanical, how can anyone possibly be expected to do prolonged, watery shits in peace? The Waiter had that to burn - he would probably have offered to wipe Dai's arse with his bare hands. It's like those guards outside Buckingham Palace - they can't move; not their face, not their body, not anything. Not allowed - those silver mimes have nothing on them. While the downside of this is that day in, day out, they must have people testing this behaviour out for hours on end by waving them and touching their big silly hats while some fat Americans take pictures, the upside is that I seriously wouldn't mind taking a dump in their company. That'd be no problem; I'd be fine with that. Maybe that's why they behave like that - that's how Britain established dominance, running a vast empire from a tiny island. Make them feel comfortable enough to take a shit in front of you and then attack when their trousers are quite literally around their ankles.

I went to leave, before realizing I had actually been asked to make sure there were no... problems.

"You OK in there Dai?" I enquired as the noises began.
"Fine, fine, you'll know if I'm not, ha ha. So..." said Dai through the door. There's very few acceptable topics of conversation in which to engage when one party is currently depositing the last year's worth of food into the toilet. "What's this month's guest ale?"
"Um, Black Swan."
"Black Swan..." he said, followed by another spate of sphincter-borne spattering. "Um... what kind of strength is that? It's a dark ale, yeah?"
"Yeah, it's a dark ale, it's about four point two."
"Four point two!", exclaimed Dai in shock as the sound of an accelerating toilet roll undercut his every word with a muffled rumble of carboard on plastic. However, I could hear through the door that there was signs of a struggle. It was at this point that I began to wonder exactly what would be expected of me by this point. Would I have to go in there and hose him down? The Waiter could have handled this; The Waiter would have stiffened his upper lip to the point of paralysis, gone in there and taken one for the team in the name of customer service. But sadly, I was no longer The Waiter, nor could I ever be again - I was me, nothing more, nothing less, and certainly not a personal bidet.

At that point, the front door to the toilet went - oh Christ, I thought, who the fuck's coming in now? If it's Eddie, I was fully prepared to dip that stupid mop of hair of his into the blocked urinal; if it was Henry or anybody else for that matter, there was literally no way to make this look good, and I may be fired before I got the chance to corroborate the story with the relatives. I was innocent!

Nobody was to be fired, as the person on his way in was Trevor. Trevor was Dai's aide - dressed in a medical outfit, Trevor was a young man with a firmly trimmed moustache and a heart quite clearly made of pure gold. Finding a member of staff listening in on his patient's bowel movements was not a problem, as he came in with a warm smile and shook my hand like he'd known me all his life. He had obviously known Dai a while too as the handshake turned the remnants of my post-Dai hand into a pile of fractured mush.

"Are you -?"
"Yeah, he's in there now."
"Is that Trevor?" called Dai. "Send him in!"
"You're not causing trouble are you Dai?" called Trevor with a chuckle. He and Dai obviously got on very well considering their relationship was essentially the same as the relationship between an arse and toilet paper.
"Have I ever caused trouble, Trevor? C'mon son, I've got a good one for you here."

I left at this point and left Trevor to do the honours and tidy Dai up a bit. After a quick discussion with Elaine, Trevor's meal was on the house and Eddie was told he would be punished.

"Totally worth it man. Plus it solved that problem of yours didn't it?"

He had me there. But punishment was still on the cards.

Afterwards, Trevor came to the bar with all the empty plates and glasses; evidently an unstoppable help machine, I became curious of Trevor. I have always been curious of people like him; people who can do the impossible with a smile on their face.

"How do you guys do it?" A friend of mine is training to be a nurse and I'm constantly amazed at how she manages her seemingly never-ending mound of poo-related duties without dry-heaving to the point of actually throwing up her stomach lining. Trevor seemed a nice young man; coming on for thirty, handsome in a rugged sort of way, and infallibly polite, as you must be if you're the kind of person who feels ready to help those who can't help themselves in that department. I've never been more grateful to be bartender by day/writer by night than I was when I was talking to Trevor.

"Oh, you get used to it."
"I don't think I could. You're incredible."
"Thank you," said Trevor, seemingly surprised that his actions are considered heroic. "It's not for everyone."
"I can imagine. Anyway, was the meal alright?"
"It was lovely, thank you so much," Trevor said. "I think Dai's got a little extra for you boys, considering what you did. As you can probably imagine, a lot of people won't do it." I could imagine it, as I had come dangerously close to it myself.

Dai made his way to the bar and propped himself up, at which point he reached into his pocket and produced a roll of fivers - I suppose aids like Trevor don't come cheap, so it stood to reason that Dai had done alright for himself when he was at the height of his powers.

"You boys did me a favour," he said in his soothing tones that seeped into the ears like melted chocolate. "So here's a little something extra for your bother."

And that's when I noticed - the index finger, left hand; the one that maintained a vice-like grip on the outstretched fiver had evidently been put to more nefarious purposes this afternoon; c'mon Trevor, if you can wipe all that up the least you can do is check the hands for remnants of the foul-smelling festivities. Check the hands or settle the bill on their behalf, you had gloves on, I saw them! I tried to explain the stain in a more innocent way - maybe he was a heavy smoker for many years and that's a nicotine stain. Yeah, right; nicotine doesn't usually glisten, and it never has a very small lump in it.

Ugh.

"Oh no, honestly..."
"Now now," he said, patting away my protests with his hands, wafting the scent towards me as he went. "You did me a favour and I know how difficult it can be. You'd be surprised how many places won't acommodate requests like that." I really fucking wouldn't. Nor would Eddie.
"Really, it's all part of the job, I -" but before I could maintain my firm stance of 'all in a day's work', fingers encrusted with what had once been 'all in a Dai's bowel' tucked a squidgy blue note into my hand as he waddled out of the door. I offered my sincere thanks as I wondered what to do with poonote. Can't burn it, that's illegal apparently (bullshit if you ask me, if you're rich enough to literally burn money - or stamps, for that matter - then who's the Queen, one of the richest women in the world anyway, to tell you that you can't use her face as a lighter?) - can't put it in the bin, people will want to know why. So, folding the crisp, five pound note at the corners as best I could, I did the only honourable thing.

"Here you go Eddie, that table left a tenner - here's your half."
"Wow, cheers man," said Eddie, putting the five pound note - and its foul-smelling travel companion - in his pocket.

Revenge smells bad.

Who's Got A Match?

2007-06-08T18:07:00.000Z

With the sunshine now out in full force - as opposed to teasing us from a distance as it has been doing - it is clear to all that finally, Summer is upon us. The smoking ban has never been more popular as the pub's fusty, dank interior is forsaken in favour of a pint and a cigarette in the great outdoors. To this end, we've taken it upon ourselves to capitalize on the good weather by doing that most British of things and wasting absolutely no time in announcing that we would be having our annual Garden Party RIGHT NOW. Well, that weekend. But the spontaneity of the whole affair caught even the staff by surprise, let alone the punters.

The Garden Party is possibly a bit of a misnomer, as our beer garden isn't really a garden (it's just a bit of the car park with slightly less gravel on it than other areas) and it's not really a "party", but it is something the pub has been doing for thirty years now, and has become one of the village's "events". Basically, it's a lightweight mooch in the sun with a bit of food and a bit of beer, no hassle. But apart from that, over time it has thankfully developed into something far more beneficial to us - it is traditionally the day that (much like the masters used to wait on the servants on Christmas day in Victorian London before forcing them back down to the furnaces in time for Boxing Day) the line between punter and staff is blurred and we can all just unwind and be social, living in harmony as Paul and Stevie intended (except we - the staff - could quite easily make up both the ebony and ivory on a keyboard all by ourselves, with our heat-sponging black uniforms and pallid, chalk-faced skin tones built up from months and months of manning the dimly-lit interiors of the pub). Last year's was a rousing success - the weather was gorgeous, the food was fantastic, and we all managed to have a good time. But that was with our old manager, Stephen, before he turned into a mentalist and pelted a gang of midgets with fried onions. We were all curious to see how Henry would orchestrate the Garden Party. A team meeting was called on the subject, naturally - there was once a time when a team meeting was telling of a gigantic, world-crushing problem, and would only be called if Korea pressed the button and we had to prepare the fallout shelter. Now, they're more regular than the Women's Institute's coffee mornings, with almost as much coffee.

"Right, I understand that this month is the annual garden party. Naturally, this is yet another test of our regime," Henry announced triumphantly, "and I intend on making this the best garden party of all time. Right, now then, I was thinking a barbeque." At this point I felt like somebody needed to step in front of the raging barbeque locomotive, and that person had to be me.
"Is a barbeque a good idea, Henry?"
"Yes." You may see why this abrupt answer failed to quell my worries, but somehow Henry didn't, so I went in deeper.
"It's just that there's concerns about health and safety, that sort of thing." I know, I know, nobody wants to be "that guy" who lets a few technicalities stand in the way of a good time, but as a relatively new personal license holder, I didn't particularly want to be that other guy much either - the one who works at that pub that got condemned and shut down for good after everyone got chronic diarrhea for a solid week after the barbeque. You know, that guy.
"Pah! Elaine will spike everything with the temperature gauge to see if it's kosher or not."
"Elaine isn't here." It's a wonder I was able to lift that spanner considering the inconceivable blow it dealt to Henry's collective 'works'. Henry literally ran over to the staff diary and sure enough, the blue A4 diary burst open to reveal that Elaine had booked holidays - a week in New York. Lovely for her, not so good for somebody who needs somebody to stand behind a gigantic metal grill and burn some slabs of flesh to the tune of £1 a throw.
"Yeah, I booked this holiday off weeks ago." Henry grimaced and slammed his head into his hands - if there's one thing Henry can't stand, it's people taking what is owed to them by law.
"Well, can't you..."

Luckily, the pre-emptive scowls radiating around the table stopped him from completing that sentence. Elaine started working here on Christmas Eve and has not had a holiday yet - she has been here every day without fail or respite, in which time she has fried thousands upon thousands of chips, prepared countless garnishes of exquisite salad which almost always wind up in the bin, and grilled more meat than a crematorium. The poor woman deserves a break, and even Henry had to concede that.

"I'll man the barbeque, Henry," chimed Frances. There then followed a few seconds of tense silence as people tried to think of a way to vocalize the sheer, undiluted trepidation rushing through their minds. While none of us (besides Elaine) are what you'd call chefs - Eddie once managed to fuck up cheese on toast and the less said about my exploits in the kitchen, the better for all concerned - Frances is by far the worst of us, for the simple reason that she thinks she is a great cook, and quite frankly couldn't be more wrong. Frances has only done one stint in the kitchen that lasted approximately twenty minutes, but it was more than enough to ensure that in the event of Elaine being ill ever again, we'd probably sooner burn the whole fucking building down and all go to work up the Fox rather than attempt to explain to another customer why their meal looks like it was tortured as opposed to cooked. She had to cook one meal, and one meal alone - an all-day breakfast. A bog-standard fry-up, the kind that thousands of greasy spoons, "proper" pubs and hotels churn out time and time again without fail, every single day. Could not be more simple, or so you would naturally assume, as I had done upon Frances requesting to cover the kitchen - what's the worst that can happen, I thought, as she sauntered down the corridor to begin her brief, sordid affair with our kitchen. Two burnt mushrooms, a deep-fat fryer fire (nearly extinguished with water before I came skidding to the rescue in the common-sense-mobile), four rotten eggs and a metal can of beans in the microwave later and we were left with a dead microwave, the first refund on our books for months and a very poor review in Village Beat. An excerpt:

"Dining at [name of pub removed] is truly a game of chance - at times their meals are more than acceptable and a welcome stray from the well-trodden path of normal chain-pub food, but other times (such as last Wednesday) the service is atrocious (if there is even service at all). Improvements must be made."

Next month will see them review the Fox & Hound again, then they'll go back to reviewing films for a bit, and we'll get another review in three months' time. There really isn't enough going on around here for an entire culture page, but that's what happens when you commit to a format. It's probably a lot more fair a system than 'conventional' restaurant reviewers who really only interview a place once, not three or four times a year for ever and ever.

So anyway, when Frances, of all people, offered to step up to bat and oversee the production of a metric assload of potentially dangerous raw meat, we were left with a dilemma. Frances was the only person who wanted to do it - while none of us had the desire to sit behind a smoldering hot barbeque on what was assured to be an absolute scorcher of a day, having to cook for what could be a fair few people. Before a happy medium ground could be decided, Henry leapt in at the deep end and granted all barbeque duties to Frances. Despite our half-page advertisement (for which we pay handsomely - although it really says something about the integrity of the Village Beat that our £4.50 a month isn't enough to weigh down the scales of fair and balanced food journalism in our favour), Henry doesn't read Village Beat and therefore has not seen the review of Frances' expertise in the kitchen, which burnt us like an overdone hot dog (something of which we wound up seeing plenty).

No sooner had Henry bombed down to Aldi to pick up a gigantic gas-powered barbeque he had seen in a leaflet for something silly like 20p, you suddenly couldn't move for posters advertising the bloody thing. A gigantic picture of a sausage with "BBQ!" written down the side of it, followed by all the relevant deets: Saturday, 5pm start, weather permitting (the standard legal get-out), burgers and hot dogs £1 each. We have also been sent a trial barrel of some fuck-awful contintental beer, so no doubt we'll be giving that away (what are we meant to do, sell it? Reports back vary from "like having your mouth rinsed out with French sewer water" to the slightly more subtle "pure shite") by the plastic cupload. People will drink anything if it's free and it comes in a plastic cup, and we're hoping this will apply to our latest barrel of company-sponsored dross, because we certainly won't be using it to line our pockets, that's for sure.

When Henry did return, what he had strapped to the roof of his car could not only feed an army, but subsequently cook them and feed them to an even bigger army and several large gorillas. It was massive - four fake-oak-panel sides and a set of dazzling metal grills. Inside, the housing for the gas tanks, and a rather elaborate health and safety statement in a variety of languages. Although the pictures, I feel, were suffice - "do not sit on the Barbemax 9000 or you run the risk of burning your skin clean off" is one thing, but even if you've not a word of the Queen's under your belt there are the ill-fated stickmen to be roasted and maimed for your visual pleasure. Next came the gazebo - so that even if worst came to worst, we could still sit outside in the freezing cold with a fair degree of shelter, tucking into the assorted food put on by Frances with only a quick sprint through the elements to get to the toilet in time to revisit the assorted food put on by Frances. However, the problem with this was, this was bought a few months ago for a wedding function, so it's bright white, covered in bells, horseshoes and "just married" insignias and whatnot, and is proof that if this company suffers anything at all, it's undoubtedly myopia.

"This not going to put people off, Henry? People might think it's a wedding party or something," I bemoaned as I began the atrocious process of erecting a gazebo, which required several identical white sticks to be affixed to eachother with numerous identical stick holders, without instructions. Eddie came along to assist, but was not assisting much by sitting down, smoking, and telling me when I had done something wrong (yet offering no solution on how to correct the matter).
"Why would people think it's a wedding party? People who go to weddings are smartly dressed and stuff. You lot look like crap." Once again, a mixed message.
"That one doesn't go there." Yeah, thanks Eddie.
"You know that's not helpful? And besides, isn't this tent kind of small? We've had a lot of interest for this."
"That one doesn't -"
"Eddie, stop." He stopped.
"Well," began Henry, shaking the poles I had successfully put up as if the answer would fall out of them, "this is only really in case of rain. And tomorrow's meant to be the hottest day we've had in weeks."
"In that case do we have to wear our uniforms?" Eddie had a good point - we weren't really going to be working, this was more a social occasion for everybody - all we'd be doing would be handling the cash and distributing the beer every now and again (e.g. getting more plastic cups and pre-filling them with whatever's not selling).
"No, I suppose not." This was great news, seeing as black shoes, trousers and shirts don't usually stand up well in intense heat.

With the tent ready to go, the sack of meat prepared (and it was literally a sackful - although from the looks of it, it wasn't so much processed as the result of pushing somebody towards someone who juggled chainsaws and then clumping the remains into a sack before forensics turned up), and the barbeque having already demonstrated its (quite frankly devastating) powers, the night before we were ready. It felt good, and I was even looking forward to it - a chance to actually unwind without the bar being in my line of sight, mixing with the punters like equals instead of servants. A good day, good company, and food that might not be lethal. I was ready for it, and it felt like it was a long time coming.

The next day, as the rain hit the ground with such ferocity that it's a marvel the flimsy poles of the overly-effete tent were able to withstand the barrage and the punters stayed firmly indoors - only venturing outdoors for food and cigarettes - the four of us (Henry, myself, Eddie and Frances) were, as always, distanced; we were "the staff", and that was it. Even if Eddie was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that didn't so much mix colours as smash them together at 100MPH to particularly garish effect, even if Henry wasn't wearing his novelty chef hat, even if Frances hadn't somehow managed to burn half a burger, we're always going to be "them", and the only difference was that we were now "them", sitting in a wedding tent, with the smell of burnt meat and cut bread mixing with the scents of fresh air and industrial gazebo material to make the whole thing smell like a burger van outside B&Q. And that's the kind of situation where you say to yourself, "hmm, this is kind of weird". However, that's more our thing than theirs - we chose to remain in the gazebo, despite the statistical probability of Frances accidentally setting the whole thing on fire, resulting in a pub run by Simon Weston lookalikes. Of course, because we all work together and our usual topics of conversation are usually pretty work-centric, now that we didn't have to speak about work, we realized how little any of us actually have in common. The only thing any of us have in common is the fact that we were thrown together by chance, united by fate.

"So... this is kind of weird, I suppose."
"Yeah."

My attempt to break the ice did not go down well.

"Right, OK, I'll tell you what, go in there and tell the boys the barbeque's being postponed, you lot can fuck off home then if you want." Henry, who I thought would be the most bloody-minded about the whole thing, surprisingly turned out to be the first to concede defeat at the hands of circumstance and bad conversation.
"Sure," I said, wrapping up a burger (that I had secretly prepared myself while Frances went to the loo) to take home. "When are we having it next?"
"Nine."
"What, the ninth of this month, the -"
"No, nine o'clock tonight. If you guys could come back then, I'd appreciate it, I'll watch the bar until then."

Confused as to exactly what would be going down at nine, we all followed orders and promptly fucked off home.

A little under four hours later I reported back to the site of the incident to see the place absolutely jumping through the patterned glass windows. I hurried in through the lounge doors to see something that no amount of undercooked meat or gumswill beer could have topped - the barbeque, indoors, with Eddie stood behind it, grinning like a buffoon, wearing Henry's gigantic novelty chef hat and cackling in a decidedly manic manner. The bar was jumping - everybody was in there. Henry looked pleased as punch behind the bar, and the atmosphere was sublime. The door slammed behind me, and the room turned - Eddie gave a loud "waaaahey!", and staggered towards me. I began to suspect that Eddie had perhaps had a bit too much to drink.

"Weeey! You came! I fucking love you, you know that?" Eddie burped surreptitiously, informing me with both sound and scent that he was spiffed.
"Thank you Eddie." Well, what can you say, really?
"Wanna be the barbeque for a bit?" That's something Eddie does a lot when he's drunk; if you're driving, he'll ask if you want to be the car, if he's got work the next morning then he 'has to be the pub tomorrow'; after a few shots of Sambuca, Eddie has trouble distinguishing between being in control of something and actually physically being something. I took a quick look around - everyone was eating and seemed to be enjoying it; a queue was forming around the barbie; and Frances was sat by the bar sulking ferociously, evidently after having her barbeque privileges withdrawn; maybe something to do with the table in the far left, the residents of which looked sick as a pig; makes sense, if they were the first to get here. Hmm, do I fancy being the barbeque for a bit? It was possibly a little late to be umming and ahhing about it, however, as Eddie had already shoved the chef's hat on my head and gone to the bar to get more booze.

Fast forward to three hours later - we should have been closed for half an hour. Eddie is asleep on the bar floor, exhausted from holding a one-man rave (that was even more impressive when you consider there was absolutely no musical accompaniment), in the recovery position. Henry's not usually one for lock-ins, but seeing as the atmosphere was so good he decided, for the first time ever, to bend the rules a little and keep the party moving. I was behind the barbeque, getting the last of the supplies to a healthy brown before wedging them between two slices of mighty white and handing them to whoever would take them. Just as midnight came and went, the front door - which, to be fair, should probably have been locked at this point - swung open.

"Henry?"

All eyes reported back towards the lounge door to see a gray suit obliterating the dim porch light. The gray suit happened to contain one Glen Christie, the manager of the entire region for the company. Glen is notoriously hard knocks - starting out in the cut throat world of bouncing, Glen simply punched his way into the white collar side of the business, and now holds all the playing cards. Anything you need or want must be overseen by Glen - the man is, by his very nature, vicious; nobody tells him what to do, and God help them if they think otherwise.

"Bit of a rowdy party for this time of night, isn't it?" But Henry said nothing. Henry's never one to mix his words, but even he's scared of Glen Christie. Rumour has it that a scowl from Glen Christie is enough to stop your heart dead in its tracks (he then reaches into your chest and eats it for sustenance - with this in mind, I quietly turned off the barbeque; if he's got that in mind he certainly isn't having the pleasure of a hot meal). "I was just in the area speaking to Ken about his new arrangement - you know Ken, right? - and I thought I'd drop the assistant manager files over; your lad still needs cellar management, and I was thinking we could set a date for him, but obviously this is a bad time." Ken's 'new arrangement' is that if he's ever caught with his hand in the till again, Glen personally promised to 'punish' him. How do we know this? He forwarded the copies of the minutes of the meeting to every single person in the company, from moguls to mop boys. I didn't even know I had a work email address until I received a rather strongly-worded dialogue between Glen and Ken (apparently the email address you supply on your contact information is given a generic company alias - e.g. glenchristie@thisisbarwork.com - and any mail that's sent there will be forwarded to your real email address, an ingenious system that probably wasn't designed for threats).
"Why don't you just ask him yourself?" Henry said, gesturing to me. Of all the times Henry could have kept his mouth shut, I would have very much appreciated this being one of them. Christie looked me up and down - on the way up, his line of sight went past my eyes and up towards the novelty hat, then back again.

"Come with me please."

As the remaining punters scurried out, making their excuses, I was invited into the lounge as Henry propped Eddie up.

I've been in some precarious situations in my lifetime - the kind of thing that it's not even worth attempting to explain, where you have obviously been caught in a bad situation and the other person got the wrong end of the stick. However, of all the bad situations I've been caught in, I'd probably go as far as to say that being caught in a gigantic novelty chef's hat, with a gigantic gas-powered barbeque, without a food hygiene certificate, indoors, after hours, by the person who decides whether or not I will someday rise through the ranks of the company, is probably among the worst. Worse than the time I accidentally wandered into the women's toilets in Cardiff Barfly, worse than the time I got caught playing Pogs for keeps in school (an activity that, at the time, was the seven-year-old equivalent of Russian Roulette - this was when those shiny Pogs came out as well, so the stakes, to our tender seven-year-old minds, were inconceivably high), worse than any of it. However, as Christie reached into his suitcase, he revealed not a set of paperwork to make me redundant, nor a knife to stab me with - it was, however, a brochure for cellar management.

As he began to outline Cellar Management to me, I naturally became suspicious - this guy is a bulldog, and is paid by the company to be their eyes and ears on the ground level and take no prisoners. But here he was, laughing and joking away with me, calling me by my first name and encouraging me to do likewise, patting me on the back, all while I was standing there in a gigantic novelty chef hat with a face that had become reddened and ashened by all the indoor cooking I had been getting up to, looking like an even bigger prick than Chris Moyles in Gordon Ramsay's latest culinary clusterfuck (in which he will undoubtedly shout at people for reasons so trivial that a light gust of wind could probably blow them away, glorify bullying in the kitchen for a bit, and then piss off to his house in the Algarve while some poor fucker in some greasy spoon somewhere is getting a knife stuck through his hand by some jumped-up kitchen manager because he didn't put a sprinkle of parsley on the £1.25 fried breakfast - the union of he and Moyles could only wind me up more if they were being followed around by Davina McCall). I was waiting, with baited breath, for the inevitable moment where he pulled the hat off my head, stabbed me in the neck with his pen and then, to add insult to injury, put my cold, lifeless hand up my own backside. No mucking about, just pop, there, a nice wee find for the police and a cheap laugh for the front page of the Western Mail. Don't ask me why, he just seemed the type who would kill somebody and then shove their own hand up their arse. But not only did I leave with clean neck and hands, I left with a clean record. "So we'll come and get you in a few weeks, and then you'll be well on your way."

"You're not annoyed then?"
"About what?"
"The indoor barbeque."
"Ah no, you boys are alright - just sort me out a burger for the drive back and it's all dandy. You lads want a lift home or summat?"

As I wrapped up the last of the burgers for Glen and sent he and Eddie through the doors (poor Glen), I let out a sigh of relief that went right through to my very core; Henry did likewise. Before I had the chance to truly relax, however, I saw Christie's car stop, and Eddie pile out of it before the car zoomed away into the night. I wondered what had happened in that short space of time that could get Eddie evicted from Glen's car. I was constructing hypothetical scenarios right until Eddie got in through the front door, his front and crotch absolutely plastered in vomit.

"Henry, can you be the car?"

But before Henry could answer, his mobile phone went off, serenading us all with a spine-chilling version of Hey Macarena, the ringtone specifically designated to Glen Christie. As Henry vanished, apologizing profusely, I set about arranging a taxi for Eddie.

Alcoholiday.

2007-06-01T17:15:00.000Z

You know, just between you and me, sometimes I do wonder if the company knows the truth about this blog, and the truth about yours truly. Whether my continuous attempts to distort my identity and the identity of the pub have been in vain as the upper echelons of "management" follow my actions to the letter and exact their revenge upon me accordingly, sending wave upon wave of actors to both put me through my paces and provide me with an almost endless supply of material. Whether the company has a file an inch thick, keeping track of my every movement, keeping a close eye on who is who, what events are being described, much the same way most people can be traced to within a couple of feet by interpol.

"Sir, he's written another entry," says a henchman as he enters the chairman's office, complete with a stack of papers containing my latest chapter. "This time concerning the headquarters!"
"Good, good," cackles an ominous Bond-villain type as he strokes a siamese cat with his hook and adjusts his eyepatch. "Send the minibus of primary school teachers! And make sure they all say the chips taste like shit!" And lo, not two days later, I am met with a surprisingly belligerent group of educators who all scream blue murder about our (perfectly good, I might add) chips.

Whether or not I am actually being watched by the company I will probably never know, at least not until the court summons comes crashing through the door or I am vanished by a group of hired goons on my way home one night - although I must assume I am being punished for something, as despite my best efforts, my ruthless efficiency, my brutal ID checking policy and my willingness to come into work no matter what the situation, I have once again been relegated to the morning shift for the week. Which, this week, meant one thing - I would be manning the bar for the Bank Holiday Monday lunchtime slot. Try as I might, I just couldn't shift that shift - and rightly so; no matter what the bribe, what I offered to people in exchange for my Bank Holiday Monday freedom, it was something nobody in their right mind would want. It's like going around and saying "hey, do you want this gigantic, back-breakingly cumbersome bag of crap? I'll swap it for your small, manageable bag of crap." Negotiating from weakness - never an easy prospect at the best of times.

"Why do you want to get rid of it? You're on double time." A good question.
"Well swap with me then." Then comes the look of suspicion, then the look of horror as they remember previous bank holiday Monday lunchtimes.
"Get fucked."

Fair enough. I can't - and don't - blame them.

Bank holiday Monday for everybody else is a bit of free time, a day off work, a day to spend as they please - go to the park, the pub, whatever. Unless, of course, you happen to work in the pub, because then your bank holiday is spent beating back the hordes of fair-weather punters with a stick as everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. If everyone's drinking bitter, the barrel will run dryer than the Sahara, bringing about the lengthy process of changing one barrel for another and disposing of the slack that lurks at the bottom of each fresh receptacle. If everyone's playing darts, the bulb above the oche will go. If everyone's after a bowl of chips, there'll be a potato famine - that kind of thing. Everyone sits outside, whether they're smoking or not, so while it appears quiet on the inside, there are dozens of people outside freezing their knackers off because if it's not raining, they have to sit outside (a very British compulsion, it would seem - the undying urge to be outside regardless of whether or not it's actually a good idea). Then they decide they want food - although they don't decide in dribs and drabs; a collective urge grabs them as they lurch inside like a gang of mindless zombies, menus in hand, trying to order their own weight in food. But of course, everybody has questions - now, seeing as we don't have waiters or waitresses at this time of day, I've had to get my waiter bit down to a fine art. I mean, it really has to be seen to be believed - in the time it takes me to get across to a table I can remove any and all trace of bile and disgust from my voice and body language and really give the old politeness thing an earnest shot. But before I can take the food out, the people first have to decide what they would like, and obviously that can lead to a series of questions as to the content of some of our dishes, and seeing as most of the time I'm the head waiter by default, all questions fall on me. From the Scotsmen who came in demanding - not asking, demanding - grilled ham and mustard sandwiches while grilling me on the origin of the ham to the old woman who wanted to know if she could have the sausage and mash without the sausage and with extra mash, it would seem that our menu falls spectacularly short of the expectations of our main clientele; the mentally disturbed (and the Scottish). Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't ask questions when going for a meal, of course I'm not - because some people have legitimate dietary concerns or they don't like this, that, or the other, but if you need to know what kind of oil we use in our fryers to the point where I need to go and look at the name of the brand on the tin (all because of your asinine theory that chips fried in certain oils taste better than others - they're fried chips, we buy them in bags so huge that it requires several men to lift them; this isn't Fugu), you're obviously in the wrong place.

So, as per usual, the light coming through the windows was obliterated by the shadows of the walking unfed, stumbling in from outside to order food by the bucketful, undoubtedly armed with questions so specific they would make Magnús Magnússon spin in his grave like a rotisserie chicken. As I braced myself for the worst, the staff door swung open and Christine barged in. A surprise to say the least.

"Right, I've done all the line checks for this week - is there much food going?" I had forgotten Christine was here, hidden away in the stock house counting bags of crisps; she is helping Henry with his stock keeping and the like, as she did at her previous pub, and had now become tired of that and decided to do a bit of front-of-house.
"Probably."
"Right, you do the bar, I'll do the food."

And just like that, I was given a reprieve. We both fielded as many questions as we could about the food and sent twenty meals through before instructing everybody else to wait twenty minutes. As the protests were muffled by the staff door slamming behind us, we got to work helping Elaine cook it all. As the least experienced chef in the room, I was assigned the job of cooking the easiest meal of the lot - the soup starter. No problem. After being ejected from the kitchen for leaving the metal spoon in the soup upon putting it in the microwave, I was left to man the bar; while it wasn't ridiculous, it was enough to keep me going until I heard an awful racket from the corridor - I went to investigate only to find Christine trying to kick the staff door clear off its hinges with five plates in each hand.

"Get the doors." I went through and wedged each door open, providing a clear path to the outside area.

"Do you want me to bring some through?"
"Nah, it's alright, I've got another five and that's it." I wasn't entirely convinced - she seemed stressed, and I thought it might be an idea to at least offer a hand.
"Well do you want me to -"
"Honestly, it's under control. I live and breathe this shit." And I believed her. The poor woman was obviously disturbed. As somebody who has survived a few years behind one of the single most financially lucrative spots in the whole of Wales, she certainly seemed to thrive on pressure, be it real or imagined. I was once like her; dashing from customer to customer, at some points literally sprinting between drinks. That was before the now-canonical Christmas Eve debacle, during which I was blessed with an epiphany; the drinks will only pour as fast as their respective nozzles will allow, there is no point getting stressed out about something as trivial as pouring somebody a drink. But considering her almost superhuman abilities, she still hadn't turned her stress dials down to country pub levels - Superman toned it down to live as Clark Kent; he didn't go flying to work, snapping pencils as he sat around with his pants over his trousers. No, he put on a pair of glasses and conceded that polite society would not allow pants over trousers as he walked to work. Although after a few meals, not even kryptonite could have calmed Christine down. My customer service statement has a lot in common with jazz music - relaxed, easy going, perpetuated by people with no real ambition in life. But Christine was, by her very way of being, making me as anxious, stressed and jumpy as she was - she was the Slayer to my Dave Brubeck Quartet, the Metallica to my Mogwai, and I didn't like it one little bit. I try very hard to bring an overall ambient atmosphere to the workplace and in she comes, kicking the door open, running around and totally laying waste to my attempts to put a calm face on stress-free productivity.

Not only that, but if somebody's running around like a lunatic, it instantly makes anybody else in the vicinity look comatose by comparison; I could literally see some people thinking "look at that lazy bastard, letting that poor woman run around like that". But here's the thing - I was doing just as much as she was. Just because she had an extremely physically exhausting way of getting from A to B didn't mean she was getting there faster than I was, as often she wasn't. So while she was jumping around like a flea on speed trying to juggle fifty plates at once, I was left to collect glasses, wash them, and then fill them with overpriced beer and half-baked conversation. Conversation is an optional service we provide; it costs nothing and can be requested at any time. However, some people talk with you, and some talk at you; and as I saw a gigantic, vinyl-decal-plastered van skid to a halt in the car park, I knew those services would be put through a rigorous test until it was time for me to go home, as for the next few hours I would have to juggle the usual requirements of the job with the added burden of listening to Frank.

Frank comes in on the weekends with a wallet full of fifties, a shaved head (which, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that his hairline is retreating back across his head faster than you can say sacré bleu) and what he perceives to be impeccable dress sense - Frank is obsessed, to the very core, with the way others perceive him; and when he discovers that you, in fact, don't spend hours in Marks & Spencers making sure your shirts match your shoes, he will advise you - in one way, he is a Stella-drinking loudmouth who fancies himself as Vinnie Jones (case in point - not three weeks ago, I was been asked for my two cents in a discussion on the favoured method of "nutting some twat because they grabbed your missus' arse") and in quite another, he is the pub's equivalent of Trinny and Susannah, with his scathing observations coming in the cunning guise of some two-bit bricklayer who doesn't know his arse from his elbow. And the bank holiday is no exception to this. One pint of Stella in, and I turn around to see Frank looking me up and down.

"You alright, Frank?"
"How tall are you, fella?" I tell him - I wouldn't say I'm freakishly tall (parents on bus stops don't tell their children to stop pointing and staring at the gigantic man, for instance), but I'm tall enough that it doesn't matter where I stand at concerts, that kind of tall.
"Yeah, you need some new threads - that shirt's doing nothing for you. You need something to accentuate your height." I let out a chuckle - was that humour from Frank? My gosh, I think it was. Either that, or - nope, maybe not then.
"Frank, this is the company uniform," I said, pointing at the gigantic logo emblazoned on the shirt.
"Sure, sure," - from a shake of the head and a raise of the eyebrow, I could see that he evidently disagreed with me; the company obviously provided me with an Armani suit, which I promptly burned before stealing my current attire from the back of some company-sponsored tramp (that's why I thought he was joking; the company logo couldn't be more obvious if it let out a high-pitched siren and had a flashing light around it). "Have you got £200?"
"What?" I almost took this as a sleight - I know that we're famously ill-compensated for our efforts but really.
"Come out with me, I'll sort you out." I dreaded to think what Frank had in mind. "£200 and you'll have a lovely bit of wardrobe going on, a few nice suits, some decent shoes, the works." I've actually got some half-decent clothes, surprisingly, but...
"I wouldn't be able to wear them to work, Frank - do you dress like that when you go to work?" A rhetorical question - Frank will often pop in between jobs in the week in his work attire - an aging, stained football strip sponsored by a company that has long since gone into liquidation, and trousers that are now primarily made of cement and plaster instead of cloth - which couldn't be less glamorous if it was simply a burlap pair of bundies tastefully offset by a waste bag waistcoat.
"I dress smart when I'm going to give estimates. That's why I'm a success - first impressions count." He even left a pause so that you could mentally complete the sentence; "that's why I'm a success... and you're a loser." Burn.
"How do you know I'm not a snappy dresser outside of all this? How do you know that when the hops-stained rags are thrown off at the end of the day, I don't turn into Raul Julia?" Don't ask me why, but I've always considered Raul Julia (especially as Gomez Addams) to be the height of suave. Needless to say, should I ever make my millions I will spend almost all my times in a smoking jacket, in a rusty old mansion playing the Street Fighter games continuously.
"Who?" Ugh. "Look, first impressions are worth a million dollars. £200's worth it if it gets you the client's undivided attention." I think Frank sometimes forgets that around here, it is very much the other way around - the clientele here tug at my line of sight like a pack of hyperactive children, I don't need to "wow" anybody or twist their arm to get them to buy beer.

This is another part of Frank's 'bit' - business tips. Doesn't matter what your business is, Frank's undoubtedly done it a hell of a lot better than you ever will, and he'll be good enough to impart his wisdom upon you whether you like it or not.

"What do you want out of life, mate?" He asks me this every couple of weeks, so after a few months of getting the same advice on how to become a writer for a living (I decided against following Frank's advice - "write a book and pay for it yourself, and if it doesn't sell in the shops, don't act like you're too good to get on down the boot sales", he said, no doubt reminiscing about Dan Brown's incredibly successful car boot sale tour the prior year - not only because it was advice so wretchedly hideous it's a wonder I wasn't turned to stone by even listening to it, but because we later received a cheque from Frank in which he promised to pay us eghtie [sic] pounds and seventy four pense [sic], leading me to believe his much-hyped autobiography was very much a work in progress) I began to get his advice on more "specialist careers" - and, to his credit, he had advice for all of them.

"Lion taming? Awfully dangerous game that; you need to get your reflexes up to scratch." At this point, he threw a very small box of matches at me as a means of testing my skills against a 500lb lion. He missed by a country mile. "Yeah, good. You're on your way. Now, you want to start writing to the circuses, because let me tell you, I'd imagine they're always on the lookout for lion tamers."

Stuff like that. Of course the advice always comes back to "how to wow the client", and this week was no exception.

"All you have to do is just sit there and listen to what they have to say," hypothesized Frank, presumably in an attempt to wow the judges of the National Hypocrite Of The Year awards, who - unbeknownst to me - must have been in the room at the time. "Let them have their say, and then take that and tell them what you're going to do. Just totally wash over them, and they'll take what you say as red because they think you've taken what they've said on board."

But before Frank could go on to tell me about all the old women he smarmily seduces in an attempt to win more business for his extremely suss construction racket, Christine emerged from the kitchen and approached me, clutching me from the jaws of Frank's 'tips'.

"Well, it's all sorted now, forty meals and no hiccups - I've got to get back to my food stock now, there's a few dishes left to do so if you get a minute, you couldn't give them a rinse before putting them in the dishwasher, could you?" An extremely reasonable request, I'm sure you'll agree; literally all I had to do was turn the tap on full blast and literally powerwash the blobs of sauce, puddles of OAP saliva and lumps of undigested mash off the plates before bunging them in the dishwasher and forgetting about them, a process that takes all of three minutes. As I went to go, Frank called me back.

"See, I'd take that as... disrespect." Frank had ingested a few Stellas by this point; they don't call it Wifebeater for nothing, and seeing as Frank doesn't have a wife to go home and clout to compensate for his shortcomings, he instead commits vulgar assaults on the intelligence of anyone and everyone within earshot of his ludicrious assertions. "Let me tell you summat, some bloke disrespected my missus once." His 'missus', of course, refers to this one poor lass named Amanda - about whom we all know an almost stalkerish amount of information thanks to Frank's long-winded monologues - whom Frank 'dated' for three months, four years ago. Here's why that relationship didn't work:

First date: The old favourite, the UCI - Amanda wanted to see light-hearted Myers outing Cat In The Hat; Frank wanted to see two-hour shitfest Matrix Revolutions. Like a true gentleman, Frank paid for Amanda to go and see Cat In The Hat - on her own - while he went to watch 120 action-packed minutes of pseudo-spiritual arsewater with a few fights thrown in for good measure. He also gave her £20 for a taxi, as her film finished half an hour after his and he couldn't be bothered waiting for her.

Second date: Badminton. Frank "battered" her 7-0, and had to think very carefully about inviting her to join his team.

Third date: Amanda procured two tickets to see The Woman In Black at a Swansea theatre, a chilling and masterfully-executed bit of theatre that people from all walks of life can enjoy; Frank instead went to see Matrix Revolutions again because he didn't understand it the first time.

Relationship over. Anyway...

"Some bloke disrespected my missus once, so you know what I did?"
"Took him to see Matrix Revolutions?" Frank never listens to anyone but himself so you can say pretty much whatever you want to him. He's the proverbial gorilla with bananas in his ears.
"I found out where he worked - he worked at MFI, right?"
"Right."
"So I went up there and I fucking smacked him one, right in the paint aisle." I could picture it, and for some reason I found the picture extremely disheartening (if it was indeed true) - this man had probably done nothing, but because of Frank's idea that everyone but him is some sort of sexual predator, he got beaten black and blue between the tins of lavender and mint. "I thought I'd get picked up by CCTV and be arrested... nope. Nothing."
"What, are you suggesting I hit her?"
"No, just... I dunno, fuck about with her car or something."
"But how did she disrespect me?"
"Interfering with the discussions of men."

Solid advice there - women belong in the kitchen, men belong in the bar with the right to "fuck about with your car" if you don't like it. This may be another reason why Frank's 'missus' wasn't his missus for very long.

"Who the hell was that?" Christine, it would seem, is yet to meet the full cavalcade of scumbags this place has to offer. I do feel bad for her - while I can piss and moan all I like about being moved from the night shift from the morning shift, she went from running one of the country's busiest establishments to festering away behind the scenes of one of the company's "development" gaffs, a place that more than likely will not still be in business in fifty years, as the regulars either move away or die and the demand for an old-fashioned country pub eventually fades to nothing while her old pub, The Cargo Hatch, will more than likely go from strength to strength, with or without her.
"Oh, that's just Frank."
"I don't think it can get any worse - it can't, can it?"
"Nah." I didn't want to tell her about Lloyd until it was absolutely necessary. She can discover him (and his profoundly worrying theories regarding religion, homosexuality and the impending judgement day that has been "nigh" for as long as he's been coming to the pub) for herself, just like everyone else did.

As Christine counted the very last of the salted nuts and I powershowered the last of the accumulated pool of dribble and vinegar from the soiled stack of plates, Christine was relieved of her duties by Henry as I returned to the bar. That is, until she came back in, face crumpled up.

"What's the matter?"
"Has one of you got a footpump or something? One of my tyres has gone flat."

I swung round, finger ready pointed, but Frank had gone - I went out to see Christine's car (obviously Christine's - it was the only other car in the staff parking zone, and Henry's car is a bright red Punto) slightly depressed on one side with an emptied pint of Stella on the adjacent bench. Fantastic.

"Here you go," Henry mumbled as he handed me a small footpump that looked like it could barely power an accordian. Noting my disgust, he answered my question before I could ask it - "I've got a bad back. I'll watch the bar. Here's those papers you wanted."

As I got to work with Henry's footpump, I actually welcomed the chance to have some time away from the bar - for the first time all day, I too was free to sit outside and have some time to myself. Time I used to really put my writing skills to good use - filling out Frank's company ban report.

All Along The Watchtower.

2007-05-25T13:25:00.001Z

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.

Notice Of Eviction.

2007-05-18T19:21:00.000Z

As I made my bleary-eyed way to the pub yesterday morning (I'm sorry, but if you expect me to do anything remotely taxing before 1PM, you're in for a disappointment), I did something that has been happening more and more these days - I went to open the door only to find it has been locked. This invariably means that Eddie is in - everyone else leaves the door slightly ajar, which says "staff can come in, but not you" in the way only an acute angle can (this is a similar trick operated by shops who open their shutters a little bit in the mornings to allow the staff in, operating on the flimsy assumption that nobody would dare get on their belly and wriggle their way into a not-quite-ready Clinton's Cards), and Frances leaves the thing so widely open that people naturally assume we're open, only for her to turn them away as if they are somehow mentally deficient (after all, who just goes ahead and assumes a shop or business is open just because the doors are completely open and all the lights are on? I ask you...).

While the locked door brings some good news - Eddie's in - it also brings with it a dilemma; I have to log onto the tills at least a quarter of an hour before the doors are flung open to the public, and it was already twenty minutes and counting (I'm meant to be there half an hour beforehand, but it's not as if you open the doors to gangs of people just itching to pay over the odds for sub-par cask ale in a pub that's either a bit too hot or a bit too cold, in seemingly perpetual twilight and hiring people like me and Eddie to run the show). So all I have to do is call the pub and get Eddie to let me in. Oh, no, my mobile's in my other trousers. Right, so I've got to knock on the door. An exercise in futility, seeing as both doors are a few inches thick and made of extremely hard wood. So a few knuckle-smashingly useless knocks transpire with no sign of life from indoors. Right.

Now most normal people at this point would have decided to go home and get their phone, ring Eddie on the way back and have him waiting with the door open like a hotel doorman, but I'm not a morning person - evident from the fact that my next logical step was to break in. Brilliant, I thought - this'll look great at my development meeting next week. "So dedicated he will literally break into his place of work." Knowing the place like the back of my hand, I knew that almost every concealed entrance is guarded by some rather large fencing - however, I also know that on the other side of that fencing are some large dumpsters. So I simply dragged a bench up to the fence and decided to jump on three. What didn't help was adjusting my body at two and half and seeing that the bins were, in fact, my side of the fence.

As I hobbled in through the cellar's loading doors, I saw Eddie casting a cautionary glance at the rotas on the wall. The rotas are the dictatorship - as sympathetic as the place usually is to holiday requests (in my time here I have not once been denied time off, nor have I seen others be denied it - it doesn't exactly take a lot of people to deal with our average number of customers, which is currently hovering just below the twenty mark, although there have been times where I haven't even poured enough of our dishwater house ale to cover my own paltry salary for the hours I was there), this thing decides when you're here, when you're not, what nights you can have to yourself; this beer-spattered sheet of A4 controls you and eventually has more say-so in what you get up to than you do. So Eddie had probably been dealt a duff shift or the like, and would invariably try and palm it off on me, the sponge. I decided to break the ice.

"Whatever shift you've got you're not palming it off on me you fucking sponge."
Just kidding.

"Alright mate," I croaked as I fumbled my keys onto the tills. "You left the front door locked again."
"Hmm?"
"What are you looking at?" I snatched the rota from his hand. I was expecting something to keep Eddie in this state of near-catatonia, but I saw nothing of note. Slowly, a finger invaded my line of sight and rigorously tapped the bottom of the rota - "list of active staff". At the bottom of the rota is a legend which dictates what the initials stand for; Frances is FB, Henry is HG, and down at the bottom of the list was the name of our latest hire; CD - Christine Dwight.
"So? A new starter. We have a new -" then Eddie tapped the date; she was coming in at 1PM. This meant only one thing.
"So we've got to train her then..." But this wasn't what was bothering him. "And? Have you met her or what?"
"No."
"So what then?"
"C'mon man, look - the men to women ratio is now 1. C'mon." I was evidently not getting something here. "I'll tell you something man, all those women's lib groups have the companies running scared. There's all this equality in the workplace bullshit - fuck that." I certainly wasn't getting that. I threw my jacket off and left it in a heap in the cutlery cupboard. Eddie followed me out into the bar as I put the nozzles on the taps.

"I'm telling you now dude, we're for the jump. I guarantee you, within six months, we'll be the only blokes working here."
"So what if we are? It's not like they're going to give us a sex change operation or anything. Edwina."
"I'm not kidding dude, this is it." And if by "it" he meant "preposterously gigantic servings of ill-thought-out bullshit", he was spot on.

While I wasn't annoyed for quite the same reasons as Eddie, I was still a little exasperated at the thought of dragging yet another person, kicking and screaming, into this trade. Training new staff is, without exception, a long and laborious process that latches onto your brain and devours both your mental and physical energy - I often wonder if it would be easier to get a job in a call centre, if only because the training would probably be something along the lines of "answer the phone and then pass the call to another building when you get bored or in trouble". Every other job I've had, the training has been quick and painless, as all the information you need to get by is shot into your head with one swift round - "dodge this person, that person, and the routes to the staffroom that aren't on camera are here, here and here, table football league is Tuesday evenings and this week's password for the vending machine should be written on the shoes stockroom door by ten tomorrow morning, the Bungster hasn't had a chance to have a look at it yet", as I was informed at my role of seasonal sales assistant at a high-street department store - but training people up in a pub is like trying to beat a whale to death with a cotton swab; you try for weeks until you realize it'd be much easier to just get in its mouth and let it choke on you, killing the pair of you in the process, by which time the whale has since gotten bored and wandered off (often to attempt to put the tap into a keg without knowing how, resulting in a beautiful fountain of profit splashing to the ground around your feet as they realize that the rest of the plugs have caps on them for a reason). I was definitely a difficult person to train, as everybody is the first few weeks - the feeling of walking a tightrope doesn't go away for a few months.

We flung the doors open to the general public to little fanfare, as per usual, and Eddie and I got back to the more pressing issue of throwing a tennis ball across the bar. This kind of thing always used to annoy me - whenever I would go to PC World or whatever to see a couple of pastel-plastered pre-pubescent pricks kicking a box around the Mac aisle, I would become quite indignant; how dare these jumped-up little arseholes amuse themselves in front of the customers, boo on them; I would hiss and throw Ethernet cables at them before hounding for their resignations as if they were Blunkett and Blair. However, I have since realized that workplace games are the tits, and I became overwhelmed with a strange sense of elation when somebody left a tennis ball here. So for the last four months, Eddie and I open up shop, go to the ice machine, lift up the service hatch and retrieve our tennis ball. We then return to normal operations - Henry has long since stopped chastising us for the tennis ball - we have never broken anything, and we can see customers coming a mile away; all we need is three seconds notice and we can both be stood behind the bar, tennis ball hidden, ready to serve a customer, who will never, ever know what an absolute pack of jokers are in charge of this pub. And it's important we maintain this facade for as long as we can; as much as both of us may gripe about this job and long for the day we can smash Dickie Dixon's slobber-rimmed pint glass over his flat, bloated head, it's important to both of us that we at least appear to be doing our jobs properly until such time as we can fulfill our wildest fantasies and lay the pain down on Dickie.

1PM came and went, without sight nor sound of customer or Christine. This is always a good first impression to make if you're starting a new job. In any other job, this is considered rude, unprofessional, and is possibly a blight on your record for all eternity (or cause enough to sack you if you're, say, a brain surgeon or a fireman), but in this job it's a particularly bad idea as it gives Eddie's absurd ideas an opportunity to ferment, his brain concocting a more grotesque caricature of you with every empty, hollow minute that sails between his ears.

"Maybe she's decided not to bother." After a few minutes, this reasonable explanation transforms, gets angry and turns green; morphing with a rip and a bulge into the Lou Ferrigno of explanations...
" Maybe she heard that we were just too fucking tough." Eddie has this really weird view of our stance at work; because we're the first port of call in times of trouble, he thinks we're some sort of Welsh take on Starsky and Hutch. While I admit we have done some serious time behind that bar - Christmas Eve being the benchmark against which all busy nights and understaffed farces shall be measured - we are certainly not a crimefighting duo who come along on silver horses to save the day and round up the posse. How I wish we were a crimefighting duo who come along on silver horses to save the day, but this is not the case and the sooner Eddie comes to terms with this the better.
"Or maybe her car stalled, Eddie," I corrected, throwing the tennis ball back to him. "Besides, unless somebody's told her, we can't assume that she knows what a pair of losers we are."
"That's true enough." Then a thunderous screech came from outside; a car ground to a halt as Eddie hid the tennis ball. I leaped over the bar and assumed my "professional" look - matter-of-fact expression, arms at sides, leaning on the back bar. Pure class, pal. However, none of this would be needed, as I could see the driver stumble out of the car looking like some sort of psychopath. Of course.

Christine strolled through the front door and as she slammed the large oak slab into its frame behind her, I was hit with the very frank realization that the training process could be quite a long one. Snapping gum open-mouthed as she sauntered in, Christine cast a very distinct impression - with her powder-blue hooded tracksuit (from Fifty Cent's notorious "G Unit" line, a line of clothing so unabashedly drenched in hip-hop stereotypia that I'm amazed they don't come complete with a keyring for the keys to your Jeep limousine and a wallclock to wear around your neck) and undoubtedly expensive handbag (you know it must have been expensive because it's one of those ones that is so comically small you'd be hard pressed to fit what little change you have left from the purchase of the bag into it). Christine is the kind of person you see on BBC news stock footage, all dressed up to the nines in the best outfit Primark has to offer and so much foundation on her face you could build an extremely sturdy house upon it, struggling to stand as she keels over a bin, vomiting up four hours' worth of hard liquor and a few kebabs as a dour-voiced presenter laments our binge-drinking culture (she is then the person you see on YouTube or other sites of that ilk, represented by poorly-lit blocks of colour from the lense of a mobile phone and with such poor audio integrity that you get the impression the whole thing was filmed underwater, starting a fight with a bronze statue on Queen Street - the video, entitled "DRUNK GIRL FIGHTS STATUE LOL", will amass a million views over the weekend as the internet takes another step towards ruining the universe). The kind of person who doesn't have a single story to relate that doesn't begin with "the other night I got absolutely hammocked", or some other absolutely absurd codeword for getting so drunk you have trouble remembering the difference between fingers and thumbs. While all this may seem like a particularly horrible assumption to make of somebody based on nothing more than their looks, now seems as good a time as any to tell you the first words to come out of her mouth.

"Sorry I'm late boys, I got absolutely fucking cemented last night. It was my leaving do last night from my last job and we got pure bricked."

Evidently the term "plastered" has run its course (and yet I sit and wait patiently for the day it becomes socially acceptable to say "ugh, I got absolutely crazy paved the other night", although I fear this is off the agenda for as long as Crazy Paving itself is considered out of fashion), and from the looks of things, Eddie's patience went with it, as no sooner had he made his judgement, he decided to excuse himself for a cigarette. Christine pulled up a chair next to me in the bar, and I thought it might be a good idea to see just how many times I'd have to repeat myself before going home at 3:30.

"So have you worked in a pub before, Christine?"
"Oh yeah, big time - busier than this as well." Now, in my experience, if you get people who claim they're used to "way busier pubs than this", those people usually wind up calling you on your mobile when you're at a gig because there's three people waiting and they've run out of slimline tonic. I'd rather they were honest.

"No, I've never worked in a pub before. At some point today, I will try and pour bitter the same way you would pour water out of a tap into a cup - I won't ask why the tap is shaped like that, just like you didn't on your first day; nobody would assume you have to put the nozzle in the bottom of the glass, that would be madness. I have never seen a man throw up down his own trousers. I have never been doused in warm, stale beer by a clumsy glass collector or a slippery drip tray. I have not once had to pour three drinks at once while an extremely drunk woman brings a half-full wine bottle back to the bar, insisting on a replacement at the top of her winelogged lungs and asserting that we had, in fact, served it to her half-full, and she hasn't drunk half of it, deary me no. I don't know what it's like to work in a fishtank, thousands of dead eyes staring at you day in, day out, expecting more and more as each drink goes hurtling towards their stomach, faster than they can ever hope to metabolize it, resulting in them crying on your shoulder about how their wives no longer love them and you've always been, like, their best friend, man. I don't know what the fines are for serving alcohol to minors, nor do I know how to spot a police sting operation. I don't know the difference between a firkin and a barrel. I don't know where the ice machine is, and I didn't know you have to clean beer lines at least once a week. I know absolutely nothing about this trade, so for the next few months I will not interrupt you, or correct you, or interfere in an area about which I clearly know nothing just to get involved for the sake of it. My brain is clay, get molding."

That would be a pretty good opening line. But no, Christine has seen and done it all before - once we did a quick explanation of the system, we waited for a customer. The door opened - Eddie sauntered in, and the tennis ball championships resumed.

"Is this all you do all day? Throw a tennis ball around?" I gave this careful consideration. What else did we do? I was hard pushed to remember life BTB - before tennis ball.
"No, sometimes we go over the shops to buy a paper, Eddie has a few cigarettes, and sometimes we play darts."
"This is boring. This is so boring. I'm bored." Eddie threw me a look, then the tennis ball. "Isn't there anybody?"
"No," Eddie said sharply. "It's just us until 2PM. So I recommend getting good at one of the staff games, which are darts, throwing cards into a bucket and throwing beermats into the fire. Then work out your average and put it in the back of the diary." The back of the diary contains the Honour League - we have devised points systems for all the staff games, and if you do well (and you're honest about it) you can write your score down next to the name of the game in the back of the bookings diary. Everybody comes around to it in the end - originally offended by the notion that throwing things into the fire is a much-regarded and fiercely-protected staff sport, Frances is now the champion of Matfire, as she has a mean curling action.
"What about the tennis ball?"
"That's my tennis ball." Normally I wouldn't suggest getting so possessive over a dirty old tennis ball you found in the beer garden, but we had developed the tennis ball game over several months - we had bonded over it; it was how we whittled away the wasted hours. Much as people in the trenches would play cards and people on graveyard shifts as night guards and the like get good at bouncing coins, we were good at throwing a tennis ball back and for. We had even developed obstacles - all throws must bounce off a table, for example, or a wall. But before Christine could probe any further, she leaned in and did the unthinkable; she intercepted the tennis ball midair. Eddie put his hand out, but it was evidently not going to be returned until Christine's questions had been answered.

"Woman, don't -"
"When's food served?"
"This is ridi-" Christine aimed at the fire.

"All day."
"Really all day or pub all day?"
"Pub all day, we stop at 9 and if Elaine doesn't feel like cooking, 'sorry pal, the cook's off sick'."
"What are the busiest nights?"
"Darts on Monday, Quiz on Wednesday, Christmas Eve is a massacre."
"How many holidays do we get a year?"
"24 days to be taken before the first Friday of December."
"What's the rate of pay?"
"Shit."
"What's the manager really like?"
"A major improvement."
"Over what?"
"The last manager."
"Who's the worst customer?"
"Dickie Dixon."
"What time does he get here?"
"2PM."
"Where's the cellar?"
"Through there."

And with that, the hostage was returned and Christine advanced on the cellar. She was right to ask these questions, but to hold the tennis ball captive was a step too far.

Christine was, for the next hour, a whirlwind - going into everything, being ridiculously thorough in her self-guided tour, as Eddie gave me ominous nods from across the room; this, to him, was it; the brewery had folded to these supposed "women's groups" who have apparently been rallying night and day to get more women working in pubs, where sexual harassment is not really so much an issue as a form of entertainment (if any more people get into it we'll have to declare it on the license as an attraction - "come and make seedy innuendo and leer without shame at womens' tits! Every night, right here! Phwoar, that sounds a bit rude, doesn't it? All this and more!") and you can actually see the punters thinking with all their might, trying as hard as they can to concoct a credible, believable reason as to why the female staff need to give them their phone numbers ("what if I'm on the way here and I want to pre-order a pint? I'm not ringing the pub... I'm just not, now what's your number?") or just strip off ("it's getting awful hot in here... best get that shirt off love. I'll help you."). I'm sure Germaine Grier and the gang are just weeks away from a march outside Parliament, burning bras and bartowels in a symbolic gesture. I'm not saying women shouldn't work in this trade, not by a long shot; I just don't think this job is a suitable job for anyone, and I've got it easy, being a man and all (not a particularly manly man, but a man nonetheless; I have chopped down a tree and I have told somebody off in a queue for being out of order, both activities that require an absurd amount of testosterone to even consider) - working in this business is a hundred times harder if you're a woman.

Once she had finished probing into every little thing, gleaning every possible detail, 2PM came and went and we were joined by our first customers of the day.

"Right, fuck off, give me marks out of ten at the end."
"I'm sorry?"
"You two go and sit in the bar and see how I manage this."

Too perplexed to argue, Eddie and I filed out into the bar as Christine dealt with Peter and Gwyn - Bitter drinkers - and the one and only Richard Alexander Dixon. Dick Dixon, so good they named him twice.

"You're new, are you?" asked Peter in a voice so unabashedly monotonous it pulls you in by the scruff of your neck, and as you start to slip out of consciousness you begin to understand why he shuffles around the village like a passive observer to life, a zombie with no desire for flesh, just a mild addiction to extremely week beer. Christine yawned - everyone yawns the first time. That's how boring Peter's voice is.
"Yeah, I just moved here with my dad - he used to run the Cargo Hatch, I used to work the bar there."

Eddie nearly choked on the coffee that he had seemingly pulled out of thin air (Eddie would make an excellent magician - he can divert your attention from anything if it means less work for him, like not making me a cup of coffee). The Cargo Hatch is the company's main gaff in the heart of Cardiff; it has since amassed a sort of Excaliburesque quality among the managers, although no hyperbole or rumour is anywhere close to the truth of how much business that pub does. Maybe Christine is used to busier pubs after all; the last leaderboard I saw had the Cargo Hatch making an average of £92,000 a week. A gigantic, four-floor complex on one of Cardiff's busiest streets, The Cargo Hatch is where the company's bread is not only buttered, but dipped in caviar, gilded, and then polished to a nice golden shine with the back side of the original copy of The Mona Lisa. Christine isn't the person you see drunk on the grainy CCTV footage of Cardiff after all - she just looks it. She's actually far more likely to be the person you see talking to the BBC reporter about how the alcohol industry has been doing this, that and the other to stop binge drinking. Christine is not the effect, she is the cause, and in a big way if she's been running the Cargo Hatch.

"That's a busy pub."
"It is, ninety two grand a week is nothing to be sniffed at."

All of a sudden, Eddie and I's four grand keelhaul on Christmas Eve seemed pallid and sickly, like the Tiny Tim to her... well, all the Cratchett kids were in a pretty bad way, I suppose, but we didn't know busy any more. We hadn't scratched the surface of busy. We hadn't so much as looked at a picture of the paw of the lion of busy.

"Well, let's see if you can pull a pint," piped up Dixon from the back. Eddie and I went back to the tennis ball game - Christine had asked us not to meddle so meddle we certainly would not. Besides, we invented a new game; beermatball. Got a tennis ball and a table with corners? Pat the ball back and forth with whatever beermats you have to hand, trying to knock it over the edge of your opponent's end of the table while simultaneously defending it from falling into your lap. This could also work in an office or something, I suppose, but childlike behaviour from grown men is generally more acceptable in pub settings.

However, no sooner had we gotten the game into full swing, we had a streaker on the pitch - a pint of Best that was flatter than a steamrolled pancake. Where there is usually a disc of creamy froth on top, there was a strange puddle of bubbles that looked like a map of Australia in a sea of deep red ale.

"No thanks Dickie, I prefer Guinness." Eddie's a wind-up merchant, I'm more of a conflict dodger.
"I'll give you Dickie," retorted Richey, his face growing to a hideous shade of crimson out of a combination of anger and I presume embarrassment at the fact he had just said "I'll give you Dickie" to two young men. "Stop sniggering. See that? Where's the head on that? Because I don't see a head on that. Now look. I don't care where you got this girl, I don't care how much she raked in. Get me a decent pint or I'll tell the manager you boys are fucking around on the job."

With this, we got up and filed behind the bar - not due to threats of managerial intervention, as anything Dickie says to Henry is either flat out ignored or met with raucous laughter from Henry before the door is slammed in Dickie's face. We got up because in the minds of the connoisseurs such as Dixon, paying for the company's "premium" product automatically means you're paying the alcoholic equivalent of BUPA healthcare, and should therefore be served by a veteran pint-puller, not the new kid on the block; he can say what he likes - and often does - of Eddie and myself; he can say we're stupid, lazy, incompetent, no-hopers who could well be those queers he read about in the paper (I can assure you we're not, but this doesn't stop Dickie pulling his pint to his chest whenever we're near, as if he may catch the gay from leaving his pint exposed around them; apparently it's an airborne disease). This behaviour wasn't entirely unexpected - everybody here has served an apprenticeship on the taps. If you want the hallowed task of slinging beer for a living, you've got to work hard for the respect of people you despise.

"Christine, that was amazing - but we've had a problem with -"
"What? The cask stuff? C'mon, we didn't do any of that at the Cargo Hatch, it was all alcopops and lagers. You think our demographic were chucking the bitter down their necks?"
"No, probably not," I began. "But our demographic is very fond of it. And I mean really fond. And that pint of best went out without a head on it."
"What, and he's complained?" I could sense a storm brewing, so I attempted to turn the ship around.
"Not complained, just suggested that -"
"Right, which one is it, the gray haired one with the sideburns?"
"Yes, I -"
"Oi, you, c'mere." Nope, no use trying to turn the ship around now. The iceberg got up and approached the bar, ready for trouble, as I resigned myself to going down with the ship, only to be cast as a grossly inaccurate lunatic who went bezerk when the film is made ninety years from now. "Got a problem, have you?"
"Listen to me, wench," - yeah, that's something I don't think I've mentioned before; Dickie calls women "wench", without sarcasm or irony (he also has a bad habit of burning witches and carrying a pitchfork around town) - "You may well come from some fucking ditch in the city but this isn't the city. You've come out here to a pub where the taps are to be respected. You're not pulling a pint for me until you learn some skills, and some fucking manners." Strong words indeed.
"No, I'm not. Nor are they. Enjoy that pint, Dickie." Richey looked like he was going to pop - my head fell into my hands. "It'll be your last for a while. You're banned for two weeks?"
"I'm sorry? You don't have the power to -"
"Staff have the right to ban whoever they please without consulting the manager. Get out." Eddie was grinning from ear to ear; I had gone past the nanosecond of euphoria and was already feeling the icy comedown that would inevitably occur upon Dickie's return. Dickie, looking like a sausage that had been pumped up with an industrial-strength tyre inflator, smashed his pint on the floor and ran out, muttering, wild-eyed and windswept. I did briefly wonder if he was going to get a gun, but a squealing wheel and a motor disappearing out of earshot suggested if he was going to retrieve a gun, he wouldn't be back for a few minutes anyway.

"I'm going to go and file the temporary ban report."
"There's temporary ban reports?"
"Oh yeah, I'll go through them with you later. Back in a second."

I went to get the mop and bucket, but Eddie stopped me - he came back, still giggling with glee as he gladly swabbed the deck of the good ship No Dicks (wait, no...). He was now Christine's biggest fan - while I joined his elation temporarily, I had to veto his suggestion that Dickiebaiting be added to the back of the diary.

Somebody That I Used To Know.

2007-05-11T08:37:00.000Z

Darts night is a big thing for our pub - we are in a league with approximately a hundred other pubs in Wales and England, and every year there are regional matches where every pub will play the surrounding pubs in the area to decide who the cream of the pub dart crop is in the UK. The league tables posted on the wall next to the oche are a myriad of colours, numbers and abbreviations, which - while they may look daunting and impenetrable to the uninitiated - hold the key to where the true darting talent lies in the area. So every Monday, the whole pub has to grind to a halt to accommodate the darts league, because it is by far the most consistent revenue stream; we provide some supplementary grub free of charge, as every pub in the league is not obliged but encouraged to do also; almost every pub does because they'll make that money back three or four times over in the increased drinks sales for the night.

So at 8pm on a Monday night, if the team are playing at home, everything stops - the television is zapped into standby, the speakers on the walls are silenced, and the darts boys commence their rituals. At first it merely appears to be a competition as to who can look the most ridiculous - darts shirts galore, grown men positively dripping polyester, as darts cases and numerous performance-related placebos hit the tables.

"See these? They're called Robin Hood X-Tech 9000 Ultraflights - they're 9% straighter than standard flights, and they improve accuracy by several millimetres. They were only £12 for the three." Of course, they then proceed to knacker the flights by shearing them with another dart. I buy darts flights in packs of thirty, which cost me £5. I have been playing darts on-and-off for a year and I'm approximately halfway through the first of the three bags I bought. The initial £30 I spent on all my darts equipment - e.g. my darts and spare flights - is still going strong (even if the same cannot be said for my game; although that said, if you need somebody to hit those 26s, first and every time, I'm very much your man).
"Yeah? Well get a load of these stems - they're made of draft copies of the Bible, signed by Jesus himself. They cost a million pounds each, but apparently stuff that Jesus has touched makes your trebles more consistent." That sort of thing - this ridiculous competition to see who can spend the most money with the least visible benefit. As you may expect, the people who buy the X-Tech 9000 flights and the stems made of papyrus are not only the members of the team who have more money than sense, they are also the members of the team that aren't very good darts players, and would rather piss their money away on faddy gimmicks than actually get down the pub and put the hours in on the board. As with anything worthwhile, you can't buy success, and the same is true of darts. Although the day the "180 every time" darts are invented, somebody will become very, very rich (and then thoroughly despised by all and sundry for tainting the game of darts forever).

So once the team have been allowed adequate time to practice, the opposing team turns up - they are then allowed a brief time to get warmed up before battle commences. The matches are, in order, four singles matches, two doubles matches, and two fours matches; the averages from the previous week's games dictate who plays in which game (the top four scorers from the week before take the singles matches respectively - this way, both teams are playing their strengths and you're playing more or less your "equivalent"). Then some food and drinks, followed by a few friendlies before the away team goes home and the home team winds down with the remaining food and a few games. The points are then telephoned around all the other participating pubs so they can keep their league tables up to date. It's all taken very, very seriously - the whole thing is propped up independently by people who are willing to work to make it happen, so the pubs are equally serious about it. And rightly so. In fact, in the past we have actually had to eject people for the sake of the dart's team - a group of people came to the pub one night and decided to entertain themselves on the dart board; when the dart team asked them to move along so they could prepare for the forthcoming game, the group said no. After a minor fracas, the group were asked to leave; had they failed to comply with the manager's orders, the police would have been called and the group could have been prosecuted.

Darts - serious business.

Well, it turns out - even with Eddie and myself filling in on occasion (it's the least we can do, seeing as we are usually at least indirectly responsible for the debilitating hangovers that have caused team members to drop like flies) - the team's not doing too badly, as we are now seeing other teams turning up from further and further away in an attempt to topple our own home-grown variety of Taylors and Barnevelds, as our boys climb higher and higher in the national ranks. Every Monday a minivan turns up, deposits a load of people into the pub (who, in turn, deposit a few quid into the tills), giving them just enough time to be fed and defeated before piling pack into the van and fucking off back to the village or town from whence they came (which is often even more obscure and tight-knit than this one). Problem number one with this is we are now getting teams over from England, where the smoking ban is still a few weeks into the distance. Many a time we have looked on in horror as an Englishman opens the door and, without thinking, released a cloud of cigarette smoke into the air; they then realize why all eyes are on them and, as if attempting to outrun the smoke, will run back outside with the same gusto they would evoke had they actually been ablaze. The second problem is, a lot of these places are very close communities where everyone not only knows everyone else, but is more often than not related to them somehow, indelibly linked by a genetic chain that cannot be broken (which, from the looks of some of the children they bring with them, doesn't stop them arbitrarily fucking eachother whenever it takes their web-fingered fancy). So sometimes, we get some people who have perhaps not spoken to outsiders in quite some time - to them, we're "city slickers", with our paved roads, motor (as opposed to horse) powered vehicles, running water and our Deoxyribonucleic diversity. Take, for example, the last troupe of dart-slingers to wrestle with our front door (what was once a fault has since become a warning signal - regulars know that the front door handle needs to be depressed fully, to the extent where you are actually exerting a downwards force on the actual door itself, so if you hear somebody engaging in a physical battle with the aging brass mechanism then you know that them folks ain't from round here), the best darters The Baroque Social had to offer (from a town whose name I didn't even attempt to pronounce, named so because it was supposedly the first - and probably only - pub in the whole of Wales to have a harpsichord, a story that I hope is true with every fibre of my being, although I suspect it may be folklore).

At eight o'clock, the Baroque Social's minibus skidded to a halt outside (this place really is blink-and-you-miss-it), and what spewed out onto the pavement was what appeared to be an assortment of children and the lone adult - however, as they each wrestled and struggled with the front door, it became obvious that these were not children we were dealing with - these were just very little adults; quite possibly midgets, if we're being blunt (and I see no reason not to be). Ronnie Corbett could have - and would have - looked down his nose at them. I'm not saying they were freaks or anything, but I had the distinct feeling that it should not be them paying our team subs, but our team paying a fee, much as you would in a circus to look at the bearded lady or gang of dart-playing midgets, who had a faint whiff of stale bread about them and all had strangely wide eyes.

The door was opened once more to allow the normal-sized Snow White of the group to enter the building, but without the traditional struggle; the next person to step through the door was somebody that I never, ever expected to see again - the door squeezed into its ill-prepared frame behind him, providing a fanfare of creaks and clicks to signify the return of one Stephen Ross. Stephen was, of course, the manager of the pub when Eddie and I first started; his departure in 2006 began "the chain" - a period lasting several months in which we became the ultimate latchkey pub; the relief management circuit was built almost exclusively around our pub, with the average relief lasting a week (some lasted two, one lasted a couple of hours before the pub was once again jettisoned into new hands by a fumbling brewery) - which ended with Henry accepting the position as manager. To Henry's - and every other relief's - credit, there was several months of ardent Stephenism to unravel and eradicate before we were converted to more modern practices; Eddie and I thought he was a fantastic manager for the time he was around for one simple reason, and that was because we didn't know any better, and a few months away from kitchen tantrums and dodgy lock-ins soon clued us in to the fact that Stephen was not being penalized by the brewery because he was "too radical for the system, man" (or whichever tired absolution Stephen had culled from the script of Bill & Ted that particular week), he was penalized because he was, in fact, a penis. I know some people will say "oh, yeah, that guy's such a dick", but such off-the-cuff remarks really devalue how much of a raging phallus this man was. People are mixed up for all sorts of reasons, and quite frankly I never want to know the chain of events that led to Stephen Ross' screws becoming as loose as they were - maybe it was years and years of not-quite-right or one gigantic burst of what-in-the-name-of-shitting-Christ, either way, by the end he lived a truly bizarre existence; a few hours in the kitchen screaming and yelling because the pasta was ever-so-slightly cold, followed by four hours of sleep, followed by a ten-hour walk, followed by an hour's sleep, followed by a game of football and God knows what else. The guy was a maniac, but while some maniacs are good fun, he was the kind of maniac that would wait for you outside in his Jeep and mow you down because you used all the Oxo cubes. That kind of maniac.

Even though it had only been six months since I had last seen Stephen, I was slightly thrown by how little he had changed - Stephen's trademark was his dense mop of black hair, which still ventured south of his eyebrows if he wasn't careful. And when his fringe would overstep the boundary, Stephen would shoot a huff of air upwards, blowing the unruly strands back into position; I had forgotten how irritating the PFFFFTs were when attempting to talk to him. He sauntered up to the bar, and I briefly wondered if he'd remember me - he would often disappear upstairs for weeks at a time; while Henry does the same, that is because he can no longer smoke downstairs; he is still running the place from the telephone. Stephen would vanish for weeks at a time, to the point where it would often be my responsibility to lock up, take the tills upstairs and all sorts of stuff that really shouldn't be entrusted to anybody who has only been in the job a month. But no, he remembered me, and seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

"Can I have a -"
"Vodka and lemonade with a dash of blackcurrant?" My ability to remember his usual was not, as he almost certainly presumed, a subtle testament to his undying legacy; it was, however, a flashback of rockier seas, much as war veterans will remember the bullet that hit them and politicians can never shake the image of the farmer who egged them (incidentally, just to stray from the topic a second, I am glad to see that most of the major news stations have used Blair's resignation as an excuse to give the Prescott-Farmer punchout footage another airing - I, for one, believe that no excuse should be needed to give the footage a day out; slow news days are often filled with stories of school children who have put together a pasta picture of a dictator or Christ knows what else, when in fact such trivialities pale in comparison to the then-deputy prime minister having an egg thrown at him and responding with the left-hook of doom). As I began to beckon the other drinks for Stephen's pint-sized posse (who, ironically, were mostly drinking halves - I suppose it makes sense; if you're half the size of everyone else you only need half the booze), I decided to strike up a bit of conversation; considering I hadn't seen him for six months I thought there would be at least some sparse catching up to do.
"So are you still managing pubs?"
"Oh yes." This came as a surprise to me - after all, towards the end of his tenure here, I was of the impression that Steve was so sick of running pubs that he would snap at any minute and petrolbomb the place, just bring it to a pile of rubble and be done with it. "I'm running The Baroque Social." This actually made sense; he didn't match the rest of them and judging from how some of the practice shots were going in his absence, he had probably started the team himself.
"That's a surprise, Stephen."
"Why?"
"It's just that I thought you were getting out of the business altogether when you left here."
"The best thing you can do is just get back on the horse." I've always hated that expression - tell that shit to Christopher Reeve's grieving widow and bankrupt stable keeper. "So I got out of this company and moved on to Blue Prince." For the few of you that aren't familiar with the mind-boggling intricacies of the Welsh brewery trade, Blue Prince is considered the "anti-brewery", in that they're everything this company isn't - they have wastage allowances, they're cheap, they provide healthcare for their staff and decent amounts of holidays. But where, I ask, is the fun in that? Half the fun of this job is having to fight tooth and nail for every little thing, be it getting time off that you actually booked months in advance, or being expected to train new members of staff on procedures and policies in which you yourself have not been educated.

"We had some good times though, didn't we?" He said this with a straight face so I decided to suppress my body's natural urge to squeeze out a rueful, sarcastic chuckle.
"Well..."
"Tell you what, if you're getting tired of working in this shithole, here's my number." Stephen loaded up the drinks tray, handed me a business card and went back to his table - however, halfway there, he balanced the tray on one hand, freeing the other hand to make the "call me" gesture with his thumb in his ear, his first three fingers contracted, and his pinkie acting as a fleshy mouthpiece for this hypothetical phonecall, one that I can assure you will not be happening.

Stephen went back over to see how his seven dwarves were doing, and it turns out they weren't doing too well - the problem was, they had practiced hitting treble 19 (which, for those unfamiliar with the layout of a dartboard - and if so, why? - is just left of six o'clock) instead of the more conventional treble 20 (which is at twelve o'clock), because it was obvious that their reach would not permit them to retrieve a set of darts planted into the treble 20. However, the pressure had obviously gotten to them - their more usual fare of whistling while they work and mining for diamonds was obviously a far less stressful game, as their game had gone to shit. The first few matches were almost painful to watch; our team wrapped up in about 12-15 darts, hitting the winning double long before Sleepy or Grumpy had chalked up so much as 100. Of course, all eyes were then on Stephen, whose blood would be quite obviously boiling underneath the facade of good sportsmanship. Stephen is a terrible loser - this was evident from his days in the kitchen; if he didn't get that macaroni out of the kitchen in five minutes flat he'd be furious. Plus, there were other factors at play, namely the fact that when he was here, Stephen attempted to stage a coo to become captain of the darts team - if you're thinking "wow, that sounds pathetic", then you're spot on, because pathetic was too kind a word for the perfectly piteous attempt at dislodging Dave from his position as captain of the darts team.

Stephen originally let us in on his plans in a team meeting (Stephen was a big fan of trivial meetings; we were famously robbed of a few grand's worth of stock, the waitress didn't know about it until I jokingly told her of Stephen's incompetence regarding the matter; Stephen's approach with actual serious matters was "best just leave it") - Stephen would practice feverishly for a solid month, and it was our job to gauge David's approval rating and, in Stephen's own words, "augmentate [sic] the cracks in his regime". Not meaning to cause a fuss, we all had a go at the anti-David propaganda, but it was no use - Dave was (and still is) a good bloke and an even better dart player, and save for one or two half-hearted questions to the rest of the team regarding Dave's performance, we couldn't bring ourselves to go along with Stephen's evil plan. Stephen's plan B involved taking the bulb out of the light above the dartboard whenever Dave was coming, so that he would eventually fall out of practice and become sloppy. This plan also fell on its arse because it didn't take into account that the dartboard is in front of a very large window that faces the sun, and Dave never practiced at night. Stephen also failed to remember the dartboard in David's front room. So it was really no surprise that Stephen was leading the Baroque Social's team, but all eyes were on him - David had since heard about the attempt on his position and was interested to see just how much better things would have been under Stephen's rule. Not much, from the looks of it, as the elves were throwing consistently poor darts - I did wonder if the midgets had been corralled by Stephen against their will; I can't imagine midgets could put up much of a fight. They certainly couldn't attempt to break free of their averagely-sized oppressor, as it's a long walk home to their pub with those little legs and I doubt any of them could drive a car that wasn't pre-owned by a clown college.

The first match was almost painful to watch; as Stephen squared off against David - you couldn't get served if you tried in the ninety seconds it took David to whittle 501 down to a double 16, and while Stephen was all smiles and shook David's hand, there was a definite unease to the whole thing. It wasn't exactly subtle from where I was standing, so I can only imagine what it must have felt like out in the thick of it, because you could have cut the tension with a knife (or a dart, as David did with a well-placed stab into the green). The tension, however, turned to a mild sense of embarrassment - the Baroque Social's team stepped up and were one by one sent packing. We were ahead by five points to nil by the time the first doubles match reached its conclusion.

"Shall we go ahead with the rest of the games?" asked David; in the event of formalities such as this it's always polite to at least offer a bit of mercy.
"Yeah, why wouldn't we?" Stephen was clearly on the defensive to the point where he hadn't even realized...
"It's just that you lot are behind five points and can't possibly win."
"Right." And there it is - the blowing of the hair out of his face that means one thing; Stephen is not a happy chap and somebody else is about to pay handsomely for his shortcomings.

We decided at that point to go ahead and bring the food out - maybe a bit of food would quell the rising air of hostility. It's a proven method of conflict resolution - the Iran hostage thing could have been over in a heartbeat had a few plates of sausages, onions, buttered bread and chips been rolled out. As both teams sat down, the air still wasn't exactly clear - ever the bastion of good sportsmanship, Stephen refused to engage the home team. We tried everything - we turned the telly back on, cranked the music up, but the two sides were still in battle mode. Actually, it wasn't even the sides; it was Stephen. After a few minutes (that dragged so slowly you could practically feel yourself aging), the Doc of the midget team piped up.

"Well, it's not the winning that counts I suppose. Shall we just play on for the fun of it?"
I don't think anybody could have predicted Stephen's response - he picked up a clump of fried onions in his hand and squeezed them as hard as he could, his rage so insatiable at this point that he was left little discourse; what man among us can truly say he has never reached the boiling point where you're so gosh-darned livid that your only chance at bringing your blood pressure down into treble figures is to squeeze a fistful of fried onions? Stephen had reached this point, his teeth clenched and a deep, seismic gurgle bubbling up from his throat. He then decided to throw the onions at Doc; to Doc's credit, he appeared entirely unphased by all this. He was clearly a man who had experienced the hot, oily sensation of being doused in a fried-onion rage before.

"We could play on for the fucking fun of it Trevor, or we could just pack you fucking cunts back off to the pub and just fucking forget about the whole fucking... fuck!" Ah yes, stage two of the onion rage - incomprehensible swearing. Although we couldn't see Stephen for the air's sudden blue hue, we could certainly hear him well enough.
"I put a lot of fucking effort into this fucking darts team and here I am, five nil down to a pack of fucking -"
"You lost your game as well Stephen," began Doc; it was a fair point, Stephen had been humiliated just as badly as his Tolkien-esque brethren. "It's really just a bit of -"
"A bit of what? You fucking midgets are all the fucking same... and what are you fucking fuckers looking at, eh? Fucking..." Yeah, that's it Stephen; midgets in general simply can't be trusted to defeat a national-competition level darts team.

The room went into a stunned silence (while I secretly thanked Henry for being too cheap to provide anything but nice, non-lethal plastic cutlery for the darts team) - as Stephen's neck began to push veins to the surface that were such an outrageous shade of purple that I wondered how long it would be before he popped entirely, the entire room went into a state of disbelief; here we were, watching an old landlord berate a team of dart-playing midgets. A sentence that no rational person should ever have to say or type, but a situation that certainly didn't seem funny at the time. David offered to drive the midgets home, and they all threw down their darts in disgust and piled into the minivan; Stephen continued shouting at them outside and up the road as far as he could run. Unfortunately for him, a minivan moves pretty quickly, even when it's full of midgets. He returned to a pub that was still in a state of shock. He also returned to see one extra person standing behind the bar; Henry. Henry had heard the ruckus from upstairs and came down with a very specific purpose in mind.

"Oh, so is this it mate?" Stephen said, leering at me; I could tell that my sausage-fingered invite to 'call him' had just been revoked, possibly for good. You can imagine my disappointment. "You've gone and called the fucking "man" on me?" I feel I must explain that Stephen had more issues with "the man" than David Bowie and the Rolling Stones combined, whatever form "the man" may take; be it the police who simply came around to see if the pub was having any trouble, to Dickie Dixon complaining about the state of the cask ales, "the man" was out to get him at all times; he was never wrong, of course, so he obviously felt perfectly justified in telling me off for no reason. It felt just like the old days.
"Actually, he didn't do anything of the sort, I heard you from upstairs. Out." For Henry to be awoken when you're shouting in his ear is a rare occurrence in itself - to be awoken by something happening downstairs meant that Stephen's outburst probably charted on the Richter scale.
"Fuck off old man, this is none of your business."
"I'm making it my business - I've asked you to leave, I suggest you do so."
"Oh yeah?" Stephen stood up and looked Henry square in the eye. "And what, precisely, are you going to do, Father Time?"

Although I am not entirely sure, I assume we will be awarded the points for the match by default - I'm sure that the opposition's captain being arrested constitutes a forfeit.

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(This entry is dedicated to Aereogramme).