bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Ahoy there, casual lovers

Yeah, considering I don’t like either honey or brandy, I was intrigued recently to find myself banging honey brandy shots off the bar at the Duke of Wellington public house, Toynbee Street London E1 at 3 in the morning with the rest of the Idiot Battalion making up Joe’s stag night.   It was a shambolic crew by that point, as you can probably imagine, and I had reached the point where words seemed to be too large to get out of my mouth.   I have a recollection of the best man raising a glass to the happy couple and falling over, exactly like the Statue of Liberty would do, and of Piers – Joe’s brother, with the title of ring-bearer on the day of the wedding itself, like some kind of hobbit or whatever – shouting at a jukebox.

I left shortly after 3, and wandered back through the small maze of streets connecting Commercial Road with Bishopsgate, deciding to get a cab home, in case I got mugged for the weekends takings which I was carrying in a holdall.   This turned out to be quite ironic.   Just by the Bishopsgate entrance to Liverpool Street station where the Cafe Nero or whatever usually is, I crouched down to get some money from the holdall, whereupon two blokes walked up beside me and gave me the gentlest push, which was sufficient to make me roll completely over.   One then grabbed the holdall by one handle.   However, I managed to grab the other one and there ensued a brief tussle in the manner of – as inexplicably went through my mind at the time – two old ladies squabbling over a tea towel, as we kind of danced around the stricken bag.

I boxed for a very long time when I was a bit younger, and in any case quite like a good scrap, so was desperately trying to draw my assailant in close enough to land a decent right upon him when – miracle of miracles – a police car pulled up.  It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to start paying taxes again.  However, being brought up in Mile End destrict of east London before it became full of Humanities students from midlands towns, I have a natural fear and loathing of the old bill, and when my muggers ran off, I ran off with them.  I don’t mean I ran off after them, or away from them – I actually ran off with them, in the same direction, at the same speed.   I don’t know whether I thought I would lie low at their place till it had all blown over, or what, as I was technically an accessory to my own mugging at this point.  I also realised how very difficult running when drunk is. I was moving more like a gazebo than a gazelle, lolloping along like Neil Armstrong, or like someone hurdling invisible bollards.   This made me very easy for the police to catch, arrest for affray, bundle into a car, and take to Bow Road nick.

I had become very confused by now, having been arrested for, as far as I could make out, either a) going to a stag party or b) being mugged. There was quite a nice moment as I arrived at the police station, when they were trying to get a statement, and I was doing the over-compensating-due-to-drunkeness routine, which in this case consisted of me babbling on going ‘Look, I know what you’re thinking, serious, I know what you’re thinking, totally I do, I totally know what it is that you are thinking’ and so on and on, and the copper said ‘Yeah how about you tell me what you’re thinking and I can start writing it down’ which was immediately followed by being put into a cell with ‘Prisioner Insensible’ on my charge sheet.

Waking up was not a lot of fun, I can tell you.  However, everything went reasonably well and I was given a cold breakfast muffin from MacDonald’s and a can of Pepsi Max, and managed to answer awkward questions as to why I was running away from the police in the early hours of the morning carrying a bag full of money.  Bishopsgate is well camera’d up and I think all they did was a have a quick look at the cctv, laugh a great deal, save it to show to their mates, and decide to release me without charge for being a harmless simpleton.  I eventually rolled into Camden at 11.30, still pretty hammered, to find that Martin and Tony had put my stuff onto my pitch.  I put the various piles of t shirts on the stall and then slept underneath it for most of the rest of the day.

That then, was Joe’s stag night. By the time you read this he will be married.   It is definitely a good idea.