As I was heading out to my gig in Islington tonight I passed two men coming out of a chip shop. It was only about 8pm but they had clearly spent much of the afternoon in the pub as they were very, very drunk. One of them had had enough and clearly thought it was time to go home. The other agreed and slurringly wished him a happy birthday. "Give me a hug!" said the birthday boy, in the manner that many a drunken friend down through the ages of humanity. They embraced.
I assumed that would be the last I would see of them, but as I waited on the eastbound platform of the Hammersmith and Shitty line I spotted the birthday boy passing me. His crapulous friend appeared on the opposite platform. They both slumped in the chairs provided. After a minute or so they clearly spotted on another and started bellowing incomprehensibly across the divide. I wasn't sure if they were parodying their own inebriated state by deliberately shouting gibberish, or whether they were so drunk that this was actually a genuine attempt to communicate. They were funny and unthreatening and the few people on the platform with me smiled rather than cowered in fear.
The man heading west somehow managed to communicate to his friend that he wanted a cigarette, but did not have anything to light his fag with. His friend did not allow his own birthday celebrations to prevent him from being generous and offered to give him a book of matches that he had with him. "I'll throw it across," he shouted. Suddenly everyone's interest was pricked. There was no way that even the strongest athelete could throw something as flimsy as a book of matches over the chasm between these two friends. But the man seemed intent on trying. He approached the edge of the platform, but pisses as he was, he could still size up the situation and knew there was no way he could hope to make this throw. He stopped and his brain whirred and everyone looked on, smiling.
"It's all right," he triumphantly declared, "I'll put it in this bag!"
He produced a very flimsy plastic bag and added a few bits of rubbish for ballast and put in his box of matches to have another go at helping his nicotine addicted, yet fire-less friend.
Now it was painfully clear to everyone who wasn't nissed as a pewt that putting the matches in a plastic bag was not going to help. The projectile was still flimsy and you could tell that there was nothing heavy enough inside the bag to help get it across such a distance. Even if there had been a couple of large stones in there, a perfectly sober man would have had trouble lobbing this the distance required.
But the man was intent on trying, even though to everyone else failure was gleefully inevitable. It was impossible not to watch this battle between sozzled hope and the immutable laws of gravity. Was his clouded optimism going to be enough to overcome cold hard physics.
He launched the bag skywards and predictably it went about two feet, before being caught in the breeze looping and fluttering hilariously on to the tracks. It was one of the funniest things that I have seen in a long time. I don't think it even made it over the first set of tracks.
Everyone else on the platform couldn't help themselves but to openly laugh. It was pure real life comedy and the inevitability of what was going to happen didn't dampen the humour in any way. It just made it funnier. It's a lovely thing to share helpless laughter with a complete stranger. I caught the eye of the woman next to me and we laughed even more. At the back of my mind I was worried that the man might feel ridiculous if he saw that he was an object of fun and fly into a drunken fury, but he just shrugged, a little disappointed that his plan had failed and went back to shouting incoherently, the matches forgotten as the bag fluttered amongst the railway lines.
His friend accepted the situation with good grace too. The thing that had failed to occur to either of them was that he was sitting right next to a "No Smoking" sign and wasn't allowed to use the matches even if they had somehow been borne by a booze angel towards his hopefully outstretched hands.
Our train arrived and we got on. I don't think I was the only one who made a point of being in a carriage as far away from the birthday boy as possible. But we were all in a better mood than we had been five minutes before.
