Going out sober on a Saturday night in London is akin to a free visit to Bedlam or perhaps a monkeys' tea party at the zoo where a disgruntled worker has filled the teapots with whisky. And also the monkeys have been lobotomised and injected with a drug that makes them extremely stupid and aggressive and nasty. Blimey that worker was disgruntled.
Tragically the ability to observe this spectacle disappears the minute you have had one drink yourself, so most of you will never see it. But as I like to perform sober and weekend nights are little different to weekday ones for me, I get to be like someone from the film Matrix who can see what the world is really like, when all the rest of you see a false reality. I don't really remember much about the Matrix so this might be a poor analogy, but after the monkey thing I've kind of given up the will to live.
What is remarkable and impressive is how drunk people have become by as early as 8 o clock which is the time I ventured out of my house (for the first time today - all this gigging is knackering me out completely) to go to work.
It was hard to walk along the pavement on Shepherd's Bush Green for all the swaying and slavering fools seemingly deliberately slowing my progress.
A woman who looked as if she was about to pass out was buying more booze ahead of me in the queue for Sainsburys (I was picking up a paper and some chewing gum - no yoghurts! Though I could see from the suppressed sniggers of the check out girl that she knew about this unfair yoghurt freak rumour). You could tell she was drunk by the way she was insisiting that she wasn't to her rather more sober companion. And the way that every sentence she uttered took about two minutes to come to completion. I was in a rush and willing her to hurry up, but her transaction took ages (and then she got in my way further up the green and swayed by instinct to be in my way whichever route I took to get round her - even though she had her back to me).
At the tube a group of dipsomaniacs chose to come to a halt right in front of ticket barrier I was trying to get through. I cursed them under my breath. Some of us were going to work. How would they like it if I stood in front of the ticket barriers, pissed at 8 o clock on a Monday morning when they had to get somewhere on time? Not very much, I would say, speaking from experience. I work nights. 8 am on a Monday is the only time I get to relax with a drink.
Behind me a more seriously drunk man was lumbering towards me. He had the air of a professional drinker about him, both from the puffiness of his face to the fresh and almost severe wound on the bridge of his nose. I wanted to get away from him, just in case his gaze fell upon me and I became a victim of random and unprovoked violence.
I hurried down the escalotor where two or three women were standing, singing something unrecognisable. Being inebriated they were shoulder to shoulder and not observing the usual rule of standing on the right (for them this was a work time rule, but didn't they understand that I was working. I had almost an hour's work to do tonight. They had no idea how tough my life is).
I got down as far as I could and then lightly placed my hand on the shoulder of the oblivious woman in my way (surmising correctly that she would not have heard me over her own catawailing) and said, "Excuse me, please," in a slightly annoyed voice, due to all the previous inconvenience caused not by this woman, but by her drunken kind.
Before she could react the escalator had deposited us and I squeezed by. She then started shouting to her friend that I had pushed her. I think she was only joking, but I was on the way to a gig and not in the mood for jokes and said, "That wasn't a push. You would know if I had pushed you." Which was a little bit aggressive, but I was astounded at the false accusation. I would never push a woman. Hit her in the face with a gigantic oar - yes, but push - not in a million years.
Her and her friend started shouting at me, again, not entirely seriously - they were drunk remember, but it wasn't something I wanted to get involved in. Well, I was kind of irritated enough to want to get involved, but sensible and undrunk enough to avoid it. And I could imagine old gash nose coming down the steps behind us, seeing the rumpus and deciding to wade in.
They should have remade "Planet of the Apes" as "Planet of the Drunks". It's only at the end when the hero does not discover Nelson's Column buried in some sand that he realises that the place he has arrived at full of insane and crapulous idiots is not in actualy fact London as he had originally assumed, but a different planet. Nice twist huh?
Rather satisfyingly as the women shouted at me about who had pushed who and who would be pushing who next, one of them fell over with quite a smack. I nearly shouted back, "See, it would be a waste of effort to push you, when you are capable of falling over alone," but I had more dignity than that. And anyway they were three of them and they might have hit me.
Their happy laughter rang down the tunnel as they appreciated the irony, or failing that, the slapstick.
Alcohol had anaethatised the pain. But I was glad that I wasn't going to be around to see the state these high spirited ladies were in in a couple of hours.
Unless they got the same tube home as me.
