St. Irish Day

“The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire, the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire, the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don’t need no water let the mother fucker burn, burn mother fucker, burn…”

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Life can be full of disappointment.

Take the Salford branch of McDonalds as an example. Every time I go to get a McFlurry I know that the Salford McDonalds staff wont put it through the McFlurrinator. Now I don’t plan on wasting my time bitching about McDonalds Staff, I mean everyone does it… It would be as obvious as saying: “The Bush administration in 2003 effectively gutted the ‘no net loss’ of wetlands policy initiated during the administration of the elder Bush.” Even so, surely the best part of working at McDonalds IS the McFlurrinator. Frankly it should violate trading standards rules to even call it a McFlurry: Without McFlurrination it’s just sub-par ice cream drowned in an annoying layer of chocolate sauce.

Another of life’s disappointments, for us at least, has been St. Patrick’s Day. Take our first Uni year. Me and Fitz shared a can of lager. Now I know what you’re thinking: “Well then surely it was a two gallon can?”… It wasn’t. “Surely it was a magic and wondrous infinite can that never ran out, procured one day from a half-crazed old crone running a mystic stall in an Arabian bazaar you were browsing around during one of your many travels to Ipswich?”… It wasn’t. “Well how in God’s name did you get drunk then?”… We didn’t. “Ah…”

Take our second Uni year. We’d saved money, we’d invited people to join us and we were going on a pub crawl. Now pub crawls are not always everything they’re made out to be. Sure if you live on Pub Street, Pubsville then you’re probably in for a good time. If, however, you live in Salford and you plan to crawl to Manchester then you may find that your crawl to lager supping ratio is somewhat off whack… Especially if you stop to have a bit of a shout at Eric Wright when you pass his headquarters. Sure we drank… But we didn’t get drunk…

And so, third year St. Patrick’s Night, we were prepared. We had a pub crawl route that included many pubs, we had a small collective of people consisting of me, Fitz and David, so as not to have to think about the welfare of others and most importantly we had good ol’ fashion British determination. The grim-realisation that we had a job in front of us and the fate of the world, and our bladders, rested solely on that tasks completion!

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Life can be full of disappointment.

Meet Gemma: The bossy fat one, Robyn: The attractive one and Daniel: The worryingly camp one that can’t hold his drink.

These three friends have just left Stafford. Actually friends may be a little strong. Acquaintances might be a better word. Stafford, however, is a place malnourished of entertainment and so if a chance to leave presents itself then you’d better believe you’re gonna grab it by the short and curly hairs. These adventurers decide that for this night of nights they would go to the Mecca of binge-drinking: Manchester.

As is common in these situations, disaster was not far away. Robin on perusal of her personal belongings realises she has forgotten her ID. Panic quickly ensues, a panic completely justified when, pan forward to the future, it was revealed they wouldn’t even be granted entry into 5th Ave. The most evil and detestable of all God’s Manchester based indie and alternative music club venues.

All they wanted was to experience a Manchester indie club, but instead were forced to wander cold, lost and alone along the streets of a harsh and unforgiving alien city. A world in which people spoke a different language and the citizens forsook the traditional British sandwich in favour of the altogether more bewildering “barmcake”. Frightened and confused they saw in the distance the faint glimmer of salvation: three warriors boldly striding… or, to be more literal, boldly staggering to their destination. They saw hope.

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Life can be full of disappointment.

I’d tried to get others to come out for St. Patrick’s Day. My mistake was probably in waiting till the day before to do this, but the point is that I tried. The worst excuse I heard (and multiple times) for not going out was the classic: I’m not Irish. SO THE FUCK WHAT?! St. Patrick wasn’t just the Patron Saint of the Irish but also the Patron Saint of Cirrhosis of the Liver and Fatal Kidney Failure and THAT MEANS IT’S TIME TO CELEBRATE DAGNAMMIT!

Still, even with just the three of us we’d had a successful drink in both The Crescent and The Black Horse (although someone had completely forgotten to inform them of the day: watching ‘A Touch of Frost’ does not constitute a St. Patrick’s Day celebration.) We’d made it to Liverpool road and had more pleasingly successful drinks all the way up until The White Lion happened. On reflection the running might have been a little over the top, but there is never an excuse for Karaoke.

Now it was time to go to the Oyster Bar… But before we could get there, we needed to deal with the three random people that had just approached us.

Their biggest mistake was laughing. We informed them that if they were looking for an indie bar then 42nd Street was probably the best place to try… It’s biggest plus point: It wasn’t 5th Avenue. We also agreed to take them to the yellow cobbled road on which they would have to follow. On the way though, our naturally charming banter had them chuckling away like an Albino in a vat of feathers. That was their mistake. They fed my ego. And it was hungry. And so through a mixture of mental persuasion and physical force we dragged them to the Oyster Bar. If you ever want to impress someone who isn’t from Manchester you take them to the Oyster Bar. You then go up to the bar and you ask for three pints of lager. For some reason the act of ordering a pint of non-specific seems to have a peculiar pleasing effect on the human psyche.

We weren’t in the Oyster Bar long, it being near pub closing time. Yet in that short space of minutes we managed to establish ourselves as Oyster Bar secondary bouncers, greeting and thanking all those who walked through the door we were at. On reflection this could have been a mistake. I’ve never been accosted by so many fat, middle-aged women in all my life… And I’ve been accosted by more than I care to mention as it is. This was all accompanied by more laughter from our admirers. It was somewhat worrying and sycophantic, but it was good. We endeavoured to keep their company a while longer.

The moment when a good thing starts to get a little tiresome and trying. The moment when friendly acquaintances sour. The moment when its time to give up and go. That moment was after the Oyster Bar. That was the moment when we should have let the Stafford 3 drift into the night. Instead…

The problem was The Footage. It’s cheap and it’s open late and, most importantly, it’s not a club. What it isn’t though, is indie. Yet we persuaded them to join us there for more drinks. It was at this point we noticed Daniel was in trouble. When a man is putting all of his effort into walking into a straight line and still manages to hit a wall you know you’ve got a problem. When the fat one realises that we hadn’t taken them to a indie club and takes the attractive one to the toilets to talk for two hours about the way they’d been arguing all night you know you’ve got a problem.

Daniel sat, sulking and miserable for those two hours. It’s the sort of sight that could well ruin your night… At least it could if you were in any way a nice person. Lucky then for me that I could continue drinking and enjoying myself. Sure the laughter had stopped, replaced with tears of misery, but to be honest I was glad because the attention and the sound of Daniel’s laughter were both getting heavily on my wick and as he sat there in despair I couldn’t help but think of Karma and laugh.

And yet the hours passed and the Staffordites ended up at our house as a last refuge of the desperate and alone. I’m fairly sure my bastard gene kicked in and I made a remark about our last victims not being nearly as co-operative (by this point I was making sure to say things that weren’t going to amuse anyone but myself) and by no small coincidence they all left early the next morning.

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Life can be full of disappointment.

Meet Graham and Becky.

They’ve been forsaken by their two flatmates and have been left alone on St. Patrick’s night. Their night will only get worse. After sitting around in their own bitter resentment for a while Graham decides to cook a meal. Tragedy strikes and the retard burns his food, and a chain reaction is set off resulting in the fire alarm going off.

Shouldn’t be a problem though. Their flatmates explained to both of them just how to turn the fire alarm off in case of such an incident. Hell, even if they didn’t remember this, it was all written on a sticker ON the main fire alarm control panel anyway.

But who needs instructions when you can just randomly grab wires inside the panel and pull them out? Who needs instructions when you can rip the alarms off the ceiling? Who needs instructions when you can short out the whole control panel causing the fire alarm to be permanently going off unless you switched off the fuse controlling the downstairs lighting?

Someone who doesn’t want to be woken up by his flatmates at 5 in the morning as they shout at him for being such a dumb, retarded, fucking useless Southerner… That’s who.

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So sure life can be full of its little disapointments. Saint Patrick’s Day held many challenges for many different people. Not me though. I got drunk. Extremely drunk. So drunk I was shouting at boaters who probably weren’t even in their barges and went to stare at a bald man in a window for around 10 minutes.

And who the hell cares about other peoples problems when you’re very, very, drunk? Happy Saint Cirrhosis Day people!

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Rantings and/or Ravings: Phil

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~ by Octaeder on March 27, 2006.