A drunk abroad

This isn’t really a drunk abroad story as such, it’s more of a drunk about town tale. One evening, in my early university days, it was planned to have a grand night out. I had made a lot of new friends in halls of residence, who were incredibly enthusiastic about their social lives. So much so that they would venture out to a different nightclub every night of the week. The plan for this particular night landed on a Monday, which meant a trip to Why Not? on George Street.

Alongside my new friends, who’s origins spanned the globe, from Thailand, to Philadelphia, even as far as Tunbridge Wells, the evening’s plan involved my friends from high school. Most of whom had made the same decision as me in spreading their wings and travelling at least 20 miles from Haddington in East Lothian to go to Edinburgh University. The rest were spread about the rest of Scotland, some even residing in a particular barren wasteland called Aberdeen.

The mix of international students who were clearly well-travelled and exuding self-confidence made quite the mix with our introverted flock of weirdo alcoholics from the countryside. All in all there were 15 of us that headed out into the night after a good pre-greasing in the ‘pantry’ (apparently our halls were too posh to call it a kitchen).

When we arrived everyone seemed in good fettle, if a couple being slightly over-merried in the warm-up. We paid the £5 to get in, which to some of my more parochial acquaintances was an absolute fucking outrage. Once we had breached the precipice past the velvet curtains perfectly coloured to mask the stains of sweat and vomit that had doubtlessly coated them in the past, the club opened out before us. It was packed.

There were three main recognised ways of getting pissed in this particular club in this era. The first was a £5 bottle of champagne which made people think they were the big dog. It tasted like a teetotaller’s piss and had roughly the same alcohol content. This meant you had to guzzle a lot of the fizzy pish to get yourself nice and loose. The second was a pitcher of ‘pussy whipped’. This was a horrible concoction of vodka, red bull, and the same shite champagne. This was favoured by the majority of my halls friends as it did get you reasonably merry and they seemed to inexplicably enjoy the taste. The final, and most effective means of preparing to make an arse of yourself was the quaddy-voddy, this as you might expect, contained four shots of vodka along with your choice of watered-down mixer. It was served in what I can only describe as a catheter bag, which made it nigh on impossible to spill.

It was these clear sacks of liquid confidence/idiocy that heavily influence the headline act in this performance. I, along with the majority of my school friends made a start on these and it didn’t take long for things to start going awry. The first batch of our group to be turfed out were ejected for playing minesweeper. This, as many of you will surely know, is a game that involves picking up undefended drinks from tables and finishing them before anyone notices. Usually it is played with discarded drinks, yet this version was deemed not risky enough for our brand of arseholes that engaged in the game. It is also made immeasurably more difficult when the drinks in question one is trying to ‘sweep’ are the catheter bags of quaddy-voddy. Not only do they take considerably longer to drink, they also have a considerably stronger effect upon the player should he successfully complete the ‘sweep’.

A couple of the first casualties were those caught in this act, usually by a group of girls returning from the dance floor to find an absolutely hammered degenerate lying along their booth with another holding the bag like an IV drip above their head, with a straw mainlining the £10 bag of scum into their mouth. Fair play, I would have probably been pissed off too. Once the minesweeping had been completed, or at least no more was feasibly possible given the combination of warnings received and successful endeavours’ effects, the pride of twats took to the dance floor. At this stage I confess I stepped out for a cigarette, but when two more of our group were ‘escorted’ out past the smoking area into the street I assumed that the drink-thievery that preluded their attempts at shape-throwing must have at least been part of the reason they were being treated like they had just slapped the bouncer’s mum.

When I re-entered the hive of debauchery, our numbers were thinning. Seven of the original 15 remained, and that was reduced again by one when an overly-extravagant dance move catapulted one of my halls friends from the dance floor careering face first into a table at the side of the dance floor. The guy was an avid golfer, and I shit you not without missing a step he looked up at the horrified girls staring at his WKD soaked shirt and face combo, and said “mind if I play through?” They didn’t find it anywhere near as funny as we did and shortly after he was given his marching orders.

At this stage there remained six of the original party. The more seasoned alcoholics of the squad. That being said, I’m sure we were quite the embarrassment to behold. The next ejection was a triple threat. My friend from school who was staying in the same halls as me had become well acquainted with my new corridor-mates. However, he hadn’t become quite as well acquainted with one of them as my other school friend, who had come out as gay when he started dating the guy. The couple and my other friend were turfed out when the bouncer found the three of them in a heap on the dancefloor, the two guys trying to rip my friend’s shirt off. He didn’t seem to care that much but there was still a great deal of commotion from the three of them. From where I was sitting it looked like the three of them had been hit by simultaneous strokes, as they writhed about on the floor in uncontrollable fits of laughter.

When they were excommunicated it left only three of us. Me, and two pals from home, one of whom was at uni and had been given the adorable moniker of ‘cheese boy’ by my corridor mates on account of him always turning up at our pantry after a night out with a wheel of laughing cow cheese. The other guy was a friend from home who was a couple of years our senior and showed his maturity in his endurance of the alcohonslaught.

I was at the bar, trying to get us some whiskys, it was that time of night. Beside me there was one of the finest examples of the toff brigade I had seen at that point. Brightly coloured shirt with the collar up, corduroys, fucking corduroys, in a nightclub for students, and some daft shoes that he looked like he had knicked from his dad. The rolex was probably real aswell. Anyway, I digress. This posh gimp next to me is ordering three bottles of champagne (not the £5 shite, but proper fancy stuff), I can only assume in  a bid to impress the wee wifey that’s the other side of him at the bar.

Everything is going well, we are both being served simultaneously, when ‘cheese boy’ turns up. He blunders in to the bar between us, I hasten to add he’s 6’4 and not slightly built, bumping the toff across a bit, further down the bar, away from his drinks. The toff turns around to remonstrate, and upon receiving a frank apology, and seeing the size of the drunken boulder mass that just nudged him, turns back to his attempted wooing. My pal notices he’s now been left in front of three bottles of champagne. I’m not sure whether he thought I’d bought them for him (I can’t believe he would think I would do that, I barely had enough for a whisky each), or if he was just re-engaging the game of minesweeper. Regardless, he picked up the first bottle of champagne and straight armed it. It was going fine, and the toff never noticed, until the bubbles from the champagne decided they wanted out of the bottle using an alternate route to the one into his mouth.

Bubbles pished out sideways, up his nose, in his eyes, in his hair, onto me, and onto the toff. This, he did notice. Despite his earlier reticence, he turned round ready to give my friend a ‘bloody good hiding’. Once my pal had recovered from his ‘champer-blindness’ he turned to try and put the bottle back down on the bar. Doing so using a wide sweeping stroke, he nailed the other two bottles off the bar in the direction of the toff and his lady friend. At this point I erupted with laughter, and the toff tried to catch the bottles before they hit the ground, the consequence being both of them exploded white fizz all over him and the bird. By the time he turned back, my pal had disappeared into the crowd just as he had arrived. This time he had taken my whisky with him. I made it clear I didn’t know him and the cunt had just pinched one of my drinks aswell before grabbing the remaining two whiskys back to the table.

We had secured a booth early on in the evening, and it had been used as a stockpile for all the drinks the group had bought/‘sweeped’ throughout the evening. The booth was just off the dance floor, adjacent to the one my other friend had head butted earlier on. Now in it their only remained me and my older friend. I sat down to enjoy the whisky with him when I noticed we had been joined in the booth by a young couple, who were going at it rather ferociously. They seemed like they too had imbibed a fair bit, but instead of thievery they focused on public shows of affection. Fucking disgusting.

It was at this point that cheese boy re-entered the fray. The booth was in a ‘C’ shape, a long bench away from the dance floor, with a low table along the middle and two small tables either side. Me and my friend were at one end of the bench, the couple were at the other. The large bumbling idiot emerged from the swaying crowd with a gormless grin on his face, holding another stolen bag of vodka. In his hurry to show off his stolen wares to us, he missed the fact there was a low table between him and the bench. He kicked it mid-stride and went careering arse-over-tit into a front flip. One arm wiped out all the booze on the side table, the other threw his freshly stolen bag straight out back on to the dance floor. Yet it was the feet that were the real showpiece. One came down and cleanly smashed my friend’s whisky out of his hand, the other was brought down like a magnificent axe kick, straight on top of the female canoodler’s head. It would have knocked most people the fuck out, but when she turned round with pupils like two 2ps, and simply asked ‘the fuck wis that?’ I thought he might get away with it. To further add to the amazement, despite landing fully onto three bottles of cheap champagne in their buckets, he never shattered any, or even broke the table. Me and friend were in absolute bits at this point, and when the bouncer came across to remove the still inanimate 6’4 lump on our table, we finished our drinks and headed out.

When I got back to halls I heard some commotion upstairs, so I thought I had best check on my friend who had been accosted by my two gay mates. When I saw the door ajar, I had some concern, but when I saw him lying alone, face up on the floor, his feet still in his bed, I could see he was fine, apart from the three large bald strips in his chest hair. “They shaved me.” Was all he managed, before he started singing Paul Simon to himself at full volume so I shut the door and left him to it.

It was one hell of a Monday night.