Pray That Someone Will Murder You in the Middle of This Room

You think about the ways in which the people in this pub could murder you with the tools currently available to them – a chair leg, splintered off and driven into your heart; a waitress clumsily drops a volcanically-hot veggie burger down you, burning you into a pulsing, dying blister; a rosé bottle, pulled from an ice bucket and shattered through your skull – and each of them has its own special quality to it, every one offering an option of gore, of oblivion, of you, still standing, staggering under the force of a death blow, blood leaking from you, but you’re not down yet. The same kids who have been allowed to run free in this pub for two hours past the time the sign on the wall says kids have to vacate the property by rendered dumbstruck now, agog, standing in silence as you sway and leak and collapse, finally, to the floor.

But no, instead, you get caught in a 50-minute conversation with someone’s dad, who is inexplicably there, and he’s telling you how gentlemanly rugby is compared to football, or some other similarly dad shit, and when you finally get out of there – resolutely unmurdered – it’s sort of too early to go to a big blow out party and too late to go anywhere else to catch any sort of vibe at all, so you call it a failure and take the two trains and a bus back home again, £16 TfL charge notification in the morning and a vow to never have such disappointing birthday drinkies ever in your own name.

YOU HAVE LOST AT SATURDAY NIGHT BUT AT LEAST YOU GOT ONE FREE PINT OF HOEGAARDEN AND A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP