I Love You, Violently Horny Drunk Woman

Occasionally, things will leap out of the unknowable chaos of the world and have a profound effect on the way you live your life. A slight breeze can waft along at just the right time, at just the right temperature, and compel you to reconcile a long-standing beef with your mother. A dog on the bus can look at you with large, round eyes and suddenly you believe in soulmates. If you leave the city and look up at the night sky, an endless flurry of constellations will fill your eyes like those little spots you see when you get a head-rush, making you feel both deeply connected to the universe and entirely insignificant in context of its vastness. These moments of bliss offered up by chance are both fleeting and overwhelming.

Which is why we must treasure this video of a drunk woman in Ramsgate headbutting an advert.

Before we get to the main event, I must first draw your attention to several things taking place around it. Just like a roast dinner, it is necessary to take in the various vegetables and styles of potato around the meat in order to appreciate its beauty as a whole.

i) The additional yelling taking place behind the camera, which is largely indiscernible apart from the exclamations "fuck", "FUCK" and "AGGHHHH".

ii) The large group of people congregating across the road. Look how composed and nonplussed they are. Look how upright and steadily they are standing. Perhaps it's an optical illusion due to how completely fucking off it our star is, but they look unnervingly sober. What’s gone on that would cause 20 to 30 people on a night out to gather solemnly on the curb like the fire alarm just went off at work. None of these are questions to be answered, just points to bear in mind.

iii) The Merc parked the wrong way in a bus stop.

iv) Is that a yacht over there as well? Are there yachts in Ramsgate?

v) "Babe, I've pissed myself."

Great. Now we have those notes to refer to, let us consider, finally: the drunk woman in Ramsgate headbutting an advert. Here she is again:

The unbridled passion, the brute force, the poetry of it. "You fucking freak. I will fucking eat you alive," she says, performing a gesture with her arm that suggests she is physically pulling these sentences out of her mouth like a string of knotted flags. Fists clenched, spittle flying. Then, headbutting her own phone out of her own hand before confirming: "I will eat you a-fucking live, yeah? I don’t care who you are, I’ll FU-" *THWACK* "-CK you up."

There are three ways of interpreting what’s going on here. The first, I think, is that she and the man doing harmonised yelling in the background are having a fight but are both too drunk to see. So you’ve got our lady in patterned leggings body slamming head-first into an advert in the foreground, while a disembodied voice directs fury at a bin or something. This is what we call the "BBC Three comedy sketch version". The second is that this is one of several confrontations taking place, but still errs on the side of anger. This is what we call the cynical (and probably completely accurate) version. The third, which is the version to which I subscribe, is that this is an expression of the natural human emotion commonly known as: thirst.

Many studies have been undertaken on the subject of British Aggro and, specifically, its representation in viral videos, but it is my personal belief that is not what's going on here. Look at the way she squares up to the plastic, the fire in her eyes, and tell me this isn't flirting. This is lust in its purest form. This is me beholding yet another magazine spread of Timothée Chalamet. This is me scrolling through mouth-watering menus of faraway restaurants while I shovel a bland wrap into my mouth at work. This is me as I squat, blind drunk, in front of the oven and narrow my eyes at many rows of potato smileys as I wait for them to crisp. This is animalistic need, violent horniness, just a very aggressive coming on to a poster of a man who sort of looks like Jurassic Park-era Jeff Goldblum but probably isn’t (who is it? Someone who knows about adverts, please email me).

If you look close enough, you will find that everything here is brimming with positive energy. Firstly, there is the woman filming the video calling her "Babe" and announcing, in solidarity, "I've pissed myself" – which says to me, "We’re all in this together!" I like to think this event took place following a brief conference about the physique of the man in question and hopefully, like, not something morally upsetting happening after a night out in the former UKIP-dominated county of Thanet.

No: based on what information we have, let’s call this a message of joy communicated through non-traditional means. I choose to believe that this is someone so overwhelmed by love and appreciation for another person that there was no option but to smash her own phone into her own face and then ram her entire body into their likeness. When you think about it, it’s basically a DM slide. That thwack – the one that interrupts the core message of "I will fuck you up" – contains multitudes. If you’ve ever desperately loved someone from afar, that thwack is the sound of you being absolutely dismantled by nerves as you approach them for the first time, forget how to talk to people normally and just laugh really loudly at something they said that wasn’t a joke. That thwack is a burning desire for the unattainable, as you propel yourself full force towards an impossibility. Like the unrelenting bodying Ryan Gosling dishes out in the lift after planting one of the greatest all time snogs on Carey Mulligan in Drive. That thwack contains within it the duality of passion. It is both heartwarming tenderness and terrible violence, both a beginning and an end. It could plausibly be the sound of one bursting out of the womb, but also the last sound you will ever hear. It is the great Big Bang of the horn.

I salute it. And I love you, violently horny drunk woman. I love you.

@emmaggarland