Aren’t people funny eh? They are all so very different. After ten weeks in a confined environment, you start to get to know them. Some of them reveal themselves quickly; others take their time. Others still are yet to emerge. The fun part is watching your first impressions and assumptions get overturned. Or not.
And then, as if things weren’t complicated enough already, people go and change. They respond to their environment. They grow in confidence and stature, or they shrink back from it as the world revolves around them. This place is incredibly intense and daunting at times, even for an old timer like me. Most of these guys are younger, and live thrust together in tiny rooms and cottages with washing up and detritus piling up to the ceilings. For the sake of my sanity I opted out of this arrangement, and will be forever grateful that I did.
When, to the recipe of this gulag, populated by a multitude of shifting characters emerging from the uniformity of their chefs’ whites, one adds the magic ingredient, alcohol, interesting things are bound to happen. I was in the Blackbird again last night. This time it felt different. I felt old, and over it.
At one point a nice young lad, one of the student’s brothers (who, it transpired, was only fifteen years old) asked me how many beers I’d had. I don’t really count, I told him, but he proudly confided in me that he had drunk eleven pints. I must look like the kind of person who would be impressed by this kind of statistic. I was more impressed half an hour later, when he returned from the bar with another pint, and declared it to be his tenth of the day. For a minute I thought that whole Time’s Arrow thing was happening again, and I would be forced to watch him get more and more sober as the night wore on. Thankfully though, the axis of time and its staunch ally, inevitability, took a confident grip on the situation and he had to run outside and vomit all over the road. Right in the spot where my car would have been, had I not been so old and wise as to park it a little further down the line.
Just to prove that it is not only young people who are stupid, another person stepped up to the plate to demonstrate their own tiny mind’s incomparable powers. There is a lady in these parts who is, in the parlance of our times, a celebrity chef. She is extremely pretty and likeable and a lot of people, the girls in particular, really admire and respect her.
They were delighted when she walked into the Blackbird last night with her husband, even more so when she enjoyed a little boogie with them, posing for pictures and generally having a good time. Her husband took exception to this however, snatching one of the girls’ cameras away, confiscating it so that their ‘PA’ could vet the pictures and refusing to return it to its owner. Fortunately I didn’t witness this episode unfolding. I fear my long history of intervening in such situations would have gotten the better of me. It will be interesting to see how this situation develops over the next couple of days, particularly as he is forever loitering around the school for no apparent reason other than it being run by his mother.
All of this contributed to a slight sense of frustration really. Maybe it’s the getting old (another birthday looms ominously in my mirrors); maybe it’s the uncertainty over what happens next. Or maybe I am just intolerant of idiots, and was unlucky enough to bump into a few of them in one night.
I like to think of myself as being quite considerate and chivalrous, despite my general air of curtness and arrogance. I always hold doors open for people and usually apologise swiftly and sincerely on the many occasions upon which I upset or offend them (except for my friends, who have come to expect this and know I don’t mean it). My patience is beginning to wear thin, and as the end (and my 32nd birthday) hunt me down so intently, it will surely become even more wafer-like. It has two weeks to hold out. Just two weeks. I sense impending doom, but know if I make it through without kicking any bins, then I really must be getting old.
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