Taps Richard Is Stressed Out

Today’s my last day at work until the 4^th of January and I’m currently flat out trying to finish off seven different things at once, so I’m afraid there will be no post today.

I’ll see you all at the Taps Christmas party tonight though.

[And I expect a large Jamesons and ice to be waiting for me on the bar]

The Taps Christmas Party

I love the Taps Christmas Party. I mean I really love it. After Christmas Eve I think it’s the best night of the year. Everyone dresses up and gets incredibly drunk, and well…

Well…

Hang on a minute, is that it?

Is that really it?

Everyone's drunk and it's in the pub?

Is that the only reason I like it?

And if so, how shallow am I? I mean is that really my criteria for the 2nd best night of the year. 2^nd out of 365 days?

I mean do my interests really only to extend to drinking in pubs, reading about pubs, talking about pubs, thinking about pubs and writing about pubs? (Preferably donel while actually in the pub?).

[give me a second to think about it]

Well….yes they do.

I really am that shallow. That really is all it takes to make me happy.

And you know what? I don’t care. Well I do care a bit obviously, I mean once as a callow youth I had harboured ambitions of growing up to be a refined, well-read and cultured adult, but that seems like a barely remembered passing fancy now, like that brief period when I wore baseball caps in the mid 1990’s.

But, thinking about it, you know what? I’m reasonably content to spend my time as an existential adventurer seeking out the meaning and truths to be found deep in the dark hidden heart and soul of the British pub.

[yes, that’s right I said existential adventurer]

So anyway, basically the Taps Christmas party is a night when everyone (well most people – I just come straight from work in whatever I was wearing) makes an effort to look nice and dress up….and then get completely shitfaced.

And that’s basically it.

Although, of course (as I would hope you have come to expect) there are deeper nuances to it than just that (to be found deep in the dark hidden heart and etc etc). It’s not just dressing up and getting drunk – because quite a lot of people do that on a Saturday night as it is.  

[Sidenote: I’m genuinely surprised by how many people do this. You’ll often see (mainly) women properly dressed up in the Taps on a Saturday night,and I’ll be sat there thinking, ‘well they must be just having a few drinks before they get a train/cab to London or somewhere’, but no, these people stay all night. They’ve literally got dressed up to come to the Taps. Which just seems weird when you’ve been sat there all day in a cardigan with ink stains on the sleeve and sausage roll crumbs in your beard].

It’s also that those people all like the Taps enough to pay £35 for a ticket and (in almost all cases) get a day off the next day to go to the party, which naturally means that they're reasonably decent and intelligent people.

And then there’s the fact that it’s called a party – and that one simple noun changes things immensely, because now, temperamentally speaking, people are all on the same page. Because now it’s a party – and people can’t help but act accordingly. They’re immediately nicer and friendly and everyone invariably ends up talking to random people who under normal circumstances they would never usually meet. By the end of the night there’s always some dancing and singing and presumably I mentioned the free bar?

No, well ok. Now technically it’s not really a free bar as you’ve paid £30/35 for your ticket, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t seem like one. And I’ve always taken the view that a free bar isn’t something to be enjoyed. It’s something to be taken on, fought to a standstill and then defeated in detail. The fact that it’s impossible to drink a bar dry in a pub only makes the effort all the more Quixotically noble and hopeless – and therefore deeply deeply heroic.

And I think that (though perhaps they don’t necessarily put it in those terms) lots of people look at it in that way, which explains why everyone ends up so massively drunk.

[Side note: also, they don’t have to carry loads of change in their pocket. I accept that this might be of very little marginal importance to the overall level of people’s happiness at the Christmas party, but it’s still a factor. Every Sunday morning I wake up with tons of shrapnel in my pocket. This is because by 12pm or so on Saturday night I can’t count so I just pay with a note every time I get a drink. Could I please therefore take this opportunity to ask our wonderful barstaff readers to please count my change for me when I pay? Thank you very much] 

Drunk, friendly and happy

(oh, and well dressed).

And on a strictly personal note, given that tomorrow is my last day at work until the 4^th January 2011, that only makes it all the better.  

It Was The Best of Times/It Was The Worst of Times

For many people today will be their last working day before Christmas – which, in TapsRichardland® is otherwise known as THE absolute very worst day of the year in the pub.

I think that I may have mentioned it before, but the only serious fight I’ve ever seen in Taps (this is going back 6 years or so now) was on the last working day before Christmas.  There must have been twenty five to thirty blokes involved in a mass brawl (seriously going at it) that stretched from the hatch to the door, and every single one of them was a pissed up Christmas drinker.

The reason for my antipathy towards Christmas amateur drinkers is a combination of things really. First there’s so many of them – and they’re all out from about 5:30pm – so it’s not even as though there’s a slow build up of them as you’d get on a normal Friday night.

So they’re all just there (mainly all grouped standing in front of the door for some extraordinary reason. Although, last night, upping the ante for sheer outright stupidity, two particularly bright sparks thought it would be a good idea to sit on stools right in front of the door). And then most of them are complete bloody amateurs. They don’t know how to order properly, and many of them just aren’t used to drinking and so end up completely hammered after only a few drinks, which, inevitably, leads to people acting like complete knobs and then being sick (one follows the other like the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire or a hangover after a free bar).

And then they just don’t know how to behave in a pub environment. Don’t know how to order or where to stand. Don’t know where to put their bags and their coats and aren’t aware of how they’re supposed to move past people in a crowded pub without knocking over everyone’s drinks.

They jostle and they shout and well…

Well, it is what it is I suppose. There’s no real point in me banging on about it [not that that normally stops me of course]. Even though, sitting here writing this at 2:34 in the afternoon, I know exactly what it’s going to be like when I get there, I suppose I have to bear in mind that this sort of thing only happens on a couple of odd nights a year.

Of course, no matter how equanimical I try to be about all of this, I’d have to be made of iron and stone not to begrudge them ruining the pub at least a little bit.

I suppose that the best way to look at amateur drinkers is in the same way that people who work in central London look at tourists when they just stop dead in the middle of the pavement for absolutely no reason at all, or when they insist on standing on the left hand side of the escalator. All you can really do is take a deep breath and remind yourself that they don’t know any better.  They’re not doing it on purpose and all they’re really doing is enjoying a new experience in an unfamilair environment.

Of course, that isn’t to say that if someone takes my stool there won’t be bloodshed.

[by bloodshed I mean I’ll get in a huff and go to the Kings Head]

I am, after all, only human.

Things that made me laugh #4

Charlie told me about this, so again, I can’t say that I saw it myself, but it did make me laugh when I heard it.

Charlie was in the George on Friday for his sister’s birthday when someone from Taps (I think it was Eugene), shouted at him: ‘It’s the Taps Boy.’

Which was then taken up by George and Finbar shouting: ‘Taps Boy! Taps Boy!’

Until everyone they were drinking with and even the people around them (who would have no idea who Charlie was and had probably never even been in Taps) all started pointing at him and laughing and chanting ‘Taps Boy! Taps Boy! Taps Boy!’

The Train

I got to the train station this morning and somebody was sitting in my seat.

Which is bad enough, and often enough to make me get off the train in a fit of disgust and wait for the next one (which is only ten minutes later), but I had to be in for a meeting this morning.

But worse, that person was Sean, and he knows that's my seat.

He knows.

[Sean and I often see one another on the train in the morning, but we have a kind of tacit understanding that we won't acknoweledge the other until we actually reach Liverpool St]

So I had to sit in a random seat.

And worse even than that, some completely mental Eastern European bloke got on at Edmonton and sat right next to me and insisted on talking to me all the way to Cambridge Heath.

Every time a train passed ours he'd smack me on the arm, get half up in his seat and say to me, 'Motherfucker, that's trains going faster!'

And I'd nod and agree that indeed that train was going faster than ours. 

Five times that happened.

Five. Times.

Quit Your Jibber Jabber

There are probably scores of copyright laws and Local Authority licensing ordnances which this would break to do so, but [just as a Taps Richard flight of fancy] I’ve always thought that pubs should show television programmes and films during the evening or on a Saturday/Sunday afternoon on those evenings/days when there’s no [credible] sport on.

Before Irena was assistant manager, Joe, her predecessor had the job, and at that time Mondays were always film night. Now, Mondays are quiet enough these days – but in those days they were even quieter and it would often just be Joe, myself and maybe one or two other regulars in, so at around 10pm Joe would just flick through the Sky Movies channel and find something that we all agreed on (which often took some doing) and we’d settle down and watch it.

This went on every Monday night for ages, until Prison Break started and Monday Night stopped being film night and became Prison Break night instead.

Which was great. Everyone was a little bit drunk and we’d all sit around talking and joking about what was going on, how stupid their plans were and speculated on what would happen next week.

It was great, because it would be the same people every week and we’d all look forward to Monday to see what happened next.

And I think that [not necessarily watching a serial in that way – although I do think that would be good] would work brilliantly in Taps. I mean, really, what’s the point of putting sport on just for the sake of it? Nobody wants to watch the replay of Saturday’s match for the fifth time, or Ice Hockey or NASCAR or American college basketball.

It’s just pointless.

So instead how great would it be just to put on some seriously cheesy/classic eighties television like the A Team, Knight Rider, or Magnum PI, or films like Karate Kid, Top Gun and Back to the Future? Everyone would absolutely love it. I guarantee you that there isn’t a bloke alive over the age of 26 or so who could walk out of a pub while Karate Kid was on.

[Put him in a body bag heheheheh…]

And come the climatic tournament itself every single person in the pub would be watching it, cheering and joking and quoting along to the lines.

The same goes for any number of classic eighties films. Put them on in the pub on a weeknight or Saturday afternoon and you’ve got a captive audience for hours.

What right thinking bloke would even dream – or hell – even be physically capable of dragging themselves out of the pub while Rocky was running up a mountain, Maverick communicating while in an inverted 4-G negative dive or Jack Burton [it’s all in the reflexes] was picking up a Chinese girl from the airport?

Honestly, they just couldn’t do it. It’s so hardwired into their cultural DNA that they would literally HAVE to stay until the end of the film.

Now throw alcohol into the mix and you can keep everyone happy for hours on end.

Of course that’s just the best case scenario. Just putting on Eastenders or Corrie or Emmerdale would be a laugh. Everyone would still sit around and laugh at the dialogue and critique the story and make bets on what was going to happen next around. Because even now some of the best parts of watching the football in Taps is half time when we laugh at the foreign adverts.

What I mean then is that the television would function in much the same way as the Crossword does. i.e. just another prop around which an evening is built.

I pity the fool who doesn’t agree with my idea.

Regulars Have Superpowers

All of us [the regulars] have been drinking in pubs for a number of years (and obviously the staff and quite a few of the regulars have the added experience of having both worked and drank in pubs for a long time), and that long experience gradually brings with it the ability to tell a Wrong ‘Un within a matter of a couple of seconds.

[Wrong ‘Un – noun, definition: bad or potentially deviant person: somebody regarded as having a bad character or deviant/criminal tendencies]

As soon as that person comes in you can tell. Conversations falter for a moment and glances are silently exchanged as everyone realises at the exact same moment that that person is a horrible bastard.

You can just tell.

There’s a certain ‘I’ve taken loads of drugs in my life and have been in lots of fights, and now I’m going to be an obnoxious cunt all evening’ look to their faces which everyone immediately recognises.

You can tell that look. It’s cruel and hard and ever so slightly glazed. Sometimes their features are slack from years of drug and/or alcohol abuse (although not always), but what is always present is a certain belligerent bristling which emanates from them like an attack dog with its hackles up.

You can tell the moment it happens because everyone goes quiet for a bit, while they evaluate how drunk, big, horrible, loud, and dangerous the person is and the implications for the evening which all of those factors entail.

And I was just thinking what a terrible thing that is.

Not the fact that people make snap judgements like that in the first place, because no matter what your mum says about not judging books by their covers, there’s nothing wrong with doing so. In fact it’s a millennia old defence mechanism. What is wrong, however, is when you treat people differently simply based on how they look. Although frankly, when it comes to my own personal safety, I maintain the right to treat someone who looks like a wrong ‘un with a good deal of circumspection until they prove otherwise.

What I think is terrible is that there are people out there who the moment they walk into a room people know that they’re a Wrong ‘Un. The very second. What must that be like? I mean imagine it. Imagine being such a wrong ‘un that you don’t even need to do or say anything for people to immediately know there’s something wrong with you.

I was outside smoking on Thursday night talking to Gary and there was this random bloke out there who I could immediately tell wanted to join in the conversation, and just looking at him, without him even opening his mouth, I could tell that he was a wrong ‘un. I absolutely knew that the very first thing that came out of his mouth would be an absolute load of total bollocks.

I knew it, and Gary knew it. Without the bloke even saying a word.

And when he did open his mouth? A total bloody Wrong ‘Un who spent the next five minutes telling us some ridiculously implausible story about the safe he’s got hidden in his wall which he’s plastered over and keeps 20 grand in at all times in case he needs to do a runner from the all the people he’s got after him.

I mean, how unbelievably shit of a person must you be that people know you’re a scumbag just by looking at you? What must it be like to go through life like that? I mean was there a definite point when the transformation took place or was it a gradual barely perceptible thing?

And before anyone starts on about how I’m unfairly stereotyping people based on how they look, just remember this is nothing to do with someone’s clothes or hair, or accent or tattoos or piecings or colour. I spent many happy years drinking in the Enfield Arms where people of every sort (and you had to have experienced it to really understand what I mean) got along with one another based solely on whether people were decent or not. That was the criteria.

I’m talking about an attitude of belligerence and air of scumbagness that floats around them like perfume. That reeks and pervades the pub until everyone is on edge; wary and watchful.

I wonder if it’s something a bit like the Queen and that old aphorism regarding how she must think that the world smells of fresh paint.

That is, that he goes into a pub and thinks to himself, ‘whoa, bit of a dodgy atmosphere in here tonight!’