Mission Impossible

Purely for want of something better to do one New Year’s Eve in the early ’90s, some friends and I decided it’d be savage crack altogether to see how many pints we could drink in our local pub in exactly one hour. After a few leisurely snifters, half a dozen of us set about our task with single-minded determination as soon as the clock struck 10. Although we found ourselves a man down half way through pint number four, the rest of us managed the mightily impressive/stupid (depending on your age and mental condition, tick whichever you feel applies) tally of seven each.

As things to do in Birr when you’re bored go, it was a profoundly pointless exercise in frivolity. Things like that just can’t be done in London.

A couple of Saturday’s ago, for example, I hooked up with a friend, one of the aforementioned “Magnificent Seven”, who was over on business for the weekend. Circumstances dictated that we couldn’t meet before 10pm, at which point we convened outside The Haymarket Theatre. Our plan was simplicity itself: find a pub nearby, get hammered as quickly as possible before closing time and then find somewhere else to continue our roistering. Imagine our disappointment when, two hours and as many pints later, we found ourselves sitting forlornly in my living room supping nothing stronger than tea while ruminating over the fact that despite our best attempts, we had been unable to get drunk in London on a Saturday night.

In the centre of a thriving city where women have been having abortions for decades, we were unable to have any more than two pints in an hour or buy an alcoholic beverage after 11 o’clock. A stranger to the bright lights of the Big Smoke, my associate – known to all but his kin as Enner – was stupefied. Stupefied, bemused, dazed and confused. I was less bewildered, as the London experience has taught me that when it comes to carousing, there are gloom-mongers in this town who will stop at nothing to thwart the best laid plans of mice and men. Well, men. Once we’d met at The Haymarket, Enner and I high-tailed it to a pub in Soho which, it transpired, was home to bar staff that even by London standards, were deathly slow in every sense of the word.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Few London experiences are as consistently traumatic as ordering a pint. This is due in no small part to the steadfast refusal of bar men and women to deal with more than one customer at a time or remember any order containing more than one drink. The result is that saloon exchanges such as the following in city centre taverns are disturbingly common.

Customer: “Can I have two pints of Stella please?”

Bar man: (watching a pint settling): “I’m serving someone!”

Customer: “Well, whenever you’re ready I’ll have two pints of Stella please.”

Ten minutes later…

Bar man: “Now, what was it you wanted?”

Customer: “Two pints of Stella please.”

Bar man: “Right. A vodka and Red Bull and a bottle of Bud coming right up.”

Customer: “No, I actually asked for two pints of Stella.”

Bar man: “Two pints of Stella? Right. Will there be anything else with that?”

Customer: “No thanks. Just the two pints, please.”

Bar man: “No nuts or crisps, then?”

Customer: “No thanks.”

Bar man: “Okay so, that’ll be eight quid.”

Unsurprisingly, Enner and I managed the derisory total of two pints each before being last to leave the pub at “kicking out” time: 11:07pm. Granted, our tactics had shown an astonishing lack of supping savvy, for if we had known what the rest of the night held in store we’d doubtless have gone straight for the top shelf. Sadly, we opted for the more sensible approach: pints instead of shorts, one at a time.

With the clock ticking, we were left with only two realistic options: a Soho titty bar or a 20 minute Tube ride to The Puzzle, a late-opening hostelry near my house in Clapham. As neither of us were particularly inclined towards paying several hundred pounds for two watered-down cocktails and mere conversation with a premium rate hooker, we opted for the latter. Our ETA at The Puzzle was midnight, which would give us 90 minutes drinking time – ample time to get sozzled with some astute ordering tactics:11 pints of porter, nine litres of Peach Schnapps and whatever you’re having yourself landlord.

We arrived at 12:03am to be informed by the doorman that he couldn’t let us in as he wasn’t allowed to admit anybody after midnight. Knowing that to be a big fat lie, as I’ve been welcomed into the same boozer after the witching hour on numerous post-gig occasions, I pleaded with him for clemency telling him that I was a regular who was attempting to entertain a mate visiting from Ireland. “I know you’re a regular, but I’m still not letting you in after midnight,” he announced. “After all, rules are rules. Anyway, the pair of you have clearly had far too much to drink already. You’ll thank me for this in the morning!”

And to think some people find bouncers unreasonable.