Nutter-Outside-The-PubWatch
One of the reasons I kind-of-sort-of welcomed England’s recently-passed smoking ban is my largely positive experience of nipping outside for a crafty gasper while drinking in other countries. While I don’t actively seek them out, and very often the short session outside the pub is a solitary one, brief chats with fellow smokers in the US and Ireland have generally been pretty good.
Since on day one of the new UK-wide ban I met a crazy, I thought it might be worth documenting the more unusual of the conversations with my fellow martyrs.
Number 1: July 1, 2007, Franklin’s, Lordship Lane.
Setting: Franklins is as much a restaurant as a pub. It was (I understand) an eating house which was retro-fitted to be a gastropub and I really can’t recomend it highly enough. At least, I’m not going to. It specialises in St John-style offal-accented big British food. That night I’d greedily scoffed a lamb’s brain terrine and followed that with a Bath Chap, which (it turned out) was piece of pig cheek wrapped around a piece of pig tongue and slowly roasted (I think). After all that, I needed a smoke.
Nutter: perfectly civil and perfectly drunk middle aged lady with big blonde bouffant and crooked lipstick. With young, silent, slightly dangerous-looking, even more drunk male sidekick.
Her: “Well it’s stupid isn’t it? The prisons are full up and they’re letting perverts out and they’re going to put us in prison for smoking in the pub.”
Me: “Haha yes well I’m not sure they’ll be putting us in prison anytime soo…”
Her: “If they fine me and I don’t pay the fine then they’ll put me in prison and to make space they’ll let out a pervert. I think it’s disgusting.”
Me: “….”
Her: “Of course they’ll probably end up making perverts legal. They made being gay legal. I mean I’ve got nothing against them but when I think about sixteen year-old boys who might be all confused and someone could talk them into doing THAT ACT. You know who the last one they prosecuted for that was?”
Me: “No?”
Her: “That actor, Orson Welles. He went to prison in Reading or somewhere but he wrote a book about it and made millions.”
Me: “…..”
Her: “Of course I couldn’t be prejudiced. I’ve got nothing against them, or the blacks. Of course, if my daughter came home with one… but I wouldn’t throw her out or anything, not my own flesh and blood… but anyway all of mine are married now, I’ve nothing to worry about.”
Me: “I’d better go back inside.”
Her: “Nice to meet you.”
[Please note: I am not the hero of this story: this story is the story of my own inability (or unwillingness) to engage with strangers' views when engagement might lead to argument. Perhaps this series may become a record of my conflict aversion.]
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FT's pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør on July 19th, 2007
“That actor, Orson Welles. He went to prison in Reading or somewhere but he wrote a book about it and made millions.”
this is the greatest thing said by anyone ever! and in a very real sense kinda sorta true (poetically anyway)! (esp.if “millions” means the same as what them QUADS meant by it)
FT's Tim on July 19th, 2007
The Orson Welles bit was the part which lifted this “conversation” out of the purely-banal-and-tiresome into the mostly-banal-and-tiresome.
bidfurd on July 23rd, 2007
A nutter outside a pub, sort of, and also on on Lordship Lane.
Waiting for a bus, 9 in the morning. A welshman, 65ish, florid, long nicotine stained hair, can of lager, engaged me in conversation after he scrounged a fag.
“See that pub there” gestures at the Harvester “used to go drinking there with a fella called Wally Jenkins. Changed his name later. Know who he was? Richard Burton.”
“Tom Jones said to me, he said the only woman I ever wanted to marry was Shirley Bassey”
“Met a man, he said give me a £100,000 and I’ll give you £5,000 a week for doing fuck all, know what it was? the stock market. Got out of that game though, didn’t like it, went to Spain opened a bar”
“I lost a million pounds…”
and many more tales, most of which began with the phrase “Sean Connery said to me…”
I half believed him though.