Last night was Idiot Night at work.
Quite apart from the usual collection of vomiting intoxicated idiots, one brave fool attempted to rob Number Two Daughter of her takings. As it happened there was an unmarked police car passing at the time. We always make a point of knowing the local unmarked police cars in case we ever need to do an illegal manoeuvre anywhere: so she flagged it down and her idiots ran away.
I thought this was an extremely sensible move on their part, because she has been practising her punching moves in the gym, with weights in her hands, and I would really not like to be punched by her. They had made her very annoyed indeed, she would not have been gentle.
Another idiot called her some rude names on the taxi rank, and then ran away when Mark leapt out of his car to join her in her remonstrations and also to remind her not to punch this one either.
A third idiot came nowhere near any of us at all, but rashly picked an argument with a police officer after the doormen had rather ungently ejected him from the nightclub.
This eventually came to fisticuffs when a police officer suggested that he might be intoxicated and should consider having an early night. The young gentleman disagreed with this recommendation rather vehemently and repeated his requests to be readmitted and allowed to purchase more alcohol, before backing up his argument that he was perfectly sober by taking a swing at the police officer with whom he was conversing.
There was a fairly nasty assault on a policewoman last week, and this week nobody was taking any chances. In less time than it would take you to say: ‘too many drugs’, the young gentleman concerned found himself lying face down in a puddle with six coppers sitting on him.
We were impressed with this, and cheered them on encouragingly from our safe vantage point on the taxi rank on the other side of the road, where we had assembled in order to achieve the best view.
One of the sitting police officers had been in Number Two Daughter’s class at school, and later told us with some amusement that the young man burst into tears when they showed him his accommodation for the rest of the night.
The final idiot came to my attention as I was driving along the road back to the nightclub after it had stopped serving at the end of the evening. As I hastened along the road in order not to be beaten to the last customers of the night I noticed two gentlemen at the side of the road having some sort of disagreement that looked rather more serious than the usual mostly-shouting-and-wrestling sort that tends to follow a night’s drinking.
I pulled across the road in front of them and turned my headlights on them on full beam. This usually discourages most sorts of anti-social behaviour, which people generally prefer to execute unobserved. At this point in the proceedings I realised that one of them had the other in a headlock and was wagging a knife about in his face in a threatening sort of manner.
Being unexpectedly spotlighted seemed to bring them to their fairly limited senses. If only there had been a handy taxi driver about just before the interval in West Side Story they could have spent Act Two getting mediation from the Race Relations Board instead of all that high drama and tragic passion. These two promptly broke free of one another and legged it off down the road, and I swerved the taxi through the crowds and skidded to a halt outside the nightclub.
Within moments several large policemen and dogs were belting off down the road to look for them, and that was when I learned something new about myself: I am an utterly rubbish witness.
I have always thought of myself as being a fairly observant sort of person, but it turns out simply not to be the case at all. When the policewoman, who had not gone off on the chase on account of only being about fourteen, asked me for a description, all I could manage to do was to gape at her pointlessly.
I suddenly realised I had not noticed a single thing about them, except that they were young, and men, and that one of them, or possibly somebody else walking past and unrelated, was wearing a red shirt. One of them was fatter than the other but I did not at all remember which.
In fact, the only thing I had actually noticed at all was the knife. I explained helpfully that this was about five inches long with a handle, and which glinted in the headlights, and which they dropped, which was when I saw that the handle had a mottled pattern on it, before they picked it up and pushed off at high speed.
The policewoman rolled her eyes at me and looked cross, and I realised that my taxi was swarming with people trying either to get in it or to steal my cash box, one of the two, and with hasty apologies I dived back into it and started arguing about the fare to Ambleside with some intoxicated young men who really did not deserve their large gentlemanly beards, and who eventually and very reluctantly agreed to hand over the meter price up front.
I turned the radio up all the way to Ambleside in order to drown out their irritating complaining.
It is wonderful to live a life which is sometimes like being an extra in Swallows and Amazons and sometimes like being a participant in an episode of Happy Valley.
If only we could say that there was never a dull moment.
Regular readers know otherwise.
I didn’t have a picture of an idiot, so you have got Fat White again instead, which is pretty close.
