Spiegeldrunks

I haven’t been out on a Saturday night for a while and this was a reminder why not.

Bank Holiday Weekend in Brighton and I’ve picked Lou up from work but it’s about half past ten by the time we are outside the Spiegeltent. She used to work with Guilty Pleasures. Sean is playing the tent tonight. “It’d be nice to stop by and say hello to him,” she said a couple of days ago. At the time I pictured a nice tent, sticking our head in the back, a few people, a quick hello.

I’m not in the headspace for a club night but this is just a hello. She worked closely with him for years. I’m just there next to her in a hat and she’s on old ground.

We find a parking space just over the road from the tent. Miracle. We cross the road. It immediately becomes clear that this isn’t going to be what we pictured. This is a club at half ten on a Saturday night on a bank holiday. Oh hell.

The queue is vast.

Everyone is hammered.

I’m immediately halfway home in my imagination but Lou is determined. She gets to the front of the queue round the side, where a beleaguered bouncer is doing crowd management on all the people trying to talk their way in the same route. She has no real cards to play but she plays them all. This is only gonna be solved with a phone call but she doesn’t want to make it. Bouncer is neither helpful nor interested. There’s been police tonight in the tent, and an ambulance. There’s a guy in the same place as us trying something that looks similar, and he is so fucking drunk that he is phasing in and out of reality. All of his sentences are drawling nonsense and beer breath. We are not in the right place to get in anywhere here. We look like polite versions of him.

We end up talking to some people through a fence. Still no luck though and I’m completely over it as all we wanted to do was say “hello” to someone and he started playing about fifteen minutes ago. This is not about anything other than principle though, as the guy who is pretending to be helpful is actually not being honest with Lou and she knows it.

The extent to which I don’t want to go to Guilty Pleasures with all the drunk people in Brighton is so vast that it has broken all the scales. I’m there with Lou, kinda hoping we don’t get in so we can get the heck away from this tent full of drunk. I appreciate that she is just being sober and pleasant and wishing that the world was different. But the world isn’t different tonight, the world is a drunk mess and crowd control has had to take precedence over listening.

We give up before it starts raining. The whole interaction takes some time to wind out. Saturday nights are a stupid time to go out at the best of times, and at the Spiegel at the end of the festival on a bank holiday Saturday? It’s never gonna be anything other than hell.

We are home now and it has started raining, and mostly I’m just glad that I did plenty of that crap when I was in my twenties and thirties. The appeal has dropped off a bit, but I’m older and uglier now. And wiser? hmm