Was a bit apprehensive about posting this- but then bore in mind that i am essentially yelling into the void/muttering to myself here, such is the scarcity of those tuned in to hear me (which is actually a comforting and not a discouraging thought- more in touch with the idea of a blog as a 'log' kept whilst aboard a ship. Full of insidious bickering about the crew and hastily sketched recounts of the journey's progress/ self-indulgent moaning about the hardship of life at sea, all written in a sinuous scrawl due to the rockiness of the cabin desk ) Besides i think my three 'followers' may soon stop being the devotees the phrase implies, and justifiably take a detour from my inanities whilst i'm not looking etc etc

Anyway i wrote this in a frenzied burst- my eyelids artificially pronged up by caffeine stimulation on sunday early in the morning following a first shift at my new job-

Dissection of a Saturday night.

The residue of nights passed clings to everything here, a testament to punters liberally dousing every surface they pass with a variety of spirits, sugars and saliva like deranged catholic priests. I’m now acutely aware of this as I reach out to grip a table for balance whilst trying to weave in and amongst the horde of sweating, lurching drunks, emphatically bellowing innocuous lyrics in their friends faces. I glance at my palm in horror and with considerable effort succeed in wrenching it from its glucose web, a squelch audible as it is peeled away. Having completed this act of escapology I turn to face my true purpose for having stepped out from behind the relative safety of the bar.

Stopping to find my bearings I’m struck by the myopia of the club where a gaze is diverted by a hesitant glimmer of familiarity in the face over there, a distinct note to RSVP in a cute girls face or the unwitting intrusion of a passing elbow to the nave of my back. Then it’s the glance that in your daze your unaware to have held and the pulsing exposure of the strobe light etching phantom forms around you; it’s a scene from which sobriety reels and staggers to escape clutching its head like Chatterton. Its just then as I feel the rapid advance of blood from my feet to my head that I glimpse what I’d been sent to identify, over there, just behind the couple dispassionately gyrating against each other like two sticks being rubbed together by a boy scout hoping to prompt a spark. So I route cautiously through the crowd, side-on sneaking through the narrowest of human corridors, ducking beneath biceps tensed for photographs and intermittently issuing a barely audible ‘sorry’. Then with a final swivel past a middle-aged woman arcing her head around a seemingly oblivious partners neck and I’m by the crime scene, a freshly trampled carpet of glass.

Crouched down sweeping up the detritus I feel as though I’m a courtyard in a cloister of high heels and trainers. I’m reluctant to leave this clearing within the brooding forest of legs, hemmed in by the refractions of the lit mirrors that line the walls. Feet trace the floor and swing inches from my head whilst I sweep shattered beer glass from beneath them and I entertain the thought that months of feigning invisibility have paid off and I am now as translucent as the shards I’m collecting. For after all the role of the employee at the lowest rung of a business is to maintain a contrite efficiency and a perennial apology for their consumption of space and time. I see it in the shade of confusion and hostility that enters the delirious expressions I encounter on my way back to the bar. It’s the most transient of sensations for the drunk when inhibitions sneak back into their mind, and their own humility is reflected to them in the furrows of my brow. Once this peculiar apparition has dissolved from view however they can continue to exile any reservations and resume dancing.

As the clock hands meet and the proximity to other bodies lessens a greater flamboyancy enters the moves of those on the dance floor; what little etiquette was in place is all but savaged as grown men entertain guitar hero fantasies, lunging to the floor optimistically before despondently calling on their mates to haul them off the beer drenched floor. Blokes who habitually trust the authority of the Suns sages jut their starch-collared necks forward in time to American Idiot, and bark orders for ‘every body to enjoy the propaganda’ Women wield imaginary microphones aloft, eyes clenched, pirouetting their unoccupied hand in the air and yelling something resembling ‘if you want it/ you should’ve put a ring on it’, the final word stressed in a spirit of empowered solidarity.