So today I am making a cocktail, a Screaming Orgasm if you must know, and carefully plopping the cream on top with nothing less than my usual haste. One of the locals interrupts me. ‘Take your time’ he says, and I give him a look that is supposed to say ‘I’ll be with you shortly sir but surely you can appreciate that this is one of the drinks we serve and if someone asks for it then I have no choice but to make it up’. In fact it probably says ‘argghh, give me a break’, but who’s counting. I serve the customers who were there before him, subjecting myself to the expected torrent of sarcasm and anger. When I finally get around to pouring out his John Smiths it is clear that he is drunk. His words are slurring and he is just plain cross. I engage in a playful little debate, not our first, in which I explain how one has to wait in queues from time to time when one is in a bar. My half falls on deaf ears. Fair’s fair though, his half does as well.
An hour or so passes before he tries to order again; this time I refuse because he had been abusive before and was obviously still drunk enough to have difficulty staying awake. As I expected (and secretly hoped) he flies off the handle. The usual garbage ensues and he winds himself into a fury by asking me incredulously and repeatedly ‘me? You’re refusing to serve me?’ He says he’s fine. He’s not.
Then two unexpected things happen. First off he tells me his brother died this morning. I feel guilty but stick to my guns. Getting drunk and argumentative is hardly the most respectful way to honour your sibling’s life but I do feel sorry for the guy. Anyway my deputy manager Carl stepped in and backed me up all the way so I felt more as though I’d made the right decision.
The second unexpected thing happened when he’d finally been persuaded we weren’t going to serve him. He started to fit. The sound of a scraping chair and a dull thud as he hits the floor and shakes violently against the hard wood. The man has worked himself into such a temper that he has brought on the epilepsy which I later discover the management knew about. It’s out of my hands, Carl is talking to some young men who are helping the man. An ambulance is called. He comes out of the fit. Shouts more abuse, starts fitting again. The people he was with order more drinks and tell me they don’t really know him that well: ‘It’s nothing to do with me, I’ve got my own problems, know what I mean?’
People stare but don’t do anything. They buy drinks. The ambulance arrives and he gets carted out to much relief.
When they don’t have family, when they have no need to go to the NHS, when Social Services can’t help them, that’s when they end up with us, and really, by giving them what they want (and would only obtain elsewhere) we only make the problems worse.

More than one reader has mentioned that it has been a long time since I last blogged. As more than one reader is more than I had ever hoped for in my wildest dreams I feel I might do worse than oblige. As luck would have it I have recently come across an issue I feel requires some discussion.
I have been a non-student, upstanding member of society for all of two months now (three if my contract of employment is to be believed; spot the mistake) and I have already noticed that what passes for passable when you are doing a degree is not so normal when you join the rat race.
Luckily, it is not personal experience that has taught me this.
You may be aware of a recent case that has hit the nationals, that of John Hagan, a Nottingham maths finalist accused (and acquitted) of rape. Needless to say his recent saga has been all over the local papers in recent weeks. I know John Hagan, not well; he was in the year below me when I was a rep for my hall Broadgate Park. His high level of involvement in Broadgate life led to his election as hall president and it was in this position that he was said to have become involved with a drunk fresher in the year below him one night.
Now I am not sure of the facts of the case beyond what has been said in the papers, and this is not the place to speculate as to the wheres and hows and the ahh!-is-it-really?s.
However, the official story does need recounting. On the night after a fresher’s ball, Hagan slept with a girl one week into her course, which, apart from the stern (but sensible) advice of the Student’s Union does not seem unforgivable. Unfortunately she was drunk and, upon finding the words, ‘I pulled the president’ on her stomach in red biro the next morning, saw fit to call the police.
What ensued was a criminal case which saw Hagan accused of rape. A not guilty verdict seemed fair as lack of consent could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, but what is concerning is not the set of bare legal facts so much as the context.
The situation described by the papers is not new. When I was in my first and second year of university I was surrounded by people whose sole purpose in life was to bed a fresher; their level of intoxication was not deemed a problem or even an issue worthy of mention. Had a fresher wound up in a stranger’s bed with biro scrawled across their stomach and no memory of the night before I would have been bemused by the hedonism of it all but certainly not surprised. In fact I would have been amazed if it had not happened.
This seems symptomatic of a failure to look after vulnerable students. Plenty of young people go to university ‘for the experience’ and that, while positive in some senses, needs to be checked by someone. I myself found some enjoyment in the consumption of large quantities of Sainsbury’s own Scotch Whiskey at £6 a 70cl bottle. Partly I enjoyed the warm smile it produced, and partly it was the confidence with which I could, by the final term of my first year, see off the best part of a bottle without so much as a stumble.
Now I can’t drink more than a generous single without beginning to notice; I have higher priorities and find sobriety preferable. As a fresher I saw the bottle as a continent and its end a frontier to be explored. With no real frame of reference to suggest this might be verging on the pathological I never had recourse to stop and think that I was behaving like a lunatic. If I spent an evening working my way through a bottle of cheap Scotch now, I would be faced with concern and possibly be physically constrained by people who just know it is not the way to behave. Then it was just a game, part of what it meant to be at uni.
I think that this might underlie what has happened in the Hagan case. To sleep with someone who is sufficiently drunk to not remember and call the police is a stupid and ruthless act. That such behaviour may have gone unchecked by a broader moral consensus about how students ought to behave is telling of quite how far we have come in thinking of the student lifestyle as a necessary and forgivable whirl of hedonism before the real world. Sanity ought to permeate these depths. Exactly how, I don’t know.