Читать книгу The World According to Vice - Vice Magazine - Страница 35

BY ANDY CAPPER | ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL DAVID FREEMAN

Published February 2010

Drunk British people love smashing things into each other’s face so much that somebody has invented a new pint glass that won’t break even if you plunge it into some poor cunt’s face at 2 AM in the street outside a bar where you can get triple shots of spirits for £5. How much do Brits like me love casual acts of extreme violence? Well, here’s something to take into account: there are 87,000 deliberate glassings a year in the UK, which is roughly 4,000 more glassings than America has gunshots, both intentional AND accidental.

If any non-Brits out there are shaking their heads in belief about the veracity of our barbarism, you can come out with me on a night out in any town or city you choose to name and see for yourselves why this happens.

I was glassed/bottled once a year for three years running. The first happened in Southport because I was wearing a long scarf. The third time was for accidentally spraying somebody with beer in the Old Blue Last. The second, and worst, was on Charing Cross Road in London by a guy who attempted to smash a bottle on the wall three times to stab me. I laughed at him but then he smashed the beer bottle in my face and ran off while his girlfriend cried: “Oh my gawwwwd. What ’ave you done!” I put my hand to my head and felt a four-inch flap of skin come lose from my head.

But as I lay in hospital with my face turned to sliced ham, the whole vibe was very much, “Oh well, no big deal.” I didn’t want to press charges. The police didn’t really care, the ambulance guys were like: “Ugh, whatever,” and the people in A&E were like: “Take a seat over there please, dickhead, and please stop breathing booze on me.”

If you’re a dedicated British drinker who doesn’t restrict himself to drinking in the same safe gentrified hipster bars every night, then being attacked with some kind of weapon is not just something you need to be mildly worried about. It’s something that you must accept as normality.

Why? There are so many reasons. Most bars close before 2 AM and so the pressure to drink as much as you possibly can means people get as hammered as they possibly can in the shortest possible time. The feelings of injustice and frustration when they’re turfed out of the club make hammered people feel angry and so they take it out on other hammered people’s faces.

Often the attacks take place in the queues for kebabs or taxis and may involve matters of the heart such as competing males who wish to claim the rights to finger a slapper around the back of the butcher’s. Girls and men mix illegal muscle-building steroids with cheap cocaine, even cheaper ecstasy, 15 lagers, and 40 percent alcohol that’s coloured bright blue. This cocktail of fun releases a chemical in the brain called Imgonnaglassyershyafuckingtwatyercunt.

There are also sociological reasons, like high unemployment, poor prospects, bad housing, and the fact that hard-working, decent foreign people with good family structures are doing the jobs that fat, alcoholic, lazy British people cannot be arsed doing any more.

Britain used to be great at public disorder for political/ protest reasons—see Toxteth, Brixton, Broad-water farm, the miners’ strikes, and the poll tax riots. Now nobody except students can be bothered to turn up in groups to throw rocks at the establishment.

Instead we channel our anger into fighting each other in the street after drinking away any semblance of self-worth or identity or hope of getting up in the morning to go to a job interview in a shitty chain bar that’s identical to thousands of others up and down the country.

Lock us up and throw away the key because we can start a fight with our own mothers, even if our mothers aren’t even in the same room as us, and we are asleep, writhing fitfully in nightmarish sleep, slipping and sliding in a pool of puke, shit, blood and kebab meat. RULE BRITANNIA!