Posts tagged ‘Pub Stories’
5 Things I Miss About London
OK, so I’m getting sentimental here, but I really do miss living in London.
The Brits have it good, although though they do love a good moan about the weather, the tube, their cricket team, the price of mince meat, newspapers with ink that rubs off in your hands, the fact that a weird-looking Australian tried to encourage fellow passengers on the 214 bus to get involved in a GreenDay sing-a-long at 7pm on a Friday evening on the way home from Sainsburys.
In fact, I frequently tell all my Brit mates that the UK is so great, that I consider it the second-best country in the world. For some reason, they’ve never appreciated this compliment. Ungrateful bastards.
So, in no particular order, here’s my list of the 5 things I miss the most about London.
1. Dunnyman. A uniquely British creation, Dunnyman (or the female equivalent – Dunnymole) is the lovable ‘attendent’ that dispenses handroll, after-shave, condoms, women-advice and philosphical mantras in the pub toilet. He is well dressed, welcomes everyone with the stock-standard ‘Freshen up boss!’ greeting, and is almost always from a war-torn or famine-afflicted nation. Despite working in barely-tolerable, unhygienic conditions and copping daily abuse from drunk arrogant punters, Dunnyman is always smiling. I thought Sydney taxi-drivers copped a handful taking my mates home on a Saturday night….I’ve finally found someone with a thicker skin – Dunnyman.
2. Fried Chicken Joints. On every street corner in London, there is a fried chicken joint selling £1 fried chicken pieces, deep-fried in month-old vegetable oil. They’re a cornerstone of the British diet, and have been around for centuries. During the Victorian era, London town-planners laid out the city in such a way that every pub would be no more than a 50m stagger from a FCJ. However, the typical modern-British male is ashamed to frequent a FCJ, often waiting until his friends are on their way home in a cab before checking over his shoulder. In fact they’re sometimes so discreet, a casual observer would believe he’s entering an adult shop.
3. The Church. Every Sunday afternoon between 12-4pm, a “nightclub” in Kentish Town holds a massive piss-up called The Church. Completely dominated by Aussies and Kiwis, it’s a perfect excuse to end the weekend much the same way it started – drinking beer, being loud and obnoxious, eating 5 chicken pieces and a kilo of fries from a FCJ, then passing out in a cab.
4. English Accents. Don’t get me started here, I love English accents. OK, let me distinguish for a minute – I’m not talking about the chav accents from South Ruislip that sound rather like down-syndrome strawberry farmers. “O’ight geezer, giv’us one of ya fags love… innit”. Instead, I’m referring to the educated public-school London accents that you hear everywhere. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit (and please don’t tell my mum) – posh female English accents give me the horn. Often I’d re-check my voice-messages just to hear the lovely Buckinghamshire Vodafone lady tell me that I have no new messages.
5. Apathy Towards Terrorism. While the rest of the world is cowering in fear at the thought of mass-murder on their public transport systems, the Brits simply don’t care. During my first week in London in mid-2005, bombs went off on buses and trains all around central London. The locals simply carried on their day-to-day business without even blinking. I thought what a crazy place to live, no one seems to mind!
Vehicles manufactured in Korea are often of inferior quality.
Me: How was your day mate?
English Friend: Yeah was fine old chap, but the tube was delayed because a bomb went off on the Piccadilly Line…I wish the London Underground would just get their act together and stop making excuses.
Me: So you honestly don’t mind all these bombs going off. What would you do if a suicide bomber sat opposite you on the tube?
English Friend: I wouldn’t care. Well, as long as he doesn’t try and start a conversation with me.
Australian Tourism – Tits, Beer and Sport
I’m doing some work at the moment for a large tourism body – the organisation that brought you the ‘Where The Bloody Hell Are You’ campaigns that were banned in the UK.
I still can’t figure out exactly what element of that campaign the Brits found so offensive. Were the Brits just sick of all the drunk Aussies stumbling around Shepherds Bush at 3am on a Saturday morning in search of the mystic beer-scooter to take them home? Or perhaps they were simply just envious that you can afford to buy a beer at any pub in Australia without the need to remortgage your house.
Or perhaps the Brits were just plain ticked-off that Australia could produce such a hottie as Lara Bingle. When wondering around London, haven’t you noticed that almost every pretty girl is speaking a foreign language? When God was handing out country qualities, did he say: “right…England….you can specialise in ugly women and substandard reality television”.
Venture out of the capital and it’s even worse. Be prepared to reach for either the whisky bottle or the Vaseline-coated glasses.
7pm on a Saturday evening, I’m catching a train into central Cardiff from the suburbs. Surrounding me are 2 parties of intoxicated, overweight 20-something year old women, all clothed in a particular theme. The group on my right are dressed as tubby school teachers. Imagine that on Wendy’s text message to her lasses earlier that evening: “let’s all dress up as fat, minging teachers, that’ll get the lads blood pumping!”.
The group in front of me, with their bare breasts pressed up against the train windows, are dressed as playboy bunnies complete with size 18 mini-skirts. They are yelling something at each other in a strange guttural language that sounds vaguely like English. In fact, I think it is English….a dialect that was spoken in 1950′s suburban Brisbane.
The two groups are going down on their cans of luke-warm Stella faster than a ten pound hooker.
The Brits just love their beer don’t they, probably even more so than Aussies. Britain is the only place I know where you can buy a can of beer at every newsagent, petrol station, fish and chips store or Sunday School. I even bought a beer at the KFC at Tower Hill.
But I guess like Aussies, Brits love a beer simply to lighten up and relax whilst watching the football, hoping to high heaven that with a few more lagers the overweight group of Welsh birds dressed as Playboy bunnies will somehow appear more attractive.
The current campaign for this particular tourism body feature rather sophisticated and romantic messaging. Emotional themes hint that Australia will be a place to enlighten yourself, remove the angst and pressures of your normal life.
In order to better target the British public, I think the core campaign message could have been simplified to: “Come to Australia. We have Tits, Beer and Sport.”
Australian holiday tip: avoid drinking in the sun without a hat
A Typical Gig in Sydney – Three Wise Monkeys Bar
We recently played a gig at Three Wise Monkeys Bar in central Sydney. For those that don’t know, 3 Wise Monkeys is a questionable bar. Why? The patrons (mostly young European backpackers) have questionable hygiene and questionable substances in their blood, there are questionable stains on the toilet walls, questionable odours permeating the corners and questionable amounts of change are handed back after each round of drinks bought.
Several highlights of the night:
- A fat British man in a suit had consumed a questionable pill and entertained the crowd near the stage with his dancing stylings. This consisted of running stationary on the spot with a big grin on his sweaty, shiny face. In fact I have a sneaking suspicion it was Peter Kay. The funny thing was that even between songs he continued running stationary on the spot with no music to back him up.
- Free beer for the band. That’s always a highlight for me. Would be slightly better however if we didn’t have to redeem them with rather large, tacky pink paper vouchers that we hand over to the bar. Hardly a cool look.
- A wannabe hip hop dancer (see the 6 types of drunk dancer) who had recently used up her 20 hour gift-voucher at the solarium last week. Well, that’s my only explanation….or she might have decided that painting every inch of her skin with orange crayon would have the same effect. Anyway, she had her hands in the air for every song, akin to a born-again christian raising her arms to God in a church service. Unlike a church service however, she had a see-through white top on purchased from the toddler section at K-Mart, and 2 inches of muffin-top oozing down all sides of her jeans. She looked like an Oompa Loompa auditioning for a Christian Hip Hop music video.
- The DJ. I’ve always been amused by the type of people large establishments employ. Their bouncers are always power-hungry meat-heads who failed the police-recruits drug test. They decided that bouncing (is that what you call the profession?) would be a similar legitimate way to spend time punching unfortunate souls in the head. Their DJ’s are unintelligent wannabe musicians who don’t understand a thing about music and think semi-quavers are the side effects of a bad coke session, syncopation is the Italian word for the job that you go to during the day, and Beethoven is a sub-breed of St Bernard dog. On this particular night, the DJ insisted on screaming out “G’DAY SYDNEY HOW YA’S GOING!! FUCKING WHOA!!!” at the start of every song. I think this particular DJ learnt English from the Russian botox-blonde Eurovision presenter.
I'm a DJ. I get all the girls
Now for the sad part of the night. After the gig, my band members and I were standing outside a nearby kebab store, and witnessed two Asian males in a heated argument. One had a rather large head, one had glasses. To my horror, Glasses punched BigHead rather hard in the mouth with a left jab. As BigHead was stumbling backward, Glasses executed a perfectly formed right roundhouse kick to the head that would have made Mr Miyagi proud. BigHead was out cold before he even reached the ground, a victim of a drunken violent ‘friend’. Robbo and I grabbed Glasses and shoved him backward as he prepared to finish the job with a soccer-ball kick to the head.
The police arrived very soon after and threw Glasses on the ground, arrested him and took him away. We all made individual statements to the police following the incident.
In an effort to give Glasses a taste of being physically assaulted and violated, I added in my statement “I heard what they were arguing about. Glasses was trying to convince BigHead to insert a condom laden with cocaine deep inside his anus. Glasses had previously done this an hour before and it wasn’t noticeable at all unless you shove a finger deep inside there.”
I hope he suffers.
Recent Comments