Pub Notes: waiting for the (northen) man

The students are back and their youth disgusts me. Every pub for the next few weeks will be full of fumbling shy packs of “getting to know you” drinkers, the air thick with clumsy sexual tension, drinking game chants, and lynx deodorant. Again I feel like the oldest person in the pub, marked out by an air of disillusionment, rejection of company and a drink in front of me that isn’t a cheap Smirnoff ice clone or flat lager. The lack of space in the pub means I’m relegated outside to the newly opulent smoker’s area and, of course, it is empty, this generation of students doesn’t smoke, that is the addiction of their parents. Jokes on them when they find out the e-numbers and “Frankenstein” foods that their parents edited from their diet as kids, turn out to be an anti-cancer vaccine and they discover their degrees are worth less than politicians promise. Unless of course their degrees are in submarine building or breathing underwater because, if the papers are to be believed, the polar caps will be well and truly fucked by then and Birmingham will be a sea-side resort.

End of times are coming, other people know this, take for example the groups of estate kids setting fire to bins and huffing the noxious fumes, all for a few hours of unconscious vomiting and hallucinations. That kind of wanton self destructive anomie only comes from a deep and intimate sense of Nihilism and background doom.

Or not. It could be the drink mellowing me a little or the fact that the clouds have finally cracked and the tension headache that was building is suddenly relieved but I realize I was starting to sound like every other cynic soothsayer that inevitably turn out to be wrong. Northern Chris has arrived and suddenly I don’t hate the freshers as much.


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