Preposterone

Ah, another splendidly grown-up night out.

We went to an excellent venue in our local-ish university town to see the one of our favourite bands, the incomparable Hayseed Dixie. It was all good, and since I'd been out on Tuesday night and put myself on the outside about a gallon of cheap white wine I was more than happy to drive.

Well. I say happy.

In fact, I was in a murderous, glowering mood, of the sort that frightens children and makes old ladies fork the sign of the evil eye. It was nobody’s fault but mine – I am way, way too old to have two late nights in a row. Still, I had a short, head-rolling sleep in the car on the way there and by the time we arrived was feeling a little more chipper.

And it all started really, really well. A couple of drinks in the Union bar to start with (where I sat and quietly mourned not having had the foresight at sixteen to carry on with my academic career – I would have been aces at drinking snakebite and black and attending three lectures a week), then into the venue itself. It’s a top place – the stage faces a sort of mini-amphitheatre with steps on three sides, so it’s always relatively easy to find a good spot to stand if you don’t fancy getting sweaty with the students in the pit. The band were fantastic as always – if you’ve never heard a bluegrass cover of Cliff Richard’s 'Devil Woman' you haven’t lived. I was on the diet coke, the Other Half was necking Stella like it was Prohibition tomorrow. All good.

And then it happened.

Out of the darkness, preceded by a waft of dirty t-shirt, stumbled a dishevelled being seemingly on the point of collapse. Now, it’s an occupational hazard of gig-going – at some point someone will piss you off, even as you yourself are pissing someone else off. The trick, of course, is to quietly fade away if someone is tetchy enough to point this out to you. So, when Dirty-T-Shirt-Man barged his way into a perfectly content group of people and proceeded to do sort of far-out stumbly festival-dancing, ricocheting and waving his arms around, it was initially ignored. It’s the British way, don’t you know?

However.

The Other Half is not famed for keeping his temper. An exchange followed in which OH informed Dirty-T-Shirt-Man that really, he was being quite annoying by continually barging into people. DTSM smiled in a glassy-eyed way, explained that he really didn’t want to “spoil anyone’s vibe” and carried on flailing around and leaning against random people for support, all the while smelling like a tramp’s vest. The Other Half seethed. I went for a wee, hoping that by just ignoring the situation it might go away. And do you know, after a little while it did. Dirty-T-Shirt-Man stumbled into the pit to fall against a whole new set of people. We watched the rest of the set in peace, bought a t-shirt and headed for the car. A happy ending, then.

Until the Other Half came out of the loos on the way to the car and explained triumphantly that he’d seen the guy in there and laid him out. Nice.

Cut to the journey home, with the Other Half asking every five minutes if I hated him, and me replying through gritted teeth that of course I didn’t, but could he try not hitting people in future if they weren’t actually threatening his physical welfare?

Boys, eh?