I hate drunk people
They’re unpredictable and noisy
It started when I returned to England a few months ago after living abroad for several years.
I’d forgotten about the drinking culture that exists in England — only to be rudely reminded about it when I found myself in York at 11 pm on a Saturday night.
York — a beautiful, historic, quaint English city — that is rampant with stag dos and hen parties and drunken revellers as soon as darkness falls.
I was visiting a friend for the weekend who lived there, and we had been to the cinema. It was the first time that I’d been out in a city at night for a while having been living in the countryside previously.
We were walking back to my friend’s flat on the edge of the town — well outside of the city walls, and to get there we had to cross through the centre.
Within two minutes of leaving the cinema, we witnessed a fight taking place between a group of blokes wearing football shirts and clutching pints. There was shouting, pushing, punching and glass smashing.
York is such a small city that most of the drinking is done on a few streets around the main high street, so perhaps that’s why it seems like there are so many drunks.
We crossed the road and cut down a different street to avoid the brawl. As two young(ish) women, we were not about to get involved.
We decided to nip into a shop to buy some milk and eggs for the morning. It was a small minimarket that my friend went to regularly on her way out of town.
We had to squeeze past two groups of guys to get to the milk aisle as they were taking up a lot of space. Then we found ourselves in front of them in the queue and they began pushing each other in that “friendly” guy way which involved a lot of elbow barging.
One of the guys stumbled back and knocked into my friend who stumbled into me. We were like a pack of dominos, although fortunately none of us fell down. The guy did apologise in a gruff “sorry love, didn’t see you there” kind of way.
We paid up and got out of there, relieved that nothing worse had happened, but a bit scared.
Next door to my friend’s building was a hotel where a guy was furiously banging on the windows in the internal door. He was apparently trapped between the two sets of doors and didn’t have his key card to get in, and now couldn’t get out either.
Again, we walked on and left him to it, glad to reach the safety and calm of my friend’s flat.
I can sort of understand it on a night out. I know that when I was younger I was drunk and noisy plenty of times too, though usually inside clubs and not out on the street.
I know that people like a drink and when they’re with their friends, things can get noisy. If it’s once a week and I can mainly stay out of the way, then it’s not too bad.
But then I got a train a week ago at 9 am on a Saturday morning to London and it was packed with people who were drinking, shouting and generally causing as much havoc as is possible to cause on a train — pushing their mates up and down in the aisles, dropping their cans and spilling beer all over the carpet, chucking their empties onto the floor.
9 am on a Saturday. I mean, what the hell? What sort of state are these people going to be in by the time they’ve finished drinking at 2 am?
I have to say that the majority of the people that I saw were men, and many of them were wearing football scarves or t-shirts, so I am assuming that they were going to go and watch a game.
I was sitting a few rows away from the epicentre of it all, but they were so loud that I couldn’t hear my podcast even with my sound-cancelling headphones on.
The train was so busy that I didn’t dare look for another seat for fear of not finding one, and so I endured listening to their arrogant lad banter for the whole journey.
Most people had been drunk and brash a few times in their lives. I know I have been.
But I wish they’d try and stick to defined areas (pubs, bars, clubs etc) and not spill into public places like the high street and the train making everyone else feel, at best, a bit annoyed having to listen to their inane banter, and, at worse, at risk of their dangerous behaviour.
