It’s witching hour.
Taxis are still dropping punters off at the Barley for a last one. Half way down the hill their gearboxes mesh into reverse when they unexpectedly encounter the pendulous mob.
I hear today that there was a meeting of local residents, Gardai and the owners of The Barley pub last week. I wasn't invited but then, I'm hardly a pillar of the community. They promise a police presence at closing time in an effort to clear the damn pub and the streets around it in an orderly fashion. Instead of the usual full-scale riot.
02:02
Now the crowd is begun their 2 AM rant. Gargled Dublin accents choke the air. Punters sulphurate the roadworks and walls and poles and shadows and doors with piss.
02:05
Not only is the rave music still zapping well gone the time, it is, in fact, louder now and the crowd is boosting. I'm no expert but I'm estimating 220 bpm hardcore. Do they have 260? Red bullshit for the soul.
The publican must be running it on an extension license because it's late opening for Dublin. Or maybe, just maybe he's completely fucking illegal the joint.
No police are on view from the Green Zone. Wow, surprise. Fifty or sixty gurriers mill about the corner. There are a further 250 people in the pub drinking, dancing, dropping drugs and such. Whistles, cheers and euphoric hand claps lift the ramshackle slates. The crowd will be evacuating en masse soon.
02:12
S-schthump, s-schthump, umpf, umpf. Repeat. The timer counts down.
02:13
Four new punters just landed in at this late hour. Sounds like a fight going on around the corner. Can't see. Excitement, aggro, the usual. Probably the bouncers beating up a valued customer over a drugs debt.
02:20
Music thumping. Gunge rave. Whacking. Ugh. When will it end?
02:22
Society Girl in a white coat, red outfit, red knee high boots, barely 20, runs down the street shrill screaming, kicking the door of a slow moving small Japanese car. L-plates on the windscreens indicating learner driver in tummy-mummy's borrowed wheels. Something upset her in that Micra. I saw her sway towards it about 20 minutes ago and get in. Streaks of urine coalesce on the street. More general mayhem brews.
02:25
If the police were going to show up as advertised, now would be a good time.
02:32
Vignettes starting all over, mostly merely vociferous but sometimes violent. Down the street the lovers tiff has taken a turn. He has locked her out of the car. She is standing around outside in her red face and red boots. After some time, he gets out of the car to speak to some other bird on the sidelines, probably to make her jealous and because he's so bloody stupid. Turns his back and swaggers over. Straight away, she gets in the car behind him and locks the doors. He's locked out now, to his chagrin. Her grin is ear-to-ear, according to my binoculars. Mammy’s boy’s getting really annoyed. What a dumb-ass.
02:35
Beats halted. OK here it comes. The pub ejaculates scurrying punters. The street erupts. The skidding cars metal wreck as drunk youngsters get in and pump their ma-worn clutches to oblivion. The high-heeled stagger of seventy-seven obese but scantily clad and heavily inebriated young women echoes up the Hill like a banshee shockwave.
The girls holler, stagger and malinger in several small groups. Foul-mouthed nonsense. Inarticulate screeching of each others' two syllable names, Ma-REE! Sha-RINNN! More and more are pouring onto the tiny street. I watch from the guard rail as the lechery kicks out like a chamber pot in a prison cell struggle.
Caterwauls reverberate outwards in the sodium light and climb the narrow walls. Single, scuttered men work the line trying their last desperate moves on the thigh-high skirted wailing women. They wagons form into an ululating circle of confused drunkenness. The temperature rises. It's sheer pandemonium. One young Dublin debutante, hanging on to the lamp-post with one hand, squats crudely holding the other hand out, handbag hooked on the crease of the elbow, knees bent as she struggles to maintain her balance on narrow heels, while attempting to light a cigarette, whilst positioned arkwardly on a steep hill. She stumbles, collides and suddenly like a ring of pudgy dominos, her and her circle of fat friends all fall onto the floor with butts in the gutter, skirts admitting the breeze.
Frustrated blokes pass by and howl like wild dogs after other single men, giving up the ghost and reuniting with their compadres, melding noisily into the half held urban darkness. The young ladies lie heaped in an impenetrable collective in the middle of the street, laughing uproariously.
02:37
No cops about but a running, or more correctly, stumbling cacophonous mob. Mobiles flicker and bleep. Pills pass through inched fingers and sharped palms.
02:40
The Green Zone is on the third floor. My lights are low so I don't draw their attention. Nobody ever looks up, usually, unless they’re prone. The sweethearts are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to stand up. They have their angles wrong. The hill goes up. Their head goes down. They are yet to realise they're upside down.
An unwitting cab driver steers into the cauldron. Finding himself staring up the business end of an inverted miniskirt in the middle of his rat run, he gnashes into reverse, ups the hill and boots around the corner. He hasn't tried a j-turn in 20 years.
Giggling handbags produce bottles of lurid blue and green alcopop drinks smuggled from the bar. Fatfrog filching fatso fools in frocks frolic on the floor for fun. This is gross stupidity.
02:49
The wind is acting strange, dying down from time to time.
02:50
Brutal bouncers push malingerers about. I observe they have a brand new 'naay-bores' policy. Instead of turning a blind ear and eye to the behavioural disaster they proliferate, the vintner’s people are on orders now to shoo their customers off the corner. One guy in shirt, tie and trademark 70s tash is management, obviously. He would have been called to the meeting with the hats I'll bet. Taking it all very seriously, he pleads with the customers to have done with it and leave.
“Come on folks go home” and all that. Less amicably, the bouncers are manhandling punters to get them to shift it. They may wish to provoke a smack-fest but the youngsters are wise to it. It's the first time the security staff have ever made an effort and it’s breaking them down.
Intense, as always, they are starting to disperse earlier than usual. Peelers are a no-show. Someone downstairs is also observing from their window. I think Helen. Drunk mobs like ours are not for the faint of heart. There's nowhere to go at three AM, otherwise we'd be prisoners in our own home who couldn't go out. As it is, we merely are trapped inside.
02:56
Wait. Show ain't over. Ain't no fat lady sung yet. (Screeching doesn't count.)
03:00
'Anto' the bouncer is leaving, but shouting at the top of his macho voice in his gut-Dub accent for the scattered remainder of "fow-ks" to go. He threatens to break their hands. I imagine that's his thing that he does. Anto the Handbreaker. Tony Tenfingers. Anto, sober, shaven headed, buff and puffa makes more noise than most of the drunks put together. I can tell he enjoys his coke-sponsored part-time job. He jumps into a drug merchant's Merc and speeds off. Stragglers still stand around sapping the life out of cigarettes. I consider deploying a water bomb out of sheer frustration but opt to maintain the policy of patience and secrecy.
03:10
Party's over. All gone early to bed. Meanest looking bunch of punters I ever saw. At least, since last time.
03:15
Looking over the letter I got from the Taoiseach's office yesterday acknowledging the problem here. I contacted the Leader of the Nation and every other politician in the area when I was attacked a few weeks ago on my front door as I came home from the club. I busted one guy on the head and ran from the other four. Suffice to say, I was not pleased with being accosted on my doorstep so.
'Trying to understand what is happening'. He's contacted the Superintendent in the Bridewell. Says it's being investigated. He'll be writing back to me. Nice golden-harp-on-top heavy-stock paper. Bertie Ahern, leader, Taoiseach of the Irish people. That's his constituents roiling around out there on the tarmac.
03:26
Mmm, ugly. They break up though. Alls it takes is a little application.
03:27
Right guys: In the Dail this morning the Taoiseach defended the garda's record. Mr Ahern said they were doing a good job particularly in areas of Dublin where they have had to deal with anti-social behaviour.
09:00
1916 WWI: Britain's Secretary of War, Kerry-born General Horatio Kitchener, 65, drowns as ship strikes German mine during storm
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| Your blogger needs YOU, Horatio Kitchener, died 1916 |
Mimmins winnie maratin.
10:30
Too many damn Bank Holidays in a row. Don't know what to do with myself. Back to bed, I suppose. Mythbusters doesn't come on for another couple of hours.
11:43
How come I done something to deserve to be excluded? And no, I'm not so fascinated with the opposite sex that I'd like to dress in drag to run 10 measly kilometers, which is not even a quarter of a marathon. It should be the fun-size Marathon, (if there's any left over after feeding the kids their dinner.)
11:49
"I'm just popping out to organise a Men-only Mini-(aargh!)"
13:50
It's tough at the top (but not as tough as it is at the bottom) trivia:
Catholic Popes who died during sex: Leo VII (936-9) died of a heart attack, John VII (955-64) was bludgeoned to death by the husband of the woman he was with at the time, John XIII (965-72) was also murdered by a jealous husband, Pope Paul II (1467-71) allegedly died while being sodomized by a page boy.
