The idea for the idiot issue was, in part, inspired by this story. It is a true story, with almost no poetic licence in the retelling (well, not much anyway).Most of my friends did the usual flee the country thing in their early 20s. Some were scattered around the world in various exotic locations, but the rest of us joined the Aussie horde in Earls Court, and staunchly did our bit to confirm the long suffering Londoners view of Australians as a bunch of loud, uncouth, but difficult to offend drunkards.
Leading the charge to Earls Court was one of my friends’ older brothers, who we’ll call Bruce.
Bruce was a man of great good humour and very relaxed attitude towards the exigencies of paid employment. He also had the most amazing capacity for ingesting ale of any man I have every met. Those of you who know my husband and any of my male friends will understand exactly how much that weight that statements holds.
Bruce spent most of him time in London testing the limits of his capacity for ingesting ale and, occasionally, taking on various temporary joblets that required minimum effort in return for maximum beer. The only slight variation on this was the few months that some poor fool employed him as a delivery driver for a French wine distributor. For a short time our tiny little two bedroom shoe-box in Maida Vale was stuffed full of crates of high-end French wine and a floating population of 15 to 20 itinerant backpackers with red noses and acidic hangovers. Naturally these halcyon days couldn’t last, Bruce was fired by the horrified Frenchman (with much beret throwing and Sacré Bleuing) and we all went back to pints and short term jobs in bars.
A few weeks later we all had to go out and pick up a bit more paid work because our landlord was threatening to send his mates around to mess with our kneecaps. This wasn’t due to any particularly unusual changes in our cash flow, there had just been an inexplicable pause in the wave of friends, acquaintances and guy-I-just-met-in-a-bar-that-needed-a-place-to-stay-and-I-offered-him-a-place-coz-even-though-i-don’t-remember-his-name-I-love-him-like-a-brother who usually paid our rent in return for a piece of floor to call their own.
I got a job with the civil service that meant I could sleep most of the day and Bruce, who had an allergic reaction to 9 o’clock starts, took on a job delivering pamphlets for a curry house near Paddington Station.
The first hour of Bruce’s new job went well. He picked up a big parcel of flyers just after lunchtime and trundled off through the damp streets to stuff them into the already overburdened letterboxes of East London.
After about an hour of this Bruce was bored, cold and thirsty. He decided to head for home, and finish the job another day. He got as far as Paddington Tube Station before deciding that the whole thing involved too much effort and not enough pints, so he tossed his parcel of curry house pamphlets into the bin and headed back out of the station in search of the nearest pub.
Many many many hours and many more pints later, Bruce lurched home and collapsed onto the piece of floor that was allocated to him as his sleeping space. He rested comfortably for a short while before being awoken by an official and not very happy sounding knocking on the front door.
He stumbled to the door and opened it blearily to find two large policeman staring at him disapprovingly.
“Bruce Anotherdrunkbastardfromthecolonies?” they asked sternly.
“Wha..umm…yeahiguess washamadda?” said Bruce.
“I think you’d better come with us” the large policemen said. They frisked him, and very efficiently took his wallet, keys and spare change out of his jeans pockets, threw them back into the flat and dragged Bruce out to the waiting police car.
Bruce, who was still wearing the effects of several dozen pints, slept peacefully in the back of the police car until his snoring annoyed the policemen so much that they started hitting him with batons.
Once they’d finished having Fun With Batons, they dragged him into the police station and sat him down in an interrogation room to relate the following story:
At about 12:15pm the previous afternoon a particularly vigilant tube station security guard had noticed a big scruffy-looking bloke meandering around Paddington Tube station with a suspicious looking parcel. This was back in the days when terrorist in London looked like scruffy Irish blokes and Bruce fit the bill perfectly.
The security guard called through to the station masters office and told the boys to keep an eye on Bruce through the CCTV screens. When they saw him dump the parcel in a rubbish bin and race for the exits alarm bells went off everywhere. In the confusion, and given Bruce’s thirst-driven rush for the bar, they lost track of him, but had a firm eye fixed on the rubbish bin.
British Rail’s finely tuned organisational procedures fell seamlessly into place. The station was quickly cleared of people, roads were blocked off, trains were diverted or halted in the yards (no small feat when you consider that five or six main London lines connect through Paddington) and, because Paddington is one of the main feeders for the Heathrow line, the airport was alerted to delay take off of dozens of international flights. The bomb squad, not a group known for their sense of humour, were called in to disarm the rubbish bin, a process complicated by the presence of some aggrieved travellers no-longer-working transistor radio.
All in all, the whole process took about 8 hours and cost the city of London over 20 million pounds.
The policemen in question reacted with some disfavour when Bruce greeted this announcement with roars of laughter.
They explained to him that given the shortfalls in the British legal system they were not allowed to charge him with being a complete dickhead and then beat him to death for his crimes. Unfortunately Bruce had not committed any actual crimes. Therefore they were going to have to let him go.
They did however, point out that there was no requirement for them to drive him home again, and if he had forgotten to bring his wallet and keys with him, well they couldn’t help the fact that he was a complete dickhead, and he would have to work out a way to get home all by himself.
They also suggested to him that trying to get through Paddington Station without a ticket, where every security guard and ticket booth guy had his photo on a dartboard, would not be sensible.
Then they picked him up, carried him, still roaring with laughter, out the front door and deposited him, not too gently, in the street.
Bruce decided that the 2 hour screamingly hung over walk home and the even longer wait outside the flats for someone else to get home was completely worth it, because for the rest of his life he gets to tell that story and have congratulatory pints bought for him wherever he goes.
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