Guest Post: Fuck You Plastic Glass

Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, or maybe it’s down to the fact I buggered off to Newcastle city centre every Friday and Saturday from the age of 15. Now, I’m quite happy getting drunk in a mate’s house or in the pub. I don’t get ripped off for a taxi on the way back and there’s a lower probability of being glassed off some idiot who’s upset he dropped his chips on the floor.

Occasionally though, I do venture out on a Friday or Saturday night. Sometimes it’ll be to after a gig or to see someone DJ. And by DJ, I mean using black shiny discs known as vinyl and not cheating by using a laptop. For the first time in ages, I went out to town with people I used to work with as a girl I know had come back from Spain where’s studying. I assume she’s learning Spanish.

Unless it’s me, the worst thing that can happen is to be the first person to arrive at said pub/dodgy club. I was told to get somewhere for around 10.30pm. In typical fashion, the people I was meant to be meeting weren’t there. Bloody great, now I have to wait like an idiot outside and try ringing people whilst groups of people stagger past me and use me a prop to keep themselves up. After getting sick of waiting, I bugger off inside and amazingly find most people there. All I’m not is “we thought we texted you to come inside”. No.

Like every bar in a packed city centre, there are always various drink offers. Known as “happy hours” they pretty much should be renamed as “liver killers for skint students”. I’m quite partial to cheapish stuff and moved away from my bog standard pint of lager to a cocktail! For a mere £2.50 I was given a lovely sex on the beach cocktail with two straws and shit loads of ice! Despite it being in the happy hour, the pricing seemed to go up and down like shares. Another bored worker charged me £2.70 and another £2.60. Perhaps they weren’t concentrating as pop tastic tunes such as Akon and Calvin Harris were bleated from the speakers.

Moving on, the next stop was to a bar with the most uncreative name ever. Called “Basement” you amazingly, go down a few flights of stairs to what would be the building’s basement. With this place, it can either be totally empty or so pact that the only sort of dancing you can do is with your fingers. For once, it wasn’t a complete sweat box and there was enough room to actually navigate without having to push people out of the away.

Basement also do a novelty drink called Skittles, which I’m quite partial to. Coming in a lime green or post box red, it is a drink that tastes like the sweets, Skittles. It doesn’t taste of alcohol and you can knock them back like fruit juice. Now, I don’t know why, but they decide in this bar to serve you in plastic cups. If I was at a gig/festival then fair enough, but I’m not dim enough to go throwing glass at people.

So after buying a yummy pint of Skittles, I walked back to the people I was with and then noticed my drink seemed to be a quarter empty without even having a sip. Only on further inspection did I notice two massive slits in the cup. Fucking brilliant, I now have to stand at a certain angle to have a drink as some tight club owner won’t use grown up pint glasses to serve people with.

It also seemed that they had a work experience person on that night. I say that because someone seemed to go a little bit too crazy with the smoke machine. God knows why they have them in the first place. Usually, a little five second burst does the trick, but someone went a bit finger happy and spurted out smoke for a good thirty seconds. In a busyish club, it makes it a lot harder to see what you’re doing when everything goes white. All this resulted in was everyone bumping in to each other and getting lost.

Now, what really pisses me off on a night out is the person who sits in the toilet with a tray of knock off aftershave, lollies, chewing gum and occasionally, condoms. There is something very off putting when going for a wee and knowing someone is watching you. What makes it even worse is when you come to wash your hands; they expect some sort of tip for holding down the tap and giving you some tissue. This one put on his puppy dog eyes and I buckled under pressure and have gave him a solid gold nugget. Next time, my tip to him will be “get another job”.

Final stop of the night was a rock club which I really didn’t want to go to. I don’t detest guitar music, but I have issues with the playlist. With indie/electronic nights you normally here a selection of tracks that are fairly current. Though the occasional classic gets chucked in to wake people up when the 2.30am tiredness kicks in. With this place, it feels like I’m stuck in some sort of time warp. Maybe it’s me, but bands such as White Snake, ZZ Top and Limp Bizkit aren’t what I’d call fresh and new.

Whilst I’m in no position to slag off people, there was some sort of rock dress code which really did confuse me. For the ladies, they all seemed to be copying the look of alt girls from Bizzare Magazine and cramming as many tattoos as they can over their tits. Sadly, most of them failed to do this. Having leopard print inked on your shoulders doesn’t make you look unique, just utterly twatish. It won’t rub off with a brillo pad and fairy liquid. For blokes, it was a mix of black, black and black clothing. Everyone seemed to have bits of metal stuck in their face, maybe they were all in a pin factory when an explosion happened. Me wearing a white t-shirt with pinks, greens and reds must have been a shock to some of them.

For four hours I bobbed away pretending to know the songs that were on. Over the course of three hours, I successfully managed to know fourteen songs. A lot of them came in the same segway as Rage Against The Machine came on, followed by Queen and then for some reason, Metro Station. During all of this, annoying people tried to start some sort of mosh pit and kept on spilling my overpriced beer all over the place.

I never quite grasp the ideas of bottles and pints and beer. After mishearing me and thinking I wanted a bottle of piss weak Fosters, I was going to be charged £2.20. For an extra 60p, I’d get double the amount in a pint. If anyone can explain this to me, then please enlighten me.

The highlight of the evening occurred in the toilet when I heard an argument between two people. Once seemed to be a normal person and the other was a white supremist. He was badly trying to explain why he thought he was right; all whilst getting bad looks from the African toilet attendant. This was the last thing I thought I’d be hearing late night. But it got worse.

After having a brief walk to a chip shop to get a portion of the fake meat known as kebab, there was another argument taking place! It wasn’t as serious, but it was slightly odd. The whole takeaway got to here the debate whether former Sunderland manager Roy Keane wanked off his dog. How the topic of wanking dogs started I’m not sure. Suffice to say, I didn’t ask for any garlic sauce of my kebab.

Matthew Laidlow is wonderful and has never wanked off his dog. Probably. He doesn’t have a website, but if he did, it’d be as useful as this