Friday, February 13, 2009
"...do you still see the same old crowd, the ones who used to meet every Friday?"
21.45 Fifteen Minute Late - Waiting For A Driver
We'd been drinking and we'd been talking about drinking.
About how, when we were students (not all together, and not all at the same time, it was a work night out not a reunion. Except that it was a sort of reunion because of Charlie having left us in January) it wasn't really a case of deciding what you'd like to drink, it was a matter of choosing the lesser evil: crap cider, crap lager, crap white wine from the Offy before the event. It was very definitely a means to an end - except for ThesaurusBoy, who claimed to have enjoyed the taste of beer even then. Maybe it was different in Kent?
Charlie had recounted how great nights out in late nineties Reading could be got for under a fiver (50p for the cloakroom, £1 to get into the disco, £2 for two pints of snakebite and £1 for the taxi home) and I was thinking (while we were waiting for that driver) that I was pretty sure that £1 of your grant money was all that was needed to procure a great Ormskirk night in 1980: four halves of cider at 20p a go and 20p for three songs on the jukebox. Unless it was a Wednesday: Disco in the coffee bar. For free! Some weeks were better than others.
The more things change the more they stay the same. Some of my best nights are still on a couple of pints of cider and a handful of songs proving, I suppose, that it's not what you drink but who you drink it with.
Setting Sons - The Jam
We'd been drinking and we'd been talking about drinking.
About how, when we were students (not all together, and not all at the same time, it was a work night out not a reunion. Except that it was a sort of reunion because of Charlie having left us in January) it wasn't really a case of deciding what you'd like to drink, it was a matter of choosing the lesser evil: crap cider, crap lager, crap white wine from the Offy before the event. It was very definitely a means to an end - except for ThesaurusBoy, who claimed to have enjoyed the taste of beer even then. Maybe it was different in Kent?
Charlie had recounted how great nights out in late nineties Reading could be got for under a fiver (50p for the cloakroom, £1 to get into the disco, £2 for two pints of snakebite and £1 for the taxi home) and I was thinking (while we were waiting for that driver) that I was pretty sure that £1 of your grant money was all that was needed to procure a great Ormskirk night in 1980: four halves of cider at 20p a go and 20p for three songs on the jukebox. Unless it was a Wednesday: Disco in the coffee bar. For free! Some weeks were better than others.
The more things change the more they stay the same. Some of my best nights are still on a couple of pints of cider and a handful of songs proving, I suppose, that it's not what you drink but who you drink it with.
Setting Sons - The Jam
Labels: nostalgia
