A living

A punter came up to me one night while I was watching a rather empty dancefloor in a yet to be busy club.

I knew this punter as the previous week he'd had one too many and I had to ask him to leave. That night he'd not gone quietly, though he did walk, he just wasn't happy about it and told everyone who would pay him the time of day.

This night as he walks up to me I'm thinking to myself, he's relatively sober and with his girlfriend tonight. He either wants to lay me out for screwing up his night last week or he's come to apologise. Turns out the latter was the case. He shook my hand and said he was sorry for being a nob the other night. He didn't think he was that drunk but it caught up with him in the morning and he really must've been. I told him not to worry and to have a good night of it tonight. After a natter he seem mightily impressed I'd been able to spot his drunkeness when even he was unaware.

To this I could only reply, "I do this for a living."
I'm sober, alert and generally fairly well rested. I've been doing it alot and know what to do and when. Unlike your average drunken punter I'm fully aware of my surroundings and can percieve the tell-tale signs of a drink addled person from quite a distance.

It's sad to think that one of the skills I've proven myself remarkably useful at over the years and have now honed to a fine art is assessing whether some-one's had a sherry or two too many from just watching them, from a distance, walk five steps. I can see it in their shoulders and the way they carry their arms. I can spot it in their facial expressions and the look in their eyes. I can also tell the subtleties of who's most likely to get aggressive, who'll see sense and walk off and who'll just get it wrong and need more than a little help to get out of the building.

All of these things I've picked up over the years and now I'm beginning to get similar appreciation of the illegal drugs that one occasionally sees. Who's up on charlie or speed, who's taken special K and will be needing some serious talking down later in the morning. All of these I see less than the drug of national habit, alchohol, and each can cause a range of behaviours with some very mixed signals.

As I say it's what I do for a living, glamourous it is not but it is a living. And importantly it doesn't involve sitting in an office at 9.am every morning waiting to shuffle paper from one box to another and read 200 emails that a sane man would just file and forget.

Seen in that light, it's more than living but it's sure as hell not a way of life.