Blood and Vomit:

The Yearly Nightmare that is St. Patrick’s Day

 

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Dear God in Heaven, it’s almost upon us again:  St. Patrick’s Day, that appalling celebration of everything from serpents to leprechauns that is and always has been the Bane of the Serious Drinker.

You will certainly get drinkers out on Sunday March 17th but they really aren’t imbibers as I understand the concept.  These clowns are only out to get well and truly bladdered; and God help them but it won’t take much because they’re not used to it.

I love pub life which means that I’m in a bar perhaps as often as six times a week.  But rarely and certainly not in recent years have I been carried out of one.

I enjoy a pint.  Simple as that and I make no apologies for it.  The kind of utter gobshites and unreconstructed wankers that will be let loose over the weekend are the twice-a-year-drinkers.  (The other horror show being Christmas.) These people shouldn’t be let out.  They should just be kept in their cages.  They spoil it for everyone else.  Even more hideously they generally drag along their ill-behaved brats with them.  Now I’m not a brat friendly person at the best of times but I really start frothing at the mouth on Paddy’s Day.

Having gotten their ghastly offspring ‘excited’ by a parade that would put any normal person to sleep  they then proceed to shovel large amounts of sugary drinks and chocolate into the obese gobs of their dreadful sprogs, all of which leads to a very simple equation:

SUGAR + CHOCOLATE SQUARED==ODIOUS LITTLE SHITS RUNNING AROUND BARS AND RESTAURANTS WHILST DRUNKEN PARENTS LIE INTOXICATED.

The serious drinker will always stay away from bars on St. Patrick’s Day.  As the day turns into night it just gets worse for the tenders behind the counter.  You’ll have idiots that they have never seen all year screaming:

“When you’re ready!  When you’re ready!”

And do you know, there is no sense to it.  They can see that the guys behind the counter are working flat out.  If they were octopuses they couldn’t be firing over any more drinks than they are doing.  They manoeuvre around each other and there is no time for finesse and certainly there is no demand for it from the customers.  All they want is drink and they want it served five minutes ago.

“Is there any fear of me getting a drink?  I’ve been here twenty fucking minutes!”  There’s another thing.  It’s never ten minutes or five minutes; it’s always twenty fucking minutes.

Or you enter a bar that is normally OK but this time it’s like pushing into a wall of rancid heat.  The noise seems to wrap itself around you and immediately you can see people with their arms in the air, soggy cash notes waving frantically.  “When you’re ready!  When you’re ready!”

And then there will be the inevitable eejit who lets out an ear-splitting: “Ya boy ya!  Yah-HOOOOOO—yah!”  He’ll then beam around him as if he has just passed a witticism of Wildean proportions, as barmen and customers alike look at him and dismiss him for the clown that he is.

“Sure we’re motoring now!” he’ll be yelling at no one in particular.

Another one that shouldn’t be let out.

This thing, the Patrick’s Day ‘craic’;  I just don’t get it.  Maybe it’s OK in other cities like New York or Chicago.  Maybe they’re more civilized there,  I don’t know.  I’ve neither gone to one of their parades nor had a desire to do so.  All I know is that in Dublin or Galway or Limerick or Waterford it will end with a lot of vomit down the shirts of a lot of twice-a-year-drinkers.  And of course there will be a lot of blood because people who can’t hold their drink tend to think that they can fight.

Is there anything good about St. Patrick’s Day?  Well, I haven’t checked if they’re open yet but maybe it will be a good day to visit the cinema.  Who knows, all the attention-defecit scumbags who can’t sit down for two hours without taking their miserable little mobile phones out or talking in loud voices just on the off-chance that someone is in there to actually watch a movie—maybe they’ll be out getting bladdered and annoying someone else.  So it might be good for that.

It’s also good that it gets a lot of our freeloading politicians out of the way for a while.  They’ll be poncing around the White House and the Statue of Liberty laying it on thick for any Irish Americans who are stupid enough to think that this kip is a country worth coming back to.  But at least when our lot are over there breathing out hot air they’re not over here doing even more damage than usual.

Do you  know, I can’t really think of anything else Paddy’s Day is good for, although I’m sure I’ll hear from the usual little drones who think that it is a wonderful ambassadorial opportunity.  Well, of course it is.  Maybe Enda Kenny will even get his mug on the cover of the American Time magazine this go-around.

But that is going to make exactly fuck-all difference to you and I.  So again, what is it good for?

This advertisement for St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland has NOT been brought to you by the Irish Tourist Board.

 

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