The perils of drink - Issue #1

Early morning, New Year's Day. A takeaway food emporium just outside Leicester's beating heart. They do proper chips and they are loved for it.

A weary queue shuffles along the warm glass. Light-hearted boozy words float about in the air. People are happy.

A trio of slight, middle-class young twenty-somethings join the endeavour. Two are smiling faintly while one bellows with drunken arrogance. They've put up with him doing this before - you can tell by the look in their eyes.

I look at his annoying shouting face with undisguised disapproval (apparently).

"What the fuck are you looking at?" The time-worn phrase, nearly stripped of its meaning through overuse flops angrily out of his mouth.

"A shouty man," I reply. A measured response. Intentionally playful. Option b, as ever, was "A cunt," but experience of early morning chip-shop queue arguments has warned me off that one.

"Yeah you fucking want some?"

"Not really. I just want to get some chips and go home."

I was entirely unconvinced of his ability to deliver "some" or indeed "any", but I didn't really want to push it towards that possibility.

He carried on projecting his voice at the world, saying various unfriendly things about me and the other people who were looking at him with the contempt he deserved. His friends' expressions suggested their friendship would shortly be withdrawn pending an enquiry.

I shook my head and performed various other physical gestures that meant "honestly, eh?" to the other people in the queue.

The woman behind me clearly caused offense next because he enquired of her, "What the fuck are you looking at you fat bitch?"

She wasn't fat. If she was a bitch, she showed no sign of it.

"Do you honestly think she's fat?" I asked.

"Oh here we go. He thinks he's Rambo."

I don't think I think I'm Rambo. It came out of left field. I laughed.

"Are you from the eighties?"

He came back hard and fast.

"Are you from the gay-ties?"

Really. He really asked me if I was from the gay-ties. (I don't really know how to spell 'the gay-ties'.)

"Haha! The gay-ties. That's rubbish!"

"Yeah, look at you with your... long hair."

"Again, you've got nothing. You're a twat."

And then I bought my chips and left. I didn't fight him. It would have been a rubbish fight. Although I reckon I could have had him.

THIS HAS BEEN A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE NORTH LONDON TEMPERANCE SOCIETY.