Events
Get One For Ya Sen - Brought to you by Gazz Wood -
I could not be skinter these days, but when Nick rings me up and says to me
“Gazz... meet me and Big Steve in Soho, I’ll get you two pity pints in”
I simply couldn’t refuse. Who knows when I’ll next get to go out and more over how often do you get Big Ste? That man’s harder to book than Lemony Snicket. Of course I went down there, taking James along with me. First pub we hit was supposed to be the John Snow, reviewed on this very website as a pleasant and nicely cheap establishment, but the lads had already moved on to pastures new and we eventually met them outside The Old Coffee House. We chatted it up and enjoyed the Power Hour video [Power Hour 2 coming soon right here on the LMU]. It was good to see Big Ste again after a long absence.
Nick was in his bloody element out on the streets [So Ste could smoke] because while I was in there getting the drinks [with Nick’s money of course] he was approached by an American couple looking for directions. NOTHING makes Nick happier than when he can extol the virtues of the fucking iPhone with impunity because it actually did something useful. Rather than showing our friends from over the water his exciting new sock darning application, Nick Googlemapped them to their destination [possibly to see Sister Act The Musical] and then stood around grinning like he fell asleep with a coat hanger in his mouth. Tosser.
We had to move on and move on we did, to the Endurance round the corner. Cracking pub but the Gents is all black and white checked so it’s too fucking trippy. It’s like trying to have a slash in Beetlejuice’s mind. Too weird mate. Once again finding ourselves outside we bump into a young lady with a suitcase and enquired as to whether or not she was a tourist. Turns out no. She lives in France but she’s a native of... NOTTINGHAM!
Would you fucking believe it? 150 miles away and the one time it’s me AND Nick AND Big Ste and who do we get talking to? A girl from Notts. Her mate comes out and of course she’s from Notts as well, but before we find that out we had to assure her of her friend’s safety. I mean you girls know what I’m talking about. You come out of a pub from the bar or toilet or whatever to find your friend is being chatted up by a small pale boy, Abraham Lincoln, what looks like a lesbian and a giant in spectacles. Do you get a good feeling from these people?
We threw out the only grenade that didn’t say RAPISTS, which was the Shared Geography bomb, and this stayed us in good stead. Throwing out places we all used to go such as Rock City [before it got shit] and RKO [before it was closed down] and The Works [before someone got stabbed in the queue]. James was entirely out of his depth and probably delighted when the girls left for the evening and we shifted our drinking to The Coach and Horses.
This is where things get... interesting.
It was getting late and the place was winding down, but the friendly barman [who turned out to be the landlord] was more than happy to pull a few pints. Then Ste said something foreign to the ears of the Londoner, which has formed the title for this very event. It went down, verbatim, like this:
“I’ll have a pint of IPA, a Guinness, bottle of Bulmers, pint of Carlsberg... and get one for ya sen.”
Let’s examine that last part one more time. Get ya sen one, translated into Southern means Get Your Self One, as in buy yourself a drink on me while you’re there barman.
This very act of Midlands Kindness puzzled the landlord so much that not only did he NOT get one for his sen, he comes across all generous like. We’d made good with the proprietor just by doing something second nature to a lot of people above the M25. Soon we were awash with free nuts, courtesy of the house, and it wasn’t just a bedazzled guv’nor who chose to shower us with gifts. The Universe had seen Ste’s kindness and chosen to reward it.
It was not but a few minutes when a particularly lovely girl wandered over to us with her friend and asked, in an American accent, if we liked The Beatles. Now I don’t, but everyone else on Earth does and a conversation was struck up. Turns out they were from UCLA [incidentally James wanted to call this event ‘UCL-Hey Baby’... do you see why it’s not called that?] and their names were Marianna and I want to say Carly... but that’s probably not right.
They were loving it, and us. It’s the accents that do it, and when the pub finally kicked out Big Ste bid us farewell and we moved on with our foreign friends to a typical English bar... O’Neills.
Yeah it’s shit and dirty but it’s open till 3am, so what do you want? I was rocking my awesome trilby but O’Neills is the sort of place where having a good look at your face on CCTV can mean the difference between a conviction and a suspended sentence, so the bouncer made me lose the thing. I put it back on of course. I’m fucked if I’m dropping £2 in the cloakroom to check my fucking hat. No Sir. Barmaid rumbled me, and then one of the girls when I tried to hand it off to her. I dunno what everyone’s beef is with hats.
The band were playing a mixture of 80’s covers and their own shit, so we got to rock out and sing-a-long to some of our favourite ironic hits. Discussion ranged from Gabe, who’s some English guy the girls know and who is a wanker [we toasted to him being a wanker about 20 times], all the way to how shit my Spanish is [very], and at the end of the evening we did our Gentlemanly best and walked the girls back to their hostel [directly opposite the Coach and Horses, so they were adventurous!] and called it a night.