A couple of years ago I went on an impromptu pub crawl with comic and professional German Henning Wehn. We ended up at a lock-in in what could only be described as 'a dirty fucking East End boozer'. People were smoking. I'm serious! They were actually smoking... in a pub! I have mixed views on the smoking ban. As a non-smoker and someone who likes wearing jeans for a fortnight I appreciate the fact that a simple visit to the pub no longer causes every inch of my body to stink of fags. At this point, I'd like to let my American readership know that every inch of my body ALWAYS stinks of fags. The unfortunate side effect of the smoking ban is that it means that people now stand outside for a smoke. I live opposite a pub frequented by Dalston type bellends which means that on any given night I have 30 smokers shouting about bellendia outside my window. I just invented the word bellendia because I don't actually know what those types talk about anymore. I was going to say The Strokes and then I remembered that that was 10 years ago. I am OLD.
Hi guys! Good to have you back for the second paragraph... here goes! So there I was in this East End boozer, a little drunk and actually enjoying the indoor smoking with a kind of nostalgia. Myself and Henning sat at the bar like real men. Then a cardboard bowl of warm, cut up sausages with ketchup was placed in front of us. Bar snacks! This was fantastic. Perhaps they had noticed my German friend and decided to welcome him. Who'd have thought that 70 years on from the blitz an East End pub would not only serve a German but feed him with one of his favourite foodstuffs? We devoured the sausages. Yum yum. 'I love East End boozers' I think to myself. Two minutes later the publican saw that the sausages were gone and everything changed...
'Those sausages weren't for you!'
'What?' We mumbled with sausage breath and ketchup round our lips.
'Those sausages were for that bloke over there'.
Oh. They were just resting in front of us. We look over to see an extra from Danny Dyer's latest film 'Shut It You Nonce!' Suddenly I'm not having fun anymore. The thing is he did put the bowl of sausages directly in front of us. If it was a baked potato then I would have assumed a mistake but a bowl of sausages... surely they were just giving us some bar snacks. I wasn't familiar with proper East End lock ins. I guessed that's just what they did. I was certain someone had put a free bowl of sausages in front of me before. Hang on. Maybe that was in Spain. Perhaps I should explain that I was a little too accustomed to the tapas bars of Salamanca and Seville. Maybe not. No worries. This was easily solved. We could simply apologise for our mistake and buy a new bowl for the gentleman behind us. If that didn't work then, heck, sausages for everyone!
'Oh. We're sorry. We didn't realise. We'll buy another bowl of sausages then. And here, get yourself a bowl of sausages on us.'
There. Panic over.
'Can't do that. There's no more sausages'
'What?'
'We're out of sausages'.
Suddenly this had gone from a sausage emporium where sausages are handed out with abandon to a veritable synagogue. Now we were properly fucked. We'd made an error and now it appeared irredeemable. I considered ordering a taxi to the nearest 24 hour Tesco and grabbing some. They could hold my German friend as a sort of deposit while I did so.
The end of the story is kind of disappointing. Some of you want it to end with us turning it round with our wit and charm and joining them in an cockney sing-a-long. Most of you want it to end with us getting the shit kicked out of us. That's what you read this blog for - the violence. The truth is we just quickly finished our drinks and left with a little menace still in the air.
Thank you for reading my 100% true anecdote about a bowl of sausages.
