Month: August 2010

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24 Hour Party People

Only schooners, unfortunately

Whilst recently getting my daily intravenous shot of UK news, I was slightly perplexed to notice that the government will shortly be repealing the 24-hour licensing laws and stopping pubs from serving alcohol round the clock.  Perplexed because I never came across a single pub that was open 24 hours.  Not one.  Not only did I never stumble across (or indeed out of) one but I don’t know of anyone else who found one of these, presumably, mythical establishments.  Was the whole thing an elaborate practical joke by New Labour or, more likely, a tool to divert our attention away from the latest catastrophic military intervention that we were embarking on?  I think we should be told.

Things are very different in Sydney, however – 24-hour drinking is very much a part of the social scene here.  There are some variations from council to council but I can guarantee that, if you are anywhere in central Sydney at any time of the day, you are never more than fifteen minutes away from a cold one.  How good is that?  Very is the answer you’re looking for.  It has to be pointed out that this liberal attitude (a surprisingly rare thing in Australia) to licensing does come at a cost namely zealotry from bouncers on an unprecedented scale.  In no particular order, these are some of my favourite denials from bouncers in Sydney:

“Not tonight boys, you look like you’ve had a few too many”.  This was said at 8PM on a Saturday evening when the people on the receiving end of the denial had had literally nothing to drink.

“Only three of you can come in”.  This was aimed at a group of four but, bizarrely, the bouncer refused to identify which one of us was persona non grata.  Admittedly this was at 2AM on a Tuesday so probably for the best that we were refused.

“Had a drink have we boys?”  This was stated at 1AM on a Friday night to which the appropriate answer would be “No you fucking knucklehead, I’ve obviously been sitting at home sipping apple juice all evening before lowering ourselves to visit your dingy little cess pit”.  Clearly the recipient of that denial didn’t take the opportunity to deliver that line though or I doubt he would have lived to tell me the tale.

To be fair though, unless you happen to encounter a particularly idiotic bouncer (which, lets face it, are a global phenomenon) and you always carry your ID (even I, in the autumn years of my youth, have been ID’d on a number of occasions here), you are sure to be able to get a drink somewhere at 5AM on a Wednesday which can only be a good thing.

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Many Happy Returns

Church-type activities aside, is there a more excruciating ceremony than the singing of happy birthday?  It’s a legitimate question and not one that I am asking just because I happen to be hurtling towards a particularly unwelcome milestone myself.  I have recently been working for a company where it is a monthly tradition that all the staff who are celebrating a birthday that month gather in the middle of the office and the section manager leads the rest of the department in a rendition of the aforementioned song.

It’s impossible to tell who is more embarrassed – the birthday victims who are subjected to a very public reminder of another year passing and spend the duration of the singing carefully avoiding eye contact with anyone else in the room or the singers who try to deliver the words without drawing too much attention to their congenital inability to hold any sort of tune.  On particularly ugly occasions after the song has, to the relief of all concerned, come to an end, some bright spark might even launch an attempt at “hip, hip, hooray” or, even worse, “for he’s a jolly good fellow”.  It makes me wince thinking about it.  The fact is that nobody enjoys the occasion so why bother doing it?  Public executions were banned for much the same reason.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for celebrating a colleague’s birthday if they so wish – four hours in the pub at lunchtime is always welcome – but not by joining in with the forced jocularity of twenty adults tunelessly serenading them.

A few years ago I was in a club where, midway through the night, they actually stopped the tunes and asked everyone there to sing happy birthday to the DJ who was on the decks at the time.  No doubt this was an emotional moment for the DJ and one that he will tearfully recount to his children in years to come.  For everyone in the club it was five minutes of irritation before the music came back on and they could get back to the serious business of getting off their heads.

There’s a time and a place for singing Happy Birthday and that is at a party for a five year old nephew surrounded by discarded wrapping paper and jelly and ice cream, not in an office surrounded by filing cabinets and humiliation and certainly not at four in the morning in a nightclub.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating making the song illegal per se just completely socially unacceptable like drink driving and reading the Daily Mail.

Is that really too much to ask?

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