I’m going to tell you what happened to me last night, a strange counterpoint to supporting Robert Plant & getting posh gin hand delivered!
I went to the MacDonalds near me, it’s good there because it stays open 24 hours and you can get a decent cup of tea for a quid, it’s bad because its MacDonalds and you don’t really want to be in that part of that, do you?
Now, there’s this horsey thing in town, so the place is filled with those travelling folk who do travelling horsey shows, you know the kind, ‘glamourous’ ladies wearing more make up than clothes, scally lads in polo shirts strutting around with their chicken selects. I’m not judging, Grandad used to make his best money doing flowers for traveller funerals & I always enjoyed when they came to see us.
It’s midnight and packed. It’s a venue, now, this MacDonalds, some a guy is playing trance on his bluetooth speaker and these kids are drunk. I say kids, there must be 150 23 year olds in this place. It’s more like a really shit version of what I imagine ibiza is like. I sat there with tea, chatting about stuff. And it starts to kick off around me. One lad lands a bad punch on another’s jaw. Gets pushed to the ground and kicked in the face. Blood splatters across the illuminated happy meal menu. There’s a baying circle of hangers on, some trying to part them, some pushing them together. Some bloke comes up to me as I try to look calm & bemused at the table and yells phone Joe, phone Joe. I don’t know Joe, I protest, sorry mate. But Joe must be phoned, so he throws his phone into my lap and goes and gets the youngest in a headlock, only to be kicked in the groin and fall to the floor then have his head stood on.
I don’t phone Joe, I phone the police. The manager of the establishment is out front now, standing around ineffectually saying, stop it, please, but by now, there are more people involved, this one girl is yelling ‘he’s a soft bully, kick his face off’ over and over, and a bunch of older dudes show up, baying and laughing, the manager yells at them that they went the wrong way round the drive thru.
It’s getting crazier, the police want the postcode, are there weapons. I tell them to google it, I don’t have the postcode. I don’t see weapons, but there better not be because this is getting very messy, and one knife in here would be bad. I’m worried about this one kid so I go and stands over him, he’s not getting up, just writhing and groaning, and I get off the phone to the po-po and the other phone rings and it’s Joe and I can’t help but answer, much as my gut says get out of here, something makes me pick up, and Joe wants to know who the fuck has his brothers phone and I tell him, big fight in macdonalds, police on their way and he’s furious – he yells who the fuck fights in macdonalds, get them out of there, we fight in the streets, he explains, so I yell – joe says take the fight outside, and they weirdly kind of do, but now there are sirens and like 5 huge vans full of police and the manager has asked the cooking staff to come out front and help get fighting men outside so I tell them all to go back behind the counter and tell the manager he’s an idiot and he needs to protect his staff and let the police worry about the fighters and he disappears and they start kicking each other in the car park, 50 people with their shirts off punching each other, so many near-naked braying onlookers filming on their mobiles, I find the guy whose phone I have and give it back to him and you know what he says? GET ME A GLASS OF WATER and I laugh and say fuck off, get it yourself and he laughs, pats me on the back and heads out into the fray which the police and doing a pretty effective job of breaking up.
I spent the next couple of hours in a lockin in the closed 24 hour macdonalds with the fuzz giving a hilarious statement a bit like this one but more serious and I’m still laughing about Joe’s brother asking me to get him a glass of water.