When Quentin Wilson off of Top Gear Told off this bloke
Remembered this as I walked down the street this morning

I'd been awake for two days and one night too many and everything looked better, everything except for me. Everything looked as if I was looking at it underwater. And everything felt wet, too. As if I'd drank so much that it was seeping out of my toenails and cuticles. Behind me, in the chaos, I knew I'd left a series of sodden footprints. But I didn't care. I was happy because I knew that when I sobered up I'd have forgotten everything but for the loneliness of the neon of the city at night, and the way the cold emptiness I'd felt at the parties had felt just the same as bored hunger. I'd chuck my wet clothes in the bin and then, when the hangover went, it would prove to me that she'd never be able to hurt me again. (wrong! Wrong! WRONG!). Oh, W****!

I was in Night and Day in Oldham Street in Manchester. I was sitting there as the frigid smile of the virgin new-year sunshine shone on the slush and the empty kebab wrappers. Smoke from the high tar cigarette spiraled as languid as an upper class lie, and the drink tasted as earnest as a promise made at midnight. And I enjoyed the contradiction.

I felt fucking good!

Oldham Street was one of the first to be gentrified - warehouses gutted and steralised into neutral boxes for media types to perch in and look down their powder white noses at the proles shivering differently by the bus stops on the streets below.

There was a flurry. Quentin Wilson (http://www.quentinwillson.co.uk/) and a camera crew appeared. He started doing a "piece to camera" about the benefits of living in oldham street. How it was changing. How it was cool. Whatever.

" 's' 'e doing?" a man at the bar asked. Men with too much time on their hands always talk in shortcuts.

"Doing a video. He was here yesterday" said the barmaid. I'd been hoping to impress her with my consumption of gin. But, as with ******, I'd failed.

"Coont" the man said. I loved the way working class mancunians swore. They put more emotion into swearwords than anyone else I'd met. The smoothness of the rounded down letters at odds with the menace of the intent.

The man went out, and as Wilson continued, and walked down the road, shouted:

"Wilson. Wanker". That's it. Two words. Bang Bang. Wilson stuttered and muttered and retreated up the street for take two.

I heard him start again and he started again.
And again, as he reached the bar, the man said

"Wilson. Wanker". Now. This fucker was big. He looked like he didn't merely excrete, his shit was so hard it punched a way out.

But Wilson was not awed. Straight over.

"Excuse me" he said. Now, as I say, the gin had decimated me so I can't remember exactly. But the conversation went *something like* this

"Yeah" said the man

"What are you doing" asked Wilson?

"Tekin piss" said the man. But he was like a fucking sandcastle in a tsunami.

"I know you think you're being clever. But I'm a working man. Same as you., Just trying to earn a living, man"

And the man crumbled and apologised. "Sorry man. Sorry" a handshake and adieu.

When Wilson got to the bar for the third time, the man merely waved (we were off Camera, Wilson was on Oldham st outside) I said, softly "Wilson. Wanker" and the barmaid laughed. I thought I was in with her. But when I got up to talk, I realised I wasn't. I wasn't, at all.
(sirolimus, Tue 25 Sep 2007, 16:50, Reply)