Friday night I put a clean shirt on and went up the Griffin. On Friday nights the Griffin is taken over by bikers. You know the kind of thing. You go in and it’s all heavy rock, leather and the smell of skunk.
The bikers were singing a song about the landlord on Friday. To the tune of ‘Bread of Heaven’ they were singing, ‘The landlord takes it up the arse!’ It was funny to see how hilarious these bikers thought their song was. Well, the landlady, his wife, wasn’t having it. Trembling with rage, she climbed on a chair, found her balance, cupped her hands round her mouth and yelled, ‘Just because he takes it up the arse doesn’t mean to say that he’s a poof, does it! The only poofs in here are you lot!’
I had to push my way through to get to the bar. When I got there, the barman asked me whether I was going to leap over the bar again like I did the last time I was in. I said I thought it was unlikely. I took my pint into the adjacent pool-room.
I used to play a lot of pool. I had a job once, in a halfway house for recovering psychiatric cases, where all I did was play pool all day with a succession of drugged-up schizophrenics. The pool table was a good one and the standard of play of these schizophrenics was high. One of the reasons it was so high, I think, was because of the major tranquillisers they were on. Yes, they had the shakes, but more importantly they didn’t panic or become frustrated when they missed the pocket. It was this unemotional approach to the game that made it such a good school to learn at.
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