As usual, the Daily Mash catches the zeitgeist. Clubbers ditch ketamine for elephant tranquillisers – “it makes you feel really elephanty”.
In North London, meanwhile, they’re wanking on the streets. Seriously. So far this weekend, I was standing in a toilet in the Sir Richard Steeles* when I heard groaning. I cancelled the maniac. But it kept polling the urban maniac API; I noticed Mr Red Goretex thrapping like a lab-chimp at the other end of the urinal. I’d just been arguing about French education policy and enlarging the zone of sanity by pushing the works of Stafford Beer; I wasn’t prepared for this. And with that, he was gone. By the time I next used the toilet, someone had already updated the graffiti; now that’s what I call social media.
Then, outside my local Budgens, I almost tripped over some character passed out with his trousers round his ankles and, yes, an obvious erection. Daniel Davies will no doubt point out that this is an example of simple probability theory, like Richard Feynman’s joke about the chances of seeing just that particular registration number. Bah, it felt like the world spirit to me. We are all wanking for coins now. I assessed the situation; breathing, obvious risks – cold or violence, funny eyes, weird behaviour (trousers), drooling (seriously – I thought it was a classic symptom of an opiate overdose, but actually it’s stimulants that do that). I donned a tone of command and tried to communicate – frothing, drivel, funny eyes. Skin; coldsoaked. Not a good sign.
Obviously I took out my adrenaline injector and rammed it into his sternum. Yeah, right. They sent for the ambulance, and one was sent. Nobody got lucky, to the best of my knowledge. They were on the scene quick enough; I briefed the Rapid Response medic on the situation. He was both deeply cockney (a rarity round our way) and deeply polite, impressive given that I’d give odds of a pound to a pinch of shit that downer boy puked all over him at some point. As I left he slurred “Youurat zha poison finger!” at me; the patient, I mean.
Happy New Year, Tom, and watch that laughing gas.
* I should stop going there, it’s the wrong crowd. On New Year’s Eve, I ran into David Aaronovitch.