I got called a twat today by a barmaid in Stourbridge. It was one of those unanticipated, out-of-proportion responses that you occasionally get from terminally baffled people or people who are pissed off about something before you even get there.
“YOU TWAT!” she shouted “CAN’T YOU READ, YOU FUCKING TWAT? THERE’S SIGNS UP EVERYWHERE!”
Confused at first, I realised that I’d put my pint down on the wooden part of the pool table and that there was a hand-written sign on the wall asking you not to do this.
“Christ,” I said, “I’m sorry, really. I didn’t see any sign.”
And I hadn’t seen it. My friend and I had literally been in the pub for five minutes. We’d picked up our drinks from the bar and carried them into the next room, in which I spotted a guy I knew and hadn’t seen for a couple of years (He used to be in a band I episodically hung out with, which he informed me today had split up due to their lead guitar guy being poached by a bigger, undoubtedly better band) and so I naturally put my pint down on the nearest surface so that I could shake his hand.
She snatched my pint from the pool table to put it up on a ledge and then gestured to a beery ring mark left by my glass.
I wanted to tell here that there wouldn’t have been a beery ring mark if she had not snatched it up so violently but decided it was best not to go in this direction and instead to just apologise again. If this had been her reaction to a ‘misplaced’ beer glass in a public house, then only Christ knew how she would have reacted to my arguing with her: she’d have probably produced an old Winchester from behind the bar and shot the place up.
“Really, I’m sorry. I only just got in the door and I’ve never even been here before.”
“TWAT!”
The weirdest thing about all of this was that no one so much as battered an eyelid at all the shouting. As soon as she’d gone, my friend just continued in our conversation as though it hadn’t even been interrupted. Perhaps the barmaid going ape-shit is a commonplace thing there, though it made me wonder if the whole thing had even happened at all and it wasn’t just a sort of
Spaced-esq moment of unreality.