by
Lupo Secco
The venting of the spleen is an act of purging, releasing pent-up anger and frustration, and it is one I think is required periodically to keep things level. Every now and again, one needs to lance the boil and release the poison, open the valve and let the hissing steam escape. No point keeping it all in.
I couldn’t be a publican. I might spend an awful lot of my time in the pub, but to own and run one requires skills I do not possess. Primary amongst which is the ability to bite my tongue when presented with people who get my goat. I think it’s been hardened by my years on the comedy circuit. If someone seems to want it — from me? They’ll get it.
In hospitality, one cannot turn away every customer who is an arse or you’d have no revenue, and your business would wither and die. After all, the world is full of arses and even they need a pint and a pie. Also, there is a freedom of speech issue, and you can’t curtail an offensive opinion just because you don’t agree with it. In these days of Reform, racism is voiced more openly and is something, unsurprisingly given my ethnicity, that I am not a fan of. I was in a pub in Kent watching England play. Bukayo Saka scored. A man in front of me said, “that’s the best thing a black man can do for this country.” And then followed it with my favourite ex culpa in the English language, “but I’m not a racist.” I informed him that, in the Oxford English Dictionary, under the term ‘racist’ the definition contained only two words. His first name and his surname.
Not great at self-screening, me.
But you have to expect a bit of that. Short of violence and incitement to hatred, as a publican you would have to endure some rank stupidity as part of the job.
But there are two types where I find I can stifle my spleen no more.
First is The Opinionated Drunk. This is a person who, invariably, arrives already drunk and proceeds to latch on, like a limpet, to someone who is enjoying a drink by themselves, or with company, and loudly asserts their views, failing to trouble themselves with either manners or any concrete evidence to back up what they’re saying. They are, to a man, ignoramuses, blithering idiots, verbal waffle-addicted, foaming mouthed cretins with all the academic acumen of a sea cucumber. I had one who insisted Russia had never been part of Europe, despite it categorically having been. He told me I needed to read more, not an insult I’ve had hurled at me before and not by someone so pissed they’re left with one eye on the fireplace and the other on the door. I told him to fuck off. When I re-entered the pub, the Lancastrian turned his head like an owl.
“Did you give him both barrels, lad?” I nodded. “I’m buying you a pint. That were twenty minutes.”
But The OD is as nothing compared to The Ageing Lech. Nothing — and I mean nothing — makes my blood bubble over like watching these putrid, perverted parasites leer over women decades younger than themselves, ignoring the bald, unavoidable fact that their advances are not just clearly unwanted, they are causing physical revulsion. I have daughters. It provokes a fury in me that makes me want to take my chef’s knife and kipper them from their puckered arseholes to their rictus grins, like an Arbroath Smokie.
They’re always as ugly as sin yet have no awareness of either their market or their market value, clearly never having used a mirror properly. And they’re almost always married, not that their vows meant anything more than whispers on the wind. They snake around the objects of their affections, extending and over-articulating their limbs, looking upwards from their eyes, with nasal tones, like grotesque Gollums in search of a precious to which they have no right or invitation. Gargoyles, golems created from inanimate matter, betrayers of their wives, back-biters, long-tongued liars. Preying on those younger than them, human scum floating on life like spent semen in a backstreet brothel. Skin-scraping sewer rats, shithouses, self-serving salamanders, over-handsy misogynist filth that should never be allowed to crawl out from the gutter. Dirt under the fingernails of life, defiling the beauty of women with their presence alone, desperate degenerates delivering their death-rattles to an audience who have never deserved it.
I think that’s pretty clear, then. Both of them can, in my humble view, go fuck themselves. Sky high.
So, probably best I’m not a publican. Still, at least my spleen is vented.
And breathe, Lupo.
