The Real Cost

The Tories, for those of you who aren’t following the news (or reality in general) are currently being a bunch of, well, Tories.
 They’re indulging in a lot of their favourite hobbies, which I assume include wiping their arses with bank notes and drowning swans in the tears of the destitute poor. The one demonstrable hobby that’s currently bothering me, however, (‘cause I fucking hate swans) is their decades-old passion for ruining the NHS.
 Personally, I’m not ill. I’m a smoker and a heavy drinker, and tonight my evening meal consisted of fried chorizo on fried bread (followed by Doritos!) but I’m in decent enough health in spite of it.
 So how can I tell that the NHS is in trouble? Because I manage a bar, and bar workers everywhere are society’s first defence against a lot of things.
 First, there’s the pandemics. Bar staff spend a vast amount of their time leaning close to the faces of many, many different people. If bird flu had ever kicked off  -and I mean properly, End Of Days kicked off - you can bet your bottom dollar the hospitality workers would have been the first to go. (Or not; years of other peoples’ germs have left me with an immune system that can resist almost anything. My doctor recently told me that my level of resilience is somewhere between Keith Richards and Wolverine.)
 We’re also, as an industry, in the front line against a far more intractable medical threat than mere disease. We’re the front line against nutters.
 Working in a bar, every so often, you get a nutter. Always - and I want to make this clear: ALWAYS - on a quiet night, you’ll get some poor bastard in a plastic army helmet with feathers on it who wants to tell you why the CIA is stealing his thoughts and putting them in JLS lyrics backwards.
 The worst part of all this is that they don’t necessarily arrive in full nutter*. They’ll come in looking about 90% like a normal person, order a half (it’s always a half, and Jesus, do they make it last) and then before you know it, you turn around and they’re wanking into a bucket whilst screaming Swedish nursery rhymes.
 Lately, this has been happening more and more to me.
 (Nutters in the bar, not the wanking thing.)
 I don’t know where these people go during daylight hours, although something in my mind wants to say “libraries”, but after dark, the mentally ill like to find a quiet bar to drink in. A guy the other week came into my bar whilst it was empty and proceeded to talk to me about literally everything, for hours. I don’t mean to seem dishonest, so I want to stress: everything.
 He told me six times that he was a licensed doorman, presumably in the hopes that I would be impressed. For those who don’t know, obtaining a doorman’s license involves the physical toughness required to sit through a two-day course, and the steely resolve to pass a short multiple choice test.  Working the doors is a tough job. Having a license to work the job involves all the gruelling hardship of putting another laminated card in your wallet. (His was expired. I checked.)
 He then told me about his whole life, and which products I should be selling that I wasn’t, which buses he had taken to get into town and which ones a less shrewd bus passenger would have taken, before segueing smoothly into the observation that I looked really bored, and that it was probably because there weren’t more customers, which was due to the products I wasn’t selling, which they sold in his local, and that he was a licensed doorman. He then listed all the differences between the door to the bar and the door to his house, which, I promise you, were many.
 These are the sort of people you used to get in a bar maybe once a month. There is a great deal of dexterity and artifice required to avoid them. The best method is akin to a magician palming a card; you trick someone else into saying something to them - literally, anything, it doesn’t matter - and then immediately find something to do elsewhere. If you’re of a charitable bent, you can return in half an hour or so and see if the poor sap who spoke to them is still there, glazed over and praying for death, at which point you can begin tag-teaming until your rambling mental case finishes his half and nutters off somewhere else, which will be around closing time.
 Lately, however, I’ve had three in two weeks. Three people who were clearly supposed to be under the supervision of someone whose only qualification wasn’t “Makes a pretty good daiquiri.” It’s become obvious to me that, due to deeper and deeper NHS cuts, there are wards closing down and people being inflicted on the public who really should have been kept somewhere else.
 So do yourself a favour, Cameron. Stop shafting the NHS, or next time you go for a press-friendly pint in a local pub, you’ll end up having to wait behind  twenty gurning headcases who want to tell the barman about the time they saw a unicorn.


*The word “nutter”, like “fuck”, can be an adjective, noun or verb as needs be.