Saturday 12 September 2009

The English Gentleman Drunk

Also at Victoria last night, on the station concourse, I spotted a very fine specimen of a particular type of drunk - the spick-and-span, cleaned-and-pressed English gentleman drunk. This type is at the opposite extreme from the reeling, bawling pisshead. He appears freshly showered, shaved and laundered, his clothes are crisp and immaculate, he walks with straight back in a straight line, his head held high, going about his business the very image of sober respectability. And he is very, very drunk. On closer inspection, everything about his look, his gait and carriage is over-composed, over-determined. The back is that bit too straight, the walk is stiff-legged, the serious, straight-ahead look too carefully composed (the eyes give it away), all is effortful artifice - but, in the true professional English gent drunk, it is superbly done. This one at Victoria would, at a glance, have passed for perfectly sober - but for one eye-catching detail he'd somehow overlooked. The left leg of his immaculately creased trousers was soaked from crotch to cuff.

5 comments:

  1. So, do I take it, then, that true Englishmen always 'dress to the left'?

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  2. For once Nige, you have left me commentless, except to say that in the sixties, Victoria had an altogether more rounded class of intoxicant, with a Caledonian accent.

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  3. Oh, my: Are you saying he'd wet his pants? Good heavens, I think better to slouch and dress poorly but manage not to pee on one's clothes!

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  4. And that, Susan, is the difference between our great nations.

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  5. Very true, Brit, very true...

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