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Every year Jim hires a coach and the Christmas celebration is held at a ten-pin bowling alley and amusement arcade. And every year, he says, there is an acrimonious dispute with the bouncers. The argument is always about closing time. Jim books the bowling lanes until midnight, and the bouncers always try to kick them out at half-past 11, when the coach hasn’t even arrived to take them home. So they have to wait outside in the cold. Last year matters came to a head and there was a confrontation in the car park. Handbags were exchanged. The bouncers were too few to take on a coachload of mechanics, vacillated at the moment of truth and retreated. But before leaving, Jim said, the bouncers had said they were men of honour, and that if Jim and his friends were ever to return to the bowling alley, the bouncers would call on colleagues working at nearby establishments, who would be only too happy to nip round and even up the numbers a bit.
If Jim thought that a self-employed magazine columnist might make a useful contribution to a mass brawl in a car park between a coachload of mechanics celebrating Christmas, and an invitation team of professional doormen standing on their honour, he didn’t say. Perhaps he thought that if nothing else I could expend myself by flinging myself randomly on to the foe, thereby adding to the general momentum.
On the coach on the way there, however, drinking beer and being affable, I realised I had little to worry about. It was unlikely that I would be called on to add my ha’pence worth. The young grease monkeys were so wild and unafraid that all we older members of the party had to do, if push came to shove, was sit back and launch them at the bouncers one by one, like torpedoes, and maybe go in afterwards to search for survivors.
I sat next to a farmer, mild and courteous, who, Jim had told me, lived alone with his cows at the end of a valley, and who hadn’t been enticed out to a social occasion for many years. To make conversation, I asked him questions about his farm and about himself. He had 20 dairy cows and grew a bit of corn. Yes, he lived alone. And, no, he didn’t go out much.
So had he come for the fight?
‘Fight?’ he said mildly. And then he looked out of the window. Cows, corn, fights — after years of living alone at the end of his valley he had arrived at a place where none of it made much difference.
I realised I had even less to worry about when we arrived and I saw the first bouncer, a fat, elderly man whose nose had been squashed into the shape of a riding boot at some point. While we waited for our bowling lane we clustered around the machine that measures your punch against a hanging punch ball and watched while our torpedoes gave an exhibition. They cheated by taking long run-ups. Momentum carried them far beyond the machine and into collision with the glass case where a doting couple were trying their hardest to pick up a soft toy with a mechanical grab.
And after seeing that, and half a dozen Stellas, not only was I no longer worried at all, I’d begun to ask what we were all waiting for.
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