Friday Night

I'm now at the age where I'm in bed by 9pm on Friday night, falling into exhausted sleep in front of a comedy chat show with guests whose faces I would never recognise again but whose voices stay with me throughout my dreams.

When the children were small, we would take it in turns to go out on a Friday night.  The long suffering husband would meet some friends and go to the pub, maybe for a quiz or sometimes after something more athletic like a game of badminton.  I might go to the pictures or more often go to play my flute somewhere followed by a quick drink.  A colleague, who has small children, was telling me that he and some friends decided to go to a new boxing class before the Friday pub session, only to discover that it was a mixed martial arts class and the instructor decided they were going to do wrestling.  Going out for an evening of cuddling his friends wasn't quite what he planned.

University years and Friday nights are lost in a fog of alcoholic brain damage.  Reading the facebook statuses of people at University, makes me realise that not a lot has changed.

From the age of 16 though,Every  Friday night was pub night.  There was no such thing as ID.  You walked to the pub at the end of the road had 2 Cinzano and Lemonades and then walked back, sober enough to remember everyone you talked to and without a headache in the morning. Sometimes, your Dad would pop in and buy you a drink.  You knew everyone in the pub and they knew you.  It was like learning to ride a bike with stabilisers.

Life seems so much harder for our teenagers these days.   Last night, my daughter and her friends were evicted from the pub because they were not ALL 18.  They had their own ID, were being honest and some who were 18 were only trying to buy a coke.  My daughter was hoping to buy her Grandad, who was in the pub with a friend, a drink because has has waited a whole month since she has been allowed to do so and he is beginning to get impatient.  The local independant pub is scared and the training wheels have come off.

So the alternative is travelling to the nearest big town on 'Student Town Takeover Night', where your ID (or someone else's if you are sneaky) buys you 5 shots for £1.  Big chain pubs are not scared and are happy to throw our teenagers straight in at the deep end without armbands.