24-hour Party People

The onset of ‘24-hour drinking’ may not have meant more drunken behaviour in our towns and cities, but it has certainly meant that more of it gets photographed. The Daily Mail, who are of course against the new licensing laws, uses these pictures of young people pissed and misbehaving as though they constituted an argument in themselves (even if they might easily have been taken five, ten, fifteen years ago). I experienced all the excitement of the transitional period myself, in Brentwood: O’Neill’s was open until 11:30 on Thursday; the Slug and Lettuce until twelve on Friday. The most dramatic thing I saw from the window of the latter was a fake fire engine stopping to offload a group of girls in little black dresses. A ‘fireman’ had to carry them out of the vehicle and deposit them on the pavement. It was supposed to be a fantasy come true; it looked like hard work. The fire engine, which previously had been real, now resembled a toy, labelled as it was with stickers that read (to take one example) ‘Blazing Squad’. It really did look like the prop in a sex fantasy - a bit sad in the cold light of reality. You kept thinking: what if a fire broke out? They’d just have to stand there watching shame-facedly.

On Saturday I attended a ‘Hollywood’ fancy dress party. After weeks of agonizing, I finally hit on the idea of going as Ed Wood, the legendary ‘worst director of all time’, a transvestite with a thing about angora. Obscure? Well yes, but how many film directors have had a film not only made about them but named after them, a film in which they’ve been played by a major Hollywood star (Johnny Depp)? My excitement when at the last moment I found a scarf with angora trim in Edinburgh Woollen Mill knew no bounds; it was as though I’d somehow contracted the late E.W’s fetish. There were problems with the stick-on moustache, but eventually I was sorted (the scarf being my only concession to transvestism). And nobody had a clue who I was, of course. I left before the party really got going, unable to cope with any more variations on the same conversation (‘Who are you?’ ‘Ed Wood.’ ‘Edward who?’).