2 Live in a squat
3 Hang out with a dog
4 Don’t pay for food
5 Look like a member of Extreme Noise Terror (or at least Doom)
6 Make some new crusty friends
7 Attend at least one punk show
WEDNESDAY
Forty-eight hours in, it was time for a celebration. My squat buddies told me that they were up for partying so I went down to the local off-license booze store and discovered how punks can afford to get drunk: three litres of White Ace cost only £3. In a flush of excitement, I spent £9 of my new friends’ money on nine litres of the stuff and retired to the squat.
I can now confirm that, coupled with the occasional bump of ketamine, drinking several White Aces leads to an almost lysergic experience. This is especially true if the person hasn’t eaten for two days because all his money went to rotting his guts with cider that even street-sleepers wouldn’t touch.
Fuzzy headed, I collapsed in a corner and woke up intermittently to throw up into a shopping bag riddled with holes. The upshot was that the vomit had leaked all over my t-shirt and increased the authenticity of my getup. When I finally awoke I felt like someone had kicked my head in. My t-shirt for the week was saturated with a nice coat of bile, and I had unexplained cuts all over my forehead. Now I was finally getting somewhere! The taste of freedom was sour and painful but intensely liberating.
THURSDAY
I haven’t eaten anything since Monday. I slept most of the day to try and kill the hunger pains but was jostled awake by my new squat buddies, Lauren and Kerri. They told me about some bins behind the local Marks & Spencer, in Elephant & Castle, that were a gold mine for just-out-of-date food. We headed over to see what the trash was serving for dinner.
Kerri was pretty optimistic after previous raids had yielded untold gourmet wonders. She brought along one of those shopping trolleys that your great-aunt Edna might use. Everyone was in high spirits. As we rounded the back of M&S, disaster struck: a huge security fence had been erected around our expired morsels.
Like good crusties, we pulled the fence apart so Kerri could slip inside. After a root around in the huge bins, our worst fears came true: we had been beaten to the punch by fellow freegans. All that was left were some chocolate éclairs. My stomach was eating its own lining at this point so I started stuffing my face. Each slightly sweaty, turd-shaped dough popsicle tasted better than the last.
FRIDAY
After a week of drinking cider and sleeping on floors, I decided it was time to get back to nature. I’d heard that West Coast power-violence veterans Capitalist Casualties were playing at crust hangout the Grosvenor in Stockwell, so I decided to spend some time in a park close to the venue before catching the show.
I felt inexplicably uncomfortable and decided a couple cans of Special Brew would make everything a little better. As I sank my second I realised that in the same way Rastafarianism legitimises smoking weed everywhere you go, being a crusty punk is just a big excuse to be a functioning (or at least semifunctioning) alcoholic.
Capitalist Casualties missed their plane. Very punk. Concertgoers were pretty sad, but there was a real sense of community and beery commiseration all round. I left feeling good about anarchy in general.
I might not have slept very well this week, and I never really ate, but drinking my body weight in cider and palling around with a few slightly smelly instigators is still preferred to mingling with the odious suited hordes that come spilling out of All Bar One every night.
In conclusion: being a champagne-swilling millionaire who shits on the weak and downtrodden while raking in profits culled from the genocidal rape of the earth causes heartburn and makes you miserable as sin.
By contrast, people who lie in the gutter begging for change while drinking a rusty old can of Special Brew as a dog dribbles on their filth-encrusted combat trousers are happy, morally praiseworthy humans. We cannot recommend becoming one highly enough!
THE GLASSING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
BY ANDY CAPPER | ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL DAVID FREEMAN
Published February 2010
Drunk British people love smashing things into each other’s face so much that somebody has invented a new pint glass that won’t break even if you plunge it into some poor cunt’s face at 2 AM in the street outside a bar where you can get triple shots of spirits for £5. How much do Brits like me love casual acts of extreme violence? Well, here’s something to take into account: there are 87,000 deliberate glassings a year in the UK, which is roughly 4,000 more glassings than America has gunshots, both intentional AND accidental.
If any non-Brits out there are shaking their heads in belief about the veracity of our barbarism, you can come out with me on a night out in any town or city you choose to name and see for yourselves why this happens.
I was glassed/bottled once a year for three years running. The first happened in Southport because I was wearing a long scarf. The third time was for accidentally spraying somebody with beer in the Old Blue Last. The second, and worst, was on Charing Cross Road in London by a guy who attempted to smash a bottle on the wall three times to stab me. I laughed at him but then he smashed the beer bottle in my face and ran off while his girlfriend cried: “Oh my gawwwwd. What ’ave you done!” I put my hand to my head and felt a four-inch flap of skin come lose from my head.
But as I lay in hospital with my face turned to sliced ham, the whole vibe was very much, “Oh well, no big deal.” I didn’t want to press charges. The police didn’t really care, the ambulance guys were like: “Ugh, whatever,” and the people in A&E were like: “Take a seat over there please, dickhead, and please stop breathing booze on me.”
If you’re a dedicated British drinker who doesn’t restrict himself to drinking in the same safe gentrified hipster bars every night, then being attacked with some kind of weapon is not just something you need to be mildly worried about. It’s something that you must accept as normality.
Why? There are so many reasons. Most bars close before 2 AM and so the pressure to drink as much as you possibly can means people get as hammered as they possibly can in the shortest possible time. The feelings of injustice and frustration when they’re turfed out of the club make hammered people feel angry and so they take it out on other hammered people’s faces.
Often the attacks take place in the queues for kebabs or taxis and may involve matters of the heart such as competing males who wish to claim the rights to finger a slapper around the back of the butcher’s. Girls and men mix illegal muscle-building steroids with cheap cocaine, even cheaper ecstasy, 15 lagers, and 40 percent alcohol that’s coloured bright blue. This cocktail of fun releases a chemical in the brain called Imgonnaglassyershyafuckingtwatyercunt.
There are also sociological reasons, like high unemployment, poor prospects, bad housing, and the fact that hard-working, decent foreign people with good family structures are doing the jobs that fat, alcoholic, lazy British people cannot be arsed doing any more.
Britain used to be great at public disorder for political/ protest reasons—see Toxteth, Brixton, Broad-water farm, the miners’ strikes, and the poll tax riots. Now nobody except students can be bothered to turn up in groups to throw rocks at the establishment.
Instead we channel our anger into fighting each other in the street after drinking away any semblance of self-worth or identity or hope of getting