By the time the police arrived we’d all had enough

Marketing is currently located in an area at the back of the general sales office, screened off with partitions so that we have some privacy. No natural light gets through to us except on very rare occasions in the late afternoon when a single shaft of sunlight will penetrate all the way across Technical Design, Customer Returns, and the big Sales Desk to finally strike the wall above my left shoulder (this experience is similar to the winter solstice illumination in the prehistoric burial chamber at Newgrange).

In the area next to Marketing is the valves section. This is almost a small business on its own, separate from the rest of the company, with its own warehouse allocation, sales staff and administration staff (I manage their marketing campaigns). Pete Haslett runs the section on a day-to-day basis. Aged in his early twenties, he is short in height, with a stocky build, short red hair and a goatee beard. His favourite occupation is binge drinking, which he does every weekend.

“I’m having a cocktail party” he announced last Friday. “Everyone’s invited.”

“What do you mean, cocktail party?”

“First priority is to make sure my girlfriend is away for the evening. Then we get a bucket and fill it with a bottle of vodka, brandy, Smirnoff Ice, cider, white wine, a can of Red Bull and some lime cordial. Then we drink that for a couple of hours. Then we go out round the pubs for a couple of hours and finish off at a nightclub.”

“Which nightclub?”

“It’s called Hush.”

“How long do you stay there?”

“Until it closes and they switch the lights on. It’s a frightening experience when they switch the light’s on. Especially when you see who you’ve ended up with.”

This morning he was describing the night out in more detail…

“We never got to the nightclub. We were in a bar and two men started causing trouble. They started swearing at the staff when they refused to serve them. Then they started throwing things. One of them took my pint and threw it at a window. One of them threw a glass ashtray which bounced on the ground and hit a girl in the face. Then a big fight started. By the time the police arrived we’d all had enough and just wanted to go home.”

“What happened to the men who started the fight?”

“The police put them in the van and took them away.”