So I’m in Nottingham for a day school, exam prep for one of my courses. Afterwards I catch a movie (Star Trek again) and dinner with Rob, then we go to a pub. Sat upstairs and outside we are talking when some guy pops his pint onto our table. “Great.” I think, “One of those drunks who wants to talk to strangers all night.”. So he asks something. I had to ask him to repeat it about 6 times and I still can’t remember what he asked. I realised he was not going away and thought what the hell, I’ll introduce myself and see where this is going. His name is Patrick, and over the course of an hour we learn that he is a thief, someone knifed his eye and the reason they did so was because he stole from them. Patrick told us the reason he was out tonight was to take revenge on this guy. He wanted to murder him. Throughout our hour with him I went from thinking he was just a drunk talking BS to thinking “Oh shit, this guy is telling the truth and is an absolute psycho!” At one point he pulled out two little bottles and I thought they were drugs. They were actually eye drops and he asked Rob to put them in for him! It was so hilarious and surreal to see my best friend attempting to put eye drops into a psychopath.

The last half of our hour was spent trying to convince Patrick that killing someone in revenge was not really the best course of action. Again simultaneously hilarious and frightening. There were times where I thought he might flip out and just hit us. Then the bit where I got most scared went something like this:

“Well even if you do kill him, his mates might take revenge.”

“Yeah well I’d just kill them too.”

“How?”

At which point he starts to get something out of his pocket. For a couple of seconds I was shitting myself thinking it was a knife or gun. But no it was…a ball point pen. He informed us he was in the army for about 10 years and could kill me with a pen. I said I believed he could, but not 10 people all at once. He claimed he could.

Luckily we had nice people keeping an eye on us. The ladies on the table behind us asked if we knew him and that they’d keep an eye out for us, and our eventual saviour, a barman. Said barman came over and discreetly asked if we knew him and if he was ok. I said we didn’t and he wasn’t too bad, but the barman asked him if he was ok and asked him to drink up and leave given his current state. After a few minutes he returned and offered to give a refund on his pint if he left immediately. This is when Patrick decided to flip out. He got very aggressive to the barman, who then insisted he left. I was surprised he didn’t get violent the way he was mouthing off. At least in his anger he had left us, causing a scene.

Anyway after that we joked with the nice ladies behind us that we deserved a drink after putting up with all that! We stayed for another drink just to be sure he wasn’t waiting for us, which luckily he wasn’t.

So the lesson is, if some drunken stranger starts a conversation with you, make a swift exit! Given the state of his eye the injury must have been at least a couple of months ago, and as I said to Patrick I don’t think he will do anything because otherwise he wouldn’t be telling us about it. To be serious for a while he probably has had a bad life and is obviously not having a good time at the moment. But any positive advice we tried to get was just met with the “It’s all right for you, you’ve had a privileged life” etc replies. He also kept saying he’d “Rather live the last 10 minutes of my life as a Lion than the rest of it as a mouse”, and waffled a lot about him wanting to be brave and take revenge, not be a coward and do nothing.

So to Patrick I tell you this: “Get a grip”. Don’t like being knifed in the eye? Then don’t fucking spend you life stealing from other people. At one point he asked me if I thought he deserved to have it happen to him. I deflected the question as to not get him angry, but I essentially said yes. I have many beliefs, the primary one being what goes around comes around.

So yes, an eventful night and one I won’t remember.