Rolling back the years in a stretched Hummer

My first ride in a stretch Hummer. I haven’t lived, I now realise. The prodigious, ridiculous thing, tricked out in multicoloured neon piping, drew up outside the pub where we were getting stoked. I was privileged to be invited by Trev to his niece’s 18th birthday celebration in a nightclub. It was very much a family affair and they are a proud family. ‘Who the fuck is that?’ I kept hearing from the younger, micro-skirted, six-inch-heeled element, in disgusted tones, referring to me, and Trev would do his best to explain me to them.

Trev thought a ‘punch-up’ inevitable when we got to the club. The women were as liable to start one as the men, in his opinion. I looked around at the state of play as we waited to climb aboard the limo. One of the young nephews was already being strenuously argued out of having a warm-up fight with some innocent and surprised-looking person not of our party. With one exception, the younger women were drunk in the same squiffy, deliberately vacuous way, and teetering about precariously on their tall heels as though on stilts. The exception was passed out lopsidedly on a chair. The birthday girl’s proud father, emerging from the pub to see his princess for the day climb into her smoked-glass carriage, fell down backwards twice in the space of five seconds.

But the most likely instigator of a punch-up, to anyone who knew their history, was a nephew of Trev called Danny, not often seen out much these days, late thirties, wiry build, big blond hair, and tonight wearing a T-shirt with the single word ‘Breed’ across his chest. Looking about him and rubbing his hands together in delighted anticipation, he said to me, ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m all ready for a spot of fudge-packing, Jer.