On Friday I went out with a friend in town and visited three bars. In the first one we sat and talked to other regulars for a couple of hours. The banter was good. Then I and my friend moved on to another bar that was a little livelier. We stayed there 20 minutes and went across the road. In this last bar I was assaulted by the bouncers (doormen) for no reason.

My friend went to the bar and I looked for a seat, telling him I didn’t want a drink. I sat down near some girls on an empty stool and waited for my friend to return from the bar. As I was waiting 2 girls approached from behind and said I was in their seat. I said there was no one sitting there when I sat down and you can’t reserve seats in this place. They became aggressive and tried to tip me out of the seat. I tried not to be tipped out of my seat and they went to get the bouncer.  I got back into my seat while they were away.

A bouncer came over, grabbed me by the neck and physically dragged me out of the bar without a word! My neck hurts today. Even as I was being lifted and bundled out of the bar, I was thinking ‘I can’t believe this is happening’, because I had not done anything wrong. He had not even asked for my side of the story.

Once outside the bar, I took photos on my camera phone of the man who had assaulted me. He didn’t like that at all and told one of his friends to take my camera off me. I had not put up any resistance until then, but was prepared to fight if they wanted to take my phone from me. It is an expensive smartphone! I continued to take photos, including some of the man now trying to take my phone from me. I walked away and told them they would be in trouble for their assault on me.

The best part happened next. They signalled for 2 police officers to come over. OK, I thought I can report the assault. But the police told me to delete my photos of the assaulters! I was astounded. The police took the side of the bouncers without asking me for my side of the story. I told them I had been the victim of an unprovoked attack and my friend could vouch for me and I had photos of the people who had attacked me. But the police said I did not have permission to take photos of the bouncers so I should delete them!

I couldn’t find the photos on my phone so I told the police I must have deleted them. They said I could then leave.

The whole incident is bewildering. First the girls push me out of my chair without provocation. The bouncers accept the girls’ side of the incident and jump me without getting one word of my side of the story. The police immediately believe the bouncers. And worst of all, the police become complicit by trying to make me destroy the evidence of the crime!

I was thinking of George Orwell’s 1984 as I walked away – the state-imposed destruction of any evidence that would help establish the truth!

Unbelievable. Shame on the police of Newcastle.

It had been a tiring day at work and I hit the happy hour bar scene between 5-8pm.

There’s a great live music venue I’ve been to a few times and dragged my tired bones up to it, telling myself that anything can happen once you are playing the game. If you aren’t playing, you can’t win. I reminded myself of the time I was bored at home years ago and on the spur of the moment bought a plane ticket to Ireland. Within a week I was in a car with three HBs, driving to a secluded beach in County Galway. Like I said, you never know what can happen.

The music venue gets up and coming new artists who I sometimes find myself connecting with before they go on stage. I noticed these bands get free food and drinks on the house before they play, so when I saw six big guys with tatoos handing over vouchers and ordering food at the bar, I knew I’d found tonight’s stars.

I opened two of the guys at the bar, running some of my best pub game opening material and they responded really well. It turns out they were from Denmark and we chatted about the gig and I threw in some of the Danish phrases I know. We got a laugh out of my pronunciation. Swedish and Danish are quite similar. But not that similar, it seems!

After the band had left to finish rehearsing, I noticed two chicks enter the venue and order at the bar. I was waiting to get served too, and the bar man served the pretty chicks before me. Typical. The chicks moved to where I had been based and split from each other. They were not together, after all. They’d just come in and ordered at the same time.

One chick was on crutches. It looked like she had a broken ankle and she sat down in the seat where I had been standing. Perfect, I now had a ready made opener. I went across with my drink and finished the last of my previous drink which was next to her. She looked up and said ‘Sorry, have I taken your seat’. I told her it was fine, it looks like she needs it more than me. I then played the intuition card. I’d noticed her dress sense was rocky – camouflage pants, pierced nose, long dark hair, she was about 27 years old, slim and very pretty. I said I bet she’d come down to see my friends the Danish band playing.

This was a combination of intuition and social proof because I was purporting to know why she had come down and at the same time bigging myself up by being linked to the band she liked. She asked if I really knew them. Sure I said, we’d talked earlier and even spoken Danish together because I speak the language and I’m hooking up with them later to arrange for a festival date at Roskilde in Denmark. The trick here is to have some background knowledge you can leverage off and amp it up to social proof yourself. This is where my travelling and languages pays off. I know little nuggets of information about cultural activities and places because I’ve visited a lot of them in Europe and speak a little bit of most European languages. It is worth studying a few phrases just to make a connection with people.

I noticed she was reading Freakonomics and I’ve read that one too, so we got into chatting about some of the ideas in that book e.g. about the falling crime rate in the USA, which Levinson links to the abortion law changes in the 1970s. She was fascinated by my conversation; I could tell by how she had stopped reading, stopped looking around and was totally focused on my to the exclusion of everything else. I noticed she was left handed and we got into discussing brain hemispheres and how it can affect your thinking and behaviour. I was getting more and more attracted to her because she was not only pretty but was intelligent and had a curious mind.

She too is a singer in a band and we talked about the band. In fact, she’d injured her ankle on stage while performing. I ran some patterns on the thrill of performing live and linked it to performing live with me (I was thinking of porn videos as I made the suggestion). She is learning French but her French was not so strong, so again I was able to act as an authority in her world by telling her about learning French and approaches to learning the language. I was leading well here, being relaxed and connecting. I even had an old business card handy from a French company I am sometimes associated with. It was all falling into place.

She dropped in her name during a story – ‘So my friend said, Emma…’, I latched onto that and said so you are Emma? ‘Right, Steve’, I said, and pointed to myself. We had each other’s names in a very relaxed way that did not signal indications of interest which could potentially trigger defences if asked for too early or too directly.

I played wth body language techniques too, doing a mini takeaway by turning away from her to focus on my drink and waiting for her to reopen me, which she did. What I should have done more of was run more ‘do it now’, pattern language to juice her up. A stronger call to action to get her investing physically would have been really useful here e.g. playing with the scarcity weapon of influence so she sees other chicks want me and I am not going to be available all the time. The logistics were bad though – she was on crutches so could not be venue changed easily. She was waiting to see the band so even if she could walk, she would be unlikely to leave the venue. I was due home hours ago and my LTR was calling me asking where I’d got to (I ignored her calls to keep her worried and missing me).

I arranged to see Emma after work again for drinks, so we’ll see how it pans out.

At the weekend, I met Paul Gascoigne, England football player, in a club in Newcastle. Here is my report (video footage available):

On Friday I met Paul Gascoigne (Gazza), the former England footballer, in a club in Newcastle. Days earlier, I’d been telling my girl about the best goal I ever saw. It was Paul Gascoigne’s goal for England against Scotland in 1996. I showed her the goal on Youtube and she had to admit to being impressed at Gazza’s skill in chipping the ball over Colin Hendry’s head, running around him and volleying the ball into the back of the net.

Now, sitting in the corner of the club was Gazza and his two friends. Or should I call them ‘minders’? Or maybe they were ‘carers’ because Gazza was in a bad state. He was totally wasted from the booze and hardly knew where he was. I didn’t recognise him at first, but sure enough, I looked again, and it was definitely him.

Gazza was drinking Guinness and seemed to also be under the influence of his friends who were lining up shots for him and moving him around the club. ‘Paul, over here! Gazza, man, this is yours’, beckoning to him and trying to get him to focus. Gazza staggered around half-propped up by the people shaking his hand. There was a private party upstairs and hot girls were coming down to meet him. Some hugged him but he didn’t seem to quite register who they were. A vacant smile suggested enjoyment, generally, though.
Read more…