Firetop

Saturday evenings are sometimes a weekly ‘baby escape’ for Suzie_Q and I, a time when our babysitting in-laws kindly take charge of listening to the baby monitor for the night. This week, having successfully ventured to Dorking and Guildford in the past month, we thought we’d really push the boat out… and go to Redhill - the town we first lived in together. We began our evening at ‘The Sun’ (a Wetherspoons pub) and reminisced about how every Friday it used to be full of deaf people busily signing to each other, odd really that they should have chosen the only non-music playing establishment to do that, since presumably anywhere would have been OK in even the loudest environment? It was after perhaps fifteen minutes in the Sun that we suddenly realised we had changed an awful lot this year what with the wedding and becoming parents - unfortunately it seems we have become responsible adults.

We’d always said that when Maria was born we would endeavour to keep our drinking and clubbing as regular activity an activity as possible, but there’s no question that once the little bundle arrives the whole drinking and dancing thing seems to be quite uninviting. Real clubbing i.e. going to Brighton or Ibiza to listen to the likes of Tiesto is still something we love, and we look forward to getting an opportunity to do that again, but the local pub and boiler plate commercial ‘club’ just don’t seem as fun anymore. There’s also no escaping from the feeling that you’ve aged and suddenly harbour parental instincts in reaction to the antics of the teenagers setting out on their journeys into drunken nights of behaving badly. Neither Suzie_Q or I look forward to Maria reaching the age where she starts getting hammered on a weekend, I guess because we realise how many stupid and sometimes dangerous scenarios we put ourselves in.

As well as drinking at the Sun we also ventured to ‘The Junction’ which used to be a dodgy looking O’Neill’s bar that we avoided on Redhill High Street, it was quite nicely refurbished. Shame about the DJ and ‘his bird’ who couldn’t mix anything together and either faded out and back in or completely mashed up beats, but I suppose we shouldn’t expect miracles. The biggest shock to us was The Abbott (or the ‘Stabbott’ as we used to call it) - bright lights, no dingy dark corners and even the clientèle seemed more upmarket, it was Breast Cancer Awareness night too so somebody thoughtful is involved there. This used to be a pub where you dared not look at somebody in the eye in case they took offense, but they played great old skool garage.

We ventured over to an almost empty Liquid / Envy night club and stayed until just before midnight, the barman reckoned Saturday’s were almost always empty, with Friday being the big night out for most people, but with it being ‘pay-day weekend’ I was still puzzled. Perhaps everybody is staying in for the X Factor and the World’s Greatest Elvis on TV. No night out in Redhill would be complete without witnessing a fight, we almost missed it - but from our taxi window we caught a guy who had earlier been dishing out verbal abuse in the street getting pummeled by a guy half his age (bouncers trying to separate them). It was only this morning when I woke up and realised my pillow didn’t smell of smoke and my coat didn’t need to be washed that it dawned on me how great the smoking ban is.

Technorati Tags: redhill, surrey, liquid envy, nightclub, wetherspoons

Bookmark to: