Saturday night's alright for fighting:

if you're in the west, anyway.

Our TM practice that day had gone encouragingly well. It was the first session for a while that felt free of the "must record!" impetus that's been in evidence of late. Finally producing something (subjectively) good enough to make publicly available (you didn't think I'd seriously forget to plug it, did you?) seems to have exorcised that demon for the time being, and we're back to messing around in an attempt to generate some new songs.

Just after dropping Mart off in Renfrew after the practice, we were pulling away from his house when Doug stopped behind a stationary taxi in the middle of the road. We looked at the scuffling people outside it and the local colour swarming towards it to wade in and simultaneously glanced at each other. Doug flicked the central locking on and reversed with alacrity, keeping a weather eye on the wrestling by the taxi. He stopped a split second later when a gentle thud came from the back of the car. We looked round at the unfortunate Renault sitting behind us and again at each other.

"Fuck", I said. "This is unbelievable."

Doug pulled forward a bit, unlocked the car, jumped out to check the damage to each car (none) and got back in, locking the doors again. The tussle had calmed down by now and the crowd was dispersing, leaving the taxi driver to shake his fist a few times and drive away.

Christ knows what the hell had just gone on. Someone trying to do a runner without paying for the taxi? Family feud? Pretty depressing, whatever it was.

We drove back to Glasgow and had a couple of pints in Mono (pretentious? Moi?) before heading off along Argyll Street, me to the station and Doug to the Arches. Doug had just come out of a shop after buying some cigarettes and we walked on, talking about something or other. Just then I became aware of three guys maybe ten yards ahead of us. One of them was on the ground, one was standing over him and kicking him in the head and the third was watching. We both stood and looked at them for a second - what the fuck was going on? People were walking by and ignoring the scene, and then a second later the two standing guys walked off past us with a laugh and a shout back at the poor bastard they'd beaten up.

I really could not believe this. We walked over to the guy on the ground and asked another passerby - a vaguely sketchy looking chap who made a halfhearted grab at Doug's packet of cigarettes right in front of our eyes, presumably hoping that we were distracted by the spectacle of the wretched bloke on the ground - what had happened. He said he had no idea, and proceeded to hover around as Doug called an ambulance and I knelt down to see how the guy was.

Luckily, he was conscious, if a bit groggy, and was trying to sort himself out. He was fairly bloody - it looked like his nose was broken; his lip was swollen and he had various nicks and scrapes but it looked ugly rather than life-threatening. I asked him how he was doing (let's face it: he was doing pretty badly, but I wanted to make sure he was more or less all there) and he mumbled incoherently as he tried to replace a shoe that had come off. It sounded like he was pretty drunk, but I couldn't smell any alcohol on him. On something, maybe?

Doug came over, said that an ambulance was on its way and knelt down to speak to the guy, giving him a cigarette when he asked. The dodgy guy asked for one as well and lit them both, giving one to the now-slightly more coherent victim. We asked him what had happened and again he had no idea. It seemed scarily plausible that he'd said something ill-advised in a drunken stupor to the wrong people; the whole thing had a feeling of utterly casual violence, and the way the two attackers had wandered off as if nothing had happened was astonishing. Here's some guy with a broken nose, blood dripping out of his mouth and barely able to string a sentence together, and the only person to bat an eyelid is some chancer trying to take the opportunity to get a fag out of the situation.

It struck me that the guy on the ground, now sitting up and puffing at his blooded cigarette, was indignant rather than shocked, and this made me think that he'd seen or experienced this sort of thing often enough for it to be utterly unsurprising. The cigarette bloke had the same kind of attitude - a sympathetic "yeah, it's a fucker when this happens" solidarity with him.

The ambulance was supposed to arrive fairly soon. We got promises from both of them to wait around until it turned up and left.

Quite probably we should have stayed around with them; I get the feeling that neither of them was there to meet it, and perhaps if we had stayed they would have been more inclined to wait. I think at the time we both just wanted to put some distance between us and what had happened: certainly I see this kind of thing sufficiently rarely that it freaks me out a little when it does happen, and then I just get depressed that it seems so mundane to everyone involved (Doug not included, obviously).

The whole episode had a slightly inevitable air about it; earlier on we'd been speculating as to why there were so many loud, drunken idiots around Glasgow Cross of a Saturday evening, and to get a brutal reminder of why this is a pretty fundamental problem was not quite as out-of-the-blue as it might have otherwise been.

[Well, that was Saturday. Sunday was reassuringly brutality free, and I'll write something about that later on.]