The trouble with a really successful pub crawl – in other words, if you manage to hit all the hostelries on the proposed route – is that the team inevitably falls apart before you reach the end.

Oh, it’ll start off in the usual high spirits, with much yahooing and backslapping as you excitedly barge your way in through the first few sets of doors. But as the evening wears on, and the decibels rise, and the golden nectar flows down gulping throats, heads become progressively muzzier and one by one, as the team weaves ever on to the next establishment, members will drop by the wayside. Usually they end up lingering behind because they haven’t quite finished their pint, or because they’ve met a girl they know, or because they’ve lost track of where they’re supposed to be going next. Or quite simply, in that mysterious way of pub crawls the world over, they’ve simply vanished from the face of the earth – at least for the remainder of that night, no doubt to show up the following morning in a garden or on a park bench or maybe slumped in a shop doorway, rain-sodden and with head banging.

Either way, by the end of the night, only the hardy quaffers tend to remain; that small band of iron-core loyalists who will always see things through.

Tonight, oddly, even though the rest of his mates were well-known on campus as big-time boozers, Keith Redmond had somehow found himself at the last port of call alone.

It was called The Brasshouse and it was located on Broad Street, where its reputation as a popular watering hole was very well deserved. On this occasion though, Keith arrived there in a fog of confusion, at least twelve pints of lager sloshing around inside him, and none of the four or five faces currently in there – when he could focus on them sufficiently – even vaguely reminiscent of his fellow rugby club members. In the way of these things, he wasn’t quite able to work it all out. But as he ambled to the bar, filching his last tenner from his jeans pocket, he had some vague notion that the rest of the crew would catch him up in due course; either that, or they’d done what they’d said they were going to do some way back – namely not bother going the whole distance and, as it was only Wednesday, heading home early.

Keith wasn’t sure which it had been.

As he stood there alone, the last few of the other midweek drinkers nodding their farewells to the landlord and his staff and drifting out, it irked him that he’d been marooned here. Though, as he downed his last pint of the evening in desultory fashion, he supposed he hadn’t been marooned as such. If it had slipped his notice that they’d reached a communal decision to terminate the crawl early, then it was as much his fault as anyone else’s. So, he couldn’t really be angry with them. Not that this would stop him taking the mickey in the morning, or more likely in the afternoon, when he was finally fit to re-emerge, calling them plastics and phonies.

These things happened, he reflected, as he threaded his unsteady way back across a central Birmingham awash with glistening October rain, and at this hour on a weekday almost bare of life. He wasn’t sure what time it was. Probably around one. Which wasn’t too bad. He had no lectures of note in the morning, so he could sleep until noon.

But

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