Kings Arms (Southwark)

Peter Marwood (Withnail and I)

I've hit rock-bottom, that's for sure. Late twenties, a non-existent acting career and a halfwit of a flat-mate-cum-sole-mate to boot.

I'm at my wits end, drowning in government hand-outs, drugs and cheap alcohol. Constantly freezing, we can't even afford the heating, let alone the rent on our Camden townhouse.

Christ, we can't go on like this.

Half our lives are spent in a haze, one terrible pub after another. Today it's the Kings Arms near Waterloo. Or, more specifically, the graffiti-strewn toilet where I'm trying to relieve myself. There's filth all over the walls and I'm hardly able to pee straight through fear.

You see, this pub is full of ancient Irish bruisers, OAPs with fingers like potatoes and three quarters of an inch of brain. And one of them has taken a violent dislike to me. They own the place, not the hoards of London commuters who nurse their Magners before 8.00 pm trains home to Penrith.

This gorilla's wrath is directed at the wrong person. And the situation is all my companion's fault. He, Withnail, only ever thinks about number one, like that time he set my backside up like a (Camberwell) carrot for his revolting uncle, in return for a weekend in some god-forsaken, northern dump. A toilet trader, he told dear uncle Monty. Withnail, you are vermin.

Today's episode started with a bottle of lighter fluid. I told the idiot not to drink it; not even the jerks on the local building site would do that. But, drank it he did - then spewed up all over my loafers.

We cleaned it up, best we could. But the smell was unbearable, this tincture of his bizarre intestinal acids. What could we do; the boozer beckoned, and I only have one pair of shoes. So we used Lynx deodorant, a particularly pungent variant (aren't they all), to mask the stench.

But this Irishman is not the kind of person who'd overlay any smell created by his own odious body, let alone countenance that sort of behaviour in someone else. This man's idea of a shower is the verbal kind, a shower of insults for any fellow simian whose knuckles are not caked in sufficient scabs.

'Perfumed ponce,' he quipped as I passed on my way to the lavatory. That was that.

Here I stand, shaking with fear. I'm delirious with paranoia, reading all sorts of meaning into the filthy rubbish scrawled on the lavatory wall.

I'm in considerable danger in here. I simply must get out – before the Irishman comes in - and I am forced to enter the arena of the casualty department.

Peter Marwood's rating for the Kings Arms – 7 / 10

Sputnikski

• View by pub
• View by reviewer
• View by place

• Natural Selection,..

  “,….. Why didn’t they live to be 100?Huh? Well, they woz running round all day, hunting mammoths, eating berries,..rumping their little hearts out. No boozing or smoking. They must have been fit as fiddles. Yer Neanderthalls……….I’ll tell you why, it’s … Continue reading →