Out on the streets ...

The beauty of having a nearly 18 daughter is that you get to see parts of your city late at night that you wouldn't normally get to see.

Take last night for instance.

Headingley is a suburb of Leeds that in the last 20 years has transformed itself into student surburbia, its about halfway between the city centre and where we live on a direct route. I used to live in Headingley when I was a kid, it was a nice area to live in, lots of shops to keep our mum happy, lots of shops to drag us kids around on a saturday afternoon, an ordinary suburb, ordinary housing full of ordinary people, a cinema and two pubs.

The houses are now all student lets, all of them, and we are talking several hundred houses here. Consequently the demography of what was our mums "shopping area" has changed too, there are still a few shops selling groceries and so forth but most of what used to be shops are now bars and small restaurants, the two original pubs are still there with bouncers on the doors (still strange fo rme to see a pub with bouncers but they've all got them now), but I couldn't even hazard a guess now as to how many other bars there are, I did a visitors guide to Headingley on RLfans for visiting supporters of opposition teams and someone actually tried to list all of the bars on there, but that list is not exhaustive, just a recomendation of some of the better ones.

All of which is fine and dandy when you are a student living in a student house and having a hell of a time in your three years of complete reckless fecklessness, and yes I'm jealous that when I was 17 I had to go straight into work and only the top 5% went into further education (now only 5% of 17 year olds go into work, or so it seems) - think of the John Belushi film "Animal House" and you get the idea of a typical student house in Headingley, the lucky bastards.

But Headingley on a Friday night is not a place for faint hearted motorists.

Last night I was purloined by my nearly 18 year old daughter to give her a lift into Headingley after she'd finished work in a local bar - she was going out on the town at a time when I was considering going to bed, a surefire indicator that I am now entering my middle life grumpy old man phase.

The main road through Headingley is a main route into Leeds and is always busy through the day, you never drive through Headingley, you queue through Headingley, but at night the motorists are replaced by taxi drivers and police cars, both of whom use the two lane carriageway at random, seemingly ignoring the rule of "drive to the left" or "park only in designated spaces" - being a common tax paying driver in Headingley on Friday night is a bit like playing a video car chase game where you've actually spun your car around and are driving back into the oncoming traffic - am I the only one who does that ?

It was complete chaos in Headingley last night, you cannot drive through the crowds on the road in some places and where you can actually see some of the road then a taxi driver will quickly pull out of a side street, ignoring you, and then stop in the middle of the road to pick up a drunken fare.

100% of the young people on the road last night were drunk and having fun and god bless 'em thats how it should be in their young lives, but why does student life involve getting drunk as fast as you possibly can of a Friday night and then making a complete tit of yourself ?

At one point as I waited for the road to clear outside one of the busiest bars a young lad staggered over the road right in front of me, leaning on my car bonnet for support, the side of his face all grazed from a recent contact with the pavement, a bottle of beer still in one hand, eyes completly vacant, he came around the side of the car and opened my passenger door, poor kid thought I was a taxi because I'd stopped despite the fact that it was him that had made me stop.

If I'd been a lone female driver I could imagine that this may have been quite frightening but the universal language of drunks dictates that a simple "fuck off pal" will usually suffice in these circumstances, its happened to me before. It worked with this kid, he shut the door and was rescued by one of his mates who guided him to a proper taxi just as a police car pulled up alongside me and gave me a long hard stare, the terminally confused police officer trying to make some sense of the chaos on the streets, I shrugged my shoulders at him and moved off slowly.

Maybe its just me at my current age but I can't help but feel a tad jealous of these carefree kids while at the same time feel concerned for them out in that environment - I'd just dropped off my nearly 18 year old into that mayhem to meet some friends who had just travelled 100 miles to be in Headingley and Leeds last night, and she thought it was a fantastic atmosphere to be partying in, as a parent you have to let them go and hope that they don't come across the one person out there who wants to do them harm or steal from them - no doubt the daft lad who tried to get in my car last night has parents at home who were thinking just the same as me.