Well, it was a rather typical scene for a Friday night. The music from many discotheques permeated into the streets, the different tunes and beats polluting each other as they did so, as did the chilly overflow from air-conditioning units blissfully unaware of the practical doubling of the surcharge in recent days. The cigarette fumes unfurled and reached for the sky in a futile exercise of vanity and the spent glass bottles of alcoholic beverages skittled and rolled upon the streets, long forgotten by the lads and girls who had drunken them dry earlier.

In the heart of Paceville there was a young man struggling prostrate upon the ground, his forehead bruising and bloodied and a look upon his face that can only be described as a picture of rage and anguish combined. Several youths closed in and withdrew from the crowd around him, raining down kicks and blows upon him in the most cowardly of fashions, with precious few fools stepping in to break up the fight. Bottles were broken, skin was broken, shirts were bloodied and stained long before the boys in blue, a half-dozen-men-strong, strolled in to pick up the pieces.

I do not know how this incident began but I do know how it should not have ended. I was under the impression that glass containers were barred from the streets of Paceville and with good reason. Not only do broken bottles pose a lasting danger to the exposed feet of revellers but they are only too easily converted into instantaneous potentially lethal weapons.

It is disturbing how few individuals there typically are in any crowd willing to interfere in such potentially deadly conflicts. It is indeed more convenient to stand by the sidelines and watch the show unfold but when the cost of one’s impromptu entertainment is potentially the life of another, it just smacks of something not too far removed of the evil of the act itself.