1 min read
You'd have to be pretty hard hearted not to feel sorry for Stephen Mallone and his fiancee, Kerry Stokes. As the Mirror reports, Mr Mallon was arrested on his stag do in Bratislava for being drunk and disorderly and sentenced to two months in the clink, thus missing his wedding.
Here's how the Mirror reports what he got up to:
The self-employed builder had travelled to Slovak capital Bratislava with 13 mates for an alcohol-fuelled stag weekend. They spent Saturday drinking heavily before, egged on by friends, Stephen stripped and jumped into a fountain near the US Embassy.
But the hapless groom picked the wrong side of the former Iron Curtain for his high jinks. He was grabbed by two policemen and hauled off to the cells.
Yet however sorry one feels for him now, it's illustrative of so much about modern Britain's booze culture. To Mr Mallone's fiancee, "He was just messing about". A friend on the trip confirmed that, as the report puts it, they were "just larking around and not harming anyone".
What to Mr Mallone, his fiancee and his friends was "just messing about" is the sort of drunken yobbery which characterises this country - and which Slovakia is mercifully free from.
It's not exactly rocket science to work out why in one country it's unpleasant, to say the least, to be out and about after chucking out time, and why in another one can wander around at any time of night and not feel in the least bit anxious. What's regarded as normal behaviour in Britain gets - at worst - a slapped wrist; in Bratislava, it carries a two month prison sentence.