Booze - and cheers
- Boston drinks
to it all!

It was interesting to read a recent item about Boston’s Street Pastors – a group of volunteers of whom few people in the town aged twenty-five and over will probably have ever heard.

Their job is to patrol the streets of Boston late on Saturday night - and watch for unfortunates who get into difficulties through too much drinking.
Interestingly, they see a slice of Boston life that many of the town's great and good - who should know better - are keen to deny exists.
The pastors carry bottles of water, flip-flops, foil blankets, sick bags and face wipes, and patrol the town’s nightclub areas into the wee small hours.
If you wonder about the flip-flops, they are issued to young women who shed their shoes when booze overtakes them – and so risk treading barefoot in the broken glass that litters our town these days.
The pastors also carry dustpans to collect glass from the streets – and pick up the empties left so they don’t join the deadly debris.
Their co-ordinator says: “We are very much part of the peace-keeping in the town.”
It makes Boston sound like Dodge City.
Whilst it is good to know that there is help available to frame this dystopian portrait – it highlights one more problem facing Boston.
The pastors have become another tier of society that helps people who can’t – or won’t – help themselves.
They represent a safety net for those whose sole aim is to hit Boston town centre on a Saturday night and get legless, regardless of the risk.
Whilst they don’t take on a policing role, the pastors take the weight off the police and avoid charges of drunkenness which would otherwise end in a short sharp shock for an offender and a few hours in the cells with a fine next morning – once enough to prevent a second offence.
We’re sure that the police are happy because it makes their job easier, and according to one nightclub owner, the pastors “do a great service for the town at night time. They look after our customers and other people’s customers.”
And that, of course, spares club owners the trouble of looking out for the best interests of their clients.
By way of illustration, this week’s local “newspapers” carry the story of a judge who wants an investigation into the selfsame nightclub whose manager was quoted – regarding its fitness to have an alcohol licence.
His comments followed evidence about the amount of alcohol served to four people who later carried out an unprovoked attack on a total stranger.
Between them, they consumed jugs of vodka based cocktails; WKD – an alcopop – lager and bitter ... serving one defendant who had already drunk twelve pints of beer.
Doubtless, this manager was comfortable with the Street Pastors “looking after” his customers – but who “looked after” the assault victim was probably not his concern either.
It’s all so brainless.
What do you make of the man on a night out whose best quote was: “I really respect the Street Pastors, because their job is rubbish?”
Or the women who approached them to ask if they would be distributing flip-flops later – making their intentions for a good night out completely unambiguous.
Boston’s attitude to drinking and public order is ambivalent at least.
We have a Designated Public Place Order, which bans drinking in the town centre – but as our picture sent in by a reader clearly shows, you can tip a tinnie within yards of the town’s police station without a problem.
And whenever someone comes up with an idea to sell Boston, by staging an event in Central Park – which always seems to require a beer tent ... the borough council cynically and hypocritically waives the DPPO and looks the other way.
Increasingly, public order in Boston is in the hands of non-empowered individuals, and not the police who represent law and order …
We have the Town Rangers, who appear to spend most of their time loafing about in shop doorways, chatting; we think that we still have Police Community Support Officers – though these days they are never seen – and their “real” colleagues are also invisible.
It appears that we are making no effort to curb the problems that occur on Friday and Saturday nights in the town by trying to educate people to moderate their behaviour.
Instead we encourage a lifestyle that cossets them if they don’t – even though … in a worst case scenario – they could end up in intensive care or as a victim of rape.

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