BEING injured isn’t fun. Being injured to the point where you need medical attention is even less enjoyable because, in all likelihood, it hurts and, secondly, you’ll have to go to accident and emergency (A&E). And nobody enjoys being admitted to A&E.

I was sat in the bath having dislocated my right shoulder while snowboarding earlier in the evening. I had managed to twist it back into the socket and while my other half urged me to go to hospital I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Besides, I wasn’t going to A&E at 11pm. The place would be full of drunken idiots and I’d have to wait hours to be told to go home and rest my shoulder. I was wrong about the latter – going to hospital was a wise move. But I was correct – depressingly so – about the former.

We arrived at about 11.45pm and, sure enough, half of the patients in the waiting room were bladdered. One appeared to be a full-time drunk (i.e. alcoholic), while the remainder, mainly students, had a less committed but nonetheless dedicated approach to their binge drinking.

As the hours wore on, a steady stream of inebriated fools flowed into the hospital. Some had been fighting, some had fallen over. Others had been fighting and had fallen over. One girl had allegedly drunk herself into a fit. And much to our frustration the drunks appeared to be receiving treatment before people with genuine conditions, like the diabetic woman sat opposite us.

While we waited for just under four hours we had to endure the intoxicated, naive musings of clueless students, essentially several thousand variations of: “Oh my God! Like, literally.” Particularly obnoxious were the loud, boorish members of a university football team who had been swapping punches in a nightclub.

Dislocating one’s shoulder is unlucky but our timing was fortunate. Had I hurt myself on a Friday or Saturday evening the tediousŠ but harmlessŠ scholars would have been replaced by the weekend binge drinkers, feckless thugs who think 14 pints of Stella (or WKD if you’re a thuggette) and a fight are an essential part of a night out.

Westminster Council has opened a ‘drunk tank’, to prevent A&E departments becoming overrun with sozzled patients. Such irresponsible inebriants accounted for one-eighth of the London Ambulance Service’s call-outs in Westminster last year. Perhaps it’s time we had a drunk tank up north.