Murder Attempt

I witnessed an attempted murder last night. I was in one of the less salubrious parts of the Barri Gòtic and I saw a couple of drunk guys fighting. This was serious fighting; none of this rolling around on the floor hugging each other nonsense - they were punching each other in the face.

Naturally, I paused to admire the spectacle (you know you would have done the same!). At one point, the drunker of the two screamed something unintelligible, turned around from his opponent and stalked over to some steps where people tend to chill out and drink beers.

He grabbed a large 1-litre bottle and smashed it against the step. I was very impressed. I read somewhere that this trick invariably goes wrong and leaves the would-be slasher with a severely lacerated hand, but in this case, he turned around wielding a pretty nasty-looking weapon.

At this point, the other guy realised that he was unarmed in what had become a stabbing fight, so he turned and ran while the bottle guy pursued him around the square, screaming at him and taking wild stabs at him. Those of us in the crowd backed away appropriately as he passed, in an effort to not lose any limbs to his errant bottle-swinging.

When he realised he couldn't get close enough to cut the guy, he stopped running and threw the broken bottle at the back of his head, missing by inches. The bottle landed in the middle of a crowd of people and exploded into glass shards. Now unarmed, three people rushed the failed assassin and brought him to the ground and held him pinned there until the red mist subsided.

One of my more enduring memories of the night will be the sight of three large men struggling to contain a drunk maniac while one of them shouts at him that he has crossed the line. It's perfectly acceptable to get drunk and start a fight, he said, but you never use broken glass as a weapon when the police are only a couple of streets away.

Sure enough, the police promptly showed up to sort matters out and I decided it was probably about time I went home.