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One balmy Bristol night, as I was whirling my mop around the shop floor and trying to ignore all the squashed up drunken faces pleading at me from the window outside, I couldn’t help thinking how similar the whole binge drinking condition was to The Matrix. After all, it certainly immerses the public in a fantasy world where they project an artificial image.

Weekend after weekend, all you see in Bristol are people using alcohol to cast themselves in a new role and shed their 9-5, Monday to Friday identity. People try to gratify some overwhelming, pent-up urge to be centre of attention by becoming someone different: someone wittier, sexier, or tougher. The only flaw of course is that this skewed sense of self perception doesn’t extend to anyone who is not also drunk. To reference The Matrix, someone unplugged.

After a year of enduring the chaotic Bristol weekend ritual sober, I felt like one of a handful people who could see the reality, and I envied my customer’s ignorance. When women lingered around the counter flirtatiously and saw themselves as irresistible, all I saw were dreary-eyed-faces running with make-up and mouths smeared with ketchup.

When groups of men entered and thought they were telling you the funniest story you’d ever heard, you felt like you were going mad with déjà-vu until you realised you’d actually heard it from them two hours before. When people picked on each other, all I saw were bullies starting fights they knew they could win, and shamelessly sucking up if they did happen to encounter any genuine nutcases.

Like Morpheus (or a much less cool version), I could see the grimy reality lurking beneath the surface. The falseness of people’s projected images which were not really glamorous or stylish, but actually revolting. They were often covered in slime and mucus like the humans batteries in their incubator pods.

In my opinion, putting people off extreme binge drinking is simply a case of showing the reality of what we were like the night before, the morning after – preferably mid-Hollyoaks – at our worst and most embarrassingly low moment.

We need to forget Hazel Blears and make way for a political equivalent of Morpheus to step up and begin a nation-wide distribution of red pills - and it really is a case of all or nothing, because if I go out on a Saturday night you can bet I’ll be down Weatherspoons strapping on my beer goggles like everyone else.

After all, who wants to be conscious when everyone else is oblivious? Who wants reality when everyone else is off enjoying wonderland? Who wants the truth when, in the words of Cipher, ‘ignorance is bliss’? This is binge drinking we’re talking about, so ‘ignorance is pissed’ might be a better way of putting it.

Marius Goubert is a freelance writer with his eye on Bristol and beyond.

Please note, the opinions expressed above are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of Guide2Bristol.