The Angry Londoner

A Rugger's Boxing Day in London

2007-01-12T05:20:00.042Z

‘Christ! That was quick.’

‘Was it really?’

‘We lot’ll say: a two-day turnaround interval on your end? Why, for a precedent you’d have to go all the way back to the primeval autumn months of ought-five.’

‘Hang about-stroke-before we go any further: didn’t I stipulate towards the end of the last one that you lot were to keep completely mum for the full juration of this one?’

‘Yeah. And since you’re apparently in the mood for a pube crab-picking contest, let us remind you that we lot never agreed to the stipulation.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘Even-fucking-not so, seeing as how we never seconded your second “Agreed?”’

‘Fuck me with a rolled-up solicitor’s contract if you ain’t right. Well, so much the better for me, who thus finds himself mercifully unhoist with his own defectively-engineered Jean-Luc.’

‘Whateverthefuck a Jean-Luc is.’

‘Well, obviously, it’s malapropising slang for petard via Jean-Luc Picard.’

[YL, aside, amongst yourselves]: ‘Talk about your textbook example of a bloke with too much time on his Lesters.’

‘I heard that!’

‘Like we fucking shiv a git. Look, we get the picture: you’re pretty much saying it’s lucky for you that we ain’t trespassing after all. But why?’

‘Well, because, no sooner had I delivered the coup-de-Royal-Mail to the last post by hitting ye olde “publish-post” button with the forediggit of one hand, than I had occasion to smite me forrid in rabid cuntsternation with the hams of the other, upon its occurring to me that in promising to you lot that I’d skip over the Welsh-Xmas-centered episode and press on to the Herbert Hancockian-cum-Proctologitexan one, I had completely forgotten about yet another episode, a chronologically intervening one, that I’d best apprise you lot of; lest, in my having occasion—if only for cuntinuity’s sake—to breathe reference to it some moons hence, you lot’d then have occasion to kvetch at me for having—as you lot’d have seen it—deliberately served you the toasted stale bookends of a salt-beef sayngwich and kept the fresh savoury filling thereof for me own private chowdownerly enjoyment.’

‘And what savoury filling of an episode might this be?’

‘None other than the episode centring on my folks’ immejiate post-Xmas visitation of YFCT in London.’

‘Oh, yeah, of course. Now that you mention it, we do seem to recollect that as early as last summer you were already on the verge of shitting your knickers over that whole bidness—we mean, of who was to visit who and when and where come Xmastime.'

'Indeed, you lot do recollect aright.'

'So ultimately it all came out in the wash (i.e., of your soiled knickers)?'

'In the end, yeah--and, TBT, pretty well flush with the beginning, at least as far as the initial calendrical-stroke-cartographical partitioning of the holiday went. Cos Mum and Dad proved so far from putting up any kind of a stonewalling fuss in resistance to my initial, ever-so-tentative, eggshell minefield- traversing suggestion that for Esmeralda's sake I might be obliged to celebrate Xmas proper at the Houghington homestead, as positively to, welcome it, as they say, with open arms. "By all means," ejaculated they [actually Dad, but Mum was clearly on board] with gusto: "Go to Wales, troll the ancient yuletide carol jolly fellowship with the Houghingtons. Good heavens! It's only fitting and proper that you should meet them before we do." TBT, I was a bit disappointed despite meself in the ease--nay, the perverse triumphalism--of their acquiescence. TBT, it made me feel as though I'd just been downgraded and transmogrified from their unique, irreplaceable, face cheek-pinchworthy filial pride-'n'- joy into some dodgy, anonymous, infinitely-fungible pimp to their phantom future daughter-in-law, grandparents-in-law and grandchildren. But I lumped it in my stride--as I had no choice but to do--as I did their counter-suggestion to celebrate a second Xmas with me (and Esmeralda, natch) in London starting on eve of the day of my return from Wales--viz., Boxing Day, the 26th. And as it is on this 26th day of December last that the episode in queue commences, I am thus brought full circle back to the question of whether you lot are in the market for a retailing of this selfsame episode.'

'Well, that all depends.'

'Depends upon what?'

'Well, odd as this might sound, upon what you mean by that queer turner phrase "my folks".'

'How so?'

'Well, cos most folks--skewed us--cunts who turn that phrase think of it as a sort of phoney downmarket synonym for "my parents": it's like they're fucking embarrassed about the fact that they know what a telly or a marmite jar is, or that they didn't spend the better part of their yoof gelding bulls and sitting round a campfire with their folks swapping tales about the death of kings and whatnot. Such that if, on the one hand, you happen to be just such a typical "my-folks"-turning cunt, why, then, we'll have no further lorry with you or with your inevitably-ensuing account of your ever-so-decorous, 10-quid schlongtail ching-chinging chinwag with Esmeralda and mum-n-dad down at Enchai--'

'--That's Emchai, thank you very much--'

'--No, thank you very much for allowing us to rest the weary plates of our case upon the basis of that there anorakishly poshile correction. Don't you mind us; we'll be on our way in a jiffy--'

'--Hang about: before you set off, please at least humour me by showing your other "if" hand.'

'Fair-stroke-shaw 'nuff: "If, on the other hand, by means of 'my folks' you meant to conjure up, quite against the grain of the current idiom, some sort of Beverley-Hillbillies-esque image of a jalopified 1930s Studebaker crammed to the bonnet-gills with every living family member to the third remove, churning up in its slipstream a whirlwind of dust--together with the occasional live, desperately flight-seeking chicken--as it sputters its grudging, 35-m.p.h. way into town along the ancient High Road; and if--and only if--the actual visitation finished up being worthy of the conjured image, why, then--and only then--we'll think it worth our while to hear you out."'

'Right. As it so happens, I was aiming to conjure up that very counter-image; and at the same time, assuming that you lot would be charitable enough to mutate the necessary mutandi in adjustment to the peculiarities of our epoch and my own familial circumstances; thatistersay, to allow a bonnet gill-less 1980s Mini to stand in for a 1930s Studebaker, to allow Mum, Dad, Sid and Aunt Agatha to stand in for Jed, Grandma, Sally Mae (sic?), Jethro, &c; and, lastly, if not leastly, to do without the whole chicken-jettisoning module, inasmuch as no chickens were to be either had or desired by any of the parties concerned.'

'Never mind the chickens; and fuck our reservations through the cardboard innards of a loo-roll.'

'Really? But I thought you said-'

'--Yeah, and so we did do, but we were bluffing. Do you really meantersay that not only your mum and dad but also your younger brother and great aunt swooped down upon you on mass, right after Xmas?'

'Yes, I do do.'

'Well, then, firstoff, how did you attend to their lodging--you being, after all, the tenant of a humble maisonette, with naught but a single, queen-sized futon
in the front room for the accommodation of visitors?'

'That's a well-appointed question, if I do say so meself (and clearly such a ceremonious formula of modesty is in order here, given that you lot are, after all, the exclusive progeny of me own 'umble gourdita). And in answer to it all I can say is, "By the skin of me teeth-stroke-seat of me slacks"; in view of the pair of facts that 1) I had assumed the lot of them had booked a suite at some north-Londinian branch of the Hilton or Holiday Inn; b) that they had assumed there'd be plenty of room chaise mwah, and hence had not arsed themselves to book any such suite in any such hotel; the twin facts in queue having arisen out of a certain three-year-old cultural disconnect between Mum-'n'-Dad and myself--more specifically between my already fairly London-savvy self of '04 and their contemporary, totally London-unsavvy selves. You see, in phoning into them the report of my shifting of residence from a Whitechapel studio into a Barnet maisonette (neither genre of lodging, incidentally, being known in Diss), I had inadvertently rather overplayed the extent of the proper real-estateal upgrade involved therein; thatistersay, I had alluded merely to the imponderable quality-of-life differential between the tatty one-room flat I was moving out of and the proper two-storey house I was moving into, and never dreamt of mentioning that my practical net gain in total square-metreage could be encompassed by the combined footprints of a coupla telephone kiosks. And, given the reportorial context, why should I have so dreamt? After all, my main concern then (in '04) had been to reassure them that all those years of inculcating in me the nondenominational McGyverian work-ethic were continuing to yield dividends, as per schedule; that, having landed a proper professional job thanks to my certification in accountancy, I was accordingly moving into digs worthy of the holder of such a properly professional position. I mean, I can hardly be blamed for not having (then) been arsed to piece together the whole rosary or Smartie roll or breadcrumb trail of twos that might, in the very-best-casest of scenarios, have led me to an arithmetical destination only vaguely resembling the catastrophe that I was to be confronted by, eventually, in '06. TBS, a moment's Stella-uncontaminated reflection might (then) have yielded up the realisation that in Mum and Dad's provincial okies the word house needs must have signified by default a dwelling of the classic three up-three down type exemplified by the McGyver semi-homestead in Diss (as against the gnomishly anticlassical 1.5 up-two down dwelling I was actually moving into); along with the further realisation that Mum and Dad were in all probability unaware of the universally-recognised prohibition, amongst non-home-owning Londinians of a certain age, against the lodging of one's visiting senior relatives under one's own canopy; that they were IAPU of the fact that amongst my set that sort of thing was simply not done. And from this pair of realisations my counterfactually-teetotalling self might have conceivably derived the third one that I was in for a woild of hoit-cum-embarrassment should the two of 'em (i.e., Mum and Dad, not the realisations) ever deign or dare to pay me an overnight visit; that I would then be faced with the decidedly awkward choice between, on the one hand, kipping out in my proper boudoireal domain whilst relegating them to the futon (and thereby pretty much securing meself a butchers-dozen-or-so thousand frequent-flyer miles on the old parental-guilt red-eye) and, on the other hand, ceding the overnight usufruct of the bedroom to them (and thereby potentially broaching the tip of a mighty iceberg of weekend parental expeditions to the West End, in service of which my humble-stroke-hallowed maisonette would be routinely commandeered as a convenient pied-à-terre). But to have derived from this trio of realisations the fourther that M&D should some day concoct, on the basis of their unenlightened, 15th century cartographic-style misconceptions about the layout of me flat (skewed me, house) in tandem with their barbaric provincial notions of filial hospitality, a visitation scheme whose realisation would virtually necessitate an infringement of my borough council's fire codes--why, that would have demanded a well-nigh godlike, super-Holmesian presence of mind-cum-power of deduction (not to mention a well-nigh schizophrenic, super-Hughesian degree of paranoia).'

'We catch your drift, counterfactual-wise. But how did this collision of mutual misassumptions ultimately pan out, actual-wise?'

'Slowly and painfully, TBS, and attended-by-the-most-acute-degree-of-embarrassment-on-the part-of-everyone-concernedly. Cos, you see, I, having envisaged the whole visitation from a purely aesthetic parents'-okie povey (i.e., as a purely mechanical demonstration of the fruits of the aforementioned nondemoninational work ethic), set about giving the four of them the tour of the place in an attitchude of coolly disinnersted pride worthy of an estate agent who knows full well that in 20 minutes' time he'll be ushering his potential clients out the front door and immejiately thereafter luxuriantly abandoning himself to the solitudinal mercies of his own schlong-'n'-fist; little knowing that each of them was, for his or her part-stroke-in contrast, receiving it in an attichude of hotly innersted greed worthy of a newly-enrostered doss house-stroke-orphanage inmate who knows full well that within 20 minutes' time he's got to lay claim to a patch of turf or else abandon himself to the sodomitical mercies of his fellow inmates. TBS, though, I managed to pass the entire ground-floorular module of the tour in blissful oblivion of this discrepancy between their expectations and mine; in view of the of the fact that the overall layout of this ground floor--comprising as it did (albeit in miniature) the usual complement of two-up-two-down-ial amenities (i.e., front room-cum-kitchen-cum-shitter-cum-dining room-stroke-breakfast nook)--bade fair that the first floor would likewise comprise, at minimum, the usual round of 2U-2-Dee-ial amenities; viz. a second shitter flanked by a pair of ample bedrooms. It was only, TBS, upon flinging open the door of the first-floor front room ('Behold: the study!' I exclaimed, in my most resonantly triumphal basso) and revealing its complete furnitureal contents as a computer desk and bookshelf--the one separated from the other by a mere sausage-dog's-breadth of floorspace--that I began to sense the rising of visitorial hackles, and to suss out the efficient cause of their rising. Not that any of them said anything--quite the contrary: it was in virtue of their opting for total silence, in preference to the usual inconseuqential round of congratulations, that I managed to twig that what they really wanted to say was 'Hang about. If this here study is the front room of the first floor, then where's the first-floor front bedroom?'

‘And last but not least: the one and only bedroom.’

No sooner had I flung open the door leading into this final chamber of me own private Bluebeard’s Castle, than Sid broke ranks with the rest of the party and made a beeline straight for the bed, upon whose surface he immejiately, in flying-squirrel fashion, pitched the full length of his prone, spreadeagled person; and thence proceeded, first, to immerse his phiz in the recesses of one of the two pillows (by way--at least I so retrospectively conjecture--of blindfolding himself against all purely spectacular aesthetic considerations); next to scissor his arms and legs, to the chune of a butcher's-quarter-dozen cycles, along the full breadth of their (and the bed's) compass, like some sort of live-action arse-view of the classic Da Vincian human diagram; next, to deliver a few spirited pelvic thrusts into the dead centre of the mattress; and, finally, to rear himself up into a sedentary posture, with both heels resting squarely atop the valance and both hands splayed squarely splayed atop his knees, before delivering himself of the following rhetorical query:

'Do you really meantersay you actually sleep on this thing, Nige?'

'Most nights I manage to do, yes.'

'Cor, even with that sprung spring in the mid-left side? It's practically poking through the fabric.'

'I know and what can I say? I guess after the first five or so years I just got used to it.'

'And what about your lady friend, eh? I dare say she ain't got used to it yet.'

'Indeed not: so far she hasn't even got acquainted with it.'

'What the pit?! Not putting out, is she?'

At this point, I'm sorely tempted to clock the little fucker--that's right, even in the presence of Mum, Dad, Aunt A., and me own shirt buttons. And so I would have done, had not the riposte that occurred to me just then seemed a whit less effectual as means of rejuicing him to the proverbial tiny grease spot on the carpet: 'Nothing to do with that, Sid. It has to do, rather, with the fact that, being a fairly chivalrous sort of bloke [actually, I've never up till now fancied meself even an unfairly chivalrous sort of bloke--just, I suppose, as a twice-weekly showerer doesn't fancy himself even an unfairly personal-hygienically fastidious sort of bloke till he runs into a twice-yearly one], I always yield the right side to her.'

I await the ensuing distillation and precipitation of Sid's person. But it is not forthcoming. Instead, he presses on, AFF:

'Even so, Nige, there's bound to be a bit of crossover--you know, when she's coming to daddy; or, cuntrariwise, when you're coming to mummy.'

Anyone marginally less thick than Sid would be right on the verge, at this point, of discovering an especially embarrassing state secret of the Ruggerswelt: namely that it’s not Esmeralda but I who’ve been refusing to put out all this time, who’s played the old stereotypically feminine ‘not tonight, dear, I have a headache’ card on each and every upstairs, shay-mwah centred occasion when her friskiness has threatened to gain the upper hand. Mind you, it’d take a considerably less viscose intellect than Sid’s to pierce through the usual prosaic explanations of such masculine demurrals to the true cause of this particular set of ’em—namely, a paradoxically blokish fear that the least soup-son of a copular chinwag on the subject of the well-wornness of me mattress will inevitably catalyse some sort of Esmeralda-initiated (albeit largely Rugger-funded) bachelor-maisonette makeover project bottoming out (albeit not culminating) in an all-day, mid five figure-receipted shopping spree at the Wembley IKEA. But, anyway, as I was saying, Sid’s obviously too thick even to make a plough-dent in the topsoil of prosaic untruth, as I can tell by the ‘gotcha’-free guilelessness with which he’s apparently reveling in the naked tit-‘n’-bummish burlesqueness of the image conjured up by his rhetorically moronic ‘come to daddy-stroke-mummy’ switcheroo. Now abstracted from the present sitch, and viewed as disinnerstedly as my congenitally Sidophobic povey would have permitted, this spectacle of unregenerate gormlessness on his part would have elicited nothing on mine but a pronounced tension of me left supercilial muscle and a slight relaxation of me duodenal schphincter. But, alas! (or, perchance, thank Cor!), concreted into the selfsame present sitch is my dread at being misprised as a fellow who can’t get it up; a misprision of a sort that’s perforce-stroke-especially psychically detumescing to one of me relatively tender penile years (inasmuch as behind its dreadful shadow lurks the still more dreadful one of not wanting to get it up in the first place). Such that the realisation that Sid's light years away from arriving at such a misprision is enough to make me hug him, as I in fact do do, as if in disinnersted appreciation of his rhetorical genius ('Come to mummy, indeed! You always did have a flair for the vernacular, Siddy boy'), thereby bringing the whole filial set-piece to a close just in time to hear Dad's verdict on the maisonette, delivered, AFF, by way of accompaniment to a parabolic head-pan spanning the lower door-jamb and the wainscotting of the opposite wall:

'Worse than I expected, infinitely worse. But it'll have to do. Right, then: you, Martha and Auntie, will share the bed up here--'

'--I'm not sure the bed'll be up to their specifications,' cuts in Sid.

'Very well,' sniffs Dad. 'I suppose chivalry must take a back seat to professional expertise: Auntie and Martha, then, will share the fold-a-bed [i.e., the futon] downstairs, whilst you and I, Sidney, will bunk up here.'

'But what about me?' I mechanically (i.e., one-hundred-percent unsuspiciously and unresentfully) enquire.

‘What about you?’ Dad poses this inevitable counter-question in such a disarmingly innocent attichude of utter nonplussed-ness (in other words, at a complete right angle to the industrially-standardised rhetorical grain of the thing), that I am obliged to make a few in-flight, seat-of-the-knickers tonal adjustments to my pre-posally-framed ultra-stroppy—nay, well-nigh-filially impious—rejoinder:

‘I mean, where am I—who am, after all the sole leaseholder of this domicile, the lordling of the manorette as it were--going to sleep? Mind you [here’s where the adjustments start kicking in], I’ll be chipperly sporting enough to kip out on a pair of chairs in the breakfast nook if need be, but it’d be nice to know I’d been accounted for in the manifest of your stayover.’

‘Why, but you have been, Nigel.’

‘Are you quite sure about that, Dad?’

‘Sure as Shaw, Nige. That is, unless…[smiting his forrid in cuntsternation]…of course! How stupid of me not to have considered the possibility. And how tactful of you, Nige, to have thus far opted out of explicitly alluding to the actuality that it has seemingly turned out to be. I particularly approve of your judicious application of the menial “I”.’

‘Sorry, Dad, but, grateful as I am for the kudos, I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re getting at.’

‘What your father appears to be getting at,’ chimed in Mum, ‘is that he believes that you and Esmeralda are already officially living together; that she hasn’t a place to call her own apart from this one; and that by “I” you’ve all along meant “we”: you and her. Am I right about any portion of this, Stanley?’

‘I couldn’t have précis'd the lot of it better myself, Martha.’

[YFCT, in the full flaming flush of rekindled (and one-hundred-per cent cuntishly duly disingenuous) filial impiety:] 'Well what the fu--erm, hell, has any of that got to do with where I'm poster kip tonight?'

[Mum again:] 'We'll get round to answering that question once you've answered this one: Is Esmeralda living with you, on a full-time and exclusive basis, or not?'

'Course she isn't. [Christ! It was all I could do to keep me hands clear of me top shirt-button.] As if you lot wouldn't have been the first to know if she was.'

[Mum again]: 'As if we wouldn't have been indeed [cutting Dad a sidewise slice of the old stink-eye], Stanley. Well, Nigel [cutting me a frontwise slice of the faux-smarmy glad-eye]: you're a bright lad. I trust that by now, on the basis of your answer to my question, you'll have twigged the answer to your question on your own, and that I needn't spell it out for you?'

'I dunno know, Mum. I'm not so sure I'm half as bright as you think I am. In fact, I might be so thick as to infer on that selfsame basis, and in the absence of a judicious application of your primary-pedagogical expertise, that I can look forward--should I so choose--to kipping out here tonight on me blissful lonesome, in me own bed, in the company of no living organism larger than a dust mite, upstairs or down.'

[Dad, through a positively barometer-imploding scowl:] 'That'll do, Nigel. Now: clearly there's been some sort of...I daren't dignify the present perfect state of affairs by calling it a "misunderstanding"...so perhaps we'd do well enough to leave it unnamed and press on as best we can towards consigning it to an auspicious oblivion. I don't suppose you happen to have a local phone directory on the premises and at least fairly ready to hand?'

‘Don’t bother answering him one way or the other, Nigel,’ says Mum, even as I’m still summoning up the pneumatic resources needful for telling Dad that yes, I think there’s a dusty old ’03 edition on top of the fridge, if he’ll give a minute to fetch it: ‘A London telephone directory’s hardly going to be of any use for looking up the number of a Cambridgeshire hotel.’

‘So, you’re planning on scaling your stay-over down to a daytrip, are you?’

‘Yes, if you’re planning on barring your front door to us tonight.’

You could have said she was calling my bluff, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d pretty much had me full hand of assorted deuces and threes fanned with the pip-side facing outwards all along; such that the volume of pride I have to swallow before answering her AFF could have been measured in microlitres:

‘Cor, what kind of a son do you think I am, Mum? Of course you lot are welcome to stay. And of course I’m sure Esmeralda’ll let me stay with her. It’s just that knowing her—Christ, knowing anyone in the same situation—there’s bound to be at least a wee bit of friction to be smoothed out before she says yes, and that friction is bound to carry over into your first meeting with her, and I’d really rather like to avoid that if I can.’

‘Well, then, you should have thought of avoiding it weeks ago, when we worked out this little arrangement, by asking her then. Not that I can even remotely fathom why you should have needed to do.’

‘What? You think she should have read me mind—or rather, your mind, cos mine was never crossed by any thoughts along the lines in queue—and volunteered to let me stay over?’

‘At the very least. And it wouldn’t have been a question of reading anybody’s mind; but, rather, of merely having the barest smattering of finishing-school etiquette. Don’t you see, Nigel ? It’s simply commonsensically decent tit-for-tat: we agreed to give up spending Christmas with you—no mean sacrifice on our part in view of your father’s and my advancing age and dolorous genetic histories—so that you would be free to spend the holiday with your sweetheart and her family. In return, she should have been prepared to accommodate us, during our post-Christmas visit, to the fullest extent of her hospitalitative powers.’

'You mean, I take it, even to the extent of offering to put you lot up in her place?'

'Even thereto. From what you've told me, I gather hers is by far the bigger of the two residences.'

'You see now, I trust, why I blushed at the thought of availing myself of the Em-word. Clearly none of us--neither I myself; nor you, Martha; nor you, Nigel; nor, indeed (sorry, son), Esmeralda--has handled this matter of our accommodation in a W. G. Grace-worthy, sportsmanlike fashion. And now that our unsportingness is out in the open, like so many hectares of dirty laundry, and my efforts to, erm, as it were, keep the friction within the family have come to naught, it seems to me, Nigel, that the least painful of all courses of action would consist in your lumping it, as per your mother's suggestion, and begging Esmeralda's hospitality for just this one night. Should she be so, erm, ungracious as to refuse; why, then, we'll just have to high-tail it back to Norfolk and hope for more glasnost all around on the Christmas-planning front next year.'

'But speaking of keeping it all within the family, Dad: supposing I were to kip out here tonight, on the aforementioned pair o' chairs; and that we kept my hosting of you lot a secret from Esmeralda--such that, come the end of the night, we'd pretend to part company; I making me usual rumbles about "needing to get back to the old barn" and you lot (with a knowing wink or four) making your one-off rumbles about "needing to get back to the hotel"?'

'In that case, Nigel, your arithmetical lodging puzzle would be solved; inasmuch as you would have, at the very least, one less warm body [meaning his, natch] to accommodate.'

'Oh, of course, Dad. I was just testing you.'

'I should hope so. Well, son: I assume you would rather prefer to make this telephonic supplication in private?'

'All other things being equal, yeah.'

'Why, then, with your permission, Martha...'

[Mum, sunnily sportingly enough, ATC:] '...Granted...'

'...we'll be retiring downstairs for the nonce.'

'I'm ever so grateful for your patience. And please do--mind you, I'm sure I shan't keep you waiting for more than a minute--but make please do make yourselves at home. There's plenty of...[I fermata'd over a mental inventory of the fridge's meagre contents (more fallout of my telepathic deficiencies), viz: a butcher's half-dozen bottles of Hoegaarden, a half a loaf of Esmeralda's accursed organic whole-grain bread and a half a jar of her twice-accursed Marmite]...reading material on the coffee-table.'

So the four of them pack off downstairs; and I, with hand, heart and schlong of equally heavy specific gravities, lift up the receiver of me bedside blower, and punch in the diggits of Esmeralda's land-line. I am answered by a butcher's half-dozen ring tones segueing into her v-mail greeting; and so, with doubled heaviness on the part of all three members, I ring off and dial up her mobile. The ambient din of unintelligible human voices and equally unintelligible unhuman percussive effects that greets me oriole well in advance of her lackadaisical 'Hullo' attests cuntsternatingly (if unsurprisingly) enough to the fact that she is in some sort of public place; and, hence, utterly unprepared for any sort of condensation of the day's agenda.

'Where are you?' I demand with a well-nigh-cuntish and yet circumstantially called-for brusqueness.

'I'm at Sainsbury's. We're running low on dog food. Also, I was thinking it might be nice to pick up some little something or other for your folks, for when you lot swing by later. Any ideas?'

'Not at the moment [In fact, at the moment a bottle or two of Beaujolais sounds like a down-to-the ground-suiting idea, but the brusque genius of the chinwag forbids my suggesting it]. Look, the point of it is: they're here.'

'Here as in at your place, of course?'

'That's right.'

'Well, then: everything's proceeding as scheduled. You lot are due at my place at noon, which gives them a full two hours to check into their hotel and freshen up--'

'--Ah, yes, but that's just it, you see: there's no hotel to be checked into; or, to put it another way, the hotel in question is located at ### Woodside Avenue, and they've already checked into it.'

[A butcher's two-dozen seconds of presumptively stunned silence; or, rather, presumptively stunned Sainsburyian din.]

'Well I never! I'm sure if the shoe were on the other foot, my parents would never dream of tenting in my house.'

'I'm sure they wouldn't do. But your parents are, after all, sometime outer-boroughial Londoners: they've at least sweated out enough standing-room-only genital-to-genital tube and bus journeys to appreciate the fact that what we crave most of all here in the capital, within our own domiciles, is elbow room; whereas my parents are genu-wine authentic rural provincials, the sort of ilk who positively look forward to rounding out their day in a sardine-tin of sweaty human bodies, seeing as how they've spent the preceding better part of it segregated from their fellow blokes and blokesses by a hundred or so cat-lengths.'

'Whatever you say, Nigel. The upshot of it is they're staying with you, and that's that?'

'More or less, yeah.'

'I was rather hoping for a simple, "Yeah", minus the "more or less".'

'Sorry to disappoint you on that score, darling; but in all fairness, you know the layout of the place as well as I do--thatistersay, you know that upstairs I've got the bed, which comfortably holds two; and that downstairs I've got the futon, which, in its unfolded state, slightly uncomfortably holds another two--'

'--Such that, being the fifth man out, you'll have no place to sleep?'

'Even so, I'm afraid.'

'Such that you'd like to stay at my place tonight whilst relegating your own to the status of a McGyver family beach house?'

'Well, I'm not sure I'd have phrased it in those terms--after all, they're a fairly well-behaved bunch, my lot--but essentially, yeah.'

'Well, speaking strictly on my own behalf, I think it's a perfectly capital idea. But you might want to run it by Lucy first.'

'Lucy?'

'Yeah, I mean in view of the fact that, seeing as how this is a Tuesday, she must be rather looking forward to spending the night at Uncle Nigel's in loo of Auntie Esmeralda's.'

Here, it suddenly struck me, like a B out of the B, what this whole S&D about needing to seek Esmeralda's 'hospititial permission' had been all about all along: namely, the safeguarding of Esmeralda's and my shared Lucy-sitting routine--which wasn't atoll tersay that I'd been consciously guilty of any sort of imposition on Mum and Dad, but rather and merely tersay that my unconscious, ever solicitous of me psychic and schpinctral integrity, and well aware of Mum and Dad's total ignorance of the existence of my implacably harsh second mistress (i.e., Lucy), had, if only for the juration of my interview with them, apparently seen fit to shift the burden of my server-side anxieties to the table and bedside of my infinitely more placable first one (i.e., Esmeralda).

Normally I shy away from these sorts of medicine-mannish explorations and explanations of me so-called inner life, but in this case I couldn’t help deferring to the professional testimony of no less eminent an authority than me own schphinter itself; which, having been as quiescent as 1989's Mt. Pinatubo throughout the recent intergenerational showdown, now began twitching and shuddering with a degree of seismic intensity I’d not registered down under since the last North London Derby.

Anyway-stroke-and so, by way of allaying these tremors via such meagre succor as wishful thinking could provide, I said, ‘We might try varying the routine—you know, just as a sort of one-off, tentative experiment.’

‘Have you been stricken with amnesia, Nigel? You know full well we’ve already tried this “experiment” two times, and I think your aggregated four-figure homicide-scene clean-up bill attests eloquently enough to the negativity of both outcomes.’

‘Well, the third time’s a charm, as they say. And besides: as you just reminded me, the last two trials took place on my turf, not on yours.’

‘And so should the third do! No offence, Nigel, but I’ve got a much heftier sum invested in my home furnishings than you’ve got in yours. Wherever Lucy is to stay tonight, it can’t be here.’

‘All right, all right, darling: say bien-effing-entendu. I trust I needn’t forewarn you that this non-automotive fiat of yours will inevitably eventuate in one of three scenarios—’

‘—yes, I know, and each of them as unthinkably horrible in its own way as the other two.’

‘Nice to know we’re at least both on the same page of the old Necranomicon. Well, we’ll be seeing you then, at your place--within the hour, I expect.’

‘Hang about, Nige. Before we ring off, oughtn’t we to decide which of three scenarios we’re going to plump for?’

‘Ought to do love, but unfortunately can’t.’

‘Can’t?’

‘Right: can’t. Must immejiately answer…[grunt] most pressing … [pant] call of nature. Bye.’

Ten minutes later and a quarter-stone lighter, I'm practically moon-walking (in a strict, non-Jacksonian astronautical sense) downstairs and into the front room. And so salutary is the effect of my late purging of me lower intestine on me upper (i.e., cranial) one that I can take in the scene that greets me upon my arrival--viz., that of Aunt Agatha snoring, and sprawled out upon the armchair in a most unladylike posture; Sid sprawled out wide-awake on the futon in a most ungentlemanly posture, with head schlonged back and gob fastened round the neck of his fourth Hoegaarden; Mum most demurely and stroppily huddled against opposite corner of the 'ton, and pretending to pore over an item in the aforementioned coffee-tabular catalogue; and Dad definitively out of sight--in an attichude of cue cummer-worthy circumspection that would have been unthinkable 11 minutes earlier. Indeed, so Freud is me sang, so slack me lower lip, so fully present me presence of mind, that I manage to blow off and bypass Mum's immejiately subsequent initiation of her pre-fabbed book slamming shut-'n'-scowling ploy, along with Sid's simultaneous initiation of his equally pre-fabbed 'What's this piss you're drinking nowadays?'-bellowing ploy, with a curtly benign nod-'n'-grin, and, without missing a scheduled footfall, to press straight on into the kitchen, where--as I myself have only just emerged from the loo--their absent Generalissimo and Chief of Operations is presumably to be found.

And there I do indeed find him stationed arse-forwards at the wee sliver of counter-space separating the cooker from the sink, and adding the so-called finishing touches to what can only be, on the evidence of the squat telltale brown jar vying for slivular-territorial supremacy with the equally telltale brown loaf, a whole-grain marmite sandwich.

'Oh, Dad,' I can't help ejaculating in uncuntained cuntsternation, 'how could you?'

'How could I do what, Nigel?' he retorts, whilst fumblingly extracting the sandwich-qua-hot potato from its well-nigh forensically delineated counter-spatial stencil, and immejiately before swivelling round to face me in a disarmingly defensive hands-up posture (butter-knife in one hand and sayngwich in the other).

'How could you raid the fridge like this?'

'Raid the fridge?' he repeats with upraised chin and narrowed okies, as if to say, Lookee here, sonny boy: I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it (and don't you forget that I am armed, albeit after an admittedly merely symbolic fashion).

'Well,' I reply, with downcast chin and okies, as if to say, My innards are at your sword's mercy, my paternal liege, '"raid" is perhaps not quite the right word for it--cos after all, it goes without saying, Dad, that you were, are and always will be welcome to help yourself to the contents of me fridge. In any case, it's not the raiding--erm, the self-helping--as such that concerns me, but rather the integrity of your appetite.'

'Of my appetite?' he repeats again, as I re-make patently-disapproving okie contact with his by-now gormless, two-bites'-full jawing phiz, as if to say, The shoe of parental admonition rather seems to have found its perverse way on to the filial foot, no?

'I mean, of course, your appetite for lunch with Esmeralda, two hours from now at most.'

'Of course. Sorry, Nige,' he says, making almost as if--but not quite actually--to lay the sandwich aside, 'but I do get rather peckish after these long drives; and in all fairness you were rather longer about your telephonic business than we'd expected you'd be.'

'Yeah, I know; and for that I apologise.'

'I trust that the length of the conversation doesn't betoken any, erm, lingering discord betwixt the two of you?'

'No: noneatoll, in fact.'

‘So, between the two of you have in fact established that we’ll be staying over here, and that you’ll be staying over there, with no residual hard feelings on her end that can’t be appeased by the crate of Beaujolais I’ve got stowed in the boot of the Mini.’

‘Let’s just say that we’ve come to an arrangement according to whose terms, firstly, your tendering of the crate of Beaujolais will be entirely gratuitous—albeit, I’m sure, graciously and gratefully accepted; and, secondly, the brunt of the imposition will be evenly shared, one shoulder apiece, by Esmeralda and meself, come what may.’

‘I don’t like the sound of that second clause of yours.’

‘No, of course you don’t; and I didn’t expect you would do—it is, after all, cun…erm, devilishly evasive and ambiguous. I was, however, at least hoping—which is more than I can do in connexion with the rest of the family—that you’d take my word for it when I swore—as I am in fact swearing now—that whatever configuration the lodging arrangement assumes tonight, Esmeralda and I both will have bent over backwards to make you lot as content as we can do; in other words, that no preemption of my filial judies by my boyfriendial ones will have entered into it.’

‘Well, of course I take your word for it, Nige; but I still can’t quite grasp the necessity for the whateverishness of the whole thing.’

‘Trust me, Dad: you will be able to and shall do, within 20 seconds of our arrival at Esmeralda’s place.’

‘And how am I—Good heavens!-talk of an injudicious use of the menial I!—are we to stave off the inquisitive promptings of the mob for the intervening [glances at watch] two-hundred-and-eighty plus seconds?’

‘Why, by the grace of our paired slack lower lips, of course.’

(Note well, DGR--skewed me, YL--my judicious use of the squireal or golf-caddial 'our', and its smooth dovetailing with the attainment of my objective of employing Dad as my de facto official spokesbloke.)

Anyway, and unsurprisingly, no sooner have we made our appearance in the front room, than the trio of familial malcontents descends upon us with a fury and flurry worthy of a press corps clustered round the foot of the portable exit staircase at some old-school 1960s presidential or papal airport-tarmac touchdown; all of them simultaneously demanding to know, in their various registers of voice and profanity, 'What the **** is going on?', 'Where the **** are we going to be sleeping tonight?' &c.

'Now, now,' Dad addresses the mob from within their midst in a paradoxically soothing megaphonic register (whilst I withdraw to the higher ground of the entryway, and stand there silently frowning, and with arms folded across me tits, as though [and only as though] I fancied myself some whelp of a consul stroppily yielding to the superior rhetorical prowess of a grizzled senatorial back-bencher), 'there's neither cause nor justification for worrying about any of that; not when we're already 20 minutes late for our next appointment.'

The truth of the matter is that by a conservative estimate we're running 20 minutes early vis-a-vis this selfsame appointment; but so immmejiately palpable is the brilliant clamor-quelling effectuality of Dad's voiced supposition to the inverse, that it hardly occurs to me to communicate this truth to him via any sort of physiognomical semaphore; indeed, it fully occurs to me to reaffirm and authenticate his mis-supposition by the surest of physiognomical indicators, namely a steadily-impatient foot-tattoo.

‘Observe, if you will,' Dad continues, 'with what admirable stoicism Nigel comports himself, knowing though he does that at this very moment Esmeralda is crying her eyes out over an oven-trayful of crêpes suzettes and crab imperials that a quarter of an hour hence will be fit fodder only for the dustbin.’

In like proportion as I appreciate and indeed admire the tactical rationality of Dad’s fabrication of this lachrymose scenario—thatistersay, inasmuch as the scenario is guaranteed to exert an immejiate sympathetic influence on the ductile glands of Mum and Auntie A—I resent and contemn its strategic gormlessness—thatistersay, inasmuch as it’s guaranteed to arouse expectations that are guaranteed not to be borne out, inas-further-much as Esmeralda and I have long since established that for the full juration of their sojourn, our gastro-hospitial judies to my kinsmen will be discharged solely in public, on the premises of our favourite restaurateurs. Not that it’s all surprising that Dad should conjecture otherwise, in view of the well-nigh hamster-worthy paedophagic tenor of conjecturage on his-’n’-hizzin’s end today; but by that same toke-in, he should have known well enough to keep this one to himself, in the light of the batting average of these conjectures so far today—he should have known, innuvvawahds, to put a full stop on his speech at ‘we’re running late for a meeting’, leaving the detail work, such as it might have been (according to demand [ideally zero]), to YFCT. And then to add the deliberate knee-in-the-balls of outright falsehood to the mere inadvertent wrist-in-the-large-of-the-back of indiscretion, to scrawl in the names of specific dishes on to what would otherwise have been the menuial equivalent of a blank cheque, potentially redeemable, if need have been (Cor help us!), out of the Esmeraldan treasury-stroke-storehouse of organic inedibles—why that verged on sociopathy or sadism. Such that, indeed, had there been no ladies present, the FR of my maisonette would have been graced by the honour of serving as the venue for the first-ever father-son McGyverian shirtfest. As things stand, though, the grotesque, front-doorward-tending convulsions of one of these two ladies—namely, Auntie A—preempt even the realisation of the old post-Exeunt omnes apart from First Lord and Second-Lord-ian type scenario—i.e., one ideally suited to the sentence ‘We’ll settle this later, pops,’--that I was hoping to participate in in the meantime. The most I can do H&N by way of punishing him (if only in the short run, seeing as how in the long run it's [at least apparently] as much in his interest as in mine to dilate this whole Point-A-to-Point-B-ial bidness) is to capitalise on his ignorance of the local geography by giving him preposterously digressive driving directions from my navigator's perch in the front-left seat of the Mini. I allow these to carry us only as far afield of our proper destination the Dollis Road roundabout (lest we should properly lose our way, and this phoney late arrival transmogrify into a proper one), before muttering an apology for having neglected to mention 'that turn-off on to Fursby Avenue (one does, I'm afraid, rather tend to slip into automatic pilot mode doesn't one, after having taken the same route so many hundreds of times--thousands of 'em actually)' and negotiating a quick eastward-bound loop back on to Nether Street, which carries us bum-flush with Ballard's Lane a mere decimetre two south of Esmeralda's place, whithin eyeshot of which we arrive--alas!--ungreeted by the kerbside profile of E's puce VW Jetta.

Of course, there is ample additional time to be bought in the form, course and sequel of our search for a non-zone-restricted parking space of our own; which I do my best to drag out as long as I can by dint of a ‘you’ll never fit into that spot’ here and an ‘I think that was a handicap-only spot there’; but in the end, I’m obliged to lump the fact that fact that, apparently owing to some holiday-injuiced exodus from the capital, there’s an uncharacteristic abundance of unoccupied kerbage in Esmeralda’s corner of South Finchley, such that between the three of them--the searching, the parking, and the return hoof trek to Esmeralda’s—we’re still left sitting for a decidedly uncomfortable butcher’s-dozen minutes on the front porch and steps of her house, with our hands on our chins and our chins on our knees, like a quintet of Dust Bowl refugees.

Dad looks at me as if he’s about to ask me something, then abruptly turns away as if in embarrassment at the bloody obviousness of the answer.

He thereby voids the field for Sid to ask what is in all probability that very same something, viz. ‘Ain’t you got a key, druths?’

‘Christ, Sid, do you think any of us’d be sitting here now if I did have one?’

(Sid, well-nigh-unprecedentedly chastened:) ‘No, ’course not. Sorry druths.’

Not that Sid’s opinion of what I would be doing if I had got a key can do anything to alter the bipartite fact that I have indeed got a key in me trouser-pocket and all of us are indeed now sitting here. Mind you, if the craved object had been anything other than a key (and yet, pair-a-Docs-ically, capable of doing judy for one), I dare say we wouldn’t have been. Cos not only are keys rather less painfully concealed in one’s trousers than hard-ons or crowbars or Boeing 747s; they’re also practically as easy to misplace and inadvertently disown than 5p coins or Oyster Cards, hence particularly tempting allurements to the perpetration of the very genre of cuntishness I was presently guilty of. Such that, supposing the intrafamilial tension grew unbearable, I could always, for mock no-stone-left-unturned-dom’s sake, do a digital tally of my key-ring, and in mock-bemusement-cum-cuntsternation exclaim, ‘Strike me pinkie! I have got a key after all’; and none of them would have felt himself within his rights to call bullshit on me, what with each of them having made the same belated discovery countless times before in his or her own life.

'But why,' you lot interject, 'did you succumb to the temptation to cuntishness in the first place? Surely it wasn't out of the super-cuntish, well-nigh dead horse-felching motive of driving home to them a sense of their hospitial presumptuousnesss via a state of transitory homelessness?'

'Well, I can't deny that the satisfaction of such a cuntishly petty sadistic craving factored into the whole duplicitous equation, but at arse-stroke in the main, I had their own best interests at heart; inasmuch as I reckoned that the more helplessly wretched a collective figure they cut in her okies at the outset, the greater the so-called leverage or bargaining power I would have at my disposal, on their behalf, in the long run.'

'Christ, druths, you don’t half put yourself out for a whole lotta nuffink.’

‘You mean, I take it, why don’t I just get a new mattress?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, believe you me, Sid: if new mattresses grew on trees—and, more to the point, if one of those trees happened to grow in me own front garden—I’d have plucked meself a replacement a long time ago. But seeing as how the purchasing of one actually requires a considerable capital outlay—'

‘—Outlay, schmoutlay, druths. Surely you can’t have forgotten that your one and only sibling is a member of the guild, so to speak—’

‘—Of course I haven’t forgotten, Sid; only I thought it a bit presumptuous to try to capitalise on your guild-insiderhood by way of any nepotistic trump-cardial manouevres—’

‘—far from it, druths: if anything I’m insulted that you haven’t thought of playing the fraternal trump card till now. I’ll have you know that I can set you up with a showroom-fresh bed, frame and all for a mere—get this—400 quid.’

With these words, I bade simultaneous tearful farewell to my long-cherished dream of seeing the inner walls of me own grave sooner than those of the Wembley IKEA (Great title for a stocking-stuffer book, incidentally, nest pah?: Ten Million Things to Do Your Effing Best Not to See Before You Die?) and sneerful welcome to an unsavoury fantasy

‘As agreed, Mr Punterfelcher, minus my flat commission of a hundred, there’s 300 quid for you…’ ‘…You did check, I trust, check the blue book value beforehand, McGyver?’ ‘Oh, yes, indeedy sir, I’m nuffink if not thorough: 185 quid 50.’ ‘With used mattress or new?’ ‘New. Cor, that just reminds me…’ ‘What, McGyver?’ [With sly smirk, whilst mentally recapping last night’s “testing session” with Suzy Mc Floozy]: ‘Looks like I netted you an extra 35 quid or thereabouts, boss.’

By now, Esmeralda has doubtless sussed out that Mum is, as they say (and put it very, very politely), one tough customer--i.e., that she's not making this bit up about what her husband said about these non-existent crêpes, that she pretty much knows that he was doubltess making that bit up, and that she's perfectly willing, and indeed, eager, to make a complete arse or scoundrel out of either of them (Esmeralda or Dad) for the mere sake of offsetting her own candour and high-mindedness in the most, erm, shrewishly abstract and rarified fashion.

There's a half a minute or so of knocking about in the kitchen (a pot-lid clang here, an oven or fridge-door thwack there) followed by an equal interval of dead silence, followed in turn by, well, more silence--along with a stink-bomb assault on our sense of smell whose ferocity, pungency, intensity, acridity or what have you almost defies comparison. I say almost, cos there are in fact exactly two items in my personal stink collection that this one lines up with like a watermark, No. 13102005C, "Innards of Burning Bendy Bus" and No. 24051989A, "***** ******** *********" (I leave the identification of the second one as an exercise for my super-longterm readers).

Dad alone seems pleased. 'That smell,' he avers with closed okie-lids, raised chin, and fluttering 'strils, 'is enough to make my mouth water.'

At last, the smell starts to fade and Esmeralda plods back in, looking suspiciously--what with her frazzled hair, sooty face-cheeks, and rolled-up jumper sleeves--not altogether unlike the survivor of an explosion from an old Warner Brothers cartoon.

'Sorry,' she says sheepesquely, 'but the crêpes are off.'

'And so?' asks Mum.

'And so what?' asks Esmeralda, with a sort of 'I-know-this-is-a-stupid-and-cuntishly-impertinent-question-,-but-for- Chrissakes-you've-got-to-give-me-more-to-work-with-than-that, milady'-esque expression on her phiz.

'And so what about the main course?' Mum asks.

'They were the main course,' says Esmeralda with a sort of 'Sorry-but-you've-given-me-a-bit-too-much to work with, thank you very much'-esque selfsame thingy in the selfsame spot.

'Don't be ridiculous, my dear. Crêpes suzettes as a main course? I've never heard of such a thing, on either side of the sleeve.'

'Oh, really? Then you've obviously not been tuning in to The Jackbooted Viscountess very religiously of late.'

'Of late? Good heavens, girl, I've never heard of her, nor, I dare say, of nine-tenths of any other TV chefs you'd care to name. No, dear: for me, English cuisine begins and ends with Eliza Acton. I don't suppose you've ever heard of her?'

[E, ever so icily:] 'No, I'm afraid I haven't done.'

'Well, she was born in 1799: that'll give you an idearrof how far back I'm coming from, won't it do?'

'Yes, indeed: far back enough, I'd wager, not to know the difference between a crêpe suzette and a tampon d'anisette, let alone what to serve it with.'

'Look, if you want to get blousy about it, girl...'

[E, clutching at the collar of her jumper with both fists]: 'Can't say as I don't want to do, madam...'

'Oh, come now, Martha. This is all most unguestworthy. Clearly the heterodoxy of the original bill of fare gives us no grounds for demanding a more orthodox one in substitution for it, now that it has been so unceremoniously withdrawn from us by an, erm, by a freak of nature, so to speak.'

‘Don’t mind if I do. This jumper’s headed straight for the skip anyway, largely thanks to you.’

‘Thanks to me? My dear girl, what on earth is that supposed to mean?’

‘It means, mums, whatever you want it to mean.’

‘Oh, I’d hardly call it a merely theoretical possibility, Stanley. You’d be surprised what can be done inside a half an hour with a dollop or two of salad cream, a couple of eggs and an aubergine—to list just one improbable combination of ingredients—especially with the help of an extra pair of hands.’

I swear the two of them were within an inch-stroke-minute of tearing each other’s eyes out, when who should come to the rescue (albeit in an indirect fashion) but—mind you, you lot’ll never guess--

‘—I reckon we will do: it was Lucy, right?

‘Even so. How ever did you guess?’

‘Why by ye olde fucking P of E, of course. You and your Dad, let’s face it, are the chip and block of henpeckedness; Sid’s a cunt of too many stripes (e.g., sadistic, mama’s-boyish, cowardly) to intervene, which leaves only Lucy.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting Aunt Agatha?’

‘Fuck us with ****** if we ain’t. But can you honestly blame us? She has been rather underutilized in this here post, to say the least.’

‘Well, with all due respect (to whom I can’t really say), that’s rather more her fault than mine. I can only work with what these interlopers into my lifeworld give me.’

Mind you lot, this here turd is quite literally and unfiguratively the first notice that any of them have ever been given that either of us owns a pet of any species, let alone of so high maintenance a one as your old Canis familiaris.

‘Really? You meantersay she didn’t come bounding up to the front window yapping her wee voicebox out the instant you Norridgians turned up on the front steps?’

‘Indeed she didn’t do’

‘Well then, surely then she must at least have had a friendly dental-cum-salivary go at the first trouser cuff to clear the front doorway.’

‘Nor that, I’m afraid.’

‘Cor, this all sounds quite a bit out of character, from what we know about her, and about them sausage dogs in general.’

‘Well, I can’t vouch for sausage dogs in general, seeing as how Lucy's the only one I've ever so much as shaken paws with. All I know is it that it was completely in character for her, as you lot would doubtless know too, if any of my previous blogospheric sallies had had occasion to allude to any of the butcher's-dozen-odd previous Lucian regressions to the pre-housebroken phase that I'd had occasion to clean up after. You see, immejiately upon any of these regressions, it's her policy, knowing full well as she does do that she's broken the rules, to slink off to the remotest corner of the house--indeed to the most secluded and un-get-attable cranny thereof--and to pretty much just stay there, in blithe hermetic disregard of the usual jinglings and slammings heralding our arrival at and entry into the premises. The idea behind the manoeuvre seems to be that regardless of how soon we stumble or tread upon the unwelcome turd, our worry about her whereabouts and well-being will eventually get the upper hand of our outrage.’

A Rugger's Xmas in Wales

2007-01-10T02:46:00.027Z

Yeah, it's been a while, I know. Naturally you lot are probably still wondering whether anything ultimately came of H.R.H.'s belated cruise-by of the Ape on Bloke Fawkes Night--

'--I beg your pardon for interrupting, MDF; but what is the meaning of this anomalous, plebeian, pluralised dishonorific of "you lot"?'

'The meaning of it, DGR, insofar as you are concerned, is--not to put too fine a point on it--that you've been sacked.'

[DGR, sputtering, and purple, as they say, with rage:] 'Sacked, indeed? As if I had ever been in your official employ to begin with!'

'As if, indeed. And yet, for want of a bit of lingo more precisely and genteelly denotative of the termination of our admittedly rather special relationship, how else can I phrase it?'

'I shall be gracious enough to take that for an apology.'

'Thank you, DGR: for for (sic) such, in a roundabout kind of way, was it intended to be taken.'

'And yet, I don't suppose you will be so gracious, whilst I'm packing up my things, as to subscribe an explanation--the more hypocritically smarmy the better--to that apology?'

'Indeed, I shall be; although in preemptive deference to the higher thingy-in-itself that is the bloggic metiér, in essaying that explanation, I'm afraid I may be obliged to go a bit easier on the salad cream of smarminess than will be to your liking. But anyway-stroke-to hew a rather longish, gownish story down to its appropriate readerly skirt-length: when I embarked on this here blogospheric enterprise way back in the big large ones of ought-five, I was naive enough to imagine the blogosphere as a kind of 24-7 Wembley Stadium, packed to the gills at any given moment with tens of thousands of impatient spectatorly readers; such that by default-stroke-extension I imagined my bloggerly scribblings issuing out of the writerly equivalent of a 5(0?)00-watt-strong tannoy, and hence requiring a declamatory tone and mode of address commensurate with the nature and reach of the technology. Whence the ubiquitous "you lot"s of my first butcher's-first-half-dozen posts. But when, round post eight or so, courtesy of the sheer dearth of comments and profile-views, I was finally brought round to the sobering realisation that the blogosphere--or, at any rate, my 500-millionth share thereof--was more akin-able to the reading room of the Barnet council library on a Sunday afternoon; why then, I thought that perhaps it'd be better to whisper rather than to shout, and to address myself as if to one reader rather than as if to thousands. And then, of course, was when you, DGR, sprang into such timely being.'

'Why timely?'

'Well, cos I was just then on the point of having to confront the dreadul SOA that, minus the occasional one-offer who'd been lured to this URL-dom courtesy of some nergle-powered investigation centring on some pet topic of his (e.g. [or, TB-dismally-F, i.e.], "Rugby League", "binge-drinking", or "Kernevistani cuisine"), I was pretty much writing exclusively for the readership of mine own okies; an SOA that, admittedly, I probably wouldn't have found atoll dreadful had I known that I was in for it from the get-go--after all, the great diarists of old, your Pepyses and Boswells and the like, seemed to take it in their stride.'

'Ah, but you see, DGR, herein lies the rhetorical difference between you and any one of these great diarists of old: he, as a matter of course--and notwithstanding the foregone conjecture that he might have been writing with the ghost of posterity standing over his shoulder all the while--could address his diurnal scribblings to himself, and himself alone, in perfect good faith, knowing as he did that the comprising volume was securely shelved under lock and key in his private library alongside, say, his bound collection of state-of-the-art, French-imported pornographic engravings. Whereas you, as a contributor to the universally-accessible open library that is the blogosphere, can never tell who might be popping round for a peek.'

'That's a fair and rational point, DGR; and one that I'll have occasion to return to before tearfully administering the final, decisive coup-de-pied to your door-jamb-flanked backside. For now, I beg your patience to consider that SOA, at that particular moment, as it were, from an irrational addict's povey. You see, having at the outset caught a jones for addressing a mass of actual someones presumed to be religiously chuning in to each and every one of my posts, I was physiologically loath to give up the ghost of a cuntinuity of readership. And if I couldn't count on a mass of such actual someones; or, indeed, even on a select few thereof--why then, I reckoned, the only practical shift, vis-a-minimum-vis the partial gratification of my jones, lay in addressing myself to a single imaginary someone. And that someone, for better and for worse, turned out to be you, DGR. I give you dibs on which of the two catalogues appertaining to either side of the and I should launch into first.'

'Why, the for better-side-appertaining one, of course, if only for the sake of rhetorical symmetry.'

'And as for the sake of your personal psychic well-being?'

'Tush to that. A true gentleman is always braced for the absolute worst, and accordingly takes the mere relative worse in his stride.'

'Very well. You asked for it. As to for the for betters: the first you already know about, viz. the easy assumption that the reader is already fully a-tit of what's been recounted here-24, and lactating in anticipation of what's yet to be recounted. Secondly: that in virtue of your srident poshness you evince an unflagging sociological-cum-anthropological curiosity WRT the daily grind of my humdrum North-Londinian existence, a curiosity that would be (and in manifest fact is) lacking in my de facto fellow-average-blokish readerly constituency. Thirdly, that IVO this selfsame SP, and the attichude of poised reserve enjoined thereby, you rather tend to curb my outpourings of what I guess you'd call plebemes--'

'--e.g., c**t, f**k, sch****g--'

'--that's right: and as I was saying--or would have better said--you tend to keep the overall proportion of such words to my total textual output within a certain manageable readerly limit--shall we say eight per cent?'

'Yes, let's: if only by way of more expediently pressing forward to the worse-ward catalogue.'

'Well, as to that: firstly--and admittedly from a certain brutish commie accountant's povey such as would inevitably be scorned by a true bloggerly artiste--you've got to consider the sheer number of bloke-hours devoted to the care and upkeep of the poshile veneer of your persona. SITS, this sort of performance don't come naturally to one of my humble ([upper-lower]-middle) middle-class origins (as Ronnie L. has sagaciously, albeit cuntishly, noted). Do you have any idea, for example, of how long it took me to cinch all those bits about Eton towards the top of the last post--vis-a-vis, I mean, the precise geographical situation of the school, its cafeterial cultchah and traditions, &c.?'

'Oh, I dare say no more than 20 minutes.'

'20 minutes? Why, I've a fair mind to guillotine your arse like those class-of-'89 Frog revolutionaries did to that poncey aristo scientist who thought it took a dozen eggs to make an omelet; although, SITS, you're erring on the opposite side of the quantitative divide: it took me a four full fucking hours to compose that bit of the post; four hours devoted to a seemingly-interminable round of nergling, gazetteer-thumbing and alumni-website-browsing --in other words, a full 11 per cent of the full-fathom 44 hours devoted to the composition of the entire post. And when you consider the fact that the eventuating DGR-ian episode amounted, in terms of sheer verbiage, to a mere 4 constituent per cent of the final product; why, then, you're looking, roughly, at a 230 per cent markup of the going rate--all in service of what cannot be described in all candour as anything other than as a rhetorical luxury.

‘Secondly, to re-advert to that point of yours: I cannot, indeed, and after all, ever be even approximately sure of who might be stopping by. And when I pause, as I do in fact do, every now and then, to settle me hooves into the moccasins or flip-flops of one of these conjectural by-stoppers, I can’t help wondering at the degree of off-putting-ness that must be occasioned in his or her okies by the spectacle of the two of us squaring off every coupla paragraphs or so like a pair of old queens. I can’t help imagining this otherwise potentially loyal reader spectating upon this spectacle and saying to him/herself: “All right: it looks as though these two have already got enough on their plates as far as dealing with each other goes: there’s clearly no point in my hanging about.”.’

‘Indeed not. And let me conscientiously remind you here, MDF--knowing full well though I do that this reminder amounts effectively to the discharging of a round of birdshot into my own left foot—that the scenario you have just adumbrated cannot be wished away into some species of counterfactual never-neverland; that on one—though admittedly only one—occasion, the two of us were accordingly embarrassed by just such a stopper-by, namely one Mr Caleb Stanhope of Carbondale, Illinois, USA.’

‘Whereupon, of course, I was obliged—much against my own cosy, blokey inclinations, I’ll have you know—to bundle you off unceremoniously into the kitchen, in order to make room in my bloggerly salon for your real-world counterpart. And who can predict when the next such untoward invasion of our bachelorly, Holmes-and-Watson-ian household will occur? And more to the point: what gives us the right to fashion this here bloggerly chimping ground into such an inviolable household? Granted: we might as well be airing our dirty laundry plumb in the bumfuck schphincter of the Sahara Desert or the Antarctic as in the blogosphere for all of the unwanted publicity it actually exposes us to; but what of that? Supposing the two of us were in fact camping on our paired lonesomes in the SD or the Antarctic; surely in such a sitch you'd be all in favour of our drying our socks, string vests and pants on a rack inside the tent, rather than on an outside clothesline, lest some improbably proximate Bedouin or Russian scientist should espy our heel-holes, pit-stains and skid-marks at sniffing-distance resolution, through the view-scope of his binoculars?'

'As to the heel-holes and--ahem--skid-marks, yes; as to the so-called pit-stains, no: inasmuch as any proper string vest, being devoid of fabric at that anatomical juncture, has no more to do with the armpit than with the appendix.'

'Just so. You know, DGR, I think that, over and above your many other Hoegaardenal qualities, that's what I'm going to miss most about you: your perspicacious, non-anorakish attention to detail. Why, the sheer pathos of your impending absence is enough to make me reach on over and give you a great crushing bear-hug--'

'--A simple handshake will do.'

'You're quite right, DGR. Please to forgive me: I quite forgot meself--and the slack-lower-lipped restraint due to one of your posh status--you know, in the heat of the tearful moment. [Tendering my paw to him:] Put her right there. [And thereupon he does do, albeit with a cuntish digital passiveness that ill beseems the occasion, methinks.] Good luck to you, DGR.'

'And good luck to you, sir.'

'Hang about--'

'--No, I really must be on my way, sir--'

'--What's with this sudden access of sirring?'

'Why, MD--erm, sir--it's simply tit for tat; for if this parting marks the extinction of the DGR for you, then it perforce must likewise mark the extinction of the MDF for me. Good day and farewell, sir.'

And with these words, he hoists his rucksack on to his right shoulder--no, strike that: a bloke of the DGR's standing would (much) sooner be caught dead toting a lady's handbag than a rucksack, at least on this side of the Alps--for hoists his rucksack &c. substitute takes up his briefcase--Christ, no! That's even worse: what do I take him for, some fucking rubbishy CIA agent or City stockbroker?--oh, I dunno, let's just say he buggers off out the front door after pausing rhetorically to heft whatever bit of baggage your average country gentlebloke of means keeps in tow nowadays.

I heartily apologise to you lot for the roughness of that last paragraph; it's just that these last 20 minutes or so--thatistersay, the first 20 minutes of my post-DGR-ian stint as a mature blogger--have been, SITS, pretty traumatic. I mean, Christ!: when you consider the sheer acreage of thickets of experience the two of us have bushwhacked through together, hand in hand, over the past half-year or so--'

'--Oh, for Chrissakes, save it for your fucking psychiatrist!'

'--What churl is it that dares to interrupt this sweet summoning up of RMOTP?'

'--What churls is more like it. It's us lot: your newly reclaimed implied readership.'

'Of course, of course. Please, do make yourselves at home; and have a go or to at fucking yourselves while you're about it.'

'Don't mind if we do, on both scores: first, we'll take our respective places on the sofa or whatever the fuck you've furnished us with in the way of arse-cushionage; and then, on the count of three, we'll all stand up, drop pant and do our level best to impale the points of our respective schlongs upon the crowns of our respective schphincters.'

'Anyway, to get back to what you was talking about at the top of the post, before that poncey toff barged in: 1) as a matter of fact, we couldn't give a bat's about whether or not Haitch-Arr-Haitch stuck round that night or not, and b) even if we could do, you needn't be arsed to tell us whether or not she did do, cos it's already plain to us as the schphincter 'tween your cheeks that she didn't.'

'How so? Were any or all of you (Cor forfend!) then present at the Ape?'

''Course not, your Royal Thickness! But, of course, we were present throughout the whole of the last post. And ain't that enough? For fuck's sake, among the butcher's gross of us we may not have two O-levels to rub together, but we've all of us, to a cunt, at least managed to slog our way through elementary maths. And what could be nearer to the right side of the old 2 + 2 + 2 equation than the assumption that the Queen didn't join you for afters? We mean, it's all more or less explicitly implied, innit? You tell us a third of the way through the post that "the Ape's ladies' toilet would have had a hard time accommodating the cloacal reserves of a single constipated pigeon"; then, two-thirds of the way through, you inform us, via the report of your trusty sauce Esmeralda, that the LT still can't get a full load "to go down in one flush"; and then, finally, at the very end of the post, this cunt Sir Humphrey asks you about the "state of the facilities", i.e., the "LT". Ergo: the Queen immejiately turns on her trainer'd heel and limoes it on down the High Road back to Westminster.'

'OK, you lot: I admit that you have twigged the narrative sequel of the last post; and, further, that I knew all along that this twigging didn't exactly demand of the reader a tripos in brain surgery or rocket science. But even so, I had rather counted on yall's being at least a coupla cuts above the common run of mere plot-fuckers--you know, the sort of riffraff who won't even dream of seeing a movie once they've penetrated the hymen of its Wikipedia-entry's spoiler warning.'

'Sorry to have to break the news to you, guv; but we are in fact just that sort of riffraff.'

'Do you really meantersay, then, that you haven't the slightest degree of interest in--Christ, I dun-properly-(k)no(w) what to call it--let's say, for want of less pompous verbiage, in the spiritual residue of my account of H.R.H.'s departure?'

'Not the slightest. You see: we've all been de facto republicans for a long time now, pretty much ever since Princess Di snuffed it back in '97. Mind you, if it'd been Kylie or Madam Beckham who'd been cooling her heels out on the pavement that night, why, of course, we'd be all ears for every spiritual detail of the shove-off, however small--'

'--Oh, come off it, you geriatric retro-geezers!' some dissenting you-lotterly faction interjects. 'At least have the common cuntish decency to call for a vote before sending our cooperative TARDIS carreening off down the old space-time continium towards destination 1995 A.D.'

'We ever-so-humbly beg your fucking pardon,' rejoins the elder faction, 'for having presumed to assume that those two veritable national treasures still held a special place in our cooperative heart. We suppose it'd take the lattest-day likes of Amy Winehouse to keep your lot's trend-fucking gaze affixed to the spiritual residue of the narrative.'

'Yeah, that's right. Either AW or Feist or pretty much any other female celebrity not already pickled in 12-year-old mothballs.'

[YLFCT]: 'All right, you transgenerational pack of fucking tabloid-fucking turds!' (That certainly got their attention, dinnit?) 'Regardless of which Page 5 (sic) micro-zeitgeistial Queen Bink you'd prefer to read about in these here pages, the fact is, I can't count myself cursed to have crossed paths with any of 'em in recent memory.'

'Oh, so then you have crossed paths with at least one of 'em in ancient memory?'

'Well, yeah,' I says, blushing for shame more than pride (I hope), 'I suppose in a sort of roundabout vicarish way I have done. You see, back in '03, during my stint at the Bush House chippiecaff, I did once--and only once--have occasion to make a frappucino for Charlotte Church.'

[The whole transfactional lot of 'em--'skewed me, you--hanging on me EW with B'd B]: 'You don't say? What was she like?'

'Short. Waifish. Long-haired. Rather ta(r)ttily attired. Manifestly 'gover'd to the gills.'

'I.e., just like in every universally-available snap in print or line. Is that really all you can tell us about her?'

'Look, you cucking funts: I said I made the drink for her, not that I sold it or served it to her.'

'Then how'd you even suss that it was her you were making it for?'

'Well, 'cos Maggie--that's Maggie Elms, my coworker and immejiate superior, whom some of you oldtimers might remember from my very first post, and who was manning the till that day--happened to lean over me shoulder just as I was plunging the old steam-spigot into the glass, and to whisper to me, all confidential-like, "You know who that's for, don't you? Charlotte fucking Church. No: mind the spigot, and don't look round just yet. But if, after you've finished, you do a discreet 78-degree anti-clockwise turn en route to the serving-station, you'll spy her sure enough." And so I did do, and so I did subsequently spy her unmistakeable full-body profile; erect, hunched over a table, and puking the undigested remnants of what looked to be our house salade grecque into the second stomach of her handbag. Oh, those were the days..'

'...We're sure they were. (Christ! As if his pseudo-encounter with CC could compare to our actual physical encounter with Madge back in '04, when we were so blessed as to happen to tread in a puddle of diarrhoeic poo depostied on Oxford High Road by one of her Alsatian studs.) But you were saying--'

'--I was saying that on account of this fact that I haven't crossed paths with any of these tabloid headline-filchers in recent memory, and that as this here blog does after all nominally cuntstitute a record of my experiences, such as they are, I can perforce accommodate your fantasies only negatively, thatistersay by omitting to write about my rencounters, elbow-burnishings, chinwags and the like with such blokes and blokesses as you would prefer not to read about. If the pan-flashing likes of Kylie or Amy--or, indeed, Charlotte--trump a genuine historical figure like H.R.H. in point of your readerly interest, that's no skin off my schlong. I'll happily save the remainder of all savoury experiential data appertaining to her for my private old-school paper diary, knowing as I do that they securely await their ultimate, posthumous repository in the grateful bosom of the Bodlean or the British Museum.'

'And good inter-tit-ular riddance to it, we say. Let 'em rot there, in the mouldering storage lockers of the BL or the BM, amongst all them sheaves of mediaeval estate charters or jars of mummified cat's bollocks.'

'Let 'em rot there, indeed, I say: but that still leaves unanswered the question of what I should fill the remainder of this here post-window with in their loo.'

'Oh, does it fucking do, indeed? And you have the cuntish presumption to call yourself a Kenophobe?'

'I'm afraid I've quite missed the Bakerloo-to-Northern Line connexion insinuated by your last remark.'

'Well, we mean that we should think that any self-accredited Kenophobe worth his salt would be above stooping to the rhetorical depths of that consummately Kennish technique known as opportunistic amnesia.'

'I'm afraid I'm afraid (sic) I'm still not following youse.'

'Why, FFS!, that's even worse. Are you really so thick that we have to spell it out for you? This here post, let us remind you, is entitled "A Rugger's Xmas in Wales"--'

[YFCT, thumping his forrid in genuine, infinite, self-directed cuntsternation] '--Yes, of course it is.'

'And yet the nearest we've come to Wales so far--and even there, indirectly--is fucking Essex--'

'--You mean, I suppose, by way of my chinwag with the DGR in the opening paragraphs--'

'--That's right--'

'--Well, in that case, you really ought to have said "Buckinghamshire", which county is, as the crow embarks from randomly-assigned GPS coordinates, even farther off from Wales than is London itself--'

'--Whatthefuckerever: you advertised this post as an account of some holiday junket of yours in Wales, and to Wales you are accordingly judy-bound to transport us. Not that we're expecting much, beyond the usual Beebish shit-bucket-derived splatterings of so-called local colour--'

'--And not that I can promise anything better. But anyway, to launch into the giving it of my judy-bound old UAE try:'

Some of the more senior, long-in-the-toofish of you lot may happen to recall that as anciently as last summer, it was in the gloomy potential offing that I would be spending the the then-following (and now-last) Xmas in Wales, discourtesy of the hospitality of Esmeralda's parents.

'Hang about. Some of us almost twice as long in the toof, and as per another of your crystal-bollocksing prognostications within the confines of that very same anniversary special, were rather looking forward to at least a half-a-post's-worth of reminiscences of your reunion with your old Leedsian mate Herb-AIR Hancock; a reunion that, if we recollect aright--we mean, if it actually did take place--would have already done come and gone as of a coupla weeks before Xmas Day.'

'Erm, well, sorry to disappoint you sub-lot, but--'

'--but it didn't ultimately pan out. Pity, that: cos we'd taken, we confess, more than a bit of a shine to that doughtily stroppy West-Yorkshireman.'

'As had I done, and then some. Which was why, on the very first occasion I was granted the wee-est respite from my Proctologitextual judies wide of a piss-break--thatisersay, at the lunch interval of the very first day of the conference--I summarily high-tailed it over to a pub just round the corner from the hotel for a quick pint-and-a-half-cum-catching-up-session with HH.'

'So then it did pan out after all, you fucking n*****dly pixel-pincher. Oh, don't bovver to apologise again. Cos we've got you sussed, Shaw-'nuff. We can read between the lines--or, rather, the absence thereof.'

'Howdjermean? I'm afraid you (sub-) lot are at least one up on me in that regard.'

'Well, obviously, we mean that during your northern sojourn something happened to (or between) you and Herb that you, for some reason or another, are embarrassed or ashamed to commit to these here pseudo-pages.'

'And to think that certain front-bench-warming Torisaurs still have the cuntish effrontery to affirm that the old Etonminster-to-Oxbridge conveyor-belt-girded class system has long since been disassembled; that we now live in a fully-fledged, perfected meritocracy, wherein, 99.999 times out of a hundred, the door of official educational accreditation slams squarely aflush the jamb of intellectual capacity with a gratifying, inner-ear-popping hermetic whoosh!'

'Spare us your wannabe-toff-ish sarcasm, you orange-brick uni washout; and give us the terminally-emaciated on what it was you'd rather not have told us. What was it, eh? Was it that the two of you rounded out the night in some sort of compromising situation, in the red-light district of Leeds--i.e., an episode that, Cor forfend!, your precious Esmeralda should ever get wind of, in the all-too-likely event that she should stumble upon this here blog-post in the course of an office-boredom-powered nergle-search centring on your name? Or was it a compromising situation of a different sort, involving, say, the two of you and a back at his flat--'

'--No. Black as is the picture sketched by either of them two conjectural scenarios, you'd really have to apply your crayon-box's spectrosopic equivalent of Spinal Tap's Amplifier Setting No. 11 to do justice to the overwhelming awfulness of the scene to be depicted. The fact is, you see, that to my unfathomable cuntsternation and disappointment, my one and sole interview with HH during that trip turned out to be--get this--too boring for words.'

'Oh, come off it, YFC! You've already subjected us to a virtual stool-by-stool account of your pooch's anti-Marmite treatment. How much more boring than that could it be?'

'Do you really want to know?'

''Course we fucking do!'

'Very well, then: just south of the asterisk, you shall be treated to a letter-perfect, jaw-motion-by-jaw-motion transcript of that very interview--and please, by all means, feel free to cry "Uncle" when you've had enough of it.'

HH: Rugger, me old fruit! So good to see you!

RMcG: Herbie, me old vegetable! So good to see you!

HH: So, anyway: how's tricks down in Loondon?

RMcG: Fine, fine. And how's tricks up here in Leeds?

HH: Couldn't be better. How's Ronnie doing?

RMcG: Well, I should think you'd have a clearer idearrof that SOA than I would do.

HH: You mean, on account of our having been best mates back in college?

RMcG: That's right.

HH: Well, I should think your living within a literal stone's throw of him now would automatically trump my having lived within a figurative--thatistersay, a testicular--stone's jostle of him way back when: I mean, of course, with regard to our respective qualifications for the title of Ronnie Livingstonian bureau chief of the news department.

RMcG: Well, skewed me for having been so gracious as to give you first dibs on appointment to the post. But now that I've been saddled with that selfsame appointment, I suppose I'm judy-bound to report to you that Ronnie is doing just fine--or, rather, was doing so, way back in the irrecoverable mists of early November, when I last saw him.'

HH: That's good to hear.

RMcG: That's good to hear, indeed! Surely you're bluffing.

HH: And by that I suppose you mean I'm concealing the conjectural fact that I've heard from him since?

RMcG: Spot-fucking-on.

HH: Well, I might as well lay me full handfool of randomly suited and numerised spades, diamonds and cloobs on the table and admit to you that I haven't heard from him since; nor, indeed, more recently than last July.

RMcG: Cor! Whodafuckingthunkit?

HH: I know. But, after all, it's all me own fooking fault. Cos what choice does a bloke--i.e., Ronnie--have, but to assume he's been given the final high-hat shove-off from a correspondent, when he's addressed not one, not two, nor, indeed 10 but 18 emails to that selfsame correspondent, without having received so much as a single, curt automatised 'What'shisnuts will be out of the office until the **th of such-and-such a month' by way of reply?

RMcG: Christ! I can't imagine what Ronnie might've done to you to deserve such a firewall of snubbage.

HH: Nor can I do. The pure and simple fact of the matter is, Rooger, that I've always been absolute pants when it comes to keeping in tooch with people, and that, with the passage of years, I've only got worse at it .

RMcG: And yet, somehow, against your slothful panterly inclinactions, you've managed to keep in touch with me.

HH: Well, that's easily enoogh explained: you see, your coommunications have always centred on the prospect of your visiting me up here in Leeds, whereas Ronnie's have always centred on the prospect my visiting him once again down in Loondon.

RMcG: So then, at arse, it's not so much your actual diggital resistance to the keyboard as such, as your full-bodied resistance to boarding a southbound train by way of the keyboard, that accounts for your recent wholesale snubbage of our dear mutual friend RL?

RMcG: So, anyway: how's tricks over at Ipimmywyf?

HH: Well, I dunno: decent to rotten, I suppose.

RMcG: I take it my West-Yorkshire rhyming slang proposal never got off the ground--assuming that is, that you weren't just humouring me when you said you'd "moot it to the lads down at the Institute"?

HH: Oh, no, I wasn't just humouring you. It got off the ground like a fooking late 1970s Concorde, and I mean with respect to the coomunity at large, not just the lahds at the office.

RMcG: Really?

HH: Really. For ee-gee-erly starters, just take a quick gander at that there handbill posted behind you, just above the wainscoting.

RMcG: What of it?

HH: What oov it, indeed?

RMcG: I mean, it's obviously just an out-of-date advert for some local charity's regular Halloween shindig.

HH: You're not looking closely enoogh. Have a quick read-through of the bit at the bottom, why don't you?

RMcG: 'We promise it'll be the right templest Halloween experience you've ever had.' Cor! It really has taken off, hain't it?--assuming, of course, that you're not in any way personally affiliated with the Leeds-Bradford Junior Scientologists' League.

HH: Never heard of 'em before that there poster went oop two moonths ago. No, it's all been by word of mouth--truth be coontishly told, of woon single mouth: mine.

RMcG: So just what sort of logistics are involved in this process of mouth-to-mouth presuscitation? Do you just sort of barge into some random pub along the High Street, at 10 pm of a Friday or Saturday, and bawl out at the top of your lungs, 'THIS PLACE IS RIGHT FOOKING TEMPLE!' like some sort of latter-day town crier, and then proceed to the next station along the way like some sort of rhyming slang-dispensing Father Xmas?

HH: 'Course not! Of course its an ever more soobtle process than that. No: firstoff, I dedicate an entire night out to each poob. I arrive poonctually at 8 p.m. of a Tuesday or Wednesday; I stake out my turf on soome lonely barstool, and pretend to be poring over the latest noomber of the Yorkshire Post. (Mind you, this is a twofold pretence, 'cos not only am I not actually reading the paper in question; boot also, like as not, the noomber in question hails from a coopla weeks back, if not earlier.) And so I sit there, waiting for the next oonsuspecting punter to take his seat beside me; and no sooner has he doon so than, with YP-article ready to finger-jab, I'm launching into soom grapeshot diatribe broadly centring, say, on the futility of the proposed trollyboos system, or on the current, ignominious performance and league status of Leeds United as unfavourably contrasted with their glory-days in the mid-'90s. Of course, there's no any guaranteeing that this particular topic'll get the doodgeon of this particular poonter up: in which case, it's on to the next topic-cum-broadleaf and so on; but as like as not something I've got to rant about will eventually pique his sympathetic ire; and once I've got him hooked, why then, it's simply a matter of incorporating at least a smattering of West Yorkshire rhyming slang into each fresh burst of invective.'

RMcG: All well and good, but how do you make sure that they 1) remember that bit of RS, and b) subsequently go on to use it properly?

HH: Why, by simply soobmitting to the natural give-n-takerly rhythms of barside chinwagging. You've done there-stroke-been that, right? I mean, you know as full well as I do that the red -arrow-level of one's co-chin's petrol tanks of patience and curiosity--not to mention a certain good-natured sort of envy--with regard to oneself, rises in direct proportion to the sheer acreage of common ground established between you vis-a-vis the topic nominally to chin, right?

RMcG: TBS, and then some.

HH: Well, then: as in each of these cases, I've seen to it that the acreage in question--I mean, vis-a-vis this or that hot-button local issue--positively dwarfs that of, say, the Yorkshire Dales, any such patch of esoteric verbiage as I see fit to launch into--be it in Biblical Hebrew or Upanishadal Sanskrit--is pretty much guaranteed to be interroopted, at the least charitable end of the spectroom, by a toking 'Coom again?'-coom-manual ear-trumpet. And as regards the explication of these bits of rhyming slang--I mean, seeing as how noothing could be more exoteric, more here-and-now-orientated than they--the dividends of the interrooption are as predictable as they are positively incalculable: I oonpack the meaning of the word, along with its logical rhymic parcelling, to the bloke; and before I know it, he's going through all sorts of ridiculous argumentative contortions in order soomehow, by hook or by crook, to work it into the living stooble of his side of the chinwag. And at that point, I can rest easy knowing that my work is doon; knowing that this time tomorrow, give or take a pie-slice, the bloke in queue is going to be remarking to woon of his mates, 'It's positively temple, the dearth of talent in this place tonight,' or, 'Are you about ready for anoother--'

BARMAN: --Are you two about ready for anoother round?

HH: Yeah, anoother Stella for me, and for him...what was it...a Ho-something-or oother?

RMcG: Hoegaarden.

HH: Foony, Rooger: last time I saw you, you were a dyed-in-the-wool Stellaphile.

RMcG: Well, the thing is, Herb: Stella and I have rather fallen out since, subscribed ourselves to a mutually amicable treaty of separation, you might say--

HH: --No need to make any prudish excuses, Rooger: I know what thaht's all about.

RMcG: You do?

HH: 'Course I do. Every long-term Stella-drinker has to coom to terms sooner or later with the so-called arsetral winds stirred up by her; and, however relooctantly, to oopgrade
to a less, shall we say, effervescent brand of brew, provided sooch an oopgrade is within his boodgetary means. Mind you, in view of the present state of my boodgetary affairs, I'm more inclined to downgrade to Boodweiser, praying to Cor it proves an exception to the fartiness-to-price index. Which brings me fresh, full-circle-wise, to me original plaint--

BARMAN: Gardee coods, gents: here coomes your latest snarkly, head afloosh the rim on both sides.

RMcG: 'Our latest snarkly?'

HH: Yeah: that's snarkly for round, by way of Roundley Park, anoother of my insinuations. I know, of course, that according to the strict rules of rhyming-slang composition, the eventuating slangeme is supposed exclusively to echo the second term of the master dyad, thereby obviating all tracings of the former to its source in the first term of the lahtter--but, Corfookit, there's a reason rhyming slang never took off here the way it did down in your parts; namely, that we've always lacked the sheer plenitude of local landmarks you sootherners take for grahnted. And so what can I say?--as mooch as it abahshes me to say it--boot that I've had to foodge a bit with the rules, for the sake of getting the good words out.

RMcG: 'Fuck the rules,' I say, if the offspring of my fuckage is a bouncing baby of a Neil O' Jizzm that stands a fair chance of finishing up in the next edition of the OED. It sounds to me, by your own account, that you're positively shittin' in high reels--

HH: 'In high reels'--?

RMcG: Yeah, reels: as in 'reels o' cotton'; rhyming slang for...but never mind that. To be Sinatra-esque witcha, Berry, I can't see what you've got to kvetch about, career-wise.

RMcG: Oh, come off it Herb. Surely you’re bright enough to have sussed by now that geographical landmarks do not cuntstitute the sole, majesterially chartered mint of rhyming slang. What about your local celebrities?

HH: Name woon.

RMcG: Well, I dunno…I suppose there’s Jimmy Saville for starters—

HH: --Yeah, and for finishers. And as look would have it, Saville happens to rhyme with exactly four—count ’em four--OED-listed words—

RMcG: --Please don’t itemise them just yet; let me guess: ‘gravel,’ ‘travel’ and…I give up.

HH: As well you might do; cos the oother two are ‘rahvel’ and ‘cahvil’: words that I wager even the most toffish or bookish West Yorkshireman has cause to use in a spoken sentence woonce or twice a decade at most. And as for the first two: sure, they’re universally oonderstood, but when you coom right down to it, demograhphically speaking, the sampleable section of the population for whom they figure as part of the daily verbal furniture—navvies and pet-shop clerks in the case of ‘grahvel’, airport workers and radio announcers in the case of ‘trahvel’—hardly amount to a proverbial hill of beans or drop in boocket.

RMcG: Yes: granted, they hardly do do; and yet, for all that, I still don’t see what cause you’ve got to be hankering after a Londinian situation. You’re apparently forgetting that whilst the overall mint down there is much larger, so too is the…I dunno…circle of circulation. I mean you’ve got to consider that at gob-to-gob velocity any word you let drop in my neck of the metropolis’ll be lucky to make it as far as the Marylebone Road, let alone across the river. Such that the only practicable means I can see of your plying your trade in London would necessitate a radical scaling down of your ambitions; it would involve say, your setting up shop as the official councilally-anointed rhyming-slang smith of a specific borough. In which capacity—at least insofar as my home-borough of Barnet counts as a typical one—you’d be stuck looking for rhymes for the likes of such mummified third-tier celebrities as Spike Milligan, or of such fifth–tier National Trust sites as that parish church up the High Road that Harry the Sixth popped into for 10 minutes to shake a tit en route to the Battle of St Albans way back in 14-when-the-fuck-ever. No, Herb, I gots to say, I’m adamant on this point: if you’ve found your true calling in this local-folkway-propagating bidness, you’re much better off sticking it out up here than starting anew down in London.

HH: Oh, aye, aye, if I've found my true calling therein: that is indeed the question-stroke-roob. Look, I haahv to confess to you, Rooger, that I was either whining oop the wrong tree or trying to kill two mighty ostriches with a single puny slingshot-round o' Jimmy when I launched off on that tangent about West-Yorkshire versus Loondon rhyming slang. Cos at arse, what I most rahbidly envy you down there is not the sheer fecoondity of your ambient foond of rhyming slang fodder--which, in spite of your well-adjoodged animadversions on the circle of circulation, I still hold to be infinitely richer than our doostbowl's harvest thereof--boot, rahther, the sheer degree of economic security you moost surely enjoy in virtue of your pursuit of a career pahth that tidily bypahsses the quangofied quagmire of the semi-private not-for-profit sector.

RMcG: Economic security, schmeconomic security-stroke-my arse! Do you have any idearrof the third-world-skirting standard of living one can actually enjoy (if that's the word for it) in London on 32-grand a year nowadays?

HH: No, boot I've a fairly clear idearrof the fourth-world-hemline-strahddling standard of living I currently and actually enjoy oop here in Leeds courtesy of my 15-grand-per-annum Ipimmiwyf-allotted salary. Mind you, I'd take all the hardship on the chin-stroke-in my stride, provided there were any long-term prospect of my advancement to the position of senior research fellow; or, indeed, any short-term prospect of my being reimbursed for these nocturnal sallies. Boot alas! the old guard of Ipimmiwyf, being the righteous heirs of the ancient ladies' temperance movement that they are, have their own restrictive, officially-chartered MO for getting the good word out; an MO centring on such stratagems as lahvishly-catered so-called professional development workshops for the local teachers, and full-colour posters spanning the height and breadth of one out of every 20 bus-stop shelters. SITS, this MO is counterproductive in the extreme, cooming across as it must do to the local younkers like their respective grans' encouraging them to take up smoking or booze, boot there you have it, in all of its resplendant irrationality.

RMcG: And all the while, you've been out there, in the trenches, so to speak...

HH: ...Thaht's right: spreading the good word, after me own vigilante-like fahsion.

RMcG: Albeit, I assume, on the eventual reimbursement-checque-remitted dime of the Institute?

HH: Christ, Rooger, can you really be as thick as all thaht? In fahct, I really do fahncy that if any of those faht-caht Pollyahnas-stroke-Goody-Two-Shoeses in our top brahss ever got wind of this here MO of mine, they’d serve me my walking papers straight away; not so mooch on account of its bypassing of the officially chartered channels of project approval (although, of course they’d be oobliged to couch the grounds of the sacking in such verbiage), as on account of its aggressively family-oonfriendly domain of execution.

RMcG: Do you then really meantersay, Herb, that you’ve been clocking in all these proselytising hours purely, as they say, ‘for the benefit of the front-man of U2-stroke-Cher’s long-dead ex-hubbie’?

HH: Thaht’s right, and, moreover-stroke-what-coomes to the same thing—cos where there’s a pay-checque stoob or a tahx return there’s a name, right?—completely anonymously.

RMcG: I admire your heroism [‘pity your suckerism’ is more like it]. And yet I am judy-bound to add, by way of a sort disheartening footnote to my admiration, that the answer to my question as to whether ‘you’d found your true calling in this local-folkway-propagating bidness’ can but be a resounding ‘Aye!’; that, for all of your understandable short-term envy of my situation down under, and come what eventually may of your situation at Ipimmiwyf, I guarantee, in view of what you’ve just confessed to me, that 10 years from now you’ll still be routinely pitching up at this here pub and at its neighbours along the Leeds High Road, whether to squander the last tenner of your dole cheque or to strip-mine an hundred-quid layer or two off the upper hillocks of your geologically-deep credit limit, all out of your disinnersted love of West-Yorkshire folkway propagation.

HH: I rahther doubt it. Look, Rooger, this is all a bit complicated, boot I might as well hahve a go at explaining it. Ahnd joost to give you fair warning: certain portions of what I’m about to say may initially seem, in a quite flagrant fahshion, to contradict certain portions of what I’ve already said today, and so I moost beg you not to interroopt me until I’ve said my piss, howsoever many open-flies-espying-like occasions for interroopting should present themselves along the way.

RMcG: Scout’s honour: I shan’t interrupt.

HH: Mooch obliged. Anyway, for starters: I’m as true-blue and authentic a native West Yorkshireman as any folkway-ferreting anorak could dream of unearthing in this most Loondon-ocentric of all epochs in recorded English memory. And with good reason: it’s in me blood, you see, the whole West Yorkshirean ethos. I’ll hahve you know that me fahmily can trace its ancestry in these parts all the way back to time of the Danelaw—in oother words, as far back as 1.2 millennia, give or take a century.

RMcG: Cor! Why, my East Anglian family tree of three-generations’ standing crouches like a puny shrub in the shade of this mighty West Yorkshirean oak of yours. And yet, I do seem to recall—

HH: --I thought you’d promised not to interroopt.

RMcG: And so I did do, but only as regarded contradictions within the context of the present chinwag. Whereas what you said just now did seem rather stridently to contradict two bits of genealogical data you let slip during our last chinwag, to the effect, namely, that your mum hailed from Bradford, and your dad from Newcastle—

HH: --You soothern hayseeds don’t haaf crahck me oop. First off, I don’t suppose you could tell me which of them two burghs, Newcaastle and Brahdford, is nearer to our four presently-situated arse-cheeks, as the crow flies?

RMcG: Well, erm, Newcastle, of course.

HH: Oh, hahve I got an itinerary for you, southgob. Step outside the precincts of this here poob, head north to the nearest intersection, coop your hands over your eyes, hang a Louie and march forwards for 81-odd minutes; then uncoop your hands and--voila!—you’ll find yourself surrounded by all the city-centrely hoostle and boostle of Brahdford, the second city of West Yorkshire, a veritable St Paul to Leeds’s Minneahpolis. Whereas getting to Newcaastle on foot would probably take you a good two or three days. So, strictoo sensoo, I'm talking only about me moom's side of the fahmily. Not that I couldn't make a open-and-shut, albeit rather ahnorakish, case for the West Yorkshirean integrity of me dahd's side, on taking into account the historically estahblished fahct that in the Danelavian era practically all of England betwixt the Wash and the Tweed was included in Yorkshire, along with certain bits of hotly-contested historical evidence suggesting that between ca. 800 to 950, Leeds temporarily eclipsed York as the de facto capital of the entire region. Boot right now, I can't be arsed--and, indeed, needn't be; cos what's really in point for our present purposes is not my genealogical entitlement to regard meself as a West Yorkshireman's West Yorkshireman, boot rather the inelooctable material fahct that I always have doon. And when I say always, I mean always, to the farthest extent of the word's meaning within the coompass of a single human life; I mean that it dates from so far back into my nipperhood that I caan't even pessonally remember when it all started. My parents trace its origin to my first year at school, specifically to a so-called disciplinary incident arising out of a conflict between my five-year-old self and his English teacher--some Croydonian or Wimbledonian bloke name of Haalf- or Hooff- something.

RMcG: Houghington, perchance?'

HH: Perchahnce. Moom and Dahd'll know; aafter all, they hahve a copy of the headmaster's report of the incident on file--or, raather, proudly on mount--in my baby-album [?], sahndwiched somewhere between me first permanent tooth [?!] and me foreskin [!?!]. Boot anyway, they say that on this particular day this teacher of mine, this Mr Hoofhisnoots erected, by way of an instrooctional aid to the day's vocahbulary lesson, this easel-type thing with this sheaf of great big cardboard squares vertically propped up on it, and on each of these squares was cartoonishly depicted soom relevant vocahbulary object, together, I suppose, with the name of the thing spelt out underneath. And so he starts working his way through the sheaf, naturally enoogh beginning with some A-words--e.g., 'Aardvaark,' 'Ahmbulance,' and 'Ahntithesis'; and proceeding on to such B-words as 'Baht', 'Booton' and 'Behemoth'; and finally winding oop (as far as my attendance was concerned) with such C-words as 'Caht,' 'Cahtafalque' and 'Croompet'. (My sole surviving memory of the whole affair, incidentally, centres on the picture served in illustration of this last word, viz. a rather booxom and tightly-laced lahss with facial features immejiately recognisable, even in stylised cartoonish strokes, as those of Felicity Kendall.) And, nahturally, this exercise being in the tried-and-true call-and-response format, he announces at the beginning of it, ‘Okeye clahss, now I’d like you all to repeat after me..’ in his twangy Estuary accent, and with the introdooction of each new word (enoonciated likewise in that selfsame accent), together with its attendant photogramme, the rest of the class, impressionable-and-stroke-or-apple-polishing sheep, the lot of 'em, chime back a grahmmaphonic echo of his pronunciation, viz. 'Aambulance,' 'Baat,' 'Cruhmpet,' &c. I alone, out oov their score-and-a-hahlf, stook to me goons, and pronounced each word as I'd learnt it at me moom's teat. Needles to say, by the time we'd got round to 'croompit', my single, sustained dissonant pedal-point in the northern register was beginning to grate on the ears of the teach, who called me to the froont of the room, and rang oop the froont office on the inter-tannoy; sooch that inside of the next quarter-hour I was bent over the headmaster's desk with both hands splayed atop its surface, and with the virgin white orb of me arse-cheeks--as yet uncharted save for a single, lowermost-backbone-to-perineum-spanning meridian--ripe for meticulous cartographic demarcation courtesy of the unsparing cane of the aforesaid Haitch-Em.

RMcG: Ripe for a caning, you say? How old are you, anyway?

HH: Joost barely old enoogh, from what Ronnie tells me, for the two of oos not to paas as hahlf-broothers by the distahff: in oother words, 29 coom next Whitsun. Oh, I know that according to official parliamentary fiat caning went out soom 30 years ago, close on the skirts oov the repeal of the sodomy laws; boot these sorts of statutory prohibitions and licences tend rahther to take a long time to catch on oop here in Leeds. I don't suppose you're familiar with Mark Twain's quip about Cincinnahti, Ohio?

RMcG: You mean, I take it, the one to the effect of 'If I ever got wind of intelligence that the world was about to end, I'd immejiately hop aboard the next Cincinnati-bound train, seeing as how everything seems to happen there about ten years later than in any other town in the Union?'

HH: Thaht's the woon. Well, I've long fahncied that in that regard--oov which the persistence of corporal poonishment well into the 1980s is boot woon amoongst a hoondred or more salient instances--that Leeds should be nominated the Cincinnahti of the UK; although, to be sure, I've met many a Sheffieldian and Glasweegian [not to mention at least one Norweegian] who would usurp the title on behaalf his own home burgh, and would have oos oopgraded to the pseudo-provincial rank of a Tahmpa or Baltimore, little realising, of course--gormless twat thaht he is--thaht it is he, and not oos, who enjoys the jubious fortune oov inhabiting joost sooch a milquetoast limbo in the kingdom-spahnning urban hierarchy. Boot woonce again I digress. You see, my main aim in introjuicing this second-hahnd ahenctdote froom me nipperhood was to bring home to you the fahct thaht the linguistic peculiarities of this region, together with its objurate resistance to the so-called latest trends--as set by Whitehall, Hollywood and Loondon--hahve kept me bound to it, literally from time immemorial, as fahst as a baited bear shahckled to its stake.

RMcG: Are you really quite sure about that, Herb? Cos if memory serves me--and again, inasmuch as the memory-reserves in question are of ought-five vintage, I'm sure you'll pardon my pointing out the apparent discrepancy brought to mind thereby--you did ultimately, albeit temporarily, sunder yourself free of them there shackles for a minimum four-year frolic, on her Majesty's dime, in a foreign county.

HH: I assume you're alluding to my university years in Mahnchester?

RMcG: Even so.

HH: Erm, well, regarding that rahther embarrassing episode, I suppose a bit of retroahctive fine-chuning of the nomenclature is in order. Let's joost say then thaht oop until about age 18 I regarded myself not so mooch in the light of a West Yorkshireman's West Yorkshireman as in the light of a Northerner's Northerner; in oother words, thaht I more or less took it for grahnted thaht all of the unique virtues of my native micro-region were to be found evenly dispersed throughout the whole of the North. Ahnd so, ahcting on thatht admittedly naive assoomption, I sought to try my fortunes in the universally-acknowledged capital of the north, Mahnchester. Ifahckins, was I in for a bit of a shock. To further draw out the stateside conceit, I arrived in Mahnchester expecting it to be the Chicaago to Leeds's Milwaukee, and I left it knowing it to be the right-pondside equivalent oov Washington, DC or Atlahnta--in oother words, a soothern (i.e., northern) town in geographical situation alone, in all oother respects a piddling boom-licking sahtellite of New York (i.e., Loondon). I stook round joost long enoogh to collect me MA in pooblic policy, and then high-tailed it out of thaht Sodom bahck to Leeds, knowing--or, at any rate, believing--that woon way or anoother, my true destiny as a Northerner both had to and could be met at home, within the confines of me native county.

RMcG: And so, when you landed this gig at Ipymmiwyf...?

HH: ...it was like receiving a full-service body massage at the hands and gob of Providence herself. I fondly imahgined that I was, vocationally-speaking, set for life. I've coom to realise that it all hinges on a certain inescapable ahmbiguity inherent in words like 'local' and 'regional' and 'cooltural'. For me, 'local and regional coolture' has always centred on whatever me particular fellow-West-Yorkshirepeople happen to get up to during their off hours; whereas for them it's always centred on whatever sooch ahbstract entities as the county council or the health board or the regional PTA or RSPCA--or, indeed, Scientology--chahpter hahppen to get oop to during their on-hours. It's sort of a reverse-play version of the old throwing-out-oov-baby-with-bahthwater scenario: insofar as, by virtue of me own longstahnding sentimental attahchment to these particular words, I'm obliged to sook oop the connotative swill of what these words mean to them. Ahnd yet, if I'm to be perfectly honest with meself, I moost admit thatht a goodly proportion of net volume of the bahthwater was oov me own pouring and brewing; cos if my real and ooltimate aim had simply been the sheer disinnersted mooltiplication and propagation of local folkways per se, why then, aht the terminus of me final Manchester-to-Leeds train commute, I'd have simply made a beeline for the nearest poob, with a view to soobmitting the vocational ahspect of me career to the hahzard of the next available poonter's chin-'n'-ear, ahd its ahlimentary ahspect to the hahzard of the job-centre queue. Boot, as I'm now all-too-belatedly realising, what I've really been hankering ahfter all along is recognition.

Ahnd froom those first oblivion-buried moments of primary school right on through to grahduation froom university, the satiation oov thaht selfsame recognition went more or less hahnd-in-hahnd with the affirmation of me West-Yorkshirean identity. I could always be counted on, you see, during that blissful 15-year interregnum, to be the woon single individual, amongst any gahthering oov however many doozens oov persons, to be possessed oov both the couillons and the competence to stahnd oop for the authentic West-Yorkshirean way oov life. To be sure, the recognitionary gestures in question more often took the form of open-faced sniggerings than ooper-hahnd-prostrated hosannas; boot at arse, they were all more or less interchangeable, inasmooch as they all singled me out froom the herd via woon method of cooling or anoother; whereas now, in the institutional eyes of Ipimwyf, I am the scape-goated delegate oov the herd; in their eyes, it’s they who have assumed the proper, anointed mahntle of West-Yorkshirean self-preservation, and I who am the hopeless, hickish, intransigent stick-in-the-mood who would retard our progress towards the rear flank oov the almighty daemon of the South, in virtue of my perversely ahntiquated chahmpioning oov these—let’s face it—working-claas idioms and usages. On account of-stroke-actuated-by which snoobage, I say: Fook Ipimmiwyf! Ahnd fook the whole cause of West-Yorkshirean solidarity. If I’m to garner the merest whisper of recognition of my—to boot call a spade a spade—unique poetic gifts—then let me do so courtesy of the open-handed cosmopolitan abundance of the South, rather than of the provincially quangophilic miserliness of the North; let me, indeed, armed with my encyclopaedic knowledge of the folkways of my home-region, and heralded by my newly-donned southern colours, lay siege to that selfsame region after the fashion of that banished Roman hero of that second-tier Shakespeare tragedy; let me, in a word, ask you, Roogger—skewed me, Rugger--if you’ve recently heard of any openings in your coompany’s advertising or marketing department?

RMcG: Not directly as sooch--skewed me, as such; although I have learnt through the old grape-mill that just last week a senior member of the public relations team popped off in a huff, without even giving her two weeks' notice, to go and work for Oxfam; and I assume HR are scrambling for a replacement even as we speak.

HH: Well then, if you would be so kind as to provide me with contact information for your senior human resources officer...?

RMcG [riffling through his wallet in search of the relevant business card]: ...Soitanly. But are you really sure that a career in the medical supplies industry is quite up your alley--thatistersay, that it constitutes an appropriate venue for the efflorescence of your unique poetic gifts?

HH: An appropriate venue, you dare to ask? As if there could be any question of its being anything short of the ideal venue for such an efflorescence? Christ, can you even begin to imagine the comic potential inherent in a scenario centring some octogenarian geezer's wrestling with his trooss--skewed me, truss--and all the while cursing the antiquated mechanism of the thing in broad, one-hundred-per-cent authentic Yorkshire dialect?

RMcG: Sure I can do, Herb, sure I can do. But I'm afraid that at Proctologitex we've little to do with such front-of-centre apparatuses as trusses; they're more the proper bailiwick of our sister firm, Urovision. Now, if you can manage to nose out the merest whiff of comic potential in such back-of-centre engines as suppositories, shunts, tents, tampons, enemas, &c.--which, Christ knows is more than I can do--

HH: Oh, believe you me Rugger my boy, I’m positively huffing up great lungfuls of comic potential from each and every one of them. Why in degree of intrinsic hilarity, a trooss is to a suppository as a Christmas crahker is to a hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb in explosive mahgnitude.

RMcG: Now, now, Herb, don’t let’s start detonating our hydrogen bombs before we’ve properly mined our uranium. Remember that this is, after all, a public relations position and not an advertising one; meaning that even if you get the job, your range of comic-cum-poetic expression is going to be radically curtailed—one might even say positively gelded. The bluest of your hypothetical West Yorkshire-lampooning suppository bits may not raise an eyebrow amongst the in-house censors at Channel 4, but even the brownest of them is hardly likely to constitute suitable copy for a Proctologitechnical press release or annual report. Suppositories and enemas are, it goes without saying, no laughing matters to our clients and shareholders.

HH: Oh aye, aye, of course; all of what you've just said goes without saying. But presumably there is a potential for lateral movement into the advertising shop-floor?

RMcG: I would assume so—six months, a year, two years hence. But in the meantime, so long as you’re operating on the public relations shop-floor, you’re going to have to be on your best—in other words, your blandest, most prosaic, most literal, most po-faced and least local-colouristic—behaviour.

HH: As if I've been graced by a single occasion to be on any other sort of behaviour at Ipimiwyf! In any case, Rugger: I can only imagine that compared with the bevy of blue-noses I've been kowtowing to these past four years, your clients and shareholders'll seem to me like a virtual stag-party of open-collared, cigar-smoking regular blokes.

RMcG: Perhaps they will do, Herb, perhaps they will do. But only time will tell. The proof of the West Yorkshire pudding is, after all, in the Eton.

HH: Coom again?

RMcG: Nothing, Herb, nothing; just communing with meself aloud, over a private joke not worth the breath of explication. Anyway, Herb: here's the card. I of course wish you all the best of luck in your Proctologitechnical endeavours, for my own sake no less than for yours; cos Cor knows my arms are already spreadeagled to the full 180 in welcome of the potential prospect of rechristening the spirit of '05 in yours and Ronnie's company.

HH: Thanks a million; and likewise, respectively.

RMcG: And now, Herb, if you'll be so kind as to 'skewed me, it's about a quarter-past high time that I was getting back to that godawful conference.

HH: By all means, Rugger, by all means. Christ!--coom to think of it, I was due back at the office a half an hour ago for a conference call with the Baton Rouge chapter of the North American Daughters of West Yorkshire.

RMcG: I.e., your stateside benefactors?

HH: Indeed. You wouldn't believe the amount of conquistadorial globe-trotting and fund-sniffing that's needed to keep a modest provincial quango such as ours afloat. But that's neither here nor there. You will, I trust, give me a bell if you happen to be free of conferential obligations during the balance of your sojourn in our fair city?

RMcG: Of course I shall do, of course I shall do.

HH: Thanks, Rugger.

RMcG: Well, then, good night--erm, good rest-of-the-day to you, Herb.

HH: And good rest-of-the-day to you, Rugger.

So there you lot have it: the full unedited, unexpurgated minutes of my intercourse with Herbert Hancock during my late sojurn in Leeds. Not that there's any point in my arseing about these up-wrapping formalities, seeing as how presumably the lot of you lot have been fast asleep since Minute Eight or thereabouts--

'--Oh cunt rare, the lot of the lot of us have been all ears--not to mention bright-okied-cum-bushy-arsed--from Minute Eight right on through to Minute Eighty-Seven.'

'So then, I take it, it wasn't half as boring as I made it out to be?'

'Naaw, not even a quarter as much. Besides, you've already milked the nodding-off subroutine for all it(')s worth, courtesy of the ears of our toffish predecessor. And at all costs, in our collective capacity of the old vox populi, surely we mustn't be lumped in with his ilk?'

'No, of course you mustn't be so his-ilk-lumped-in-with; and I must confess, with all due FS rendered unto your toffish predecessor, that what you lack in manners you more than make up for in wit and sheer pertinacity of recollection. But now--seeing as how the above-transcribed transcription cuntstitutes, at arse, a petty digression from the nominal topic of the present post--to return to which: pack up your shillelaghs—erm, thatistersay, rather, your ready-made meals of Welsh rarebit, your Dylan Thomas first-editions, and your…erm…Tom Jones LPs. it's onwards and north-northwestwards to Wales!'

'In due good time, mate, in due good time.'

(RMcG): 'Whateverthefuckdjiermean, "in due good time"? Surely the doogooderly time in queue elapsed some two hours ago at the recentest.'

(YL): 'That's as maybe, the "maybe" in queue being entirely subordinated to our readerly curiosity.'

RMcG: Your 'readerly curiosity' as to what?

YL: As to how you cuntrived to piece out the remaining five modules (i.e., the two ensuing lunch-breaks and three ensuing night intervals) of leisure afforded you during your Leedsian sojourn.'

RMcG: Begging your readerly pardon: is that really any of your corddam bidness?

YL: Well, yeah, we think so: in fact, in view of the intrinsically confessional nature of the genre and the meejium, the lot of it is. Now, we already know you didn't piece these modules out with further instalments of Herb's company, which can only mean one of two things--either that they were pieced out in full by a succession of utterly snoozeworthy Proctologitextual-centred functions, or that they were pieced out at least in part by some diversion or succession of diversions even less snoozeworthy--hence even more postworthy--than your single chinwag with Herb.

RMcG: As a a matter of fact, with all due FS-ary deference to your Holmesian powers of deduction, those five remaining extra-conferential modules were devoted to neither genre of milieu: the lunchtime ones being centred on a pair of solitary CTM-downwolfings at an Indian takeaway sited conveniently just round the corner of my hotel, and the overnight ones on a trio of Arsenal-match-highlight-viewings taken in from the recumbent, cross-legged, stockinged-feeted, fag-ash-flicking perspective of my hotel-room bed.

YL: Oh thou magistereal cunt of cunts! What of your promise to Herb 'give him a bell if you happen[ed] to be free of conferential obligations during the balance of your sojourn in [his] fair city'?

RMcG: What of it? Look, I Sinatra-esquely confess to having forsworn my solemnly-avouched oath to Herb, but only to avoid forswearing an oath no-less-solemnly-avouched to a higher liege-lord exacting a more reverent degree of fealty--namely, myself; an oath, morever, of far greater anitquity, its terms having been sealed the day before whilst, with overcoat slung insouciantly over me right arm, last-minute fag apathetically dangling from the left corner of me gob and right plate resolutely planted on the bottom step of a Leeds-bound Midland Mainline carriage--the whole pictorial ensemble amounting to a criminally-missed B&W photo-op redolent of 1950s Life-magazine spreads centring on the likes of Al Camus and Jack Osbourne--

YL: --In other words, you're saying--daft as it sounds--that before setting off on this Proctologitexan walkabout--'

RMcG: --Walkabout, you say? Since when did you lot morph into a passel of strine jackaroos?

YL: --Since, well, never. It's just that--sorry, occasionaly, just to keep the tone of the idiom plausibly streetworvy, we're obliged to smuggle in slangemes from other corners of the Commonwealth, for lack of insular equivalents.

RMcG: I understand the rationale, but I by no means approve of it. So, if you'll only please to revise and resume your interruption, according to the native lights of your insular idiom--

YL: --Shawnuff: 'So, in other words, you're saying--daft as it sounds--that before setting off on this business trip you swore to yourself not to spend more than X number of hours in Herbert Hancock's company, and that come the end of that lunchtime chinwag, you’d already met or exceeded the allotted balance.'

RMcG: In my honorary-native Barnetian idiom, 'you're well on your way to Edgeware' with that inference. No: rather, just as I was setting of on the trip--as depicted above--I swore to meself that, as I'd been roped into making it quite against me thoroughly-routinised Potter's-Bar-centred inclinations, I would not squander so much as a microsecond of me free time therein on Proctologitexan matters; and the sole aim and objective of my seeking out Herb's company at the earliest practicable opportunity was to put a sojourn-spanning kibosh on all importunities that might tempt or effectively oblige me to forswear this selfsame oath--as, for instance, 'Oh, Nigel, we're heading off to a "battle of the bands"-style karaoke session at the Hilton with the folks from Anusette; please do join us'; to which I would have been well within me rights to rejoin, on every such occasion (had Herb only seen fit to do his goddam ciceronial judy), 'Sorry, loves, but no can do tonight: you see, there's this old college mate [sic] of mine in the area who I've got a lot of catching up to do with. Rendezvous with you lot on the flip-flop, what-what?' But Herb, cunt that he was, effectively put the kibosh on my kibosh, by effectively transmogrifying our de-facto casual, blokish-neutral lunchtime reunion into a de-jure Proctologitexan pre-job interview pep session; i.e., in thereby insuring that all subsequent interviews with him would prospectively centre less on the sort of ‘This-is-my-domain’-esque peacock struttings that I’d come to expect of him by default (I mean, inasmuch as he’d presented himself at our last interview as a veritable specimen of pig-in-shit contentedness), and more on the sort of whinging, canine ‘What’s your [i.e., company-koocharul] domain all about?’-esque grovellings that I dreaded (and still do dread) above all other things. Hence, what choice did I have but to give Herb the widest imaginable berth for the juration of my Leedsian sojourn?—I mean, inasmuch as nothing could more nearly have approached an OED-certified illustration of the entry for ‘busman’s holiday’ than a randomly-selected 50-word excerpt from any of the so-called conversations that inevitably would have ensued had I seen fit to pick up the blower on any of the butcher’s-two-dozen occasions when Herb’s telltale Caller ID subsequently emblazoned itself across its LCD-screen?

YL: All right, mate, all right: no need to play Houdini with the knickers of your conscience about it; it ain’t like this is a bleeding seance, or us the presiding chanelliers of Herb's living ghost. But anyway, did he get the job?

RMcG: Well, erm, I believe so.

YL: You believe so or you know so?

RMcG: All right, I know so. But what’s it to you ostensibly impersonally disinnersted lot?

YL: At arse’s bum, zilch, FA, nix, nada. We mean, it ain’t anything we’re going to miss a wink of sleep over it one way or the other. But by that same toke-in, we’d tuck into our baked-beans on-toast with perfectly routine gusto the very instant after reading in our dinnertime Sun or Daily Mail that ‘Rugby W. McGyver, aged 26, of Woodside Park, Barnet, was run over by a bendy bus at 8:28 Tuesday morning.’ In other words, we care about it as much as we can do about anything having to do with your schlongamamey, tuppenny-ha’penny lifeworld.

RMcG (sardonically, TBS): Much obliged to you lot for your 2.5’-pee’s worth of earnest for my services.

YL: Anytime, mate, anytime. So, now that we’ve established that he did ultimately land the gig, we’ll take the liberty of asking to what extent he’s holding his own vis-à-vis that selfsame company kooh-cha we mentioned a bit earlier.

RMcG: Well, as near as I can gather, he's more or less holding his own.

YL: Whateverthefuckagaindjiermean, 'as near as you can gather'?

RMcG: I mean, as near as I can gather--and so far have gathered--from my station down in the bowels of bidness services, separated by a full three flights of stairs (or roughly 20 vertebrae) from his station up in the pineal gland of public relations. Which, unsurprisingly, in the light of the Everestian heights involved, ain't a fuckofaheckofalot.

YL: That schlong won't fight. Cos after all, you never would have heard about the opening in PR in the first place if you hadn't somehow managed to keep a-tit of the goings-on on the fifth floor.

RMcG: But that was a different kettle of kippers. In that case, I went out of my way to keep so a-tit, seeing as how I had a vested personal interest in seeing the position in queue voided as toot as sweet possible.

YL: Rightrightright, on account of its being occupied by that bink who gob-lashed you in full view the massed puntility of Hoxton Market way back in the autumn of '05. But surely (at least according to our admittedly bloke-centric lights) the fortunes of your best mate's best mate cuntstituted a vested personal interest in their own right? And what of your solemnly-avouched desire to 'rechristen the spirit of '05' in Ronnie's and Herb's company? Was that ever realised?

RMcG: Well, I dunno if 'realised' is quite the right word for it; but, yes: in bare terms, the three of us did eventually convene over a nonet or two of pints...

YL: ...during the course of which convention, even supposing the two of you (i.e., you and Herb) had in the meantime been as effectually severed from mutual communication as a paraplegic's head from his pinkie-toes, Herb must have had occasion to kvetch or rail or descant or buttonhole about, against, upon or apropos of his Proctologitexan situation?

RMcG: What exactly are you lot driving at with this steering wheel-encumferencing string of question marks?

YL: What we're driving at is, it sounds to us as though in the debris issuing from a head-on responsive collision with our questions, you'd have all the makings of a proper post; a post that, come what may, minus such cuntishly pointless digressions as the present one, ought easily to rival the present post in point of length.

RMcG: Why, so I would have; and so it ought to do, and so--if I have any say in the matter--it shall do, come Valentine's Day or thereabouts. But in the meantime, we--you lot and I both--have got to slog through a hundred or so Wellington-boot-drenching paragraphs centring on my slightly-less-recent sojourn in Wales--

YL: --But have we really got to do?

RMcG: Why of course we have; for these paragraphs shall serve as nothing less or other than a complete record--a veritable Passion According to St. Rugger, as it were--of my personal incarnation of the mythic Arthurian hero of that harrowing, definitive, Rubicon-crossing moment in a bloke's so-called relationship with a blokess, viz. the moment wherein he pits himself against his prospective in-laws, on their home turf, in non-Texan plain view of their sole-begotten progeny, who is at one in the same time his Dulcinea--

YL: --Yeahyeahyeah, we know it must have been harrowing enough for you. But what about us?
RMcG: What about you lot?

YL: Well, we mean, does your prospective Wales-centred post, at arse, and from a reader's povey, stand FA's chance of being effectually different to certain of your other posts centring on other provincial precincts? Take, for instance, your prospective father-in-law, Mr Houghington.

RMcG: What about him?

YL: Well, in 10 or more words, how would you summarise his whole ethos-cum-habitus?

RMcG: Well, he's a retired schoolteacher from Wimbledon.

YL: And?

RMcG: And a fanatical collector of Wimbledon FC memorabilia.

YL: And?

RMcG: And a perpetual denouncer of the local council's so-called economic development initiatives; e.g., the introduction of a closed-air shopping centre complete with multi-level car-park on the outskirts of the county; and of a local-greengrocer-annihilating Sainsbury's on the village High Street.

YL: And what of Mrs Houghington?

RMcG: Well, she's a retired social worker, likewise and obviously from Wimbledon--

YL: --And?

RMcG: --and who seems to expend the better part of her breath on belittling her hubbie's admittedly futile, sepia-tinted nostalgia for the good old days of Wimbledon FC.

YL: In short, between the two of 'em, they seem to cuntstitute a near-perfect mirror-image of your own kin back in East Anglia--minus, of course, the perenially-underachieving younger sibling--

RMcG [with suitably rue-laden phiz]: --in actual point of fact, that 'minus' should be a 'plus'.

YL: Cor, you don't say?!

RMcG: Indeed, I do do, inasmuch as they share quarters with their other daughter and Esmeralda's younger sister, a 20-year-old O-level washout name of Griselda, who ekes out the fag-portion of her beer-'n'-chips per-diem (the main portion thereof being supplied by the local male chavvility) through her services as cashier at a local retail establishment known as 'Just Baths'.

YL: Well then: that only goes to reinforce the point we were about to make, which was that to our readerly okies an account of your '06 Xmas sojourn in Wales would pretty much amount to a cutted-'n'-pasted recap of your '05 Xmas sojourn in East Anglia; and that, as far as we're concerned, you might as fucking well skip over it altogether.

RMcG: OK, as far as the domestic sitting-room aspect of the whole trip goes, I concede your point. But what about the whole natural-historiographical aspect thereof?

YL: May your cuntship be prevailed upon to restate the question in plain English?

RMcG: Gladly: What about my explorations of the purely inhumanly-geographical lie of the Welsh land? I’m thinking here in particular of my Father Houghington-escorted hike up the crags of Mount Somethingorother, from whose summit we were vouchsafed a TDF-worthy twilit prospect of the snowcapped northern three-fifths of the Cambrian range? Surely you’re not going to claim that an account of anything of the kind is to be found in my East Anglian diaries of yesteryear.

YL: Surely not, and thank Cor it ain’t to be found there. Christ, if we were even remotely innersted in reading that sort of amateur-Sir-Edmund-Hilaryish rot—which we ain’t—we’d sooner turn to our borough-council library’s copy of the Rough (or Lonely Planet) Guide to Wales than to this-here blog of yours. No: we say, stick to what you’re good at, or, at any rate, less shitty at—thatistersay, the recording of jokey interchanges and pratfalls involving characters of varying degrees of cuntishness and gormlessness—and fuck the rest.

RMcG: So, in short, you’d have me scuttle the whole Welsh-holiday-expeditionary episode and press on to the Hancockian-Proctologitexan-sea-leg-finding one?

YL: ’Tsroi’.

RMcG: Skewed me?

YL: We said, ‘THAT’S RIGHT.’

RMcG: Oh, of course. But what makes you lot think—I mean, even after setting aside the typological redundancy of the dramatis personae of the first episode—that the second episode will be any richer in these sorts of ‘Oops, there went my trousers’-type moments that you seem to prize so highly?

YL: Nuffink, really, aside from a vague hunch arising out of Herb’s especially low gorm quotient as evidenced by his behaviour in this here post.

RMcG: Very well. Vox populi, &c., as they say. So, then, just so's I can be sure we’re all, as they say, on the same so-called page: firstly, I will devote my next post to an account of the HH-stroke-PT-centred episode unfettered by any guarantee that this post shall be any more ‘O,TWMT’-rich than, say, last week’s instalment of The Archers. Agreed?

YL: Agreed. And secondly?

RMcG: Secondly: You lot shall keep your gobs fast-zipped throughout the entirety of that selfsame post, however obviously-stroke-urgently-called-for your yielding to the temptation to interrupt might therewithin prove to be. Agreed?

YL: What? Don't you fancy us?

RMcG: 'Course I do, and please don’t take this second proviso of mine personally: cos it’s got nothing to do with you lot qua you lot—thatistersay, I don’t particularly mind your interruptions qua interruptions; it’s just that, well—

YL: --Yeah?

RMcG: --It's just that you lot sound a fuckofalot too much like me for me own writerly comfort.

FINIS POSTIS

Take Back the Night (Again)

2006-11-15T03:49:00.002Z

'You really do try my patience, MDF.'

'How so, pray tell, DGR?'

'Well, in first prematurely cutting off the last post on the grounds of "sleepiness"--not, however, without first promising me a post-haste summary of the narrative backlog--and then in popping off to parts unknown for a full two weeks without so much as a BYL.'

'For the umpteen-thousandth time, DGR, I must insist that all dilations, elisions and deferrals of certain swaths of the narrative texture on my part have ever here-24 been and shall ever after be undertaken solely and ultimately with a view to your greater readerly comfort and delectation; and for the first and last time, I must beg you to take my word for it that the present admittedly rather snot-clotted tissue of all three narrative techniques cuntstitutes no exception to the general programme.'

'You may beg all you like, MDF; but the proof of the Yorkshire pudding is, after all, in the Eton.'

'Ah, yes: a fat Yorkshire pudding of a pun whose sub-crustial significance naturally eludes the tongue of this county-council-school educated bloke.'

'Naturally. Well, you see, the sub-crustial significance of the pun issues from the fact that the Eton upper-form kitchen's Yorkshire puddings are widely held to be the finest in the Kingdom.'

'This despite the fact that Eton is situated in what county...Essex?'

'Buckinghamshire--but yes, in any case, a good three-hours' train-ride sou'-sou'-east of Yorkshire. Apparently, from what I learnt in my fagging fourth-form days, the tradition dates all the way back to 1608, when one Maeve Brennen, a toothless Yorkshire spinster of threescore, was taken into service as head cook. Rumour then had it that Goody Maeve was a practitioner of the so-called black arts, and that she'd pinched the recipe off Old Nick himself--'

'--Enough, DGR! Talk about your digressive pot calling the dilatory kettle black!'

'TBS. I stand duly chastened, aitch't by mine own pee, &c. Nonetheless-stroke-and so, I demand that you redeem this otherwise inexcusable episode of silence by way of a substantial remittance, to my order, of the only thing that counts as L.S.D. in this bl*****rly realm, to wit--'

'--to wit, a post coked to the gills with farcical high-jinks, pratfalls, about-faces and suchlike episodes?'

'Even (albeit afraidly) so.'

'Well, I hope that the meat of the present post answers to those very specifications. But before we tuck in, I have a confession to make. The sad fact, you see, DGR, is that I was fudging a bit when I proclaimed at the start of the last post that you were about to be treated to an essay in the genre fully worthy of its name, fully "'O Koran of the date of its posting"; that on the eve of the very eve of the penning of that selfsame post--thatistersay, on Saturday, 28 October--there befell me an event truly worthy of recording in these Ruggerian annals, particularly from your own especial Merrie-Olde England-rogering povey.'

'Well, then, why the devil didn't you incorporate it into the text of that selfsame po--?'

'--Hear me out, DGR, if you will. The reason I forbore including an account of this event in that post was that I instantly foresaw that it wouldn't bear properly ripe narrative fruit of whatever species until a good week and a day subsequent; i.e., a good six days posterior to that fortuitous off-night (i.e.e., an Esmeraldan girls' night out) in which I was vouchsafed the luxury of a few blessed blogospheric hours to myself. And so, during those precious butchers' quarter-dozen hours of solitude, I brought everything up to date as best I could to the 27th, and preemptively earmarked everything from the 28th to the 5th inclusive for the next post.'

'To the 5th inclusive, you say?'

'That's right.'

'Why the 5th and not, say, the 3rd or the 7th?'

'My, but aren't you too thick by thirds, DGR! Well, anyway, for all your thickness, I'm sure you'll suss the import of this particular month-straddling time-bracket soon enough after I've launched into the narrative portion of the post proper, as I shall do just to the right of the approaching colon-'n'-inverted comma, as follows:'

On the evening of the 28th of October, Esmeralda, Lucy and I were trotting along Ballard's Lane en route, as is our Saturday-evening constitutional wont, from E's place to the Divan--mind you, though, we'd set our time of embarkation forward an hour, so as to enable our eventual chow-down time to coincide as closely as possible with the kick-off of the Arsenal-Everton match at Emirates--when there issued from me right side a plaintive, squeaky, infantile cry of--get this--'A penny for the bloke!'

Upon hearing these words, so familiar and yet so strange--or, to be more precise, four-fifths relatively unfamiliar yet utterly unstrange and one-fifth utterly familiar yet utterly strange--I naturally enough stopped short and glanced over me shoulder to pinpoint their precise point of origin. Esmeralda, too, stopped short and glanced backwards, but seemingly more by way of following of my cue than on her own aural account (as for Lucy, she naturally kept merrily-cum-obliviously trotting along until she'd exhausted the slackness of the lead, the masterly end of which was looped round my wrist). Anyway, the PPOO in question proved to be this wee knee-high nipperess of no more than seven years of age, standing forlornly betwixt the two nearest shop-fronts to the back of us, her hands crossed behind her arse in Chuck-Atlas-worthy support of the twin handles of an adult-size wheelbarrow.

'Fancy that,' came Esmeralda's blandly noncommittal reaction to the discovery: 'a Guy-child. It's been simply ages since I last saw one.' She might as well have been talking about an old 4d tanner that had turned up in her daily residue of pocket change for all it seemed to matter to her, and I got the distinct impression that she was all for pressing on rather than for back-tracking and tarrying even long enough to humour the poor li'l waif with the traditional complement of small-talk-cum-cambio. In other words-stroke-as I immejiately realised, I was by default more or less on my own on the auditory fact-checking front; which, as far as I was concerned, was all to the good, inasmuch as I was in no mood to argue my way clear of a certification of barminess (as if anyone on Cor's GE has ever been in such a mood), should it in fact have turned out that I had misheard the un-mis-hearable phantom bloke for the actual guy. So, by way of preempting such a disastrous SOA--albeit at the risk of precipitating a merely humdrum copular-rowish one--I handed the dog-lead over to Esmeralda and excused myself on the 'sentimental' grounds of my relative age and provincial provenance; dashed back over to the girl, squatted down on me haunches so as to be facing her at optimum near-okie-level from the get-go, and posed to her point-blank the question:

'Are you you absolutely sure you didn't mean to say "A penny for the guy?"'

With a world-weary air that was enough to break your heart in virtue of its emanating from one of such tender years, she replied, 'No, I said and meant to say "A penny for the bloke." It's all to do with Bloke Fawkes Day, the fifth of November.' And here, by way of further explanation, she extracted from one of the pockets of her mini-hoodie, and thereupon proffered to me, a leaflet, which principally read as follows:

'COME JOIN US, STARTING AT 5 PM, FOR THE BURNING OUT OF THE SECOND OFFICIAL BLOKE FAWKES DAY: 5 NOVEMBER 2006.' This main stretch of text was disposed in an Olde-English black letter font alongside a bit of crude woodcut clip-art depicting a pair of beardy blokes in baggy knee-breeches and clown-collars immersing an oversize marionette-type-thingy in a vat of stylised flames, and above a subsidiary stretch of text in smallish modern italics reading: 'The Sedulous Ape / *** Barnet High Road. / For details, call 020-***-*****.' And even yet below this stretch one could discern a wee glyphic coronet along with-stroke-side the words By Official Charter of H. R. H. , the Queen.'

Well, I could hardly consider myself surprised by any of the intelligence disclosed in the leaflet--shocked, yes, but not surprised: for the real and unique jaw-slackening-cum-schphincter-dilating moment of this episode--to wit, the reaffirmation of her enunciation of the bloke vocable--had already done come and gone. From that point onwards (which point had handily and reinforcingly coincided with my spot-ocular survey of the bloke presently in tow, whose bidness-suit attire and shop-hoover-hose neck-scarf--along with such Johnny-on-the-spot un-fabricatable embellishments as stitched-in Chinaman's okies, combed-over toupee and ready-to-hand fake Red Leicester cheese wheel--had cued me in to his Kennian original), it had simply followed as a matter of course that this girl's presence here would have something to do with that inaugural Bloke Fawkes Day of '05; and from this point onwards, I saw no reason to comport myself towards her any differently than I would have done towards any random anachronistic Guy-child--that is, apart from prefatorially clearing up as best I could, by way of her testimony, a certain mystery conjured up by the phone number displayed on the leaflet, which sequence of diggits corresponded neither to those of the Ape nor to any others that I had dialled in surviving memory.

'Now, I'm going to ask you a question, and if you answer it truthfully to my satisfaction, I promise to award your guy--erm, your bloke--a sum a good deal greater than a penny. That question is: Who sent you here?'

'Why, an't please yo,u guv'ner, my grandpa.'

[Well, that at least narrowed it down to one-fifth of the male population of the Kingdom, dinnit?] 'I see. And what do the grown-ups you know call your grandpa?'

'Erm, well, that depends. When they're stroppy with him they call him bastard, or shithead...or sal-O.'

'And when they're not stroppy with him?'

'Why, then, they call him mate, or granddad...or mong view.'

Well, that pretty much narrowed it down to one male inhabitant of the borough of Barnet. And so, giving the crown of her head an avuncular tousle, then rising to my feet, I said to her, 'You're a very good girl, erm..'

'...Albertine.'

'Pleased to make your acquaintance, Albertine,' I says, shaking her wee right hand in mine whilst fishing a five-pound note out of my wallet and chucking it into the wheelbarrow with my left one; 'and please, if you will, to give my regards to your grandpa from Monsieur McGuy-VERR.'

'Oh, I will do, sir, I promise,' she says, turning round immejiately thereafter to forage in the till of the wheelbarrow, and thereby giving me my cue--which I duly take--to turn round in my turn and proceed back up the HR. Before I've taken so much as a butcher's half-dozen steps in that direction, though, I hear her screaming at my arse, as irate as could be, in her wee, pippish soprano, 'CHEAPSKATE!' thereby giving me full licence to turn back round and scream 'INGRATE!' at her face in my resonant, manly baritone. But I forbore to claim that licence and opted rather to keep hoofing it on taking immejiate remorseful cognizance of the fact that more than anything else it was surely brute monetary inflation that was to blame for the death of the venerable tradition of kerbside Guy-dunning, and that, taking into account the cumulative devaluation of the penny since 1605, I really ought to have given her a tenner at least for her pains. This newly re-tapped well of reflections on the Guy-stroke-Bloke-Fawksian constellation tided me over, preoccupationally-speaking, to my re-rendezvous with Esmeralda ('I trust you've filled your annual quota of provincial-cum-microgenerational nostalgia?' she asked me jeeringly, whilst handing me back the lead; and I, for my part, absently replied, whilst taking it up again, 'Yeah, yeah: of course.'), and, indeed, clear on through past the moment of kick-off and tuck-in back at her place. You will, I trust, DGR, appreciate the especially low pH index of the pickle I'd now got myself into. For, having only just recently got one row of Esmeraldan ducks (viz. the Arsenalphobic one) all lined up, I was now confronted with a fresh chaotic assortment of ducks (viz. the Bloke-Fawksian one) requiring the same laborious sequencing, and then some: cos whereas the last assortment had consisted entirely of your common run of inanimate fairground decoys (inasmuch as Arsenalophobes--de facto and de jure inclusively--numbered in the thousands if not millions), the present one comprised a veritable living, breathing, eating and shitting litter that I had pretty much given birth to; such that to ignore their pathetic quackings now would constitute a veritable act of infanticide, whilst to heed them would be--well, to risk imposing on Esmeralda the job of part-to-full-time Ruggerian duck-sitter. NB, though, that I say risk rather than resign myself to: for the whole answer to the question as to whether she'd greet this duck-sitting gig as an imposition or as a CV-expanding opportunity hinged in turn on yet another pair of questions, the first being that of the degree of prestige that had accrued to BFD during the three-hundred-and-fifty-some-odd days of my absentee-motherhood, the second being that of the degree of probability of my being recognised by the present-day BFD cognoscenti for the cardinal founding father of the holiday that I in fact was. If, on the one extremely optimistic hand, BFD had blown up into the biggest UK-wide sensation since Big Brother, and, come Bonfire Night, I could count on being greeted by the charter Ape contingent like one of those dukes in a Shakespeare play who, after a presumptive year-long holiday in Bumfuck, Poland, pitches up in the last scene to dole out great heaping dollops of whoopass to his negligent deputies and retainers; why, then, I could hardly imagine Esmeralda's resenting her appointment as my personal assistant on a minimum salary of the mid-six-figure complexion. If, on the other extremely pessimistic hand, BFD had dwindled into Woodside Park's extremely local real-world alternative to World of Warcraft, and I could count on being greeted by the fistful of pimply anoraks devoted thereto like some sort of Benedict Arnold figure pitching up at the original American Cuntstitutional Convention; why, then, I could hardly imagine Esmeralda's tolerating any sort of connexion with me thereafter, even on the most exorbitant financial terms entailed thereby (say, the full payment of our bill at the alternative venue of Emchai, pre-first-course champagne and post-third-course prawn shlongtail included). In any case, the sole potential means of even approximating the point along the hand-spanning spectrum occupied by the current BFD-ian SOA, in advance of Bonfire Night itself, inhered in the dialling of the mystery phone number displayed on the leaflet. And so, I devoted the best part of my attention during the first half of the match to brooding over a massive tree-ful of 'When'- and 'How'-prefixed questions centring on this matter of the dialling, and divaricating into the following branches and sub-branches: 'When to do it? Tonight? And thus risk spoiling the otherwise untrammelled Arsenalophobic Abe-end's ghost of the present evening? Or tomorrow, and thus ensure myself a bout of intervening insomnia intermittently punctuated by nightmares starring a knife-wielding Blokefawkesophobic Esmeralda?' 'If tonight, then how? By way of a transparently duplicitous piss-run? Or by way an-only-marginally-less transparently duplicitous phone-break "to check up on the [fictitious] goings-on back at the plant in preparation for Monday's [fictitious] meeting?" Or by way of a full-on, candid, tit-hoovering preface recounting the authentick particulars of the genesis of Bloke Fawkes Day, and setting forth the rationale behind the exigency of my re-engagement with my festive progeny?' 'If the last of these, then when? 20 minutes hence, during the half-time-break chinwag or 200 minutes hence, during the post-coital one?', &c. Luckily enough, Esmeralda herself unwittingly delivered the first of an ultimately fatal series of axe-blows to the very trunk of the thing, when, just as the first half of the match was rounding itself out to the limping rhythms of Justin Hoyte's welcome exit for the full duration, she said to me--apparently noting a certain lack of enthusiam in my mimcry of her red-Indian-style ululations against the restoration of match-worthy functionality to JH's hamstring--'Hey, what's eating at you? Surely you're not still fretting over that first goal? For Chrissakes, Cahill tied up the score over a half an hour ago and they haven't reclaimed a foot of pitch ever since.'

'Eh? What's that? Which goal?'

'Which goal, you dare ask me? Why, van Persie's goal way back in, I dunno, minute five and tuppence!'

'Oh, yeah, of course.'

'Don't you "oh, yeah, of course," me! I can tell you haven't been paying attention. Whodathunkit? A scant two months ago, wild horses couldn't have dragged me to the kickoff of a football telecast, and now here I sit, plumb in the middle of just such a telecast, happy as a pig in shit, as they say, and obliged to drag you by the nose of all noses back to the pedipilular grindstone--or, rather, trough.'

'Yeah,' I agreed with a smile, my pedipilular-pedagogic pride momentarily getting the better of my Blokefawksian jitters: 'Whodathunkit?'

And then me mind's telescope involuntarily swivelled round and focussed itself on one of the highlights of that first tutorial in Arsenalophobia 101; a tutorial which had centred, for want of more apposite viewing fare, on a grainy camcorder video of a 1997 match between the Gunners' and Spurs' respective Girls' Polliwog League sides. The mise-en-scene is squarely and statically fixed, at nipper-eye level, on Tottenham's goal. From out of the right edge of the frame appears a girl of no more than five years of age, togged out in the trad Gunnerly away hues of yellow and blue, and driving the ball forward towards the goal with a cuntishly fierce single-mindedness. An inch or two shy of the penalty box, though, she suddenly stops short, grabs the goalkeeper by the throat, completely immobilising her with a veritable Venusian karate death-grip, and then, and only then, delivers the net-pulverising coup de pied-cum-grace. Next, from the left edge springs into view a ref, who in no uncertain terms (i.e., with wildly exaggerated hand-gestures and violent head-jerks) signals 'RED CARD PENALTY'. Whereupon, a pair of trousered adult legs ambles into the frame from behind the camera, to be immejiately pounced upon and embraced by the penalised nipper. 'You'll save me, won't you, papa, from that howwible, big bad wef?' she sobs. 'Of course I will, sugarplum,' booms a masculine voice from above. Taking her into his arms and hefting her over one of his shoulders (the camera pans upwards and advances forwards to track the whole sequence from behind), the bloke approaches the ref and says to him, 'Now what's all this about a fucking red card?' 'What's all this about?' says the ref, with arms akimbo and lower lip enviably slackened: 'It's about your Number 22's laying hands on the goalkeeper, a clear case of interference if I ever saw one.' 'Laying on hands, you say?' says the bloke. 'That's right,' says the ref. 'Well, I,' says the bloke, depositing his presumptive daughter alongside him on the pitch as if in preparation for something ugly, 'saw only one hand being brought to bear on the goalkeeper; hence, this is a clear case of non-interference if I ever saw one.' 'Oh, come off it, mate,' says the ref. 'It's a transparently inclusive figure of speech: hands for one hand, two hands, a hand and an elbow, a knee and a forearm, etc.--all of them being equally inadmissible.' 'Look, mate, if you want to fucking get shirty over it,' says the bloke, beginning to doff his wind-cheater--

--And here, at mid-doff-point, I press the pause button on the remote and approach the telly with laser pointer in hand. 'Now,' I says, encircling the nipperess with a virtual halo of LED -esque pinpricks, 'if you can just bring yourself to imagine that she is Thierry Henry and that he,' encircling the bloke in like fashion, 'is Arséne Wenger, then you'll have got a pretty fair idearrof the fundamental cuntishness of the Gunnerly ethos.'

‘That’s enough for today, thank you,’ Esmeralda categorically pre-empts, rising from the couch, then beginning to make a beeline for her bedroom via the stairs. Naturally, I drop my pointer and hasten after her.

‘Might as well cut my losses,’ she adds in a faux undertone, from about five stairs ahead of me, whilst keeping her gaze orientated doorwards and upwards.

‘Cut your losses?’ I gormlessly query her threshold-clearing arse from the top stair.

‘Yes, my losses,’ she repeats, turning round at last to face me from within her newly-secured sanctuary, and with one hand poised on the inner door-knob: ‘At least as things stand now, when I’m on my deathbed I’ll be able to console myself with the thought that I squandered only one half of a youthful weekend afternoon on a nine-year-old video of a girls’ polliwog league football match.’

Then comes the inevitable rhetorical door-slam, followed (AFF) by the inevitable damage-controlling apostrophe to the invisible Esmeralda:

‘Look, darling, it does get better. Trust me: I’ve watched the whole thing through to the end. [30 seconds or so (I happen not to have my mobile ready to hand just now) of silence.] I understand full well how childish it must appear to you--Christ, how literally childish it actually is--but just picture it to yourself, if you will, as a kind of miniature monochrome engraving of the vast, room-spanning, particoloured canvas that is your typical full-scale Premiership Arsenal-Tottenham match.'

But it was only in the course of our next tutorial, centring on a professionally-recorded broadcast feed of a 2002 match between the Arsenal and Chelsea Ladies' sides, that I made the slightest degree of headway with my art-historical analogy. Here, we were, after all, dealing with adults if not with full-fledged Premier-league blokish professionals; hence, if you will, with a kind of poster-sized mezzotint of a full-scale Premiership Arsenal-Chelsea match--'

[DGR:] '--You will, I trust, forgive me for cutting in like this, inasmuch as it is for your own writerly benefit that I am taking the liberty of doing so; for I am at last beginning to see the point of your building-industrial analogy involving the spectatorship of drying paint.'

'Oh you are now, are you? Well, inasmuch as saying "I told you so" cuntstitutes a clear violation of the gentleblokey code, I won't say "I told you so."'

'Indeed, MDF: I am only too grateful for your elision of that four-word-long phrase of reproach.

'And a propos of elisions, DGR: as I assume your interruption was orientated towards this very resumption, I likewise assume you will not object to my resuming the account of my conversation with Esmeralda of last 28 October.'

'Indeed not, MDF.'

'Very well, then. As I was saying to Esmeralda, prior to the digressive flashback:'

"'Yeah, whodathunkit?'"

'And am I right in assuming,' (says Esmeralda), 'as you haven't been the same since, that your abstraction from the match has got something to do with our late encounter with that guy girl on the High Road?'

'Yes you're right: it has got something, and, indeed, everything, to do with it.'

'And I likewise assume that whatever it is has got to be of a pretty serious nature to pull you away from undividedly attending to a Gunners match.'

'Organically pretty and serious as a myocardial infarction, and, try as it might, incapable of being otherwise .'

'OK. Well, I might as well peg my first guess to the worst-case scenario and work backwards along the Richter scale: this girl is your daughter by an ex-girlfriend, and has been turned out on to the streets to collect alms in support of her mother's heroin or crack-cocaine habit.'

[Christ! What kind of a potential deadbeat recreant does she take me for? (Mind you, I'm hardly inclined to look the collateral gift horse of a conjecturally capacious romantic CV in the mouth)]: 'No. Thankfully, no.'

'Then she's your long-lost niece, turned out on to the streets, etc.'

'No. Look, you're barking up a whole wrong forest here, let alone the particular tree. You see, it's got nothing--or at least practically nothing--to do with the girl per se--'

'--Then what, for Chrissakes, has it got to do with? Surely not with Bonfire Night per se--'

'--You've now, at last, crossed into the precincts of the relevant National Trust site. You see, long ago, before I ever met you--to wit, a full year ago minus a round half-fortnight--'

'--You ran into this anonymous bloke at the pub who asked you, "Have you got any plans for Bonfire Night '06?" And you said to him, "Not as of yet," whereupon you committed to attending an "old-school" Bonfire Night celebration way off in in the Bumfuck Isle of Skye or Egg, and you're just now thinking to yourself, "Christ! I forgot to book my ticket! And oh, for shame! I'll never live it down in Whatshisbollocks's eyes if I don't show up--'

(The composition of the multi-volume theoretical treatise provisionally entitled De Amicitia Blokorum Sub Specie Blokessitate, and effectively abstracted in the forgoing interjection, I leave as an exercise for the [DG] reader, whose researches will doubtless derive incalculable benefit from a [re]visitation of my post of 27 May, definitively entitled 'Regent's Park Well Before Dark [UAdR: Part Three]'. Vis-a-vis my own practical purposes, though, at this instant, it sufficed for me to clue Esmeralda into her abuse of her blokesserly privileges, into the uncalled-for driving-home of the supernal insight into the blokish psyche she supposed herself to possess, by adverting to a familiar formula of our coupledom, AFF:)

'--Late blow, Esmeralda, late blow.'

[E, duly chastened]: 'I'm sorry. Go on.'

And so I indeed went on to recount to her the genesis of Bloke Fawkes Day, more or less as it has already been recounted in my first "TBtN"-eponymised post, the more-ish bit of the recap being super-added by way of explicit and particular causal linkage of today's streetside encounter to the inaugural BFD (including an explicit proffering of the handbill to Esmeralda's hurried scansion), the less-ish bit being subtracted from the original pedipilular-cum-randy-bacheloric-specific post-frame (together with certain of Ronnie Livingstone's more gormless intervening interjections). To my great surprise and relief, she greets the account, and, indeed, the very idearrof Bloke Fawkes Day, in an attitude of unqualified approval bordering on outright enthusiasm:

'It certainly sounds like a bankable idea to me. And yet you say you let it drop, without ever giving a subsequent thought to following up on your meta-petition to the Her Royal Highness?'

'Well, yes. But as a fellow Arsenalophobe and accountant, you must surely appreciate how all competing obsessions tend to abate in severity as one approaches the mid-season mark and the end of the second fiscal quarter.'

'Well, yes: provided one hasn't founded a sodding national tradition in the meantime.'

Oy vey! I can't believe what I'm hearing, my dad might have exclaimed just then, whether in jubilation or cuntsternation is anyone's guess at this point. 'So you really take this bill at its word, that the Queen herself endorses the holiday?'

'By default, yes, I do. And even if she hasn't yet endorsed it, who's to say she won't do in future? In that case, it all depends on you, Nigel.'

'Correction, Esmeralda: in either case, it all depends, rather, on the current organiser of this year's festivities; to wit, whoever resides at the receiving end of this phone number, a bloke or blokess whom I'm none too keen to talk to, let alone meet.'

'Fair enough,' she says, reaching for her mobile, 'if you're not man--erm, bloke--enough to make the call, then I am.'

'Oh, I'm bloke enough, all right,' I says, reaching for, and obtaining, my mine, along with the leaflet. I'm all set to punch in the diggits, substantially importunate schpinctral tremors notwithstanding, when a two bird-shaped idea suddenly pops into my gourdita. 'Hang on a bit. Do you mind if I use yours instead?'

'What ever for?'

'You'll see.'

She hands her 'bile over to me with a decidedly dubious look. I dial the number, and before the first ring-tone has sounded, am hailed by the following crisp salutation, uttered by a voice I instantly recognise:

'Thank you for ringing the Bloke Fawkes Day information hotline. This is Ronnie speaking. How may I help you?'

To which I reply, in the plummiest U accent I can muster, 'Good afternoon to you, Mr--ahem....?'

'...Mr Livingstone.'

'...Mr Livingstone. Waldo Houghington, Bart. speaking. I'm calling from the Palace.'

'The P-p-palace?'

'That is correct, sir. I am her Majesty's Privy Home Secretary for Public Appearances and am calling to make a few--in point of fact, merely two--enquiries against her Majesty's prospective assistance at the forthcoming festivities.'

'B-b-b-y all means, M-m-m-ilord--thatistersay, y-y-y-our Grace--thatistersay, your W-w-worship--'

'"Sir Waldo" will do. We baronets are, after all, mere commoners, albeit not mere misters such as yourself.'

'Yes, of course, Sir Waldo. What can I do you for?--I mean, rather, if your Baronetship--erm, if you, Sir Waldo, would be so gracious as to spell out your two enquiries in the vernacular--'

'With pleasure. The first centres on the scale of the event.'

'The scale of the event?'

'Yes, to wit, the number of prospective fêteurs. There's no need for you to carry it to the second decimal point, i.e., to particular body parts of a specific subject; a ballpark estimate, as the Yanks say, rounded off to the nearest ten or hundred or thousand, will suffice.'

'Well then, Sir Waldo, based on a conservative tally of ringers-up to this here hotline, I'd say you may expect something in the neighbourhood of 500 attendees.'

'Very good, sir, very good. In that case, her Majesty may make do with her customary glove of polyester-nylon lace, and need not don her ever-so-less comfortable emergency glove of polystyrene ceramic lace, guaranteed one hundred-percent impervious to the acidic incursions of a thousand subject-lip-pairs' discharge of spittle. Now, my second query centres on the frankly rather delicate matter of the state of the public facilities in your establishment.'

'The public facilities, Sir John? Do you mean what we churls call the ladies'?'

'That's right, Mr Livingstone. Specifically, I should like to know something of the static and inductive capacities of that vessel vulgarly known as the toilet. You see, her Majesty requires of any such vessel that she may have cause to avail herself of, that it shall be capable of accommodating, and forthwith dispatching, at a single flush, a mass of no less than .5 stone or 3.18 killogrammes. Not that her Majesty by any stretch of the imagination anticipates depositing a load of such gargantuan heft in the course of this or any other public appearance; but merely that, for reasons of state, the most extreme precaution must be taken against betraying, by way of the merest suspicion of a skid-mark, any trace of the late immanence of the Royal Stool to subsequent users of the aforementioned vessel.'

'Of course, Sir Waldo, of course, I understand. Well, I promise you that, in the unlikely event that the facilities do not meet this rigorous standard as of now, they shall be brought up to this standard well in advance of the festivities--' [In the unlikely event, my arse! Last time I checked (i.e., upon having been locked out of the gents' for an unconscionably long waiting-period [come on, lads, we've all done it!]) the Ape's ladies' toilet would have had a hard time accommodating the cloacal reserves of a single constipated pigeon.]

'--And in the unconscionable event that they haven't been as of three days prior to the festivities, I should jolly well expect you to ring--' Here, prudence suddenly dictates, just in the nick of time, a modification of the prescription, and I break off for a coupla seconds, provoking Ronnie to rejoin:

'What was that you said just now, Sir Waldo? I'm afraid you cut out for a coupla seconds.'

'I said, "I should jolly well expect you to bring them up to the mark within two days of the festivities".'

'And quite rightly, Sir Waldo. Are you absolutely sure you have no other enquiries to make on her Majesty's behalf? Say, as to the menu...or, or, the decor?'

'Absolutely. Her Majesty is stridently catholic with a lowercase cee on both those counts, and presumably equally so on any others you might care to advance. You may expect her punctual arrival at the inaugural moment of the solemnities: to wit, 17:00 GMT.'

'And so I shall do. Thank you, Sir Waldo, and--and--and...'

'And what?'

'And God Save the Queen...?'

'God save her indeed, and [switching over into my earthiest guttersnipe's register just before ringing off] Goddamn you, you fucking cunt.'

'Well, you see why I opted to use your phone instead of mine: in the event that the person on the other end of the line turned out to be some Ape regular--and, as you will have dejuiced by now, that person turned out to be the regularest of all possible such regulars--I didn't want them to be tipped off to my identity courtesy of the caller ID.'

'Yes, I understand that full well--not that I have deduced the slightest thing about your interlocutor--

[Right. She was, after all, introduced to him as Ronnie, not as Ronnie Livingstone.] '--Well, he was none other than Ronnie Livingstone, whom I'm sure you'll remember from the Last Orders Competition and its aftermath--'

'--Yeah, sure, I remember him, but getting back to my main point, what I don't understand is why you chose to style your Palatial persona Sir Waldo Houghington.'

'Well, because I couldn't very well plausibly have styled myself Dame Esmeralda Houghington. I mean, my falsetto is passable enough; but even so, surely I was right in thinking that whoeverthefuck would more readily be imposed upon by the fiction that I was Dame Esmeralda's hubby speaking through her phone than by the fiction that I was Dame E herself.'

'Fine, but why of all the male Christian names that you could have availed yourself of did you have to pitch upon Waldo?'

'Well, I dunno. I suppose, off the shirtycuff, I'd say I reckoned it as the forename that would yield the highest product out of the equation Obscurity-times-Plausible Genuine Englishness. How many people, after all, in the whole factual-cum-fictional universe, can you think of that are actually named Waldo? There's the Philadelphian bloke in that Velvet Underground song; and the stripy-shirted eponymous hero of those picture books of our nipperhood; and then, I suppose, if we're counting middle names, there's Ralph Waldo Emerson and then--'

'--And then there's my Dad, Waldo Houghington, Esq.'

'Ah yes, of course!' I exclaim melopenitentially smiting me forrid. 'Talk about your Freudian slips.' In point of fact, I couldn't recall her ever having divulged her old man's first name to me (after all, it isn't the sort of thing a blokess has any cause to divulge to her beau prior to the final inward-bound leg of that inaugural trip the parental homestead, when it might suddenly occur to inform him, for example, that 'Dad can't bear being addressed as "Mr Houghington" by his juniors; it makes him feel old, you see; so you must remember to call him by his Christian name, Waldo, right from the start, even before you've properly been introduced to him.'). But in the circumstances, it seemed wiser and less taxing to shed a river of crocodile tears over the spilling of this kitty's serving of phantom milk than to try to convince her that I'd never had the fucking saucer in my hand to begin with. 'Oh darling! I'm so sorry.'

'As you bloody well should be. Can't you see what a walloping albatross you've slung round his neck? How he, a bloke who doesn't know Bloke Fawkes Day from Thanksgiving, is, in all probability, for each and every hour of the next week, going to be badgered by return calls from your mate Ronnie, asking him if the bloody "plumbing of the site of the forthcoming festivities meets her Majesty's exacting specifications"?'

'In all probability, darling--and with all due contrition--I think not. Surely, in the unlikely event that Ronnie does nergle upon your dad's name in the course of his researches into the whereabouts of her Majesty's Privy Home Secretary for Public Appearances, he's going to realise straight away that in this Wales-dwelling pensioner he's got hold of the wrong man. And, in any case, as far as albatrosses go, this is one that any bloke in his right mind would kill to have slung round his neck. Not that my heart don't go out to the old gentleman all the same--cos TBS, I can only imagine how carrying round a stone or two in gold bullion night and day would play up your lumbago something fierce.'

'What do you mean, a stone or two in gold bouillon?'

'Well,' I rejoin with cuntish disingenuousness, 'perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration vis-a-vis this year's Bloke-Fawkesian revenues. But if one reckons the minimum claimable founder's fee at a modest 10 quid per subject-head, and multiplies that by 500, one arrives at the by-no-mean-unprincely sum of five grand; and if one further projects this year's prospective tenfold increase in attendance into next year, and into the year after that, and so on--why, then, as far as claimable founder's royalties go, this guy's--skewed me, this bloke's--the limit!'

'Waitwaitwait, back up there just a bit. From what precise empirical source are you deriving this factor of 500?'

'Why, from Ronnie's own testimony, of course. Surely you remem--' [Here I once again smite me forrid, in more or less the same manner as the last time round] '--Oh! I forgot. You wouldn't have overheard that bit, now, would you have done?'

'No, of course, I wouldn't have done and didn't do. But anyway, you're saying that Ronnie said he was expecting roughly 500 people to pitch up at this shindig?'

'Even so.'

'But even so, you did, as I recall, ask for a mere ballpark estimate--'

'--which, in light of the Palatial provenance of his phoney interlocutor, more likely than likely erred well on the side of smallness. Your royal types are, after all, notorious claustro-cum-agora-phobes.'

'OK. Let's assume, then, that at least 500 people will be in attendance. That still leaves to be answered the question of whence you're deriving this figure of a 10 quid per capita founder's fee.'

'Well,' I shuffle and sniffle, 'I suppose it only seems fair--'

'--Yes, as fair as the thin air from which I presume you filched the very notion of a founder's fee, a fee that I reckon you'll have your work cut out for you in trying to claim even if you mark it down to a halfpenny. After all, what concrete, documented evidence can you produce in proof of your paternity of the holiday?'

'Well, none, I suppose. But there were witnesses--'

'--Namely?'

'Namely, firstly and most obviously Ronnie himself.'

'Oh, phffft! He doesn't count. He's already of the Devil's camp. Don't you assume that if he'd given a rat's arse about sharing the founders' booty with you he'd have got in touch with you by now?'

'Yeah, I suppose in that case he would have done by now, the fucking cunt. Well, what about Mr Sedule, and Jimmy--and Manish and Denise and Claudia?'

'Well, as to them: if I recall your account aright, Mr Sedule was introduced to Bloke Fawkes Day by way of your report of a collaborative chinwag between Ronnie and yourself, the proper minutes of which are as much a secret to Ronnie as to you; and the rest of that lot heard about it either through Mr Sedule or through the two of you in tandem.'

'Yeah. I've got to hand it to you, you've definitely filled in every rat-hole in the room. I suppose that, as of now, come what may of Bloke Fawkes Day--even if it eclipses Xmas itself in point of retail sales volume--the most I can hope for in recognition of my paternal claims is a piddling Wikipedia stub article vying for world-record-low nergle-tallies with those of such spectacular losers as that ill-connected antipodial bloke who discovered the theory of evolution a week before Darwin, or that equally-isolated madman who alighted upon the twelve-note method of composition a year before Arnie Schoenberg; the sole contributor thereunto being one RWMcG@couldabeenacontender.co.uk. And yet--' I break off, suddenly espying a potentially empty rat-hole that might, after all, turn out on closer inspection to be nothing other than an especially large knot in the lower wainscoting, a knot artificially blackened into false relief by the finisher's brush.

'--And yet what?'

'And yet, well: I dunno. I suppose, there is, after all, the petition.

'Ah, yes, of course! The petition. I assume you were prescient enough to make a photocopy of it before popping it in the post?'

'No. The thought never crossed me mind.'

'Oh, you git!'

'And even if it had done, I'm sure I wouldn't have acted on it. Christ, can you even begin to imagine what a thorough, freeze-drying hoovering to my billowing rhetorical sails it'd have amounted to? I mean, if I'd actually paused at the threshold of the pub and said, "Now, if you lot'll be so kind as to excuse me for a half an hour or so, I'm just going to hoof it up the High Road in search of a 24-hour copy shop"? Why, I'd have been lucky to find a straggling 10th of my fellow-petitioners still on the premises by the time I'd got back--assuming, that is, that Sedgie would've been charitable enough to let me back in after closing time. And then, of course, there would have been no subsequent burning of the Ken bloke; hence no precedent for Bloke Fawkes Day '06.'

'I take your point, and I apologise for calling you a git. You did the right thing.'

'Albeit in an ultimately futile, pathetic, tragic-heroic sort of way, I assume you're going to add?'

'Not just yet. After all, as you seem to have ascertained, this endorsement by "H.R.H. The Queen" printed on the leaflet isn't pure tommyrot; that is, although Ronnie was taken aback by your call, he wasn't completely nonplussed by it; which suggests that since you posted the petition there has been some sort of communication from the Palace to someone having to do with Bloke Fawkes Day; which suggests in turn that they did indeed receive the petition and that they presumably have it filed somewhere.'

'That's all well and good, but how are we to get at it within the span of the next butcher's half-dozen days?'

'You disappoint me, Nigel. I should have thought that an accomplished amateur scholar of constitutional law such as yourself, aware of his constitutional right to petition the monarch, would have likewise been apprised of his constitutional right to audit petitions to which he has served as a signatory. That said, according to normal due process, you'd be lucky to get hold of your copy of the thing by next Whitsuntide. Fortunately, I do have a connection at the Palace Archives who might be able to expedite the process for us.'

'Who he or she?'

'Tamsin. No, not Occuvisual Tamsin; the other one--'

'--your college roommate.'

'That's right. I'll give her a bell straight away. I can't imagine she'll be obliged to keep us waiting more than three days. You see, not only is she personal assistant to the Royal Archivist; she's also, erm, romantically involved with the Master of the Stole...'

Wellsir, in letter-perfect fulfilment of her prophecy, Esmeralda received a copy of the petition from Tamsin's hands at the Palace gates, in plain view of the eternal complement of impassive Beefeaters, at 7 pm on the following Tuesday. From that point onwards, the two of us were at last afforded the luxury of devoting our undivided BF-Day-oriented strategic and tactical attention towards the strategic means and the tactical timing of the disclosure of the aforesaid certificate of paternity. As first to the means, we debated the the question of whether we should boldly announce our possession of the petition or simply leave it lying about on some random table for the adventitious discovery of one our fellow-500, eventually ruling out the second option as 'too risky (albeit infinitely rich in rhetorical potentiality)'. Second, as to the timing, we bandied about the pros and cunts of letting the secret out, on the one hand, immejiately upon our entering the pub; on the other hand, at some intermejiate and as-yet utterly unanticipatable moment--say, when Ronnie was about to launch into some speech to the effect of '18 score and five days ago, our father--i.e., me--brought forth on this here island a new notion...' etc.; or, on the third hand, at that last-possible (hence, in many ways, the very best) moment, the moment just before the torch would be plunged into the humble synthetic innards of the Ken bloke. Finally, tried as we might(ed?), we could hardly avoid a glancing, forrid-smiting, en-route blow from the old spanner in the works cuntstituted by the incalculable possibility that H.R.H. or one of her representatives might, after all, make an appearance at some point in the evening. (Tamsin, incidentally, for all of her file-javelinning prowess, proved absolutely useless on this score; for, according to her, neither she, nor anybody else at the archives nor, indeed, the Master of the Stole himself had ever heard of Bloke Fawkes Day, let alone of any royal preparations thereunto.) It was rather contingently apropos of this aforementioned spanner that Esmeralda mooted the idearrof our showing up incognito, i.e. togged out in some pair of slightly post-seasonable fancy dress costumes. I immejiately vetoed the proposal on the eminently rational grounds that even through the thickest stratum of latex, crepe wool and greasepaint, Ronnie or anyone else atoll acquainted with our respective phizzes would immejiately suss out our identities; only to be met by the eminently rational counterproposal that even through the thinnest stratum of latex, &c., neither Ronnie nor anyone else howsoever intimately acquainted with our respective phizzes was atoll likely to pick them out of a crowd of 500; whereas if we were to pitch up in a crowd of that size undisguised and in our customary weekend mufti, we'd be statistical sitting targets for a substantial subpopulation of all the blokes and blokesses who'd complimented us on the cuts of our respective jibs at random watering holes and parties over the past butchers' eighth-dozen years. There remained the choice of costume, and of the attendant so-called cover story. We eventually settled on presenting ourselves as Andrei and Natasha, a Romanian couple on holiday in London and drawn on a whim to the BFD event out of touristic curiosity about authentic English folkways. Why a Romanian couple, you ask, as against, say, a German or Javanese one? Well, DGR, firstoff because it seemed the least physiognomically-cum-biographically-cum-geographically-cum-culturally-cum-economically-cum-linguistically

falsifiable of all the alternatives that occurred to us. As a pair of Javanese or Togoans, we reasoned, we'd have been much more likely to get away with lying through our teeth about the notable sights of our home town, about our jobs, about the performance of our national cricket team, etc., and with passing off a few syllables of gibberish as a sample of our mother tongue; but we obviously lacked the basic genetic equipment to pass for a citizen of either of these countries at first blush. On the other hand (WR'd), although we could easily have passed at first blush for Germans or Italians, the odds were in that case that at some point along the way some git would have wanted to try out his German or Italian on us, or to ask us if we were personally acquainted with some auntie or cousin of his resident in Hamburg or Florence, or to wax inquisitorial about the height of the spire of Cologne Cathedral or the going market rate of Calabrian copper, or (worst of all) to take the piss out of us for our woefully incomprehensible ignorance of the original Guy Fawkes holiday ('Christ! You lot come up here every other year; it's about time you caught on.'). As Romanians (WR'd), we could probably coast along well enough on a generic Eastern European accent and the odd vapid reference to Bucharest or the Black Sea. Secondly, our immejiately exploitable wardrobe options seemed to sort particularly well with the Draculean mythos of the place: on my end, there was my only proper suit, a ghastly jet-black four-button Lurch Adams-style ensemble that I'd last worn to my gran's funeral back in '02; on hers, an equally ghastly jet-black low-cut Morticia Adams-style gown that she'd last worn to her grandpa's funeral back in...well, somewhere in the early-to-mid oughties. Top the former off with a pirate's beard and the latter with a vampira wig--procurable at two quid apiece at Tescoe's post-Halloween clearance sale--and we'd be good to go, as they say.

And, indeed, we were consummately good to go as of 8 pm sharp on the N in Q, and accordingly set out for the Ape at roughly a quarter past. (From a founding-father's povey, I naturally would have preferred to arrive at a quarter of four, with mobile-phone cam ready to hand and pockets well stocked with reserve batteries, so as not to miss a second of the unfolding of the whole thing, from pre-soup to post-nuts; but alas! such a pre-thick-of-thingsian-timed touchdown would inevitably have eventuated in the blowing of our covers in NTF.) The sight that greeted us upon our rounding that final bend on to the High Road--to wit that of the Ape's familiar purple-'n'-gold sign swinging merrily in the breeze aloft and athwart a good hundred yards of pristine, pedestrian-free pavement, as per usual on any mid-Sunday evening--immejiately aroused in me a suspicion that Ronnie had grossly overestimated the prospective turnout. Cos you see, DGR--as if you could ever be so thick as not to have surmised as much by now from the numerous clues thereunto that I've dropped over the past 14 months (in the form, e.g., of numerous allusions to the minuscule size of its staff, and of that one-off mini-paean to its participation in the venerable pubular ideal of the 'watering hole-cum-larderia')--the Ape is the sort of joint that, even when stretched to its gill-perforating, fire-code-violating limit, can accommodate no more than a hundred arses at a time. Hence, if even half of Ronnie's 500 had turned up by now, a good three-fifths of them would of necessity have been disporting themselves outside the premises proper--i.e., on the pavement and/or street.

'There's always the possibility that they're revelling out back,' Esmeralda wishfully consoled me as we drew level with the front door: 'You know, in the courtyard or in the alley, in deference to council regulations.'

I knew full well that the pasty-faced fiat of a borough council could hardly check the publicity-hungry streetward-thrusting impetus of 200-plus drunken yobbos, but in deference to her solicitude, I held my piss whilst giving the door the most tentative--and, at the same time, the most desperate--of shoves.

No sooner, though, had our collective arse-cheeks cleared the threshold of the pub, than I began to wonder whether Ronnie had aimed so wide of the mark after all, vis-a-vis the turnout. Not that either my schlong or Esmeralda's tits were then in any immejiate danger of becoming uninvitedly acquainted with the hindquarters or shoulder-blades of anyone present; but that they decidedly would have been thus imperilled had we gormlessly trodden onwards to the chune of a single yard: for not only was every bloke Jack of a table-chair in the house apparently bespoken, but also the residual standing puntility were clustered round the bar three-or-four deep, like a mob of importunate spermatozoa round an apparently impermeable egg.

'So what's next?' I shouted into my girl's ear above the demographically unremarkable (albeit locally uncharacteristic) torrent of voices.

'Dunno,' she shouted back: 'Or, rather, I guess before proceeding farther we might as well learn as much we can from this lot [i.e., our neighbours, i.e.e., the doorward-tending fringe of the bar mob].'

'Yeah, might as well,' I selectively echoed without conviction or enthusiasm: for I was no more hopeful (for some un-pin-pointable reason) of gleaning any useful intelligence from that lot than I was eager to engage any of them in conversation (for the easily pin-pointable reason that, as usual, I wasn't in the mood for a chinwag on any topic with any random bloke or blokess). But having assented to the proposal, I was, qua our party's sole representative of the foul sex, more or less judy-bound to actuate it; which I did by timidly tapping on the shoulder of the thinnest of a nearby trio of shaved-headed, leather jacket-swathed, 15-to-20-stone blokes, and equally timidly crying out, 'Excuse me, sirrrr!' [Here and hereafter, BTW, the multiple arrs signify a trilled cuntinental pronunciation of that normally silent terminal consonant.]

'Yeah?' the bloke grunts back, swivelling his originally profiled head a noncomittal butcher's- dozen degrees towards me.

'Excuse me, but my wife and I are arrrriving kheer for the Blawk Fawkes Day celebrrration.'

'Come again?' he says, whilst squinting not unamicably, and cupping his pint-free hand to his chinwag-free ear.

'Blawk Fawkes Day. It khappens khere, so we have kheard. Do you know if it khappens now?'

'Well,' the bloke rejoins, 'firstoff, it's not Bloke Fawkes Day, it's Guy--hang on a bit. Where are you two from, anyway?'

'Romania.'

'You don't say!' he exclaims, whilst breaking into an oriole-to-oriole grin. 'Why, I've got a cousin lives in Sofia; perhaps you know him: name's Roger Bid--'

'--Naw, naw, naw, not Bulgaria, Romania.'

'Oh, sorry. You're right: now that I recollect, it was the Bulgar and not the Roman republic that Rog told me he was popping off to. I always get them two mixed up, same as I do Bolton and Boston back here. Anyway, as I was saying, the proper name of the festival is Guy Fawkes Day, and, as far as I know, there's nothing special going on here Guy-Fawkes-Day-wise. Are you sure you've got the right pub, mate?'

'Erm, I mean, akhem, perkheps not.'

'Yeah, you're probably looking for the 5 Oceans just round the corner; or Ahir Lorenzo's a half a mile down the High Road. Exploit each and every excuse to make an extra ten quid per head, be it Cinco de Mayo or Kasmir Pulaski Day, is that lot's motto. Here at the Ape, thank Cor, we order things differently. Here, admission is free, and a pint's a pint's a two-quid pint, come what may, 365-and-a-quarter days a year. Guy Fawkes Day, Schmuy Fawkes Day, is the Apeketeer's motto. What use, after all, is a classic English pub like this one, if it don't afford a bloke the opportunity of hefting his plates up and relaxing in an atmosphere of timelessness, like there was no yesterday and won't be no tomorrow...'

And so onwards droned the fatuous old windbag, solipsistically enough to allow the two of us take French leave of him without fearing the slightest injury to shirt or shin in recompense for the snubbage.

'So much for the punters,' Esmeralda equably inaugurates the so-called regrouping session back at our former station: 'Now it's on to the staff.'

'Whatjjearmean, So much for the punters?' I says, miffed to say the least by the rakish liberties she's taking with the virgin schphincter of the principle of induction: 'We've only talked to one out of a hundred-plus of 'em so far.'

'Yes, and at this rate, in relying exclusively on them, we might be here till next Bloke Fawkes
Day before we'd learnt anything useful. Whereas, given that your kerbside Bloke Girl is a direct descendant of the proprietor of this establishment, one assumes that a single interview with any member of the staff would suffice for our purposes.'

'B-b-but what,' I futilely splutter, 'about our covers?'

'What about 'em? They're going to be blown sooner or later anyway.'

'Yeah, but I'm sure you'll agree there's a difference between a cover blown from a distance, and at the precise strategically-cum-tactically apt moment, and one blown prematurely and point-blank. Christ, do you really imagine that Mr Sedule could be taken in by this lot [gesturing first towards my beard, then towards my suit] at close range? Or, a fortiori, by your costume, given that he's seen you undisguised as recently as a scant month-and-a-half ago?' (TBT, by this point, seeing as how my principled initial logical objection to her staff-orientated proposal has long since been quashed by her eminently practically logical counter-objection, I'd as Erikson confront Sedgie stark naked, in all of my unambiguous Ruggerian ignominy, as risk a shirtfest with yet another Apean greenhorn possessed of sufficiently massive co-jones to pass himself as an old-school Apeketeer, but by this selfsame point I'm already in for a pound anti-staff-wise, and am accordingly obliged to hold down the argumentative fort on my side; even as, pseudo-ironically and cuntishly-annoyingly enough, Esmeralda is finally coming round to my way of seeing things, a(n) SOA evinced by the following:)

'You're right: I hadn't thought of it that way.'

Just at that otherwise impasse-able moment, though, we happen to be rescued from our dilemma by the appiration of a lanky, tow-headed youff no more than 20 (Jimmy's replacement?) skirting by us en route from the bar with a tray-load of pints in palm.

'Speak of your anonymous guardian devil on the house payroll,' she says, giving me an altogether gratuitous shove in the pint-bearer's direction.

'Excuse me, young sirrr,' I says to him, upon my tit-a-tit arrival at my destination: 'would you kheppen to know--that is too say, my wife and I khev arrived khere for the Blawk Fawkes Day celebration--'

'--Third table from the front, just next to the gents',' the blokette laconically replies, evincing not the slightest seismographically detectable degree of astonishment or stroppiness or relief or gratitude-- or, indeed, any other emotive species of shit-giving-ness--in reaction to the question, before proceeding on his un-shit-giving, un-merry, pint-burdened way towards the back.

'There you are: problem solved!' comes Esmeralda's unwarrantedly smug, air-handwashing, felicitation back at base.

'Whateverjyear mean, "problem solved"? "Problem set"'s more like it, IMHO.'

'How so?'

'How so? Note the cuntish specifity of the coordinates: "Third table from the front": meaning a butcher's half-dozen celebratants at most, meaning in turn a decidedly awkward and disappointing situation on all fronts for ours truly.'

'Oh, nonsense. I'm sure he simply meant that the fesivities were headquartered at that table, not that they were circumscribed by it.'

'Oh, how silly of me; of course that's what he must've meant,' I says, seizing her hand and thereby decisively actuating our jaunt towards the fabled third table; nonetheless, throughout the whole of our sluggish, miserable, genitally-cum-mammilarily invasive progress thither, I maintained a steady, under-the-breath burden of Fee Fie Foe Fawke / I smell the blood of an anorawk, for the benefit of my third wheel (meaning you by default, I guess, DGR).

In the end, it wasn't the tabular-cum-looular coordinates as such, but rather the sighting of a fragment of Ronnie Livingstone's tell-tale phiz situated some 20 degrees below the mean shoulder-level horizon, that clued me in to the fact that we'd arrived as near to our destination as we were likely to get, absent a good bit of further, and potentially cover-blowing, nudging and jostling. And to Esmeralda's credit, a goodly portion of the two-deep human buffer-zone between us and the table proper did seem to be taking a more than casual interest in whatever proceedings had been convened round its immejiate circumference; and I bethought myself at this point of gathering what intelligence I could from one of these apparently-not-uninterested bystanders, AFF(amiliarly)F:

'Excuse me, sir: we are khere for the Blawk Fawkes Day celebration--'

'--Shh!' the bloke stroppily and wordlessly remonstrated without looking round, before straight away shoving me forward by the shoulder and whispering distractedly into my ear, 'You're just in time for the re-enactment of the scene of discovery.'

And so, at the bloke's behest and invitation, and tugging Esmeralda along with me in my train, I arrive at the inner sanctum of the table, just in time to hear a distinctly familiar--albeit equally distinctly non Ronnie-Livingstonian--voice chiming in off-frame, AFF:

'Are you one Brutus Caius Fawkes, otherwise known as Bloke Fawkes, of Yorkshire?'

'I am,' replies Ronnie, at the obvious prompting of a script he's presently poring over.

'Why, then,' answers the off-camera voice, which I've now identified as the property of me old mate Manish Shah, 'by the authority vested in me by his Majesty Jacobus Rex, I hereby place you under arrest on suspicion of capital treason and attempted regicide.'

[Ronnie:] 'Oh, shit.'

'Next,' whispers the anonymous, and still-proximate, bloke, 'comes scene of the trial.'

Whereupon I hear yet another off-camera voice, this time hailing from the opposite end of the table, and equally familiar to me as the property of me equally old mate Jimmy Phipps, intoning: 'I hereby sentence the defendant, Bloke Fawkes of Yorkshire, to be hanged by the neck until he be dead; and afterwards to be drawn and quartered; and yet afterwards still to be abandoned to the sodomitical mercies of the choicest, pox-afflicted cohort of his Majesty's hounds. Have you anything to say before the sentence is carried out?'

[Ronnie]: 'Yeah: It's a fair cop, but, an't please your M'ludship, that cunt Monteagle's ultimately to blame.'

'Right, then: let's have at this bloke!'

And with this all-too-familiar war-cry of Jimmy's, the seated company all rise to their feet; all, that is, save one: namely, a haggard, dejectedly slumped scarecrow of a figure whom I identify as my not-so-old mate, the Ken bloke from the kerbside, only belatedly; thatistersay, a butcher's-dozen seconds later, whilst Jimmy and Manish are together hoisting him aloft, one forearm-to-armpit apiece, from his perch, and gingerly-ly setting him down, still fully erect (personwise, not schlongwise), on to the patch of floor just behind the table. Next, the three of them swivel round in tandem and, still locked arm-in-arm-in-arm-in-arm and shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder, commence a slow, stately, Frank-Kafka-style excecution march towards the rear exit; the remainder of the Fawkesian contingent, such as it is, gradually falling into queue behind them.

'I think we missed our chance,' Esmeralda says to me, as we begin trailing the procession by a discreetly remote metre or so.

'Nonsense,' I says to her, patting her half of the handclasp: 'if anything, we arrived too early. You see, it's the lighting of the bonfire that's the real rhetorical high point of the evening. I say we wait till whoever the fuck it turns out to be is standing there, with lit match in hand, poised to ignite the pyre. Then, and only then, should we make our move.'

Out back, in the courtyard, all is initially dark, without form and void; but even out of this pitch-black chaos, in my virtual blindness, I immejiately manage to suss out, with a drop-dead degree of certitude and precision that somehow eluded my full-sighted self back in the interior of the pub, the salient SOA that the turnout for Bloke Fawkes Day '06 is more or less exactly half that for Bloke Fawkes Day '05. TBS, I've already been vaguely underwhelmed by the unitabular constituency of the reenactment, and by the meagre extent of the processional queue, but, at arse, nothing could have driven home the pathetic unpopularity of the whole affair so effectually as does our present audible, two-tail-to-tail-cats-swingable distance from our nearest fellow-Bloke-Faweksians, out here in this dedicated Bloke-Fawkesian domain, as against the genitally palpable one-Manx-mouse-unswingable distance thereto and herein last year. So disheartened am I by this all-too-palpable proof of the limited staying-power of my Apean legacy, that I am much of a mind to slink off inside, out the front door and back to the maisonette, there to drown my sorrows in 76 ounces or so of Hoegaarden; but, regrettably, as I have certain standards of masculine slack-lower-lippedness to uphold for the benefit of Esmeralda's okies, I'm obliged to tough the thing out, come what ignominiously may.

But anyway, as I was saying, things were only initially dark, &c. out there in the courtyard; and by intially I suppose I mean for about the first half-minute or so; after which, with a great convective sonic whoosh, a full-on--no shit--mediaaaeval-style torch is lit and subsequently borne aloft by one who turns out to be none other than Mr Sedule himself, in all of his beschmootzed-apron'd glory. Whether I've simply failed to spot him in the crowd or the queue, or whether he's sneaked out here on his lonesome after the exit of the processional proper, I can't say; all I know is that this sudden incandescent revelation of his presence in our midst somehow immejiately alleviates the whole of the burden on my lower lip; that with his kindling of the torch, my faith in the whole Bloke-Fawkesian project is likewise rekindled. And once he's borne the torch to centre-stage, as it were, and thereby granted it its full, sporadically-nook-and-cranny-illuminating licence, why, I can't help being positively moved by the spectacle unveiled thereby; comprised as it is not only by Ronnie, Manish and Jimmy; but also by Denise and Claudia; by Sedgie's granddaughter, the Bloke girl from the kerbside; by my anonymous informant from back indoors, together with a supernumerary quartet of equally anonymous fellow Bloke-Fawkesian enthusiasts; and, last, but not least, by the Ken-bloke himself, newly re-deposited in his wheelbarrow, which is now situated immejiately in front not of our shabby 3 cubic-metre-capacitied dustbin of yore, but rather of an imposing, 24-square-foot-circumferenced Texas barbecue-type apparatus. 'This may,' I inwardly conclude, not without an attendant slight blearing of me okies, 'be a rather paltry contingent of Bloke-Fawkesians; and yet it is, for all that, a decidedly dedicated one.'

But now, just as I'm wrapping up me old internal monologue, in sprints Ronnie from the wings, to take his place between Mr Sedule and the Bloke-barrow, and to commence the following oration:

'Firstoff, I'd like to thank you all for coming out tonight, in courageously unanimous opposition to the sundry so-called traditional Bonfire Night celebrations taking place in remoter districts and boroughs, to say nothing of such wholesale festive snubbages of the very date of 5/11 as are being exemplified, even as I speak, within the very walls of this very pub back of us. Secondly, in answer to the judicious quibble mooted by Mr Jules Sedgwick of Bermondsey, and centring on the discrepancy--'

'--You can call it a discrepancy, if you like!' a member of the aforesaid anonymous quintet somewhat rudely, and more than stroppily, cuts in, 'but I call it a bleeding travesty.'

'Very well, Jules: as to the travesty occasioned by the discrepancy between the properly Fawkesian identity of the villain of our re-enactment and the improperly Livingstonian identity of our prospective ignitee; well, what can I say but that we're still ironing out the kinks occasioned by the overlapping of two distinct traditions: namely, the venerable four-hundred-and-one-year-old tradition of Bonfire Night proper, and of the nascent, pre-inoculated, one-year-old traditional babe that is Bloke Fawkes Day. Mind you, Jules, I feel your pain; inasmuch as for purely personal reasons that do not warrant disclosure in this public setting, I would much prefer that this bloke were togged out in authentic first-Jacobean doublet and hose as against his present second-Elizabethan two-piece suit. But the fact remains that last year's bloke was a Ken bloke; and that, so long as we're committed to maintaining a semblance of continuity between Bloke Fawkes Day '05 and Bloke Fawkes Day '06, this here bloke has likewise got to be a Ken bloke.

'Secondly, as regards our publicly-touted endorsement by Her Majesty, the Queen: let me make it perfectly clear that, notwithstanding the singularly conspicuous absence of any royally-delegated surrogate, let alone that of the person of H. R. H. herself, our host Mr Sedule did receive, approximately eight weeks posterior to our posting to the palace of a petition to make Bloke Fawkes Day an official national holiday, a very gracious letter, subscribed to official palatial letterhead, a missive stating that Bloke Fawkes Day had indeed been designated such a national holiday by Her Majesty, and signed by one Cyril Twit-Thornwaite, Bart., Her Majesty's Privy Home Secretary for Public Appearances. Mind you, this selfsame letter contained nary so much as a hint of a promise of participation in our present festivities by Her Majesty either in person or by proxy. Hence, we were acting in perfectly good faith--'

Here my attention to Ronnie's speech is momentarily divided by a tug at my coat-sleeve, and a subsequent Esmeraldan whisper into my ear, AFF:

'Look, seeing as how, at this rate, the bloke-burning proper can't be less than ten minutes off in the future, do you mind if I excuse myself for two of those minutes to pay a visit to the ladies'?'

'Course not,' I grunted back (as if I could do otherwise, and although I did in fact mind quite a bit; but, in any case, all copular tergiversational efforts on my part would only have postponed my full re-achunement to the speech, which continued, during Esmeralda's interruption, and after her exit, and as near as I can reconstruct, AFF:)

'--when we advertised this event as "endorsed by H. R. H. The Queen." Interestingly enough, though, a few days ago, I received a phone-bell from a person identifying himself as one Waldo Houghington, Bart., likewise Her Majesty's Privy Home Secretary for Public Appearances. Now, from my conversation with this Sir Waldo I gathered, not only explicitly and certainly that Sir Cyril had either retired or been replaced, but also implicitly yet no less certainly that we should expect Her Majesty to assist at our festivities not by proxy but in person. So what I'm getting at, at bottom, vis-a-vis those of you who were expecting such a royal visitation--'

Here Esmeralda returns to my side, a good minute or two ahead of schedule, thereby prompting me to remark, despite my Ronnie-attentive self, 'Well that was a short trip.'

'Yeah, well,' she replies, 'it would have been an even shorter one if I'd managed to get everything to go down in single flush. I thought Ronnie was supposed to have taken care of that--'

'--Shh!' I cut in: 'mind the speech.'

And so, Ronnie continues (reconstructed bit in square brackets) '--[is that, whilst I abjure any share of responsibility for the absence thereof,] I nonetheless claim with you a full lion pride-member's share of disappointment at this absence; that, in four short words, I feel your pain.'

'And auquel propos of my pain?!' rejoins Mr Sedule: 'Bordel de Dieu! I am basting myself with this fucking torsh like a fucking cochon au jus. Can we not get on déjà with the burning in of the bloke before I burn moi-même to a fucking croustillant?'

'Of course, Mr Sedule,' Ronnie equably assents, 'of course. If Jimmy will be only so kind as to deposit the bloke in the pyre, I'll be only too happy to relieve you of your torch-bearing duties.'

'Well,' says Esmeralda to me, whilst the depositing of the bloke and the handing-over of the torch are in progress, 'it's now or never, I suppose.'

'Yeah.' And so, no sooner has Ronnie re-taken his solitary stand, with torch in hand, in front of the now-bloke-stoked pyre, than I leap out of the darkness, petition brandished athwart me tetons, ready to exclaim 'Hold on there a second, mister!' (or, rather, 'Khold on wahm moment please, sirrr.' [No point in blowing me cover one gratuitous instant earlier than necessary, is there?]).

But Ronnie beats me to the rhetorical punch, in unanctipateably appending another period to his oration, AFF:

'There's just one more topic I'd like to address before the burning-in proper--and I trust, that, as I promise my treatment of it will be shorter by half than that of either of the previous two; and that, as I'm now literally taking the heat for it, no one will object. I introduce it mainly for the edification of you lot who weren't here last year: Jules and his mates, for example; or this gentleman standing up front [i.e., YFCT]. You see, I can only assume that, judging by appearances as you inevitably must do, you lot have concluded that this here festive occasion was some Frankensteinian brainchild of a coalition of us presiding officials--Mr Sedule, Jimmy, Manish and myself. But in point of fact the sole individual who may justly lay claim to the paternity of this event is one--and only one--Rugby Nigel Wetherby McGyver, or Rugger for short. It was Rugger, you see, who first felt the stirrings of the restorational-cum-revolutionary impetus that constitutes the unique and irrefragable spirit of Bloke Fawkes Day; Rugger who indeed coined the very name of the holiday; Rugger who penned from header to footer the entirety of that noble petition that ultimately secured us our present hard-won royal charter. In short, Rugger is our George Washington, our Tom Jefferson, our Ben Franklin, all rolled into one; we humble presiders are mere Sam Adamses, Lewis Morrises and Button Gwinnetts by comparison with him.'

'OK,' shouts back that inveterate heckler, Jules, 'so just how do you account for the absence from our midst of this Swiss-army founding father of ours?'

Ronnie does as much as he can do in the way of nonplussedly spreading his hands and shrugging his shoulders without dropping the torch or setting his head on fire. 'Your guess is as good as mine, Jules. Numerous attempts were made to get in touch with him, via email and phone, but to no effect. In any case, that's neither here nor there, in contrast to this presently exigent bit of bidness, namely--'

And with these words, he casually, and almost too abruptly for comment, flings the torch over his shoulder into the pyre, thereby immejiately surrounding and obscuring the bloke with a manifestly chemically pre-prepped halo of foot-tall flames; whereupon every bloke Jack and blokess Jill present--YFCT and Esmeralda not excepted--presses forward to witness the gradual, inch-by-inch progression of the flames from the perimeter of the pyre towards its centre, and the correspondingly incremental immolation of the bloke. The Red Leicester wheel, affixed to his left hand, is the first bit to go; setting little rivulets of molten red wax scurrying in every which direction even as it hastens the propogation of the fire up the bloke's arm to his left shoulder. Meanwhile, 45 degrees clockwise of us, one gunpowder-charged shoe, then another, explodes, setting off two no-less precipitous counter-offensives scurrying up each of his legs. Soon enough, the only discernibly intact portion of the whole monstrous edifice is the head, which gormlessly totters forwards and backwards a few times on the axis of its incinerated trunk--as if noddingly signifying, with cuntishly Kennish smugness, a sentiment to the effect of ,'Yes, never you worry: the Oyster Card and the congestion charge will soon put all that to rights'--before ultimately losing its perch and pitching forward--again, in a consummatetly Kennish (and now literally) autofellationary gesture--plumb into what's left of the bloke's crotch. And, as if this weren't enough, to the visual delights of the pageant were superadded certain indescribably intoxicating olfactory ones: for, this year's pyre, in contrast to the burnt-marmite stench exuded by yesteryear's, wafted over all and sundry a wondrous bouquet of mingled wheat, rose-hips, coriander and orange-peel; a bouquet which, whether by accident or by design, just happened to correspond, inner-nose-follicle-by-inner-nose-follicle, to the gust exuded by a properly-hexagonally-englassed draught of Hoegaarden. Once again, one couldn't help marvelling at the all-stop-out-pulling dedication of this year's wee mystic Bloke Fawkesian crew, nor being moved thereby--this time round to the chune of a good butcher's-dozen outright face cheek-inundating tears. Indeed, so thoroughly wrapped up am I in my private emotional orgasm, that my non-Esmeraldan neighbour has to devote more than a coupla shoulder-taps and straight-into-the-horn 'Skewed me!'s to rouse me from it and divert my semi-divided attention from the fire to him.

'Skewed me, sir,' he--i.e. (as it turns out), Ronnie-- says, 'you're not by any chance weeping because--hang about [he breaks off, proffering me his RH]: it's awful bloody rude of me to put the interrogatory thumbscrews on you before we've even been properly introduced to each other. I'm Ronnie.'

'I am Andrei,' I says, submitting to his clammy yet vigorous hand-pump.

'Pleased to meetcha, Andrei. And who, if I may be so presumptuous as to ask,' he adds, in his characteristically smarmy would-be homebreaker's register, 'is this lovely lady?'

'This is Natasha, my wife.'

'Enchanté,' he blushes in acknowlegement of Esmeralda's distant curtsey, 'Natash--erm, Mrs Andrei. Well, anyway, Andrei,' he continues, for my ears only, 'between men, I was about to ask you if you were weeping on account of the fact that I'd cut you off with my eulogy to my absent chum Rugger.'

(YFCT, momentarily forgetting the whole point of my front and centre-orientated mad dash): 'Khaht me off?'

'Yeah: you seemed to be on the point of saying something.'

'Oh, well, yes--but 'tweren't--erm, eet was not nothing.'

'So, in other words, it was something?'

Cor, but the fucker seemed to be being willfully thicker than the cornerstone of a Jesuit abbey. 'Yes, it was something, but something of no importance. I wanted simply to thank you for introducing me and my lovely wife to an authentic English folk-festival. As you may be guessing from our names and from my accent, we are not from this kahntry.'

'Yes, I had rather guessed as much. And as to your specific homeland of origin, I was thinking Bulgaria.'

'You are very clawse: Romania.'

'Ah, yes: Romania,' Ronnie contentedly half-echoes, without subsequently segueing into any of the sorts of questions his possession of the conversational ball certainly entitle and practically beg him to ask (e.g., 'So how does our humble Bloke Fawkes fest compare to similar festivals in your native land [say, Lad Dracula Day?]'). Which is fine by me, insofar as it lets me solidly off the Romanian national traditional-bullshitting hook; but decidedly less so, insofar as it leaves my carcass still hanging high on the host festival-fellating one. Fortunately, during the last decorously permissible second or two of silence on my end, a third hook--namely, the auto-fellating one--comes spontaneously into view, and I hoist myself on to it with gusto, by way of the following quasi-question:

'This Rugger person you were telling us about: it sounds as though he must khave been quite a blawke.'

'Oh, yes, indeed he was--and is one still, I assume. And not just with respect to Bloke Fawkes Day, I'll have you know. Oh, no; he's a real renaissance man in the classic enlightenment sense of the term, is Rugger: a discriminating beer connoisseur [Check!], a top-flight accountant [Check!], a shrewd observer of the local London political scene [Check!], a diehard Millwall F.C. supporter [Ch-WTF?!], accomplished amateur electric tuba player [WT-F-ing-F?!!!] (in chamber, orchestral, jazz, and rock ensembles)...'

I don't know what Ronnie's on about vis-a-vis these surreal last two items in the catalogue of Ruggerian renaissance virtues; but, SITS, their appendage is enough to send me right hand involuntarily scurrying up to me shirty-collar, leaving the preemptive Romanian character-saving labour to my trusty left-hand-cum-brain tag-team wrestling combo; but even before the aforementioned TTWC has a chance to get its dual arse in gear, me RH freezes upon encountering, on its upper surface, and in the general vicinity of its target top button, an eerily unresistant swath of ticklish hairiness. And at this selfsame moment, Ronnie, encountering this selfsame swath, albeit at a greater remove, and from a visual perspective, breaks off his catalogue (hence the above ellipsis) to remark to me, whilst sporting an apparently genuinely bemused expression on his phiz:

'...Excuse me, Andrei, but something seems to have gone wrong with your beard.'

'My beard?!' I exclaim, whilst the palm of me left hand, summarily forsaking its character-saving judies, claps itself on to me right face-cheek, where it meets with the precise obverse of the SOA already met with by its knuckular right counterpart, viz: a patch of freshly-shorn man skin. Whereupon I immejiately dejuice that, on account of its exposure to the ambient heat exuded by the fire, the adhesive affixing the right side of my false beard to the right side of my face has all but completely melted away. Now, a less dedicated and more cravenly cowardly spirit than myself, on having his cover thus half-blown, would immejiately have proceeded to demolish the remaining half--thatistersay, by admitting outright, then and there, that he was not, after all, Andrei What'shisnutsescue from Bumfuck, Romania, but Rugby Wetherby McGyver of Woodside Park, Barnet, London, England, UK; whilst a no less dedicated but much less inventive spirit would have fabricated an excuse along the lines of 'My wife and I were at a fancy dress ball earlier in the evening; this isn't really my beard (although, for continuity's sake, if you don't mind, I'll do my best to slap it back on)'; but I, being neither a coward nor a dullard, pitch upon what really--or so I flatter meself--would have cuntstituted, in any other Londinian setting, a cast-iron-ological explanation of this untoward detachment of my half-beard from its facial mount, to wit:

'Akh, well, you see, Ronnie, I suffer from a condition known as male-pattern facial folicular deficit--a condition, alas! all too common amawng my fellow kahntrymen, owing to that tyrant Ceascescu's willful "experimental" poisoning of our water-supply with oestrogen in the airrrly 1980s. We Romanians of my generation, you see, make up for the khyumiliation of being otherrrwise permanently beardless by sporting these kheer prosthetic bearrrds.'

'Oh, come off it, Rugger,' says Ronnie (you see what I mean now, DGR, about any other Londinian setting), suddenly dropping all phizzionomical pretence of bemusedness, and simultaneously reaching forward to give a brutal tug to the still-attached left side of the beard, which, not having been previously mollified and marinated by the fire, breaks free of its moorings at considerably greater cost of pain to YFCT.

'Cor's whores!' I ejaculate, even as my right hand, all character-saving stratagems having (obviously) been newly rendered null and void, is brushing aside the twin locks comprising me newly-barbered scurvy Fu-Manchu goatee, and making its post-haste way once again to me top shirt-button: 'That really fucking hurt!'

'Serves you fucking right,' spits back Ronnie, even as his RH is making its way towards its chemisial counterpart, 'you bloody impostor.'

Wellsir, by this point the stage had been more or less completely set for a resumption of our untimely-ly broken-off shirtfest of last May; and I dare say the ever-dwindling audience of Bloke-Fawkesians would have been treated, willy-nilly, to the remaining three acts thereof, had not Esmeralda, in unwitting mimesis of Ronnie himself on a certain occasion, seen fit to step forward, and interpose an arm athwart the two of our respective carcasses, whilst interjecting:

'OK, guys, guys! Or, rather [she abashedly corrects herself, upon her single pair of okies' crossing paths with our pedantically smouldering two pairs], blokes, blokes! I bid you restrain yourselves--either that, or make it a two-to-one match. Cos, don't forget, Ronnie, that Nigel and I have imposed ourselves on you in disguise as a couple, and, accordingly, that you're obliged to reckon with us as such, by fist or by mouth.'

'Erm, well,' says Ronnie, stroppily enough, whilst reappointing both his hands to the perfunctory judy of straightening out the skirts of his parka, 'now that you've put it that way, Natasha--erm, Esmeralda--I think I can hold off for the time being.'

'Splendid. Now, provided I can trust you two to keep your hands off each other for five minutes, if you don't mind, I'd like to excuse myself for a bit of catching up with an old pal of mine, Pierre.'

And with these words, she sashays off in the direction of Mr Sedule, who's now busy hose-piping into extinction the last protesting embers of the bonfire.

'Cor!' says Ronnie as soon as she's out of earshot, 'since when was Esmeralda on a first-name--or any-name--basis with old Sedgie?'

'Since sometime late last summer, when she and her boss dropped by here for a nightcap sans mwah.'

'And sans mwah too OC, evidently.'

'Evidently. Anyway, Ronnie, about this whole impostorial charade: well, in hindsight I admit it comes across my okies as a none-too-gentleblokey, manoeuvre--nay, an outright dastardly manoeuvre. But what choice did I have but to fight dastardly fire with its equivalent, inasmuch your complete and total exclusion of me and Mayan from the loop of Bloke-Fawkesian preparation amounted, ultimately, to a studied policy of imposture by omission and malign neglect? Numerous attempts were made to get in touch with him my sanctified schphincter! A cuntishly artful use of the passive voice, that. I can't help speculating as to the identity of this wee telecommunicative birdie that was repeatedly despatched on this fool's errand. Was it, perchance, the blokess who keeps ringing me about those all-expenses-paid package tours of Mallorca? Or, on the other hand, the bloke who keeps emailing me about increasing the girth of me schlong? One thing I can say for certain: it wasn't Ronnie fucking Livingstone! I guess, though, that such brazenly cuntish fibbing came easily enough to you, via the assumption that my carcass was safely absent and rotting in a ditch or gutter in some far-flung corner of the postcode.'

'Erm, well,' says Ronnie, immejiately in advance of a diplomatic fist-cough, 'firstly, my use of the passive voice wasn't as artful as it might have seemed. It was sort of an improvised extra layer of protection, you see--a sort of rhetorical adult nappy, if you will, insulating my arse against the semantic liberties I was taking with the use of the word numerous. You see, about a month ago, I did in fact email you--mind you, not via your personal address, but your work one--an invitation--'

'--An invitation that you bloody well should have known, from past experience, would be routed directly into my junk mail folder like any other message issuing from a non-Proctologitexan source.'

'Yes, I should have known that, and perhaps in all candour I actually did do. As for my telephonic attempts: at about the same time, I did give you a bell, only I rang off after a few rings--that istersay, well before either you or your voice mail got round to answering. So, inasmuch as I did make two half-hearted attempts to reach you between the two media, and inasmuch as two is a plural number, I wasn't technically fibbing when I said that numerous attempts had been made.'

More exhausted than infuriated by this anorakish digression (but perhaps that's the whole point of the thing), I wearily sigh out 'All right, all right, all right: let's just get on to the secondly-ly portion of your apology before Bloke Fawkes Day '07, shall we?'

'OK, let's do: secondly--and I know my whole MO is bound to seem infinitely more cuntish and dastardly in the first-blusherly light of this fact--I was already well aware of your presence here when I began my pre-ignitionary speech; hence also, a 40-orey, when I got to the bit of it centring on my communicative attempts.'

'Why you little--!' I sputter out in an access of rage and accompanying prospective shirtiness; but luckily I have enough presence of mind to glance round on all sides before undoing me top button; whereupon my okies alight on those of Esmeralda, who is now submitting to a suffocating Sedulean bear-hug, and who apparently has enough presence of mind
--and brain-oxygen--in her own right to counter my gaze, over the deck of Sedgie's massive forearm, the upper-facial portion of a glare signifying Don't you dare so much as think of it!

Meanwhile, Ronnie's put his own anti-shirt-shucking plan into operation by stepping back a foot or two, thrusting his palms forwards and outwards in an attitude of semi-surrender, and saying, 'Now calm down a bit, Rugger; I'm sure you'll at least feel the stirrings of second thoughts about pounding me to a pulp once you've heard out my defence.'

'Well, we'll see. Please proceed.'

'OK. Well, as I was saying, I already knew you were here incognito; and I was kicking myself for so half-heartedly trying to reach you during the run-up to the event, and desperately wanting to involve your cognito'd self in the proceedings before the night was out; and yet, I was loath, say, an hour ago, to simply march up to you and say, "Hullo, Rugger. Long time no-see. What's with the fancy dress?" Firstly, and most obviously, because I had no idearrof how you'd take it; and secondly, because even in the best-case-scenarial event that you took it--and me--with open arms, the ensusing catch-up period would necessarily have thrown the whole itinerary of the evening off the rails. I mean, I ask you, in your capacity as the one person in the world who cares more about the spectacular integrity of Bloke Fawkes Day than I do, just to picture to yourself what the newcomers would have thought of it?'

'Oh, I'm picturing it to myself, right vividly enough. I'm picturing them saying to themselves, It seems like these two lovebirds are more interested in each other than in the event that we've hoofed and tubed it all the way up from Bumfuck, Bermondsey to celebrate.'

'Exactly. Whereas if I'd managed to draw you out by indirect means during the expiring final minutes of the itinerary--as I attempted to do via my pyre-side speech--why, then, we, oldtimers and newcomers alike, would have been graced by a consummately spectacular denouement, as you, like some long-absent duke from one of them Shakespeare comedies, sprang forward to unbeard yourself as the actual presiding genius of the holiday; whereupon I, in embracing you, would have been obliged to drop the torch, like the proverbial hot potato, directly into the pyre, and the catching-up module of our reunion could have taken its leisurely cakewalkish stride to the soothing accompaniment of the bonfirely crepitations.'

'Well, Ronnie, I guess I can make no other answer but sorry, and sorry.'

'There's no call for any apologies on your part, Rugger old boy--for regrets aplenty, perhaps, but not for ary an apology. Christ, if anything, it's me who should be apologising to you, what with my having so brutally and unceremoniously semi-unbearded you a coupla minutes ago, for having personally and concretely taken out on you the violence that was entirely and impersonally due to the missed opportunity in the abstract.'

'Oh, for Chrissake's don't bovver, Ronnie old boy,' I says to him ['And yet,' I says to meself, 'what harm could there be in checking up on the prognosis of the old wound, via a quick pap-schmear of the site of injury with me trusty suit-pocket handkerchief?'], 'It was a mere trifle, nothing ['Gorblimey!' I ejaculates to meself, fairly swooning at first contact with the hankie-clotting pointillistic study in crimson gouache that greets me okies afterwards]--nothing a good 20 minute douche of Haitch-Two-Oh-Two and a cubic foot or two of elastoplast won't put to rights ['Or,' I mercifully forbore to add, 'should that fail, and the wound begin to putrefy, a partial mandibulectomy followed by an arduous course of reconstructive surgery.'].'

In point of fact, though, even the censored minutes of my reaction to the full severity of the facial injury rather overblow the degree of my hypochondrial hysteria thereupon; for the actual F&C object of my preoccupation at this moment--i.e., now that Ronnie has redrawn my attention to the disguise by dint of apologising for his demolition thereof--is a very different one, namely a certain punctillio of vanity that I attempt to satisfy by posing to him the following question, immejiately upon repocketing my hankie:

'But anyway: you've already told me you knew whom you were addressing when you began your speech; and then, you also said something about the possibility of addressing me as my Ruggerian self an hour ago. What I want to know is, at exactly what earlier moment in the proceedings did you manage to suss out that it was me and not some random beardy punter who was in your presence?'

'Oh, I dunno, Rugger,' says Ronnie, wincing and grimacing as if at the sudden onset of an attack of wind: 'Is there really any need for me to get so specific as all that?'

'Yes, I'm afraid there is, Ronnie. Cos Cordammit, Esmeralda and I put a considerable amount of time, money and effort into these costumes; and it'd be flattering to her and me alike to learn they'd at least enjoyed their 15 mintues in the shade, as it were. So when was it, eh? Was it out here, in the courtyard, whilst the audience was assembling?'

'Earlier, earlier,' he says, still grimacing, whilst also shaking his head and insouciantly spinning air-candyfloss with his RH.

'Why, then, back at the table inside, during the scene of re-enactment.'

[Ditto, from the first inverted comma to the full stop.]

'Why, then, for Christ's fucking sake, when else earlier than at our ingress into the pub, as the starkly twilit silhouette of my head, obscured though it was by a five-fathom-deep scrim of cigarette fumes, could nonetheless not help betraying--in virtue of a certain irrepressibly resolute setting of the jaw, a certain devil-may-care heavenward jutting of the chin, its Ruggerian prov--'

'--Look, Rugger, as far as the present evening is concerned, you can fast-rewind all the way back to the instant when you set out from your front doorstep, and retrospectively transmogrify me into your nearest street-corner CCTV camera; cos even then, and in that capacity, I would have been on to you. The fact is--and I really was hoping to spare you this revelation, but now that you've pressed me to it, here it goes--the moment when I first discovered I was being imposed upon by you should be specified not in terms of a certain number of hours or even days ago, but, rather in terms of a full week and then some ago, namely--'

'--Surely, you don't mean--?'

'--Yes, I mean the moment when you rang me up in the character of one Waldo Houghington, Bart.'

'But what about me accent?--and intonation?--and vocabulary?'

'All three transparently see-through-able as those of Rugby Wetherby McGyver, C. A., from your inaugural "ahem" onwards. Face it, Rugger: when it comes to doing Posh, you ain't exactly David Beckham. No, you're far closer, I'd say, to a kind of a blokey analogue to Molly Sugden.'

'Late blow, Ronnie, late blow.'

'Oh, OK: I admit it wasn't as unconvincing as all that. In fact, I fancy any random bloke would have fallen for it Haitch Ell and Ess, at least for the first coupla minutes or so. But that's the thing: I'm not just any random bloke, but rather, a bloke who's as attchuned to the peculiariaties and idiosyncrasies of your vocal timbre as anyone could be. Anyone, that is [here, he suddenly raises his voice and diverts his gaze to some point on the arseward horizon], except, perhaps, for the lady now approaching us.'

And here, before I've had time to process, as they say, the meaning of this last clause, I feel almost simultaneously the tug of Esmeraldan arm-hook round both me shoulders and the impress of an Esmeraldan gob-smack against me left face-cheek; the two of which in tandem oblige me to say:

'Welcome back, darling. And how did your reunion with Mr Sedule go?'

'Swimmingly. Apart, that is, from the concluding bear-hug--I mean, medically speaking. Depending on how I'm feeling tomorrow morning, I might very well have to schedule an appointment with my GP to check for fractured ribs.'

'That's the trouble with Sedgie,' says Ronnie: 'he don't know his own strength.'

'I'll say,' says I, in toking deference to the nominal Esmeraldan magnitude of the Sedulean episode, before proceeding to my own particular peace of copular-solidfying bidness, by addressing Esmeralda AFF: 'Do you know what Ronnie's just been telling me?'

'No idea, dearest.'

'That he wasn't taken in for so much as an instant, over the blower, by my Sir Waldo spiel.'

'Well,' she says, exchanging with Ronnie a glance the dagger-wielding character of whose Esmeraldan component I can readily dejuice from its utterly abashed and deflated Livingstonian counterpart, 'that certainly goes a long way towards accounting for the historically unreconstructed state of the ladies' toilet.'

'Yes,' he says, 'I suppose it does do, and then some.'

At this point (at least as far as my own conversational resources went), there doubtless would have ensued a rather nasty, tape-worm-lengthed specimen of that entity known as an awkward silence--seeing as how Esmeralda had entirely beaten me to the rhetorical punch on the Ronnie-bashing front, and I had nary a non-Ronnie-bashing alternative rhetorical card secreted up me shirty-sleeve--had not Jimmy just then emerged from the back door of the pub, sidled up to Ronnie and injected a welcome botoxial note of administrative jollity into the anarchically sagging face-flesh of our chinwag by announcing to all three of us:

'Well, friends, as it's now getting on 11, I must insist that you return indoors. After all--not that we're in any imminent danger of a nose complaint this time round--we don't want to risk a repeat of what happened last year.'

'No, I dare say n--hang about, Jimmy! Since when have you been working again back up here in Woodside?'

'Christ, Rugger! You really are out of loop. Only since, I dunno, mid-September or thereabouts.'

'So I take it the gig at the Milton didn't quite pan out?'

'No, it certainly didn't. Mind you, the pay was good, to the chune of a 50 per cent rise over what I was making here; but working-condition-wise, I was easily a hundred and 50 per cent in the red, what with my having to keep a constant watch on all them dogs--you know, so as to make sure none of 'em either chewed or fucked any of the other ones to shreds. "Cordammit," I said to the governer on the night of my resignation, "I'm a barman not a fucking pet-psychologist-cum-relationship-counsellor--"'

'--Oh, c'est vrai, vraiment?' Mr Sedule, now suddenly louring over our humble quartet, cuts in: 'Then why are all these fucking punteurs still standing here outside at five mintues before closing time?'

'Good point, Mr Sedule,' says Jimmy, thereupon encircling Esmeralda and myself with one arm and Ronnie with the other; then subsequently and ever-so-gently swivelling the lot of us 180 degrees anti-clockwise; and finally whispering, as all four of our united pairs of feet begin marching tentatively, in Sedgie's train, and under Jimmy's guidance, back towards the arsehole of the Ape, 'so what do you lot say to joining Sedgie and me for a good old-fashioned English lock-in?'

'I'm certainly game,' says Ronnie.

'Me too,' says Esmeralda.

'So, it'll be just us five then, counting Mr Sedule?' queries YFCT, in de-facto rat-sniffing mode.

'I'm a frayed sew,' says Jimmy, as he disburdens us of the arm-yoke, now that we're standing at the threshold of the exit, 'at least as far as the Bloke Fawkesian class of '05 (honorary members included, of course [he parenthesises, with a chivalrous nod to Esmeralda]) is concerned. Manish and Denise and Claudia all seem to have scarpered a while ago.'

[YFCT (who else?)]: 'And as far as the non-Bloke-Fawkesian contingent is concerned?'

'Difficult to say. During my last sweep of the pub I counted about 20 punters who expressed at least a half-hearted inclination to stay on.'

'20?!'

'That's right, Rugger. A pretty modest remainder, I'd say, considering that at peak-turnout-point we were all the way up to about a fire-code-violating 150 or thereabouts.'

'Have you an idearrof of so much as a soup's son of a conjecture as to why the Ape would be graced by such a munificent turnout on a Sunday night of all nights?'

'As to why? Well, that's easily enough explained, innit, Rugger? It was a Torchwood-viewing night.'

'Torchwood? You mean that craptacular, pointless, stillborn, next-generational Doctor Who spinoff--?'

'--Actually, I quite like it,' cuts in Esmeralda.

'Me too,' nods Ronnie, assenting, methinks, too much and too abruptly for my conjugal comfort.

'Case in two points, Rugger. Mind you, as a dyed-in-the-wool classic Who fan, I can't stomach the show myself, but there's no denying its popularity, at least in our humble corner of this particular postcode.'

'But it's only been on the air for a fucking month-and-a-half, if that long!'

'Be that as it may, Rugger, in those scant four-to-six weeks, and for Cor knows what reason, the Ape has blossomed into a veritable Mecca of Torchwoodmania. Yessir-stroke-by-jiminy, nowadays the Torchères--that's what they call themselves--can't seem to get enough of this place. But like I was saying earlier, Rugger, you have lately been rather out of the Apewise loop.'

Anyway, back indoors, the lock-in party almost immejiately and predictably, if dishearteningly, splinters into two festive factions: a Torchwood-episode-debriefing one, comprising a butcher's dozen or so assorted specimens of riff-raff, along with Esmeralda, Ronnie and Mr Sedule, clustered round the arseward end of the bar; and a Bloke-Fawkes-Day-eulogizing one, comprising Jimmy and myself, bisected athwart the front end, he erect on the bidness side thereof--and occasionally breaking from my company to shuttle provisions to the enemy--and I sedentary on the pleasure one, with one leg lugubriously splayed atop the nearest three or four intervening empty seats, as though they collectively comprised a single, mighty, articulated gout-stool; and one hand-and-elbow propping up my inconsolable forrid, whilst all the while the other H&E repeatedly succors me gob with bottle after Phipps-administered bottle of me beloved Hoegaarden.

'It's like fucking feeding-time at the zoo!' I ejaculate, come the uncapping of Hoegaarden No. 8 or 9, momentarily (and unwisely) disengaging my forrid-propping hand just long enough to form it into a defiant arseward-orientated fist, at the instance of the 20th or so roundly-applauded Cap'n Jack impersonation of the night down under. 'I mean, honestly, Jimmy, whodathunkit?--that a venerable Apean tradition of a solid year's standing could be usurped, upstaged, drowned out, obliterated or what have you, by some ephemeral bit of televisual flotsam?'

'Yeah, whodathunkit?, indeed, Rugger,' says Jimmy--or, at any rate, the bits of him that I can manage to make out through one okie at a time, whilst futilely attempting to square my gyrospcoping cranium with the horizon courtesy of a pinball-playeresque alternating application of both hands to their respective temples--'But the way I sees it, as a sympathetic fellow-Bloke Fawkesian, you've got to consider the whole present contretemps from two points of view. Firstly--'

'--the philosophical one--?' I gormlessly, reflexively interject, on the naive, stupefied basis of Jimmy's having assumed a mien that, what with its narrowed-okie-liddedness, its schlonged-back-headedness, its momentary, opposite-wall-penetrating utter disregard of YFCT, can only be described as philosophical.

'--No!' he vigorously retrojects, whilst suddenly thrusting his phiz downwards within chin-whisker-frisking distance of mine, and resolutely planting both fists in decidedly unphilosophical fashion upon the surface of the bar: '--the anthropological-cum-sociological-cum-biochemical one. I mean, you've got to consider that a positively chronic Torchwood jones on a given person's part by no means prohibits or precludes the cohabitation of an equally potent Bloke-Fawkesian addiction within the organism of that selfsame individual. Consider, for example, the far-from-hypothetical case of the heroin junkie who doubles as a respected wine connoisseur--or, even more appositely, and closely to home, that of the Bloke-Fawkesian arch-founding father who moonlights as Barnet's most ardent scourge of Highbury's Foulest [i.e., Arsenal].'

SITS, the adhominemal gist of this rhetorical sally does not elude me, and in even marginally soberer circumstances I would doubtless take the rhetorical trouble of audibly articulating the counter-sally that then occurs to me--viz., that 'there's a qualitative difference between an anthropological-cum-sociological-cum-biochemical affiliation with a subculture with bone fide legs and roots (i.e.-stroke-e.g., Bloke-Fawkesianism and-stroke-or Arsenalaphobia) and a corresponding affiliation with a mere zoosporic subculture (I.E.-S-E.G. Torchwoodmania)', but as every last microjoule of my will but one is currently bespoken by the effort to keep both arse-cheeks squarely affixed to naugahide, the most I can do with the remainder is but feebly to nod in feigned recognition of meself, and rejoin, 'OK: Fair enough. And as to your second point of view?'

'Well,' he says, springing back from the bar and briskly honing one palm against the other (one can't help envying him his utter, naturally-caffeinated sobriety, and the majesterial command of his own person that it affords), 'that'd be the economic one. I mean, who do you think pays the bills of your--sorry, make that our--festival?'

'--The bills?'

'Yeah, I mean, where do you think all the money for those nose-complaint-proof combustibles came from?'

'Christ, I dunno, Jimmy: as you've pointed out more than once already tonight, I have been altogether out of the Apewise loop of late.'

'Well, I'll tell you where it came from: straight out of the wallets of those instrinsically-justifiably-malignable Torchères at the other end--from their wallets and from those of their absent confederates. I'll have you know, Rugger, that well into the third fiscal quarter of the present year, the accounts of this joint were auditably in the red. Such that when Ronnie and I, about a month-and-a-half ago first proposed a re-celebration of Bloke Fawkes Day, Mr Sedule would have no truck with it. But then, come a week or so later, we were suddenly aflush with punters on Sunday nights, all thanks to this Torchwood programme. And then--and only then--did Sedgie begin to countenance the idearrof of financing Bloke Fawkes Day '06.'

Once again, I am wise to the whole AHRG of Jimmy's parley, the difference this time round inhering in the fact that I am, at least in principle, chuned into the appropriate auditory wavelength--meaning that I not only see Jimmy's point but am in full agreement with it. I mean, he's clearly in the right: in hindsight my railings against the Torchères do look rather cuntishly petty--not that I can atoll be blamed for not having assumed all along that it was they in particular who'd bankrolled the whole Bloke-Fawkesian extravaganza, but rather that I can, and, indeed, should be blamed for not having taken stock of the obvious general fact that somebody had bankrolled it, and that that abstract somebody axiomatically excluded YFCT, inasmuch as (prior to the present after-hours binge and its inevitable wallet-hoovering aftermath) it'd been a good six months since I'd contributed so much as a tanner to the Ape's coffers. And yet, at arse, the prevailing emotion washing over me brain-pan at this particular moment is not one of contrition, but rather, of pity or compassion; PoC, that is, for Jimmy, on account of his being cursed, in the person of YFCT, with such a sorrily unresponsive audience for what is obviously a well-rehearsed speech. But how, I reason to meself, can it be otherwise, given the present extent of my inebriation--an extent that, in a professional capacity, Jimmy must be fully aware of, in view of my recent hourly rate of consumption--? Such that from my original emotional SOA of piteous compassion there is an easy transition to one of outright stroppy resentment, which I am just on the point of giving voice and shirt to, when out of the blue, as they say, a pair of peals issuing from the the Ape's cheeringly anachronistic doorbell--which comprises a mechanism exactly like that of one of them old-school wind-up alarm clocks, with the two circles and the circle-thwacking thingermmijig planted squarely betwixt them--immejiately puts paid at one go both to Jimmy's settled, schlong-sure "Well, what have you got to say for yourself?"-ish glare and to my still-nascent, tentative "I dunno yet, but whatever it is, it ain't gonna be pretty"-ish counter-one.

'Bordel de diable!' exclaims Mr. Sedule from across the way: 'Who in the fuck can this be, at this immonde hour of the evening?'

Whereupon Jimmy summarily, in advance of any explicit prompting from his boss, hoists himself over the end-flap of the bar and makes a caffeinated beeline for the front door; a beeline that I subsequently endeavour to trail in my own good codeinated, exegetical time and fashion--not so much out of any degree of anthropological-cum-sociological curiosity vis-a-vis the generic chav posse or homeless bloke doubtlessly lurking out on the pavement, as in exploitation of this one-off opportunity to give me sea legs a dry run for the looming LSH (or Long Shimmy Home).

Anyway, when I finally do make it up front, I am bemused to find myself peering out, over Jimmy's shoulder, at a pair of the most demographically-improbable of all lock-in gate-crashers: viz. a thin, tallish, bowler-crowned, brolly-toting sexagenarian bloke togged out from chin to ankle in a buttoned-up beige raincoat (along with a smattering of protuberant shirty-collarage-cum-necktieage, as if by way of certifying that this isn't all he's wearing, if you know what I mean), and a rather dowdy old octogenarian blokess less flatteringly clad in a buttoned-up, off-puce hooded parka, white tights and bright orange trainers.

'Indeed, sir, we are already well aware of that fact,' the bloke is just now saying, presumably in reply to Jimmy's boilerplate shoving-off spiel about the Ape's being 'a pub that observes a traditional schedule of hospitality', 'and yet, I can but hope that once you have been apprised of the nature and provenance of our visit--both of which we shall gladly disclose to you once we are safely indoors and clear of the prying gaze of his Yeoman Mayorship's surveillance cameras--you will find that it behoves you to make an especial exception in our case.'

'All right,' says Jimmy, now sauntering outside, whilst imprudently leaving the front door swinging wide-open for my eavesdropping, slipstream-dogging exploitation, 'I'll let you in: for a drink.'

'For a drink, sir?' the bloke gormlessly rejoins; 'But surely, in your capacity as barman you have no need of--'

'--Not literally, but figuratively. You know:' (He makes the money sign.)

'Very well,' sighs the bloke, and then immejiately commences fumbling round under the skirts of his coat in search of his wallet. But the blokess stops him short with a coupla well-aimed palm thwacks to the under-elbow, leaving him frozen with both hands embarrasingly thrust deep into the fronts of his trousers, as if he'd just been caught in flagrante delicto, during a spirited bout of pocket-pinball.

'Look, you two,' firmly remonstrates Jimmy: 'you've got to understand that I'm going to have to do a good bit of explaining to my boss so as to account for your presences; and that if that bit of explaining should fail to convince him, I'm looking, at minimum, down the twin barrels of a two-day suspension of pay. Now, if it were just the one of you seeking admittance--meaning you, sir; why, I'd be fine with letting you in gratis. Cos, you see, I could always explain you away after the fact as "the local police inspector-stroke-borough council president just popping round for a look round the place-stroke-to borrow a phone". Whereas when it comes to you, madam--no offence, but--"

'--But what?'

'Well, I mean, you're hardly dressed for official business of any sort, are you?'

'What do you think this is?'

And so saying, she gingerly-ly nudges back either side of her parka-hood just far enough to reveal, sitting atop her grizzled and rather mingey coiffure of curly locks, a swathe of diamond-encrusted tiarage, centring, just above the knitting point of the eyebrows, on a particularly keratin-rich triangular peak.

'Oh, Your Majesty,' Jimmy exclaims, whist not so much falling, as collapsing, on to his knees, 'I do most humbly and abjectly beg Your Majesty's pardon, and apologise for my altogether gormless misprision of your royal person. Believe Your Majesty's me, if I'd had any idearrof the fact that it was you--'

'--Rise, fair subject [whereupon Jimmy does do], and accept of our pardon, whilst sparing us your apologies--which, after all, serve only to prolong the term of our exposure to the depradations of this--well, we ought not to impugn the prognostications of our meteorologists by terming it unseasonable--but, at any rate, even the seasonable meteorological depredations of an English November night do rather tend to take their toll on the constitution of a woman of fourscore and tuppence such as ourself--'

'--'Nuff said, Your Majesty. I shall forthwith conduct you and Sir, or, perchance, Lord--?'

'--Sir Cyril, thank you very much,' says the bloke, who is only just now assuming an appropriately royal mein, with each hand splayed palm-downwards against its appropriate outer skirt of his coat.

'--Sir Cyril, into the humble precincts of our establishment.'

Now, here's the moment--i.e., just as Jimmy's about to swivel round to lead them indoors--when I suddenly bethink myself to do some pre-emptive swivelling and hoofing of me own; in simultaneuous order to escape detection qua eavesdropper (I mean by Jimmy, not by the royals--who, although they have presumably already spotted me, can be counted on not to breathe a word of the spottage [for such, after all, is the essence of what they call good breeding, innit?--viz., not to bother with mixing yourself up in quarrels whose outcomes will never stand a chance of touching on your immejiate interest]) and to be stationed at the head of the royal hand-kissing queue, well to the front of the foremost of the accursed Torchères. But just as I've cleared the threshold--and, hence, more or less attained the first of my objectives--I happen to overhear, courtesy of Sir Cyril's gob, a scrap of dialogue that just now arrests my steps, a dialogue whose conclusion--alas!--is destined to put paid to the attainment of my second objective before I've trodden another inch:

'There's just one other matter I should like to broach with you, Mr Phipps, before we send our car off and proceed within.'

[Jimmy, natch:] 'Yes, Sir Cyril?'

'Her Majesty maintains certain minimum standards for public appearances.'

'You mean, I suppose, as regards the, erm, quality of company?'

'Good heavens, no! Do you seriously imagine that she who has deigned to swap skin-grafts with sub-Saharan chieftans and to rub noses with Eskimo peasants shall be put off by the prospect of a handful of mere chinwags with the admittedly reeky denizens of a good-old-fashioned English pub? No, the standards I am adverting to appertain to the state of your, erm, public facilities.'

'Our public facilities?'

'Yes: specifically, the maximum flushing capcity by mass and volume of your ladies' toilet.'

FINIS POSTIS

The Education of Esmeralda Houghington: Part Two

2006-10-30T05:02:00.002Z

Well, it's AFT, wouldn't you say, DGR?

'I'm sorry,MDF? "AFT"?'

'"About Fucking Time."'

'About F****ing Time that what?'

'AFT that you're being graced with a post fully O'Koran with the calendrical date of its header; and hence, truly worthy of being designated a post in the proper journalistic-cum-Royal-Mailian sense of the term. You would, after all-stroke-I-trust, feel yourself well and truly cheated of your 50 p's worth of news if, upon purchasing a copy of the 30 October 2006 edition of the Sheffield Evening Post, you discovered its top front-page headline proclaiming "KING HAROLD TROUNCED AT HASTINGS" or even "THE KING [i.e., Mr Presley] IS DEAD"; as I trust you would likewise feel cheated of your monthly report of high-jinks at the old folks' home if, upon unsealing an envelope from your gran postmarked the same, you discovered her nattering on, in the letter contained therein, about rationing vouchers and the latest Cary Grant picture or Frank Sinatra 78.'

'Well, TBF, with respect to the latter example, I shouldn't so much feel cheated as worried about the onset of senility...'

'...Understandably, yes; just as, with respect to the former example, you'd be equally well within your rights to gather that the editor of the paper had a few chairs missing from his front room. But it all comes to the same thing, as far as the application of these two examples to the present bout of auto-flagellation goes: for two or three posts running, I've been mired, narratively speaking, in the events of last July and August, all the while allowing each post to default to its Blogger-assigned date of publication. Now, when I was recounting the events of late July in early August, such a mis-synchronisation of dates could have plausibly inconvenienced you, DGR, no more than, say, the Old-School postmark of a letter penned by Shakespeare or Liz the First in 1590-something would have inconvenienced his or her New-School-dating cuntinental correspondent. But come the publication of my last post, by which point the gap had widened to one of a full two months; why, by then, I found myself occupying an altogether more embarrassing position akin to that of some late-nineteenth-century Petersburger or Muskovite corresponding with a Parisian or Londinian contemporary. For Chrissakes, my Parisian or Londinian correspondent would have been well within his rights to write back, Pope Greg's been in his grave for going on three hundred years. When are you Russkies going to get with the fucking trans-national calendrical programme? And so, with the inauguration of this here post, dated 30 October 2006, I've firmly resolved to bring the Ruggersweltian chronicle fully abreast of the events of the 29th of that selfsame instant.'

‘All to the good, MDF, all to the good; and yet, talking as we were just now of anachronistic headlines, is it not rather incumbent upon you for consistency's sake to bring the headline—that is to say, the title--of this post fully abreast of its dateline?’

‘Why, yes, of course ittis; and so I have done: the last post was entitled “TEoEH: Part One”, and this one is entitled “TEoEH: Part Two”.’

'Good heavens! Surely something in the course of the past two months and sixpence has displaced Miss Houghington's Aresnalophobic education as the keynote of your lifeworld?'

'I'm a frayed knot, DGR. Nay, come to think of it, why should I affect the merest soup's son of pusillanimity on this score: I'm positively proud to aver that as of 30/10/06 I remain unswervingly devoted to my heaven-sent vocation of Arsenalophobic pedagogue. Surely you didn't imagine that such an arduous course of study, a veritable pedipilular Gradus ad Parnassum could be comprehensively swotted in a single evening's micro-chinwag.'

'Erm, well, of course not. But I was rather assuming it could be got out of the way over the course of two or, at most, three such micro-chinwags.'

'Here you show your true colours: viz., those of a dyed-in-the wool pedipilulophobic cricket snob. There's absolutely no call for you to assume, on the basis of the fact that our matches are played out over the course of a compact hour-and-a-half as against the average week and a half required by one of yours, that a full understanding of the rules of the game alone--to say nothing of the infinitely more complex sociological-cum-anthropological study of a particular pedipilular subculture that is now in point--ought to be correspondingly foreshortened. Indeed, as far as the subcultural considerations go (thatistersay, from my admitted cricketophilically benighted standpoint), I'm inclined to think that things are a good deal less complex on your end. After all, doesn't your fandom at arse, for you lot, amount simply to a continuous unison thwacking of the okies of a fistful of former imperial dependants with a massive St-George-Cross or Union-Jack-patterned beach towel? Whereas for us pedipulophiles, its a wee bit more complicated. Say, for example, you're a 45-year-old chippy-proprietor from (and in) Salford: on the one hand, you've never wanted to have anything to do with Manchester City, on account of its official municipal affiliation with the awful, satanic Big Marmite Jar to the south; and yet, on the other hand, you're all too keen to disassociate yourself from the MU Premiership bandwagon, brimming full as it is by now of Gucci-walleted, Blue-Tooth-sporting Londinian latecomers advertising their solidarity with the so-called working class by way of their support of a northern club; and then, on the third hand, you don't want to give offence to your mum, a die-hard Blackburn supporter on account of dear old great-uncle Fred's two-month stint as a winger for that club just before the war--'

'--I thought we were confining ourselves to the consideration of a single pedipilular subculture, namely the Arsenalophobic one.'

'Why, so we are in the main DGR, so we are; only I thought it was high time that you got at least a fleeting first-class train-compartment's view of how the other 999,999 /1,000,000 live, lest you should continue supposing (as I suppose you have supposed all along) that the extreme pitch of pedipilulomania evinced by us Arsenalophobes is unique to our subculture.'

'I have never supposed anything of the kind, and my resentment of your last digression springs not in the slightest from my ignorance of the state of affairs alluded to therein, but rather entirely from my utterly imperturbable indifference thereunto. Believe you me, MDF, I can never be moved by any laundry list of the travails of the beleaguered football fan, be it ever so so long or tear-stained; and to recite such a list in my hearing is but to bring coals to Newcastle--or, rather, to perform the perfectly antithetical act--'

'--say, to bring dog turds to Marseilles or inner London?'

'I couldn't--for two or more reasons--have come up with a more serviceable metaphor myself. But in any case, and by way of obviating any premature divagations on the subject of Arsenalophobia qua subculture, let me remind you here that as of the narrative stage reached at the end of the last post, whatever it may have transmogrified into since, your Arsenalophobic education of Miss Houghington was merely a one-off tactical feint intended to eventuate in the latter's strictly professional placation of her boss, Mrs Todd. And so, from my DGR-ian shop steward's point of view, the question immediately to be posed and answered is Was this feint successful?'

'Erm, well, I dunno; thatistersay, the answer rather depends on your definition of success.'

'My definition--viz., the maintenance of her Occuvisual situation--is as succinct and categorical as can be.'

'Why, then according to that definition, it was resoundingly successful. On the other hand, according to my (and presumably her) rather more nebulous and yet rather more exacting definition--viz., the shoring up or boosting of her Occuvisual situation--it fell rather wide of its intended mark. Indeed, according to my lights (if not hers), it was a colossal schlong-up or even outright failure. You see, when Esmeralda and I next rendezvous'd, an hour or so after the ensuing workday--i.e., well after her presumptive preparation and submission of the accursed report alluded to in the last post--'

'--Surely now is as good a time as any to drop the inverted commas and commence the observance of strict, non-conversational narrative decorum--'

'Surely ittis, DGR, surely ittis. So, anyway, as I would have said had I been observing SN-CND from the beginning:'

When Esmeralda and I next rendezvous'd, an hour or so after the ensuing workday, &c., (and, refreshingly contrary to custom, at my place) she was, as they say, in a right huff.

'Now don't tell me you didn't finish the report.' [I knew full well shed've been in an exponentially righter huff if such had been the case, but as I'd slept in a full conjectural hour after her departure in the morning, this was a perfectly tenable ice-breaker.]

'Oh no: I finished the report, all right, and handed it punctually and personally to Tamsin at 8:45. It was with the aftermath of the handing-in that my troubles began--or, rather, re-began.'

'So, then, she wasn't fully satisfied with the report?'

'Well, at first, she seemed to be, and then some: "Impressive work," she said whilst thumbing it through, all the while sporting this sort of...I dunno...smugly dictatorial...'

'...Mussoliniesque might just be the word you're looking for--'

'--Yes, that's it: she was sporting this Mussoliniesque frown of...I dunno...grudging approval. And then, whilst riffling towards the back cover, she suddenly broke out into a veritable beam of parental triumphalism and, looking back up at me, exclaimed--'

'--Let me guess: "Not so impressive as to be too impressive to be true, but--"'

'--No, she said, "Diabolically impressive work! In my 12 years at Occuvision, I've never seen its like, in point of proficiency, professionalism and presentation within such a rapid turnaround time-frame. Indeed, I'm hard-pressed for an adequate comparison to anything I've seen within these walls or without them. It's like...like.."

'And here, Nigel, I honestly don't know what came over me. I guess I just got a bit headstrong, or started feeling my Arsenalophobic oats or whatever. In any event, I somehow couldn't resist interjecting, verbatim, "...like a hat-trick worthy of the diabolical Thierry Henry?''

'At which point, her beam collapsed into the glummest, the most glowering, of grimaces, and, with her thumb resting literally on the last page of the report, she laid the thing spreadeagled flat on her desk, and beckoned me downwards for an inspection of its contents. "Now, lookee here," she said. "Column JJ, indicating the non-adjustable shortfall in revenues for allowable expenditures, is highlighted in burnt vermillion. Now, as you surely must know by now, courtesy of our last brown-bag luncheon on report-formatting--correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall seeing you there--in official company reports all non-adjustable shortfalls are to be highlighted in raw ochre, the better to showcase their intrinsic, metaphysical, oil-and-water-like incommensurability with their adjustable counterparts. No, I'm afraid this just won't do. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to re-do the lot."

'And by when?' I had the confounded...balls to ask her.

'"By when?!" she snarled back. "Why, by last Tuesday week, of fucking course!"

'And so I re-did the report for her, by as close to last Tuesday week as I could manage; namely, about an hour-and-a-half ago. Christ! What a bitch of a time I had, highlighting one column after another, page after umpteenth-hundredth page, and trying to make sure all the while that I didn't mistake the burnt ochre square in the colour-palette for the raw one. Do you think there's such a pathological condition as burnt-ochre-stroke-raw-ochre colour-blindness?'

'I hope there isn't.'

'Me too. Cos if there is, my arse is neutral-ochre grass, etc.'

Here, I let about a half a minute of silence elapse, so as to grant the ochre-hued particulate bits of Esmeraldan paranoia-cum-resentment their due settling interval, before venturing to ask:

'Not to sound like a broken 78-RPM record playing through the wormhole-stroke-horn of a 22-hour-transcending time-warp, but is there any chance that it was, at bottom, your violation of this official chromatic policy rather than her erect Arsenalophobic hackles that occasioned her re-commissioning of the report?'

'Not a chance.'

'You mean you either know or conjecture that she was making all that bit up about burnt vermillion-versus-raw ochre highlighting?'

'I dunno if she was actually making it up--after all, as her memory correctly served her, I had skipped out on the last brown-bag luncheon, the last half-dozen or so of them actually. But I do know for a fact that her own attendance at these luncheons had and has been spotty at best; indeed unapologetically so: you see, it's pretty much an idée recue in the finance division that these brown-bag luncheons are nothing but off-season pantomimes--you know, opportunities for the drama-school washouts in marketing and advertising to let off some steam and strut their stuff, with no material short-term or long-term effect on company policy. Our motto--that is, her motto as well as mine--is: Blow it off unless or until it shows up in a mass-circular email memo. So it was decidedly out of character for her to fall back on a BBL-originating directive like that. But even supposing against supposable supposition that my violation of this so-called policy had really mattered to her--well, then: how could she have scanned through literally hundreds of columns of brilliant, retina-scorching burnt vermillion without taking notice of their burnt-vermillion-ness at some early point along the way?'

'OK: you've made your case, and a stainless-steel fire-'n'-waterproof jobber of a one it is. Now, I know you've been champing at the bit all along to stampede into my Arsenalophobic confessor's booth, but you must understand that it hasn't been in a n****rdly nit-picking spirit that I've been posing to you these non-Arsenalophobic counterfactual scenarios. You see, insofar as it's possible, I'd like to spare you any deeper water-mark of immersion in my subculture than you'd be game for independent of your present Occuvisual crisis.'

'I understand that, darling, and I'm incomparably grateful for it. But seeing as how a deeper immersion is called for, towards the solution of this crisis--'

'--I'm not atoll sure that it is. You see, it seems to me that it wasn't on account of any Arsenalophobic obliviousness evinced by your riposte to Tamsin that it failed of achieving its desired effect. Indeed, taking it on its own, I'm most impressed--and, indeed, floored--by its more general pedipilular aptness.'

'How so?'

'How so? Do you really need to ask? You likened your report to a hat-trick comprising the triple virtues of proficiency, professionalism and presentation.'

'I'm afraid I still don't understand.'

'Don't you see? Are you utterly gormless on the score of your own metaphor-fabricating brilliance?'

'I'm a frayed sew.'

'Three virtues in one report pulled off by a single reporter equals three goals achieved by a single player in a single match equals an Occuvisual hat-trick pulled off your gorgeously fleet diggits.'

'I'm afraid I had no idea that a hat-trick had anything to do with doing things in threes.'

'Well, you do now--not that I lend the wee-est degree of credence to your profession of ignorance on that score. Doubtless you remember a good deal more of the rules and folkways of the game from your Wimbledonian days than you're consciously aware of--or, more likely, than you're willing to admit.'

'Perhaps. [She, incidentally, presenting the very allegorical image of enigmaticness in so placidly declining to opt for either of my posited alternatives by way of this simple Perhaps.] In any event, clearly the aptness of the hat-trick metaphor either went quite over her head or was drowned out by the apparent un-aptness of the Arsenal reference.'

'Clearly.'

'Well, now that I trust I am finally ensconced in the Arsenalophoic confessor's seat, I ask you: "What element or aspect of the reference was it that rendered it so positively un-apt?"'

'Why, the reflective metaphorical glory it shone on M. Henry, of course.'

'Whatjermean, "reflective metaphorical glory"? She termed my performance on the report "diabolical": you can't get much more unglorious than that.'

'No, you can't: but all the same she did so by way of praising you, however ironically or mock-enviously; and in likening the praiseworthy qualities of your report to Thierry Haitch's performance on the pitch, you transitively ascribed these selfsame praiseworthy qualities to that performance.'

'I see. Or, rather, I saw it all along; only I rather assumed the fundamental negativity of diabolical would somehow shine through the wash of irony.'

'So it doubtless would have done, had your common Arsenalophobia been a clubbish given from the get-go, along the lines of our common Kenophobia. Remember how, about a week and a half ago, you reminded me that we had to return a coupla videos to the rental shop, so as to avoid a trifling two-quid late fee, and I said to you, "Christ! You're a regular Ken Livingstone, hal'pennying and shillinging me to death like this"?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, I could get away with likening you to Ken then without any fear of your resenting the likeness, inasmuch as I knew full well that you hated him full as much as I did. But Tamsin knows nothing of the kind on the score of your Arsenalophobia and, indeed, has assumed by default that you are of the opposite camp; hence the path of least mental resistance for her consists in construing any potentially positive appraisal of a Gunner on your part as an actual, wholehearted endorsement of said squad member or club affiliate.'

'So you're saying we should throw in the J-Cloth on this one: that your Arsenalophobic coaching so far has been and always will be all pretty much for naught? That Tamsin's motto is pretty much Once a Crypto-Gooner always a Crypto-Gooner, and that I might as well start applying for a new position at Arsenal club HQ?'

'Now you're simply being a perverse shag, cos you know full well that I'm saying no such thing. What I'm saying is what I'm sure you know full well I can't help saying: namely, that you're going to have to be far more selective, far more judicious, in your Gunnerly name-dropping; that you're going to have to save your next Arsenalic reference for an occasion when you find Tamsin categorically, unironically denouncing, inveighing against or carping at some bête noire of hers.'

'But it might be weeks before such an occasion arises.'

'Yes, or even months. Naturally, I'm sympathetic to your impatience; naturally, I understand you're hoping to get this whole Occuvisual shit-blot squared away by the end of the week. But it just ain't gonna happen. As we Arsenalophobes are wont to say when the Gunners happen to be levitating over the table-top a coupla weeks into the season: Neither was Emirates built nor shall Highbury be demolished in a single day.'

'I'd better add that proverb to the repertoire: it could come in useful.'

'Indeed, but only--'

'--Yesyesyes, I know: but only in its proper, non-ironic, categorically deprecatory context. So that's it? You've said your peace? The session's adjourned sine die and its back to the dreary old drawing board for my miserable, lonely Occuvisual self?'

'Well, not just yet. In fact, at bottom, the contextually-centred bit of my critique of your performance was really just a digression from this main acontextually-centred bit that's about to follow; and, to be frank, it was mostly for the sake of letting off some Arsenalophobic steam on my end that I homed in on the context to begin with--cos if I had damned the old torpedoes and stampeded full speed ahead towards the bull's-okie according to my red-filtered Arsenalophobic bull's lights, well, believe you me it wouldn't have been pretty (here, phrases like "restraining order" spring to mind); but luckily I was clear-headed and perspicacious enough to realise that what was okie-burstingly obvious to me qua inveterate Arsenalophobe might not be so obvious to you qua pseudo-Arsenalophobic greenhorn--'

'--namely--'

'--Namely, that one must never--nay, that it should never even cross one's mind to do so--advert to a Gunner's pedipilular prowess as a thing-in-itself, in the course of an Arsenalophobic slur or diatribe.'

'Why not? Or, rather, how not? Isn't that one of the main things--if not the main thing--you lot hate about Arsenal, that they're so bloody competent?'

'Yes and no,' I semi-concur, through clenched teeth and whilst tucking me right hand under me left arse cheek. 'To be sure, in the absence of that selfsame sheer bloody competence the gloriously incendiary, endlessly re-catalysing chemical reaction that is Arsenalophobia could never take place. But as a thing-in-itself it is something that can command only admiration. You see, it's only in solution with the sheer, unsportsmanlike depths of mendacity and puerility to which the Gunners habitually descend in their efforts to close the gap between mere competence and outright mastery or supremacy (which unsportsmanlike conduct, for its part, would be merely laughable in a squad of lesser pedipilular prowess)--that this competence can come into its true Arsenalophobic own; such that to allude to an instance of Gunnerly competence in the presence of an Arsenalophobe without throwing in a complementary allusion to an instance of Gunnerly unsportsmanship is like...I dunno...help me out here: you passed an A-level in chemistry didn't you--?'

'--it's like...erm...puffing hydrogen-powered cars in the presence of someone who's allergic to water?'

'Well, I'd like to think we Arsenalophobes aren't such rare freaks of nature as these aquaphobes whereof you speak, but yes: I think you get the gist of it.'

'Good. So then, to filter what you said earlier about proper contexts through what you said just now about chemical constituents: what I really should be looking out for, vis-a-vis my next bout of Gunnerly name-dropping, is a moment when Tamsin happens to complaining about the simultaneous competence and childishness of some person or institution within the company?'

'Ideally, yes.'

'So when you said I might have to wait months for my next pseudo-Arsenalophobic opportunity, you really ought to have said years, or possibly even decades?'

'No. In all candour, I ought to have said a fortnight at most, only I didn't want to get your hopes up before I'd fully apprised you of what you were up against. Trust me: you needn't be long in waiting; for, in the immortal words of Sir Thomas More, Every organisation hath its Machiavel or Wenger....'

There now ensued a decidedly tense week-and-a-half throughout which my girl proved, on the whole, to be as consistently stroppy and uncuddleable as a PMT-afflicted she-porcupine; proved on the whole to be so, I say, most quantifiably and empirically in virtue of the fact that she rang me up on six of those ten consecutive nights--among which six figured two consecutive weekend ones--to let me know (and only to let me know, before ringing off immejiately afterwards) 'that I needn't come round [i.e., to her place].'

[DGR:] 'Even so, the glass remained two-fifths full; i.e., you were suffered to come round on the remaining four nights.'

'Why, so it did and so I was, DGR; and, TBS, on each and every one of those four she started out brimming full of such ardent self-recriminations on the score of her neglect of YFCT as toasted me heart schlongles to sublime perfection. Nonetheless, with each successive rendezvous, the proportion of the stayover devoted to the initial self-recriminatory module (including its coitional sub-module) grew ever slimmer in relation to its inevitable Nigel-recriminatory sequel, such that by Rendezvous No. 4, I'd scarcely time enough to strip down to my string vest and shorts before being obliged to weather the onslaught of her boilerplate lecture on the subject of "this is all your fault." And as for the solo off-nights back at the maisonette; well, whilst I managed merrily enough to piss away the first two of them in a Hoegaarden-cum-Pizza-Express-saturated attitude of rationalised bachlelor-ly devil-may-care-ness, by the third of them I'd pretty much inaugurated a pizza-free routine of frenzied beer-swilling and chain-smoking, fearing as I did by then, and not without reason, that I had lately embarked not on a mere Woolwich ferry day-trip of quasi-bachelorly semi-celibacy, but on a veritable transatlantic Queen Mary-voyage devoted to that selfsame semi-monastic lifestyle. Luckily enough, though, just after dusk on night number 11, I received an Esmeraldan bell not merely inviting, but positively exhorting me to come over toot sweet, on account of a certain development that required my immejiate input.'

'What's this all about, then?' I stroppily queried upon my arrival, from just inside the front doorway, whilst enduring the usual round of Lucy-issuing trouser-cuff chompings.

'What it's all about,' Esmeralda says, whilst prancing up to me, peeling off my jacket and hanging it up on the coat rack, quite in defiance of recent custom, 'is I think I'm finally beginning to make some Arsenalophobic inroads.'

'How so?' I says, through a sceptical, sideways, schlong-eyed squint worthy of a Columbo.

'Well,' she replies, luxuriantly flinging herself on to the couch and motioning me to do likewise (which I do do, albeit in an altogether more wooden, spartan attitude), 'towards the end of the afternoon today I happened to walk in on Tamsin whilst she was in the midst of a phone conversation with this guy by the name of Steven Milliband, vice president of product planning. "Oh, yes Mr Milliband," she was saying when I pitched up, "by Friday at the latest. No, that shouldn't be a problem. Of course I will do, Mr Milliband. Thank you." Then, she rang off and exclaimed to me, in an imploring sort of tone, "That contemptible little shit!" "Which contemptible little shit?" I naturally asked. "Why, Steve Milliband, of course," she said. "He just expects me to drop everything I'm doing, and, at two days' notice, bugger off to fucking East Anglia with a custom-tailored Power Point presentation in tow. Of course, it's absolutely and exclusively typical of him to make such exorbitant demands of a sister division. "Ton Koopman [that's our CEO at the parent company down in Amsterdam] will have me out on the carpet if my prognostications aren't underpinned by a solid foundation of numbers," he wines; as if I should care! Would Susan Acheson [VP of marketing] or Jan Haitink [VP of product production] dare demand anything of the kind of me, at such short notice, regardless of whatever torments Meynheer Koopman might have in store for them? I don't think so: they know their respective places, exalted enough though these may be. But Stevereno, just because he's the golden boy newly arrived from Visitech, whose footsie position he managed to jack up by a few fractions of a point courtesy of his introduction of the oil-absorbent, non-slip nose-guard (which wasn't even his invention, by the way), has somehow got it into his puny little skull that he's above the usual professional courtesies." And here I had the good genius to chime in, "The little brat's a regular Thierry Henry." Whereupon Tamsin fixed me with the most appreciative, and, at the same time, the most searching gaze, and exclaimed, "Why, so he is! But where did you get that from? I'd have hardly expected such an apt comparison from a crypto-Gooner such as yourself." At which point, before I was obliged to elaborate the comparison (as if I could have done!), the phone started ringing again, and Tamsin presently found herself mired in a second bout of conversational rigmarole with Mr Milliband, from which I circumspectly recused myself amid much bowing and scraping.'

'Which moment of rigmarole-cum-self-recusance, I take it, marks the end of your most recent interview with Tamsin.'

'Even so.'

'Splendid. Now, I can tell straightaway that what Tamsin was looking for when she asked you "where you'd got that from"--and what she'll be looking for tomorrow, assuming another Milliband-bashing moment arises during the course thereof--'

'Oh, I'm sure it will do. This Milliband bloke's her bête noir, and now that he's got her by the presentational short hairs, I can't imagine she'll manage to--'

'--Good. You've told me more than enough, darling. As I was saying, what she's going to be looking for is a match-specific citation.'

'You mean a reference to some particular moment in some particular match when M. Henry behaved in this characteristically puerile manner?'

'That's right.'

'Ugh! Just the level of pedipilular nitty-grittyism I was hoping I could avoid altogether. After all, I'm totally at sea when it comes to that sort of thing, seeing as how I haven't seen a match--apart from that World Cup one back at Roger and Susan's--for going on ten years.'

'Pshaw, what arrant self-derogating nonsense! Remember Wimbledon! It's just like riding a bike: it'll all come back to you when you're back on the pitch; you'll see. In any case, if we script and choreograph this properly, any such nitty-gritty-istic lapses on your part won't ever come to light. But before we can even move on to the scripting and the choreographing, we need a commensurately exemplary moment in the annals of Gunnerism to script and choreograph. Now, my personal favourite is this T. H. kvetchvest in the final seconds of an Arsenal-Blackburn match dating from way back in '02. It's perfectly tailored to Tamsin's present situation in so many respects, not the least respectable of which being the match's inter-league setting.'

'How so?'

'Well, because, assuming this Visitech company that Mr Milliband hails from occupies a slightly higher position on the corporate totem pole than the one occupied by Occuvision--correct me if I'm wrong, but I did read as much between the lines of your conversational recap--'

'--Yes: you read as much aright. Go on.'

'Why, then, Tamsin'll be cast by implication in the role of the driver of the plucky little Championship-side of a steam engine (i.e., Blackburn/Occuvision) who managed to overtake the pompous Premiership state-of-the-art bullet-train (i.e., Arsenal/Visitiech).'

'Sounds fucking brilliant!' she says, whilst dashing over to the dining-room table to grab her scribbling block and biro (in case I forgot to mention it, we were sitting on the front room couch, just like last time round). The butcher's dizaine seconds comprised by her round trip, however, are enough to give me second thoughts as to the aptness of this admittedly fucking brilliant similitudinal vehicle to the present scheme, which 2ndTs are ultimately vocalised as follows:

'On second thought, I'm not so sure this particular example is best suited to our purposes, admittedly fucking brilliant though it is.'

'And why not?'

'Well, because--and here, at the risk of coming off like a 1970s-style male chauvinist pig, I'm going to have to draw on a feminine stereotype (but what choice do I have knowing as little as I do about the specifically Tamsinian Arsenalophobic habitus?)--stereotypically your female football fans don't really go in for the exhaustive hoarding of eldritch archival club lore, which savours rather too gamily of masculine anoraksim in their nostrils. In the fancy of one of these amazons, the mere mention of a phrase like "back in '02" is likely to conjure up the horrifying spectre of an interior-design-blighting mural collage of posters, autographed photos, ticket stubs, match programmes, drug-test results and the like. No, your stereotypical female pedipilulophile likes to travel light, and to keep her frame of reference squarely focussed on the old Haitch and Enn. Such that if you start hearkening back to a five-year-old match in Tamsin's presence, she'll in all not-unlikelihood suss that you've been briefed beforehand by a bloke (i.e., me), and possibly even resent the hearkening as a thing-in-itself, supposing (as I have at least a half-arsed reason to do, knowing as much as I know of Cuthbert's Arsenalophilia) that it is this selfsame stereotypically masculine aspect of Cuthbert's Goonerism, rather than its Gunnerly provenance eo ipso, that lies at the root of her Arsenalophobia.'

'What a fine textbook definition of "mixed signals" this is turning out to be! First you're telling me I need to be more specific, and next you're telling me that if I'm too specific I'll give the game away. '

Fuck me with two-thousand volts of alternating current if she wasn't on to something there! And yet, seeing as how she'd managed to hit the main bull's schphincter of the appropriate course of action only by way of missing the subsidiary one by a mile, I had no choice but to preface my reply with a modest corrective, AFF (inclusive of the first full stop within the next inverted comma-bracketed stretch of text): 'No, in point of fact, the signals I was sending were as unmixable as those of BBC1 and Radio 4: the main shortcoming of the Arsenal-Blackburn reference that I was trying to get at was not its specificity but its antiquity, and I was about to go on to suggest an alternative reference to a no less specific but much more recent match-moment. Still, it seems to me, now that you've made an issue of it, that excessive specificity on its own might serve, in your words, to give the game away. So here--in light of your insight--is what you do. When the next Milliband-bashing occasion arises, you say to Tamsin, "he's behaving just like Thierry Henry did at the Champions Final on 17 May"--no, strike the date (it's too specific), and let it simply read "at the Champions Final".'

[E, scribbling:] '...At the Champions Final . OK, what next?'

'Next: "'...when he started pissing his pants in the presence of Terje Hauge"--no make that simply "in the presence of the referee" (pity, though, that you won't be able to advert to the poetic justice inherent in the idearrof T.H. being bested by a bloke sharing his initials) "over Sammy Eto's supposedly 'offside' goal at a convenient 14 minutes shy of match time..."--no, make that "at a conveniently late moment in the match"...'

I could tell the instant I answered the blower at 7 pm next day that things had not gone well back at Occuvision, and accordingly hunkered down for another spell of enforced celibacy, this one being (seeing as how, Occuvisually speaking, I'd cast my last saving throw the night before) to all appearances prospectively permanent.

'Oh, Nigel, dearest,' Esmeralda commenced on the other end, 'I fucked up. I royally fucked up.'

'Oh really?' I said, trying to sound concerned, whilst fretfully scouring my desk-drawers in search of that perennial bachelorly cooter-mint, the so-called Little Black Book (a decided misnomer on both adjectival counts in my case, as my LBB happens to be both palm-Bible-sized and bound in a particularly deliciously U hue of well-scuffed, off-orange shagreen). 'Howjermean?'

'Well, predictably enough, Tamsin did make mention again of Steve Milliband, and I dutifully sprang into action with my Champions League final reference, as per your instructions.'

'Oh, yeah?' I absently replied, momentarily distracted as I was by the apparition of the very volume-let I was seeking; then, recollecting where I was and to whom I was speaking, I added, 'I mean, there's a good girl. So how did she react?'

'Quite promisingly at first. I mean, I got as far as mentioning Thierry Henry's behaviour at that particular match; whereupon she began to smile encouragingly, just as she'd done the last time round, and then...?'

'And then...?'

'...And then, well, you see, as vague as your account of the match was, it did include a specific mention of a specific name...you know, the name of that player from Barcelona...'

'...Sammy Eto.'

'That's right. And so, you see, out of fear that I'd forget the name--which I did do--I'd biro'd it down on my inner wrist, taking care, mind you, to wear a long-sleeved jumper today so as to keep it concealed until I needed have recourse to it--'

'--And then Tamsin caught you having recourse to it.'

‘Yeah, of course. Mind you: at first she put a totally different spin on the consultation, cos you see, I’d written the name down in red ink; so when she caught me peering down at a bare wrist criss-crossed with red lines, her first thought, naturally, was that I’d tried to off meself for some reason or other; and so she naturally came rushing to me crying out, “Merle! What have you done?” and seizing hold of the adjoining hand, she started going on about how she understood that this was a stressful time for all of us, what with this and that and the other, and yet, of course (she said) that was no reason to resort to such extremes of desperation, etc.; all the while, of course, peering down at the supposed wound, which, of course she eventually managed to construe as the upside-down sequence of capitals that it in fact was, and to decode the name denoted thereby; whereupon she fetched me a right hefty slap against my right cheek, exclaiming, “I should have known! You’ve been briefed. Crypto-Gooner, avoid my sight.” What could I say? I'd been caught literally red-handed--'

Meanwhile, I had begun and completed my thumb-actuated survey of the contents of the old BB, and been dismayed--albeit hardly surprised--to discover that the overwhelming majority of numbers contained therein were prefixed by East Anglian dialling codes, that the underwhelming Londinian minority appertained almost exclusively to various takeaway establishments, and that the sole, straggling, female-hailing exception to either category was comprised by the diggits of that fat old doxy Maggie Elms, recorded not in the midst of our most recent disastrous encounter at the Ape (which was, in any case, of practically prehistoric provenance), but some two years' previous, during my Bush House chippying days. Clearly the whole BB-unearthing enterprise had been an exercise not so much in wishful as in wistful thinking.

'--Well, in fact, literally red-wristed --'

'--Oh, please do spare me your anorakish hair-splitting for once, Nigel. After all, grim and meagre as it is, it's the only scrap of consolation I've managed to salvage from this whole fracas--the thought of having been caught literally red-handed.'

'Yes, yes, yes, of course, and far be it from me to wish to rob you of it: anorakish reservations aside, it's a real gem worthy of permanent display in your jeweller's showroom of anecdotage.'

'A jewel which I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities to retail in the coming weeks and months--i.e., to my queue-mates down at the unemployment office.'

'Oh, please do spare me your perverse-shaggish hand-wringing for once, Esmeralda. After all--well, in fact, for all I know not after all after all, in light of the fact that you haven't brought me fully up-to-date yet--but, anyway, assuming that Tamsin's next move after fetching you a blow across the chops wasn't to give a bell to security requesting your immejiate removal from the premises--'

'--No, I assume not--not that I really have any way of knowing one way or the other, seeing as how I immejiately fled the room and haven't seen Tamsin since--'

'--a goodly portion of that since being comprised, presumably, by the remainder of the work day; during which you were, again presumably, suffered, by the confederated inertia of the powers that be, to cower unmolested in your cubicle.'

[E, through a receiver-overdriving sigh:] 'Yes.'

'From all of which I conclude--and please correct me if I'm adverting to an overly-anorakish definition of any salient term of the following--that for the moment your job at Occuvision remains nominally secure.'

'Yes. And I suppose you're now going to argue that I have nothing to worry about; that, Tamsin's repugnance to my alleged Crypto-Goonerism notwithstanding, unless and until she can come up with a solid professional case for my being fired, it'll be smooth sailing for me at Occuvision from here on out.'

'Whoa, Nelly! I was about to argue nothing of the kind. TBS, I imagine she'd already had such an allegedly solid professional case collated and three-ring-bound for ready reference, after the fashion of any boss worth his or her pound-of-flesh-hungry salt, long before she learnt of your alleged Crypto-Goonerism; and I can but assume that she's already faxed a few of the most incriminating pages therefrom to the axemen up at HR by now. Even so, it'll surely take at least a week or two for the axe to be properly whetted and primed for the dismissive death-blow, which--if you'll do me the favour of stomaching this noxious metaphoric schlongtail--gives us more than enough time to reconfigure our side and plot a new match-plan.'

'Now, here you're being the perverse shag. No--strike that: it goes beyond being perverse--you've crossed over into the realm of sheer barmyness! What side--what match-plan--can you possibly be thinking of? Didn't I make it clear enough earlier? She knows you're behind all of my Arsenalophobic posturing. There's nothing more we can do. We've hit rock bottom.'

'Why, so we have done. But as this bloke name of Tim Bottoms said at our most recent brown-bag luncheon--'

[E, with evident envy bordering on outright cuntish malice] '--Oh, I see, that's the secret of your success: you attend the brown-bag luncheons.'

'No: it's just that I gather we've a different corporate culture to yours--you lot are like the Russians under Krushchev, whereas (as you'll see) we're more like the Chinese under Mao--but anyway, as Tim said, apropos, incidentally, of our lowest-ever ebb in enema revenues, "The Chinese have a proverb: "Lock bottom" is simpry anothel wold fol "loof of mighty pagoda".'

'Yeah, and so? The relevance of this fortune-cookie proverb to the price of the tea I'll be serving up to Tamsin for the fag-end duration of my Occuvisual career rather escapes me, I'm afraid.'

'As well it might escape anyone who, unlike meself, has not already plunged through the tradesman's trap-door of the aforesaid roof, nor beheld the majestic vaulting interior of the pagoda in all of its luminescent oriental splendour.'

'Oh, for Chrissake! You speak liddres, glasshoppel. What fucking pagoda? What fucking splendour?'

'Why, the splendour of the magnificent pagoda of genuine Arsenalophobia, darling.'

'Oh, Christ!' she exclaimed [and here I fancied I heard an actual gasp on the other end (not that it's particularly easy to distinguish a gasp from a belch over a phone line)], 'Surely you don't mean--'

'--I'm afraid I mean just that, dearest: you are among us, and you must become one of us.'

'Why, that's...that's horrible!' she rejoined via a choked-up delivery worthy of a Doctor Who
heroine about to be cannibalised into cybernetic spare parts (as she surely could not have helped doing, given that I myself had just unthinkingly cannibalised verbatim a speech delivered by the Cyber Controller in the 1967 classic Troughton serial Tomb of the Cybermen [they constitute a kind of collective race memory for us Brits, dontcherknow, these classic Who scripts]).

'To the contrary, it's wonderful--or, rather, it will be. You know, Esmeralda, at this moment I really do feel like one of those so-called inspirational fourth-form English masters--like Mr Chips, say, or that bloke played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets' Society--standing at the threshold of his own classroom on the first day of term and nervously thumbing his tweed lapels for sheer maniacal envy of those young charges of his, in whose bosoms he is about to kindle the first flame of discovery of the genius of Shakespeare or Whitman. Cos you see, when you come down to it, just as all of humanity can pretty much be divided into those who adore the Bard and old Walt and those who have yet to read either of them, so they can in like fashion be divided into those who loathe Arsenal and those who have yet to see the Gunners in action on the pitch.'

'But surely,' says Esmeralda, recovering her pluck amidst much residual sniffling, 'there's a third category?'

'A third category?' I says, whilst quite failing to catch the nub of her gist, and panickedly wondering whether I've, in the Stateside idiom, covered all my bases.

'Yeah: that surely not-demographically-insubstantial category comprised by genuine Arsenal fans.'

'Oh, that lot,' I concede, through a great belly-laugh of surprise and relief. 'Well, they're hardly human are they?'

'If you say so. But look: even supposing your comparison of Arsenal-hating to Shakespeare-and-Whitman-loving holds up, it nonetheless must remain the case that just as there are hundreds if not thousands of millions of people who manage to live long and happy lives without encountering a single foot of Shakespeare or Whitman along the way, there exists a correspondingly massive population of happy-go-lucky total Gunnerly ignoramuses, among whom I fully intend to dwell for the duration of my natural. And anyway, as I seem to have to keep reminding you, this isn't about my potential aversion or lack thereto to a specific football club; it's about the peculiar significance that football as a whole has for me, its significance as a token of a particular prepubescent phase of my life that I've got, at all costs, for my sanity's sake, to keep cordoned off from the present. To plunge back into the whole weekend-consuming match-viewing lifestyle now, at this point in my life, would be as creepily unsettling as to devote every hour of my spare time to marathon screenings of 15-year-old Blue Peter episodes. But far be it from me to nip your promising career as an Aresanalophobic pedagogue in the bud: I'm sure with your charismatic enthusiasm you'd have little trouble persuading our borough community centre or local YMCA to offer a course in Arsenalophobia to some of our more impressionable hobbledehoys--you know, by way of getting them off the streets and back indoors and in front of the telly where they belong.'

'Erm, well, you must do what you feel is right, of course. In fact, I can't help standing agape in face of your sheer slack-lower-lipp'd pluck, your courage in the face of adversity, your cleavage to the old gun-holsters now that the going's got definitively tough, &c. Besides, far be it from me to nip in the bud your promising career as a job centre-queue stand-up raconteur--'

'--Late blow, Nigel, late blow--'

'--Not atoll, dearie, not atoll: I'm simply telling it like it is, straight-up on the rocks and sans chasseurs. But rest assured, I can play good cop as expertly as bad in the service of my cause. Picture yourself, if you will, a good month or two hence, sitting at your desk of the wee small minutes of a business morning, bright-okied and bushy-tailed, and furiously scanning the results pages of the BBC sport site, according to your matutinal wont, when Tamsin comes staggering in, a half an hour late, frazzle-coiffured, self-evidently knackered and 'govered to the gills, and poking her protuberant schnozz into your bidness en route to her office according to her Em-Double-ewe. "Good morning, Merle," she'll say, and then add, "What's that you're reading?, assuming the answer to consist in an allusion to whatever work-irrelevant bit of news-screedage you do in fact habitually and casually browse of the wee small minutes of a business morning nowadays--'

'--That'd be the Fortean Times--'

'--Ah, yes, of course: that veritable institutionalised apotheosis of work-irrelevancy, the venerable non-financial FT. But, as I said, you are, in fact, in the present prospective-world scenario, not so much casually browsing as furiously scanning the results pages of the BBC, specifically that page thereof appertaining to the Arsenal FC; scanning it, in fact, so furiously, that in framing your reply you can hardly be arsed to switch over to the deferential forelock-touching mode of address required of a professional subordinate. Instead, you snap back at her over your shoulder, in an attitude of well-nigh autistic heedlessness that simply cannot be faked by any mere pseudo-Arsenalophobe or potential crypto-Gooner, "Can you believe what that cunt Fàbregas got away with last night? Two goals and one assist in the teeth of initial referee'al opposition?" Whereupon, she immejiately recoils, with hands crossed horizontally, palm-outwards, in front of her okies, like some silent-movie vampire untowardly impaled in the gut by a shaft of sunlight, and feebly stammers out "I'm s-s-s-so s-s-s-orry Merle, I'm afraid I m-m-m-m-missed last night's m-m-m-m-match," and staggers backwards into the relative sanctuary of her office, there to lick her poseurly Arsenalophobic wounds for the duration of the workday. Hence, inductively and conclusively I submit to you, darling, the following question: Can you conceive a more apt anecdotal illustration of the phrase "cat-bird seat" than that furnished by the afore-narrated scenario?'

[E, audibly a-sighing and a-sniffling:] 'No.'

'Look, the first round of friendlies is starting up in a coupla days. That'll give you plenty of time to dip your toe in the water--and keep it there, if you like--whilst you make up your mind whether this is really for you. Heck, if you like, by way of alleviating the pressure even further, I can even program a few non-Arsenal matches into our pre-season syllabus--'

'--For the second time in the last half-hour, Nigel: this is not about Arsenal-hating--'

'--it's about football. Yes, I know; no need to remind me. But insofar as "football" for you equals "aggressive football fandom-stroke-antifandom" equals "full-grown blokes screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs"--and in light of your accounts of your Wimbledonian experiences with your old man, I can't help thinking that's very far indeed--you will, to a corresponding degree, find the trauma of your Arsenalophobic initiation alleviated by this friendly, and occasionally non-Gunnerly, context. For my part--and, TBF, whose other part matters as long as we're spectating in the privacy of our own front rooms rather than in the publicity of some smokey pub?--I can testify that I've never uttered an imprecation stronger than "Footfuck thyself with thine offending hoof, Henry!" during a pre-season Gunners' match; and that during non-Arsenal friendlies I'm as habitually, dispassionately well-behaved as a robotic kitten. So, what do you say?'

'Oh, all right. I suppose I might as well give it a go.

'Yeehaw!'

'--Provided, firstly, that not merely the first, but the initial full weekend of these friendly-viewing sessions is comprised by non-Arsenal-involving matches.'

'Well, that shouldn't be too hard to arrange.'

'I don't care how hard it is to arrange: if the broadcasting schedule won't cooperate, then find another source, be it a 200-quid video of a 20-year-old junior-league match on E-bay. And, secondly, provided you agree to take full responsibility for any regressive traumatic symptoms that might manifest themselves on my end along the way.'

'Well, of course I shall do. Never fear: in the person of me, your ever-patient tutor, you'll always have at your disposal a shoulder to cry on, an ear to scream baby-talk curses into, a face to slam a door into, Christ! even the occasional fatherly 50 p outlay on candyfloss if it should come to that--'

'--I'm not just talking here of short-term emotional support, Nigel. I'm talking also of short-term and potentially long-term financial support [as if my lately-pledged 50 p minimum didn't count as such!], in compensation for any missed workdays (I'm at the end of my sick-leave balance, you see, on account of this surreptitious five-day trip to Mallorca I took with Manisha last March), NHS-allotment-exceeding therapy hours, and the like.'

My, but aren't you laying it on a bit thick, to the chune of a full jar's-worth of your beloved Marmite! I was tempted to interject here, but I swallowed me old pride and held me equally-old piss, in laconically retrojecting the single disyllable, Agreed.

And the rest, as they say (or fucking well ought to say), is another glorious chapter in the annals of Arsenalophobic history. As of the date of this posting, Esmeralda's and YFCT's hearts beat as a single (albeit regrettably ruby-hued) organic unit--Christ! If anything, her ventricular half of the organ has been doing the lion-heart's share of the pumping of late. I would have you know, DGR, that just the other night, in the midst of a dream centring on the chicken-tikka pizza I grudgingly planned to share with her the following evening, I was rudely awakened by an Esmeraldan finger-prod, prompted by her insomniac musings on the question of--get this!--my pet question of whether the alphabetical overlap between Arséne Wenger's Christian name and the name of the side in his custody was sheer coincidence or the manifestation of some diabolical Arsenalophilic cosmic anti-entelechy. In short, I can but hope that it be merely a matter of time--i.e., the time requisite to our smoothing over our admittedly nettlesomely divergent attitudes to that ghastly viscosity answering to the proprietary name of M*****e--until these pseudo-pages are intermittently blackened by the typographical equivalent of the pitter-patter of tiny feet, accompanied, naturally, by such winsome, halting first baby-vocables as Fuck Thiewwy Ennui! And from there, of course, it'll be on to a full wardrobe of toddler football togs--duly patterned, according to exacting North-London-Arsenal-Basherly specifications, after the colours of the current roster of Gunner-besting clubs.................................................................................................................................................................[....]

'Whence issues this seemingly interminable ellipsis, MDF?'

'Whence? Why, from the sight of the droopy, comb-and-wax-neglected corners of your here-2-4 unfailingly impeccably twirled and upturned moustache, of course. Is something eating at you?'

'Well, truth be told, yes.'

'Say on.'

'Well, the title of the present post is, after all, "The Education of Esmeralda Houghington: Part Two."'

'Natur-like. What of it?'

'Why, then: assuming that the goal of that eponymous Education was Esmeralda's initiation into the true path or inner sanctum of Arsenalophobia...'

'...Even so, TBS, even so.'

'...well, confound it, then! Aren't you rather depriving us--or, more namely, me--of the main morsel of dramatic interest we've been craving all along, in (your) simply J-clothing over the whole transformation of this hard-line pedipiluphobe (i.e. Esmeralda) into a born-again pedipilulophilic Arsenalophobe?'

'Hardly.'

'Hardly, you have the confounded cheek to protest: Hardly? You who have essentially, thus far, provided me with the equivalent of a two-volume Divine Comedy gutted of everything save the first canto of the Inferno and the last twenty lines of the Paradiso?'

'I beg to differ, DGR. It seems to me that what I've done is given you the unabridged and unbowdlerised whole of the one really innersting book of the DC, the Inferno, and winnowed down the remaining two utterly boring ones to their respective one-sentences essences, viz. It took a whole lot of turrryin' to get up that hill and They all lived happily ever after up yonder in paradise. BYM, DGR: the whole ordeal of simply bringing Esmeralda round to submit to that inaugural match-viewing, as recounted above, cuntstitutes the prime meat of the drama; by comparison with which an equally exhaustive account of the ensuing tutorial itself would be about as engaging as a half-speed slow-motion video of the drying-out of the freshly-painted Emirates stadium, especially in your pedipilular-indifferent okies.'

'Doubtless it would be. But damn and blast it all!: at bum what's in point here is not the satisfaction of my dramaturgical curiosity, but, rather the avoidance of an insult to my readerly intelligence. Surely, you could be suffered to cull, out of the mass of Esmeraldan match-viewing footage, a few exemplary thingummies--Pardon me, but what's the proper televisual term for them...?'

'...Highlights?'

'...Thenkyaw, highlights, by way of proving to me that this lately-attested transmogrification of ethos is well-founded.'

'Well, I'll see what I can do, come the next post.'

[You, DGR, livid with well-nigh apoplectic rage:] 'Come the next post?'

'Yeah, through the judicious use of flashbacks and suchlike cinematic artifices. In the meantime, as I'm feeling a bit sleepy and have--say what you will otherwise--long since discharged the letter of my obligation to bring this post up to date with the current Ruggerian SOA, I bid you, DGR, a fond and fair Good Night, by way of my usual Soupy-Twistian formula, viz.:'

FINIS POSTIS

The Education of Esmeralda Houghington

2006-10-15T04:29:00.000+01:00

'Well then, MDF: now that we're safely on the far side of the non-coded postal border, I gather I am finally at liberty to re-pose the question I so untowardly broached on the near side thereof.'

'You gather aright, DGR. Pose away.'

'Thenkyaw-stroke-ahem: "In precisely what spirit did Esmeralda greet your Arsenalophobic unregerenate-ness (assuming that you saw fit to make a clean breast of the matter upon your return to London)?"'

'To which reposeage I am at last at liberty to rejoin: "Firstly: I did see fit to sani-hoover me tits clean of every particle thereof; and, secondly: she greeted this sanihooverage in an altogether not-uncharitable spirit-stroke-attichude."'

'Hmm. I see. It's all a bit unhelpfully and ambiguously litotic this rejoinder of yours, seeing as how it might plausibly signify anything from, on the minimal end of the charitable spectrum, her granting to YFBT a two-minute grace period of voluntary self-quittance of her residence against the phoning-in of a YFBT-restraining asbo; and, on the maximal end, her setting of, say, a ten-pound limit to her personal outlay towards the bibulous expenditures of the next convention of North London Arsenal Bashers.'

'TBS, DGR, I am more than sensible of the unhelpfulness and ambiguity of the rejoinder as it now stands; but you'll just have to hold your olde spectrum-pacing horses till I fill you in on the on the informing context thereof.'

'Which informing context consists in-stroke-of...?'

'...Well, it consists, first of all, in my Greenwich-clock-certified return to Esmeralda's place a full ten minutes shy of our beforehand-agreed-upon rendezvous time of 11 pm sharp.'

'And when you got there...'

'...And when I got there, I say, I found the ground floor of the place three-quarters darkened, and Lucy whining and pecking at my knees with all the desperation and relief of a dog that's been bereft of human companionship for the best part of a canine day.'

'From which sure signs you inferred that Esmeralda had not yet returned home.'

'Assuredly, and therefrom garnered an altogether warm-'n'-fuzzy-stroke-borderline-cuntish aura of smugness at having assumed, for a change (albeit de facto), the mantle of the responsible, early-retiring, dressing-gown-'n'-slippers-donning half of the couple. And so, basking in that selfsame aura, I self-congratulatorily cracked open a Hoegaarden from the fridge and settled down on the front-room couch, with Lucy curled up alongside me, to treat myself to a spot of telly courtesy of Esmeralda's newly-purchased global-map-sized flat-screen set (doubtlessly a full-scale replica of the model now gracing Mum and Dad's FR).

As luck would have it, a few button-clicks of the remote carry me to the perfect televisual after-dinner-mint to my Arsenalophobic triumph: viz., the opening seconds of the rebroadcast of a '92 Arsenal-ManU match on Sky TV Classic Sport. TBS, the Gunners are (or, rather, were) getting their arses reamed throughout; indeed, to such a monotonous mind-numbing extent that, come the 45-minute-mark, my attention starts to wander; that, indeed, I start to worry if Esmeralda and Tamsin haven't, after all, met with some mishap...

...but evidently these worries never get the better of me; for, the next thing I know, I'm alone on the couch and being rudely roused from a slumber of indeterminate length by a coupla Lucy's gruff 'Intruder Alert'-signifying barks, hailing from the vicinity of the front door. I'm just getting round to attempting to reconcile the discrepancy of the threat signified by these barks within with the familiar jingle-jangle-and-clink of keys without when the door is flung open and the mystery solved by a sudden influx of paired feminine voices, the one being immejiately identifiable as that of Esmeralda, the other unknowable from that of Eve. Fortunately, as mother nature has seen fit to hard-wire Paranoiac Self-Preservation as Subroutine No. 2 in her Rude Awakening Programme, I manage to grab hold of the remote and zap it ahead a coupla channels well in advance of the alightment of this selfsame still-gabbing (and as-yet-invisible) feminine vocal pair at some indeterminate site well to the arse of the couch; by which point the identifiable, Esmeraldan one of the two is saying:

'--for 1500 a month.'

'Oh, no! [spake The Alien One-ess] It's simply Colloseal the amount of space you've got here. And how nicely turned out it is, too. I tell you, we moved to the County to save money, but if I'd had any idea you could nick a place like this in London for a grand-and-a-half a month, we never would have shifted--Hullo! This must be Nigel!'

No sooner has my inaugurally-christened name been spoken than I feel a butcher's-quarter-dozen manifestly artificial fingernails scuttling none-too-gingerly-ly across the breadth of me right shoulder like...well, I was going to say like the talons of a rabid turkey buzzard, but let's face it: the natural diigits of a mere pathologised bird of carrion can scarcely compete with the unnatural ones of a phizless blokess in point of dilating a hapless bloke's schphincter with sheer gormless terror. All the same, you've got to roll with the punches, haven't you? So I do my level best to sublimate my terror into a ghastly, ear-joining, copraphagic grin before craning my head and right arm backwards and upwards towards the conjectural source of the scurriage, and exclaiming 'And this must be Tamsin!' (the syntactical reflectiveness of this exclamation constituting, N.B., a sublimation in its own right of my subsidiary stroppiness at having been singled out and presumably gawked at like some sodding exhibit in a museum of mummified freaks).

'Indeed!' says the afore-named blokess, mercifully disburdening my shoulder of her claw before mercilessly impaling my right hand therewith in a clasp of Vaderesque magnitude. 'How d'ye do? I've heard so much about you.'

'Ah, well,' I says, rising without letting go her hand (as if I could do!) and swivelling round the back of the couch with Travoltan aplomb so as to finish up erect (non-schlongwise, of course!) and phiz-a-phiz to her, with a chaste square metre or two of carpet between us. 'I've heard lots about you, as well. [Here, I stop short upon descrying out of me old PV, and through the crepuscular gloom of the kitchen-illuminated dining nook, the glint of a pair of Esmeraldan ocular daggers, just in time to add:] All of it favourable, of course.'

'Ah, how endearingly diplomatic of him to say so! I'm beginning to like this fellow already.'

(Just as I, concurrently-stroke-for-my-part, am beginning already to dislike this fellowess , in view of her by-now-apparently-habitual disposition to refer to YFCT in the third person.)

'So,' I quiz, availing myself of the preeminent (albeit not sole) prerogative of the first-arriver, 'how was your night out?'

'Oh' gasps Tamsin, at last withdrawing her mitt from mine for the sake of its participation in a flawless impression of a Chinaman with an acute case of appendicitis, 'it was simply wonderful. We went to to this pub just round the corner from here, name of The Busy...no, The Industrious...no, that's not right--'

'--The Sedulous Ape,' Esmeralda cuts in, accompanying her intervention with a combination of hand-and-head gestures that, in their shorthand implication of the full-on waist-to-floor imamic bow, call to mind all too vividly and pathetically my comportment in the presence of Mike Ayhern.

'That's right: The Sedulous Ape. Do you know it?'

'Yes,' I reply (herewith unsheathing a pair of Esmeralda-orientated ocular daggers of me own, knowing full well that these will be received not as a manifestation of the primal source of my resentment [viz. Esmeralda's preemptive appropriation of one of the prime patches of me stomping grounds, into whose mysteries she should by rights have been initiated solely in the company of YFCT qua cicerone] but rather as a manifestation of a secondary (but no less devastating) quibble centring on the self-evident SOA that at no point in the evening had she felt herself arsed to mention that she'd first heard of the place from me, 'As a matter of fact I do know it: intimately.'

'Well, as I was saying, it was simply wonderful. We were waited on personally, hand and foot, by the proprietor, this most charmant Frenchman--'

[YFCT, cutting in, asserting his territorial prerogative:] '--Ah yes, that'd be Mr Sedule.'

'Would it be? Well, I can't speak for Esmeralda, but as of now I'm not on a second-name basis with him. No: as of now, I know him only as...Pierre.'

'Hang on a bit,' I says, voicing my putting of 11 and two together less out of abstractly-blokish resentment of the apparently limitless chronopaghic power of tits, or out of concretely-blokish suspicion of post-Simian feminine high-jinks, than out of concretely bloke-neutral anticipation of a personally-beneficial, H.M.-licensed Simian windfall, 'Last I heard, the Ape closed up at 11 sharp, with a watertight prohibition of lock-ins on weeknights. Whereas it's now, what...?'

'...Five past one, roughly,' Esmeralda announces, her ocular daggers now transmogrified into a cuntishly smug array of eponymously scintillating gem-glints.

'Well, apparently,' Tamsin says, 'this prohibition is still very much in force. "Mais pour vous, mes petites ouiseaux," Pierre said, once he'd sent the rest of the punters packing, "I make a one-time especial exception." And the next thing I knew, the three of us were downing our third lock-in'd round of cognac, "sur le maison, bien sur," and if it hadn't been for the all-too-timely intervention of my trusty right-hand woman--[here she cuts a decidedly ambiguous look Esmeraldaward]--by now, for all I know, I'd be launching into my fifth or sixth round thereof--if not into the first or second round of an altogether more kinetically-exacting pleasure.'

'Well, erm, I don't know if we've got in any cognac' I says, not knowing bloody well what else to saya by way of cleansing me mental visual palate of the image of Sedgie's apron-stringed arse vigorously thrusting athwart Tamsin's spreadeagled legs atop me favourite table, 'but I fancy we'd be able to make up for those lost rounds of yours in some fashion.'

'Oh, how frightfully thoughtful of you, Nigel. A white wine spritzer would certainly do--or, failing that, a beer of more less the same blond hue.'

'Say, a Hoegaarden?'

'The very imprint I was thinking of! I tell you, Merle, this fellow can read my mind; we've got a connection--'

'--I'll get it,' says Esmeralda, preempting my first shuffling movements towards the kitchen with a homing-pigeonesque dash thitherward, and thereby vouchsafing me, for cor only knows how long, the jubious pleasure of a tit-a-tit with Tamsin.

'I see,' she says, uninvitedly settling down on the couch and picking up the remote from the coffee table, 'that you were watching one of my favourite programmes when we barged in. Do you mind [i.e., if I switch on the sound (which YFCT had decorously seen fit to mute during the same thumbflicking session that witnessed his changing of the channel)]?'

'Of course not,' I rejoin a bit absently, what with my belated efforts to suss out from the chubeal goings-on at least the genre (and, at most and ideally, the precise identity) of the programme I'd purportedly been so deeply immersed in a scant ten minutes earlier. The first (non-sound-accompanied) gander I get is a close-up of a pair of feminine hands cupping a butcher's-dozen off-white, sponge-textured, grape-shaped-and-sized thingies, which immejiately enables me to suss out that this is a cooking show. Then there's a cut to a long shot of the blokess in question uncupping the thingies into a transparent bowl half-full of milky liquid and saying (now that we have sound) '--into the rosewater-and-coconut marinade.' Next, she dips one of her hands into the bowl, extracts one of the pseudo-grapes therefrom, and inserts it into her gob, subsequently fluttering her closed okie-shades in a manner which I've grown all too accustomed to (and shagged-out by). 'I apologise for the delay,' she says, after swallowing and opening her eyes, 'but whenever I'm working with mountain oysters, I simply can't resist the odd taste-testing of the raw materials. They're just so scrumptious, so nutty.'

'So,' says Tamsin, glancing over her shoulder up at my doubtless transparently horrified phiz, 'I see that you, like me, are a fan of The Stiletto'd Margravess?'

'Well,' I says, immejiately doing my best to substitute a mask of blushing self-deprecatory candour for the afore-more-or-less-alluded-to one of pallid transparent horror; and simultaneously opting for the former's verbal counterpart (viz. the three-quarter-part untruth as against the outright fib), 'I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan. Let's just say that, for reasons of economy, I'm trying to swot up my culinary skills. You see, it's a bit of a financial drag, our dining on takeaways most nights, given that Esmeralda alone of the two of us can cook--'

'--I'll say she can do. Her Thai tofu-kimchee jambalaya was the toast of our last party. She'd brought, I'd say, a good hogshead of the stuff with her; and yet, once the last dollop of it had been served and consumed, there were still cries for more!'

At this point, YFCT-rejoinder-wise, a certain ethical-cum-epistemological Rubicon was crossed; inasmuch as anything I might have subsequently said in endorsement of Tamsin's appraisal of Esmeralda's cooking would not have had so much as the flimsiest of bases in a genuine SOA (which SOA, WRT the preceding near-fib, consisted in my sincere self-interested desire to avoid Esmeralda-concocted dinners for the duration of me natural). Luckily, at this very point--a point when, incidentally, I was beginning to wonder why it was taking her so long to uncap a bottle--Esmeralda rushed back in, bearing a pint glass of blond beer, garnished with an anorakically mandated freshly sliced wedge of orange, and thereby resuced me from my plight and solved the mystery of the delay at one go.

Tamsin took the glass from her, peered into it, crinkled her nose in fart-huffing disdain, and said, 'Now, really, Merle, this is quite unacceptable.'

'You mean,' said Esmeralda, with all the mingled rage and desperation of a printer's devil who's spot-checked the dotting of every eye and crossing of every tee before handing in the proofs to his-or-her master, 'there's something wrong with the beer?'

'No, I mean it's quite unacceptable for you to evince such untoward neglect of your partner in bringing back only one drink, especially in view of his most chivalrous efforts to take up his share of the domestic slack. Now, see here: I categorically refuse to quaff so much as a microlitre of the contents of this glass until your dear Nigel has been served in kind. So if you'll just turn round and--'

'--I'll get it!' I exclaim, meteorically dashing into the kitchen before I've quite known what's hit me. It takes me a good half-minute of elbowular communion with the front edge of the kitchen sink to unmask the true identity of the hitter, viz. Tamsin's self-consciousness on the score of her being the only genuinely blotto'd-cum-cup-bearing member of our trio. TBS, that bit about Esmeralda's 'neglect' of YFCT doubtless had some pseudo-foundation in their official-political relations, as well as in Tamsin's menopausal yearnings; even so, the upshot was that she was falling back on this pseudo-foundation a fuckofalot sooner than she would have done if the three of us had met on equal bibulous terms from the get-go. Accordingly, although I've long since sussed out, on the evidence of Esmeralda's hair-trigger alertness and hyper-paranoia, that she has long since privately declared herself out for the count drinkwise, and that she is positively aching for the whole triadic chinwag to be adjourned Aesop, and although I (now) suss out that in procuring a drink for Esmeralda I should only be adding a flagstone to Tamsin's pseudo-eff, I at last-stroke-arse conclude that the only hope of transmogrifying this as-yet-horrific night-in into some semblance of an occasion for elbow-jostling-cum-back-slapping fond reminiscence consists in repositioning all three of us at the starting line. So I extract, first, from the cupboard, a pair of plastic tumblers (the sole genuine glass of the house being already bespoken); next, from the fridge, a pair of 'Gaardens (the last two, as it so happens) along with Esmeralda's three-quarters of an orange; and set to work at the pre-primed cutting board, before returning, at last, five minutes at the inside from my moment of departure, to the front room, where I discover Tamsin seated to Esmeralda's left, plumb in middle of the couch, gabbing the latter's left oriole off and ceding to me by default the last free patch at her (T's) left side.

'We were just talking of,' says Tamsin, breaking off as I hand Esmeralda her tumbler (which she accepts with an inscrutable whisper of Thanks) 'or, rather, speculating as to--well, firstoff, as to how soon we might expect you to grace one of our tables with your inevitably idiosyncratic take on the Margravess's mountain oyster pilaf; and, secondly, as to the outcome of your appointed philosophical dialogue with my husband.'

'Well,' I says, settling into me aforementioned LFP, and immejiately draining half me tumbler by way of fortifying myself with a hefty dose of Belgian courage qua anti-truth serum to the whopping fib I'm about to tell, 'as to the first point of speculation, I'm afraid it's going to be a while yet before I can whip up a vat of the old MOP, inasmuch as, as the Margravess happened to let slip before your arrival, the high season of mountain-oyster harvesting is in late March--you know, the primetime mountain-goat rutting period, when the oysters are in their ripest--that is to say their most, erm, distended and engorged.'

'But surely in the meantime,' Tamsin says, echoing my half-glass-draining sally, you could procure a tinful of last season's harvest.'

'Uh-uh,' I rejoin with a gravely emphatic head-shake, 'It's utterly out of the question. For, according to the Margravess, nothing but fresh-from-the-farmer's-market, newly-harvested oysters will do. "If you're thinking of going the tinned route," she says, "you might as well save yourself a couple of pence by substituting with olives or water-chestnuts."'

'Isn't it admirable, Merle, this culinary purism of his?' says Tamsin, glancing over to me girl.

'Oh, most admirable indeed,' agrees Esmeralda tepidly, facelessly, from behind Tamsin's menacing full-body profile.

'But what,' Tamsin says, turning back to me, 'of our second point of speculation, which issues, after all from the whole raison d'etre of this gender-bifurcated evening?'

'You mean,' I says, glancing yearningly at my 200 millilietre's remainder of Belgian courage, yet not daring to avail myself of it for the time being, in anticipation of as-yet-more-exigent traumas to come, 'erm, as to how things turned out between Cuthbert and myself?'

'That's right.'

'Well,' I temporise mindlessly, desperately and fairly inarticulately, 'it's all a bit complicated, I suppose.'

'Nonsense,' she says soothingly. 'There's nothing complicated about it. Either he won the argument or you did.'

'Well, erm,' I re-temporise no less desperately and even more inarticulately, albeit slightessly less mindlessly (for, having by now sussed out that Tamsin would prefer to hear that I'd won rather than that I'd lost, I am now weighing the pros and cunts of revealing the true SOA vis-a-vis Esmeralda's estimation of YFCT; inasmuch as such a revelation would constitute, at one and the same time, a setback to Esmeralda's Rugger-reforming project and a seeming booster to her career-advancing prospects), 'I dunno.'

'Come, now: you're amongst friends.' Here Tamsin lays an unambiguously imploring-cum-seductive hand on me right thigh.

Talk about your dromedarial-back-breaking straws! Mind you (and here I call upon my then-utterly-deflated, pinkie-lengthed schlong as my witness), this has got nothing to do with the merest soup's son of an attraction on my part to Tamsin; but all the same, I ask you, DGR, what self-respecting bloke could suffer himself to remain clammed up in face such an offer?

'Well, in all candour, Mrs Todd--'

'--Tamsin, please, Nigel dear,' she interjects whilst giving me thigh an admonitory-cum-reassuring squeeze.

'Well, in all candour, Tamsin, I gots to admit that...'

'...Yes?'

'...well, that I--' [here I break off to quaff a rhetorically-exigent (albeit corageously gratuitous) half-pint, which acts on me like a tinful of Popeyean spinach, injuicing me to rise from the couch and triumphantly proclaim, with fists, chin and tits thrust heavenwards, AFF:] '--that I done whooped his pathetic, mealy-mouthed, lily-livered, droopy-drawered Goonerly ass!'

Of course, no sooner have I ejaculated the above, than the gratuitous Belgian cardiac injection has run its course, and I've started to feel the wee-ist bit self-conscious and accordingly glanced rightwards and downwards for the obligatory two-cut reaction shot. Firstoff, I see that Esmeralda is cowering against her corner of the couch, with elbow mounted squarely atop armrest and thumb and forediggit thrust pain-injuicingly into okie-sockets. Next, I cut to Tamsin, peering at me over her raised pint glass with eyes-'n'-brows bespeaking equal parts astonishment and curiosity. Well, I dare say I could have done a fuck of a lot worse reaction-wise.

Casting my cue-taking lot by default with Tamsin, I piss away the next ten seconds or so waiting for her to finish off the last of her ’Gaarden, during which interval I begin to feel positively ridiculous in maintaining my de facto art-class nude-model’s posture; but, to be fair to her, it’s only ten seconds, and at the end of them she wastes no time in setting her glass down on the coffee table and summoning my arse couchward with a militaristic series of palm-raps on the vacant left patch.

'Firstoff, just to clear the air: am I right in assuming that you didn't literally--or at any rate, figuratively but physically--flog my husband's bottom earlier tonight?'

'Of course you are. I swear to cor I never laid a ha--[come to think of it I did pat his shoulder, and I am under oath]--I mean, a fist, into him all night.' Courtesy of certain unmistakeable phizzionomical signs (knitted brows, slouching mouth-corners &c.) I instantly surmise that my brazen phrasealogical back-pedalling has conjured up in Tamsin's mind's the Looney-Chunish image of YFCT rope-a-dope-ically palm-slapping or karate-chopping Cuthbert into a chirping-bird-halo'd coma; but, hey, what can I do? It's all water over the eight bridges of Kingsborough, innit? All I can do is press on (AFF) and hope the cumulative weight of contradictory particulars sets her straight and spirits away that image well clear of the remotest precincts of plausibility: 'What I meant, of course, was that I'd won the argument hands-down.'

'You mean you managed to persuade him that your hatred of Arsenal amounted to an, erm, to a philosophically tenable position?'

'I dunno. You'll have to ask him. What I do know is that by dint of sheer down-'n'-dirty philosophical footwork, I got him to show his true Goonerly scarlet-'n'-black colours; whereupon he pretty much instantly voided the pitch, kicked over the old scrabble board, or what have you--which sort of behaviour, in my books at least, amounts to a de facto ceding of victory to your opponent. Mind you, in all immodesty I must admit that for a while there he had me squarely on the keeve-eve for some shin-music, with me arse-cheeks fairly brushing against the cage; and, indeed, that had his Arsenalophilic passion not got the better of his philosophical right reason, he might very well have soundly trounced me--for I am, after all, merely a humble accountant with a mere undergraduate term's worth of philosophical schooling to his credit, hardly the equal of a--'

'--So you're saying you didn't know from the outset that Cuthbert was an Arsenal supporter?'

'No, of course not. Why should I have done?'

'You mean she didn't tell you?'

Obviously all hemming and hawing on Esmeralda's behalf is in vain at this point, now that I've made the revelation of Cuthbert's 'true Goonerly colours' the centrepiece of my account. Which isin'tersay I'm not on the point of launching into a spirited bout of such hemming'n'hawingage, for want of a more honourable alternative; but luckily, before I've got round to aiming the pistol thereof at my (at arse, our) foot, let alone firing it, Esmeralda hits upon a last-ditch foot-saving manouevre that--given enough temporal, Tamsin-attention-divertive padding--just might work, which consists in her rising from the couch, stretching her arms and ejaculating, through a theatrical yawn:

'If you two will excuse me, I think it's high time I was getting to bed. I can hardly keep my eyes open.' [Of course, 'I can hardly keep 'em closed' would be nearer to the truth.]

'So then,' says Tamsin, 'you don't mind if Nigel and I stay up a bit longer? You see, I'm most desperately keen to learn the particulars of his philosophical bout with Cuthbert.'

'No, of course I don't mind. See you both in the morning.' In the ocular sector of her sunnily retreating phiz I fancy I can descry the merest glimmer of a pair of bodkins signifying 'You'd better watch yourself, mister!' (there is, after all, only so much information you can get across to one pair of okies without betraying your purpose to the other pair), to which I see fit to return a pair of ocular-cum-browular somersaults signifying (I hope) 'Believe you me, this ain't no picnic!' before turning back to Tamsin and pseudo-recommencing as follows:

'Now, as I was about to say: Cuthbert's main line of attack centred on this thought experiment that he called the Swampman Scenario--'

'--Before we go any further,' she cuts, whilst balefully gazing down at her empty glass, 'I'd like to ask you, is there anything else to drink?'

'Well,' I says, mentally-ocularly canvassing the interior of the fridge, and alighting on nothing but the empty 'Gaarden-carton, 'I suppose there must be.' But then, upon making a further, aurul-cum-tactile mental sweep thereof, I recall that when I went to fetch the beers, I was met armwise and earwise with a cannon-ball-esque tumbling and rumbling hailing from one of the lower door compartments, which I now surmise could only have issued from that half-full bottle of vodka left over from our (E's and YFCT's) last private schlongtail hour, dating from some two months back. 'Do you have any objections to vodka-based drinks? Specifically--' (Yes [I now recalled]! That orange we sacrificed to garnishes was but one of a dozen secreted in the crisper.) '--to screwdrivers?'

'Oh, no of course not,' she says. 'Indeed,' she continues, with a most cuntishly lickerish half-smile-cum-pair-of-okie-crinkles, 'I fancy I fancy a well-mixed screwdriver at least as much as the next girl.'

'Right, then!' I says, whilst bounding up from the couch. 'I'll be back in a jiffy. Or, rather,' I suddenly think to add, by way of preempting any kitchenward incursions on her part, 'two jiffies. It takes a bit of time, you see, to, erm, squeeze the oranges...'

'...Ah yes,' she nods, her lickerish mask still well in place, 'squeeze the oranges.'

So, anyway: here I am back in the kitchen, glad to be alone for the nonce, and de-fridging the bottle, which turns out to contain a mere two-thirds of the originally-estimated volume--viz., some 200 ml, or, roughly, three shots' worth. Now, whilst I've originally repaired hither fully intending to mix the two of us a pair of equally stiff 'drivers, out of the sheer spirit of chivalry-neutral English fair play; it now occurs to me that, as an equal division of the contents of the bottle will inevitably eventuate in a pair of decidedly flaccid schlongtails, whose divided consumption may very well eventuate in turn in my staying up a good bit longer with Tamsin than I've a fair mind to do (which may very well in turn eventuate in fuck knows what), it would be better for all parties concerned if I devoted the whole of the bottle's contents to the manufacture of Tamsin's drink, and solaced myself with a mere Minnie Driver, thatistersay, a screwdriver hold the vodka--'

[DGR]: '--In other words, a glass of orange juice such as one might imbibe in the course of a typical buffet breakfast at an English country house.'

'Indeed? Since when at a typical buffet breakfast at an English country house did one take one's orange juice with ice?'

'Why, since--since never, now that I come to think of it. Touché, MDF, touché.'

'Thanks, DGR (and thanks also, BTW, for keeping your arseings-in to a minimum)--'

'Not atoll, MDF, not ato-'

'--I said, Thanks for keeping your arseings-in to a minimum. Now, if you'll skewed me, I've got a paira schlongtails to finish mixing.'

Apropos of which (in case you were wondering, DGR, just how I managed to make a Minnie Driver pass for a twin of its dipsomaniacal elder sister): I divided the eventual orange-squeeze yield betwixt the two highball glasses [Yes: in conformity to girlish folkways, Esmeralda's cupboard is abundantly stocked with these, in contrast to its relative dearth of pint glasses] according to a three-to-two ratio; that istersay, by topping off Tamsin's glass with three fifths of the juice, and mine with the remaining two fifths (along with a squirt of water from the tap for the sake of volume-cum-hue-saturating equalisation).

Then it's back to the living room, where, in the meantime,Tamsin has made herself, as they say, a bit more comfortable: she's now sitting plumb in the middle of the couch, with both feet de-shoe'd and propped up, 'neath crossed, stocking'd legs, on the coffee table; and with arms spreadeagled across the full upper breadth of the couch's back-cushions. And there's more: for, to my immeasurable horror-cum-relief, I descry, sprouting from the diggital-furrows of her right palm, the cottoned pleasure end of a fag.

'Now, now,' I admonish her, whilst setting the drinks down on the cunt-hair's-breadth of tableage as-yet-uncommandeered by her plates (and whilst she languidly draws her fag-bearing hand gobward for a fresh drag), 'house rules explicitly prohibit the consumption of ignitable tobacco products on the premises.'

'Oh, is that so?' she imperiously exhales, as I take my seat at the far left side of the couch (and thus, given her plumb-mejiate situation, delineating a mere half-square-foot of inter-arseal no-man's-land). 'What a pity, then, that I didn't think to bring along my snuffbox. Still, now that I've lighted up, would you care to partake?'

I.e., in virtue of the fact that she hasn't seen fit to accompany this offer with its usual complement of an open case or pack, Would you care to share my fag with me? Now, I've always shied away from fag-sharing as well as I can do, not so much out of hygenic or sexual-political squeamishness as out of aesthetic squeamishness on the score of its inevitable, well-nigh-photographically-mimetic conjuration of the phoney fellowship of joint-passing hippies; but when in barbarian-sacked Rome, one must do as the barbarians do, no? So I take the fag from her and give it a tug, whilst she in her own right gives a hefty enough tug to her highball. I do my best to synchronise the two tugs such that I'll be in a position to return the fag to her no sooner or later than she's finished for the nonce with her drink, but to no avail: long after I've flicked my ash into the de facto tray (viz. her empty pint glass), she's still working her way through her first swallow, amid much panting, gasping and coughing.

'I'll say,' she says, whilst at last laying the glass back on the table and taking the fag from me, 'you really know how to mix a drink.'

'I'm sorry. Did I make it too strong?'

'Oh no! Not atoll! I like mine strong. It's just that I wasn't expecting anything of the kind from--'

'--From what or whom? From a North Londoner? From an accountant? From Esmeralda's bloke?'

'Well,' she says, through a wry, pursed-lipped smile whose self-possessed, well-nigh-irresistable, repartee-baiting essence bodes decidedly ill vis-a-vis my original plan of rendering her comatase Aesop, 'from any of the above, I suppose.'

'Well,' I says, whilst downing a full half of my MD, amidst much lower-key (i.e., more masculine) mimicry of her highball-swilling panto, 'admittedly, Esmeralda's something of a borderline teetotaller; and, admittedly, us accountants have something of a deserved reputation for temperance; but, as far as us North Londoners go--why, there I draw the line. I'll have you know that, in point of mixological uncompromisibility, there's not a barman within a 50-mile radius of Charing Cross who can compete with my mentor, Jimmy Phipps of the Sedulous Ape right here in Woodside Park. Jimmy'll have no truck with your automatic pourers. Trust me: if you ask him flatly for a Jim Beam and Coke, upon delivery of the drink, you'll be lucky if the soda-nozzle has been properly introduced to the bottle in the meantime.'

'Hmm. Well, as I'm sure you will remember, Esmeralda and I were at the Sedulous Ape earlier tonight, and I assure you, nothing we were served was half as strong as this.'

'Ah, well,' I says, suddenly recollecting Jimmy's late relocation to the Milton, 'I dare say the Ape of today is but a pale shadow of the Ape of yestermonth. All the same, my original point in vindication of North London's bibulous prowess stands, if only from an historical povey.'

'Of course it does do, of course it does do,' she reassures me, with a schpincter-dilating-cum-schlong-shrivelling round-the-shoulder knee-pat. 'But back to our original subject: your quarrel with my husband.'

'Right, erm: as I was saying, Cuthbert's main line of attack centred on this philosophical thought experiment that he called the Swampman Scenario. Mind you, I don't want to waste your time with a retread of familiar territory--as it's just now occurred to me [as it in fact only just now had done] that you're probably well enough acquainted with the whole Ess-Em-Ess already...'

'...Howdjermean?'

'Well, I mean, it's just that what with your being married to Cuthbert...and that, well, from a bloke's point of view, it's hard to imagine keeping any hobby horse of mine a secret for long from the woman in my life...'

'...Speak for yourself, Nigel. On our end, Cuthbert has never encountered the remotest difficulty in concealing his professional hobby horses from me. Far from it! He knows too well of my utter lack of curiosity on their score even to dream of letting one of them loose in my presence.'

'Save, self-evidently, at some philosophical hobby-horse-fancier's convention held chez vous,' I might very well have rejoined, with uncompromisingly snarky justice. Instead I wisely opted to rejoin, with equal justice, and a mere fraction of the snark, 'Nonetheless, you have managed to learn at some point along the way of the existence of his Arsenalophilic hobby horse.'

'Yes, but firstoff,' she corrects me briskly (or, at any rate, as near-briskly as one can do when tottering at the threshold of alcohol poisoning), 'I was speaking of professional hobby horses, not amateur ones; and, secondly, Cuthbert's Arsenal-fandom hardly qualifies as a mere hobby horse. If anything, it's he who's the horse and it who's the rider. And, in any case, this whole innocent, idyllic, nursery-room metaphoric complex hardly does justice to my feelings on the matter.'

'Oh, no?'

'Indeed not. I prefer to think of it--I mean, his passion for Arsenal--as a kind of ghastly spore straight out of one of those 1950s horror or sci-fi films. Do you see what I mean? On one's initial contact with it, it seems harmless enough--as did Cuthbert's Arsenal fandom when we first met at college, long before he'd even qualified as a reader in philosophy--but then, gradually, it starts to take over one's organism, until finally, come 20 years later, there's n-nothing else l-left!' [Here, she takes the decidedly unwelcome twin liberties of wrapping the nearer half of her couch-spanning embrace round the nearer of my shoulders and of burying her forrid in the corresponding collarbone-nook. And then, gormlessly addressing me left nipple:] 'I confess, dear, sweet, innocent Nigel, that this was all a bit of a set-up on my part, this pre-arranged pitting of you against Cuthbert. You see, I was hoping against hope that, on having finally met his match on the opposite side--I mean, someone wholeheartedly, philosophically dedicated to to the lot of opposite sides rather than to some particular club other than Arsenal--he'd see the light of reason, and eventually devote some significant fraction of his spare time to something other than match-viewings. Even more desperately than th-thaaaahht [from the wind-gusted pricking of my nipple, do I detect a yawn?], I was hoping against hope against hope that I might eventually meet this philosophically-inclined Arsenal hater, who might (who knows?) prove to be my knight in SHHNN-NNMM MMM-MMBH [the unintelligible transcription of these last two words registers the fleeting--and, presumably, involuntary--collision of her gob with my shirtyfront, and the pectoral hummer administered thereby] who would rescue me for good from this Gunnerly hell I've inhabited for the past decade or so. Little did I dream, though, that I would be fortunate enough to meet him so soon.'

With this last sentence, she disengages her head from my CB and cranes it back just far enough to force me to take in her lash-wide stare-cum-lip-wide gape, along with the invitation it unequivocally signifies. Suffice it to say, by this point it's a bit too late for me to rally the D. Hoffman-esque hard-to-get-playing rhetorical troops. Luckily for me, though, by this selfsame point Tamsin can hardly manage to keep her pre-assembled A. Bancroft-esque seductive troops in formation, inasmuch as, after a good butcher's-quarter-minute of sustained staring, her gaze starts to lose its my-ocular focus, and is interrupted by the intermittent lid-flutter; and, a good butcher's half-minute after that, the okies have to all appearances shut up shop for good; and, a good butcher's full-minute after that, on the evidence of a coupla hearty snores, she's fast asleep.

Not that my Tamsin-sitting duties have by FA's stretch of the imagination been fully discharged as of now: if anything, this marks the advent of the most cuntishy gruelling segment of the gig, consisting as the latter does, firstoff, in the extrication of my person from hers without awakening her; secondly, in laying TT out on the couch in a decent--thatistersay, comfortable yet none-too-corpse-like--posture; and, finally, in fetching and disposing the full round of cooter-mints to which, in her capacity as guest, and a fortiori, as Esmeralda's boss, she will have felt herself entitled come the next cold, sober, unerotic broaching of bourgie dawn's arse-cheeks: viz. pillow, duvet, water-carafe, tumbler, travel-toothbrush and 'profin-stash.

Upstairs, in the bedroom, I am greeted by the most salutarily placid bit of scenage I've any right to expect, given tonight's events (and given the prospective catastrophe of the day to come): the lights are out and Esmeralda's in bed--her long tresses rather than fair phiz turned YFCT-ward--and, to all arserly-cum-darkly discernible appearances, fast asleep. But no sooner have I stripped down to my usual slumber ensemble of string vest, shorts and socks, and have parked me arse on the edge of my (left) side of the mattress, than she's switched on the torchère lamp sited to her immejiate (right) side--bypassing, I might add, its more congenially romantic settings in favour of its full-on, Stazi-certified, 200-watt capacity--and, having apparently turned round, is posing to me (or, rather, me shoulderblades), in a stroppily peremptory tone, the question, 'OK: so what happened?'

Shocked as I am by the preceding ocular-cum-oriolular onslaught, I can hardly (again, in view of tonight's events) consider myself surprised by it; and so, without condescending to crane me neck her-ward by so much as a minute of arc, I reply: 'Do you mind if I make myself a bit more comfortable before answering that question?'

'Erm, well,' she stroppily concedes, 'I guess not.'

So I draw me legs under the covers and prop meself up on one elbow, Roman-patrician style, before finally locking okies with her and saying, with Roman-patrician-worthy placidity, 'The answer to your question is, of course, 'Absolutely nothing happened.'"

'What do you mean, "Nothing happened"? Of course, something must have happened!'

So implacable is her ceritichude on this score that I can't help doing a quick ocular scan of my visible person for some telltale evidence of such a non-happening, which scannage quickly brings to light a bright scarlet lipstick smooch staring blurrily back at me from roughly midway between me neck and me right shoulder.

'Ah, well!' I ejaculate through a volley of disingenuous chuckles. 'That's easily enough explained. You see, whislt Tamsin was handing me my drink, she happened to slip and fall, thus bringing her face into collision with my--'

'--I'm not talking about the hickey! For Chrissakes, I know where that came from: you decided to get her drunk off that half-bottle of vodka, and once you'd managed to do that, she started getting all lovey-dovey with you, and smothering your face and neck with kisses.'

'Now look here: in the first place, it was only a quarter-bottle, and in the second place, it was just a one-off acccidental peck.'

'Allow me to reiterate: I'm not talking about any of that. I knew then and know now that you weren't and aren't interested in her.'

'Then what, for JFC's sake,' I ejaculate in genuine, wholehearted bewilderment-cum-cuntsternation, 'are you talking about?'

'I'm talking about the outcome of your narration to her of your philosophical chinwag with Cuthbert up at Potters Bar.'

'Really?' I ejaculate in genuine, wholehearted bewilderment-sans-cuntsternation. 'But why-- and mind you, I'm asking you this not as if to say "Mind your own bidness" but as if to say what I'm actually about to say--why should any of that concern you?'

'Every bit of it concerns me because in my capacity as her subordinate, both as regards things I've already said and things I might eventually say, I have to know where she stands on this issue--I mean, I have to know whether she's fundamentally pro-Arsenal or anti-Arsenal.'

'You mean you didn't gather all along by default that she was pro-Arsenal on the basis of the fact that her husband was an avowed Gooner?'

'As if I could have done! As if she'd ever breathed to me a word of his persuasion in one direction or the other!'

'So you're saying that when Tamsin said You mean she didn't tell you she was--'

'--she was saying the thing that is not, either out of inebriated forgetfulness or by deliberate fabrication.'

Here, as they say, the scales suddenly fell from me okies. 'I see. So, at work, throughout the whole run-up to tonight's philosophical chinwag you were behaving on the assumption--'

'--on the assumption that the absurdity of your anti-Arsenal animus was a fait accompli. Yeah, I was all can you imagine?s and he even goes so far ases in her presence, for two or three weeks running. And she sucked the lot of it up in apparently sincere approval. But then, tonight, when she suddenly let slip that Cuthbert was an Arsenal supporter, and so ardently expressed a desire for a blow-by-blow account of your discussion with him, I couldn't help surmising for the first time that things weren't particularly rosey between Cuthbert and her, or worrying that she might after all be firmly of the opposite camp; i.e., your camp.'

'Well, I'm sorry to have to inform you, darling, that both your surmising and worrying were all too well-founded.'

'You mean that her marriage is on the rocks, and that she's an Arsenal-hater?'

'Indeed. And, what's more and worse, that it's something of a chicken-and-egg problem to try to sort out which of the two passions--I mean, her Cuthbertaphobia and her Arsenalaphobia--is the governing one. You see, by her account, she married him 20-some-odd years ago knowing he was a Gooner and thoroughly disapproving of that fact, and yet hoping against hope that it would all clear up over time; whereas, in fact, with time, it only got worse--such that now she can't stand the sight of the bleeder.'

'Alas! I'm done for and undone! Oh, Christ! How did I ever come to be dragged into this mess, this whole fucking mess?'

'Well, as I'm not privy to the goings-on up at Occuvision, I can't very well say. But now that you've asked, I might as well take a stab at a forensic reconstruction of the initial shitball-levering scenario, as follows: you staggered into work bleary-okie'd, 20 minutes late, of a...let's say of a Thursday morning, and Tamsin asked you "Are you all right?"--which, as we both know, is bosserly shorthand for "Where the fuck do you get off showing up a half an hour (sic) late without ringing in beforehand? Oh, I see. You were out painting the town puce last night and punching the snooze button like it was a telegraph key this morning, and when at last you saw fit to drag your arse out of bed you were thinking 'With any luck, if I skip me usual douche and manage to catch a post-rush hour green wave, I might just get in at a fudgeable ten minutes' lag of me official starting time. Well, let me tell you, Missie and/or Mister, such shenanigans are not kindly looked upon by the middle brass of Company X"; and so, seeking the path of least exculpatory resistance, thatistersay, the bloke-stigmatising one, you replied, "Yes, I'm fine. It's just that I couldn't get a wink of sleep last night. You see, Nigel--that's this bloke I'm seeing--insisted on keeping the telly on at full volume into the small hours so he could take in a two-month-old replay of a football match, an Arsenal...Chelsea (or was it Manchester United?) match. Oh, well, anyway-stroke-TBS, he hates Arsenal, does my bloke; he's always going on about how cun--erm, how front-bottomishly unscrupulous they are--'

'--As a matter of fact, darling, it was just the opposite--or, rather, the exactly complementary--scenario that got the whole shitball rolling: you see, it was she, Tamsin, who staggered into the office bleary-eyed some 45 minutes late, and I who asked her "Are you all right?"--which, as we both know, is subordinately shorthand for "Where the fuck do you get off, &c...Well, let me tell you, Missie and/or Mister, vis-a-vis your mid-level executive position, I'm in the cat-bird seat"; and her explanation for her tardiness-cum-bleariness was that Cuthbert had kept her up all night watching a--I remember this quite distinctly--a replay of an Arsenal-Liverpool match. "Oh, he's a rabid Arsenal fan, is my bloke," she said. "You can't get him to shut up about how cuntishly enterprising they are."'

'So Tamsin was right: you did know all along that he was an Arsenalophile.'

'No. Or, rather, yes; or, rather, no. I mean I did know it at the beginning, but then the conversation took a more general turn and started to polemically centre more on blokes and their all-round, team [sic]-irregardless [sic] passion for football, and then, finally Tamsin happened to mention Cuthbert's book, and the objective philosophical light it cast on the whole subject--'

'--In short, your inductive-tending pedipilophobic passion got the better of your deductive common sense: you were so eager to pitch upon a stratagem for curing me of my Arsenalophobia that all remembrance of Cuthbert's Arsenalophilia, along with Tamsin's repugnance therefrom, was obliterated in your desperate flounderings after the book qua general pedipilophobic life-preserver.'

'Yeah, I guess so.'

'And am I right in surmising that having mooted Cuthbert's book qua &c., Tamsin from then on out kept completely mum on the subject of his Arsenalophilia?'

'Yes, you're right: from that day onwards she never once broached the subject again.'

'OK. So upon the foundation of this additional bit of evidence I will hazard to build the further surmise that she successfully entrusted to the so-called winds of time the task of obliterating from your memory every footprint-trace of recollection of her initial mention of Cuthbert's Arsenalophilia, thereby facilitating her enlistment of my prospective interview with him towards the realisation of her own petty Arsenalophilophobic ends.'

'So, in a word, you're saying that I, that you--that we--have been serving as mere pawns in a kind of cat-and-mouse chess match between Cuthbert and Tamsin?'

'In a word, yes--or, rather, maybe; inasmuch as, at the moment, I'm having a hard time ascribing any degree of cat-or-mouse-worthy sagacity to Cuthbert's enlistment in the match--'

'--Be that as it may, the chess-match metaphor still holds up. And seeing that it does do, it seems to me that the two of us, pawns though we may be, could have held it at a stalemate if you hadn't scuppered every possibility thereunto by engaging in that Arsenalophobic triumphal Navajo raindance--'

'--Which performance would have been obviated altogether if you hadn't seen fit--for cor knows what reason--bring her round to your place after hours.'

'Oh, come off your "for cor knows what reason" high horse. You could see full well from the moment she walked in that she was in no fit state to drive.'

'Oh, TBS, I could see as much. But surely it would behove you to affect at least a smidgen of humility in dismounting your "you could see full well" high horse long enough to beg the twin questions, "Why did we opt for a chinwag-point sited within staggering distance of my place rather than of hers? [Did you ever think, for example, of Cuthbert's local, the Slow Loris? As you knew we were to meet at the Oakmere you must have known that it was unbespoken by him tonight.] And why, out of the butcher's-half-dozen such stagger-worthy potential points of chinwag did we happen to alight upon the Ape? Mightn't we have at least done Nigel the paltry decency of avoiding a pub whose door he is forbidden to darken, dearer than all other pubs in the Kingdom though it is to his heart?'

'Cut the carp, Nigel: as I've got a perfectly rational, dispassionate answer to both questions, there's no need for me to beg either one of them. As to the first one, consider, first, that, as I'd never been out with Tamsin in public I hadn't the slightest idearrof what an accomplished piss artist she was. Of course, if I had had any such idea, I would have googled out beforehand the nearest alcohol-serving establishment to her home address and somehow contrived to make it seem the most logical place, from a common-ground teetotaller's point of view, for us to hang out in. But acting, as I couldn't help doing, on the assumption that we'd both be automotively-capable come the end of the evening, I naturally aimed to settle on a spot that would be as convenient to her route home as to mine, meaning, in other words, some spot sited along the Barnet High Road. And once I reached that point, well, my range of choice was rather limited, wasn't it? Naturally, I thought at first of Ahir Lorenzo's, but as neither of us were particularly in the market for pulling or being pulled (again, as far as I knew), it hardly seemed a suitable venue. And as for the alternatives--meaning the places hereabouts that you and I frequent together--well, the lot of 'em consisted of a string of posh and semi-posh restaurants as against the down'n'dirty pub that we'd established as the only proper genre of establishment for our counter-chinwag. And so it happened that your glowing eulogy of the Sedulous Ape as "a relaxed, unpretentious watering hole-cum-larderia where blokes and blokesses of all shapes and stripes can unwind and hold forth at their respective leisures" came to the rescue. Mind you, if I'd known your self-prescribed absence therefrom was such a sensitive issue, I would have resorted to some still-more-desperate venue--even, say, the forecourt of Stora Market.'

Here, at last, I suddenly realised that in the heat of my self-righteous upper-handedness vis-à-vis a certain SOA (i.e., Emseralda’s introduction of the besotted Tamsin into our here-2-4 cosy household) I’d allowed my sense of injury to bleed over into my remarks apropos of a certain contingently adjacent SOA (i.e., my recent absence from the Ape), to the detriment of the veracity of the aforesaid remarks. In other words, I’d held forth to Esmeralda as though I were officially banned from the Ape (and as though she already knew as much); whereas, in fact, I’d merely, in Esmeralda’s all-too-apt phraseology, ‘prescribed [to myself an] absence therefrom'; privately and essentially for the sake of avoiding any awkward rencounters with Ronnie Livingstone, publicly and contingently (thatistersay, in answer to Esmeralda's occasional suggestions of nipping down to 'our' local for a quick bite-'n'-pint), for the sake of sparing my innards the ingestion of a two-thousand-and-some-oddth serving of fish 'n' poppers (which serving, at duodenom, I had naturally been craving all along). At all events, and whether by intent or by accident, that last-delivered sentence of Esmeralda's served as a perfectly effectual high-horse-dislodging lance-blow to YFCT; and rather than go to all the trouble of remounting the aforesaid HH via a painstaking apologia for my Ronnie-Livingstonian snubfest (in essaying which apologia I would, in any case, have risked touching off yet another volley of Esmeraldan recriminations against my Arsenalophobia, Tamsinian considerations notwithstanding), I thought it best to call it a night--or at least summon forth a night within hailing distance--by replying as follows:

'Yeah. I guess you did what you had to do.'

'I'll say I did do. But look what good it's done me.'

'That sounds a bit premature to these orioles,' I says, giving her a consoling smack on the face-cheek whilst self-assuredly tamping down me pillowcase in ostensible (and, for all I know, actual) preparation for finally settling down to sleep. 'Look, with any luck, come morning she'll have forgotten the whole fracas from her first sip of cognac onwards.'

'With any luck, sure. But assuming that what we've learnt about Tamsin tonight is true, that'll still leave my openly Arsenal hating-hating self at the beck and call of an Arsenal-hating would-be Clytaemnestra. You know what they say: in vino veritas.'

'Yeah, and if you'll pardon my dog-Latin, I also know what they ought to say: in vino cuntitas. Trust me: for every bloke or blokess for whom a coupla pints amount to a jemmy-spanner into the safe deposit box of the heart, there's at least ten for whom they amount to a great big walloping shit-stirring spoon-cum-get-out-of-jail-free card.'

'I see. And do you testify as much from firsthand personal experience, as one of these other ten?'

''Course I don't!' I demur, whilst indignantly re-assuming my Roman-patrician posture. 'Naturally, I speak solely from personal secondhand experience, as one of the proud, the few, the elite, the maximum-nine-percenters, the veritas blokes, outflanked at each and every turn by the cuntitas-ian mob--'

'--Of course you do, darling; of course you do,' she says, whilst deftly switching off the light, knocking me off my elbow-prop and snuggling up alongside me all mama bear-like, all at one go. 'As if I'd have it any other way.'

'There's just one other thing, Nigel.'

'What's that?'

'You didn't just leave her down there...I mean, stuck in whatever ungainly posture she happened to have passed out in?'

'Oh, no. I tucked her in right and proper, and put her within arm's reach of every needful hangover-curative accoutrement--a bloody sight more, in fact, than I've ever done in me own behalf, in parallel circumstances...'

Unsurprisingly enough, something less than the best part of a single Occuvisual work-day sufficed utterly to unravel the filligree'd J-Cloth of wishful thinking with which I'd so artfully sopped up Esmeralda's residual Tamsinian apprehensions the night before. For the fact was that, although I had invoked the 10-to-1 cuntitas-to-veritas ratio qua general SOA in a spirit of dispassionate candour worthy of the worldly-wise social tippler-cum amateur statistician that I had been, was and am, I had by no means concluded that Tamsin constituted an instance of conformity to the general rule: to the contrary, I had concluded that she, like myself, was one of the maximum-nine-percenters, a true-blue veritas woman. TBS, the first half of her performance (the Nigel qua chef-baiting and Esmeralda qua hostess-bullying half) had been crammed chock-full of a sufficiently diversified number of cuntworthy sallies to belie this veritasian essence even to my urbanely hard-bitten okies; but the second half (the Nigel-qua-tear-bucket overflowing one), had been altogether too monotonously abject in character to pass for anything less or other than a manifestation of the royal veritasian Doyle even in the tenderly-unbitten okies of an autistic teetotaller. Luckily for my slumber's sake, Esmeralda had been present for the first half alone; otherwise the aforementioned J Cloth would have been of about as much use on the apprehension-sopping front as a square-foot of waterproofed sealskin. Anyway, as I was beginning to say in more impersonal and less situated phraseology at the commencement of this here post-asteriskial episode, I was hardly surprised, when, at roughly 9:45 GDT the following day, my well-nigh-Kantianly imperturbable mid-morning browsing of the Randy Nannies site was interrupted by the silent flashing of my desk-phone's ring-LED, along with an LCD-displayed string of diggits that I instantly recognised as hailing from Esmeralda's mobile.

'Thank you for calling Proctologitex,' I nonchalantly drone into the uncradled blower, before mandatorily launching into a full-fledged Perry Como-esque croon to the chune of 'Happy Holidays,' AFF: 'Proctologitex. / Proctologitex. / May your haemorrhoids / Cease stinging / With Proctologitex / In you.' (Yeah, I know this is a personal call; but the croonage is official company telephonic protocol, not to be waived under any circumstances whatsoever [for, as Tim Bottoms peremptorily reminded us at last month's brown-bag luncheon: 'Each and every incoming caller, be she your mum ringing in to inform you that your gran's just pitched over dead of a stroke, is a potential customer.'] and the cubicle partitions do have ears. In any case, Esmeralda's all too well inured to the drill to make the slightest fuss about it by way of preamble to the meat of her gist, viz:)

'She's got it in for me, Nigel. I'm convinced of it.'

'By she, I presume you mean Ta--'

'--That's right. Look: I'm just calling you to say--and, mind you, I haven't much time--that just in case you were thinking of spending a quiet evening alone at your place tonight; well, stop thinking about it. I need your help.'

'So you want me to meet me at your place, say at around 6:30--?'

'--Make it 6 if you can. And if I'm not there by 7, dial 999. In all seriousness, Nigel, I'm wondering if I'm even going to make it out of here al--'

At this point the connexion went dead. And so, after discharging me obligatory butcher's-trio of I'm-sorry:-you're-breaking-ups, I cradled the blower and resumed my pornoscopic browsings in an attitude of scarcely discomposed complacency. Surely, after all, I mused to meself during the course thereof, that bit about 'wondering whether she was going to out of there al[ive]' was nothing but sheer feminine hysterics. Surely, no blokess has ever lost, or shall ever lose, so much as an eyelash in contestation of such a puny patch of turf as is comprised, according to the inverted telescope of femininity, by the full sesquicentennially- ancient history of league football?

Needles to say, the eventual appointed rendezvous with Esmeralda, chez elle, set me straight on just how much more than an eyelash was at stake between Tamsin and her vis-a-vis the sesquiannually-recent history of league football, and, even more parochially, vis-a-vis the recent history of that accursed club that shall not be named. The RiQ was inaugurated at precisely 19:02 GDT, i.e. a full two minutes posterior to the likewise-appointed 999-ringing time, (i.e., just barely posterior enough thereto that I could have fallen back, had I needed to, on the unsynchronised watch-excuse by way of vindication of my neglecting to punch in the aforesaid triple-nines), when Esmeralda burst in through the front door, slammed it shut behind her and leaned against it, with hands clasped behind her arse, like a wanted woman, she panting all the while like a proverbial bitch in heat [blame the ungallantness of the image on the proverb, not on me!]

'So you did manage to get out of there alive after all?' I asked, in as suitably grave a tone as I could manage to affect.

'Only--only just,' she pants out. 'Look, I haven't much time.'

'Oh, no, not again. What's happened? Has Tamsin been stalking you all the way home on foot? And is she at any minute about to start hacking away on the other side of that door with a machete or axe? If so, I'd advise you to stand well clear of the threshold--'

'--No, Nigel, it's much worse than that. She's assigned me a 200-page report, due complete and spiral-bound on her desk by eight o'clock sharp tomorrow morning!'

'Oh, darling,' I exclaim, suddenly overcome by a wave of empathetic remorse such as only one who has been there, done that and worn the sodding hairshirt can be overcome by, 'I'm so sorry! How could I have been so callous!' Then, rushing towards her, extricating her hands from behind her arse and taking them in mine, I continue, amidst a liberal smattering of chivalric finger-pecks: 'What do you need me to do? Calculate the aggregate depreciation of lens-grinding equipment across three fiscal quarters?--or, say, the aggregate appreciation of your R&D team across a parallel calendrical stretch? Just say the word and I'll hop to it!'

'I need nothing of the kind from you, darling. Please don't take this as a slight against your professional competence, but I flatter myself that with my Occuvisual insider's know-how I would do better to take care of the accountancy-proper side of things unassisted.'

'Ah, well, then,' I says, with a John-Wayne-esque jerk of the head directed over her shoulder towards the door qua door, 'as my services will not be required after all, I suppose I'd better just mosey on.'

'Not so fast, Nigel. You see, it wasn't your professional expertise I was alluding to over the phone today when I said I needed your help.'

[Well, of course, I'd known as much; but this was, after all, a professional point of honour.] 'Oh, it wasn't?'

'Yes, it wasn't. It was, rather, in point of your amateur expertise on a certain subject that I then stood most desperately most in need of your assistance. And I suspect if I'd actually had ten minutes' leisure to avail myself of that expertise--in other words, if Tamsin hadn't been lurking round the corner all the while I was on the phone with you--this report assignment would have remained right on through to now what it was at that moment--a mischievous twinkle in her eye, rather than externalising and transmogrifying itself into the slackened noose around my neck that it now is.'

'But now that the noose is slackly slung round your neck, and you don't seem to want my professional help in shaking yourself free of it--well, what's the use of my amateur expertise on this certain subject?'

'The use consists in arresting the otherwise-inevitable, irreversible tightening of the noose from tomorrow onwards. Look, this report, as near as I can tell, is mere window-dressing in Tamsin's eyes: I mean, I gather she assigned it to me sheerly by way of lending a veneer of professionalism to her...Arsenalo...'

'...Arsenalophobic?'

'...That seem to be the mot juste, thanks...[here, I couldn't forbear smiling, vis-a-vis the sheer apparent novelty of the adjective to her greenhorn'd orioles]...to her Arsenalophobic spite.'

'Are you sure you aren't--and weren't--being just a wee bit paranoid? I mean, not only as to the particular genesis of the report, but also as to its broader psychic background? Did you really conceive yourself on just grounds to be a full-fledged member of that ancient, celebrated Mark-Knopfler-fronted rock ensemble when you called me today, and the more so entirely on account of your lack of enthusiasm for Tamsin's Aresnalophobia?'

'I'm sure as Shaw on both counts. Look, as I was saying,' she says, stroppily extricating her hands from mine, as if by way of preparation for a headlong dash into the front room proper, 'I haven't much time, so if you'll just give me a bit of something to work with Arsenal-wise tomorrow, toot sweet, I'd be ever so grateful.'

'Look,' I says, soothingly, grabbing hold of one of the fugitive hands and tugging her forwards towards her presumptive intended destination, 'I'm all too willing--indeed, eager--to help you, but surely there's no point, say, in my mechanically catechizing you on the full current Gunners squad roster in the next 20 seconds or so. All that'll've eventuated in, at best, come tomorrow, is your regurgitating some random name in Tamsin's presence--and who knows whether you'll even have got the name right, let alone whether it'll've been anyone she'll have ever heard of.'

[E, thoroughly nonplussed:] 'Catechizing me on the current Gunners squad roster?'

'Case in point: as of now, you're unacquainted with so much as the barest rudiments of the club-specific argot. If I'm to be of any use to you atoll on the Arsenalophobic front, I'll need to ply you selectively--tactically, as it were--with a mere handful of names and terms guaranteed to press Tamsin's Arsenalophobic buttons. But pursuant to the production of such a tactically-purposive handful, I'll need to sketch out an Arsenalophobic profile of Tamsin--which will perforce necessitate your relating to me as patient an account as you can manage of what passed between the two of you today, which will in turn, of course, require some more-than-negligible expenditure of time. Now, tell me truthfully, darling: how much of that precious commodity would you estimate you've got ready to hand?'

'I dunno. Perhaps 20 minutes--half an hour at the most. The depreciation calculations alone'll take four hours, the appreciation ones another three or so; and then, of course, I have to factor in another two hours for checking the figures, along with a quarter-hour for printout; the lot converging on my 6 a.m. departure time, so's I arrive at the office early enough to be sure of commandeering the ring-binding machine...Christ, she really rubbed it in! Surely an electronic copy would have sufficed!'

'Surely. But as we've only, as you say, a half an hour at most to ourselves, perhaps you'd better commence your account...' [By now, we're both standing in front of the couch, to which I give a paralytic, leftside bow-cum-free-arm sweep, in classic Ruggerian-cum-ZZ-Toppian fashion; and once we're both seated arse-cheek-to-arse-cheek thereupon, with both pairs of legs crossed and propped up on the coffee table, she delivers the aforementioned account, AFF:]

'Well, the day started off auspiciously enough: Tamsin slept through the entire drive into work; and, in fact, once we'd arrived it was all I could do to get her out of the car, back on her feet and into the front door of the building.'

'If you'll pardon the briefest of interruptions, none of this so far sounds particularly auspicious.'

'Well, you have to put yourself in my shoes then (or keep yourself in our shoes now, whichever's easiest). You see, it seemed to me at this point that Tamsin was so utterly knackered by the night before that she'd never be capable of putting in so much as a single solid hour's work, let alone a full day's one; that by 10 o'clock at the latest she'd inevitably either have punched out or sequestered herself in her office under pretence of some uninterruptible seven-hour conference call. In either case, I'd have been off the hook Arsenal-phobic-[sic (but let's at least give her credit for trying to pick up the lingo)]-wise for at least another day. But then, once we were in the lift, everything took an irrevocable turn for the worse: her mobile started ringing, and whilst she was barely managing to keep herself propped up against the handrail, she somehow summoned up enough manual dexterity to extract the phone from her handbag and cup it to her ear in time to answer the call.'

'Let me guess: the bell in question came from Cuthbert.'

'"Ding-ding!" as they say. Well, anyway, Cuthbert presumably having asked her where she was, she said, "I'm at the office, you shithead! Where in fuck's name else would I be this time of the day?" And then, Cuthbert presumably having asked her where she'd been for the past 11 hours or so, she said, "I stayed over at Merle's." There was a bit more silence, accompanied by much nauseated eye-rolling and tongue-lolling in my direction, and then she says, "OK, have it your way: at Merle's and Nigel's. I did, after all, forewarn you that I might not be coming home." From this point onwards I was at something of a loss to reconstruct the Cuthbertian end of the conversation in any detail, but I gathered distinctly enough that it centred in the main on a disgruntled appraisal of your end of your earlier conversation with him. But as for Tamsin's end, I recall her saying, first, "Oh, poor baby! Does your pussy hurt?" and then, "Well, I don't care if it is an ungentlemanly comparison. It's about fucking time someone had the balls to make it in public" and finally, "That's enough for today, dear. Sieg Heil!, and Fick dich! to boot."'

'Let me just interject, by way of gratifying your presumptive reconstructive curiosity, that the comparison in question was one of the current Arsenal fan base to the Hitler Youth movement of the 1930s. Hence the smattering of German vocables in Tamsin's sign-off.'

'Ah, yes! Soft-pedalled subtlety has always been your forte. Anyway, the point is that upon the conclusion of that phone-convo, which coincided all-too-tidily with our exit from the lift, Tamsin was suddenly galvanised into caffeinated sobriety; and that, from that point onwards, except on the evidence of the slightly static-frazzled discomposure of her hairdo, and of the barely-noticeable misalignment of her skirt-flies with her blouse-buttons, none of our co-workers could have guessed that she'd been pissed as a backed-up urinal a mere eight hours previous. And naturally, the galvinisation was attended by a string of imprecations against the galvinisor. "He's hopeless," she said, throwing her hands up from behind her desk. "We're hopeless--he and I. Goddamn him and his fucking Terry Ornery and Arsenio Finger and Czech Fabri-Gas!" But, of course, having nothing to go on vis-a-vis this catalogue of Cuthbert-affiliated people or things she was inveighing against, apart from some vague sense that all of them had something to do with Arsenal, it was as much as I could do to reply with a a mousey smile of feigned sympathy whose insincerity she saw through to straightway. "As if you'd understand," she said. "Why don't you go and fetch me a cup of tea. I could use one, and, in any case, it seems to be the only practical task you're cut out for." Naturally, I took advantage of the precious four-minute interval of solitude presumptively required for the preparation of this selfsame cuppa to ring you up from the kitchen. I even erred so far on the side of caution as to synchronise the starting of the timer of the microwave with the dialling of your work number. But unluckily for me, Tamsin--no kettle-warming, loose-leaf-straining tea snob she, apparently--poked her head in at 1 minute 20 and counting to demand "what's taking so fucking long" and so I had to ring off. Then, no sooner had I delivered the tea to her desk than she assigned me this report, along with its impossible deadline, which, suffice it to say--apart from the occasional pee break, the drive home and the present conversation--I've been furiously, uninterruptedly swotting away towards ever since.'

'OK: granted, you've established to my infinite satisfaction that Tamsin heartily resents your all-too-palpable absence of sympathy with her Arsenalophobia. That said, I'm still not fully satisfied that there's a tight--thatistersay necessary and not even partially contingent--connexion between her resentment and the impossibly-deadlined commission of this here report. In other words, I want to know on what evidence you maintain that Tamsin would never have commissioned such an assignment in the absence of such resentment.'

'Well, firstoff, on the evidence that last year's version of the same report wasn't due till mid-November at the earliest; and secondoff, on the evidence of her parting words.'

'Namely?'

'Namely: "If this report isn't on my desk at start of business tomorrow, Houghington, your crypto-Goonerly ass will be grass.'"

'Ah, I see. Well, that about cinches it. Mind you, you're off to a promising enough start. Firstoff, you recognised the adjective Goonerly for the Arsenalic subcultural slang-lexeme that it in fact is; and secondly, you managed to carry home at least an approximate phonetic record of Tamsin's personal unholy triumvirate of Gunners: such that all that's really required against your setting up shop as a full-fledged, greenhorn Arsenlophobe is a bit of phonetic fine-chuning and biographical back-in-filling. Are you ready?'

'As Freddie.'

'Are you sure as Shaw? (I mean, in other words, shouldn't you be writing at least some of this down...)?'

'Oh, yes, of course!' she says, springing up from the couch, fetching a scribbling block-'n'-pen from the dining room table and finally re-seating herself, pen ready to block, alongside me haunches.

'OK,' I says. 'The first individual in this rogues' gallery is Arsène (not Arsenio) Wenger (not Finger). His first name is spelt A-R-S-E (with an accent grave, not that you really need to know that for now) N-E. For mnemonic purposes, just think of it as the name of the club minus the terminating 'al.'"

'Oh, come off it, Nigel! It can't be that simple: his name is Arsène and he's managing a team called Arsenal? Surely you're setting me up for your own...crypto-Goonerphobic ends.'

'I wish I could say I was. But, alas!: sometimes, as in this case, truth is stranger and more cu--more front-bottomish than fiction. His first name is Arsène and there's an end on it. Now, as for his second name, it's spelt W-E-N-G-E-R. Again for mnemonic purposes, just think of the celebrated Kraut composer and proto-Nazi Dick Wanger--'

'--I'm sorry, but isn't that Wagner...?'

'...Erm, well, I suppose it is. So just transpose the G and the N and substitute an E for the N and you're all set. Anyway, Monsieur Wenger (b. Strasbourg, France, 1949; MA in Economics, Robert Schumann University 1974) a.k.a. the Professor, a.a.k.a. Dr Moreau or Mengele in intimate Aresnalophobic circles, onetime striker for RC Strasbourg and erstwhile manager of AS Monaco, is due to celebrate his tenth anniversary as club manager come this September. Clever, ruthless, reservedly genteel in upbringing and yet mercurially boorish on the pitch, he can be counted on to descend to the utmost depths of pottymouthism in contesting the most blatantly cut-and-dry (or is it cut-and-dried?) red card flung in the phiz of a member of his side.'

'OK,' says Esmeralda, furiously scrawling with the tip of her tongue sticking out ever-so-winsomely betwixt her lips, 'I think I've got all that down. I've one question though, not apropos of Monsieur...Wenger, but of football generally: what's a red card?'

'Oh, come off it, Esmeralda!' I couldn't help ejaculating, more out of horror (on her sham-Arsenlophobic behalf) than resentment (on my generic pedipilular own). 'You might as well ask me "What's a stadium?" or, indeed, "What's a football?". Surely you've retained at least a smattering of the basic terminology of the game from your nipperly days of Wimbledonian fandom?'

'Apparently not.'

'Very well, then: a red card is the visual symbol of an infraction against the official rules severe enough to result in the sending off of the player in question--thatistersay in his being excluded from further play for the duration of the match. And just to forewarn you, if the fact that you've had occasion to ask this question is anything to go on, you can expect, at minimum, a yellow card or two from Tamsin tomorrow--'

'--As if I knew what a yellow card was--'

'--yesyesyes: or, for that matter, a free kick or a hat-trick. From now on, let's just stick to the biographical register and hope against hope that on its own it amounts to a serviceable enough bucketful of chum to her Arsenalophobic gullet. Now, the next rogue in the line-up is Thierry Henry: first -named Thomas-Howard-Ivan-Edward-Roger-Roger-Yolanda, surnamed awn-REE, which, despite its poncey French pronunciation is orthographically identical to our English Henry, as in John Haitch or The Six Wives of Haitch the Eighth. Anyway, Monsieur Henry (b. Paris 1977, Brevet Collège Jerry Lewis 1992) a.k.a. Cap'n Shithead, striker and squad captain, has been with the club since 1999...'

END of '(T)E(o)EH: PART THE FIRST'.