Stropfest '05: Part 247

It's midnight. Just got back from the pub. I'm pissed on six pints of Stella and right stroppy! Had a run-in there (at the Ape) with one of my old girl mates (or whatever the proper word is for a richard you haven't managed to pull [yet!]), name of Maggie, Maggie Elms. I met her about three years ago, when we were both working at the caff at at the BBC--Bush House, not the Television Centre. Blonde, bit on the heavyset side, seems to take her fashion cues from Desperate Housewives. Still, not a bad looker--not to mention the fact that she's got a rack you could shelve a complete set of the OED--the real, pre-digitised one--on. Back then at the Beeb I tried chatting her up a few times , but with no luck; I didn't even get to the half-way line with her. Then I was fired from that job (probably because I was spending so much time chatting her up and so little time minding the chip vat), and I lost touch with her. Anyway, I'd been sitting there at a table by the fruit machine for about two hours talking to my mate Ronnie Livingstone (no relation to Ken, he swears [and I swear I'll smash his fucking steak-and-kidney-piehole in if I ever find out they are related!]) and watching, not very closely, a replay of the Wolverhampton-Burnley match on the telly, when she walked in. I signal to her to join us, which she does, and we do a bit of catching up. Turns out she's just moved to the neighbourhood (not that I consider Golders Green part of the neighbourhood as such) and now works at a bank. So Ronnie offers to buy her a beer, and she says she'll take a Guinness, and right about then I start feeling like I'm within my rights to get shirty with Ronnie on account of the fact that he seems be putting the ball in play so he can get a direct free kick out of this girl's being there, but I let it slide because obviously I have to let it slide if I want to have any hope of scoring point one, let alone a hat trick, tonight. So he goes away to the bar, and I do my best in the interval to lay on the charm, but all I manage is to get an earful from her about this bank job of hers before Ronnie's back with three beers--two Guinnesses for him and her and a Stella for me. I buy the next round, and he buys the one after that, and so on; Maggie doesn't buy any, doesn't even lift her finger to offer to buy one (I took that as a sign that she assumed we were both pulling on her, and wanted us to know that she assumed it). And the whole night I'm thinking I look like a total cheapskate because I'm drinking Stella, which at the Ape costs a full quid less than Guinness. But I'm not about to switch to Guinness, even for a single night, just to impress some dopey girl. I'd sooner drink my own piss than drink that swill. Actually, I'd much sooner drink my own piss than drink Guinness, because my own piss at least looks a bit like beer, whilst Guinness not only tastes like piss but on top of that looks like liquid shit. Well, anyway Ronnie and I had already put away about three pints before Maggie showed up, so naturally we were already pretty well on our way to being tanked by then, and we were definitely three sheets to the old double-yew when they called last orders. And as usually happens in these situations where two blokes are pulling on the same girl, the conversation pretty much just kept rolling along as it would have done if the girl hadn't shown up. It has to do that, because the only alternative is for one of the blokes to pay more attention to the girl than to his mate, who then inevitably starts feeling like a bollocksless wonder and either picks a fight, or, more typically, storms out of the place in a seething rage of repressed randiness and stroppiness, which just encourages the girl to throw in the old J-Cloth on the evening too. It's a lose-lose-lose situation, you see. So we just kept debating the original point of the evening, which was 'Who is a more monstrous cunt--Arsène Wenger or Thierry Henry?,' and as you can tell by my phraseology, our lingo generally leant more than a few degrees towards the off-colour side of the perpendicular. Mind you, I was watching Maggie out of the corner of my eye the whole time, and I could tell she was getting more and more offended by all the profanity. Until finally, just after Jimmy Phipps, the head barman, had come round the first time to tell us to finish up, she stands up, puts her hands on her hips and says in this hoity-toity tone of voice, 'My, but aren't you two guys giving yourselves some side?--carrying on like a couple of chavs with your cees and effs, and completely ignoring me. What do you take me for, some kind of a spandex jumper and cutoff jeans-sporting blokess who actually follows football?'

Well, that about settled it. At that point, she was all Ronnie's, as far as I was concerned. He could have her and the fucking package tour of Cornwall in the bargain if he wanted to do. But there was a point I thought I owed it to myself to make to her first. So I said to her, 'My, Princess Margaret the Second, but aren't you giving yourself some side?--calling us guys, comparing us to chavs and taking umbrage at the idea of being regarded as a blokess. I myself am proud to call myself a bloke, and would hardly scruple to consort with, or even to marry, a blokess. Of course, I would never dream of addressing a fellow bloke as bloke, any more than, were I a member of the poshility, I would dream of addressing an individual fellow toff as gentleman. We blokes have a different honorific for that purpose, that honorific being lad (ladess--not 'ladette'--being its feminine equivalent). But being a bloke or a blokess, per se, is nothing to be ashamed of. And as president and charter member of the East Finchley chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Blokishness against the Incursions of Guydom and Chavishness (SPBAIGC), I am duty-bound to remonstrate with any person or set of persons who would besmirch the good name of bloke by imputing to it the remotest degree of consanguinity, by the spear or by the distaff, with that most churlish of all anthroponyms, chav. Hie thee hence, woman; get thee to a chavvery, for 'tis plain to all that have eyes that thour't naught but a chavess in blokess's clothing.'

She was looking poisoned micks at me throughout this speech, and just as I was getting to that bit about the Society for the Preservation of Blokishness, etc., I saw her eyes narrow into horizontalised vertical smiles, as they say, and I could tell that she already had a comeback waiting for me. So as soon as I finished, without missing a beat, as they say, she says to me, 'I apologise for the chav comparison. That was paying you too high a compliment. I see now that, even worse than that, you're nothing but a common, run-of-the-mill anorak.' And with that, she picks up her three-quarters-full glass of beer, drains it at one go, puts the glass back on the table, summons forth a mighty belch worthy of a 20-stone bloke, turns on her pointy three-inch heel and marches out, leaving Ronnie and me alone with our two schlongs and our two half-glasses of Guinness and Stella. I tallied the total cost of her beers in my head--Cor, she'd just bilked us to the chune of 10 quid! Then Ronnie says to me, 'For fuck's sake, why did you have to go and bollocks everything up like that?' And I says to him, 'Like what? It must have been obvious to you that she wouldn't have had anything to do with either of us for all the kheer in Oldham.' And he says to me, 'Well, you didn't help matters any with your Society for the Preservation of Cuntishness Against the Incursions of Dudedom or whatever the fuck you called your fictitious club. Christ, you don't even live in East Finchley!' 'Course I don't,' I says to him, affecting to examine my nails with a detachment worthy of a Cotswalds bungalow. 'But what self-respecting regular bloke is going to admit he's from Woodside Park, a mere throne's stow from the fucking Hertfordshire County Golf Club? At least East Finchley's got a couple of snooker parlours.' 'Whatthefuckevs, you fucking anorak,' I then heard (or thought I heard) him mutter into his last mouthful of Guinness. Then Jimmy came round a second time to kick us out (No lock-ins on weeknights is an inviolable rule of Mr Sedule, the owner), and I walked home and started writing this here post.