Why Don't You Go Rugger Bugger Yourself, Yah Facking Cant!

Time to dip into the old post bag here. In reply to my post of the 14th instant, Bradley the Bradford Bullhead comments, 'Nice blog. Always warms me heart-cockles to come across a fellow treiziste. Hope your Bronco arse is recovering nicely from that goring we administered to it on the 22nd!' Now, Bradley, before you show up at my doorstep asking me to be your date for the next London-Bradford scrumfest, let me set you straight on one point: I'm no fan of the London Broncos. I'm not even a fan of rugby at all, of either the league or the union strain. Until this morning, when I read your post, I didn't even know the Bradford league team were called the Bulls. The thought that you've pegged me as a Bronconian is enough to make me want to jump on the next train to Bradford (the Mazda's still in the shop, you see) and hunt you down and give you a sock in the gob, but I won't do that; I'll keep my shirt on. After all you're hardly the first bloke or blokess who's been misled by my first name into assuming that I'm prey to some sort of overweening passion for rugby, and I've so far managed to keep my shirt on in the presence of that lot. Christ, you know, back in '03, when England won the Cup, it was unbearable. Back then, whenever I'd introduce myself to someone, the other bloke, instead of saying, 'How d'ye do. My name's Steve' or 'Mike' or 'Jeff'' or whatever, would launch into a rendition of 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' that would have done Paul Robeson himself proud. Why, you ask, since I couldn't give a pair of fetid dingo's bollocks about the sport, did I ever elect to call myself, or allow myself to be called, Rugby? Well, if I do say so myself, there's an interesting story leading up to the answer to that question. The story begins back in 1994, during my fourth-form year at High School, in my home town of Diss (a.k.a. Satanston), near Norwich. One day, at the end of classes, in the halls, I happened to run into one my mates in the fifth form, Ned Stilton. And he tells me that he and some of the other fifth-form lads are planning to meet for a pick-up game of rugger at Stuston Common later that afternoon, and asks if I'd like to join them. I say yes like a shot, even though I'm absolute shite at sport, because I'm not about to let slip an opportunity of hanging with the older lads. So I go home and change into my shorts and T-shirt and trainers, and then I head for the park. It's a good mile and a half from our house on the west end of town to the Common, well out past the east end, towards Scole. I've never made the trip from one to the other on foot, but I figure it'll take about 15 minutes. Instead, it takes nearer to a half an hour, and so I finish up arriving well after scrum time; only, to my surprise, there's no game underway: the lads are just pacing around, arm-wrestling, kicking up clods of dirt, or what have you. I go up to Ned and ask him what the cause of the delay is, and he says it's on account of the fact that nobody thought to bring a ball. 'I thought it was your job to bring it!' one of them accuses the other. 'No, it was definitely yours, you fucking tosser,' says another. Then yet another of them, a big, hulking 18-stone bloke name of Archie Mills, says, with this look that would have made the Devil himself (i.e., Ken Livingstone) shudder, 'Wait a minute lads. I've got an idea: why don't we use Nigel as a ball?' Then I start to become conscious of a palpable slackening of the tension in my anal schphincter. Nigel, you see, is the name I was originally christened as (with?); the name my parents gave me, the name I had always borne up to that day. Within, I'd say ten seconds, a wave of jubilant assent to Archie's proposal has rolled through the whole laddish assembly, and I see that I'm done for. There's nothing a scrawny 8-stone fourth former can do to gainsay the will of a 300-stone-strong mini-mob of fifth-formers. And the next thing I know the aforementioned Archie has scooped me up under his right arm and after briefly suffocating in the blokish swarm of the scrummage, I soar aloft for two or three euphoric seconds before crashing down on to Ned, breaking his collarbone in my fall as I learned afterwards. From here on out I guess you could say everything was a blur, although I prefer to think of it as a bloody, pain-saturated haze. I woke up next morning in a hospital bed at NNUH. The doctors said I'd broken 78 bones, including all my ribs and both my tibiae. Still, it was nothing a few weeks in a body cast wouldn't set right. From that point on--'that point' being a month later when I finally went back to school--a fifth form lad had only to whisper the word rugby to me, or pass me a note bearing that word, for me to know that my services would be required down at the park after school. I'm a past master at sussing out coded messages, you see. Oh, they were the salt of the earth, those fifth-form lads. Fortunately and naturally, most of them graduated at the end of that year or I wouldn't be here to type this story atcha. As it turns out, the only lasting physical damage I've suffered from those games consists in a permanent case of slight double-vision (such that I see things more clearly with 3-D glasses on), and a slight limp in my right leg. But it was worth it, of course, for all the personal growth. Well, not to stray too far from the nub of the discourse, from rugby-as-shorthand it was an easy transition to Rugby as nickname, and the rest, as they say, is history...

...but not quite. One day, maybe three or four years after my last rugger game at Diss, when I was still living at home and studying part-time at the University of East Anglia, my dad comes in from checking the post and hands me an envelope, saying 'I can only assume this is for you' (while cutting me one of those weary Must-you-put-me-through-this-again-you-arsehole looks). It's an electoral registration card addressed to a 'Mr Rugby McGyver.' Incredible, as it sounds, apparently some bloke or other had managed to trick the county registry office into thinking that he was me, and that I wanted to change my name to Rugby! That was the only possible explanation. Well, suspicion naturally fell upon the old Diss fifth-formers, and in particular on this one bloke among them, Jarvis Chumley, who I'd always privately referred to as 'Me on Steroids--a fuckload of steroids.' In a welter of stroppiness I dash through the front door and sprint down Louie's Lane to Roydon Road, tearing at the buttons of my shirt all the while. I'm aiming for Denmark Street, and ultimately, for Chumley's house in Beehive Yard. But about halfway there I feel myself cooling off, running more and more slowly, and I eventually just stop and button my shirt up and take a moment to reappraise this course of action. 'Look, you cunt,' I say to myself, 'In the first place, you don't even know for sure that Chumley's the one that pulled the prank; in the second place, you don't know if Chumley still lives there. In the third place,' well, in the third place...Rugby was actually sort of a cool-sounding name. It certainly sounded a hell of a lot more manly, indeed more blokey, than Nigel. Nigel was the ultimate chinless wonder's moniker, the name the Yanks always gave a Brit in their sitcoms when they wanted it to be assumed that the character in question was the ponciest poofter in the Kingdom. By the time I got back home--for home I had already begun heading--I was completely reconciled to the name Rugby, which has indeed remained my legal name ever since.

Finally, to get back to the subject of sport and my likes and dislikes in that area, let me warn any of you lot who might one day get it into your thick skulls to ream me on the trouncing of Chelsea or some other football club traditionally favoured by Barnetians (to say nothing of our own pissant league two team [Here's hoping ManU fumigates you bees on Wednesday!]): I support no football club. All I care about is seeing Arsenal lose. During an Arsenal game I'll cheer like a Buckinghamshire soocer mum for the opposing team, but the next day the lot of them can die in a bendy bus accident for all I care. There is no cause on this earth more worth getting riled up about than the defeat, disgrace, and utter annihilation of the Arsenal football club. (Not even the deposing of Ken? No, though it is a close second.) I really do believe my enmity for that team is such that if the old nuclear briefcase happened to fall into my hands, I wouldn't hesitate to use it, knowing as I would that bloody Arsenal would go up in smoke with the rest of humanity. Burn alive all of Arsenal. Burn them at the stake. Burn them as retribution for their blatant defilement of themselves. Burn them for their neverending void of purpose. Burn them on principle alone. I'm sorry, I'm a little verschtimmt here. I was going to sign off with one of my usual 'Fuck Soandso' formulas, but I can't; there's just no word in the language that's strong enough for what I want done to that club. Cor, I need to get some Stella in my gullet, and toot sweet!