Take Back the Night

Old habits die hard (with a vengeance? no, with a savage cuntishness), and here I am falling back into one of mine: sporadic, un-Boswellian posting. And had my life taken a slightly different turn over the past few days, I might have put off posting even longer; but, thankfully, not two nights ago as of the moment of this typing, I was vouchsafed a bit of experience that not only met but actually exceeded my original criterion of blog-worthiness (i.e., personal memorability); as it centred on a matter that should be of great, and indeed, urgent interest not only to all Barnetians, or, indeed even to all Londoners, but to all Britons; namely, the birth of a new British national holiday.

First, the obligatory background (I call the background obligatory in view of the fact that not only was I present at the parturition of the holiday, but that in all modesty I must account myself its presiding midwife or obstetrician, and in that capacity I am obliged to tender an account of all of the circumstances pertaining to myself that also directly or indirectly pertain to that parturition. It's like in that movie about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, right?, where we're treated to ten times as much footage of Tom Jefferson trying to roger his wife as of him actually writing the fucking thing.): Round about 11 on Saturday morning I rang up Ronnie 'Anti-Ken' Livingstone to see if he'd be up for meeting up with me at the Ape to watch the Sunderland-Arsenal game. And, of course, he was up for it, because not only does he, like me, hate Arsenal (although I'd say not quite as much), but he also considers himself a Sunderland supporter; this on the flimsy grounds that he has an uncle who lives there, although Ronnie himself has never come within a hundred miles of the beshattened town (and who can blame him?). I've been known on more than one occasion to take the piss out of Ronnie for the factitiousness of his Mackemomania, but Saturday night was no such occasion; for just as surely as stone blunts scissors and paper wraps stone (and cunt wraps schlong), so, in my eyes, does true Arsenal-enmity trump false Sunderland-fandom. To be sure, though, neither of us had great hopes for Sunderland. They've been hovering or slouching at the very bottom of the table, in last place, since their promotion form the sub-tabular realm of the Championship League at the beginning of the season. If the Premiership table may be likened to a gauge of ocean depths, then Sunderland are one of those species of creepy-crawly fish only lately discovered by the most advanced and deep-diving of submarines, the type of spiny, slimy, hideous little critter that has evolved its way out of the need for eyes. That said, on Saturday the Cats fared a lot better than either Ronnie or I expected them to do, no thanks to any great exhibition of skill on their part. It was really only owing to T. Henry & co.'s cuntish forbearance that they even managed to score those two corners, and to finish down by two points instead of ten. It's fascinating to me how with the viewing of every new match, my animus towards the Gunners becomes ever-more subtly nuanced, acquires an ever richer bouquet, if you will. If, on Saturday, Arsenal had simply roundly and expeditiously trounced Sunderland, my hatred of them would have been undiluted by so much as a dram of its current strength, and yet it would have lacked something of the metaphysical richness it now posseses by virtue of the slow, depraved, Gestapo-style approach to the kill they opted for on that night. Time and again, Arsenal would taunt Sunderland, would say to them, 'You pussycats with your seasoned, callus-toed talent are obviously the real professionals here, and we're just a bunch of Johnny-come-lately hacks--come on, show us what you've got; swat us clean on up into the stands with your little back pussy paws,' only to send the kitty fur flying with the full brunt of their cuntish barrage. It was like (if you'll pardon my switching metaphors in midstream) watching a bullfighter take on a chihuahua or a dachshund with specially wrought burrito-or-sausage-dog-sized skewers.

But to take up the thread of my narrative here and now lest I lose it courtesy of a state of total absorption in my one true passion: the game had just ended, and Ronnie and I were glumly and silently nursing our respective fifth Stellas, when I heard the announcer say: 'And that's all she wrote, ladies and gents. The Gunners shut down the Black Cats three to one, and Thierry Henry extends his goalscoring record by an impressive three points here at Highbury on the fifth of November, 2005.' It was his allusion to the date, couched in that precise format, that set me off, that instantly set my mind's I-Pod playing the first line of the first stanza of that most perdurable songs of my childhood, a song that I would have learned at my wet-nurse's tit if I'd had a wet-nurse: Remember, remember the Fifth of November. But that, I realised, as I listened to this fragment of tuneage in my head, was just the point: this year, for the first time in my life, I had forgotten the fifth of November; or, to be more precise, I had allowed the best part of that day to elapse without reflecting on its significance. My shame was indescribable; it was as though I'd just realised I'd forgotten my mum's birthday. (And as I in fact tend to do with my mum's birthday, I'd noted the significance of the day in question a few days in advance [i.e., in this case, as I was typing my last post on the first] only subsequently to forget it on the day itself.) But was it entirely my fault that here I was, a slender span of six hours away from my passage into the utterly insignificant calendar date of November sixth, and only just now recalling what the fifth was supposed to be all about? Had anyone here at the pub tonight broached the subject? Had, for that matter, anyone at work in the course of the preceding week, thought to ask me, 'Have you got any plans for the big holiday on Saturday?' No and no. Could it be, I wondered, that my inadvertent snubbage of the fifth was not the result of a personal, individuated mental eructation, but rather that it participated in a general syndrome afflicting the British people (or at any rate, those Britons residing along the Barnet-Potters Bar corridor) at large? Well, there was only one way to find out. So, after draining my Stella to the lees and signalling to Jimmy to pour us another two, I said to Ronnie:

'So, it's the fifth of November. You know what that means, right?'

Absolutely dumbstruck incomprehension on his side. 'Only 50 shopping days left till Christmas?'
'No, you stupid cunt. I mean do you know what the date in itself means, without reference to any other date.'

'Hmm,' he says meditatively, matching me on the Stella count as Jimmy brings us the next round. Then, setting his glass down before taking sip number one from it, and slapping the table with an air of triumphal smugness that sorely tempts me to reach for my shirt, he exclaims: 'No, I've got it! The tenth anniversary of the first game in Aresnal's all-time longest losing streak.'

'Wrong again, YSC-squared!' (Truth be told, though, I'm flattered by this second guess qua well-gravied sop to my Arsenalophobia.)

'Well, I give up then.'

'Remember, remember, the fifth of November,' I sing along to my mental I-Pod, conducting an air-choir with my Stella-free hand,'the gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot. Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent, to blow up King and Parliament. Three score barrels were laid...'

'Cor!' he exclaims, laying down his Stella once again and cruelly, almost audibly, smiting his forehead. 'It's Guy Fawkes Day--Bonfire Night!'

'Exactly!' I say, laying down my own Stella and reaching across the table to give his forehead a painless stuntman's smite of my own.

'You know what else...?' he says, ignoring my gesture of gentle piss-taking, and suddenly coming over all pensive, and biting a thumbnail. 'I just remembed that this year's Guy Fawkes Day isn't just any old Guy Fawkes Day. I hear tell, from something I was reading in the Daily Mail last week [Ronnie, you've been reading that downmarket sanitary napkin? Neighbah, please!], that 2005, in fact, marks the four hundredth anniversary of the gunpowder plot.'

'You don't say!' (That sounded about right. Jimmy the First, Will 'Shakes' The Bard, Guy himself and all that lot flourished in the 16-oughties, didn't they?) 'Well, that quadruples the severity of the infraction, dunnit? Here it is, the quadracentennial of the original Guy Fawkes Day--'

Here Ronnie has the co-jones to interject, 'Is quadracentennial a real word? I thought it was just the title of a Who-album-cum-movie-tie-in.'

'All right, you little linguistic cunt-hair-splitter. I thought it was a real word, but maybe it isn't. I'll look it up in my compact OED when I get home. So, then: here it is, the four hundredth anniversary of the original Guy Fawkes day, and what are you and I, two red-blooded Englishmen--'

Ronnie con mas co-jones: '--Don't forget I've got some blue blood coursing through me not-so-old veins. I am, after all, 35th in the line of succession for the Earldom of Shaftesbury, via my direct descent from Susan De Coverley, second cousin twice removed of the Second Earl.'

(Just like a Croydon chemist's son to whip out his posh credentials at the slightest little provocation!) 'Here we are, then, two full-blooded Englishmen--'

'Woah, woah, woah, don't pour so free-handedly with the full bottle, mate. Remember your Scots great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, the bloke who was Davie Hume's valet de chambre?'

(Fuck me ever so gently if the cunt didn't know my family tree better than I did!) 'Here we are, then, two native-born Englishmen, in a pub flush with native-born Englishmen and Englishwomen--'

'--Flush seems a bit hyperbolic to me. First off, you've got the owner himself, Mr Sedule, a Frenchman; then old there's Manish Shah (Punjab, India) and Jay Gulati (UP, ditto) up at the bar, plus Denise the Cypriot and Claudia the Italian at the next table; not to mention that Yank Van Adams back in the kitchen...'

I'd had about enough of Ronnie's sophistic shenanigans. He's too clever by half sometimes, is that Ronnie. So, giving a few rhetorical tugs to my shirt front (but without raising my voice above the optimal pub-din volume), I break in with: 'All right, you've made your fucking point. And I think right about now I'm making mine, extra-verbally, with equal pellucidity. [He looks down at his glass as if to say, in a stroppy-yet-mollified tone, No need to get shirty about it, YFC!] So, if you'll allow to me continue: Here we are, a pubful of people who, regardless of whatever piece of turf we happen to have been squeezed out on to from the womb, regard England, in our adult years, as a better piece of turf on which to piss away a Saturday night than fucking Portugal or Malaysia or Togo; here we are, I say, on the four-hundredth anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day, and how are we keeping this anniversary? By watching a sodding football match!'

'An it please your worship (and as your worship must appreciate), this wasn't just any old football match. It was an Arsenal match.'

'Cor's whores, I haven't forgotten that! But if we'd remembered we'd surely have found time for both--for the Arsenal game and for bonfire night. Up here in the lower fringes of the Arctic Circle, we are, after all, graced by seven full hours of pre-midnight darkness in November. My point is that we forgot Guy Fawkes Day altogether, we let it slip by us without so much as a "Take care not to let the door hit you on the arse on your way out of the pub". That's my point, and the question I would like to pose to you, my stalwart comrade at pints, is why?'

'Well,' Ronnie says, as he begins to zamboni his patch of table fretfully with the bottom of his pint glass, 'Again, as they said in the Daily Mail, apparently it's got something to do with terrorism, or, rather, with the fear thereof. On account of 11/9 and 7/7 and whatnot.'

'What has, the fact that you and I've forgotten about Guy Fawkes Day?' (Note here the essaying of McGyver Signature Rhetorical Ploy #52: Pedantic Disengenuousness. Direct free kick for the Rugger!)

'Course not, YFC! I mean the general unpopularity of the holiday this year.'

'Pull the third one, Ronnie, it's got balls on it! Terrorism schmerrorism; this little access of amnesia of ours has been a long time in coming. When was the last time you attended a Bonfire Night celebration?'

'Let's see...must have been about ten years ago, in Regent's Park. I've only been to two or three of 'em in all of my 27 years. The whole shebang was always considered a bit old hat in Croydon, you know.'

'Well, I remember going to a Bonfire Night as recently as eight years ago, in Norwich. And the crowd that year was maybe half the size of the crowd at the one I'd gone to before that, in '92 or '93. And when you compare the GFD/BN scene in the early '90s with the one of late 80s--well, Christ, there is no comparison. Back then, in my late single-digits, all of Norfolk celebrated Guy Fawkes Day like it was 1699. Of course, as my dad likes to joke, Norwich is the Cincinnati of the UK--'

'--Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Diss is the Cincinnati of Norfolk.'

'How'd you know I was going to say that?'

'No special powers of divination needed in the present instance. The Cincinnati joke is one of your paternal hobby horse's oldest tricks, innit?'

If stone blunts scissors, etc., then sentimentality blunts shirtiness. 'Well, then,' I continue, contenting myself with a 'Shut-your-CTM-hole!'-ish glare at him en pissant, 'I'll set off on this here trip down Memory Lane on foot. I still get choked up every time I think about my first Guy Fawkes Day, you see. Cor, Ronnie, I couldn't have been more than five or six. With what loving, painstaking care my mum and I stitched together my first guy! (A Margaret Thatcher effigy, natch.) It must have taken us a week of pattern-cutting and sewing, well into the small hours every night. I remember standing against a shop-front on Mere Street, shivering in the unseasonably cold early November air, and pathetically calling out "Penny for the Guy!" to the passersby like a sodding homeless nipper from a Chuck Dickens novel. I remember a pack of lads twice as old (and tall) as me sauntering up to me and saying, "That's a girl not a guy, you fucking pansy!," filching all the cambio from my bucket, and leaving me blinkered with the latter planted upside-down (and unbudgeable) over my head. I remember driving up to Norwich in our old clunker of a Mini on bonfire night itself, the infernal majesty of the bonfire in Eaton Park, comforting in its provision of warmth and, at the same time, sublimely terrifying. I remember the surge of elation, the sense of sheer omnipotence, I felt as I single-handedly lobbed my guy into the flames and saw it consumed to a cinder in the span of a minute. I remember just afterwards a little girl of about my age lobbing her own guy, a dummy sporting a brown business suit and a preternaturally russet and immaculately-coiffed toupee, into the fire; and asking my dad who that was supposed to be. "That, son," he said, "is supposed to be Ronald Reagan." "And who's Ronald Reagan, dad?" "A very, very naughty man, I'm afraid." Oh, you don't know what you missed out on, Ronnie. Alongside those bonfire night memories my Christmas memories seem like...'

'...Thanksgiving memories?'

'Exactly. Like memories of a total non-holiday. And yet, somehow, I've let Guy Fawkes Day slip away from me. We've all of us, collectively, let it slip away from us, including you lot who never celebrated it much in the first place.'

'Well, as you were telling your story just now, another possible explanation for the decline of the holiday popped into my head.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah, I mean the coinciding ascendancy of Halloween. Yet another manifestation of the creeping American supersedence of--pardon me [belch]--hallowed British traditions.'

'Well, there is that, of course,' I say, feeling a twinge from the old war wound of the other night in the right corner of my mouth, 'but let's not forget that Halloween, unlike Thanksgiving, isn't a proper stateside-genetic festival. Of course, it's only very recently really taken off nationwide in the UK, but all the same, here and there, in pockets dispersed throughout the Kingdom, Guy Fawkes Day and Halloween have co-existed as local celebrations for centuries. Still, in bringing up the Yanks you may be on to something, Ronnie, I'll grant you that.' [You see, once again, my mind's I-Pod was cranking into play mode and setting me off on the trail of a hunch.] 'Ronnie, is your dad by any chance anything of a Gilbert and Sullivan buff?'

'No, by fuck all chance. His tastes run more towards Rodgers and Hammerstein.'

'So, then, I suppose you've yet to make an acquaintance with the Gilbertian-Sullivanian corpus.'

'Och, by fuck all stretch of the imagination. I practically know the whole bleeding thing by heart, from Thespis to The Grand Duke, courtesy of my uncle Milton.'

'The Sunderland uncle?'

'That's him. Yeah, every time he visited for Christmas he'd commandeer the stereo and subject the whole household to a round-the-clock aural diet of G&S. It was horrible, put me permanently off ever taking a trip to Penzance or Japan.'

'I know what it's like. There's one in every family, isn't there, scarring us young 'uns for life? Well, anyway, do you remember when you first heard Ko-Ko the Lord High Executioner's song from the Mikado, and in particular that couplet in the song that goes:

And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy,
And who 'doesn't think she waltzes, but would rather like to try'? '

'Yeah, what of it?'

'Well, what did you think the executioner was saying when he drew that comparison between the provincial chica and the guy?'

'Dunno. Well, yeah, come to think of it, I do know: I thought he was saying she was some kind of female tranny--that she was a lady who looked like a dude, to misquote Aerosmith.'

'And it probably struck you as a trifle...anachronistic, right?, this Anglo-Japanese gent of the Victorian age bandying about the word guy with the ease of a Premiership centre forward?'

'You bet it did.'

'And you were so flummoxed by the anachronism that you just had to ask your uncle for an explanation. Am I right?'

Right now he's looking pretty much how I imagine I must have looked when he finished my Cincinnati quip for me.

'Yeah, you're right.'

'And then he explained to you that guy was being employed here not qua synonym for bloke, but rather in allusion to the figure burnt on Bonfire Night, a grotty scarecrow-ish dummy. Am I still right?'

'Right on all three scores and tied with T. Henry tonight. So you're saying you likewise mistook the guy-line for an inverted Aerosmithism on hearing this tune in your nipperhood?'

'Even fucking so.'

'Well, that surprises me a bit. I mean, I'd expect a virtual Fawkesian ignoramus like myself to have made a mistake like that; but for you, steeped since infancy in the rites of Bonfire Night to have made it...'

'...speaks volumes about the sea-change the de facto meaning of the word guy underwent in the British Isles during the period stretching roughly from 1960 to 1980; a sea-change that was more or less complete by the time we were born. In my case, as in yours, guy-as-bloke-synonym was what I picked up first; and it was only afterwards, thanks to all those Norwich Bonfire Nights, that I partially unlearned that sense of the word and became acclimatised to the other, more ancient, sense. Cor, I wonder what it was like for the average full-grown bloke during the period of the switchover between the two senses; what it was like for him to unfold his morning Times or Torygraph of the sixth of November of, say, 1975, and come across a story reporting that "this year, for the first time on record, the UK-wide total of guys incinerated at Bonfire Night celebrations was exceeded by the number of uses of guy-as-bloke-synonym in the combined prime-time schedules of the BBC and ITV. Our correspondent counted ten such uses in yesterday's episode of The Sweeney alone". It must have come as a right hefty sock in the co-jones of his blokish national pride, mustn't it have done, to read such a so-called news-item?'

'Great heaping gobfuls of whatevs to you. You weren't that bloke, that guy, so why do you give an art's raz about the switchover? It was a done-to-death deal 30 years ago. And you've arrived on the scene 30 years too late to undo it.'

'Oh, have I now, clever schlong? I see no reason why this treason against the good name of Guy should--or need--ever be forgot.' By this point, you see, I'd bypassed the hunch and was just shy of pouncing on a full-fledged conviction. 'I'm convinced that all Guy Fawkes Day needs in order to endure--nay, prevail--is the slightest bit of tweaking to its public image, of a tactical re-branding, if you will.'

'What are you getting at? Some sodding in-your-face 24-7 public relations campaign a la Cool Britannia, spearheaded by a correspondingly berkish slogan, e.g. He's Just a Fawking Regular Guy or Guy Fawkes Shit Up, TBS!?'

'No, no, no. You're well on to your way to Edgware with that tube-line-tine of speculation. I'm talking about, so to speak, rebritifying Guy Fawkes Day, about replacing the name Guy with some other vocable as yet untrammeled by Americanisation.'

'Like, for instance, Jeff or Steve or Bill?'

[Into my hand, as if through the tannoy of a tube-train]: 'Next stop: Edgware Station. No! Another forename will never do, for the simple reason that not even the most certifiably English of of forenames--Ethelred, say, or my old handle of Nigel--are nailed-to-the-ground English property. Christ, just think of all the continental nobs throughout history who've sported the consummately English Christian name of Edward. No, what I'm saying is that for Guy we should substitute a word that no one outside the Commonwealth would ever dream of availing himself of save for satiric purposes, for the sake of impersonating a Brit in the context of some sort of joke or panto. And there's really only one word that'll do. And that word is--'

'--Chap.'

'No: too posh-sounding.'

'Well, then: lad.'

'Uh-uh: too juvenile.'

'Mate?'

'Too familiar, and sexually ambiguous to boot. No, the only word that will do for this purpose is a word that I have, for ten years running, studiously and conscientiously employed in lieu of lower-case guy; a word that has already turned up a dozen or more times in this very convo; and that word is bloke.'

'So, you seriously propose rechristening Guy Fawkes Day Bloke Fawkes Day?'

'Yepper.'

'You're absolutely barmy. It'd never fly.'

'O cunt rare, it'd soar like a gossamer dirigible. Just do a quick find-and- replace on all the history books, substituing this bloke for every instance of Guy and no one will be any the wiser; but, for all that, everyone will be all the merrier to be reading about the events recounted therein; and, come November 5th, all the more proud to be paying homeage to an exemplar of that most archetypally English of human types, the bloke, in the person of a bloke who would henceforth be known as the original bloke, Mr Fawkes himself.'

'Paying homage to him by burning him?'

'Burning, roasting, toasting, boasting--it all comes to the same thing, dunnit? No publicity is bad publicity, as P. T. Barnum or some other carnie cunt once said.'

'I reiterate in 14-point-bold caps: YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY BARMY.'

'You still think so, YFC? Well let's do a little straw poll then. Here's pollee Numero Un--Mr Sedule [who happens to be passing by en route to the bar from the kitchen with a plate of fried calamaries in one hand]. Oh, Mr Sedule!' I call out to him.

'Oui, Monsieur Meck-Eye-VAIR?'

'Bit of a queer question, but does today's date, November 5, mean anything in particular to you?'
'Bien entendu, Monsieur. C'est la nuit des grands feux...how do you say...Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes Day!'

'At least somebody round here noticed it,' I shout aside to Ronnie. Then, to Mr Sedule again: 'Ronnie and I've been chinwagging the idea of changing the name of the holiday to Bloke Fawkes Day. What d'ye think of them there palms?'

'O, Monsieur, I think it is a splend-DEED idea. And bloke, it is a splen-DEED word. Enffectivement, 'bloke,' c'est le fond de la langue anglaise. Alors, au moins, so it was, once upon a time. I remember the first time I came to Lon-DON, in 1959, and I did not know a word of English. En tout cas, I am...a bit, how do you say...peck-EESH, I walk into a peub, I sit down, I listen to the people, I try to understand something that they are saying. And all I hear is this word bloke; everybody saying bloke this bloke that, bloke au cul. I am so relieved, because it to me seems that with très peu you can go très loin in English. So, for ordering my meal, I have an idea. I call to the garçon du maison, 'Eh, bloke! bloke!' and make a gesture, comme ça [here, he opens wide his mouth, his tartine hole, if you will, and pokes his free forefinger into it a few times] and the garçon, he makes a frown, comme ça, like I have just broken the wind in his face [I can see where this is going], and carries me to the door and throws me out on to the pave-MENT. Quelle outrage! But this is all by the side of the point. The point is: now I do not hear bloke quite so much. Today in place of bloke what I hear is--'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah: guy this, guy that, guy up the arsehole...'

'Oui, bien sûr, guy--mais en plus, I hear this phrase...fucking cunt. Fucking cunt this, fucking cunt that, fucking cunt à la con. The whole fucking country has gone absolument merde du singe over fucking cunterie. Décidément, fings ain't wot zey used to be in merrie olde Eng-LAND.'

[Here, I want to say to him, 'Why don't you move back to Frogistan, you old garçon de Nancy, if the way we talk nowadays on this side of the sleeve gets on your nichons so much?' But it would be impoltic, to say the least, for me to say such a thing to the pubmeister of me local.] 'Well, messy, Mr Sedule, for your vote of confidence in our little proposal. Could you ask Jimmy to bring us another round of Stellas?'

'De rien, et bien sûr, respectivement, Monsieur Meck-eye-VAIRR!' he answers with a curt bow, and heads off to the bar.

Well, a minute or two later Jimmy comes round with our booze, having been briefed on Bloke Fawkes day by Mr Sedule; and he is, if anything, even more enthusiastic about the idea than his boss. 'I've always resented the g-word, but felt I had to use it because of peer pressure and whatnot. Christ, I'd give up me left bollock for the chance to come out of the closet as a regular bloke.'

'No need to break out the scalpel and the anaesthetic, Jimmy; rest assured, we'll make it happen.'

Next, I pitch my proposal to Denise and Claudia, who prove to be twice as game as you could hope a pair of continental blokesses to be about a piece of UK legislation having fuck all to do with the Euro or the labelling of sodding chocolate or wine; and having by now canvassed the premises as thoroughly as I can without shifting my arse cheeks, I've pretty much won Ronnie over to the sanity of the notion of Bloke Fawkes Day, and it's now just a matter of persuading him the practicability of, as I was just saying to Jimmy, making it happen.

'Cos after all,' Ronnie reminds me, with his characteristic knack for pointing out the fucking noseonyourfaceous, 'a straw poll at the Ape does not a Royal Proclamation make.'

'Course it doesn't! But is that the last word on the matter? Is this the DDR? Is this the PRC? Is this the FDA? I thought it was the fucking UK. Have we not been entrusted by the Bill of Rights of 1688 with the power of petition of our Monarch?'

'Yeah, but--'

'--I don't want to hear any buts from your gob. Butts are for ashtrays--and prudish Yanks.'

And so, calling for pen and paper, which were both delivered to me forthwith by Mr Sedule himself, I indited the following screedlet:

'We, the underfigned refidents of the N12 poftcode, having unanimoufly agreed that

WHEREAS the Chriftian name of Guy, which whilom denoted, in the minds of Your Majefty's fubjects, the eponym of that auguft British national feftival known as Guy Fawkes Day, otherwife known as Bonfire Night, has of late come, courtefy of the perfidious agency of the media of cinema, radio and televifion, to denote in these felffame minds, the whilom ftrictly American acceptation of "a human individual of indeterminate fex"; and that

WHEREAS the common noun of bloke, which whilom ferved as the de facto token of the narrower acceptation of "a male human individiual" in thefe Your Majesty's realms, has lately in that capacity fallen into defuetude, likewife courtefy of the aforementioned agency, and that

WHEREAS, for fome years now, owing to the circumftances alluded to in the two foregoing claufes, Your Majefty's fubjects have been forely wanting for occafions for the fêting of their national identity as Britons, (we) hereby humbly implore Your Majefty to iffue a Royal Proclamation to the effect that the aforementioned feftival fhall henceforth be known as Bloke Fawkes Day in all of your dominions lying both north of the 42nd degree of latitude (including the Bailiwicks of Guernfey and Jerfey [the latter being coextenfive with the ifland that ferved as the fetting of the BBC televifion programme Bergerac and exclufive of the American State of nativity of Meffrs Springfteen, Willis, &c.]) and eaft of the 58th degree of longitude (including the ifland of Barbados but excluding the Canadian province of Newfoundland).

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.

Defpactched from the fign of the Sedulous Ape, November the 5th, 2005.'

Then I circulated the document round the premises for the affixing of John Handschlongs. TBS, there were a fistful of blokes and blokesses who put up a show of not wanting to sign, but each of them was soon brought round to a adopting a more complaisant attitude by the judicious offer (on my dime) of a complimentary Stella. That in itself is a venerable British political institution, innit--the swapping of pints for petition signatures? Well, when the bottom half of the page was fairly swarming with cursive up to its very margins, I asked Mr Sedule for an envelope and stamp, and having duly sealed the missive and addressed it to 'H. R. H. THE QUEEN, BUCKINGHAM PALACE, LONDON SW1A,' I popped outside and slipped it in the postbox at the kerb. And when I got back inside, I could perceive from the general gazelle-shaft's-ghost, that no one was quite prepared to wait for a phone call from the Palace to initiate the inaugural celebration of the holiday, that, as far as this crowd were concerned, Bloke Fawkes Day the First was already in full swing. Nonetheless, I couldn't help being momentarily taken aback when Jimmy, grinning and aflush with newly unkennelled desire like a Stonewall Day debutante, clapped an arm round my shoulders and said, 'Let's go find ourselves a bloke.'

'Come again?'

'A bloke. To burn on the bonfire.'

Christ, to think that I, of all people, the George Washington of Bloke Fawkes Day, should have thought he meant anything else! 'Oh, yeah, of course. I'm right with you there, mate. But it's a bit late in the day to talk of breaking out the sewing machine, innit? Maybe next year.'

'We don't need no stinking sewing machine! Just take a gander round you.'

And strike me red-as-Ken if he wasn't right! Suspended from the rafters at every corner of the room was a bloke-sized-and-shaped figure just screaming to be burnt: here a Dracula mannequin, there a Frankenstein, here a mummy, and there a Wolfman. Mr Sedule, I just then noticed, had yet to take down his Halloween decorations.

'Let's go for the mummy,' I said decisively. 'It's the most adaptable, the most nondescript.'

So Jimmy drags a chair up to the mummy-anointed corner, steps up, pulls down the poppet and starts waving it menacingly round the crowd like it's a fucking red-hot poker or a firehose. 'All right, you lot!' he howls. 'Are ye with me or agin me?! Are ye with me or agin me?!'

'WE'RE WITH YOU, JIMMY!' we all scream back.

'Right then, let's have at this bloke!' And he rushes towards the back exit, with all assembled (yours truly among them) in tow. Along the way I catch myself singing aloud, And the lady from the provinces who dresses like a bloke / And who doesn't fancy cannabis but thinks she'll have a toke...

Well, once we're out back, in the courtyard, Mr Sedule pulls up an old metal dustbin, and everyone sets to work filling it with leaves and twigs for kindling, of which, given the time of the year and the prevailing verdure of the Woodside Park area, there is an abundance. One issue remains to be decided, though: namely, the identity of the person whom the bloke is supposed to represent. It should come as no great surprise to my readers that I mooted our mayor as the most suitable candidate, nor should it come as a great surprise to anyone familiar with the general political climate of our borough that I was eagerly seconded by everyone present. So Manish generously gives up his suit jacket and tie, and Jimmy bravely gives up his trousers, and the rest of us, once the dummy has been clad, unhesitantly tape our Oyster Cards to its lapels, skirts, cuffs, etc., and Mr Sedule wraps a length of corrugated shop-hoover hose round its shoulders, like a scarf, as a symbol of Ken's bendy-bus-iness; and together we all lob our Ken bloke into the dustbin, into which Jimmy tosses a lit match. And in the succeeding three-or-four odd minutes, deaf to the cheers of my fellow Barnetians, I relive my first Bonfire Night celebration in Norwich. That and then some, for whilst the evils of Thatcherism were naturally merely an abstraction for my five-or-six-year-old self, as a sentient tax-paying adult I have felt each and every one of the depredations Ken has visited on this devoted town as a sentient, tax-paying adult all too concretely; I have, indeed, taken them quasi-personally. The incineration of this here Ken bloke--first the costume, then the dummy itself, and last of all the shop-hoover hose--thus amounted shay moi to an instance of what that ancient Greek drama queen Aristotle called catharsis, the feeling you get when you see some kingly motherfucker getting his comeuppance on stage (minus the pity that old Aristy posits as an essential constituent of this emotional compound, as I can be said to pity Ken only in the loosest of senses, the sense in which Mr T was known to pity his prospective arse-kickees).

Yeah, so, the shop-hoover hose was the last bit of the bloke to go up in smoke, discharging in its consummation an unbearably pungent acrid chemical smell that sent everyone scattering to the corners of the courtyard. (And it really did smell uncannily like the interior of that burning bendy bus last month.) The fucking thing had been smoldering for, I'd say, a good ten minutes when I hear the sound of an approaching siren coming from up the back alley, and then see a police car pull up more or less level with the back gate of the courtyard. An officer emerges from the car, steps up to the fence and gives the gate a rattle.

'What is all this then, offic-AIRRR?' Mr Sedule asks him.

'A few of your neighbours have phoned in a nose complaint, sir. Phugh!' he ejaculates, producing a hanky from the breast pocket of his jacket and covering his nose. 'And I don't blame 'em. What are you lot barbecueing out here, a bloody hogshead of marmite? I've never smelled anything so horrible.'

'No, Monsieur offic-AIRRR, there are no marmites here. We are simply having a petit feu de Bloke Fawkes Day.'

'A what?'

'A bone fi-AIRRR.'

'A bonfire? Look mate, this isn't Bumfuck, Norfolk. This is London. Round here, you can't just go burning cartloads of rubbish outdoors without a permit.'

Mr Sedule just composes his phiz into a sheepish 'Hey, babe, what can I tell you?' kind of look and spreads his hands and shrugs.

'What's more,' the copper continues, 'it's after hours. [I check my mobile. Blimey! He's right: it's 11:40.] I'm off for now, but I'll be back--with reinforcements--to check out the sitch round midnight. By that time, this fire had best be out, and every one of your customers who doesn't want lodgings at government expense tonight had best be gone--and by gone I mean gone as in Bon [i.e., the original frontman of AC/DC, the long-deceased Mr Scott? (RMcG)], not gone as in gone back inside the pub for a nightcap.'

I couldn't help cursing my sodding shitty timing. If I'd only been a bit less digressive in my convo with Ronnie, I tell myself, or written my petition a bit more quickly, we could have all been safely indoors and downing our ninth Stella by a quarter of eleven. Well, no use crying over spilt suds. Time to make this here feast mobile. I go up to Ronnie, who alone among the assembly has taken no particular interest in the bloke-burning and who as of now is in fact sitting with his head against the back wall of the pub, fast asleep, and nudge him with my foot.

'Eh?' he grunts as he comes to life and looks blearily up at me.

'How are you for Stellage back at your place?' I ask him.

'Dunno. I've got maybe a twelver and a half.'

'Well, that beats my half-empty twelver. Come on. Up and at 'em.'

'What?'

'Afters at your place.'

'Whatevsissimo,' he says with stroppy resignation as he pulls himself up off the ground.

Ronnie and I and a butcher's dozen of stragglers then hoofed it to his flat, where, metaphorically speaking, we kept the flame of Bonfire Night alive in '05 for another two hours. In spirit, though, I have to admit, it felt a bit more like Oktoberfest, if you catch my meaning; all the girls having bolted through the back door of the pub--and presumably right on out the front--with the arrival of the copper.

And so ended the first ever Bloke Fawkes Day, Bloke Fawkes Day 2005. Pending the approval of Her Majesty and the borough council, I hope to see each and every one of you lot down at the Ape next year for the burning in of Bloke Fawkes Day 2006. I'm especially looking forwared to meeting some of the comelier blokesses amongst you. OK, make that any of the blokesses amongst you.