22.5 Hour Party People

On second thought, fuck Bloke Fawkes Day. Fuck it in the knottiest, the most involved, the most un-get-out-of-able position diagrammed in Joseph Weckerle's Golden Book of Love, namely this one:

I realise that this here little exordium might strike the reader as being a smidge schizophrenic or bi-polar--or whatever bit of clinical-psychological babble passes mustard among the vulgar as a synonym for contradictory or incongruous or just plain slightly off these days--when juxtaposed with the peroration of my last post; so with that in mind, I'll just whip out my two-quid-at-Woolworths rhetorical trowel here and explain that fuck is to be taken here (i.e., through the twin-arseholes of the reader's irises) in a relative rather than in an absolute sense, that it should not be understood as expressing my wholesale, unrepealable abjuration of the Bloke Fawkes Day holiday, but rather as registering a provisional and partial ebbing of my enthusiasm for that holiday in favour of another event to which it must, for the moment, yield pride of place in my affections. And just in case the cement I'm working with here is too abstract for you, I'll concretise my point with a little illustration: there's a scene in this porn flick I once saw at the age of 12 during a Boy Scouts camping trip in the Pennines, in which the hero, a bloke name of Moon, is experiencing the pleasures of buggery for the first time--as a bowler, with a girl--and cries out 'Fuck that pussy! I ain't never done this before. I'm sticking with this,' (adding more calmly, as an aside, with impeccable timing, a few seconds later, 'I like watching it go in, too'.). Now, in thus willing the pussy in question to be fucked--i.e., not fucked by him--and announcing his intention of 'sticking with' the arse, our hero clearly did not wish it to be understood, least of all by his young fuckmate herself, that he was thereby permanently renouncing the usufruct of the front entrance in favour of the back; he wished it merely to be understood, rather, that by virtue of its sheer novelty and strangeness this new backwards coital dispensation demanded a degree of attention and alacrity that rendered the exigencies of attending to the old frontwards dispensation of negligible interest and importance to him for the moment--and only for the moment. And it is in precisely the same spirit and with precisely the same intent--mutatis mutandi--that I now say 'Fuck Bloke Fawkes Day'. For just as we may conjecture that, with the subsidence of his enthusiasm for the arse relative to the pussy (and in tandem with his acquisition of mastery of the former orifice), Mr Moon eventually became accustomed to shifting freely back and forth between front and back entrances during a single evening of ballage, so we may conjecture that come next Bloke Fawkes Day I shall be fully prepared to go balls deep, so to speak, in celebration of the rites of that holiday without stinting an inch in my obeisance to the by-then-no-longer-new dispensation of which I write. In fact, if Mr Sedule manages to get his merde together and hire some new help, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do fairly by both of these institutions at the Ape itself (unless there's an Arsenal match on that night, in which case things might get a bit dodgy). But here I go again bollocksing up my narration, prematurely disclosing key elements of the plot before I've even properly completed the setup. And it really is high time that I made it plain what I mean by this new state of affairs, dispensation, or institution--not, I'm sure, that I really need to as far as my readers north of the Channel and east of the Atlantic are concerned. For the benefit of the rest of youse, then and though, let me just say that what I'm talking about here is the introduction of 24-hour drinking to the UK. Yes, after decades of plugging their ears and whistling 'Lillabullero' to the arguments adduced by such paragons of common sense, such consciences of the Kingdom, as Charlotte Church and George Orwell, our Parliament have finally seen fit to drag us all shitting and giggling forwards into the 20th century (or back into the early 19th, take your pick). Now I know it's quite fashionable in certain geezerly circles to yawn disdainfully over this here legal-cum-mixological Reformation and act as though it merits no more notice than, say, the re-branding of the Royal Mail as Consignia (and as though it's just as unlikely to take). 'You younkers,' says one of these geezers, 'weren't around for the switchover from LSD to the decimal system. Now that was a cataclysmic event. Might as well apply for US statehood as soon as give up the torture of calculating how many pence go into a guinea, was what we all said back then. But this 24-hour-drinking thing--pthhbthbthhh! As though in practical terms it's going to make fuck any difference. As though 24-hour drinking has ever been by fannie adams's stretch of the imagination illegal in the UK. As though it hasn't always been the case here that, provided you know where to go, courtesy of our own inimitable take on the speakeasy known as a lock-in, you can drink till the cows come home on any night of the week.' Ah, but there's the old chamois--provided you know where to go, to which appositive our geezer really should have added another one reading and provided you have the werewithal to get there. Evidently he moved to London at a time when rents and crime were low enough that the average bloke would both want and be able to afford to live in the parts of town that fairly bristle with pubs with weeklong lock-in policies; either that or he's some sodding pensioner who has all the time in the world to squander on half-hour-long walks and bus-trips to such pubs. As for me, living as I do in the semi-suburban fringes of north London, I've only got one local, and I'd like to think I'm not so pathetic as to piss away the better part of a Tuesday or Wednesday evening hoofing or busing it to a semi-local a half a mile into the next postcode for the dubious privilege of staying on till midnight or 1am in the company of the assemblage of toothless fruit-machinists I'd doubtlessly happen upon there. Which counter-factual traipse brings me by an oblique route to the site of my quarrel with the institution of the lock-in eo ipso. My satisfaction-seeking thwack on the old face-cheeks of that institution amounts to this: that it is all too aptly named. At a lock-in you are essentially a cell-mate of whatever motley band of boozers the bitch goddess Contingency has seen fit to leave straggling on the premises at 11, and you're presented with the stark choice between sticking it out with them and going home to pound your pud and/or Stella in solitude. In theory, I suppose, this constraint might turn out to be paradoxically liberating; as (in theory) for all you know, these self-same stragglers could turn out to be a whole university women's lacrosse team. But in practice (at least at the Ape on those occasional weekend lock-in nights when I've been, as they say, flying solo), you invariably finish up consorting with the sort of anthropomorphic space-hoovers that make you wish you hadn't ventured out of the maisonette in the first place: ever-so-genteel and ever-so-boring (and ever-so-male) Barnet supporters ('I say, old chap, that was a bally good arse-reaming we got tonight, dontcherthink?' 'Bally good indeed, MDF. Hard cheese!'), blue-haired sexagenarian postmen's widows on the make for some vigintegenerean schlong, and the like. How roseate, in contast, would my Friday and Saturday evenings at the Ape be, were they only brightened by the remotest hope that come 11, just as I would be reaching the apogee of the cool buzz and would be in my rarest conversational form, at any minute some fresh face and perky pair of Bristols might sashay in through the front door and plant themselves on some barstool in my immediate vicinity. But in clutching at the modal auxiliaries would and might with the tenacity of a Scotsman grasping for a golf ball, I am once again getting ahead of myself, which wouldn't matter so much if this here post were intended merely as an op-ed paean to the new licensing laws rather than as the yarn or mini-romance that I conceived it to be ab ovo. So, anyway, as Jeff Shoemaker might put it, here beginneth the Tale of the Wandering Barnetian Bibulophile:

Last Friday evening, I get home from work round about six. No takeaway tonight, as I'm planning eventually to sup on the Ape's house fish and jalappeno poppers (which surf-y-tierra combo, incidentally, appears to be catching on like wild fire in Barnet, whence I'm sure it'll spread with equal rapidity to the neighbouring boroughs. In ten years' time, I shan't be surprised if fish and chips are as foreign as escargot to the untutored English palate.). As always, the first thing I do is check my messages on my land phone. There's two of them. The first one listens as follows:

Eh? [female voice] It's me again. Like I gots to remind you. Here it is, a stane's throw from the end of the month, and I'm still waiting on me fucking child support cheque. Oh, TBS, I don't give fuck all about meself. It's little Billy wot concerns me. [I hear a baby crying in the background.] To think that you could give a putrid tinker's fuck about the well-being of your own flesh and blood makes me blousy as all fucking get out! All the same [she continues in softer, more conciliatory tones], if you wanted to lay out the money on an all-expenses-paid [sic] package tour of Mallorca instead, I shouldn't raise a finger by way of demurral...

Bloody telemarketers! The second message is from Ronnie, who starts off by singing, in the timbre and phrasing of a spot-on Jimmy Durante impressionist: Happy times are here for once; ain't felt like this in fucking months; Gonna bare my ass to all you cunts; happy times--a-a-a-re he-e-e-re fo-o-o-r o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-nce! [I can't imagine what untoward access of good fortune has served thus to rouse Ronnie from his phlegmish slumbers. News of his coming into an inheritance, courtesy, say, of the death of Uncle Milton?] Then he continues, in speech: 'Pip-pip and tally-ho, YFC. Well, I trust you know what tonight's all about. It's about partying like it's still 1999, innit?; and in Las-fucking-Vegas, not in Salt-Lake-fucking-City. So stuff your pockets with plenty of caffeine tablets and profin and meet me at the Ape at eight. Be there or be...Cher? No, I've got it: ware--Be there or be ware! [Thaht's right, you fookin coont! I hear a Northern voice boistrously seconding Ronnie just slightly off-phone.] Oh, yeah, and Rugger. I've got my mate Herb-Air with me here--he's down from Leeds visiting for a couple of days. As you can probably tell, we've been getting a head start on the proceedings. I took the day off, you see, to entertain my company. Anyway, Rugger, hope you don't mind if he comes along. Cheers.' [And what if he doos mind? It's a free coontry, innit? I hear this Leedsian git querying Ronnie just before the phone cuts out.]

Well, although I never did admit as much to Ronnie, the truth was that as in the case of Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day, I had forgotten for at least a good month or so that the new licensing laws were going to take effect this past weekend--or, to be more precise, on last Thursday. But, TBS, Ronnie had been right to act as though what tonight was all about went without saying . That bit about partying like it was still 1999, etc.--those were my very words, uttered in his presence at some point last spring, and amounting to a kind of vow or promise to party in just such a fashion on the first 24-hour drinking weekend night, viz tonight. As to the prospect of his bringing this other bloke along, well, stricto sensoo, I didn't mind it, as of course I had no monopoly on Ronnie's time and it wasn't as though I'd specified last spring that our antemillennial-style baccanale was to take the form of a cul-a-cul or date. I had no just cause for getting shirty over the matter, in other words. But in a looser yet if anything more powerful sense, I very much did mind the intrusion of this bloke into our weekly routine; in the first place because I needed another bloke acquaintance about as much as I needed an extra hole in my schlong [Naturally, I'm speaking here as the type of bloke who doesn't go in for genital piercings], in the second place because I knew full well that his presence would effectually put the kibosh on any speculative or philosophical turn the convo might have otherwise taken. I've already said my piss on the demerits of the two-blokes-cum-one girl conversational trio, and rest assured I have a whole nother bladderful of piss in reserve for its all-bloke counterpart. In two words, when three blokes get together for a chinwag, you end up with a recipe for rampant, interminable, unadulterated, LCD-ish anorakism. By anorakism I have something in mind that is in some ways more specific and in other ways less specific than most people's notions of it. For most of these most people, anorakism is a strictly subcultural phenomenon, involving sci-fi TV show fandom, stamp collecting, and other pastimes associated with the sorts of coke-bottle-specs-sporting blokes who don't pull the birds or get out much. For others of these most (most of them being blokesses, incidentally), the manifestation of any bit of knowledge they happen to be unacquainted with, by whatever means or motive, counts as proof of unregenerate anorakism on the part of the manifester (-or?). For example: one night about a year ago I was sharing a table at the Ape with Manish Shah and his girl Manisha Asha, and, talking of a Charlton-Arsenal match of a couple of nights previous in which, standing there literally with his thumb up his arse (the camera had zoomed in for proof), an uncharacteristically absent-minded Stephan Andersen had given up a goal to the Gunners, I said to Manish, 'If that cunt had had any decency he would have committed Sapporo after a fuck-up like that, right then and there.' (this 'committing Sapporo' idiom being an instance of McGyver Signature Rhetorical Ploy #24: The Deliberate Malapropism [Sapporo (the beer) = a substitution for sapuku, another word for hara kiri]). To which squib Manish appended a cleverer squib of his own: 'But being a Dane, wouldn't he have had to commit Carlsberg instead?' At which point Manisha pounced in screaming 'ANORAK ALERT! ANORAK ALERT! and started thrashing Manish about the neck and shoulders with her brand-wanking-new Fistoulari handbag. I knew it was a Fistoulari because earlier in the convo she'd been bragging about how she'd picked it up a week earlier at Harrod's for a mere £150.53 ('a steal'); and when I'd conjectured that this Fistoulari bloke or blokess must be an eminent personage in the world of fashion indeed if his/her handbags routinely fetched upwards of 150 quid in the bargain rack, she'd come back at me with 'HELLO? He's only the most important designer to have come out of the former Soviet Union since last summer! Trust a bloke not to know.' But Manisha's protestations vis-a-vis Sapporo and Carlsberg notwithstanding, it was she and not her bloke or myself who proved to be a true anorak that night, inasmuch as: 1) (and preeminently) Manish had introduced the Carlsberg moniker into the convo in a purely jocular spirit--meaning that he hadn't intended it as a genuine impugnment of my knowledge of beer-brand names or of their pertinence to suicide rituals, and b) although Sapporo and Carlsberg might not exactly be household names among teetotallers, they have enjoyed a fair amount of publicity in the beer-swilling community for a great many years if not decades (certainly for a period extending back well beyond the summer of '04), and 3) I'm sure that if Manisha had queried either one of us on the significance of the names Carlsberg and Sapporo, the query-ee would have thought it proper to rejoin with a more civil riposte than a lecture and a thrashing--I know full well that I would have calmly, and with exemplary unshirtiness, explained to her that these were the brand names of foreign beers. You see, for me, it is in just the sort of petty oneupblokeship on trivial, ephemeral, inconsequential matters as was evinced by Manisha on that night that true anorakism consists. But to its credit, anorakish chit-chat does possess the singular merit of absolving its expounders of the obligation to think; which is why (to close up this digression and bring it full circle) it comes in particularly handy in a convo involving three blokes whose only common bond is their acquaintance with one of the trio, that one being in this case Ronnie. I can only assume that when three blokesses find themselves thrown together in the same configuration, they anorak it up about the names of fashion designers or blokes' schlong sizes; with us, it's either women's measurements or sport statistics. Last Friday's anorakfest centred on a particularly unwholesome metastatization of the second variety of anorakism, to wit, an anoraks' kvetchvest on the salaries of leading footballers. And throughout this veritable auction of copraphasia I of course felt like a classic fourth wheel--the third wheel in such sitches, being, of course, the imaginary mate you apostrophise in your head by way of keeping your hands off your shirt front and your biscuits inside your belly. By default I tend to picture this imaginary mate as being Ronnie himself, but as Ronnie's actually sitting there in the flesh, I bring in my old UEA buddy Ricky 'Tex' Winckelmann to sub for him. Lucky for me, in my fish 'n' poppers I had a plausible enough cause for pretty much absenting myself from the actual proceedings (the lads for their part contenting themselves with beer nuts), and devoting myself wholesale to my hypothetical chinwag with Tex, at least for the first 20 minutes or so.

'And that coont Rio Ferdinand from Man United,' I notice Herb saying at about minute 27, 'with his hundred-fooking-thousand-quid-a week salary--he takes the fooking cake. A hoondred-fooking thousand quid a week to kick a bag of air around a field.' [As against the two hundred quid a week you probably get for rolling a pair of bollocks against your tonsils, I think to meself over my last popper and bit of fish.] 'And you know where all that mooney's gonna go, dontcha?'

'Oh, I know,' says Ronnie. 'Straight up his...'

But Herb cuts Ronnie short with a peremptory lollipop man-esque flash of his upraised palm; brings his pint glass mercilessly crashing down on to a helpless cashew; leans over; and, with a finger holding shut one nostril, actually hoovers up the powdery residue of the nut with the other one. The things some especially stupid cunts will do to get the last word in, I says to myself as I spectate on this jack-assian performance. 'And in this case,' I continue, addressing Tex, 'the last word itself is cuntishly stupid enough in its own right. Why should I care if Rio Ferdy sinks all five-million-plus-quid of his annual pay cheque into a line of coke long enough to circle the equator ten times? I know what I'd do if I was pulling in that amount of money: I'd buy me an olympic-sized swimming pool and keep it filled to the high-water mark with Stella continuously circulating at a temperature of 2 degrees centigrade. And that's hardly a Geldolfian undertaking.' 'Hardly,' Tex concurs with empathic (and emphatic) stroppiness.

Anyway, so then, as Herb's wiping cashew bogeys from his nose, Ronnie excuses himself for a trip to the gents; and now comes the moment I've been dreading; a moment that I full well know will make the first part of the evening, as shitty as it was, seem by comparison like a dip in the Stella pool I've just sketched in my dreams--the moment when I'm left alone at table with Mr Air and, for Ronnie's sake, have to hew out a conversation from the living rock of total un-shit-givingness about him that saturates every pore of my being, or, at any rate, whatever part of you is supposed to give a fuck about other people. 'Well,' I says to Tex, after asking him if he'd mind leaving Herb and me alone for a second, 'let's just hope Ronnie only has to let go a number one in there.' 'Yeah, let's just hope,' Tex says, rolling his eyes and stepping cooperatively off to the bar.

And then I address to Herb the only question I've so far got in reserve for this moment, namely: 'I gather you met Ronnie in Manchester, at the University?'

'Yeah, that's right--well, not actually at the University itelf; at a Blur gig at the Free Trade Hall, as a mahtter of fahct, back in '96. But, yeah, we were both at the University at the time. You want to make soomething of it? Got soomething against the old former VU of M, have you?'

'Course not, you f...my dear feller. After all, round these parts my alma mater, the University of East Anglia, is known as the University of Manchester of the southeast.'

'Oh, is that so?'

'Yes it is.' By now we've reached the kind of coversational impasse that, for the sake of extricating yourself from it, you start looking after your own entertainment and giving the old two-finger salute to your interlocutor's; that point in the convo where you start asking your new acquaintance the sorts of questions that, while seldom amounting to outright provocations of shirtiness, are still for safety's sake best broached at the morning-after debriefing with the third party rather than to the face of the second one. I think you'll catch my meaning as soon as you see the question I next posed to Herb-Air--one that'd been needling me from the moment I heard Ronnie's phone message--set down in CRT pixels:

'That's an interesting Judeo-Christian-Islamic name you've got there: Herb-Air. Would it be presumptuous of me to ask how it's spelt?'

['No more presumptuous than to ask me to drop my trousers right here and now and deliver a stool sample into my pint glass' is what the look that accompanies his answer seems to say, but in its bare transcription the answer itself spells 'unadulterated accommodation' in seven letters:] 'H-E-R-B-E-R-T.'

Just as I'd suspected. This here Herbert bloke had indeed turned out to be a specimen of one of the most unsightly species in my private menagerie of arse-chafers, the cunt with the name that's spelt like a standard English name but pronounced with a foreign accent. (I've never quite settled on which type of cunt is worse, the mum or dad who gives their nipper such a name or the nipper himself who clings to the phoney pronuciation into his adult years. Bestowing a name like that on your kid essentially amounts to issuing yourself, and him, a lifetime permit to make sensible, no-harm-meaning people--meaning anyone unlucky enough to see your name in print before they hear it--feel like turds.) Now here's the point where, if I give two shits about my shirt, I'd best keep my gob zippered. But I guess I don't give those two selfsame shits, because I say, 'In other words, Herbert.'

'No, in oother fooking words, Herb-AIR.'

'Ah, I get it. Your parents are naturalised French immigrants. Or perhaps--mind you, you speak with a more convincing West Yorkshire accent than Davie Gedge himself--perhaps you yourself were born in France?'

'No, I was born in fooking Leeds. And me moom is from Brahdford, and me dahd is from Newcaastle.'

'Fair enough,' I say, and make as if suddenly to take an uncommonly keen interest in the wood-knots in the floorboards; but inwardly all the while I'm serenading my shirt to the tune of 'So Long, It's Been Good to Know You'.

'Look, mate, are you taking the piss out of me?'

'Prendre ta pisse? Moi? Unthinkable. Impossible, in fact: I took especial care to leave me piss hoover at home tonight. Mind you, I'm beginning rather to wish I hadn't...'

[TO BE CUNTINUED]

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.

Just Another Mazdaless Monday

I don't mind telling you lot that I'm a bit of a novice at this here activity known as blogging. And now that I've done a bit of browsing through some the other sites here at blogspot, it occurs to me that unbeknownst to myself, I've essentially and flagrantly been flouting the conventions of the genre since day one. First off, to judge by common practice, it's pretty much derry gurr to publish a post every day, or at the outside, every two days; and secondly, it appears to be equally mandatory to fill every post from miso soup to wasabi peas with a comprehensive catalogue of the minutiae of one's daily routine, be any of these minutiae ever so ponderously unreadable. The typical blog post, from what I gather, begins as follows: 'I got up this morning and scratched my pubes and repaired to the loo with last week's Sunday Times crossword in hand. I'd solved three clues and voided every last bit of matter from my bowels when I found myself snagged on number 12 across (Talleyrand's
wiedergänger twice removed, quoth Lord Acton). The stool was of a generally firm consistency, in ten pieces, cretaceous rather than globular in composition, and of a caramel buff colour streaked with highlights of umber...' and concludes 'I sat at the foot of my bed, with the vertical axis each buttock intersecting with the surface of the mattress precisely 15 centimetres inland from the edge of the latter, and trimmed my toenails. I calculated that my big toenail had grown 3 millimetres since I'd last trimmed it, two months and four days ago, whilst my pinkie toe had grown only by a single millimetre during the same period.' It's like reading a fucking transcription of the Radio 4 shipping forecast, minus the romantic aura of life at sea. (In hindsight, BTFW, Sarah Slother strikes me as a born blogger.) Obviously these wankers have taken their cue from that Boswell bloke, the one that wrote the bio of the wig-coiffured geezer I mentioned in my last post but one, who said 'I will live no more than I can record' and, true to his word, finished up with a diary about ten times as long as the London telephone directory. But from what I dimly remember seven years on from poor old Max Sebald's autobiographical lit course at UEA, the Boz actually had a life that was worth recording; he'd spend his days chinwagging with likes of PM Billy Pitt, Sr., Frankie 'Voltaire' Arroway and JJ 'Dyn-o-mite' Rousseau, and his nights whoring in Hyde Park and St. James's; and therein lies the difference between him and our contemporary Joe Blogses. The best part of all lives lived today--yours truly's not excepted-- are tracts of irredeemable shittiness unworthy of being recorded even for the benefit of one's future self, let alone for the benefit of sodding so-called posterity. And so my motto vis-a-vis this here blog has been 'I will record no more than I will want to remember,' which so far, I'm disappointed to say, hasn't amounted to a hill of baked beans on toast. All the same, for a while now, I have felt as though it would be worthwhile to try my hand at writing a post that conforms more closely to the conventions of the genre--i.e., that records my progress through a whole calendar day, and that incorporates as much of the trivially unmemorable bullshit as I can force myself to remember from the-next-day's distance. Maybe the habit grows on you. I doubt it, but anyway, without further ado:

Yesterday, Monday, the 31st of October, I rose at 6:30 (or as late as :40, if due allowance is made for snooze-buttoning). Next, the four esses followed by Weetabix and peanut butter to a soundtrack of JoAnne and Jono. At 7:30 sharp I'm out the door and hoofing it to Barnet High Street to catch the northbound 7:45 Number 383 bus, which sets me down at Union Street just in time for me to hop on the 84. Nothing recallable--as distinct from memorable--about either leg of the trip, apart, of course, from its interminability. I swear the next time I find myself Mazdaless I'm getting a bike. That or a helicopter. I alight from the bus at Southgate Road/Mutton Lane, just a two-minute stroll down the street from corporate HQ on Baker Street. As I'm stepping through the front door of the building and walking to the lift, I check the time on my mobile. It's 8:58. I'm supposed to be there at 8:45, but luckily I make my way to my cubicle without crossing paths with anyone who might give a rat's arse about my punctuality.

Ordinarily, after getting in, I take a stroll down to the kitchen to nab an extra-large cuppa fee, which I then drink at my desk over a leisurely browsing of the Nergle News. But straightaway this morning I see that there's likely going to be a slash administered to the tyre of my routine, as the voicemail indicator light on my phone is flashing, and that can mean only one thing: a message from Mike Ayhern, my immediate superior. And sure enough, the first thing I hear after electing to listen to my first (and only) message is Mike's voice, squawking peremptorily at me in his burrrrish Edinburgh accent, 'McGyver, I want to see you in my office, ten minutes ago! You hear that? Ten minutes ago!' The message is stamped 8:55; which means that, by his reckoning, I'm already 15 mintues late.

A parenthetical word or two about Mike is in order here. He seems to fancy himself something of a Perry White or Lou Grant figure, the editor of a 1970s upmarket American newspaper as depicted, for instance, in the first Superman movie or in that Redford-Hoffman snoozefest about the blokes who got Schlong Nixon busted, They Couldn't Put President Humpty Together Again, I think it's called. (I, on the other hand, tend to fancy myself something of a George Taylor figure in a version of Planet of the Apes [not, alas, the Ape] where the apes can't speak and do nothing but fling poo at each other, but that's a different story.) Exhibit A in support of my thesis as to the Whitean-Grantian provenance of his delusion: his insistence on being addressed as 'Mr Ayhern' rather than 'Mike.' (If only his surname were 'Hunt'!) Exhibit B: his (already witnessed) insistence on addressing his subordinates by their last names denuded of the prefatory 'Mr' or 'Ms'. Exhibit C: his predeliction for leaning back in his desk chair with his hands folded behind his head so as to expose to best advantage the sweat puddles on the pits of of his shirtsleeves. A couple of weeks ago I actually walked in on him applying water to his armpits with a squirt bottle, at a lavatory mirror in the gents.

So, anyway, having listened to the message, I sprint down to Mike's office and find him disporting himself in his characteristic pose. 'Ah, McGyver. Late as usual!' he says to me in the same squawking tone he used on the blower. 'Well,' he continues, gesturing towards me with his left elbow, 'Have a seat.' Then, pointing with that same left elbow to a dish full of gumball-sized sweets of various colours, he asks, 'Care for a toxic waste ball?'

I say, 'No, thanks.' For well I remember the night at the Ape, last April, that Dave Sims, that sadistic old tadger, slipped one of those toxic waste balls into the beer nuts; along with the look on the face of his gormless victim, Duane 'Lord' Dennyson. Cor, it was enough to make you cry yourself blind in sympathy.
'Well, I'll have one myself, if you don't mind,' he says, grabbing a green one and inserting it into his gob, afterwards re-placing his hand at its accustomed perch. 'My little Brianna's got me hooked on these things. [Brianna's his cuntess of a five-year-old daughter. He actually had the hoot's-pa to bring her to the last company Christmas party, where she gave me a surprisingly painful sock in the co-jones. She's got a bright future ahead of her in women's boxing] 'But enough of this...persiflage. Let's talk turkey. Where's that report I asked you for on Friday?--the one on revenues for coffee suppositories in the last quarter?'

As sure as I am that the current pope is a kraut who shits in the Black Forest, I'm sure he's made no mention of such a report. Clearly he's acting on the advice promulgated in one of those businessman's self-help books like The Seven Habits of Deeply Offensive Cunts, following some rule that reads, Never flinch, in the face of your underlings, from making shit up as you go along. But I, acting on the advice of my own private piss-boy's manual The Seven Habits of Shallowly Inoffensive Schmucks, dare not betray the merest soupcon of my awareness of the fact that he's conjuring his allusion to this report ex nihilo. Instead I say, 'Oh, sorry, Mr Ayhern. I'll have it to you in a jiffy.'

'Mark my words, McGyver. If I don't have that report on my desk by three this afternoon, your ass [not arse] is grass.'

'And I guess you're the lawnmower?'

'You catch on fast.'

So I rise from the chair and make for the door. But as I'm about to cross the threshold, he says to me, 'You'd better watch your back, McGyver. I don't care for your type.'

'I know, Mr Ayhern. You've told me so several times already.'

'Right, well, I'm telling you again because it bears repeating; repeating and elaborating. And so let me elaborate: you strike me as the type who's too...ductile, too easily led.'

I cut him a blank No shite, Sherlock-type look, and answer, 'Are you saying this is a bad thing, Mr Ayhern? You are, after all, my team leader, are you not?

'Well, of course,' he hems and haws, for a bit, then resumes: 'I don't mean easily led by me or other paragons of leadership. I mean, easily led by unsavoury types. Bad elements. Riffraff and such-like.'

'Of course. I stand corrected.'

'And it's not just me. Other people have remarked it as well.'

'Other people such as?'

'Other people senior to myself. I trust I needn't name any names.'

'No, certainly not. Well, anyway, I really should be off to work on this report...'

As I'm saying these words, his face suddenly puckers into a mask of agony, and his hands spring out from behind his head, and he starts pounding his desk with his right fist like Nikita fucking Krushchev with his shoe at the UN.

'Is it the toxically sour centre?' I ask him. He gives a mute, helpless nod.

My parting words to him are, 'Hey, Mr Ayhern--calm down a bit. That's the only way that centre's ever going to get better.' I don't know what else to say to him. He knew what he was getting into with the Toxic Waste, right? It's his superfund, you could say. As I pull open the door to its full compass, he flashes me a thumbs-up sign with his free hand, whilst continuing to pound the desk with the other one with undiminished fury.

On the way out, I'm practically run over by Winnie Wilkins, an 18-stone fifty-something secretary in our division, walking in with a large three-ring binder and wearing, as usual, her signature plum-coloured tam-o'-shanter, the type of headgear you find at a car-boot sale. (In the summer months, she doesn't wear much other than this plum tam o' shanter, to the infinite revulsion of myself and most of her other coworkers.) 'I've put stamps on those letters, Mr Ayhern,' she's saying as I barely manage to squeeze past her behemothic form, 'and recorded them all in the ledger, like you asked me to.' Winnie Wilkins and her fucking plum-coloured tam-o'-shanter. Christ, how I hate the old bag!

Then en route to my desk I come across a couple of office boys, lads from the post room, literally jumping for joy and hi-fiving each other. I ask them what the hooplah is all about. One of them tells me they're congratulating each other on Barnet's defeat of Rushden and Diamonds on Saturday night. These League Two fans are so fucking pathetic. Why do they insist on doing things by halves? Why don't they just attend junior football games if they're so thrilled by the spectacle of shitty, ninth-rate playing? At least with the juniors, there's a chance that someone out there on the field might someday amount to something, that five or ten years hence you'll be able to boast to your mates, I saw so-and-so when he was just a wee bairn in the junior league.

Anyway, back at my desk I run Ayhern's sodding report. The whole operation takes a grand total of 20 minutes, and I piss away the next four-and-a-half hours browsing the North London Arsenal Bashers' website, along with my favourite porn site, Randy Nannies of the Northern Line. Ordinarily at about one I'd pop down for lunch at the teria, but as I'm keen on avoiding Sarah Slother for at least a good week, I content myself with lunching at my desk on a packet of crisps and Coke from the vending machines on the mezzanine level. Then, at 2:30 sharp, I return to Mike's office and present to him the report, encased in a manila folder.

'Mmm,' he says, stroking his chin and frowning a Mussolini-esque frown of grudging approval, as he pretends to read the text. I write pretend in full confidence because I took care to hand the report to him facing upside-down, and he hasn't seen fit to turn it the right way up. After about a minute or two of this pointless panto, he closes the folder, places it squarely in front of him on the desk, and says to me:

'Impressive work. Not so impressive as to be almost too impressive to be true, but impressive enough, to be sure. Run me another report, would you, on the same fiscal quarter; this time on anisette tampons. I need it by noon tomorrow.'
'Righto, Mr Ayhern,' I say, and head for the door.

'Oh, and McGyver!' he calls out to my back. 'About those guys in the top brass who said you were easily led?'

'Yes?'

'Well, they were only half right.' I look back and see he's sporting one of those frozen grins that these newspaper editor types always sport in the final shot of those 70s movies and TV programmes, as though he's expecting a title card reading Executive Producer: Bob Newhart to descend from the ceiling.

And doing my best to cop a choked-up Jimmy Stewart attitude, I say: 'Thanks...uh, thanks, Mr Ayhern,' (thinking even as I'm saying this, 'Cunt's too nice a word for you, you supercunt) and turn back round and walk out. Well, as I've got another two-and-a-half hours to punch-out time, I figure I might as well run this second report, which I do. Afterwards, another two hours of electrified porn & scorn, then I'm headed for the door and towards Baker Street to catch the 84. About ten minutes into the second leg of the trip, on the 383, I hop on my mobile and give a ring to Quadruples, my local takeaway sandwich shop, and place an order for an Italian cold cut sub. Over the course of twenty or so of these Mazdaless commutes I've got this sandwich-ordering routine down to a science, as they say. I know that ten minutes into the 383 leg is exactly the moment when I should call in if I want to be sure my sandwich is just about ready when I get to 'Druples, if I want to be able (as I am today) to walk in there, greet Suma or Jagdeesh at the register, hand over my tenner, and be proffered my usual all inside of a minute. (Let me as an aside just put in a good word for the 'Druples's Italian cold cut sub, a noble edifice stuffed with every kind of meat and cheese imaginable. And to any Yank who might be reading this now and saying to himself, This limey asshole thinks he's had a real Italian cold cut sub. Has he ever been to D'Amici's in New York? or to Di Cazzo's in Philly? I say: just try me. I'd be more than happy--once I've got a few hundred quid to spare--to jump on a direct flight out of Heathrow to your home metropole, and take you on, culo a culo, in all of my shirty choler, in defence of the Quadruples Italian cold cut.)

Back at the maisonette, I put the takeaway bag on the kitchen counter and check the voice mail on my immobile phone. There's one message, from this bloke who calls himself Ralph. I can't say as I can recall having met anyone named Ralph since moving to the capital. At UEA, I did know a bloke name of Ralph Shillibeer, but it's been almost five years since I lost touch with him, when he dropped out at the end of his second year. What would he be doing calling me? And how would he have got hold of my number? It's unlisted. Anyway, the message went more or less like this: Hi, this is, uh, Ralph. [The tone of the voice is muzzy, absent-minded, indistinct.] How's it hanging? Uhhhhhhh.... [a belch] Sorry about that. I got way too pissed last night. Having trouble putting two thoughts together. You know how it is. So, I was just calling to remind you...uhhhhhh...excuse me a moment. [There's a few seconds of silence followed by what sounds like someone puking his guts up from a fair distance away, followed in turn by the equidistant sound of a flushing toilet. Then a few more seconds of silence, and he's back on the blower.] Sorrier about that. Anyway, uh, as I was saying, I was just calling to remind you about what I was telling you the other night down at the pub. [Indeed?] You know, about that special package trip you've been selected for, the all-expenses-paid trip to Mallorca...

I hang up. Well, there just went two minutes of my life I'll never get back, I say to myself. Two minutes squandered on hearing out the sales pitch of a fucking computerised telemarketer. Christ, will they stop at nothing?

Wellsir, this little digressive hurdle having been cleared, I go to the fridge and crack open a Stella, unwrap the sub and carry them both to the coffee table in front of my futon, where I settle down to eat and catch a spot of telly. It's 500 channels and fuck-all on, as the so-called Boss sings: sodding cooking shows and Hitler documentaries the full length of the dial. Much against my better judgement, for want of any better viewing fare, I allow myself to be sucked into watching a full episode of EastEnders. As I haven't followed the show since I was about ten and was practically forced to for a whole summer by my Grandma (at the time it was her favourite story), I can't recognize any of the characters or make head or tail of the plot. For some reason or other, the climactic moment involves this one bloke catching this girl--who he's shown no sign of being shacked up with or trying to pull--talking to another bloke on a closed-circuit TV monitor. I guess it'd all be clear to me if I'd tuned in 27 weeks ago.

Just as the credits are rolling on EastEnders, and I'm balling up the remains of my sandwich for the dustbin, at half-past eight, the doorbell rings. I assume it's Ronnie Livingstone, come round to propose an impromptu piss-fest down at the Ape, although it's not really his style to pop by unannounced like this. At all events, I hardly expect that when I open the door I'll be greeted--as I in fact subsequently am--by not one, not two, but ten children, dressed in a motley assortment of costumes, and screaming 'TRICK OR TREAT!' at me in discordant unison. It takes me a moment or two to register what's going on. Is this an unseasonably early charity collection for a local school's Christmas pantomine? Or a party of revellers on their way to or from a fancy dress ball for dwarfs? Then I reflect on what they've just said, remember what day of the year is, put one and one together, and realise: it's Halloween, and this is a pack of so-called trick-or-treaters.

Now, I don't know what part of the world you're from, gentle reader, but depending on the degree of popularity this here holiday of Halloween enjoys in your home town or country, and on your degree of familiarity with the history of regional folkways in the UK, you might be inclined to crown me the King of Thickness for not having anticipated this type of visitation, or for not at least having recognised it for what it was right off the foot. But I'm from a pretty remote corner of Norfolk, you see, and it occurs to me as I set about rationalising my stupefaction in the face of these trick-or-treaters, that there might actually have been a grain of insight in Sarah Slother's pigeonholing of me as a provincial the other night. My dad likes to joke, riffing on Mark Twain's famous quip about Cincinnati, Ohio, that if Norwich is the Cincinnati of the UK--meaning that if the world were about to end, you'd pack up and move there straightaway, seeing as how nothing seemed to catch on there till ten years after it had caught on everywhere else--then Diss is the Cincinnati of Norfolk. I haven't been back there at this time of the year in a good four years, so I don't what it's like now, but back in my day, we didn't celebrate Halloween in Diss. It was a Guy-Fawkes-day-only kind of town, and so, for that matter, was Norwich, as near as I could tell as a part-time resident. It was only after moving to London that I started getting used to seeing Halloween sweets and costumes on sale at Tesco's; but what with my being a single adult bloke with no kids, it never really sunk in with me how quickly mandatory celebration of this festival had caught on here. And as for flesh-and-blood trick-or-treaters, I'd never seen nary a one till last night. Next year, I'll see that I'm better prepared for the onslaught, if only for peace-of-mind's sake.

Anyway, back to the front door and the first dawning of my Halloweenic epiphany. I really want to say to these kids, 'Fuck off, you cuntlets; go bother Mrs Preston next door,' but I get a visceral kind of feeling, perhaps set off by associations between the present scene and my run-in last winter with little Brianna Ayhern, that that would be unwise. I know there's nothing in the kitchen suitable for consumption by minors, but I guess you could say for form's sake, I ought to make a cursory rummage round back there. I check the fridge: nothing but a half-empty jug of milk and my still ten-strong Stella twelve pack. I check the cupboards, whose sole contents consist of a half-full box of Weetabix, and exactly ten packets of Korean ramen noodles that I've ostensibly been saving for a rainy day (i.e., a day when I'm so much on my uppers that it comes down to doing without Stella or doing without takeaway). If only I'd grabbed a fistful of those fucking toxic waste balls when I had the chance! Well, I say to myself for the 50th time in the past week, adopt, adapt, and improve. The noodle packets are brightly-coloured and shiny, and labelled inscrutably enough in Korean: hopefully I can get the door bolted behind me before any of them opens one of them and catches on to the imposture. So, grabbing five of them in each fist, I head out back front and start passing them round. As I'm doing this, I note each of the costumes. To a little man and a little woman, they're transparent impersonations of characters from the just-past or just-approaching movie season: Spider Man, Lemony Snicket, Mr Tumnus, Johnny and Joan Carter Cash, etc. The last blokette has me stumped, though: he's got on a great black curly Harpo Marx wig, a black Charlie-Marx-sized fake beard, and an ankle-length smock or apron covered in what to my eyes look like bits of crusty fecal matter. 'And who might you be, young sir?' I ask him. 'I'm a Hairy Potter!' he rejoins 'Clever lad!' (Or not-so-clever lad with clever and sadistic mum or dad).

And with that, I shoo them all away, and slam the door behind me, taking care both to lock the deadbolt and pull the chain to. I go back to the futon, sit down, close my eyes, let out a deep sigh and count to one. Silence outside. I count to one again. Still not a sound. But just as I'm about to count to one a third time, I hear an irregular knocking sound coming from towards the bottom of the front door, followed by these muffled words, delivered in a voice that I'd say sounded like David Beckham on helium, if David Beckham's natural voice could get any higher than it naturally is: 'You fucking sod, trying to pass off fucking Chow Mein [sic] noodles for sweets! My mum's a lawyer, she'll get you, she'll have you put in Wormwood Scrubs, you cunting fuck!' Then the knocking gradually grows weaker, slows down, and finally stops, and before I get to my second count of round two of one-counting, there's a crashing sound of (no shit) breaking glass at the front window. I walk over to the site of the impact, and peer out at Woodside Avenue just in time to identify the perpetrator as he disappears into a shadow cast by a willow tree on the opposite pavement: it's the nipper in the Johnny Cash costume. I see that the little sod has managed to take out a whole pane of the window. With the expense of this repair tacked on to replacing the windows of the Mazda, I'm already close to a thousand quid out of pocket to the glaziers in the space of two days. At this rate, come the end of the month, I'll be lucky to be living on ramen and water.

At the moment, there's no remedy to hand but to crack open another Stella and light up a fag, and when I'm finished with the fag and half-way through the Stella, I'm finally calm enough to break out the old whisk broom and dust devil and sweep up the bigger pieces of glass and hoover up the smaller ones. In the midst of the breakage, I happen across the missile that was its cause--that missile being an unopened grenade-sized canister of Toxic Waste Balls. Well, I must thank Stella for small mercies. Here's a means of making nice with Miss Ayhern (and her dad) at the next Christmas party. Maybe I can even parley the presentation of it into a rise...? Not bloody likely.

By nine, I've got the glass cleaned up and a piece of cardboard from an old Stella twelve-pack taped over the empty pane, and I'm just settling down, over a third Stella and a second fag, to another pointless bout of cable roulette, when the doorbell rings again, and this time, my better judgement tells me I really should let it go. I tell myself, Look (YFC), you've cleared out the pantry, there's nothing else in the house to fob off on to the kids, maybe if, and only if, you mute the volume on the TV and keep absolutely stumm, maybe they'll think no one's home, and they'll go away without putting another hole in your front window.

But in my cuntish stupidity, I decide, as if in revenge for the abuse I've so far suffered tonight at the hands of the munchkin mobility, that, although I'm easily forty years too young for the part, I'm going to play at being the sinisterly stroppy bogeyman of a neighbour, that I'm going to fling open that door, let out a mighty guttural roar like a rabid wombat, and send them all scattering like terrified desert mice (or whatever sort of prey wombats prefer). Bad decision. Christ, I should at least have taken a look through the fucking peephole!

So, as I was saying, in my cuntish stupidity, I set my phiz in the most grotesquely stroppy attitude the muscles will bear, stomp up to the door, fling it open and see...a fully grown man. And Ronnie Livingstone it ain't, although he appears to be about Ronnie's (and my) age. He's wearing a flight jacket, a bloody Arsenal T-shirt, a plaid deerstalker-ish cap, khaki slacks and trainers. And behind him are standing four or five other blokes, similarly attired.

'Trick or treat,' he says to me, without a trace of a smile.

'I'm sorry,' I say to him, 'but your, em, predecessors have cleared me out. No more sweets on the premises, I'm afraid.' (In the space of a nanosecond I find I've morphed from a stroppy ogre into a wobbly-kneed latter-day Jeeves. My but how suddenly finding yourself face-to-face with a pack of unreconstructed yobbos does wonders for a case of the strops!)

'That's all right. We're not really in the market for sweets anyway. We prefer vittles more suited to grown-ups. Isn't that right, lads?' he adds, with a nod back to his mates, who all murmur back, each in his own good time, 'Yeah.'

'So, what are you blokes--er, lads--dressed as this evening?' I say, desperately keeping the charade going for want of any better stratagem.

'We're dressed as members of the East Finchley chav posse.'

And with his dropping of that monosyllable chav, I immediately find all of my strength returning to me. In a rush of adrenaline, my knees lock up, my fingers set to work on the top button of my shirt--but all for naught, for at that very moment, my interlocutor administers a mighty wallop to the pit of my stomach, and I crumple up on to the floor. There, as I lie weeping like a freshly-neutered puppy, I can hear the sound of many pairs of feet stomping past me towards the kitchen, the hermetic pop of the fridge door opening. I manage to get back up on one elbow just in time to catch the posse emerging from the kitchen, with one of the chavs, a different yob from the one who punched me, carrying an object I recognise all too well under one arm, a boxy something about the same size (if not shape) as a newborn infant. Reflexively, as the red-white-and-gold crest passes, I reach out towards it with a choked cry of 'Stella!'

'Aaaah, shaaaaddup, yah schlongsucker!' the kidnapper grunts at me, following up with a kick at the corner of my mouth that sends me collapsing once again back on to the floor.

Then everything goes black. Well, not really, or not, at any rate, immediately: what actually happens is that after they leave, I'm simply too overcome by the abject shittiness of my situation to get up off the floor; and that I prefer to lie there and fall asleep in a puddle of my own bloody drool. Well, naturally, next day--today--I pull a sickie. Good thing I got that anisette tampon report done a day early, what what?