Post Baggage
First things first: purely for the record, I should mention that last weekend—the very next weekend after our abortive motor-pub-crawl—Ronnie and I did indeed discover a proximate, quasi-local late-night drinking venue, a joint up in Chipping Barnet sited a mere 3-quid-minicab ride’s distance from each of our abodes. As I’ve only been there twice, though, and have yet to get much of a feel for its genius loci potandi; and as nothing worth writing home about, as they say, took place during either of these visits, I won’t bother essaying the even the most schematic description of the place for now. Truth be told, at arse I’m keeping mum for now lest, by extolling this new pub’s virtues too fulsomely, I should jinx my still-nascent late-night drinking routine and have to start all over again at square one. Who knows? Maybe this place will turn out to be the Sedulous Ape Squared North. Then again, it might just turn out to be the Barnet franchise of Mr Dunderbeck’s All-Night Sausage Emporium.
Next, it’s time to take another dip into the old post bag. The following letter was sent to my personal email account, although, as the reader will see, it was obviously intended for publication here in the AL. As etiquette demands in such sitches, I’ll let the author herself get the first word in and save my own piss for the postscript:
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR RUGBY MCGYVER, EDITOR OF THE ANGRY LONDONER
Dear Mr McGyver:
I was led to the most recent post of your weblog by a google query centring on a topic of exigent interest to me in an official capacity whose precise parameters will be delineated for the benefit of you, and of your readers, shortly. Before I address the concerns relating to this topic, though, I should like to express myself in my sheer capacity as a resident of Hertfordshire; and to apologise for the admittedly rough treatment you received last Friday week at the hands of Officer Roscoe Q. Coltrane of the Hertfordshire County Constabulary. You may rest assured that in my 35 years as a Hertfordshire resident, Officer Coltrane is the first rotten apple in the constabulary bunch whose existence I have yet got wind of; that during each and every one of my many transactions with the local police force over the course of those 35 years, they have comported themselves to a man and a woman with exemplary courtesy, discretion and forbearance; and that I have never had the slightest occasion to lodge a complaint against them on behalf of myself or of anyone associated with me. In particular, my husband and I have always heeded the stoat crossing signs that you have made mention of, never stinting in our aurigational efforts to avoid collisions with members of the ermine tribe; and have yet to be molested by the local gendarmerie for our punctiliousness on that score.
Now, at last to divest myself of my humble burgher's tunic and don the purple robes of high office: I am addressing myself to you, Mr McGyver, in my capacity the President and Co-Founder of the Hertfordshire Chapter of Childless Housewives Against Binge Drinking (CHABiD). It was in the days and weeks antecedent and posterior to the effectualisation of the new liquor licensing laws that, in the aforementioned capacity, I entrusted to myself the unenviable but urgent task of trolling, as the subcultural vernacular holds, the so-called interweb in search of evidence of fresh irruptions, in the UK generally and in Hertfordshire especially, of the pathology to whose eradication my association have devoted themselves selflessly, wholeheartedly and unanimously. To be sure, none of our sorority were in favour of the introduction of these laws, which we did everything in our power to forestal. Some of us even went so far as to offer our services as concubines to the members who, as they say, might have swung in either direction; but ultimately to no avail. There are, after all--alas!--only so many satyrs and sapphists in the Lower House to go round.
But as brevity is the soul not only of wit but also of solicitude, let me advert forthwith to the specific passages in the latest post of your weblog that elicited my concern. There are two of them; and whilst either one, encountered on its own, might have slipped, as they say, below our radar screen as an index of a repellent but ultimately benign strain of yobbishness, in tandem they betoken your complicity in a conspiracy whose all-too-feasible achievement would spell the annihilation of every man, woman, child and sentient non-human creature on the planet.
The first passage is coextensive with your account of the initial minutes of your northward flight from your local public house, the Sedulous Ape. Therein, in reply to a timely query as to your fitness to drive, posed to you by a member of your cohort, you averred that you had consumed only four pints of beer in the span of five hours, and that hence your personal blood-alcohol content could not have but been below the legal threshold of intoxication. If, sir, these pages constituted a court of law and your post a form of sworn testimony, I should not scruple at this point to adduce the medical evidence culled from the annals of our neurologists, who assure us that the first centres of the brain the daemon alcohol attacks are those of judgement, whose bailiwick comprises inter alia, the power of enumeration. But as these pages do not constitute such a forum, I must and shall abjure all recourse to the argument ad hominem, and treat every circumstance alluded to by you as a matter of fact rather than of conjecture.
This concession to your veracity having been granted, let us now turn to the second passage in--or, rather, out--of question, the passage treating of your hours spent on the premises of The Green Guy Pub in Great Offley. In this passage you admit to having ordered a round of Kronenbourg draught beers for yourself and your confederates, and with the consumption of your self-allotted third of this round (at the very latest), you crossed the porous European-Union-esque border separating the salubrious desmenses of genially yobbish merrymaking from the pathological lepers' duchy of Binge Drinking, from whose borne no traveller ever returns. For the Chief Medical Officer of this our United Kingdom has fixed the border separating the occasional and tippler from the unregenerate and diseased binge drinker at--for an adult male--the consumption of five units of alcohol in one-twenty four hour period, 20 in one week, 500 in one year, 800 in one decade or a thousand in a lifetime. And let us not mince words here: binge drinking is a disease, like cancer or depression, like gout or athlete's foot. The fact that it was not recognised as such as recently as ten years ago should not serve as a kind of scrim occluding our discernment of its fundamentally and virulently pathological essence; for we inhabit a far more enlightened age than did our forbears in the twilight years of the last decade of the second millennium; and the strides made in medical science over the course of the past five years are such as to have trebled the store of knowledge accummulated in the preceding 500. Thus, to those who would argue for a more measured or lenient response to the crisis to the public health of the Kingdom presented by binge drinking, CHABid retorts: 'Let us set the chronometer of our time machine for ca. 1500 AD'. We believe, indeed, that the government and its affiliated public health quangos, in emphasising only the more spectacular, the more grand-guignolesque case studies in the pathology, have heretofore prosecuted their case against binge-drinking in a merely semi-gludial fashion; and that as long as they continue to do so they will never succeed in bringing home to the average pub-goer and off-licence patron the dangers inherent in the pursuit of a career in binge-drinking. We have been vouchsafed oodles of televisual footage from our CMO on instances of alcohol poisoning at all-night parties at universities, but not a millimetre of digifilm devoted, for example, to the economising-yet-would-be-charitable housewife who, on encountering a starving homeless gentleman on the High Street, reaches into her change-purse for the five-pound note that would procure for him a life-saving takeaway curry, only to discover her fingertips alighting on bare vinyl, and exclaims to herself, with immeasurable vexation and remorse, If only I hadn't had that fifth pint down at the pub three years ago next Friday!; scads of radio hours from our so-called Yob Czar on gangs of inebriated hooligans smashing in shop-front windows, but nary a wireless whisper concerning the octagenarian pensioner who, titubating under the weight of the two imperfectly counterpoised four-packs of Boddington's that he has just purchased at the local off-licence (and determined to extinguish the first and crack into the second by nightfall), falls flat on his face and bleeds to death at his own front doorstep. All told, CHABiD put the conservative estimate of the number of British deaths caused directly or indirectly by binge drinking at three million souls per annum. That is an Hiroshima every fortnight, an Auschwitz every month, offered up at the altar of the Tomcat Moloch Potio Immodica. And yet ninety-nine point ninety-nine per cent of these casualites go unreported as binge-drinking casualites. The sources of this hush campaign are not far to seek; for it should go without saying that the publicans, brewers, distillers, swizzle-stick manufacturers, etc. have all got their hands deep in the pockets--and, by extension, on the naughty bits--of our polity, as well as of our print and broadcast media, and that in face (or, rather, crotch) of such brazen and munificently bankrolled importunities as these, any disinterested call for the pursuit and public execution of the true culprit will inevitably fall on deaf ears (or, rather, numb genitals).
But we at CHABiD refuse to be complicit in this Vichyist quietism. We shall not lie back and think of England, not this time. We shall stand patiently massed outside the county jail, flaming acoustic torches in hand, until the sheriff delivers the caitiff recreant into our hands for mortal impalement on the stiletto'd tips of our parasols. Even as I type, thousands of CHABiD members are liaising with representatives of their respective local YMCAS (and their Judaic, Islamic and feminine counterparts), community centres and continuing education schools of our colleges and universities; urging them on pain of boycott to treble their curricular offerings in such wholesome, rejuvenationary subjects as knitting, scuba-diving, hang-gliding, and shark-baiting--activities that afford their practitioners a natural high in juxtaposition with which the artificial stupor induced by binge-drinking makes a very sorry showing indeed. Additionally, and at great personal expense to our membership, we have had printed, in a first run of 100,000 copies, a Personal Binge-Drinking Scorecard, sized for convenient insertion in the photo-snap sleeve of the average billfold wallet and subscribed, in attractive mauve uncial capitals, by our organisation's official slogan of 'A BINGE DRINKER FOR ONE NIGHT IS A BINGE DRINKER FOR LIFE'. (Regrettably the formula does not quite rhyme, but we are hoping to remedy this prosodic defect by petitioning the OED to annex all senses currently appertaining to the word life to the definition of the word light.) By means of reference to this checklist, the would-be tippler can determine for himself how soon--be it next hour, next week, next Christmas, or next Halley's Comet visitation--he may suffer himself to down another tall-guy or highball.
Of course, Mr McGyver, as far as your own personal salvation is concerned, this is all by the by. Whether it would not have already been so a month, a year, five years ago, I cannot say; as I know nothing of your personal history beyond that portion of it disclosed in your last post. All I know is that, even supposing the first pint of ten nights ago contained the first grain of alcohol that had ever passed through your lips, by six o'clock the following morning the hymen of your binge-drinking virginity was rent asunder, and that now no amount of the most up-to-date laser-scoptic suturing will ever restore to it its original pristine, mebranal integrity. Why, then, you may well ask, am I bothering to write to you at all? Why, upon conclusion of my perusal of your post, did I not simply chuck it on to the top of the already three-foot high sheaf of documentary evidence that I am compiling against Herts-CHABiD's end-of-the-year report to the County Council? The answer is elegantly simple to the point of criminality: to judge both by the bare demographics of your so-called user profile and by the inordinately strong admixture of unfamiliar words in the periods and paragraphs of your weblog proper--words whose sense I am able to divine neither on my own nor with the help of my trusty 1990 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary--I cannot but surmise that you have your finger on the pulse, so to speak, of the Sprachsgeist of the youth of today's Britain as none of us at CHABiD can have, in virtue of our relative seniority and our diurnal abstraction in the chores of our self-appointed vocation of ménageuse. You will, of course, have done us an inestimable service merely in publishing this letter; but if, supernumerarily, you could be prevailed upon to accept a carton of our scorecards, and to cry up their utility to your friends and acquaintances in the rude patois of your common subculture, the salutariness of the initial gesture will have ultimately been magnified a thousandfold. And in so doing--in spreading the good word of CHABiD in the incarnation of a recovering, albeit incurable, binge-drinker--you should enjoy an ineffably spiritual satisfaction such as as has perhaps not been vouchsafed any subject of this Kingdom since the glorious first heyday of the Salvation Army, when fallen women plied the pavements of the most disreputable districts of our cities in search of others of their sex who, but for their own timely intervention, might have otherwise shared their own decidedly unenviable fate. I patiently await the notification of your home address at the inbox of the account whence this letter was posted.
But never fear, Mr McGyver! With or without your assistance, we at CHABiD shall continue to fight the good fight against binge-drinking, up to and including, if necessary, the moment at which the bibulous mob are obliged to prise our parasols from our cold, dead fingers. And even if at any time it should fall, I (speaking once again in a personal capacity) shall raise and carry the banner of anti-binge-drinking and alone lead its charge. I would fain die in theatre for that which itself is infallible and undying.
Sincerely,
Mrs Abigail Ashby-Jones
Royston, Hertfordshire
P. S. I apologise for the extremity of certain of the rhetorical figures in the preceding paragraphs, but I am hard pressed to discover words in the English lexicon that express with sufficient vehemence the extent of my devotion to my cause. I am, moreover, I confess, a little out of sorts on account of having missed by an hour my matutinal cup of Twining's darjeeling, in my zeal to have this letter posted and on its way to your inbox by noon of this instant. And so, avanti ed adesso, to the kettle!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, what can I say, Mrs A-J? Your letter leaves me likewise at a loss for words. How shall I ever circumvent this here attack of aphasia? [Interpolate two-minute long stretch of ellipses.] Got it. I'll express myself charadically. Ready? OK, here goes:
Three words. First word: One syllable. Sounds like: [I jerk my torso forwards and pass my hand briskly backwards over the top of my head.]
'Bow?' you say?
No. Mind especially the second half of the performance.
'Duck?'
Got it. Sounds like duck.
'Good heavens! Not f--'
'--No.' [I point to the ground.]
'Luck? Muck?'
[I keep pointing downwards.]
'Suck?'
I nod Yepissimo emphatically .
'Hardly an improvement over effims. Next word?'
One syllable. [I gesture broadly towards my own carcass.]
'Me.'
No.
'My.'
Yes.
'Third word?'
Two syllables. Sounds like: Movie title. [I do the stationary wall-climbing dance.]
'Spider-Man?'
No, and, in any case, that's three syllables. [I stroppily swat at the air as if at a swarm of gnats, every now and then leaving off to leer squintily as if at a microscopic pair of bazoombas.]
'King Kong?'
Got it. Sounds like King Kong.
'King Wrong? Song?'
[I jerk my thumb upwards.]
'Long? Dong?'
Got it: Dong. So spell it all out for me, woudya?
'Suck...my...King Dong?'
Good work, Mrs A-J!
Next, it’s time to take another dip into the old post bag. The following letter was sent to my personal email account, although, as the reader will see, it was obviously intended for publication here in the AL. As etiquette demands in such sitches, I’ll let the author herself get the first word in and save my own piss for the postscript:
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR RUGBY MCGYVER, EDITOR OF THE ANGRY LONDONER
Dear Mr McGyver:
I was led to the most recent post of your weblog by a google query centring on a topic of exigent interest to me in an official capacity whose precise parameters will be delineated for the benefit of you, and of your readers, shortly. Before I address the concerns relating to this topic, though, I should like to express myself in my sheer capacity as a resident of Hertfordshire; and to apologise for the admittedly rough treatment you received last Friday week at the hands of Officer Roscoe Q. Coltrane of the Hertfordshire County Constabulary. You may rest assured that in my 35 years as a Hertfordshire resident, Officer Coltrane is the first rotten apple in the constabulary bunch whose existence I have yet got wind of; that during each and every one of my many transactions with the local police force over the course of those 35 years, they have comported themselves to a man and a woman with exemplary courtesy, discretion and forbearance; and that I have never had the slightest occasion to lodge a complaint against them on behalf of myself or of anyone associated with me. In particular, my husband and I have always heeded the stoat crossing signs that you have made mention of, never stinting in our aurigational efforts to avoid collisions with members of the ermine tribe; and have yet to be molested by the local gendarmerie for our punctiliousness on that score.
Now, at last to divest myself of my humble burgher's tunic and don the purple robes of high office: I am addressing myself to you, Mr McGyver, in my capacity the President and Co-Founder of the Hertfordshire Chapter of Childless Housewives Against Binge Drinking (CHABiD). It was in the days and weeks antecedent and posterior to the effectualisation of the new liquor licensing laws that, in the aforementioned capacity, I entrusted to myself the unenviable but urgent task of trolling, as the subcultural vernacular holds, the so-called interweb in search of evidence of fresh irruptions, in the UK generally and in Hertfordshire especially, of the pathology to whose eradication my association have devoted themselves selflessly, wholeheartedly and unanimously. To be sure, none of our sorority were in favour of the introduction of these laws, which we did everything in our power to forestal. Some of us even went so far as to offer our services as concubines to the members who, as they say, might have swung in either direction; but ultimately to no avail. There are, after all--alas!--only so many satyrs and sapphists in the Lower House to go round.
But as brevity is the soul not only of wit but also of solicitude, let me advert forthwith to the specific passages in the latest post of your weblog that elicited my concern. There are two of them; and whilst either one, encountered on its own, might have slipped, as they say, below our radar screen as an index of a repellent but ultimately benign strain of yobbishness, in tandem they betoken your complicity in a conspiracy whose all-too-feasible achievement would spell the annihilation of every man, woman, child and sentient non-human creature on the planet.
The first passage is coextensive with your account of the initial minutes of your northward flight from your local public house, the Sedulous Ape. Therein, in reply to a timely query as to your fitness to drive, posed to you by a member of your cohort, you averred that you had consumed only four pints of beer in the span of five hours, and that hence your personal blood-alcohol content could not have but been below the legal threshold of intoxication. If, sir, these pages constituted a court of law and your post a form of sworn testimony, I should not scruple at this point to adduce the medical evidence culled from the annals of our neurologists, who assure us that the first centres of the brain the daemon alcohol attacks are those of judgement, whose bailiwick comprises inter alia, the power of enumeration. But as these pages do not constitute such a forum, I must and shall abjure all recourse to the argument ad hominem, and treat every circumstance alluded to by you as a matter of fact rather than of conjecture.
This concession to your veracity having been granted, let us now turn to the second passage in--or, rather, out--of question, the passage treating of your hours spent on the premises of The Green Guy Pub in Great Offley. In this passage you admit to having ordered a round of Kronenbourg draught beers for yourself and your confederates, and with the consumption of your self-allotted third of this round (at the very latest), you crossed the porous European-Union-esque border separating the salubrious desmenses of genially yobbish merrymaking from the pathological lepers' duchy of Binge Drinking, from whose borne no traveller ever returns. For the Chief Medical Officer of this our United Kingdom has fixed the border separating the occasional and tippler from the unregenerate and diseased binge drinker at--for an adult male--the consumption of five units of alcohol in one-twenty four hour period, 20 in one week, 500 in one year, 800 in one decade or a thousand in a lifetime. And let us not mince words here: binge drinking is a disease, like cancer or depression, like gout or athlete's foot. The fact that it was not recognised as such as recently as ten years ago should not serve as a kind of scrim occluding our discernment of its fundamentally and virulently pathological essence; for we inhabit a far more enlightened age than did our forbears in the twilight years of the last decade of the second millennium; and the strides made in medical science over the course of the past five years are such as to have trebled the store of knowledge accummulated in the preceding 500. Thus, to those who would argue for a more measured or lenient response to the crisis to the public health of the Kingdom presented by binge drinking, CHABid retorts: 'Let us set the chronometer of our time machine for ca. 1500 AD'. We believe, indeed, that the government and its affiliated public health quangos, in emphasising only the more spectacular, the more grand-guignolesque case studies in the pathology, have heretofore prosecuted their case against binge-drinking in a merely semi-gludial fashion; and that as long as they continue to do so they will never succeed in bringing home to the average pub-goer and off-licence patron the dangers inherent in the pursuit of a career in binge-drinking. We have been vouchsafed oodles of televisual footage from our CMO on instances of alcohol poisoning at all-night parties at universities, but not a millimetre of digifilm devoted, for example, to the economising-yet-would-be-charitable housewife who, on encountering a starving homeless gentleman on the High Street, reaches into her change-purse for the five-pound note that would procure for him a life-saving takeaway curry, only to discover her fingertips alighting on bare vinyl, and exclaims to herself, with immeasurable vexation and remorse, If only I hadn't had that fifth pint down at the pub three years ago next Friday!; scads of radio hours from our so-called Yob Czar on gangs of inebriated hooligans smashing in shop-front windows, but nary a wireless whisper concerning the octagenarian pensioner who, titubating under the weight of the two imperfectly counterpoised four-packs of Boddington's that he has just purchased at the local off-licence (and determined to extinguish the first and crack into the second by nightfall), falls flat on his face and bleeds to death at his own front doorstep. All told, CHABiD put the conservative estimate of the number of British deaths caused directly or indirectly by binge drinking at three million souls per annum. That is an Hiroshima every fortnight, an Auschwitz every month, offered up at the altar of the Tomcat Moloch Potio Immodica. And yet ninety-nine point ninety-nine per cent of these casualites go unreported as binge-drinking casualites. The sources of this hush campaign are not far to seek; for it should go without saying that the publicans, brewers, distillers, swizzle-stick manufacturers, etc. have all got their hands deep in the pockets--and, by extension, on the naughty bits--of our polity, as well as of our print and broadcast media, and that in face (or, rather, crotch) of such brazen and munificently bankrolled importunities as these, any disinterested call for the pursuit and public execution of the true culprit will inevitably fall on deaf ears (or, rather, numb genitals).
But we at CHABiD refuse to be complicit in this Vichyist quietism. We shall not lie back and think of England, not this time. We shall stand patiently massed outside the county jail, flaming acoustic torches in hand, until the sheriff delivers the caitiff recreant into our hands for mortal impalement on the stiletto'd tips of our parasols. Even as I type, thousands of CHABiD members are liaising with representatives of their respective local YMCAS (and their Judaic, Islamic and feminine counterparts), community centres and continuing education schools of our colleges and universities; urging them on pain of boycott to treble their curricular offerings in such wholesome, rejuvenationary subjects as knitting, scuba-diving, hang-gliding, and shark-baiting--activities that afford their practitioners a natural high in juxtaposition with which the artificial stupor induced by binge-drinking makes a very sorry showing indeed. Additionally, and at great personal expense to our membership, we have had printed, in a first run of 100,000 copies, a Personal Binge-Drinking Scorecard, sized for convenient insertion in the photo-snap sleeve of the average billfold wallet and subscribed, in attractive mauve uncial capitals, by our organisation's official slogan of 'A BINGE DRINKER FOR ONE NIGHT IS A BINGE DRINKER FOR LIFE'. (Regrettably the formula does not quite rhyme, but we are hoping to remedy this prosodic defect by petitioning the OED to annex all senses currently appertaining to the word life to the definition of the word light.) By means of reference to this checklist, the would-be tippler can determine for himself how soon--be it next hour, next week, next Christmas, or next Halley's Comet visitation--he may suffer himself to down another tall-guy or highball.
Of course, Mr McGyver, as far as your own personal salvation is concerned, this is all by the by. Whether it would not have already been so a month, a year, five years ago, I cannot say; as I know nothing of your personal history beyond that portion of it disclosed in your last post. All I know is that, even supposing the first pint of ten nights ago contained the first grain of alcohol that had ever passed through your lips, by six o'clock the following morning the hymen of your binge-drinking virginity was rent asunder, and that now no amount of the most up-to-date laser-scoptic suturing will ever restore to it its original pristine, mebranal integrity. Why, then, you may well ask, am I bothering to write to you at all? Why, upon conclusion of my perusal of your post, did I not simply chuck it on to the top of the already three-foot high sheaf of documentary evidence that I am compiling against Herts-CHABiD's end-of-the-year report to the County Council? The answer is elegantly simple to the point of criminality: to judge both by the bare demographics of your so-called user profile and by the inordinately strong admixture of unfamiliar words in the periods and paragraphs of your weblog proper--words whose sense I am able to divine neither on my own nor with the help of my trusty 1990 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary--I cannot but surmise that you have your finger on the pulse, so to speak, of the Sprachsgeist of the youth of today's Britain as none of us at CHABiD can have, in virtue of our relative seniority and our diurnal abstraction in the chores of our self-appointed vocation of ménageuse. You will, of course, have done us an inestimable service merely in publishing this letter; but if, supernumerarily, you could be prevailed upon to accept a carton of our scorecards, and to cry up their utility to your friends and acquaintances in the rude patois of your common subculture, the salutariness of the initial gesture will have ultimately been magnified a thousandfold. And in so doing--in spreading the good word of CHABiD in the incarnation of a recovering, albeit incurable, binge-drinker--you should enjoy an ineffably spiritual satisfaction such as as has perhaps not been vouchsafed any subject of this Kingdom since the glorious first heyday of the Salvation Army, when fallen women plied the pavements of the most disreputable districts of our cities in search of others of their sex who, but for their own timely intervention, might have otherwise shared their own decidedly unenviable fate. I patiently await the notification of your home address at the inbox of the account whence this letter was posted.
But never fear, Mr McGyver! With or without your assistance, we at CHABiD shall continue to fight the good fight against binge-drinking, up to and including, if necessary, the moment at which the bibulous mob are obliged to prise our parasols from our cold, dead fingers. And even if at any time it should fall, I (speaking once again in a personal capacity) shall raise and carry the banner of anti-binge-drinking and alone lead its charge. I would fain die in theatre for that which itself is infallible and undying.
Sincerely,
Mrs Abigail Ashby-Jones
Royston, Hertfordshire
P. S. I apologise for the extremity of certain of the rhetorical figures in the preceding paragraphs, but I am hard pressed to discover words in the English lexicon that express with sufficient vehemence the extent of my devotion to my cause. I am, moreover, I confess, a little out of sorts on account of having missed by an hour my matutinal cup of Twining's darjeeling, in my zeal to have this letter posted and on its way to your inbox by noon of this instant. And so, avanti ed adesso, to the kettle!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, what can I say, Mrs A-J? Your letter leaves me likewise at a loss for words. How shall I ever circumvent this here attack of aphasia? [Interpolate two-minute long stretch of ellipses.] Got it. I'll express myself charadically. Ready? OK, here goes:
Three words. First word: One syllable. Sounds like: [I jerk my torso forwards and pass my hand briskly backwards over the top of my head.]
'Bow?' you say?
No. Mind especially the second half of the performance.
'Duck?'
Got it. Sounds like duck.
'Good heavens! Not f--'
'--No.' [I point to the ground.]
'Luck? Muck?'
[I keep pointing downwards.]
'Suck?'
I nod Yepissimo emphatically .
'Hardly an improvement over effims. Next word?'
One syllable. [I gesture broadly towards my own carcass.]
'Me.'
No.
'My.'
Yes.
'Third word?'
Two syllables. Sounds like: Movie title. [I do the stationary wall-climbing dance.]
'Spider-Man?'
No, and, in any case, that's three syllables. [I stroppily swat at the air as if at a swarm of gnats, every now and then leaving off to leer squintily as if at a microscopic pair of bazoombas.]
'King Kong?'
Got it. Sounds like King Kong.
'King Wrong? Song?'
[I jerk my thumb upwards.]
'Long? Dong?'
Got it: Dong. So spell it all out for me, woudya?
'Suck...my...King Dong?'
Good work, Mrs A-J!
Labels: 24-Hour Drinking, Post Baggage
posted by Rugby McGyver | 5:02 am
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