Had Meself a Shi(r)ty Little Xmas: Part the Last

Well, suffice it to say, I arrived back at McGyver Manor at seven o'clock-con-cambio on Christmas Day Eve with considerably less fanfare than I had seen fit to accompany me at the same hour two days earlier. On second thought, waiter, hold the suffice it to say on that there Well...I sayngwich: I know full well that a considerable minority, if not an outright majority, of blokes and blokesses amongst my readership must hold that the proper way of re-introducing yourself to a social do you've alienated yourself--and subsequently absconded--from consists in marching in with floodlights and sirens blaring and your hands behind your head; in other words, in treating yourself at once, vis-a-vis the affronted party, as copper and suspect in a single fluid succession of gestures. At any event, regardless of the cuntishly cowardly aspect in which the blokility might view my comportment on this occasion, I chose then to re-introduce myself into the old home-world as inconspicuously as I could manage, viz--once I had given the knob of the front door a twist and thereby ascertained that it was unlocked--by creeping in through the vestibule and standing well clear of the entry-archway of the front room until I had properly sussed out the genius momenti from boca to culo. The FR itself was now darkened, but there was enough illumination seeping in from the dining room for you to make out the basic shape of everything. Of the old 25-inch telly there was nary a trace, and parked rather pathetically at its former station on the middle shelf of the so-called entertainment centre was a little 12-inch set that I recognised as the one from my bedroom (Why this one, and not the 15-incher from Sid's room, I couldn't help wondering at this point). As the coast so far appeared to be clear, I thought I might as well move my listening station up a stage to the threshold of the dining room, en route to which I caught sight of the carcass of Aunt Agatha, sprawled prostrate, dead to the world, on the couch, and covered from chin to toe in one of my old Star Wars blankets.

Once I was positioned at my new post, the first intelligible sound that made it into my orioles was that of Mum saying to someone obviously not present, '...five foot nine, with closely-cropped dark brown hair, and wearing a navy blue jumper and dark grey trousers. Oh, you say one of your officers sighted a person matching that description? At about what time? And where?' Right about when Mum's finishing up her missing-person's profile of me, I venture to take a quick surreptitious gander into the dining room, where I see Dad sitting at the now-bare-and-declothed table, with his arms folded in front of him; and Mum herself standing off to the right and talking into the mouthpiece of our 1980s-vintage un-cordless blower. (The Birthday Boy hisself only knew where Sid was--possibly in his room; more probably out on a fresh spree of whoremongerage.) And just as Mum's starting to receive secondhand the Stewart-doppelgaenger's intelligence on my recent whereabouts, I start to think, if only for the sake of sparing her the expense of a so-sorry-to-have-bothered-you return phone call, that I really shouldn't postpone the revelation of my obviously-still-living--albeit rather haggard and hangdog--phiz to her and Dad a second longer. So, clearing my throat as loudly as I can manage, I do a sideways step into the dead centre of the frame of the dining- room threshold; and I give a couple of knuckle-raps to the right arch-post with one hand, and a flat-palmed HRH-style wave with the other. Both pairs of parental okies join in shared cuntsternation with my single filial pair; then, immediately afterwards, the paternal pair settle comfortably back into their tableward-slouching stance, whilst the maternal pair roll themselves at me in a manner that I would not hesitate to deem synonymous with the interjection, 'You cuntish cunt!'; did I not know full well that cunt is a word that figures not in my Mum's private--let alone public--lexicon.

Then, she resumes, blower-wards: 'Actually, sir, he's just now stepped in. So sorry to have bothered you. And thanks ever so much for your help. Bye.' After cradling the phone, Mum wastes no time in getting round to saying to me, 'Nigel Weatherby McGyver, where have you been for the past two hours? Your father and I have been worried to distraction--'

'--I'd settle for miffed to borderline preoccupation, dear,' Dad cuts in. 'There is, after all, only so much harm or mischief a bloke can come or get up to in two hours, in Diss town, in the Cincinnati of Norfolk...'

'There you go again Stanley! I don't know which of the three is most irritating-- your Twain-quoting, your pedestrian punning or your Gilbert and Sullivan fixation. Can't you give the whole dog and pony show a rest for just one night?'

'I'll do my best, liebchen. But the night is getting rather prematurely old, I'm afraid; and a bloke must find ways of diverting himself in his quotidian dotage.'
Mum tossess her head and delivers an interjection of Humph! as if to say, Even at my expense, you s*dding windbag!, and steps off into the kitchen. Then Dad resumes: 'I was about to say that, although, unlike your mother, I never entertained the slightest suspicion as to your well-being; I did, and still do, find your theatrics a bit--well, let's not mince words here--arse-chafing, and--'

'--Dad, if this is about the TV, I'm all set to pop up to Norwich to get you a replacement, first thing tomorrow morning.'

'It's not about the TV, and least of all about it tomorrow morning. Good heavens! I wouldn't dream of your suffocating yourself in the Boxing Day shopping rush, even if you'd Molotov-Cocktailed the entire front room. In any case, entre nous--' here he leans over to me and continues in a near-whisper, '--I'd been planning, for our thirtieth wedding anniversary next month, to surprise your mother with one of those flat-screen high-definition jobbers that you can hang on the wall like a world map--I mean one that's the size of a world map. In the meantime, the old 12-incher will do.' [Well, this little scrap of divulgence certainly nixed in the bud my filial reparations project. In the first place, I couldn't very well upstage Dad's anniversary plans; and in the second, well, round about the 150-quid mark the spirit of Filial Remorse gives up the ghost, and the spirit of Personal Fiscal Panic takes over for him.] 'No, it wasn't the demolition of the telly that piqued me--there is, after all, no more time-honoured method for a bloke to get his ire out than by lobbing a cricket ball at the source of his vexation, and he can't always count on the ball nearest to hand being up to league regulation standards. Truth to tell, towards the end, that Chavworthy fellow was beginning to get to me, too, and if you hadn't beaten me to the scone, I might have taken a bowl at him with it myself.'

'Really? You seemed to be enjoying his schtick as much as anybody else in the room.'

'Well, I was--at first, without quite understanding why, as I'm not really au courant on this chav phenomenon. But when he made that crack about UEA-versus-Luton U--well, that put a different complexion on things entirely. I couldn't help asking myself, "What planet is this bloke living on?"'

'Probably Planet Oxbridge, from whose ethereal vantage-point all English universities founded since 1300 look like piddling, pebbly little asteroids. But you were saying, the thing that miffed you wasn't the...'

'...the telly, right. No, it was your taking French leave of all of us so precipitously. What, pray tell, was the point of that bit of panto?'

'Well, there was no point to it. I just needed to get some fresh air, as they say. I just couldn't face up to the whole confrontational aspect of the situation, I--'

'Oh, come off it, Nigel. What was the worst that could have happened?--that you'd have nicked your finger on a shardlet of glass whilst helping us clean up? Certainly you had nothing to fear from any of us. Where was your backbone, man? Your slack lower lip, your...' [With slightly curled fingers he palms the air in a hefting gesture.]

'...couilles?'

'If I may pardon your French, and mine, yes: your balls. Good heavens! Did your mother and I raise a man or a m-'

Before he gets to the end of that word that I'll hazard to conjecture would have been mouse, Mum cuts in, screaming, from the kitchen: 'STANLEY! WOULD YOU GET IN HERE AND HELP ME GET THE LID OFF THIS MARMITE JAR?'

'No need to shout, dear; we don't want to wake your auntie!' Dad calls back meekly, and, in a bit of French-leave-taking of his own, exits stage right without comment. Presently from the kitchen there issues a dialogue of inarticulate grunts and groans seemingly calculated by the Almighty Scots Demiurge to put me in mind of the most grotesque parental copulatory kinetics; and, slightly less presently, I am obliged, for the sheer sake of expunging these images from my mind's porn-cinema-screen, to intervene. I step into the kitchen and silently proffer my old RH to Dad, who's half-doubled up, purple-faced, over the aforementioned obdurate MJ (Mum, for her part, isn't so much looking on as leaning off, against the fridge, fanning herself and panting as she dazedly regathers her strength and wits after her own last futile crack at unlidding). Dad all-too-obligingly hands me the jar and joins Mum at the fridge-cooling-station; and I, wrapping a couple of square inches of pullover wool round the edge of the lid, give the latter a couple of hardly-Herculean anti-clockwise twists that, between the two or three of them, suffice to render unto all six of our grateful ears the much-sought-after 'POP' assuring us that the cherry on this here centiletre-sized batch of marmite has been broken. (My heartfelt apologies, incidentally, go out to all of my readers whose lunch has been irretrievably spoilt by my invocation, in the last sentence, of the insufferable gustatory combo of cherries on marmite.) This minuscule, manifestly un-taxing, test of strength having been passed, I return the jar, cupped in my palm bottom-downwards--as if thereby to say (and, I should hope, communicate) Voila! Mes couilles!--to Dad, who, after thanking me for my efforts in well-nigh asthmatic or emphasymic tones, finishes off the unlidding of the vessel and sets to work applying its contents with a butter knife to a sextet of de-crusted bread-slices that have all along been patiently awaiting such treatment, at a cutting-board next to the sink.

Whilst he's preparing the sandwiches, Mum suddenly takes it into her head to announce--as I'm fairly positive she wouldn't bother doing in the absence of my late proofs of filial fortitude--'By the way, when you where out, your friend Tex called.'

Blimey! I'd forgotten all about Tex Winckelmann, my old mate from my UEA days. Not that I'd exactly lost touch with him--in fact, he'd emailed me a couple of weeks before the holiday to ask if I'd be in the area thenabouts--but in the midst of the familial tempest, the mental ferryboat linking me with this sole other-genred island of Norfolkiana had been more or less solidly moored ever since my arrival. But now that Mum had broached his name, the exigent thought of at last speaking to him nixed, in one swell foosh, all of my accumulated angst-cum-triumph appertaining to the TV, the abscondment, the Diss-missal and the marmite-jar.

'Did he leave a number?' I ask(ed), doing all I can to cuntain any betrayal of the life-or-death import that, just now, hangs in the balance of this question.

'Two, actually,' Mum replies, tearing off and handing to me a post-it note from the scribbling block affixed to the front of the fridge. 'The top one is his home number, and the bottom one's to his mobile.'

'Right,' I say, heading towards the dining room en route to the stairs and my room. 'If you'll excuse me for a bit...'

'Don't you fancy a sandwich, Nige?' Dad asks me with his back still turned.

'No, thanks, Dad. I'm still full from dinner.' This is a lie, as the reader of my last post will have deduced. But I'm of the opinion that it's a prerogative of every marmite-loathing adult to keep that noxious concoction well clear of his palate and gullet by whatever means prove necessary, be they fair or foul.

Back in my room, I try to reach Tex at the home number, but all I get is a voice- mail greeting bearing the vocal imprint of a blokess speaking in a drawling, reedy-as-all-get-out midwestern North American accent: 'You've reached the Weeenckelmann-Stuckenschmidt residence. Ooo gaash, I'm afrayeed we're naat hoom at the mooment, soo if you'll just leave your neeeame and number, we'll get beeaack to you as soon as paaasable.' Don't mind if I don't, you nasophone trans-pondial cuntess, I say to myself. I do, however, succeed in getting hold of Tex at the second number.

'Oh, huh-huh-hi Rugger,' he answers. 'HUH-HUH. Nice to huh-huh-hear from you. HUH-HUH.'

I can tell straight-away, from the pant-to-word ratio of these first coupla sentences, that he's doubtlessly kind of in the middle of something, as they say--coition or fellatio most likely--so I resolve to keep it short. 'When do you want to meet up--and where?'

'HUH-HUH-huh?'

'WHEN AND WHERE DO YOU WANT TO MEET UP?'

'HUH-HUHAAEEdunno. HUH-HUH-Horseshoes? Tomorrow-HUH-night? Eight-o'-HUH-HUH-clock?'

I do a quick mental check on the chronographic coordinates of tomorrow's Charlton-Arsenal match, then reply, 'Sure.'

'HUH-HUHhhhexcellent. HUH-HUH. Sorry, Rugger, I'm on the...HUH-HUH...on the road.'

'On the road? Has your power steering given out?' I was trying to be winsomely waggish, but in retrospect, this seems a right cuntishly tactless question. It's quite conceivable, nest pah, that a bloke might be driving and receiving a blow job simultaneously?

'HUH-HUHHhh, no. I'm on my...HUH-HUH-HUH...on my bike.' [Here, he's interrupted by a stream of dopplerised car noises leading up to, and following right on the heels of, an interjection of 'Out of my fucking way, you fucking berk!'] 'I've really-HUH-HUH-got to go, Rugger. See you...HUH-HUH...see you tomorrow night.'

Now, I hope you lot will forgive me for turning the dial of the miraculous Ronco-patented McGyver yarn-spinning-machine back to STANDBY position for a moment or two whilst I do a bit of biographical backfill on Tex—it is, after all, only for your own readerly good and comfort that I’m bothering to do so at all. Actually the best, the most timely, moment for suspending the narration for this selfsame purpose was probably a coupla paragraphs back, right after Mum handed me that post-it note bearing Tex’s diggits; but as I invariably find this back-ground-in-filling subroutine the most cuntishly teejious one of the whole blogging enterprise, in this case, I’ve put it off, as usual, to the last possible moment (i.e., now). Mind you, I nonetheless maintain that mastery of—or, at least, borderline berkish competence in--the background-in-filling subroutine is essential to any bloggeur who aspires to attract a readership wider than that comprised by his own shittily foreshortened circle of friends (not that I've told any of my friends about this here blog). For, averse as I am to the fecal-tea-leaf-reading school of blog-post-composition (see, if you need to, my post of 1 November of last year), not even the Honourable Alexander himself could be Downer than I am on the antipodally opposite approach, sc. that of Norse-saga-esque unqualified-name-cataloguing. Typical essay in the aforesaid: For dinner last night we went to Bob’s [is Bob’s a restaurant or some bloke’s house?], where we ran into Tom, Cindy, and Chartreusa, who introduced us to Tim, Harry, and Prunella. At the end of the meal, Prunella suggested we should adjourn to Raul’s [again I pose the question: taberna or residence?] for schlongtails and Strip-Cluedo. Christ, you could learn more about these people by combo-nergling their names in the local phone listings. Needles to say, as first-blush-inducingly incommensurable as the two approaches would seem to be, you often enough find them being employed cheek-by-jowl within a single post, for the scandalously simple (if less-than-okie-burstingly-obvious) reason that pretty much everybody is much more readily captivated by the chemical constitution of their own turds than by anything having to do with other people.

But back—or, rather, on—to Tex. Like me, he’s a native East Angelino; but unlike me, he’s not a native Norfolkian, hailing as he did originally from somewhere in the vicinity of Sudbury, well to the south of the Ouse and the Waveney. We met, as I’ve already indicated at the University, quite early on, in fact, when I was still enrolled as a part-time student. I remember the occasion as though it were only four years ago instead of eight. We--the two of us-- and a butcher's half-dozen other students were seated round a table at the Student Union under the aegis of some semi-official event, probably one of those loathsome so-called orientation sessions organised by the university administration during the opening week of the term; and in answer to the question of 'What kind of music do you listen to?' posed by the so-called student facilitator of the meeting--a blokess a year or two ahead of us--to each of the rest of us in turn, Tex replied 'Tex-Mex music.' (My own reply is lost in oblivion, but I assume it was something entirely unimaginative like 'indie-rock' or 'classic schlong rock.') Hence, you reason, the moniker of 'Tex'. Well, yes and no: for if our bare avowals of musico-subcultural allegiance had counted for anything on that score, then I presumably would have answered from that day forwards to the appalachian of 'Indie' or 'Classic Schlong'. The real reason the Texan nickname stuck chez nous--the real reason, in fact, that the jaunty little biplane of our friendship first took wing--was that when, later that same day or week, I encouraged him to initiate me into the mysteries of the Tex-Mexican musical canon, he frankly confessed to me that he owned not a single recording representative of that canon; that, indeed, he hadn't the foggiest notion of what Tex Mex music sounded like or on what make of instruments it was played; that he had inprovved his curiously parochial reply to the facilitator's question in a spirit of resentment towards what he saw as the question's cuntish intrusiveness, by supplying his interrogator with information at the furthest conceivable remove from the truth. Well, as this under-the-table two-finger salute to the Man (or, rather, Woman) jibed most harmoniously with my own modus operandi--and, indeed, in this instance exceeded it both in the M and the O--I took an immejiate shine to the bloke, from there on out, right on through to graduation, we were thick as thieves. And I guess you could say that, unlike the protagonists of the Jam song of the same name (i.e., 'TAT') we remained so well into the semi-maturity of our mid-twenties--the sheer frequency with which I've called upon him to act as my imaginary second-or-third conversational wheel in recent years attests to that SOA; only, as of last month, I hadn't seen much of him lately, on account of the fact that he'd been abroad for so much of the time. The very same month in which I'd moved to London, you see, he'd taken a job at a so-called web design firm in Canada, and it was there, in Toronto, that he'd met and eventually married the selfsame blokess whose voice I had encountered--for the first time--on my first attempt to get in touch with him on Christmas Day. Eventually, though--and, specifically, last summer--he'd moved back to EA, either out of an unquenchable yen for the shores of old Blighty or an unquellable intolerance for life in Canada, and set up shop as an independent consultant in Attleborough, basically a southern suburb of Norwich sited about halfway between N-Town and Diss.

Well that, I'm more or less confident in saying, is pretty much all ye need know for now concerning Mr Winckelmann. What do you say I get back to a spell of yarn-spinnage? Next day, Boxing Day, in keeping with tradition, was pretty much a loll -about-and-sit-on-your-arse day for YFC's truly. Mum and Dad drove Aunt Agatha back to Earsham in the morning while I held down the fort at Diss. Then, in the afternoon, there was the Arsenal-Charlton match, a bit of a downer for me on two scores--first, on that of my having to watch the game on the TV in Sid's room, surrounded by piles of malodorous unwashed laundry and stacks of empty beer tins (I felt that I at least owed it to Mum and Dad to register my contrition for the demolition of the front-room telly negatively--i.e., by not presuming to usurp their viewing privileges down there); and second, on the quite literal score of the outcome of the match itself: Arsenal 1, Charlton 0. I blame it all on Charlton's grounding of their no-holds-barred-opting goalkeeper Stephan Anderson in favour of the highly-competent but over-scrupulous Thomas Myhre. That clinical, scientific, whip-out-your-surveyor's-telescope-and-plumb-line-if-and-only-if-the-ball-crosses-the-halfway-mark-style defensive approach just doesn't work against the Gunners, at least not consistently. To keep the Thierry-Henry-spearheaded-blitzkrieg consistently at bay, you need a goalkeeper who is actuated first and foremost by a well-nigh-gormless sense of team loyalty, the type of bloke who--like Anderson--will pounce on the ball with the heedless abandon of a foxhole private clutching a live grenade to his chest, in so doing surrendering his own sorry carcass to pulverization that his cuntishly ungrateful platoon-mates might live.

After the game, I cop a couple of hours of zeds that throw me smack dab against the striking of seven, giving me just enough time to perform the four esses before taking my leave of Mum and Dad at a quarter of eight to keep my rendezvous with Tex. At precisely 7:47, I climb into the Mazda and drive a coupla miles due east along the A143--Her Majesty's official Diss-transcending name for our Park/Victoria/High Road--over the railway tracks, through the dorflet of Scole, and pull over at a largish, peak-roofed, two-storey building resembling--to my okies, at least--a mediaeval army barracks. For the benefit of the gormless or uninitated, a large green sign posted above and well to the right of the front door identifies the establishment housed therein as THE HORSESHOES. I step inside and take a quick tour of the nine-tenths empty ground floor, including the so-called Non-Smoking-Dining-Room annex indicated by a 1970s-style cuffed pointy-finger suspended from the ceiling of the main room. As, on the evidence of this tour, I'm the first to arrive, I procure myself a Stella from the bloke behind the bar and take a seat at a table set flush against the middle of the three monolithic support beams that divide the room in half. From this station, I judge, Tex and I will be remote enough from the hubub--should any materialise--to converse unmolested, and yet close enough to the bar to forestall any perverse, well-nigh-slapstick-worthy bar-ward treks through vast swathes of unoccupied tableage should business remain mercifully sluggish for the duration of the evening. Sipping my Stella and lighting up a burro, I reflect that, considered on the basis of its own merits--bland standardised cuntry pub menu, below-average beer selection, geriatric clientele--the Horseshoes really has absolutely nothing going for it, and that, all in all, I would gladly have traded the convenience of the easy commute for the novelty of hanging out somewhere nearer to Tex's vicinity, at some Attleboroughian venue as yet unknown to me. And yet, I thought, it was Tex's idea, not mine, to meet up here. And whence had this idea sprung into his gourdita? Well, presumably from the recollection that this was where we had met up the last time we were both in EA, Christmas before last. And presumably the only reason we'd done so then was that my parents had dragged us here for dinner once before, in the summer of '03. You've got to keep a well-nigh cuntishly vigilant eye on the old bugbear of inertia, I apostrophised myself, otherwise, like something out of the writings of that famous Germanaphone Czech bloke, it's liable to morph into a cuntishly fearsome tiger named Tradition.

Well, fortunately, at about this point, I'm distracted from these reflections--which in another ten mintues would surely have degenerated into a pissy bout of sedentary flaneurie not much different in character from the one of two days ago--by a flash of red, white and blue appearing at the corner of my right eye. I glance up, and see that the white is emanating from a cyclist's helmet, the red from a pair of thigh-hugging, schlong-and-sack-delineating knee breeches, the blue from a puffy ski waistcoat; whilst framed exquisite-corpse-fashion by the whole ludicrously outlandish, Union-Jack-colour-schemed ensemble, is the all-too familiar phiz of my mate Mr Winckelmann, who's now standing at the corner of the opposite end of the table.

'Sorry---I'm---late, Rugger,' he says, through slightly laboured breaths, as he unbuckles the helmet and unzipps the waistcoat, 'only I was--held up for a few minutes--just outside of Attleborough. Bit of a pile-up of cars behind me--I had to pull over and---wait for 'em all to pass before I could go on. Christ, there must have been about 50 of 'em, a veritable cavalcade.'

'You mean you biked all the way down here?' Well, of course, I could see that he had done just that, but the gentlebloke prefers stark avowals of feigned incredulity to candid imputations of barminess, at least for starters.

[Sitting down, hanging jacket on back of chair next to him, laying helmet on seat of selfsame chair, adjusting scrotal package below table level] 'Course I did. It's only fifteen miles. An hour-and-a-quarter, tops. Three-quarters of an hour in good traffic.'

'Well, then, you must be well knackered.'

'Not quite. Pleasantly exhausted are two words for the sensation. About ready for a beer are five others. Are you yourself--about ready for a second?'

'Yeah, or will be soon enough. Stella, please.'

So Tex steps off to the bar and returns presently with a pintful of clear gold in one hand; and a silver-and-white-labelled brown bottle, along with a polyhedral short bloke of a glass, in the other. He nudges my pint over to my side, fills his glass to the rim with about half the contents of his bottle, and says to me: 'Were you planning on eating?'

Well, as a matter of fact, I was; only in getting my first Stella I had neglected to take a look at the menu, which--in a cuntishly incommoding gesture apparently meant to impart an old-school-pub-style aura of off-the-shirtycuffness to their culinary preparations--The Horseshoes sees fit to post above the bar in eraseable chalk. 'Yeah. What are the highlights of the bill of fare tonight?'

'Nothing out of the ordinary. Ploughman's dupper, steak and kidney pie in Guinness gravy, fish and jalapeno poppers.'

With his divulgence of the last item in this culinary catalogue, Tex seemingly unwittingly puts a well-nigh-un-dessicatable damper on my convivial spirits. If fish and poppers are already to be had in this provincial watering hole, I say to myself just then, perhaps I really am, at arse, an unreconstructed hick--a chav even. But I dare not betray a soup's-son of the aforesaid dampening at such an early moment in this here cul-a-cul. And so, with consummate slack-lower-lippedness, I ask Tex, 'What were you thinking of having?'

'Well,' says Tex, lifting his glass to his nose and sniffing the rim with all of the cuntish anticpitory fastidiousness of a wine connoisseur, before taking therefrom the most cuntishly minuscule of first sips, 'I was leaning towards the steak and kidney pie.'

'Leaning towards it or falling into it?' I insist with a brusqueness that, for its own part, is not lacking in cuntishness.

'By now, I'd say, "falling into". And you?'

'Never mind me. I'll go and place the order.' The fact was, I hadn't made up my mind. The ploughman's dupper I could cross off the list straightaway--I had no patience tonight for sawing through a hundred schlong-lengths of cheese and sausage. But as to the steak and kidney pie and the fish 'n' poppers; well, in the choice between those two entrees there hung in the balance a veritable declaration of allegiance (and possibly, even, of independence) that I might never subsequently live down, either in my own okies or in those of my confederate. The prospect of digging into a steak and kidney pie was certainly mouth-watering enough; but I had long ago forsworn all commerce with the Guinness brewery and its imprinted potations--Harp and Smithwick's included. On the other hand, if Jeff Chavworthy's spiel was anything to go on, in tucking into a basket of fish 'n' poppers in the presence of my comrade, I should be laying myself open to a litany of imprecations that might very well exhaust the mine-shaft's-ghost of the entire evening, and leave me feeling in the end like dirt's kid sister to boot. But after a half-minute or two of mental hemming and hawing at the bar, the blokish half of myself eventually remonstrated with, and thereby succeeded in overpowering, the poncey half of myself, thus: Fuck it. You've already uncloseted yourself as a Stella-drinker anyway. How much more harm can a pair of fish cutlets and a butcher's dozen of poppers do? And, anyhow, you like fish 'n' poppers a helluva lot more than you do steak and kidney pie, right? So I resolutely says to the bartender, in a resonant basso, 'One steak and kidney pie and one fish and jalapeno poppers, please,' and return to the table.

'So how's, err...' I begin.

'Susan?'

'Yeah.'

'She's fine. Or, rather, more and less than fine: she's pregnant.'

I do my best to look enthused. 'Congratulations. When's the baby's ETA?'

'Early June.'

'Ah, splendid.' [A right berkish rejoinder, if I do say so myself. As if a May or July delivery have been a whit less splendid.] 'And how's business these days?'

'Never been better. But enough about me, Rugger. How's life in sunny old north London these days?'

As I'm no more of a fan of the catching-up midget-dialogue qua speaker than I am qua listener, in answer to this question I essay what amounts to a twenty-word paraphrase of 'same-old same old' before leading my old discursive pet wiener dog by degrees to a conversational topic I actually have some interest in, and on which I hope Tex might be able to enlighten me. From the London HQ of Ruggerworld it's an easy stroll to the East Anglia branch of the same enterprise, and once arrived at the latter destination, I can proceed fairly briskly to reporting to Tex on certain peculiarities of my brother's speech patens that I've noticed for the first time during the present visit, and to quizzing him as to whether he's noticed anything of the like kind among the youth of Norfolk since re-settling here.

'He's absolutely smitten,' I say, 'with this phrase ride all of the new jet. Are you familiar with it?'

'Passingly.'

'And you know what it means?'

'I haven't the foggiest. I've always assumed it had something to do with being up-date--but up to date on what?'

'Clothes, apparently, according to Sid.'

'You don't say!'

'I do. And here's another one for you: whereas you or I might disparage an indiwidual whose behaviour we disapproved of by means of the epithet of cunt or twat, his preferred tool in the same line of work is pit. As in, Shut your CTM hole or Stick a pair of wadded up knickers in it, you pit. Sometimes it's you shaved pit or you wax-jobbered pit.'

'Yeah, well, I actually heard that one when I was still living in Canada.'

'I must say, it sounds right throwbackish to me; like something you'd hear in a 1950s Yank movie set in a soda-jerkerie. Conjures up the image of a poodle-skirted blokess ejaculating Oh, jeepers, Bradley, this place is the pits!, if you know what I mean.'

'Yes, I do, but I'm afraid you're bound straight for Lowestoft on that particular steam-powered train of thought. The pit in question, you see, isn't some kind of rubbish tip or coal mine--it is, rather, a part of the human anatomy.'

'You don't mean--?'

'That's right, Rugger--it's the armpit. According to the meejia, our microgenerational descendants have acquired a predeliction for what in clinical terms is known as axilar coition; otherwise, in the current youth vernacular, as pit-buggery.'

Never in my worst nightmares would I have guessed that that was what it was all about. 'Christ, Tex, I think I'm going to be sick.' As I utter these words, I hear the barman calling out to us in the background, Soup's up, guys!

'Pretty piss-poor timing on your part, Rugger. Shall I fetch the grub while you quell your queasy innards?'

'No, that's all right. I could do to spread me legs a bit after what you've just told me. You about ready for another...what's it called?'

'Hoegaarden. Yes, thanks.'

So I step up to the bar and claim our plates and ask for another round--along with a tray, so's I can carry the food and the drinks back to the table unassisted. Then, as I'm popping my first popper and Tex is forking up his first dripping gobful of S&KP, he takes up the thread of the conversation from where we dropped it a couple of minutes ago.

'Yes, Rugger, the younguns of your brother's microgenerational niche have a whole way of talking and acting entirely different to the one we came up with.'

'By came up with do you mean invented or inherited?'

[With a dismissive wave of forkful number five or six] 'Same difference.' [Belching through mouthful number four or five] '(Mmm! The meat is good.) And we'll never be able to mend the gap; all we can do is mind it. 25 or 30 years ago, in our parents' day, a difference of a half-a-dozen years wouldn't have counted for much--we'd still be wearing the same clothes, talking the same lingo, listening to the same chunes, as the teenagers. Now that difference is enough to place you, in the younguns' eyes, well to the pasture side of the cattle-guard. You know what they say, 25 is the new 36.'

'Do they now? But don't they also say 36 is the new 28? Seeing which, isn't 25 actually also only the new 28?'

'Beats the carp out of me. Point is, Rugger,' [spooning up the last traces of gravy from his pie-plate (meanwhile, I've got three poppers and a whole piece of fish ahead of me)] 'I'm fully sympathetic to your communications issues with your brother. In fact, you could say I'm more than sympathetic; as I suspect that in your place, I'd find the going even rougher.'

'Whatjyer mean?'

'I mean, has it ever occurred to you that, at your insoo (as their vernacular would phrase it), and especially for one so long in the tooth, you might enjoy a fairly decent rapport with the younger microgeneration after all?'

Here, I happen to notice the BEATING OFF ABOUT BUSH (AS SHRUB-OR- CUNT-COIFF-SYNONYM, NOT AS NAME OF CURRENT U. S. PRESIDENT) indicator flashing on my mind's dashboard bullshit detector. 'And on the basis of what evidence do you draw this rather co-jonic inference?'

'On the evidence of, well, a certain phone conversation...' He trails off and his phiz assumes a solemn aspect that suggests he would at this very moment be saying You'd better sit down for this, only, unfortunately, I'm already sitting. Then he resumes: 'As you probably know, Rugger, it was your mum who answered the phone when I tried to reach you last night--'

'--Goddam her and her cuntish Machievallian maternal machinactions! What did she tell you? Did she tell you about what I'd done to the telly?'

'Yes, she did, but I'm not really concerned with the TV as such.' [I wish someone were concerned with the TV as such. It would make everything a bloody lot more simple.] 'I'm concerned, rather, with the circumstances that surrounded, led up to and actuated your assault on the TV qua Jeff Chavvworthy proxy. You see, Rugger, I'd happened to catch the Chavworthy special myself on that day, and noticed, both in the contents of Chavworthy's checklist and in the guy's general stage presence, certain familiar traits--traits that, to put it bluntly, reminded me of you.'

Christ! (and TBS), this outright cuntfrontational stratagem is much more than I've bargained for. Ordinarily, Tex is a model of tact; hence, I thought I was in the clear of his mercilessly reserved snootiness when the arrival of the poppers failed to elicit the typically Texan toffish sniff or toss of the head, but evidently not; evidently he's been stifling even these cuntishly restrained tokens of disdain all along, and with a well-nigh Arsenalian degree of cuntish forbearance. In the presence of any acquaintance of more recent standing (even, say, Ronnie Livingstone), my fingers would be plucking away at shirt button number four right about now. 'What is this, Tex, some kind of a sodding intervention? I'd have thought that you'd be the last person in the world to take Rugby Weatherby McGyver for a fucking ch-'

[Tex, raising an admonitory forefinger to his O-iform lips]: '-ch-ch-ch-shhh! Remember Item No. 154 on the Chavworthy Checklist. And, as a matter of fact, the answer to each question is No, this isn't an intervention, and No, I don't think you're a chav. I have, however, I confess, remarked over the past few years certain chavemes in your social habitus that I believe could be extirpated therefrom at a negligible psychic cost--'

'--but surely, Tex, we're just haggling over semantics here. Chavemes, chavvism, what's the difference?'

'A very substantial one, to my mind. You see, while from a loosely heuristic point of view I consider Mr Chavworthy's checklist absolutely indispensable, from a strictly philosophical point of view he and I are very much at loggerheads; for I, unlike him, do not regard chavism as a spiritual kinda fing; which is to say that I regard it at bottom as a matter of behaviour rather than of worldview.'

'You mean that, in contrast to him, you really do think that clothes make the chav?'

'Clothes, yes; but not merely clothes: what one elects to eat, drink, read, listen or otherwise pay atention to--in short, a whole range of lifestyle choices--all contribute to the social constitution of a chav. It therefore follows that by voluntarily declining these choices individually or in the aggregate, one may manage to free oneself either gradually or at one go--and ulimately once and for all--from the opprobrious imputation of chavdom.'

'So your advice to me, in short, is to lay off the fish 'n' poppers?'

'Well, yes, for starters (and, a fortiori, for the main course). But what you really should be aiming to do--and I know you're not going to want to hear this--is find yourself a new most-favoured beer brand.'

'Cor, are you barmy, Tex? Give up my old faithful RW&G? You might as well tell me to trade in my bollocks for a pair of nuticles.'

A shadow or soup's-son of a spasm of a grimace passes over his phiz, as though I've inadvertently reminded him of something cuntishly unsettling but off-topic. But it passes quickly. 'This is all up to you, Rugger. No one can make you give up Stella. Consider this, though. Your fish'n'popper addiction is a strictly private matter between you and your barman or server. I'm sitting less than a metre away from you, and yet, if I didn't know better, I'd be hard pressed to say whether those poppers on your plate were fried jalapenos or fried escargot. Whereas it's entirely possible that that septegenarian bloke sitting way over there in the corner of the room knows that the beer in your pint glass is Stella, supposing he saw the barman filling your glass from the tap. And at off-licences and parties, of course, the evidence is even harder to conceal. What with the company-logo-bearing bottle or tin being on your person at all times, you're practically a walking Stella-Artois billboard.'

'I don't buy it. I mean, I buy the Stella-billboarding bit but not the chav-indexing bit. What does this Chavworthy wanker know anyway?'

[Tex, Poker-faced]: 'I see. Well, if you're looking for a third opinion...' He unzips the nearer of the two ski-waistcoat pockets, and from it extracts a sheet of paper, which he hands to me across the table. I take a gander at the paper: it's a full-colour computer print-out of what at first glance appears to be a Monopoly board; and at first-and-a-half glance reveals itself to be some kind of Monopoly parody styling itself Chavopoly (the substitute name is spelt out in the familiar board-bisecting diagonal capitals; and at the centre of the board, in place of the harriedly good-natured moustachio'd and top-hatted figure of Mr Moneybags, there's a headshot of a stroppy Burbury-capped young bloke who could easily earn a few quid as my brother's stunt double [if there were any call for such work] And disposed at every rectangle round the edge, in place of the usual property-names and other such real-proprietarial verbiage, I see such bits of chav-sniping verbiage as HANG AROUND NEWSAGENTS. TRY TO SNOG FAT BIRD and WHITE LIGHTNING. PUNCH YOUR GIRLFRIEND).

'These Chavopoly games are selling like hotcakes this holiday season' Tex parenthesises as I study the sheet. 'I couldn't resist picking up one myself, for my nephew Kyle, just to take a bit of piss out of him. Now, if you'll just read the text on the fourth rectangle on the left on the bottom row--the light blue one--you'll see what I'm getting at.'

Aforesaid text reads, jaw-drop-inducingly enough, Down the pub for a pint or two of Stella and a fight. As I take in these words, I'm utterly demoralised. I feel like some sort of grimy, burlap-smocked peasant who's just been laughed or tomatoe'd out of a hoity-toity big-city restaurant for asking the head waiter whereabouts he could find a decent cow or sheep to shag. 'All right,' I say, handing the paper back to Tex. 'You win. Perhaps it is time for a potational upgrade. Any suggestions?'

'Well, yes, plenty of them--and one of them's ready to mouth.' He empties the remainder of his silver-and-white bottle into his glass, and hands the latter over to me. 'Try it. Drink the lot of it, if you like.'

I take a tentative first sip, and find the taste not unpleasing. 'Bracingly bitter,' I report. I take a bolder, more voluminous, second sip, this time letting the beer cascade slowly across my palate before swallowing. 'Bracingly bitter,' I say again, 'but with a smooth and slightly fruity finish.'

'Now that,' Tex triumphantly asserts, 'is what I'd call a respectable mid-priced continental import.'

'I'll say. What's it called again?'

'Hoegaarden.'

'Hoegaarden,' I repeat, ruminating aloud, 'Hoe-garden, a garden of whores, i.e., a brothel. Not sure I much care for the name. But I dare say the taste will grow on me. How much does a bottle of this here Whore-Garden set a bloke back by?'

'By roughly 75p more than a pint of Stella, and the difference is worth every penny.'

Thereupon I start mentally tabulating the balance sheet of a Stella-to-Hoegarden switchover: Let's see...75p per bottle, at 20 bottles a week--let's make that 25, so as to account for the bottle-to-pint differential--equals an extra 15 pounds plus...3 pounds 25....'

But my calculations are rudely interrupted by the ring-tone of Tex's mobile, sounding the opening bars of 'Lillabullero' with muffled monophony from the right pocket of his waistcoat.

'Excuse me, Rugger,' he says, reaching over, extracting the phone and placing it against an ear. I can tell straightaway, by the cuntishly deferential posture he immediately adopts, that the caller is none other than Mrs Winckelmann-Stuckenschmidt; and that, for some as-yet-inscrutable reason, Tex has just been booked a single room in the connubial doghouse. Decorum in such sitches is decidely dodgy: on the one, more reflexive, hand, you don't feel you have the right to eavesdrop; on the other, more reflective, one, you feel you owe it to yourself to do just that, in order to avenge yourself against the cuntish intrusion precipitated by the interruption of your own convo with the phonee. More often than not, as in this case, the Spirit of Happy Indifference lends a helpful mediating hand between the two extremes; such that, by the midpoint of your interlocutor's conversation with the interloper, you've long since retreated gratefully back into your own private thoughtworld. Such that, by the time Tex is re-secreting the phone, I've long since resumed and am in fact am drawing to a final tally my beer upgrade calculations as follows: That's 126 plus 13 pounds, equals 139 pounds per annum. I think I can swing that. And just as the full stop is hitting the right end of the t in that, Tex announces, with unwittingly perfect timing:

'Sorry-squared, Rugger. Bit of a cock-up on the home front. I'm afraid I'll have to be heading back.'

'Oh, come on now, Tex,' I retort even as the dictionary-definition-header lost cause, flanked in the margins by a snap of the two of us sittng there, pops into my mental field of vision. 'We've been here, what, maybe an hour and a half. Surely after a gap of two years you owe me more so-called face time than that. Besides,' I suddenly think to add, with cuntish archness, 'you could always plead heavy traffic if Susan gave you so much as a turdlet of shite about the delay.'

'No, I'm afraid I couldn't, Rugger,' says Tex, his phiz immejiately assuming a more Haggard aspect than those of H. Rider and Merle combined. 'I don't know how closely you were paying attention just now [If he only knew how cunt-hair-ishly close to fuck all closely the truth actually was!], but I did happen to let slip to Susan that you'd driven here. [Chief Inspector Noseycunt, thine alias is Woman!] By which I meantersay, or rather, ask...er, beg...'

'...me for a ride back to Attleborough. Yes, yes, of course, I understand, and would be more than happy to oblige.' My tones, in acquiescing to this supplication, are within a micro-hertz of the those of the Good Old Samaritan. My actual motives for so doing are, of course, hardly worthy of a bloke aspiring to canonisation. I'm quite looking forward, you see, to watching Tex sweat, shiver and squirm for another 20-odd minutes under the prospective slings and arrows of the old shawl and bane. An involuntarily celibate bloke such as myself isn't often afforded opportunities such as this--opportunities, that is, of treating his bachelorly Schadenfreudal rooster a proper strutting stroll round the barnyard. As Tex is settling the bill, I bask in the prolepctic glow of him asking me sheepishly, halfway up the road, So, what are you going to do for the rest of the night? and me replying, bullishly, I dunno. Maybe I'll try to spend some quality time with Sidney. We'll drink some pints, rustle up some whores...who knows? Maybe I'll even see about getting my axilar-sexual cherry popped. Unfortunately, my rooster is destined to remain cooped. You see, maybe two minutes into the trip, before I've even fully retraced my route back to Diss, there's another burst of mobilephonic Lillabullerage, and Tex is obliged to take another call from Suse. This time round, the convo is brief enough that I take in the whole Texside part of it before I've made up my mind whether or not I want to.

'Hello.' Tex says. '...So you've managed to work it out on your own?...Ah, splendid. I'm really proud of you...So you don't need me back there just yet?...Right, well, just give me a ring in an hour if you haven't heard from me by then. Love you. Bye.

Having signed off, he addresses me thus: 'Well, Rugger, it appears we've been given the go-ahead to prolong our little frolic an extra hour or so. Are you up for it?'

'Yeah, sure, of course.' [In fact, I gots to admit I'm at best semi-tumescent about it, without quite knowing why.]

'Wahsome. We could, of course, go back to Horseshoes, although I must say I've about had my fill of it for one night.'

'Ma Aussie. And I'm not too keen on, say, the Two Brewers either. [The 2Bs being my watering hole of first resort in Diss proper.] What do you say to our hitting your local up in Attleborough?'

'Well, Rugger, I haven't really got a local per se...'

'Christ, you must know of at least a couple of pubs in your neck of the woods.'

'Yes, but by name and reputation only, nothing firsthand.'

'Well, then, it's high time that first hand of yours got a pint-hefting workout. I've had it up to my teeth with Sufnorfolk, and I'm primed for some Sufcentralnorfolkian action.'

'Fine with me, although I doubt it'll make for much of a change of scene. Personally, I think Diss compares quite favourably with Attleborough--and with Sudbury, too, for that matter. Are you really having such a miserable time here?' From the toffish and well-nigh Joan-Greenwoodian lilt in his voice as it raises its skirts to step over the word really, I can tell that the last vestiges of connubial panic have evaporated, and that he's about to re-mount the podium and re-don his lecturer's mortarboard.

'In all candour, yes,' I answer him, knowing that he'll eventually force me to admit as much anyway. 'I can't recall three consecutive days of such concentrated shitiness in all my natural. And I can't imagine what ever possessed me to squander a whole week of my precious leave time on this place.'

'Ah, but that'll never do for an answer, Rugger. Because a guy can have a perfectly shitty time just about anywhere, if he's of a mind not to do otherwise. The question is, can you in all candour say you would necessarily have spent the same four days less shittily anywhere else--say, back in London?'

[Damn him and his cuntish Socratic shenanigans!] 'Well, er, no...not necessarily...'

'To cut to the chase, I'd be interested to know, if there's nothing that attracts you to East Anglia, what it is in London that's holding you down there.' (As cuntishly intrusive as I find this whole line of questioning to be, I gots to admit that the very fact that Tex is capable of pursuing it attests to the transparency of our friendship. Having reached the London-bound fork in the road, a bloke who knew me less well would have said to himself, 'Ah well, London. It's the capital, dontcherknow,' and headed back home for lunch. But Tex knows every bit as much as the reader does how little I care for the pomp and pageantry of capital-ism.)

'Well, er...'

'...and if the answer is within spitting distance of Fannie Adams, I'd be even more interested to know whether you've ever given any thought to moving back to EA.'

The truth is that, like Mr Sedule on the matter of 24-hour licences, I've thought about it for the duration of a single thumb-and-forefinger fillip, and on equally solid, equally incontestable grounds. The trouble is that in Tex's okies these grounds are bound to appear as boggy and foggy as those of The Norfolk Broads in midsummer. To a bloke so quixotically starry-okied as to believe it's actually possible to do what you love for a living, my purely inertia-driven argument for staying on at Proctologitex will carry no momentum; ditto for my case for the Ape vis-a-vis a bloke who's never known the charms of a well-appointed local, with its ever-dependable-yet-never-static assortment of familiar faces and arses. So I try to postpone essaying an answer to his question by ever-so-lamely turning the tables on him. I say:

'Well, what about you? You've lived in the big city--well, a biggish city, Toronto--and you gave up your metropolitan amenities to settle in Attleborough. What was it about East Anglia that you absolutely couldn't do without in Ontario?'

'I dunno, Rugger. You know, when I was over there--and by there, I mean not just Canada but the States as well--I saw six of the seven wonders of the modern world: the CN Tower, Niagara Falls, the Empire State Building, the New Jersey Turnpike...the...erm...Varsity Hamburgeria in Atlanta....er....hem...the South of the Border Fireworks and Petrol Emporium...and somehow none of them could hold a candle to the city centre of Norwich, or the medieval ruins of Dunwich, or a Lowestoft sunrise or a promenade down Great Yarmouth High Street. There's something about East Anglia that has never been surpassed on this island, or, I suspect, in any other corner of the western world. I mean, we really lucked out here; we got all the mod cons of industrial civilisation--electricity, abundant food supply, and none of the drawbacks--the smokestacks, the supermotorways, the crappy-looking suburban new towns, et cetera. In four words, this is God's country.'

He falls silent for maybe half a minute, during which interval we approach, then overtake, a road sign that reads ATTLEBOROUGH 2.

'Rugger, I know it's a bit ungentlemanly, a bit low-rent, to pry into another bloke's financial affairs, but how much per month is your London flat setting you back by?' Christ, he certainly wasted no time in bringing it all back to me. Serves me right, though, for not filling in that patch of dead air.

'Technically, Tex,' I rejoin with prideful anorakism, 'it's a maisonette--a split-story unit--not a flat.'

'Oh, for crying out loud, it's a one-bedroom dwelling space, right?'

'Well, yeah.'

'Which is a flat as far as I'm concerned. So, how much...?'

'950.' (Disclosure: next month it rises to a full grand.)

'Crikey! Round these parts you could find a two-bedroom for a hundred less. And if--as I quite understand you might be--you're put off by the thought of living with your folks while you're looking for a place of your own, Susan and I have an extra room that we'd be willing to let to you for 400 a month.' (As if the thought of living with a pregnant woman and a henpecked dad-to-be should be any less off-putting.)

'And when you say we, you mean--'

'I mean it in the non-royal sense. I've already proposed the idea to Susan and she's thinks it splendid.' [Curses!] She's quite keen to meet you, in fact. Of course, as the room will eventually go to the baby, this would be a strictly temporary arrangement.'

'Well, I'm certainly touched by the offer, Tex, but the fact is, even coming up with the 800-odd pounds for the room is going to be a rather dodgy prospect, so long as I don't have a job lined up in the area.'

'You can have it on credit if you like. Although, really, Rugger, I doubt a man with your connections will have much trouble finding work round here.'

'Connections?'

'Yes, connections--to the Greater Norwich Old Boy's Accountancy Network.' (Disclosure No. 2: Like me, my Dad is an accountant. And so was his father before him. [And his father's father before him? Circus contortionist.])

At this point, if my hands weren't occupied with the steerage, I'd be throwing them up into the air and ejaculating Ayayayay! in inarticulable exasperation. 'I still don't understand what the motivation for moving back here would be. Christ, who do I know here, apart from you and Mum and Dad and Sid? How am I supposed to fritter away my free time here--by playing Cluedo, or watching Sex and the City reruns, with you and Susan?'

'No,' he replies, with just a soup's-son of alkaline stroppiness. 'Have you ever considered, Rugger, that I might have some semblance of a social life in spite of the fact that I haven't committed to memory the Lonely Pub-Crawler's Guide to Norfolk from cover to cover? You do know what a book group is, don't you?'

'Course I do,' I say (forbearing to add, with exemplary uncuntishness, Just because I like to get out for a pint every now and then doesn't mean I've lost my command of the fucking alphabet). 'It's when you get together every so often with an assortment of blokes and blokesses for a chinwag about a certain book, and at the end of the meeting someone proposes a title for the next one.'

'Exactly. Well, Susan and I have belonged to one for about two months now(mind you bear to the left up ahead, by the way; the road forking off to the right looks like a continuation of this one, but it isn't), and through it--this book club--so far, we've easily made a dozen new friends in the area. I daresay you'd find your niche amongst some subset of the group, if you cared to tag along. And the books themselves are, of course, endlessly stimulating. Two weeks ago, we read Dude, Where's My Country?; last week, The Da Vinci Code; and next week it's on to The World Is Flat.'

Christ! Cluedo a trois with the Winckelmanns seemed like a piss-up at the Ape by comparison with that lot. 'Sounds...fascinating. Where do I go from here?'

'Well, Rugger, that's up to you. I've said my peace on the--'

'No, I mean, where do I drive to next?' (At the moment, we're stalled at a railway signal, waiting for the last cars of a passenger train to clear the intersection.)

'Oh. Keep going straight till you get to the first big intersection, then hang a left. That'll carry us to the High Street, and to within a couple of doors of the Snooker Club. Barring a couple of borderline tearooms, that's really the only pubbesque place I've even heard of in Attleborough.'

Whilst I'm affecting to be completely absorbed in following the last bits of navigationage, I set about framing a suitably pissy riposte to Tex's full litany of prospective Ruggerian lifestyle changes, a rejoinder capable of reducing to rubble his whole meticulously fortified Alamo, so to speak, in a cuntishly merciless atom-bomb drop; for, you see, I have by this point long since revoked Tex's stewardship of Mr Doubt's government benefit cheque--the exact moment of the revocation having elapsed, probably, as he was effectively outing himself as a moonlighting member at large of the East Anglia Board of Tourism a couple of miles back up the road. So after I've parked the Mazda on the High Street, within spitting distance of the sign of the Snooker Club--a drinkery [spoiler warning!] whose potations I have yet to sample--and disengaged the engine, I turn to Tex, and let fly at him a classic instance of McGyver Signature Rhetorical Ploy #47: The Calculated Non-Sequitur:

'You know, Tex, there is...Arsenal.'

Tex [B-mused as Ed Wood or Roger Corman]: 'The football club?'

'No, the second word in the title of Morrissey's third solo effort. Of course I mean the football club.'

'Well, in that case, I'm in full agreement with you. There is Arsenal. Arsenal, like shit, happens.'

'Oh, so you're one of us after all, are you? I'd never have guessed it.'

'One of you? You who?'

Me [triumphantly high-fiving my inner goat-poacher]: 'One of us Arsenal-bashers. You know, Tex, if you're even half as down on the Gunners as I am, you really ought to consider relocating to London.'

Tex [rolling his okies]: 'Oh, I see what this is all about. You're back on your anti-Arsenal kick again, aren't you?'

'Not back on it, Tex: still on it.'

'Whatever. And you mean to say that for an anti-afficianado of Arsenal, there's no place like London.'

'You got it.'

'I see. Have you heard of this amazing invention known as the wireless, patented more than a century ago by this Italian bloke name of Marconi; or of this even-yet-more amazing invention known as television, patented round 80 years ago by this Scots chap name of Baird--'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I catch you. But can you imagine what it's like, Tex, to pound the pavement in the vicinity of Highbury, confronted at every turn by 20-stone blokes in red number shirts, and think to yourself, If they only knew what I thought of them, and of that cuntish club whose colours they're sporting...well, the like kind of so-called adrenaline rush is simply not to be had in these parts.'

'Well, Rugger,' he says, clearly apostrophising his second wheel--i.e., presumably, his wife--Take a gander, darling, at this here exemplary specimen of Homo sapiens barmiosus, 'I think it's high time you channelled some of that negative fan-energy of yours into some more positive outlet. We do have a team here in Norfolk, the Canaries. Oh, I know they're not quite premier-league material these days--'

'Oh, fuck the Canaries, Tex. Fuck them in their pinprick-sized, triple-duty piss-poo-and-egg chutes. Fuck the Norf and the Suf of East Anglia. And...fuck you, Tex! If the only alternative to chavdom is being a bollocksless metrosexual like yourself, then sign me up for a lifetime supply of Burbury caps. As for EA, I'd rather spend the next four days at my London maisonette, hoovering out my navel, than suffer through another minute of your Bono-esque eulogizing of this pathetic grab-bag of provincial shitholes. Sarah Slother was right about Norfolk...'

'...Sarah Slother? Who's that?'

'Oh, never mind. Collect your bike, and go.' I electro-unlock the front and back side passenger doors.

'But, Rugger, we've easily got another half-hour ahead of us. Why not have a pint, calm your nerves--'

'No, my mind's made up. I'm heading back to Diss toot sweet, and tomorrow, back to London. Get your hoss outta my hoss, and git!'

Once he sees I mean business, he climbs out, opens the back door, and starts to pull the disassembled bike, one piece at a time, out from the back seat--only not quite fast enough for my liking.

'I said git and I meant it! Git awn outta here, you git!'

No sooner has the second bike tyre cleared the foot-guard, than I rev up the engine and pull out on to the street, without even giving him time to close the back door, let alone say 'WTFYFC'. It was a pity to lose such a first-rate third wheel--I mean Tex, not the bike--but on the whole I don't regret what I did, given the circumstances. I mean, that's a risk a bloke always takes when he meets up with one of his mates who he hasn't seen for a stretch, that his immago of the other bloke as an all-round righteous jude will be supplanted by a new one sporting the phiz of an all-round cuntish cunt.

Next morning, I'm up well before the parting of Bourgie Dawn's arse-cheeks, packing my things--throwing my dirty clothes (including the old sailor's pullover) into a plastic shopper's carrier, and my Christmas takings into my suitcase. On catching sight of a still-clean string vest lying folded in the lower jaw of the latter, I can't help saying to myself, Tut-tut: two days' worth of costumery gone to waste! Round about seven, I'm ready to go, and step into the front room with my luggage. My Escape Plan A involves leaving a note on the fridge, but as I happen to discover Mum and Dad already up and breakfasting in the dining room, , I'm obliged to fall back on Plan B, which involves the oral delivery of my pre-fabbed excuse: 'Sorry, Mum, Dad, but I'm afraid I've got to head back to London--actually, to Hertfordshire. I got a call late last night from work. They need me there today. Seems there was an explosion down at the plant. Pools of flaming latex and petroleum jelly as far as the eye could see, they told me. Horrible.'

'But you don't work at the plant,' Dad quite reasonably demurs.

'Er, well I do now, for the time being. They need, er, reinforcements, to cover for the injured blokes.'

'I hope,' Mum says, rising from the table and wrapping an arm round my shoulders, 'this hasn't got anything to do with us.'

'What do you mean? What could you two possibly have against Proctologitex?' My thickness knows no limits at times, particularly at the single-diggited AM ones. 'Oh, I see what you mean. Er, no, of course it hasn't. I'm telling you the honest to goodness truth.'

'Because if there's one thought about us you should take away with you, it's that we both love you very much, even if you are a sexually-diverse chav.'

'Come now, Martha!' Dad remonstrates, sternly though not stroppily, 'Surely this is no time to be opening those two cans of worms.'

'Oh, what do you know about timing when it comes to emotional issues, you insensitive clod!' Mum screams, disengaging her arm and turning to Dad. 'All you care about is your Gilbert and Sullivan records...and that Trippet-Jones woman!'

'Oy, vey!' Dad exclaims, rolling his okies. 'I can't believe what I'm hearing.'

'Don't you try to wriggle out of this, mister. I saw you talking to her yesterday morning.'

'Yes, for the ninth or tenth time in as many months. And for Christ's sake, we were standing five feet apart.'

'All the better for concealing your affair with her. I'm warning you--if I catch you speaking to her one more time, we're through. I'll pack my bags and move in with Aunt Agatha.'

I start thinking this is probably my last chance to make a speedy exit. Mind you, I really do want to rally to Dad's defence, but that would involve getting myself dragged right back down deeper than ever into the very mire that I have already resolved to escape from. So, grabbing hold of a bag in each hand, I step silently from the dining room, through the front room and out the front door.

Barring the New Year's party at the Ape, my navel-hoover-centric prognostications of the night of the 26th proved chillingly prescient. If I wanted to, I could devote a whole nother post to the New Year turnover itself, whose highlights included a near-shirtfest with Manish Shah, occasioned by a 12-pint-induced bout of pulling on his girl; and a 2 p.m. pigeon-peck-induced, half-naked solo reveille on a pavement in Hendon on New Year's Day. But all told, I think I've had just about enough of '05, and I think it best to put a full stop on my reminiscences of that terrible year with the final full stop of this very paragraph. To sum up belatedly the end-of-the-year SOA chez Rugger, as of this 12th of January, 2006: At home, all is well, with no further damage to the window since Halloween night. At work, I continue to plod along in a spirit of very nearly tolerable stroppiness. Arsenal have fallen to fifth place in the Premiership table; and I find that, accounting for outstanding debts, I am worth -₤3000. For all of which Stella and/or Hoegaarden be praised.