Had Meself a Shi(r)ty Little Xmas

Well, if you lot thought my aspirations to truth in advertising had been undermined by last month's account of my little overnight junket in Hertfordshire, you ain't seen nuffink yet: just wait till you've sunk your okies a few layers of paragraphage into this here post. I meantersay, for the benefit of the thicker amongst you, that of late in these pages there has irrupted a kind of fissure between their purported provenance--as indicated by the name of the blog, The Angry Londoner--and the actual setting of the events recounted therein; and that this selfsame fissure is only going to widen into a veritable gulf with the publication of my next deluge of typeage. But I can't say as I'm entirely to blame for this admittedly regrettable SOA; for, if it were up to me, my movements (of the non-bowel variety, natch) over the course of an entire year would trace a kind of irregular trapezoid whose four vertices would comprise, respectively, the maisonette, the Ape, Sainsbury's and Stora Market (my de-facto local off-licence)--barring, of course, the single tangential spike marking my more recent semi-weekly peregrinations up to Redford's (the all-night joint I mentioned in my last post). Christ, if I'd had my druthers, by now I'd have worn a fucking trapezoidal trench clear on through to the mantle of the earth with my pavement-pounding between and amongst those four points. Naturally, had my stomping grounds been so mercifully circumscribed on the day I first logged into Blogspot, the present weblog would never have been entitled The Angry Londoner at all; it would have borne, rather, the handle The Placid Barnetian, or some other such sober-K expressive of my complacent suburban parochiality. Regrettably, from the outset, I have been obliged to make the occasional 4-A into the redbrick-and-dog-turd jungle that is inner London; and, perhaps even more regrettably, in order to shift my arse-cheeks for myself--in order to compete, let alone go for the bronze, in the great rat's-arse-Olympiad of global capitalism--I have been obliged, five days in every seven, to cross the county line into Hertfordshire, and thence on to Potters Bar and the offices of my employer, Proctologitex, Ltd. Most regrettably of all, perhaps, I retain ties of consanguinity and grudging affection that oblige me to venture no less occasionally even further afield of McGyverworld HQ, sc. to that quadrant of the English sub-kingdom semi-officially known since pre-Norman times as East Anglia. And it is to an account of my latest sojourn in that region that the best part of this very post--and probably the next one as well--shall be devoted. For, as I have already once sworn to all and sundry who might happen upon the urldom of the Angry Londoner, I shall record herein no more--and, I would now add, no less--than I would like to remember; and this latest and by no means shortest of my stints in EA was nothing if not memorable.

And so, to strike a pithy and pissy compromise between connecting the dots for the benefit of my thick-though-loyal readers and lithograping the entire fucking picture in the minutest detail for the benefit of the thick-and-thin newcomers: the reason I submitted to this my most recent bout of trippage to East Anglia--as to all preceding thitherward bouts--was that it was there that I was born, and that it is there, in the ancient market town of Diss, that my parents still reside, in the very same semi-stuccoed bungalow, in fact, in which I resided in tandem with them (together with, eventually, my little brother) from the day of my deliverance from the neo-natal ward of NNUH, in the regional capital of Norwich, 40 kilometeres to the north, to the day, 20 years later, on which I flew from the familial coop--so far for good--and alighted at my university-dormer's nest back up in my birth-city. Now, during the first three-quarters of my two-year stint as a full-time student and resident of UEA, at my parents' behest, I tended to pop back down to Diss quite frequently; roughly at every other weekend. And what with campus life at East Anglia being, on the whole, of a temperature and tempo sufficiently tepid and sluggish to make dishwater fear for the renewal of its royal charter of Official Metaphorical Vehicle of Dullness, I bore the burden of these semi-monthly visits to the genitors rather lightly; they were like a gentle zephyr blowing through the defoliated treetops of my virtually non-existent personal life. Even during my last term, when I was trying desperately to make up for lost time, and to cram four years' worth of bird-pulling and pint-guzzling into four months (with, I might add, staggeringly pathetic results); and when I made a grand total of, I think, three trips home, I'm pretty sure I still managed to acquit myself of the merest soup's son of filial impiety courtesy of my weekly lunches with my dad--who worked and still works at the University--at the student union. But then, a scant two months after graduation, came my big move to London. [Cut a la Alexander Payne to a cheekily anachronistic montage of grainy 1960s newsreel footage depicting caravans of Routemaster buses rounding Nelson's Column at Trafalgar Square, platoons of perky-titted dolly birds in jumpers, minis, and knee-high boots promenading alongside the shop-fronts of Carnaby Street, etc.] Ah, London! Home of a myriad-cubed distractions fit to blind the fenokies and sanitise the wallet of a guileless young buck fresh from the provinces. The London Eye! The Tate! The strip clubs of Piccadilly! The Dim $$$$UM-erias of Chinatown! The fucking congestion charge of the whole fucking city centre! And last, but certifuckingfiably not least, FUCKING KEN LIVINGSTONE!!!!!!!!! ['Skewed me while I recompose my shirtyfront.] Truth be told, for all-my meritorious inner-London-bashing, I did rather enjoy myself during that first year of my residence in the Capital, much to the detriment of my Norfolk-nostalgia, and of any impetus to return to my home burglet; especially as in those days I lived much closer to the centre than I do now. And yet, London-besotted as I was, I still managed to make something like five trips to Norfolk during the course of that first year. Not a bad showing, that, all things considered, Mum and Dad must have thought come New Year’s Eve. It was only afterwards, upon my relocation from Whitechapel to the decidedly less hubbubious precincts of Woodside Park, that the first symptoms of Filial Snubbage Syndrome became manifest in the Ruggerian organism. Indeed, I put off going back to Diss a full six months after my move to Woodside; and I don't mind telling you the fart’s-ghost of that first post-Woodside return trip was none too friendly; for, in addition to being cuntishly fatiguing, like those of all the preceding trips, it was additionally and no less cuntishly unsettling or disturbing. A mite paradoxical, innit, this alienation from home setting in only after I'd mounted a horse (i.e., Woodside/Barnet) that has been known occasionally to overtake Dishwater and UEA Student Life in the Kentucky Derby of Dullness? Well, don’t you worry, Mr Pair O’ Dox, you’re in capable hands; I’ll see your first name changed to Orth by the end of the next sentence but one. I have this theory, you see--it's less of a theory, really, than a speculative premise--that the n**gardly Scots demiurge who rules this tube-station-bog of a cosmos of ours, to no apparent end other than the flexing of his tartan-swathed cunt-muscles, has decreed that a bloke mustn't be allowed to feel at home in two places at once. He may have spent 149,999 of the preceding 150,000 hours of his life in one place, but all that counts for naught in point of homeiness once he's passed the 500-hour mark as a resident of some other place; no sooner has he arranged the furnishings of his bachelor's maisonette in the second locale--no sooner has he stocked his fridge with Stella, shelved and alphabetised his porn video collection and set up his Thierry Henry punching doll in a corner of the front room, than he starts to feel himself ill at ease anywher other than within a 30-mile radius of his by-then-no-longer-new domicile. During that first year in London, you see, when I was living in Whitechapel, swotting for my accountancy certification and working part-time at the Beeb, I knew for a dead cert that the life I was leading was an altogether transient one; consequently, the McGyver ranch at Diss remained my de facto home base, and it was always still with a palpable sense of relief, of homecoming, that I scraped off the soles of my galoshes on to its front steps. But once I was truly and wholly settled in Woodside Park; once I’d ferreted (or stoated?) out the Ape as a weekend and occasional weekend hangout, and attained virtual fluency in my Ayhern button-pushing typewriter exercise up in Potters Bar, I began to conceive of the life I was now leading there as a permanent one; and it was towards that corner of London, specifically to the front steps of the maisonette on Woodside Avenue, that the mud on my galoshes-soles began gravitating. All I really meantersay, in short, is that, in contradiction of received opinion on the subject (which, I have no doubt, is being tirelessly iterated at this very moment, in every corner of the Anglo-blogo-sphere), it’s not the positive elements of these holiday-season trips—the reversion to parent-child role-playing, the sleeping in your old room with your 15-year-old model aeroplane collection to hand on the chest of drawers next to the bed, etc.—but rather the negative elements thereof—the not being able to choose between CTM and vindaloo at dinnertime, the not being able to nip down to the pub for a pint at eight o’clock—that really do you in. Are you paying attention, BTFW?

'Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z...eh, what? [snort, yelch] Yes, of course. Go on with this... fascinating disquisition...'

Don't mind if I do. Actually, I'm pretty much through with the Diss-quizzatory bit (and ready to launch into a fresh yarn-spinning bit); apart from the little bridge passage comprised by the second part of this sentence: the upshot of the creeping un-Heimlich-kite of Diss that set in after my move to North London was that my return trips became ever-more-widely spaced, such that, indeed, the first 11-and-a-half months of last calendar year, 2005, elapsed without my paying my parents a single visit; and that thus, when the so-called holiday season rolled round, I felt I ought to try to mend the gap by making an unprecedented weeklong do of my annual Christmas sojourn. And the only way of pulling off this scheme in tandem with my other pet scheme of ringing in the New Year at the Ape (New Year's Eve being the one night of the year when Mr Sedule dares to keep the joint open after 11 for the benefit of the general puntility) was to haul my luggage into PB in the boot of the Mazda on the morning of Friday 23rd and leave for Norfolk directly after work, and, coincidentally, the office Christmas party. This whole pre-trip prepping routine was a cuntishly fatiguing decathalon, I don't mind telling you. There's nothing like fishing in the wash basket at 2 a.m. like some sodding sartorial Noah--i.e., in search of exactly seven of every kind of garment [seven overshirts, seven pairs of socks, seven string vests, etc.]--to give a bloke a right chronic case of the strops; especially knowing as he does that he's got to be up a mere four hours later, at the arse-crack of bourgie dawn. E-fucking-squared-specially knowing moreover as he does that he'll be spending the better part of the day ahead rubbing besotted arse-cheeks with the devil's cunt-brigade comprised by his assembled coworkers.

To change my forename to that of the late Mr Sinatra, though, the party wasn't half as awful as it might have been. In the first place, little Brianna Ayhern was mercifully absent, owing, her father said, to her attendance at a kick-boxing lesson [!], and so I escaped the scene with my co-jones unbruised. (With cuntishly forced magnanimity, he condescended to accept in her stead that canister of Toxic Waste Balls I'd salvaged from my front-window shards on Halloween night.)

On the debit side of the balance sheet, though, as I was driving, I couldn't really partake of the bracingly potent house punch beyond the first two glasses, and you really do need to be pissed to stomach and humour the lower-primatial attempts at wit of the Poctologitex rank and file. More materially, I did not manage to escape the scene with my gob or phiz unsullied by the lipstick of Winnie Wilkins, who, at a particularly inebriate late moment in the proceedings, dragged me under the mistletoe and subjected me, from the top of my forehead to the tip of my chinny-chin-chin to a succession of wet, stale, Charley-perfume-permeated smooches. I'll wager that it was only by dint of reaching behind her shoulders and flinging off her scarlet-and-white-pom-pommed Santa's helper's variant of her plum tam-o'-shanter (which she thereupon scampered away to retrieve), that I eluded a fate worse than death at her hands--or, rather, cunt. Naturally, if I'd tried forcing anything of the kind on, say, Sarah Slother, I'd have been given my walking papers right then and there.

Oh yeah, speaking of old SS, it was to her account that the other entry on the credit side of the party's balance sheet should be charged. You see, about an hour before the WW incident, I managed to get in a dig at her that, I flatter myself, should count at least as a corner against the goal I gave up in not getting a dig in at her old man a month earlier. She had just passed within a cunt-hair's breadth of my shoulder en route to the Swedish meatball tray, apparently utterly oblivious of my presence (and by that apparent-ness dutifully proffering Serve No. 225 of our three-month-old tennis match of mutual snubbage), when I suddenly thought to call out to her, 'Hey, Sarah, that's a nice snap of you on your dad's desk.'

She turns round and asks me, 'What's that?' The ball has just hit the net and the score is now Rugger 1, Sarah Love. I can tell from the sheer uninventiveness of her disyllabic riposte that I've caught her certifiably off-guard. And, heartened by a not-quite-cuntish sense of exaltation, I continue:

'When was it taken? In 99? No, scratch that--I'd say in '96 at the latest, to judge by those oversized specs you're wearing in it.'

For an instant or two longer, in virtue of her wide-eyed muteness, she betrays her ongoing enthrallment to the Tomcat Moloch Paranoia (as Mrs A-J of CHABid might put it). But then the mental gears of rationalisation start engaging themselves; she starts saying to herself (so I conjecture), 'What could a gormless rube like Rugby McGyver know of my father's metier, let alone of the furnishings of his bureau?' and she says to me, 'You're a swiving barmy lot, you Norweegians.' Then she jumps back on to her bee-queue to the buffet, planning no doubt on her arrival to engage in round 355 of Rugger-bashing with one of her colleagues in PR.

Finally, as a kind of splits addendum to the debit sheet of the party proper, on my way out, I find myself heading for, and eventually inside, the lift alongside Mr Ayhern and no one else but. Turning to me with the stroppiest of phizzes, as the doors gather themselves shut in front of us, he asks, 'You'll want all day off tomorrow, I suppose?'

What kind of overtime shanghai is this cunt trying to pull over on me? I wonder to myself. But not to be nonplussed by his cuntishness, I answer, with a faint smile, 'I should say so, sir. It's a Saturday. And then,' I go on, fishing my leave slip out of one of my front trouser pockets, 'I'll want and expect to get the whole of the following week off as well,' punctuating this remark with a few well-timed flicks of my forefinger against the slip, so as to produce the ineffable Sound of Smugness that can be elicited only from the ballistic impact of human fingernail-matter on a schlong-stiff paper surface.

'Let me see that,' he growls, snatching the slip from my mitts, and frowning and grunting and 'Mmm'-ing over it like there's a fucking proposition from Wittgenstein inscribed on it. At last, just as we've exited the lift and are standing in front of the guard's desk, in the vestibule of the ground floor, he indicates the spot where his John Handschlong is sited, and says, with grapefruit-sized co-jones, 'That's not my signature.' Here he goes again, acting on the advice of his business-cunt's self-help manual. But fear not, Cher Amy reader: the Rugger is ever-resourceful and forsees every contingency. So I says to him, 'Well, sir, perhaps you've forgotten you signed it. If you're in need of a memory refresher, look no further than the other side of the sheet.' So he flips the paperlet over; and on the verso, to his cuntishly infinite cuntsternation, he discovers, spanning the full length of the slip, the un-forgeable, palsy-stricken JH of Chester H. Wickwire, chief of the accounting division. (That's right, CAR, acting on the precedent of his exhibition of the selfsame cuntish conduct the last time I'd tried to call in one of my leave debts, I had ventured to go over Ayhern's head for a co-signature for this one--and succeeded in getting it.) Glancing up at me with lips pursed, nose scrunched, and okies fit to burst out of their sockets, Mike hands me back the paper. In plain English, what he wants to say to me just now is something like, 'Sir, I would demand satisfaction from you in no uncertain terms at this very instant, were it not for the fact that, aware as I am of how cuntishly in the wrong all and sundry would judge me to be in that event, I know that I could not count on my own mum to act as my second.' In even plainer English, what he actually says to me is, ' Well, I suppose you must have the whole week. Be here all the earlier on the following Monday!' Then, without tendering me so much as the most cuntishly perfunctory of good-byes (let alone such borderline cuntishly perfunctory seasonable valedictions as 'Merry Xmas to You and Urine'), he turns on his heel and strides briskly towards the door and out of the building.

Well, I'm not the sort to stand about brooding over the disapprobation of such a moronic cunt as Mike Ayhern. All the same, I'm certainly not keen on crossing his path again in '05--as I'm in slight danger of doing, on the pavement, if I follow his egress too closely--so I fritter away a minute or two trading pleasantries with the guard, a fellow Arsenal-hater. We toast each other over the Gunners' recent dip in the Premiership standings, and then I proceed on my own merry way out the building and next door to the company car park, where the Mazda is berthed.

Now, I know that in the post before last I rather tore a new schlong hole in outer Hertfordshire, in making it seem--as it in fact did at the time--like Britain's answer to Hazzard County (Christ, though, it wasn't my fault that cop's name was Roscoe Coltrane!); but there's nothing like a drive from inner Hertfordshire to outer Norfolk to put in perspective a Barnetian's metropolitan snobbery vis-a-vis even the most hickish purr-loos of the London commuter belt, especially if he hasn't made the trip in a year. You know what the biggest town along the whole 100-mile itinerary is (unless you count the tangential brush against the very outer arc of the nipple halo of Cambridge at mile 60, which I don't)? It's Thetford, the Manchester or Chicago of Norfolk. In so dubbing Thetford, I of course don't mean that it has anything of the character or appearance of either Madchester or the Windy City; I mean, rather, that it happens to be the second or third largest city in Norfolk. And when you consider that Norwich itself numbers barely a hundred thousand souls, and do the math to scale, you'll see that in point of populousness Thetford makes even Potters Bar look like, well, Norwich by comparison. Now you'd think that the one saving grace of 100-plus miles of Gobi-deserted highway would be that they made for speedy, limit-breaking, cruise-control-guided driving, and so the London-to-Diss stretch of road does at most times of the year--but not at this one, not at Christmastime. At the acme of the so-called holiday season, East Anglia seems to be the place on which all of England converges to lapse into a turkey-induced coma, and thus you're lucky if you clock in an average of 30-miles-per-hour from door to door. Things get especially strop-inducing during the last third of the trip, when you leave behind the motorway and hit the two-lanes-per-carriageway A11.

Anyway, the upshot of all this gazetteer-mongering that I've been doing for the past coupla hundred words is that, although on account of the party I got off work an hour early, at four, I don't pull into Diss till half-past seven, hungry and stroppy as a grizzly bear in mid-spring. Mechanically, without having to remind myself of the route, I hang a louie off Roydon Road on to the aptly-named Louie's Lane, then another on to Orchard Grove, following the southward bend of the road almost all the way to the end and parking in front of the third house on the left back from the so-called cul-de-sac. The familiar tokens of identification are all still there: the lime tree in the front garden, the beige 1975 Mini parked in the drive, even the old red watering can on the front porch, just barely visible in the fluorescent glare of the front-door light (itself a permafixture of the place). Minus the extra foot of growth on the tree everything looks exactly as I remember it looking in 1995 (or, for that matter, 1985).

As I take in the scene, the timeless melancholy lyrics of the Moz blare through the speakers of my mind's tannoy and reverberate hollowly against the walls of my mind's deserted high school gymnasium: I don't want to go home, because I haven't got one...anymore. And so with a heavy heart, and an even heavier schlong, I get out of the car, walk through the front garden and up the front steps and, with grossly affected jauntiness, give a few raps to the front door.

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TBC, you ask? 'Course, YFC!