Reveries of a Solitary Rugger (HMSLX Part Three)

My, but how a bloke's fortunes and self-respect can take a tumble in the course of a single hour! At 4:30 in the p.m., he's sitting, with feet securely stirruped, astride his Unprodigal-Filial high horse, and smugly stroking his poncily-trimmed-and-waxed, bum-fluff dragoon's moustache; and come 5:00 he's AWOL and on foot, limping along the High Road with a bullet-wound in one leg and the military cuntstabulary of Filial Impiety in hot pursuit of his carcass. OK, I admit that I didn’t actually have a bullet lodged in my thigh at 23:00 sharp on Christmas Day, and that consequently I was actually moving at a pretty steady clip (and as you lot were there with me at 4:30, you already know I wasn't literally sitting on a horse, etc. in the strip-cartoon panel thus time-stamped). The fact remains that at that at at that precise moment, at 5:00, I was out of doors, on a road that was--and is--indeed named High (amongst other appalachians at various points along its bent-schlong-like cursus), and heading away from home and the tsunami of curses, imprecations and what-did-you-that-for-you-cuntish-gits, that doubtlessly would have come crashing down on to my head from all sides of the room in the wake of my demolition of the telly had I lingered there even a fraction of a second after taking conscience of the enormity of what I had just done. It must have been round about 5:07, as the Rugger runs, that, having got far enough the fuck out of there for my conscience's tolerable discomfort, I finally got round to giving the here, the now and the whither their alloted ten second's apiece on my mind's casting couch; that, my breath becoming rather laboured, my ticker positively kvetcing for overtime pay and my okies alighting on the cross-street sign bearing the legend 'MERE STREET,' I paused and, shivering like a pirate's timbers and schvitzing like a gefiltefisch, considered what I should do next.

'Is it too soon to go back?' I asked myself.

'Is it fucking ever, Jude!' myself rejoined. 'You'd be lucky to walk in on them wheeling away the telly and sweeping up the bigger hunks of glass if you headed back now. I'd wait another hour, at least.'

'And by means of what cuntishly slow-strangling karate or ninjitsu hold, pray tell, am I to dispose of that selfsame hour?'

'Well, the technique's got nothing to do with karate or ninjitsu. Nothing to do with Asia at all, in fact. It's a little soft-shoe step invented by the Frogs, and it's called...'

'Yes, yes, yes..?'

'Flanerie.'

'Flannery? As in Flannery O'Connor or O'Brien?'

'No, flanerIE. As in Flannery Adams Else. It's basically a hifalutin word for taking a walk, only with this difference: that as you're walking you pause occasionally to make snippy little remarks on the shittiness of the people, scenery, etc. immediately to hand. What with all the pausing and snipping, you can easily treble the timeage of your constitutional.'

'But if there are any people about, won't they think me a bit barmy? Or, worse yet, take these animadversions on their shittiness as a provocation to shirtiness?'

'Of course not, you fucking fleischkopf, because you won't be saying these things aloud; you'll be saying them to yourself (i.e., me).'

'I see. And presumably you've chosen this moment to moot this flanerie-ing chronocidal strategem because here we are at the foot of Mere Street, the Fifth Avenue, the Charing Cross, the Tiananmin Square of Diss...'

'Exactly. Because, in short, it's the finest quarter-mile of flaneur's fodder this side of Thetford. On Mere Street, that queer street, they do things they don't do on Broadway...'

'OK, that'll do. Matt Monro or Frank Sinatra you ain't. I'm off.'

Thus putting a full stop on the old inner dialogue, and putting one hoof in front of the other, I beat a leisurely stroll along the curve of the pavement linking the east-west left flank of Park Road to the north-south left foot of Mere Street. The local-heritage puffers tend to describe this left or westerly side as the more 'picturesque' of the two on account of the fact that it abuts on the town's greatest natural geographical treasure, the eponymous Mere; but to all the Dissian newbility (who are not to be confused with the non-existent Dissian nubility), I say: 'Don't be taken in by the LHPs. The Mere is no great shakes.' In any newer-fangled town--say, Milton Keynes--it'd be mistaken for a man-made drainage pond, and not a particularly spectacular example of the genre at that.

But anyway, I couldn't have taken more than a couple of dozen steps on my northward-bound stroll, when I became conscious all at once (as one tends to do in cold weather) of an acute and well-nigh-unpostponeable need to piss. As I was just then drawing level with the municipal public bog housed in a rather unprepossessing little bungalow set off to the side, within (so to speak) pissing-distance of the Mere, my first instinct was naturally to repair to the Gents' half of that edifice; but to no purpose: it was, unsurprisingly, locked; and so I was obliged to relieve myself under the only other cover to hand, namely the great 15-foot-high willow tree out in front. To divert myself during the first half of the relief effort, I glanced to my left over at the Mere, on whose opposite shore loomed the Rotary Club's traditional Christmas display, a massive tanenbaum-shaped edifice of particoloured lights surmounting the cuntishly oversized characters R-O-T-A-R-Y; at the sight of which I said to myself, A tourist from another planet would think 'Rotary' was the name of the fucking holiday. Then, pointing my okies downwards, and watching the piss descending from my schlong in great cataracts or inverted geysers and running down the bark of the tree-trunk in little steaming rivulets or lava flows, I recalled, for the first time in perhaps a decade, a certain anecdote or legend centring on this very tree that Mr Jenkins, a primary school teacher of mine, had related to us younguns during one of our many lunchtime outings on the Merestrasse. According to Mr Jenkins, the Norman King Stephen, had, in 11-something AD, during one of his progresses through Diss en route to London from Norwich, watered with his own piss the seedling from which eventually sprouted this mighty willow. And for the first time in, well, probably all of the 20 years that had elapsed since the relation of the anecdotage itself, it occurred to me that there could not be so much as the slightest soup's-or-cunt's-son of truth to this story. There was no way this tree was more than a hundred years old; and it was probably less than 50. Willows (it just occurred to me then) aren't fucking sequoias or even oaks--they're simply not cut out gene-wise for the long haul. Lies my fucking teacher told me indeed, and probably for the sheer cuntish thrill of telling them to a so-called captive audience of credulous tykes. Well, cuntishly disillusioning revelations like this one do have a way of creeping up on a bloke at the most cuntishly inopportune moments.

I was not, however, about to let myself be fazed or otherwise incapacitated by the falling from my eyes of this particular scale-let; I had resolved to promenade along all 500-or-so metres of Mere Street, and so, after zipping up my flies, I set off once again towards the fulmilment of this resolution. I passed the Waterfront Inn, Cannell's the Butcher's and Amity's the Florist's, and paused in front of the National West Bank, from which station, sited roughly halfway between the southern and northern terminuses of the road, I could take in virtually every salient observable detail of the opposite side in one sweeping 180-degree, left-to-right neck-pivot. Taylor Electrical; W. H. Smith's; the offices of the Diss Mercury, the local paper--all were shut up and darkened for the holiday. Even towards the middle right edge of the frame, to which the pink-and-green neon shop-window sign of Hing Lee (the remains of whose insipid Kung Pao chicken were at that moment wending their way through my large intestine en route to my colon) could have been counted on to impart a bit of light and colour to the composition on any other Sunday, there was nary a glimmer. Nor, much to my would-be flaneur's chagrin, was there a soul was in sight on the pavement, on either this side or that one. Only once, in fact, during the twenty-odd minutes of the whole Mere Street stroll were my meditations interrupted by the vaguest obtrusion of a human presence, in the form of a town copper walking his beat (or so I assume, though in truth I have no idea if these blokes even have beats to walk). Whether it was on account of the copper's gratuitously militaristic gait or on account of the suspiciously helmet-like composure of that portion of his curly black coiff visible beneath his gendarme's cap, I can't say; but as he briefly passed within a few cunt-hair's-breadths of my person, and grunted a none-too-friendly pair of syllables that passed with equal plausibility for 'Evening' and 'Fuck off,' I couldn't help taking him for this bloke Sergeant Stewart, an officer of the Norfolk Cuntstabulary who in my first-and-second form days at Diss High used to come round every month or so to deliver a so-called motivational presentation to us tykes on the legal hazards of drug use, petty theft, vandalism, littering and cursing. (These presentations, incidentally, had always terminated a quarter-hour ahead of schedule, with old SS, on the evidence of our collective apathy, collecting his presentational paraphrenalia and marching out with the valedictory ejaculation of 'You're a fucking pack of lost causes, you lot!') But a quick bit of mental arithmetic-cum-sartorial-analysis soon set me despondingly straight: there was no way that bloke had been Sergeant Stewart; as old SS when I had known him was already pushing retirement age, whereas this bloke couldn't have been a day over 60 now; and whereas SS had been a county cop, this bloke's uniform had clearly marked him as one of the local rent-a-bobbies.

Otherwise, I was at liberty to mull over the desolation, the solitariness, the prosaic otherworldliness of the whole scene, and therefrom to draw out the most mercilessly snippy conclusions ad nauseum. At first, TBF, although I did feel that there was something off, if not downright sinister about the aspect of these environs, I was hard pressed to put my finger on any particular quality that merited my disapproval. Yes, at half-past five in the afternoon of Christmas Day, Mere Street, the hoppingest thoroughfare in Diss, was dead as Dillinger's doornail, but was there anything especially objectionable in that? This was, after all, a self-styled sleepy East-Anglia market town; and it would have been completely out of character at such a time for its main pedestrian drag to be swarming with punters laughing, shrieking, puking and otherwise carrying on like the yobbility or chavvility of your average inner London borough on a Saturday night. The LHPs had gone balls deep to make the Mere Street of 2005 look as quaint as Queen Elizabeth the First's cunt, and had succeded in doing so beyond the pie-est-in-the-sky-est dreams of local-historical anorakism. Here were none of your tastelessly anachronistic wire-mesh public dustbins, let alone any of your High Street-busting Concrete-and-Perspex architectural monstrosities. No, the newest building on the strip probably dated from ca. 1600; the tallest of them stood at three storeys, and the broadest of them squatted at no more than 20 feet. So apparently keen had the LHPs been on making Mere Street pass for the real deal in the eyes of a 17th-century time traveller, that, in seeing to the public lighting, they had forsworn the usual fluted-cast-iron-lamppost-type schema one usually encounters in such so-called heritage districts. (Lampposts? I imagined one of these LHPs ejaculating through a pinched nose, Ugh! How smuttily Victorian, how modern! You might as well talk of opening up the area to flying cars.) Instead, they had gone for affixing unobstrusive reading-lamp-sized lights to the fronts of the shops themselves. And it was, in fact, only after my vision had gone slightly out of focus from having been fixed so long on the same static prospect, and thereby diverted my attention away from the fake-aides of the buildings and towards the dingy yellow sodium vapour halos emanating from these very lights, that I began to get a purchase on the peculiar and yet all-too-familiar aroma of shittiness exuded by Mere Street, and--by extension--by Diss in culo. You see, it was in taking notice of the portability, the un-placededness, of these halos, and of the uniformly garish, monchromatic tinge they imparted to every square millimetre of the streetscape, that I was vouchsafed a singular revelation vis-a-vis the boutiques of Mere Street: namely, that every bloke Jack of them was simply a scaled-down, cut-rate, inferior version of its equivalent in Norwich or London. Sure, the buildings themselves were quaint enough, but their contents and purposes were anything but. I had never seen a Diss Strip Steak on view under the front counter at Cannell's, or a Norfolk Nosegay advertised on the sandwich boards out in front of Amity's; and if (as I was sure it must do) the Waterfront Inn now happened to dispense from its taps some undrinkable goo of semi-local provenance styled Lowestoft Lager or Somerleyton Stout, it was pound coins to peascods that the first keg of the stuff had been bunged not a day earlier than Whitsuntide of 1995, in envious emulation of some Leicester-or-Cambridge-originating so-called real ale dating from no farther back than the hoary old late 80s. And this revelation induced in its turn the more general and no less devastating revelation that, pace your Billy Braggs and Paul Wellers and other dirgesmiths of the grand old industrial British crap town, it was actually Diss and the hundreds if not thousands of other ancient market towns of similar size that comprised the real set of boar titties on the belly of this here Sceptred Isle (incidentally, I'd place the sceptre itself--i.e. the boar's craggy, atrophied little schlong--somewhere in the vicinity of Portsmouth), and had done for probably the better part of two centuries. If, I reflected, a town like Manchester, or even Sheffield, had been swallowed up whole into the earth even in the period of the absolute US Green Party presidential candidate of its industrial fortunes (1970 or thereabouts), all of Britain would have wept and wailed at the catastrophe, whereas if the same fate, during the same period, had befallen a town like Diss...

Here I suddenly and positively reeled as if felled by an apopleptic seizure; and, overwhelmed by the torrent of stupid puns un-dammed by the phrase a town like Diss, I was obliged to plant a palm on the pavement in order to keep just barely upright. But debilitating and unnerving as this little episode was in the short run, in the long run I was grateful for its occurrence, as it eventuated in the clearing up of a mystery that in my mind had always surrounded a certain series of public relations initiatives undertaken by the town council during my late nipperhood and early adolescence. You see, when I finally felt well enough to disengage my hand from the ground and to set off again northwards up the street (if for no other reason than to prove to myself I was constitutionally up to it), and thereupon added the two of my lamp-lit revelation to the two of my pun-induced seizure, I all at once, and for the first time, saw these PR campaigns for what they really had been--utterly desperate attempts by the local bigwigs to capitalise on the one attribute that really did set Diss apart from the thousands of other UK bathroom communities with which it was otherwise virtually interchangeable, viz. the ludicrously, endlessly riffable character of its very name. Any traveller who has passed two hours together at a Diss pub on karaoke night will have been subjected to the perennially popular punning parody of the Specials' classic 'This Town' (Diss Town is coming like a ghost town, etc.). I myself remember learning it on the nursery school playground, and along with the so-called Mere ducks it's probably the closest thing we'll ever get to a genuine local folkway. But at least as far as I can recollect, it's never been exploited for the purposes of publicity, perhaps for the okie-burstingly obvious reason that it casts the town in such a disparaging light, perhaps for the less okie-burstingly obvious one that the costs of remaking even a single stretch of one of our commercial roads into a facsimile of an abandoned town of the American Old West, complete with robotised tumbleweed, faded Saloon marquees and the like, would almost certainly have bankrupted the town treasury.

But we're not talking about counterfactuals here; we're talking of actuals--actual instances of an official attempt to extract revenues from the town name; and the earliest such attempt in my lifetime that came to mind then, on Christmas Day, as I was passing by the shuttered windows of the Meat Inn (Cannell's rival charcuterie on the trip), had centred on Diss's exact phonetic, if less-than-exact graphic, correspondence with Dis, the name of the celebrated (or infamous) capital of the Hell of Dante's Inferno. I recalled that for a few fleeting months in the summer of 1988 or 1989, strategically placed, street-spanning banners bearing the legend 'WELCOME TO DISS: ONE HELL OF A TOWN!' had greeted visitors at all three of the town's main gateways: Roydon Road, Frenze Road and Denmark Street. Here, the TC must have reasoned, I thought, was a PR sally that would be as cheap to pull off as it was insanely catchy; and indeed it had proved so popular with the locals that plans eventually had gone afoot to extend the Dantean semio-geography to the rechristening (or, rather, re-sataning) of specific local landmarks: the river Waveney, to the immediate south of town, was to be re-named the Phlegethon, after the fluvial border of lower Hell; the mouth of the Mere the Malebolge, after the so-called evil pockets leading into Dis; and the Mere itself Cocytus, after the frozen lake at the very bottom of the Ninth Circle. But all these plans had come to naught after a certain senior octagenarian member of the town council (quite rightly, in Mum and Dad's view) warned that the wholesale Satanification of the Dissian map, innocuous enough as it seemed at first blush, could not fail of eventually attracting in droves a decidedly unpleasant element--Goths, genuine Satan-worshippers, junkies, mafiosi and the like; and that from their infiltration of the town it would be but an easy step to the conversion of our beloved Park into the site of a year-round Woodstock, Glastonbury or Burning-Man Festival. This prophecy being subsequently and universally seconded in the town council, and thereafter generally seconded in the community at large, the banners were pulled down as swiftly as they had been put up, and no more had been heard since on the subject of Diss as the UK's Next Great Hellhole.

But at least in point of sheer ambitiousness or hoot's pa, I thought, the Dante venture had been but a run-up to or foretaste of the high era of Dissploitation, the early '90s. I recalled that the entry, at some point in 199o or 1991, courtesy of the infectious transatlantic pop-musical-cum-subcultural phenomenon known as hip-hop, of the word diss meaning 'to disrespect, snub or treat in an all-around cuntish manner' into the lexicon of the UK youth vernacular had been a positive windfall for the most aggressively self-whoring faction of our so-called business community; who, on the basis of a consensus that they must strike while the iron was hot, had promptly set about placing an advertisement bearing the leader of 'DISS YOUR WORST ENEMIES, AND SHOW 'EM A GOOD TIME TO BOOT!' in all of the major UK pop music magazines (NME, Melody Maker, Smash Hits, etc.) and in a smattering of their Stateside counterparts. The idea had been that for the rather princely sum of eleven hundred quid, you could send your chosen victim a so-called Dissogram, inviting him or her anomymously to a free junket in Hawaii, Acapulco or wherever-have-you; and that, supposing they took the bait, they would thereupon and unbeknownst to themselves be transported, by whatever conveyance proved necessary, to our little corner of East Anglia. Once here (so the pitch went), they would--for all of their stroppiness at having been dropped off at a destination entirely different to the purported one--be so speedily captivated by the sheer face-cheek-pinchable charm of the place that they would no less speedily offer up their open wallet or handbag to the hose-ends of our local cash-hoovering establishments, and ultimately pass on the good word about Diss to their friends and so-called loved ones. The only taker--or takee, rather--that I had ever heard tell of in connection with this scheme was a bloke hailing from the hardly-exotic locale of Norwich, a rapper bearing the moniker of MC Sir Thomas Browne, who'd claimed to have been despatched hither courtesy of the cuntish machinations of his London rival, MC Sammy 'Let met give a shout out to all of my' Pepys. And the only reason I had ever even heard about the apparition of this bloke in our midst was that Anglia Tonight had done a short segment on it, in the summer of ’91 or ’92—I forget which. This bit of footage had opened with a long shot of the mouth-end of Mere Street centred on the diminutive person of MCSTB making all of the stock gestures of cuntsternation (pacing up and down, stamping one’s feet, shaking one’s fist at the heavens), then cut to a medium-close-up that revealed him to be a frankly clownish—nay, even guyish—figure attired from head to ankle in togs that reminded me simultaneously of the Three Musketeers and the Mayflower pilgrims (plumed three-corner hat, voluminous cloak, laced-up waistcoat, baggy pantaloons and calf-hugging postman’s socks, all in black); whilst on his feet he sported immaculately white, fat-laced, moon-boot-sized trainers. 'You done dissed my lily-white Norridgian ass plenty of times before, Pepys,' Browne stroppily addresed the camera, 'but this diss, dis Diss [at the words dis Diss there was a cut to a kiddie-TV-show-style super-close-up of the landmark cruciform town sign, and of the bloke's gloved forefinger laboriously underlining the town name posted there in four-inch high capitals] takes the [BEEP]-ing cake. At two o'clock this afternoon, a minicab pulls up at the front porch of my crib, and I get in thinking it's gonna take me to Norwich airport, where I'm poster catch a plane to Mallorca. Instead, it takes a wrong turn, and heads south and drops me off at this pissant shamlet. I dunno, though. Maybe Diss is my mother[BLEEP] fault after all. Maybe my mother[BLEEP] mind's playing tricks on my ass. Or vice-versa. Let me check my appointments for the day [reaching into the folds of his cloak and producing a small memorandum book and a ballpoint; then, licking the tip of the latter, and opening the former; and, finally peering into the latter (i.e., the former former) whilst scanning it with the former (i.e., the former latter)]. Let's see here: 8 AM: COLONICS (DR ARSCHSCHWIMMER). 10 AM: DRIVE-BY. CAP RESPECTIVE ASSES OF MESSERS BOYLE AND HOOKE. 11:30 AM: TAKE GRAN TO SEE TERMINATOR 2 (CENTREFOLK CINEPLEX). 2 PM. AIRPORT. BRITISH AIRWAYS FLIGHT 451 TO [dramatic pause] MALLORCA.' Yeppers. Just as I thought: Mallorca. Ain't no mentionin' o' nuttin' here 'bout no mother[BEEP] Diss. Mark my words, Pepys, yoh nappy, titty-gropin', closet-masturbatin', diary-keepin', naval-contract-pimpin' ass gonna pay for Diss. I'm fittin' to Bismarck or Fargo yowass, you catch? T-B-mother[BEEP]-S, this mother[BEEP] town is whack. A neighbah cayn't even get a decent blunt or a fowty in this mother[BEEP] dorf. Shiah, Nero...' The segment had closed with a cut back to the studio, where a presenter mooted the purportedly widely-current rumour that Pepys had had nothing to do with the Dissing of Browne; that Browne had engineered the whole affair as a publicity stunt timed to coincide with the release of his new LP Urne Buriall, which, I now recalled, in subsequent months had figured fairly prominently on the playlists of some of the overnight shows on Radio Norfolk. To my fairly untutored 12-year-old's ears the record had sounded like an intriguing cross between the Geto Boys and Joy Division. (I wonder [now] what ever became of old MCSTB...) In any event, the iron had cooled soon enough afterwards; by '94 or thereabouts the grizzled punditry of the political chat shows had got hold of diss with a lowercase 'd' and, by virtue of bringing it to bear on every bloke Backbencher's most cuntishly ephemeral tiffs with Whitehall, transformed it into a veritable shibboleth for out-of-date squaredom pretty much overnight. And thereafter--and every year since--for our TC it had been back to round one of the All-UK Pissant-Towns' Self-Promotional Talent Tournament, with its boilerplate soft-shoe routine of 'Great schools, blah-blah-blah; only a half-an-hour from Pseudo-Real City X, two hours from Quasi-Real-City Y, blah-blah-blah; rich cultural history, blah-blah-fucking blah'; and in whose closing ceremonies Diss might hope, at best, to receive an honourable mention every 20-odd years.

I reached the slightly misaligned three-tined fork at the end of the road. Straight ahead, Mere Street morphed into Mount Street, and to my immediate left was Market Hill; whilst at a just-barely legible distance further ahead, and to the right, the sign of Church Street beckoned. My bout of Mere-Street flaneurage was at an end. At arse, for all of the Diss-illusionment (ugh!) it had wrought in the Ruggerian psyche, I could hardly in retrospect call it Diss-appointing (ugh-squared!). It had served its purpose; it had killed what I could only suppose was the better part of an hour; moreover, in shifting the onus of angst from one of my mind's arse-cheeks (the arse-cheek of filial piety) to the other (the arse-cheek of hometown loyalty), it had made the prospective re-assumption of the burden by the first arse-cheek that much easier to bear. I could now, I realised, face my family with a cunt-hair's-heft of equanimity. It would all be a matter of ponying up to the front doorstep--on the back of my unprodigal-filial little Shetland--with an offer to replace the telly as toot enough close to sweet as possible; i.e., first thing tomorrow morning, when the shops opened. Such an offer, tendered in a spirit of real contrition, should smooth things over with Mum, Dad and my conscience alike for the duration of the evening.

Rather than follow the shortest route up Market Hill, I took the long way back up to St. Nicholas Street by pressing on up Mount Street past Church Street, so as to get a proper up-close gander at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, whose austere, understated English Gothic grandeur--my steadfastly pissy reservations about Diss a culo notwithstanding--I would trade for the overblown neoclassical proto-Washingtonian hooplah of St. Paul's in London on any day. And as I marvelled anew at the salient architectural features of the church--the triangular, castle-worthy spire, comprising nearly a full quarter of its total height; the rather miniscule, purely functional, prolate windows peering out diffidently amidst massive blocks of freestone, each individually traceable even from the distance of the pavement; the rough-hewn, stylised gargoyles that in their only half-hearted aspirations to full-fledged critterhood were more evocative of 1950s car-bonnet figurines than of their cuntinental counterparts--my okies happened to alight on the dial of its clock, which, I observed, now read almost half-past six. Yes, it was certainly well past time to be getting back. For the first time since setting out from Orchard Grove I noticed--actually noticed, not merely felt--that I was cold, and that my ancestral sailor's pullover, salvaged from the day before, did not, on its own, afford sufficient protection against the depredations of this barely-super-freezing late-December weather. I also noticed that I was already once again getting a wee bit peckish; and where there is peckishness, to misquote some ancient Roman geezer with a name like a pizza, there is hope. Impelled at this point by a heady cocktail of more appetites and passions than one could have shaken a swizzle stick at, I dug my boot spurs into the hind flanks of my humble little Unprodigal Filial steed and cantered off homewards faster, and with more alacrity, than I ever would have thought possible a scant hour before.

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To be [JMFC!] continued (and concluded)...