Basher's Delight

Corrigendum to the closer of my last post: for lives to bash another day read lives to wish he’d died that very day. I know it doesn’t scan properly, but fuck it; at least it accurately renders the spiritual SOA in the lifeworld of YFCT over the course of the past three round weeks. In these 27 days, in racking up win after win despite their total absence of footerly finesse, squeaking through by the skin of their depilated cunts each time, Arsenal have furnished proof after proof of the perduring partiality of the almighty Scots demiurge to their cuntish cause, both at home and abroad. I mean, it would be one thing if they'd actually topped out the Premiership table--in other words, if their success vis-a-vis their material standing in the football world had actually been commensurate with their insular performance, and superior to that of Chelsea, ManU et al. In that case, TBS, I'd still be angsted to the gills, but my angst would have missed that superaddition of that cosmological mickey that has ratcheted the pain up to all-day-hangover levels. '"Let the best side win," they say,' I would have said, in that case, 'If the best side happens to be populated by the most depraved cunts in professional sport--well, that's just the way the old Weetabix cake crumbles, innit?' But no--the Gunners had to go and 'roid up their performance just barely enough to get them from number five to number four position on the table; just barely enough to ensure themselves a berth in next year's Champions roster; and--most cuntishly of all--just barely enough to ensure a tie with Juventus on the 5th instant. The whole strategy reeks so gamily of n***ardliness that it's no wonder the ASD took them under his wing--er, kilt; he must have seen in them a pack of kindred spirits. Of course, as long as I'm haemmoraging counterfactlets here, I might as well add that even if all other things were equal on the Gunners' (i.e., arse) end, I'd still find the present period of bereavement easier to endure if the Bashers still existed in their pre-March-24-configuration. With all due fellationary suction having been rendered once again unto Reg's ex-presidential schlong, although blokish fellowship has indeed never been the fundamental telos of the Bashers, I'm sure that Reg himself would have been the first to concede that having a roomful of fellow bashers' shoulders to cry one once in a fortnight made the Arsenalophobic cross a much easier burden to bear; that it was, in other words/to say the least, a salutary epiphenomenon of the club's core mission. And with all due fellationary suction having been rendered unto Ronnie's legal-scholastic schlong, although the Bashers, TBS, have perdured since 24/3 as a legal entity, I'm sure Ronnie would be the first to admit (and, indeed, he was Toadmit Numero Primo) that these past few weeks haven't exactly amounted to an occasion for our iterating Davie Byrne's most celebrated catch phrase to each other. Just do the maths (specifically, the first-form set theory): as all three of us surviving North London Bashers are honorary or fully-accredited Barnetians, the club is Judy-bound, for the time being, to hold its meetings at a Barnetian local. But as the Bashers are banned from the only such local known to our chapter, we are essentially--and, again, for the time being, venue-less. TBS, by dint of conducting all of our official club bidness on the pavement, en route either to or from the Ape, and of swapping our livery-shirts for non-football-semiological T-shirts and button-ups, Ronnie, Lou and I have managed to conduct our past two mandatory meetings in Mr Sedule's property without a hitch, and under cover of plausible deniability. Still, as I reflected to Ronnie at some point after the first of these sessions--from an Ape's-eye point of view, there really was nothing about an April '06 North London Arsenal Bashers' meeting that could set it apart from a generic Ronnie-'n'-Rugger chinwag of October '05--apart, that is, from the presence of Lou, which, in any case, could have been accounted for by our pre-Bashers-era chumship. But, alas! There we Bashers were--stuck in our anonymously Simian holding patten. There we were then. There we were then. There we were--'

'Skewed me,' the reader propitiously interrupts. 'What about that fellow...whatshisname...'

'You'll have to give me more to go on than that, MDFC.'

'...Of course, of course...[twirling left-nostril hair meditatively]...Fellow with the first-generation Krautish mum: Cox...No...Box...No...'

'Ochs?'

'That's the fathermucker.'

'What about him?'

'Must I explain everything to you?'

'No, you mustn't--or, rather, needn't--do. Still, I think you yourself would find this here expo inestimably more readable if you did.'

'VFW. As of March 24, Ochs was still a member of your surviving non-insularist, non-Spursophilic chapter of the Bashers, right?'

'Right.'

'And Ochs is also a resident of Barnet; hence, a legitimate North Londoner, right?'

'TBS.'

'But at the same time, I must assume, unless you've been playing the cunt with us for six months running, that he is not an habitue of the Ape.'

'No, I've been on the vertical-cum-vertical with you on that point: to my narledge, Ochs had never set foot in the Ape before March 23.'

'Well, then, according to my first-form set-theory calculations, you should have had an alternative venue ready to hand in Mr Ochs's presumptive local. Whence, then, the necessity of recourse to these clandestine meetings at the Ape?'

'Whence, MDFC? Hence: [leaning leftwards as if to facilitate the insertion of right hand between arse cheeks]. No, but seriously, Madeira Football Club: my thoughts did indeed advert to the super-hypothetical watering hole of the Ochs when I began planning our meeting of April 6, and they materialised in my ringing him up on the weekend of the first. My call began and terminated with an audition of the following voice mail message:'

Hallaw, this is Anna von Ochs. Neither myself nor my son David is able to come to the telephone. Und do not trouble yourself to call tomorrow: we will not be able then either to come. Und if you are one of those verwuenschte Arsenal-bashers, I have got a message for you: Ficken Sie sich!

So, there we Ochsless Bashers were--stuck in our anonymously Simian holding patten. And whilst throughout the duration of the first of these holding-patented meetings the Ape's-eye point of view described above obtruded itself in a strictly theoretical and aesthetic plane; during the second of these meetings--i.e., the most recent one to date--it assumed a much more practical and detrimental aspect vis-a-vis our activity as Bashers. During the first of these post-24/3 Ape meetings, I may have been irked from time to time by the reflection that Van or Suzie or DW or Dwayne could not but have represented the spectacle comprised by the three of us under the prosaic appalachian of 'Rugger and his mates having a chinwag' rather than that of the infinitely more poetic 'Seventh Bimonthly Convention of North London Arsenal Bashers'; still, for all of my irkage, I might in good conscience have affirmed at evening's end that not a single minute at our table had elapsed unescorted by an Arsenalophobic gesture of some make or other. During the second meeting, though, I discovered just how much of a double-edged beard or sword plausible deniability could be; for I had to contend not merely with the theoretical notion of being seen as a mere undifferentiated chin-wagger, but rather with the practical reality of actually being treated or addressed as one, and of being helpless to disavow the imputation.

What I meantersay is that, whilst this new dispensation possessed the singular advantage of rendering us invisible to Jimmy’s and Mr Sedule’s Basherdar, it also possessed the singular demerit/liability of rendering us vulnerable to the off-topic chinwaggerly incursions of the puntility, among which figured no small number of our friends, to whom it was rather out of the question to give the old-British raj-style blow-off glance signifying, ‘Fuck off—we don’t want to talk to you and it’s none of your fucking business why we don’t,’ for, needles to say, such a riposte would have eventuated in the tragically gratuitous sullying of tens of square yards of genial shirt fabric.

Wellsir, it was by just such an incursion that the three of us were confronted last Thursday night when, in the midst of a particularly so-called heated exchange on the subject of that cunt Fabregas's prospectively imminent defection to his hometown side of Barcelona, Manish Shah, whom I hadn't run into in Donkey's weeks, took the liberty of pulling a chair up to our table and saying, ‘Supsters, Rugger, Ronnie? Long time no see. And, er, sorry,’ he continues, extending a hand to Lou, ‘I’m afraid we haven’t met. My name’s Manish.’ Lou gives the hand a hearty pump, nods, smiles ingratiatingly, points to his own person, oratorically stretches forth his right arm, and, with chin jutting upwards, tortures his phiz into one of those orgasmic faces characteristic of an opera singer holding a high note.

‘Song title?’ Manish gormlessly queries me rather than at Lou.

‘I think so,’ I answer.

Whereupon Lou nods, gives another ingratiating smile, and literally skips off in the direction of the gents like a little girl playing hopscotch.

'Skip?'

Lou leaves off hopscotching just long enough to give a negative shake of the head.

'Anyway,' I say, 'there's no song simply entitled 'Skip' is there?'

'Yeah,' says Manish, 'Testicular Atrophy, 1982.'

'Must be a rare B-side. I've never heard of it.'

But Manish doesn't stick around to confirm or refute my discographic conjecture. Instead, he steps off in pursuit of Lou's foot-ball steps and follows them straight through to their destination at the threshold of the bog, only to have the door unceremoniously slammed in his face. ‘SKIP TO MY…LOU?’ he shouts his second guess through the barrier.

‘That’s right,’ I say, and beckon him back to the table.

‘But if I got it right,' he says upon arrival, 'why isn’t he coming out?’

‘Probably because he's actually got to go.’

‘Makes sense. Anyway, Rugger,’ he says, thread-up-pickingly, and making as if to settle down in that there newly up-pulled chair of his, ‘I trust you've been keeping abreast of the latest pair of Ken-related scandals? Irangate? And Embassygate?’

Oh, TBS, I'd been running left-nipple-to-right-nipple alongside both of these scandals from their respective Day Ones, and forcing myself to keep mum on them in the presence of a fellow diehard Kenophobe like Manish was almost enough to impel me to leap to my feet and do the old pee-pee jig; but mum on them I indeed had to keep so long as I remained within the charmed circle of Arsenal-Basherdom: ‘Well, I dunno, Manish…,’ I lamely temporised.

‘What d’you mean, you don’t know? Either you have been or you haven't.’

‘I catch you Manish. It’s just that...Well, what do you think, Ronnie? Would it be possible to insinuate a treatment of Mannie’s topics into the minutes of the present session?’

‘That depends, Rugger. Does either of these Ken scandals by any chance appertain at least tangentially to the Scottish football team?’

‘The Scottish Football Team?’ Manish cuts in incredulously. ‘Since when were either of you a supporter of that organisation? Come to think of it, since when was anybody south of the Tweed a supporter of them? For fudge's sake, they haven't even been in the World Cup since '98.’

Now, from a balls-to-the-wall Arsenalophobe's point of view, what I really should do right now is milk this here misinterpretation of the SFT epithet for all it[']s worth; that is to say, by assuming an embarrassed yet offended air and rejoining something to the effect of All right, you've outed us, Manish. Ronnie and Lou and I are fans of the Scottish national team. Is that so wrong? Are we not thereby participating in a noble pan-insular British tradition of cheering on the underdog? Instead, my gormless vanity gets the better of me, and I finish up candidly explaining--

‘Point of clarification, Manish: we’re not talking about that Scottish football team, or, indeed, about any other team actually hailing from Scotland (except, perhaps, in a loosely metaphysical or ethical sense [but that’s neither here nor there]). You see, we’re using the phrase “Scottish football team” as a kind of euphemism pattened on the old thespian substitution of “The Scottish play” for Macbeth.’

--which explanation effectively delivers the detonation button of a Bashers'-cover-blowing fart-bomb straight into Manish's mitts. For, as remote from the outer circumfrence of the loop of our official affiliation with the Bashers as I suppose him to be (to say nothing of his probable degree of remoteness from the OC of the loop of Mr Sedule's interdiction of our club), Manish is well enough acquainted with Ronnie and myself to suss out that the lexical schlong-and-jones concealed by the euphemistic fig-leaf in question cannot but be Arsenal. He is, moreover, just borderline cuntish enough to take the unmentionability of the A-word as a cue to mention it, well in advance, most probably, of having formed the foggiest notion as to why we’d rather he didn’t do:

‘Oh, I get it. You’re talking about Ar-’

(Fortunately, for all of my gormlessness, I’m wise enough, if only just barely, to this Tweed-straddling cuntishness of his to clip its wings before they take flight:)

‘-rrrright, Manish, that’ll do. You get the picture, and I’d appreciate your not ringing up the appraisers at Southeby’s just yet. For now, let’s just stick to your original ice-breaker of these most recent Ken piss-takes. I think it’d be safe to say, Ronnie, that no amount of calisthenic exertion on the part of Fannie-Adams’s flabby-arsed imagination is going to bring these here Ken-related news items within auto-fellationary reach of the SFC. What time have you got, anyway?’ (In actuality, I could probably guess the current time to within a microsecond of the reading at the Greenwich Observatory, but rhetorical logic calls for me to feign casual gormlessness on this point.)

Ronnie checks his watch. 'It's about a quarter past ten.'

'A quarter past ten, eh?' I say, rubbing my chin faux-deliberatively. 'Only fifteen minutes till last orders. Well, we've put in the best part of our two and a half hours tonight. I say we step outside and conclude our, er, transaction now, and then return to wag our chins unreservedly in tandem with Manish's.'

‘But Rugger,' Ronnie recalitrantly remonstrates, 'we had just started off on a fresh Cecs Fabregas-bashing tear. We were really just starting to break new ground there.’

‘I agree. But new ground is all the more fertile for having been given time to breathe.’

‘Whatevsissimo. Rather than waste half of our precious quarter-hour tilling that metaphor with a ten-foot-handled hoe, I think I’ll simply ask our third active member if he’d fancy a spell of tie-breaking.’

Lou—oldly enough returned from the gents to get the gist of our dispute—simply spreads his hands, shrugs and composes his phiz into a sheepish (and cuntishly disingenuous) Don’t look at me: I’m just along for the ride kind of look. (Cf., natch, the look Mr Sedule cuts the copper in my post of November 7 of last year.)

‘Righto,’ sighs Ronnie, literally throwing his napkin in towards the centre of the table and rising to his feet. ‘It takes three to thuringo, after all. Lead the way out back, Rugger.’

So I rise in my turn and make for the rear exit; at which, while holding the door open for Ronnie and Lou, I call back to Manish, as an afterthought, ‘BYOBB!’

‘What’s that?’ shouts Manish, flummoxed. ‘Don’t you mean BRB?’

‘No, I mean Bring Your Own Beer Back. Just in case we don't have time for another trip to the bar before last orders.’

Out in the courtyard—at which site we have collectively agreed to conclude our meetings, for the surer evasion of Mike O’Schorr and his hypothetical confederates—we do the old count-off, and sing the familiar strains of ‘Arsenal, O Arsenal,’ etc. Then it’s back indoors and to our old tea-n-seas, where Lou and I settle our respective pairs of arse-cheeks kitty-cornered to and opposite Manish, respectively.

‘So then,’ I say, addressing Manish, and rubbing my hands together briskly and eagerly, as though the convo to hand were a piping hot plate of fish'n'poppers, ‘Where shall we begin? With his tiff with the contractors or his tiff with the American embassy?’

‘I'd prefer that we work our way backwards, chronologically’ says Manish, quaffing the head off a fresh pint, 'from the embassy tiff to the building-conrtacting one. As much of a cock-up on the Ken front as Embassygate is, it's really just chum to the corpse of Irangate.' Then, half-stroppily taking cognizance of the North London Arsenal Bashers' Sergeant-at-Pints' still-erectile person hovering within kneeing distance of his right elbow, he glances up and asks, ‘Aren’t you going to join us, Ronnie?’

Ronnie, stifling a probably-artificial yawn, replies: ‘No, thanks. I’m right knackered. I think I’ll be heading home. Night, all.’ And so saying, with stooped shoulders and a heavy gait, he plods on out of the pub through the front door.

'Funny,' Manish says in the wake of Ronnie's arse-cheeks, 'how the bloke always seems to suffer from an attack of narcolepsy the moment anyone's about to lay into Ken.'

'What are you getting at, Manny?' I say, giving my shirtyfront an ever-so-discreet pair of sub-nipple-level tugs.

‘Er, nothing,’ says Manish, with a sidelong aversion of the okies, ‘nothing—just that he seems to be awfully bored by local politics.’

'Well,' I say, 'each cunt to his gout, as the Frogs say. 'And you and I, unlike Ronnie, appear to have been genetically predisposed to contract a version of that ailment merely in virtue of our residence in a burgh presided over by the Right Dishonourable Mr Livingstone.'

'It's a mark of aristocratic distinction, you might say,' Manish gamely rejoins.

'One can only hope. Well, anyway, on to what you've termed Embassygate--'

But just then, later than I feared but early enough, I'm cut off by the appointed apparition of Jimmy, who, laying a left and right hand on each of our complementary respective shoulders, leans across the table to say to us, in what comes across as a whisper in these noisy environs:

'It's about that time, gentlemen. Drink 'em up.'

'You're awfully low-key tonight, Jimmy.' I say. 'What gives?'

'This does,' says Jimmy, stepping back, producing from one of his trouser pockets a small sheaf of papers--wrapped together, like a wad of Isabellas, in an elastic band--and deftly shucking a trio of leaves therefrom on to the tabletop.

I screw up my okies to take a gander at the nearest leaflet, which in design would appear to be a take-off on that one Devo album cover with the little tyke in profile shouting EEG waves through a hand trumpet, the only detectable divergence from the original being the presence of the words 'GREATER LONDON BARMEN'S LAST ORDERS COMPETITION/REGENT'S PARK/11:00 AM/20 May 2006' in place of the EEG curve.

May 20, eh? I says to myself. That's the Saturday after the UEFA Final. Bit like making plans for after the Rapture, what what, fixing an agenda for that day? But before giving Jimmy the old thumbs-down, let's see whether the presence of OFCT at this event will even be exigent, namely by posing the following question to him:

'So you're leaving these with us why?--because you're an organiser of the competition?'

'Not an organiser--a contestant. And I'd be ever so grateful to you if you could make it out there to support me. The vote, you see, is by volume of applause, so the more Apeketeers who show up, the better the odds for this local boy trying to make good.'

As of now I'm being assailed on the one benumbed mind's arse cheek by a distinct incapacity to pitcher to myself exactly what a last-orders' competition might actually entail, for either the participant or the spectator; and on the other by a distinct incuriosity to make that picture any clearer, on account of the more pressing impulse to take a crack at the old Keñata. So, secreting the flyer in my tit pocket, I say:

'All right, I'll pensu it into my calendar.'

'Meaning,' says Jimmy, a smidge stroppily, 'you reserve the right to back out at the last minute.'

Cor, I exclaim to myself, the bloke must really be desperate to win this thing if he's tallying his support punter by punter. And why single out YFCT, rather than Manish or Lou, for upbraiding as a prospective no-show? Is this a talent show claque he's putting together, or a World Cup football team? Which string of reflections impels me to rephrase myself thus: 'Fair enough, Jimmy. I'll sharpie it in. You can count on me to be there.' That is, if Arsenal haven't won the Championship--and if they have, well, I'm pretty sure Miss Manners counts being dead or institutionalised as a legitimate excuse for cancelling an engagement.

'Thanks, Rugger. And, er, will you be wanting another 'Gaarden? There'll be absolutely no pressure tonight to finish up by 11, I promise.'

'Sure,' I answer reflexively, just as I notice Manish sucking down his pint with an unwonted degree of alacrity, through a straw no less. 'That is, provided both of my comrades are planning to make up a full round with me.'

'Sorry, Rugger,' says Manish, withdrawing the straw ever so briefly from his gob. 'I've got to run.'

'WT-fucking-F, Manish!' I ejaculate in immeasurable cuntsternation whilst moving Jimmy along to the next table parenthetically with a You-can't-get-decent-help-nowadays-ish roll of the okies. 'What was the point of adjourning the Bashers' meeting [Sic/Doh!] a quarter of an hour early and scaring off Ronnie, if you were just going to footer the dissection table before we'd even made incision number one in the Livingstonian cadaver?'

'Yeah, I take your point, Rugger, and I apologise. Fact is, when I rolled up here I was banking on a good half-hour of chin-time with you, and meanwhile I've neglected to adjust my personal chronometer to the interruptions. Still, if you were up for it, we could continue, er, initiate, our discussion elsewhere...'

In virtue of the respective flavours of Manish's antsiness and cuntrition I can suss out the exact coordinates of this elsewhere, convo-genre-wise if not GPS-wise, and TBT I'm none too eager to repair thence: 'I take it you've scheduled a rendezvous with Manisha.'

'Yeah, up at Redford's. She's having a bit of a girls' night out there, and I promised I'd stop by to pick her up round 11.'

'Well, that hardly sounds like a Buckingham-Palace-sized bay window for a Kenophobic chinwag, the interval between our showing up and your reaching for the car keys.'

'You might think so; but nightlife-wise Manisha tends to be a true-blue Tory in principle and a redder-than-Ken Old Labourite in practice. Meaning that when I show up at 11 at one of these 24-hour joints she's typically just catching her second wind.'

'A second wind, at 11 on a Thursday? I was lucky to catch mine at half-past nine. Doesn't she have to work tomorrow?'

'Yeah, but that doesn't slow her down much. You forget, Rugger, that by comparison with us she's a mere babe in the woods. Don't you remember what it was like to be 22?'

Indeed I did, albeit rather vaguely. Much more concretely, at the moment, I recalled what it was like to be 26.1622695 and looking forward to a leisurely Ape-centred Ken-bashing chinwag, and to be 26.1622790 and realising how Manish's cuntish negligence had put paid to this forward-spectating ambition. And now, here I was, aetatis 26.1622885, weighing the pros and cunts of taking up his invitation to adjourn to Redford's. TBS, the sheer moral inertia of the human psyche--and perhaps more particularly, the blokean psyche--is a cuntishly staggering force to cuntemplate. On the one hand, at that moment, I was miffed beyond belief at Manish on account of his not having been up front from the beginning about how pressed for time he was, and his having consequently, gratuitously and undoubtedly expunged my name from Chapter One of Volume One of Ronnie's good books; and in view of the centrality of Ronnie to my lifeworld relative to Manish, I should have long since footered the premises. On the other hand, so finely had my Kenophobic appetite been whetted by Manish's initial mooting of those two scandals, that not even the most potent moral emetic imaginable--say, the news that Arsène Wenger would be presiding as guest barman--might have sufficed to put me off the board of the feast then on offer up at Redford's. So, with affected reluctance masking my barely-batable enthusiasm, I says to Manish:

'All right, I'll come with,' not, however, without adding as a conscience-sopping saving throw, 'provided you can assure me we'll have a proper spot of tableage to ourselves, well clear of the tractor beam of the hen session. I'm in no mood tonight to have my co-jones pulverised on the score of my oblivion of the latest trends in handbag engineering.'

'I can assure you of no such thing, Rugger. You know as well as I do how hard it is to get a table in that place for Sunday dupper, let alone at prime time on a preekend night. Still,' he says, standing up and twirling his keys smugly round his forefinger, 'that's no reason for bowing out. Quite the contrary, I should imagine, because from what Manisha tells me I gather that at least one of her friends has pronounced Kenophobic tendencies.'

What make of mythical creature was this sylph, this Blokessa Kenophobiosa, of whom he spake? I could scarcely produce enough mental wool to muffle the rintintinabulation of wedding bells going off in my head just then, let alone enough thoughts of cricket to continue my masterly-enthusiasm-bation; such that my final, determinant voicing of assent came out as a kind of ejaculation of constipated stroppiness:

'OK--then--let's be--off.'

'Glad I managed to bring you round. And what about you, Lou?' [Lucky for me that Manish had remembered our tablemate. For all of my two years, 7 months, three weeks and eight days' margin of seniority of acquaintance with Lou, I'd have probably been out the door and well on my way to Chipping before I'd given thought number one to him.] 'Do you fancy popping up to Redford's with us?'

Lou shakes his head, puts his hands together in a prayerly configuration, lays his head ear-downwards on the pair of them and closes his okies.

'You want to go beddy-bye?' I ask him.

He nods Aye in his feigned slumber.

'Well, I wish you'd let me know earlier, specifically before Ronnie headed out. That would have saved us both a lot of trouble. (Lou's crashing at my place tonight),' I add, as an explanatory aside to Manish.

'Oh, really?' says Manish, his phiz betraying about a billion times more beflummoxedment than the SOA lately divulged would seem to warrant. 'Well, in that case, I suppose I needn't have mentioned Manisha's Kenophobic pal.'

'I don't mean in my bed, for fuck's sake,' I spit back as soon as I get a gust of Manish's imputation. 'We're co-workers. Lou lives up in Hertfordshire, and every other Thursday he comes down to London for the...'

'Yes?' quizzes Manish from the free end of a rope lasso'd round that there the...'

Fuck it. At least for the next Ape-bound minute or so I'm just going to have to live with the knowledge that Manish takes Lou for my semi-long-distance boyfriend. 'I'll explain later. You promise,' I say to Lou, 'to sleep with the telly and the stereo off, so's you'll hear the doorbell when I get in?'

Aye, Lou signifies again, by the same means and in the same posture.

'All right, then,' I say, fishing out the maisonette keys and hooking the ring thereof round his outward-jutting thumbs. 'Sweet dreams.'

'You don't reckon by any chance he's actually asleep already?' Manish asks me out front, as we're pounding the butchers' half-dozen squares of pavement en route to his hoss (a yellow ought-two VW Bug, for the benefit of all period-cum-local-detail anoraks).

'No I don't, by fuck any chance. Christ, even a hand-made pillow needs some kind of under-support, and his elbows were half a foot clear of the tabletop.'

'Because in your place,' shouts Manish across the top of the car as he's opening the driver's-side door, 'I'd have been wary of leaving my keys with him.'

'Yeah, I know it must seem a bit strange,' I say, settling my arse cheeks into the front passenger-side seat of the Manishmobile, 'but the thing about Lou is, he really prides himself on the integrity of his mime schtick. Such that he'd have held that pose till sunrise, if need've been, so long as we were lingering in sight of him. But I guarantee that the instant he felt the cold steel of my key-ring round his thumb-knuckles he started counting down the seconds to the moment of our probable exit, and that by now he's hoofing it up Woodside Avenue, if not scraping his shoes off on the mat of my front doorstep. Bit of a queer fish, that Lou, I'll admit--but a real upstanding bloke, nonetheless. I trust him implicitly.'

'Well, yes, I imagine you must do,' says Manish. 'Trust is, after all, the cornerstone of every meaningful long-term relationship.'

Note, DGR, the utter bereavement of italics or double-inverted commas in the preceding spot of dialogue, an episode of typographical puritanism attributable solely to the corresponding apparent absence of the merest soup's son of a twinkle of ironic cuntishness in Manish's single visible okie as he cuntributed that very string of characterage to the pixellage of this here post.

'Look here, Manish,' I say, stuffing a hand under each arse cheek in a burst of emergency shirt-shielding prophylaxis, 'Lou is not--I repeat, not--my bloke. It's just that we have this club, the Arsenal-Bashers--'

'Yeah, I know. You mentioned them a while back.'

'I did?'

'Yeah, back at the Ape, right after I told you I had to skedaddle.'

'Blimey! I hope no one in the know overheard.'

'You mean, say, Jimmy? I wouldn't worry about that. Not that I can be sure he didn't overhear, but that it's no cause for sounding the village alarm bell if he did do. You see, he filled me in on the checquered history of the Bashers, and of your involvement therein, as I was ordering my second pint tonight, while you lot were palavering out back. "I know what that lot are up to," he said to me, "and trust me, all it'd take would be a single word from me to Mr Sedule and KHHHHHH!" He drew a finger across his bollocks (I'd mimic the gesture if I weren't driving).'

This spell of retrospective exposition was enough to make my head reel, as in the attempt even tentatively to suss out its implications I found myself staring into the vertiginous depths of an apparently infinite regress of cuntishness, of Shahvian cuntishness framing Phippsian cuntishness framing Shahvian cuntishness and so on, like a bloody moral-cum-epistemological well of mirrors. I don't mind telling you, DGR, that if it hadn't been for the more exigent cause of forestalling the full onset of an incipient case of carsickness (leta alone the fact that my hands were still pinioned under my ACs), I would have been more than content to put a fist into the Shahvian end of the old Gordian mirror-pit right then and there, the attendant risk of our smashing into a late-night-trolling bendy bus at 40 mph notwithstanding.

'So...if Jimmy already knew the Bashers were meeting under Mr Sedule's roof...?'

'...Then why didn't he have you lot kicked out? Who knows? Some sort of personal don't-ask-don't-tell policy vis-a-vis the Arsenal Bashers? In any case, surely the question is of merely academic interest now that you've got insurance.'

'Insurance?'

'Yeah, in the form of your pledge to show up at his sodding last orders competition. No need to worry about being pitched out of your local for the better part of the next month--or possibly even beyond that, if he wins.'

Fuck me with a rolled-up sheaf of actuarial tables if every trace of Manish qua standard-bearer of the spirit of unregenerate cuntishness wasn't once again being effaced in my good books by Manish qua non-standard bearer of good news. Rather gormlessly goaded on by this ongoing effacement, I then took it upon myself to ask him:

'So, then, if you already know about the Bashers, then all this talk about my supposed committed long-term involvement with Lou was...'

'...Mere acting, in the service of good-natured piss-taking. I know how paranoid you single guys are about being caught out on a man-date by the neighbourhood paparazzi.'

Right, that does it, I says to myself as both hands bolt out from their sub-gludial lair and, with the sureness and swiftness of a pair of laser-guided missiles, bear down on the bull's-spchphincter of my top shirt button. Trouble is, what with having been pressed down like a pair of panini for the past butcher's half-dozen minutes, for the time being they--my hands--are no better suited to shirt-shucking than a pair of dolphin's flippers would be. So, like a blokess drying her nails, I start flapping them feebly about in an effort to wake them up.

'Right, here we are--beautiful downtown Chipping,' says Manish, disengaging the engine. Then, glancing over at me, and subsequently evincing a good deal more schphincter tension than I should do were I in his Birkenstocks, he says, 'Chin up, Rugger. It'll be all the same in a hundred beers' time.'

'Er,' I stammer back gruffly, 'Would you mind letting me out from outside? I seem to be somewhat, er, incapacitated at the moment.'

(TBC, TBS, TBC, TBS, TBC, TBS, TBC, TBS...)