Yarnfacker's Bank Holiday

It is with no small degree of Shah-grin and cuntsternation, DGR, that I initiate the typeage of this here post by reporting to you on the unprecedented viscosities of ins-pissation attained by my thickness roughly ten minutes ago. It was right about then, you see, that, having brought you practically within pissing distance of the threshold of the venue of the second module of last Thursday's out-hangage in the closer of my last post, I was sitting with all ten diggits poised curled above my keyboard like those of a pianist primed to strike up the opening bars of 'Furry Lisa,' primed, i.e., and for my own part, to launch into a fresh spell of yarn-spinnage commencing in medias Redford's, when the following thought belatedly got round to staggering its stroppy 'govered way across the synapses of my gourdita: Hang on a bit. I may know Redford's better than I do the puckered ridges of my own schphincter (er, rather, 'considerably better than the PRMOS'), but who's to say my reader enjoys a more intimate acquaintance with Redford's than with the schphincter (or fanny) of Fannie Adams? What fact concerning Redford's is he or she capable of de-juicing from the meagre data I have hitherto supplied to him or her, apart from the bare predicate of its mere existence, i.e., the fact that, as my ex-third wheel Mr Winckelmann might put it, 'Redford's, like shit, happens'? In other words, I realised that the time was not so much ripe as rotting for me to do a spot of back-in-filling on the subject of me old local-away-from-local. That said (or, rather, thought), I also realised that, as this back-in-filling would very probably consume a considerable amount of pixellage, I might as well take advantage of the opportune inter-postal moment of its irruption by devoting a separate post to it. For ever mindful and respectful of the non-paying bloggerly puntility's addiction to a well-spun yarn as I am, I cannot but assume that the numerous back-in-filling episodes that I have hitherto been obliged to interpolate into the threadeage of this here blog must obtrude upon the okies of some goodly portion of this selfsame puntility as so many unsightly sheep-turdlets. So, DGR, if your body mass happens to cuntribute to that goodly portion, if to your mind the only good narrative is an uninterrupted one, I heartily, and without the merest soup's son of cuntdescension, implore you to shut this here window and seek out bloggerly pastures new, and to pop back in a day or two to catch Part Two of Basher's Delight; the present post will, after all, still be available ready to mouse should you encounter any clouds that require elucidation during your reading of that semi-narrative.









(YFCT, in a whisper): Are you sure they've gone?

(MFCT, likewise): I think so.

(YFCT, switching lights back on, settling into armchair, lighting meerschaum pipe and taking a few ruminative puffs therefrom): Splendid. Well, you may recall that the sole raison d'apparition of Redford's in these here pages, way back last December, consisted in its being a 24-hour tippling establishment within minicabbable distance of the maisonette. You may also recall that in the same typist's breath with which I made my inaugural mention of it, I pledged myself to suspend judgement on it until such time as I had properly sussed out what I then termed its genius loci potandi. Well, as you may have gathered from the sparsity of allusions to Redford's in subsequent posts, the aforesaid judgement, when it all-too-speedily cleared the docket of the courtroom of my private Old Bailey, was far from favourable. To summarise the main nub of the ultimately-triumphant case for the prosecution: Redford's suffers from a certain inherent and ineluctable generic limitation that renders it fundamentally ill-suited to the sustenance of the Ruggerswelt; for, you see, in contradistinction to a venerable old watering-hole-cum-larderia like the Ape, it is an accursed so-called theme-bar, specifically one of those so-called surrogate-retro bars that have become so fashionable here in London over the course of the past year. Just in case you've been living in a cave--or East Anglia--during the preceding twelvemonth, I should tell you that the general aim or principle of these places is to capture the mood or zeitgeist of a particular stretch of calendar-hooverage vis-a-vis an earlier stretch of calendar-hooverage. Still stumped, my troglodyte or East Angelinan friend? To spell it out more fully, then: you know how every decade of the past half-century or so, be it the 1950s or the 1990s, has had as its counterpart an ancestral decade with whose fashions, folkways and miscellaneous other unmentionables it was unaccountably obsessed? (Maybe you don't know. I can't say as I blame you, inasmuch as I didn't either this time last se'enmonth. But for what it's worth, since becoming acquainted with Redford's, I've heard tell of two other joints in the less immejiate vicinity exploiting the same premise mutatis mutandis, and in my okies, three of any sort of establishment of a given make or model doing bidness simultaneously within the confines of the 33 boroughs constitutes a bonerfied trend in London nightlife.) Well, in Redford's case, the two decades in question are the 1970s and the 1890s, as the casual punter may ascertain by taking the most toking gander at the front cover at its menu, emblazoned in a kitschy old-timier-than-dirt-typeface with the motto The Gay 90s as You Knew Them in the Swinging 70s; or at the home page of its website, on which it bills itself slightly more elaborately as 'an authentic full-scale replica of a classic Gay-Nineties-style ice cream parlour-cum-pizzeria of the 1970s'. As my carcass was scarcely in the early stages of preemie-birthable foetushood as of the concluding microseconds of the more recent decade of reference, I'm hardly in a position to vouch for the letter-perfection of Redford's mimicry of its model. I can, at most, offer a negative testimonial or two in affirmation of the joint's claims to authenticity, by pointing to certain of its traits that have struck me as being congruous neither in the setting of the present nor in that of the remote past. First off, there's the attire of the staff, consisting uniformly of red waistcoats and black trousers woven out of a version of polyester whose coarseness of woof-'n'-warp you wouldn't find disgracing the tits or shanks of the lowliest cashier or stockman at Tesco's nowadays; together with ready-made black bowties and elasto-strap-on'd mock-boater hats of moulded white plastic. Secondly, there's the decor, the better portion of which consists of these black-and-white-or rather brown-and-white--family portraits in which the blokes are togged out in frock coats and ascots, the blokesses in close-fitting dark dresses stretching from their necks to the floor, the boy-nippers in short jackets and knee-breeches, and the girl nippers in looser-fitting, lighter-hued versions of their mothers' dresses. At first glance, you might take these portraits for the genuine fantasy eccle article; but at second glance you start to notice certain sartorial peculiarties that tip you off to the fact that they were all snapped well into the latter end of the last or 20th century: a bloke here will be wearing trousers with flared bottoms, or even jeans; a blokess there will be sporting a boxy wristwatch or a plastic handbag; a nipper here or there will be spectacled in lenses that are large enough between the two of them to blot out the upper half of his or her phiz, or cradling a C-3PO or Barbie doll in his or her wee arm. Finally, there's the entertainment centrepiece of the joint: an automatic or so-called player-piano, which, in loo of a jukebox, offers up an assortment of unaccompanied chunes that mostly, in their cheerfully monotonous syncopation, seem indeed to hail from a more-byer-than-bygone era, but that occasionally mimic the familiar rhythms and cadences of a composition penned by Randy Newman, Elton John, James Taylor or some other singer-songwriterly pantheist of a generation-and-a-half ago. As for the rest of the place-specific paraphrenalia--the slatted faux-mahogany wainscoting, the brass fittings on the taps and doorknobs of the loos, the stained-glass-ensconced table-lamps; and, indeed, the Anglospheric purity of the menu (on which nary a curried or kebab'd or satay'd starter or entree is to be seen)--the lot of it might have been inherited from a TGIF's, as, for all I know, in my Chipperly ignoramushood, it actually was.

Well, I think that about covers it as far as Redford's-in-back-filling goes, unless, DGR, you've been living not so much in a cave or East Anglia as in a self-drilled pit extending a hundred metres into the peatage of the Norfolk Broads; for, if there's one fact of modern life that any indiwidual living in a corner of the globe touched by capitalist enterprise knows, it's that, regardless of their particular check or stripe, such godawful theme bars as are instanced by Redford's are consistently, and okie-burstingly out of all proportion to their intrinsic merit, packed to the point of suffocation. It was to this packed-to-the-gills SOA that I was alluding in shorthand when I averred a coupla hundred words back that Redford's was fundamentally ill-suited to the sustenance of the Ruggerswelt, and that, indeed, Manish had already alluded even more concisely when he spoke in the last post of the difficulty of getting a table there on a preekend night; and, TBS, the scene at Redford's hardly constituted an exception to or betrayal of this SOA when the two of us pitched up there last Thursday night at 22:58 GST.