Regent's Park Well Before Dark (and Marylebone Slightly Before and Well After)

Seizing Esmeralda's hand, and yanking on the dog leash so as to extricate Lucy from between my ankles--where she's been sandwiched, cowering and whimpering with her tail curled between her own ankles all the while--I force sprint the three of us back towards the patch of woods whence we emerged hours earlier. (It's amazing how these sausage dogs, for all of their paw-dragging comportment in nine-tenths of all other genres of sitches, become as docile as sheep as soon as they have the slightest cause to fear the consignment of their carcasses to the grinder.) By and by, after we've emerged from the trees back into clear terrain, I judge it safe to pause for breath-catching and bearing-taking. To the deafening soundtrack of my heaving bellows, I confirm that we've arrived here safe in three pieces--or rather, four pieces, counting Ronnie, the preservation of whose carcass, I gots to admit, I devoted nary a thought to in our flight; nonetheless, his arrival to our immejiate left only seconds after our own touchdown comes as a decided relief, so much so that I receive and return his Johnny-on-the-spot-proffered bloke-to-bloke full-armed shoulder hug in a spirit of spontaneous gratitude. As for answering the question of where here actually is, the strikingly obvious closeness of the opposite bank of the lake relative to its apparent remoteness on our way into the woods establishes at minimum the fact that we must be standing a fair pass south of our point of entry. Esmeralda's indication of a landmark--the celebrated bandstand--situated about a hundred metres off to the left/south, narrows even further the potential range of coordinates; and additionally affords us a provisional goal towards which to orient our steps as we indiwidually and silently mull over the carnage we've just witnessed. Mind you, neither the goal qua goal nor the purpose qua purpose (or qua anything else) is made explicit; it's just that sticking together at least as far as the bandstand just seems by tacit common assent to be the right thing to do, which isn't by any means to say for a dead cert that it's the wisest thing to do, what with your average post-traumatic gazelle shaft's ghost being the transient, mayfly-life-cycled beastie that it is. Case in point: although I can hardly vouch for my co-strollers (apart, perhaps, from Lucy, who throughout guides my arm along precisely the same shoulder-dislocating vector she imposed on it intermittently on our way into the Inner Circle), the nearer we draw to the bandstand, the harder I find it to keep my mind's okie and oriole focused on the stomach-inverting imagery of the massacre back at the old OAT; by and by, I start to notice that something up ahead sounds and smells awfully good. The sound gradually coalesces into that of an oompha-oompah band farting out a good-natured olde worlde dance chune, the smell--ah, the smell--into that of grilled meat (pork?) at optimum down-wolfing temperature. 'Do you hear that? And smell that?' I venture to ask, and nae mair. 'Yeah,' (and nae mair) Ezzie and Ronnie see fit to reply, poker-phizzedly. Thus am I thrown back on to the private intelligence-scoopers of my own okies, orioles, and nostrils as far as sussing out the occasion of these seemingly festive sense data goes; and the six of them have to wait a good bit--viz. another five minutes or so--to be of any further use. But at that point, all becomes clear--or, at any rate, mystifyingly, cubistically un-unclear, which istersay about as clear as you can ever expect anything to get in this so-called crazy mixed-up world of ours. In the bandstand stands a handle-bar-moustachio'd bloke clad in a red, brass-buttoned gold-epauletted military uniform, and crowned with a curious parti-coloured brimless top hat; waving his arms in time before an ensemble of clonically attired blokes all puffing on all of the usual oompah-oompahfying instruments--chuba, trumpet, trombone, non-skin-flute etc.--save for a butcher's quartet amongst them, who are all pounding away with their hands on what I assume (or hope) to be the heads of conga-heighted drums. Meanwhile, on all sides of the 'zebo, literally dozens--or quasi-figuratively hundreds--of people are merrily (i.e., half-drunkenly) dancing arm in arm, not in couples but in trios, each comprising two blokes sporting the same headgear as the band-members along with full-body smocks or man-dresses (likewise particoloured), and one blokess togged out in the hard-on-injuicing regalia of a Krautish beer-hall serving wench (ankle-length skirt, bazoomba-hefting, asthma-injuicing bodice and white blouse). Whilst at a much farther remove, I was content to identify the musical fartage as an olde-worlde dance chune and leave it at that; up close, I find myself continually tempted to pin a more specific handle on it, only to be thwarted at every such attempt: for a measure or two it sounds like an obvious knock-off of or tribute to The Blue Danube or to the waltz from Doctor Zhivago, then it shifts no less fleetlingly into something that sounds every bit as much like the Radetsky March or Stars and Stripes Forevahh--in short, it's a real poser, metrically speaking. Off to the left side, well clear of the bandstand but within groping distance of the dancers, there are arrayed, in neatly serried ranks, a butcher's sextet of long picnic tables, at which another literal several dozen blokes and blokesses are sitting, gabbing and necking; and quaffing great liter-glasses of beer and chowing down on great foot-lengths of sausage. Clinching the purpose-y point of the whole shindig, to the cubimystical extent above-mentioned-and-about-kvetched, is a massive plastic fly-by-night-high-street-boutique-style marquee wrapped round the crown of the bandstand, and proclaiming in Hitler-fonted capitals, against a test-pattened background of vertical colour bars, WILKOMMEN ZU DE 145te THURINGO-GHANAIAN MAIFEST. Well, betwixt the novelty of the whole spectacle and the gobsomeness of the food and drink on offer (possibly gratis), I'm all for unweighing anchor here at the Maifest. But to my infinite surprise and cuntsternation, neither of my bipedal companions (Lucy possibly being another story, the narration of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) will have anything to do with the suggestion of doing so. 'Hadn't we be getting back to the car?' Esmeralda opines. 'Yeah, Rugger,' Ronnie adds, exploiting his newly-won solidarity with Esmeralda to finagle an implicit ride back to Barnet; 'haven't we all had enough of Regent's Park for one day?' 'Well, I don't know that I have--or that Lucy has. But if you two insist...' (E&R, in adamant unison): 'Oh, we insist.' (YFCT, in stroppy solitude): 'All right, then, we'll turn round.' But just as I'm giving tug number 200 or so to Lucy's leash, towards the end of pursuing Esmeralda's and Ronnie's already dwarf-sized, steadily northbound-retreating, arse-view carcasses, a voice of no mere amateurish stentorian-ness calls out to me and mine, from the near east: 'HEY, RUGGER! RONNIE! ESMERALDA!' JUST WHITHER THE FUCK DO YOU LOT THINK YOU'RE GOING?' Which call turns out to have issued from the lungs, throat and gob of none other than James Phipps, seated at the near end of one of the aforementioned tables, with a beer stein in one hand and a knackwurst in the other. To think that all three/four of us had ventured into this frontier postcode for the sole purpose of giving moral support to this same James Phipps, but that none of us (Lucy again possibly excepted) had devoted a single thought to him since the moment of his presumptive defeat! Why, you could have penetrated neither the irony nor the pathos of it all without the aid of a titanium pea-soup spoon! 'I'd ask you to pull up a coupla chairs, only unfortunately,' he says, with a bemused, behind-the-arse arm-sweep paralleling the extent of the single backless bench stretching the full length of the table, 'the seating arrangement rather seems to preclude my extending the courtesy. But I dare say some space'll be opening up any minute now, at the start of the next dance number; the turnover rate's been quite high all along.' 'And you've been in a position to judge all along [i.e., because you haven't been doing any dancing yourself]?' 'Yeah, I'm afraid so. Call me a cultural, imperialist if you must, but I just can't seem to get my head round the mandatory gender ratio. I mean, there's easily ten times as much sausage up there [indicating the de-facto dance floor] as there is down here, or on the grill.' 'And when you term the gender ratio mandatory...?' '...I ain't just whistling "Two Blokes for Every Bird". No, according to this girl I was trying to chat up a bit earlier, before she was whisked away by a pair of her Thuringo-Ghanain brothers, it's a traditional dance configuration, imposed on them centuries ago by an outbreak of plague in Thuringia--or Ghana, I'm not sure which--that, whilst sparing three-quarters of the males, wiped out a third of the female population.' 'Either that,' I says to myself, recollecting a certain admission made by Herr Morike-Jones in his epistle to the Angry Londoner (and accompanying this self-apostrophe with a telepathically significant glance at my third wheel, signifying I'll explain it all when we get back to the ranch), 'or it's a traditional dance configuration imposed on them a fistful of years ago by the attrition of female attendance at these here Maifests.' 'In any case, Rugger,' he adds, his okies affixed downwards on the rim of his stein, 'I haven't exactly been in the mood for dancing, as you can well imagine.' Upon his glancing back up again, and making bloodshot, unfocussed okie-contact with me, I realise he's just crossed the threshold from the cool buzz into the spiritually touch-and-go realm of full-on bepissedness. Doubtlessly realising that I've realised as much, he assumes the stroppy yet resolute mien of a solicitous charge-taker and continues: 'But you lot must be parched and starving, thanks to my guild's exemplary professional standards [implicit cuntemptuous italics his]. Don't think I didn't notice it, the total absence of food and drink purveyance at the competition. I took the matter up with Ned--the MC--straightway, before the start of the whole thing. And, of course, he responded by throwing the book at me: "The cardinal rule of bartending is A clear head and an empty stomach." (Nevermind, of course, the flagrant disregard of this rule by half the contestants.) And when I countered in my turn, "But what about the punters?" he just shook his head and laughed insouciantly and said, "Oh, yeah, them. They can bloody well fend for themselves, can't they?" Whatta fucking cunt, that cunt. Anyway, my original point was, you should grab some free grub and suds here whilst you can. The beer's a first-rate pils, and the knackwurst is TD-motherfucking-F. I wish I could say the same for this gruel they're offering up in loo of sauerkraut.' He prods with a plastic spoon a wee ramekin, sitting on the edge of his plate, and full nearly to the brim with something that looks like quite a bit like runny oatmeal mixed with brown sugar. Wellsir, as far as I'm concerned, Jimmy's prescription to chow and drink ourselves into a coma on the dime of the Thuringo-Ghanaians amounts to as clear-cut a recipe for quotidian felicity as we're likely to encounter this side of sundown. But, alas, my companions are cuntishly prey to cuntradictory leanings. To state the case more Sinatra-esquely, Esmeralda will have nothing to do with the prescription, and Ronnie follows her lead her after the manner of a certain type of single bloke who, regardless of his immejiate prospects vis-a-vis the reigning blokess, will pretty much toe the gynocratic party line on the misguided quasi-Hindu or Buddhist grounds that he is thereby improving his chances of scoring a karmic corner against the hypothetical blokesses of futurity. 'Sorry, but eating sausage is rather out of the question for me,' she says. 'Whyzzat?' I gormlessly ask her. 'You don't mean you're a sodding...?' 'That's right,' she says with a wry little rictus of unmistakeable disappointment in HFCT. 'I'm a vegetarian. I should think you'd have noticed that by now.' Relexively, without any intervention from the cerebral cortex, my right hand starts plotting an open-palmed course for my forrid, as it will do whenever just about anyone draws my attention to any purportedly okie-burstingly obvious phenomenon, be it that two and two make five, &c. (see the last paragraph but three of my post of 24 May for the full catalogue of impossible phenomena). But then my left hand steps in just in time to arrest its progress and address to me the following pep-talklet: 'Hang on, old boy, and give yourself a bit of credit: you did notice at breakfast this morning that you were the only one tucking into the bangers. And all ungentleblokish sniping vis-a-vis her evident relish for certain genres of sausage aside, I would hazard to venture to guess, pending a comprehensive review of the takeaway receipts of the past month, that your girl is not, properly speaking, a vegetarian at all, but merely a North-Occidental Carnaphobe.' 'Meaning that in fact she'd happily devour a hogshead of minced human flesh provided the preparation thereof in question bore some appalachian hailing from east of the Urals or south of Gibraltar.' 'Now you're simply being spiteful, quite perversely against the grain of the spirit of my intervention, I might add.' 'Which grain-stroke spirit is...?' '...That of merely suggesting to you that Esmeralda is most probably not being quite above board here, and that you most probably can look forward to a bit of rhetorical elbow-room opening up on the gustatory-habitual front over the longue duree.' 'And as far as the shortue duree goes...?' '...my recommendation is to keep your gob zippered and gin and beer it.' 'Well adjudged and spoken, El Haitch. Thanks.' 'Not atoll-stroke-any time, old boy, not-atoll-stroke-any time.' [You really ought to meet my El Haitch, DGR. I think the two of you would get on famously.] Meanwhile, I see that Esmeralda is about to make a perfunctory trial of the maligned gruel qua potential sausage substitute: at her instance, Jimmy has just dredged up a spoonful of the gloop which he is now proffering to her, handle-outwards, along with a napkin, like a proper gentlebloke. She inserts the bowl of the spoon into her gob, gives the sample a few rapid-fire, mincing, copraphagic lip-cum-tongue-smacks, then clasps the napkin to her lower phiz and extracts the spoon all at one go. 'Ugh!' she exclaims, It tastes like bloody arse.' 'Couldn't have put it better myself,' smiles Jimmy. 'Well, I guess that settles it: we're off. Sorry things didn't, er, work out for you today, Jimmy...' '...Oh, Nigel,' Esmeralda whines, whilst giving one of my upper arms a supplicatory squeeze, 'must we really leave Jimmy all on his lonesome like this, in his hour of need? Surely we could relocate to one of the caffs at the Inner Circle...' 'We could do, and as I've eaten my fill, I wouldn't say no to such a plan.' Jimmy cuts in. 'All other things being equal, though, I would prefer the ambience of my own element to that of the Campari and hummus set.' It was hard to keep your jaws together, witnessing Jimmy playing the sympathy card-stroke-feminine heart guitar like this, with a degree of adroitness and co-jonicity worthy of commemoration by Machievelli or Sadé [yes, the soulful one-hit wondering English chanteuse, not the accent-grave-less buggering French aristocrat]. ‘And by your own element you mean your place of work, the, erm, Arrogant Chimp?’ (Whether the pained expression now traversing her phiz issues prevailingly from embarrassment at having got the name of the pub wrong, or appallment at a 90-minute-plus-wide chasm of uninterrupted peckishness opening up before her belly’s okies, is a query too sad to insist on.) ‘That’s the Sedulous Ape, FFR. But no: as a matter of fact, in view of the sorry showing by the Apeketeers today (present company excepted, of course), I feel I practically owe it to them not to show my face there tonight. What I’m hankering for is the ambience of pubbish anonymity, for some noisy li’l hole in the wall where nobody knows my name and where I can nurse my pint ‘n’ wounds in the company of the people who truly matter to me, unmolested by the sneers ‘n’ jeers of my fair-weather colleagues and friends.’ (Ah, Jimmy! If only you knew how closely this contingent of true-matter-ers came to comprising Ronnie and Fannie Adams—how a missing milk-bottle alone catalysed the transformation of this duo into a quartet—you’d be humming a different sitcom signature chune.) ‘Well, do you know of any such places in the vicinity of the park? Particularly any that are, erm, dog-friendly?’ ‘Yes,’ says Jimmy, re-donning his Sadé-istic smirk, ‘yes, as a matter of fact I do…’

*

Half an hour later we're handseling our first round of pints at a Marylebone pub sited not a quarter of a mile sou-sou'west of the Park. The atmosphere of the place--which occupies the ground floor of a narrow, five-storey backless wonder of a rusty-bricked terraced house typical of the Bone--is at once decidedly posh and decidedly blokey, after the manner of an old-school gentleman's club of the pre-or-non-titty-bar sort. In the front room, (a.k.a. the tap or bar room), I noticed, there was a genuine acoustic fire blazing in the genuine hearth of the genuine fireplace flanked by two armchairs of genuine, arse-scuffed non-Corinthian leather that might very well have been hewn from the same cow-carcass as supplied the upholstery of the complementarily well-worn table-chairs now supporting our arse cheeks here in the dining room; which, for its part, is adorned with its own panoply of upmarket blokey knick-nacks: pipe racks, tabacco-tins, snooker-cues (but no snooker table!), and, most okie-rivetingly, a well-smoked, donkey's decades-old oil portrait of a long-haired, smooth-faced tyke in a white clown collar and black shirt or waistcoat. And here's the clincher, DGR: whilst taking an obligatory lingering, wallet-bracing gander at the front cover of my menu, I managed to suss out that the monochrome, banknote-style image of a much older, slightly less ridiculously togged-out bloke depicted thereon was the image of the very same bloke as the one portrayed in the painting! The okies are always a dead giveaway, you see--for howsoevermuch the rest of the face may be baked and pummelled and stretched every which way, from nipperhood onwards, they retain their original--'

'--Look, mate,' you, DGR, cut in, 'Is all of this Radio-4-travel-documentary-style liquid-shite-finger-painting south of the asterisk just a roundabout way of saying, We finished up at the Milton, the blind-geezers' pub Jimmy told me about back at the competition?'

'I wouldn't go that far (or disparagingly [Cor! Radio 4! Hoegaarden save me!]; but as you've brought it up, I was eventually going to get round to springing that revelation on you.'

'Well, now that I've sprung sprung the revelation meself, let's get on with it.'

'With what?'

'With the high jinx involving the blind geezers...and the dogs...along with (ideally) some big-bazoomba'd bird being chased around the premises by some combination of the same. You know, something in the grand old tradition of broad English humour a la Benny Hill.'

'Look, mate, no one appreciates good old traditionally broad English humour more than I do. And believe you me, if any of the traditional clientele of the Milton had been on hand to offer up some choice cuts thereof, I'd have been right in there with my butcher's wrapping paper ready to hand. No Alsatian would have been suffered to pony up his prodigious schlong to the diminutive hind quarters of a Pekingese; no blindman to grope opportunistically for his missing dentures in the Pagean-stroke-Partonean cleavage of the Milton's admittedly well-stacked bar wench, without offering YFCT triplicate-permission-formed consent, in advance, to having it all written up in this here blog, with caffeinated sax-heavy skiffle soundtrack files attached.' 'So there were no dogs?' 'Apart from Lucy, no.' 'Or blind geezers?' 'Nor any of them, unless you count the aforementioned pictures of JM.' 'Cor...' 'Hence--as I hope you now appreciate--the need for all of the still-blokey-liferly filler after the asterisk.' 'Like Benny bloodyfucking Hill do I appreciate it. Why, for fuck's sake, didn't you just start out by saying, So we finished up at the Milton--the blind man's-stroke-seeing-eye dog's pub. Funny thing, though: there was nary a dog or a blind man in sight there ('nless'n, of course, you count, respectively, Lucy, and the pictures of John Milton hisself on the wall and the front of the menu)?' 'Because, DGR (incidentally, your average-blokish self is easily ten times as cuntish as your posh one), the possibility of doing so hadn't occurred to me till you mentioned it.' [Tugging menacingly at the flaps of your open shirty-collar]: 'And now that I have mentioned it...?' [Tugging no less menacingly at mine own shirtyfront]: 'I'll skip judifully ahead to the moment when the peculiar SOA in question was first brought to my attention.' 'Fair enough.' 'I wonder,' Jimmy says, as he and I are tucking into our respective burgers (you don't mind, I hope, DGR, a parenthetical allusion to the meal eo ipso)... 'You do what you gotta do. [aside, into your tit pocket:] You fucking wanker.' 'I heard that, but I'll let it slide. So, anyway: "I wonder," says Jimmy, as he and I are tucking into our respective burgers, and Esmeralda and Ronnie into their respective grilled chicken (!) caesar salads, 'where all the dogs and blind geezers have got to."' 'I expect,' I answer drily (i.e., in trying to repress every soup's son of an evincement of what a gormless berk I think he's being even in posing the question), 'that most of 'em are either in hospital or at the police station by now.' [Jimmy, nonplussed]: 'Howzzat?' [I, a bit wet this time round, in spite of myself]: 'You know, after the tussle back at the competition.' At which point one of my shins recoils from a well-aimed under-the-table kick, and I glance up to find Esmeralda glaring at me in Ralph Cramden fashion. 'Oh, I'm sorry,' I correct myself. 'I'd forgotten you weren't there.' (As a matter of fact, neither the direct nor the circumstantial evidential file quite precluded my instead asking, in all candour and gormfulness, something along the lines of 'You mean didn't catch any of it--not even the initial cane salvo?,' &c., but ultimately Esmerala's application of Ockham's Trainer-Toe proved well adjudged.) Thus, the three of us--Ronnie, Esmeralda and YFCT--are obliged to give Jimmy a recap of the goings-on at the competition after his departure, which, by his account, took place a mere butcher's-quarter-dozen minutes before the outbreak of hostilities--i.e., not a microsecond after the MC's (Ned's) divulgence that someone other than Jimmy Phipps had (in contravention, from a Phipps's-mind's-okie-povey, of more or less the same idyllic Yank sitcom scenario limned in the last post) been named champion. The whole collaborative narrative adventure amounts to a thoroughly unecomonical, time-hoovering, shaggy-cum-unshaggy dog epic; a bare schlongtaphone transcript of which, for all that, would almost certainly have put to shame my much snappier account--as already related to MFCT--of the same events in point of just about every yarnfackerly virtue apart from snappiness. But such, alas, is the curse that befalls every half-or-full-arsedly competent yarn-spinner who can be arsed to ply his trade for a full shift, as every human thread of his so-called material cuntstitutes a potential spinner in his or her own right; a bloke or blokess who will, indeed, eventually and inevitably get round to doing some serviceable if not first-rate spinning of his or her own if the master-spinner's yarn happens to extend long enough, or to become so tangled, as to involve participants in some earlier episodic constituent thereof. The early masters of the art--your Johnny Boccachioes and Jeff Shoemakers--had it easy: somehow they felt entitled to omit every mention of the adventures that befel them en route to the point of convocation of the random, sociologically-correct assemblage of blokes and blokesses that cuntstituted the very fuel and modus operandi of their spinning-wheel (and thereby to exempt themselves from any account of the recounting of these adventures to that assemblage); somehow they also felt entitled to assume that, once assembled, this assemblage would have Football Association better to talk about than the non-scrotal-sacking of an ancient Greek city, or the coitional habits of the chickens in some barnyard in Anybumfuckdorf, Anywhere--somehow it never occurred to them that, say, one of their precious knights might have been more preoccupied with stoating out whether or not the franklin or the miller was having it off with his (the knight's) wife's lady-in-waiting (a strange SOA indeed, this lack of snooperliness on the part of our ancestors, when you consider how much less crowded the world was back then). Anyway, the upshot of the second part of this digressive felching of the dead straw horse of the ancient yarn-spinners (the first part being an exercise in pure authorial shirt-shedding) is to justify my leaping ahead to the point in the evening--for evening by then it must surely have been, by every conceivable calculus (solar, chronographic, &c.)--when the so-called human interest factor began to re-rear its decidedly mingey head, which istersay, the moment when, our respectively plates having been cleaned and cleared away, and our fourth rounds of Hoegaarden (YFCT & Jimmy) and Boddington's (E & Ronnie) served up, Ronnie, who had long since dropped out of the convo altogether, cuntishly re-intervened by insisting on a change of topic, to wit on our addressing certain unfinished business appertaining to the Scottish Football Team (his words verbatim). TBF, I could see exactly whence, spiritually-cum-erotically speaking, this intervention issued, viz. from a self-addressed apostrophe along the lines of Here I am, in all of my hurricane-esque rockability, the pre-eminent bearer of three simultaneous standards--viz. those of Arsenalaphobia, Phippsophilia, and Esmeraldaphilia (the last by way of my menu and beer selections), and yet my creditor's balance on all three fronts amounts to the homonym of a trademarked cigarette lighter. So be it: it's high time to set the house ablaze with this selfsame Zippo. And whilst I fully sympathised with both the eros and the spirit of this selfsame apostrophe, I nonetheless felt judy-bound, vis-a-vis both myself and our tablemates, to resist and repulse its claims on my heart-schlongles. After all, by way of casting his fellow barmen's constituents in such a savagely piss-poor light, the three of us--Ronnie initially included--had managed to augment Jimmy's contempt for his profession a hundredfold, to a point where he was almost glad to have lost the competition. And on top of that, in virtue of my Hoegaardenar performance in this aspersion-casting-fest, I had revarnished my aura of blokey coprophonic eloquence in Esmeralda's okies. I was therefore to be roundly rogered with a snooker cue if I let it all come to naught courtesy of Ronnie's misplaced stroppiness on any of his three standard-bearing scores. Why couldn't he have kept his flies zipped instead of waving round his green one-okied serpent swathed oh so cuntishly and co-jonically in this condom of various non-green and non-red disinterested hues? To my surprise and quasi-relief, it's Jimmy rather than Esmeralda who's the first to clamp down on this rather unsavoury bit of convo-bait: 'Oh, for crying out loud, Ronnie [sclaims JP], it's a Saturday not a Thursday! And there's no need for you to speak in your twee little code: we're a world away from the Ape tonight.' Ronnie shakes his head as if to say, How I pity thee, thou poor gormless fuck. 'On any other given Saturday, Jimmy, I'd be right up there, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you behind the barricades, ready to sacrifice shirt, shoes and service in defence of your inalienable right to veto all discussion of Caledonian-pedipilular matters. But as the broaching of this particular Caledonian-pedipilular matter dates not from last or any other Thursday but from the present and no other Saturday, I must respectfully insist on my right to bring it to the company's attention. Now, as for my admittedly incongruous recourse this so-called twee code--well, that's easy enough to explain. You see, I believe that as it is Rugger alone who has generously vouchsafed us enlightenment with regard to the matter in question, it would be most ungracious and rapacious in me to deprive him of a scintilla of his full thousand-watt-bulb's worth of illumination by presuming to speak openly on the MiQ myself.' 'All in good time, Ronnie,' I say, not to be outdone by an ace when I have a joker up my shirtysleeve, 'all in good time. Remember that this is Jimmy's day not ours, and that therefore the calling in of any debts we may have contracted amongst ourselves ought by all rights to be postponed until we have collectively made good in full our debt to him--that is to say, by yielding to his chinwaggerly predelictions. If Jimmy would prefer not to talk about the Scottish Football Team, we must respect this preference from this here moment of...[glancing down at my mobile]...9:27, up until 11:59 and 59 seconds inclusive. From midnight sharp onwards, I'll be all too happy to talk Scottish Football with you two till my face turns plaid, if such is your desire.' 'Fair enough, Nigel,' Esmeralda says, pulling her hand away from mine and crossing her arms over her tits, as though she's suddenly caught a chill, 'but with all due respect to the man of the hour, I've got a right a basic, inalienable, unpreemptible right to straight talk from my fellow chinwaggers. And so I dare to ask, and with every expectation of receiving an answer: "What, Jimmy, has Thursday got to do with the unmentionable topic?"' Jimmy (damn him!), with ashen-phizzed resignation: 'Thursday's the official meeting night of their sodding club, the North London Arsenal Bashers' Association...' [Ronnie]: '...Correction, Jimmy: the name of the club is the Greater London Arsenal Bashers' Association, a mighty convocation of which our little Ape-based cadre constitutes merely the North London chapter.' 'You lot can fucking well call yourselves whatever you like, Ronnie, cos to me you always have been and always will be known as the Woodside Park chapter of the Phippsian-Arse-Chafer's Association.' [YFCT]: 'Now, that's hardly charitable of you Jimmy. I know we've long been something of a source of, shall we say, friction...' '...I'll say you have--enough to flay the fucking foreskin off an elephant's pizzle. At least five times you've nearly cost me my job, at least two you've nearly cost me my life [Plainly an exaggeration: by my count the reckoning is no higher than thrice and once, respectively]. I swear, Rugger, if it hadn't been for the fact that this competition was coming up, I'd have...' YFCT, cutting him the most pathetic, imploring, bovine-okied look: 'You'd have done what?' Jimmy blushes and clams up. 'Oh, nevermind. I was getting carried away, speaking out of turn or what have you. Just be on your best behaviour next time, OK?' I, solemnly raising my left palm and resting the right one on an air-Bible: 'Will do, Jimmy, will do.' It is, TBS, a very tender scene of understatedly heartfelt interblokial tweren't-nothingism that passes between Jimmy and me over the course of these last coupla lines of dialogue; one that'll easily make its way into the pantheon of the Top 20 tenderest such scenes that I have yet been a party to. All the same, I gots to admit that its net effect on the well-being of the Ruggerian psyche-cum-organism, in its present state, is such as could be simulated pretty effectually by a coupla extra gobfuls of Hoegaarden. For I know full well, even as I'm making nice with and being made nice to by Jimmy, that the unconnected cat-dots of my Arsenalophobia are well out of the bag and it's only a matter of time (30 seconds max) till Esmearalda limns the critter in all of its--to her prospective okies--horrid anorakish ghastliness, as she in fact does do, well within the margin of estimation: 'So you two,' she says, indicating Ronnie and me, 'have got this club whose sole purpose or mission consists in the running down or bashing of the Arsenal football team.' 'Not team,' Ronnie cuts in: 'club. Outside of international contexts, "team" is a match-specific designation.' [YFCT, shielding my cringing okies with one hand whilst tugging futilely at my shirtyfront with the other]: 'Surely, Ronnie, this is no time to be haggling over semantics.' 'O cunt rare!' Ronnie ejaculates with Neronic triumphalism. 'What better time for such haggling than the present? And while we're at it, I'll have you know, Esmeralda, that you're hardly dealing with a pair of Basherly back-benchers here. Yeppers'm: sitting at your elbow, and across from you respectively, are the Sergeant at Pints and President of our chapter.' 'And you meet, every Thursday--' Ronnie again, natch: '--Not every Thursday: on alternate Thursdays. Special occasions, such as last Wednesday's UEFA Championship match, excepted.' 'So that's where you were the other night. You told me you had to stay in to work on a report for your job, something having to do with...what was it?...ah yes: anisette tampons!' Well, in all due fairness to myself, I hadn't lied to her either as to the necessity of completing the report, or as to its nature; I'd merely fudged a bit on the prospective time frame of its completion (i.e., five hours as against the half-hour-con-cambio of time it'd actually finished up hoovering). But of course, the tendering of such a plea now would only serve to tighten the noose already looped ineluctably round my neck, so I just keep cringing in the same phiz-shielding posture as I await the executioner's kick. And when it comes (AFF), believe you me, boyo, 'I think I'd like to be alone for a bit.' ‘But darling,' I say, unvisoring my phiz at last, 'we must be miles away from the car by now. Surely you aren’t thinking of walking all the way there by yourself.’ ‘No: I’m planning on walking no farther than to the Marylebone Road, a jaunt I can quite safely undertake on my own, thank you—especially with my protection ready to hand.’ Through the involuntary agency of some sort of mental rebus (High-Street-Walking + Protection), I immejiately put the worst, and most improbable construction, on this last sentence. TBS, it's a proper house of lead cards, this construction, but it holds up just long enough for me to gape back at her like a total fucking gormless moron: ‘Protection?’ Coldy, impassively, mercilessly, she clarifies by motioning to me to swivel my chair sidewards and stretching both her hands downwards towards me lower waistline, a gesture that in all poignancy I gots to admit I have no trouble interpreting atoll (there being no equivalent to the mental rebus in the realm of so-called body language). So I judifully unhook the loop of the dog leash from my chair-arm and, scooping Lucy's then-not-quite-snoozing carcass up from my lap, hand the blessed li'l critter over (much to the sorrow to the BLC herself, if the string of whimpers and doleful backwards glances at YFCT during the transfer count for anything). Without another word, she cradles Lucy in her arms and marches out of the dining room. In the wake of Esmeralda's departure, Jimmy is, unsurprisingly, all hands and air-caps/-forelocks. ‘I’m sorry, Rugger. Believe me, if I’d ever had any idearrit’d set her off like that…I never would have brought it up.’ I console him by briefly re-assuming my solemnly genial tweren't nothing phiz, cocaine-razoring out a string of scare-ellipses on the tabletop and saying, 'In any case, it wasn't you who brought it up. It was him wot done it.' Then, swapping the TN phiz for the most bellicose, most hate-contorted of 'tis-everything-in-this-shittiest-of-all-possible-worlds-and-then-some ones, I orient my okies diagonally across the table towards Ronnie. At this point only his adoption of the most contrite, the most timid, the most forelock-smiting-cum-jaw-cum-scphincter-shivering of attitudes, can save him from suffering a fate almost as wretched as the so-called fate worse than death, at my shirty-hands. But what do my wondering, cuntsternated okies encounter in contrast but the perduration and augmentation of the most defiantly, unregenerately stroppy of 'tudes on Ronnie Livingstone's part. 'You're fucking right I fucking brought it up. And not a fucking moment too soon. Look, Rugger, the fact that you've got a bit of crumpet in your life hardly entitles you to sideline the Bashers. You're hardly entitled to make like we don't exist on her account.' Strictoo sensu, he's got a point; the adduction of which canary-schpincter-sized punctillio, I feel, entitles me to be as cuntishly hair-splitting in my reubuttal : 'And on what evidence, Sir, do you dare to charge me with this avowedly treasonous offence of outright Basher abnegation?' 'Pfff!' he air-spits back cuntemptuously. 'Exhibit A: Your nine-hour spanning term of temporisation vis-a-vis any elucidation of the terms 'one of us' or 'Gooneress' to your paramour [fair enough]. Exhibit B: Your self-exemption from the after-match celebration on Wednesday on the jubious and unprecedented grounds that you had 'a report for work to attend to' [Cuntishly late blow! I did, as a matter of fact, have to dash home after the match to email that report off. What business of his is it if I happened to give a tucking-in bell to Esmeralda afterwards?]. Exhibit C: Your wholesale snubbage of all of my phone calls and messages from the third through the 16th of May, eventuating in a rudderless, un-presided-over meeting of the Bashers on the 11th. [Christ! Has the fucker had a private schlong tailing me these past coupla weeks? And what about that lacuna in our calendar on the 27th of April, when both of us were bedridden?]. Face it, Rugger: this girl's made you go soft.' Anyway--TBT, present-tense-markers notwithstanding, those asides in square brackets are more representative of my present reflections, at the moment of postage, than of any even vaguely semi-articulate thought that might have formed in my gourdita during Ronnie's prosecuting barrister's speech. At the time, I dare say, all I registered, apart from the text of the speech itself, was the cuntishly face-cheeky expression he sported at the outset of its delivery; and the subsequent fact that as I, with the revelation of each exhibit, unhooked shirtybutton after shirtybutton, the points of his grinning gob, far from sinking or shimmying under the ever-more imminent menace of the reduction of his carcass to the proverbial grease-spot on the pavement, kept ratcheting his face-cheeks up notch by notch; such that by the time he'd emptied out the last grains of salt from the cellar on to the open wound of my blokish pride with that cuntishly under-the-belt concluding remark that I'd 'gone soft,' his phiz was a dead ringer for that of Jack Nicholson's Joker at its most cuntishly triumphant, barring the white powder and purple lipstick. In view of which phizzerly shenanigans, my reply to the whole speech consists, as it needs must do, in the single disyllable of Outside. Here, as before, the most toking gesture of retraction or contrition on Ronnie's part would suffice, AFAYFTIC, to spare us both and each the brutality of an outright shirtfest; but--alas!--no such gesture is forthcoming. TBS, he drops his Nicholsonian grin toot sweet, only to assume immejiately thereafter, with downast, self-communing lidded okies and outthrust chin, a mien of quiet, unstroppy patrician defiance, whilst unbuttoning his own top three shirtybuttons in quick succession. Only through the gentle, pulsing undulation of his ready-set lower jaw muscles does he manage to betray so much as a soup's son of an awareness of the woild of hoit he's imminently in for at the hands and shirt of YFCT. Recognising that the two of us have reached, as they say, the point of no return, I rise to my feet; and, laying a hand gently on Jimmy's left shoulder, as if to say, One of us, I trust, will be back, I stretch out the other hand leftwards and arsewards in a blokey stylisation of the chivalrous ZZ-Toppian AV gesture. Whereupon Ronnie rises in his turn, skirts his seventh's worth of the table, and judifully marches towards the front room, I following his footsteps in martial lock-step. I gots to emphasise here, DGR, the spot-on, imperturbable regality of Ronnie's performance from table to front door--it really was the stuff of a classic BBC adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities; on our way out of there, you (i.e., I, at that moment) really did imagine Ronnie in the very near future baring his chestyfront whilst stoically proclaiming, 'I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my cuntishness; and--why the fuck not?--it is a far, far, better rest my shirt goes to, than it has ever known, &c.' Outside, of course, once all four of our arse-cheeks had cleared the threshold of the Milton, it was rather the stuff of a different sort of BBC production--or, rather, the stuff of a certain kind of Thames production--in fact (there's no need to be coy about this amongst gentleblokes, is there, DGR?), the stuff of a classic Benny Hill retro-Keystone Kops chase scene, minus (regrettably), the topless blokesses. Which istersay that, far from taking his stand, doffing his shirt and putting up his jukes like a real man, Ronnie instead opts to set off at full speed, with knees to chin, up the pavement; and that I, in default of fuck better a course of action, set after him in so-called hot pursuit. And seconds later, just when I think I'm about to catch up with him, just when my mitts are fairly clutching at the phantom sinews of his neck, I find to my infinite cuntsternation and bemusement that he is nowhere to be seen. I give my legs the 'whoah-boys!' signal, and, after they've caught on and I've finally drawn to a halt, swivel my phiz in every pertinent direction. Ahead, and to my right, about a hundred metres off, I can vaguely descry the sodium vapour aura and traffic-generated conch-shell echo of the Marylebone Road; behind, and to my left, stands a cluster of municipal-collection-ready dustbins abutting on the corner of a side-side street or alley. For a half-minute or so, I temporise, fretfully and futilely kneading air dough in each hand, until I catch the sound of a movemental clink emanating from the dustbin-cluster; towards which I glance just in time to see Ronnie's phiz, crowned Chinaman-style by the lid of one of the dustbins, leering back at me with palms outstretched and thumbs impaled in its orioles, and blowing me an audible raspberry. Wellsir, in the by-now-proverbial blink of a hummingbird's okie, he's out of the dustbin and heading down the alley, and I am once again in no less hot (if slightly more winded) pursuit. When, a butcher's-dozen-seconds or so later, I find myself deprived of the sight of my quarry for a second time, my small-townerly-cum-suburbanite rectilinear streetsmarts kick in. Why bother trying to stoat him out of this veritable warren or hornet's nest of side-side-side streets and closes, I rhetorically query meself, when, sooner or sooner-er, he's bound to pitch up on the main drag anyway? So I beat a leisurely right-angled jog back to the dustbin-corner and down to the MR, and, shaw 'nuff, no sooner have I emerged into the hustle and bustle thereof, than my first rightward gander takes in the unmistakable figure of Ronnie about fifty metres off, staggering with a theatrical limp and shoulder-hunch across the first bar of the nearest zebra crossing. Closing in for the kill, I sprint off with cheeterly determination towards the aforementioned zebra, only to find myself semi-immejiately stopped short--and, indeed, thrown face-downwards--by an irregularity in the pavement, occasioned, so it would seem, by the overly-ambitious root of one of the civically-mandated High Street oaks or sweetgums (Thanks be to Ken!). I anticipate the fall just soon enough to save my phiz by stretching out my palms, but not quite soon enough to save my knees. The first order of bidness, on my re-erecting my person, is, of course, to scope out the ZC for signs of Ronnie. But such signs are quite evidently by now the legal guardians of a certain underaged blokess known as Miss Fanny Adams; having either been oblivious of my near phiz-plant or (more probably and cuntishly) goaded by it to press on faster across the street, Ronnie is no more to be seen. So, I start weighing the pros and cunts of continuing the chase on the north side of the Bone: a process largely amounting to a chemical analysis of wild goose vs. lame stoat content, but also taking into account such factors as YFCT's knowledge of the lie of the land and his physical condition...

Speaking of which, I says to meself when I get to that point in the assessment, How are those old knees of ours looking? The left one's looking about as pretty as it ever has done, but the right one's a different picture, as I have no trouble discerning through the newly-torn gap in my trouser leg, athwart which a grisly wine stain has already begun ominously spreading. The damage is nothing that can't be put right by a half-pint of peroxide and a few square inches of elastoplast; still, together with the millions of independently-tweezable shardlets of 'sphalt and glass permeating the surface of my palms, not to mention the grease-smudges besmirching each of my shirtyleeves, it's enough to decide me squarely in favour of postponing the final round of the arse-off and heading back to the Milton, as toot sweet as I can manage at a non-theatrically limping pace. Wellsir, immejiately on my barging in through the front door of the Milton, I discover, courtesy of the most cuntishly improbable and intrusive, if effectual, of antenna-prodders--to wit, the untoward collision of my schlong with the great-coat-swathed buttocks of a male punter--that quite a proper little brouhaha has erupted back here during my butcher's quarter-hour's absence. The scopic follow-up reveals a whole mass of such blokes--along with the occasional blokess--not so much queueing up at as swarming round, and completely obscuring, the bar. TBS, I daresay the whole assemblage can't number a swinging schlong or standing cunt above 20, but in the wee front room of a public house like this one, 20's a veritable mob. Even without consulting the digiclock of my mobile--which, in any case the ambient space-hooverage wouldn't suffer me to whip out--I can suss out with this is all about: it's closing time, and these volker are here to place their last orders. But why all the It's-a-Wonderful-Life-ian chaos? As I'm edging my way off to the left, towards the dining room, I get a pretty clear view of the sitch behind the bar; a view that only magnifies my gormlessness: the governor of the place is stationed at the tap, with his hands pressed to his temples like those of a hold-up victim as he remonstrates futilely, punter by punter, with the front tier of the mob. Behind him stands the barwench, filing her nails with cuntish unflappability. But of course this gormlessness is really all by the by, as my main aim, in thus scootching myself over, is to make my way back to Jimmy, whose arse'n'shoulders I'm now relieved to espy, through the archway leading into the dining room, still seated at our table and forlornly (as far as arse-speak can communicate forlonness) nursing the dregs of a pint. Just as I'm about to cross the threshold, though, I hear a whistle from behind my back, followed by some bloke calling out, sharply: 'Hey you there--shorty!' I turn round to find the governor leaning on to the left corner of the bar, and animatedly beckoning me over. Wearily--Eastwood-esquely, one might almost say--I trudge my way over to him, and claiming my full entitlement of stroppy amiss-taking, say: 'Sir would have got my attention just as effectually. And by the way, I'm not short: I'm five foot eight.' 'No, of course you aren't short, Sir. Sorry about that: I tend to overcompensate for the low ceilings, you see.' 'What can I do you for (as they say)?' 'Erm, well, did I not happen to overhear your friend--the one still sitting back in the dining room--mention that he was a barman?' 'You may have done. What of it?' 'Well, you see, I'm in a right pickle. Our own barman is apparently, shall we say, indisposed tonight, and Suzy here' (with a timid glance back at the nail-filer) 'doesn't do windows or last-orders.' 'I'll see what I can do. Mind you, I ain't promising anything.' [Re-pasting his hands to his temples and wandering off back to the tap] 'Of course not, of course not...' So, I finally make my way back to Jimmy, and get his attention with a quick tap on the shoulder. 'Psst, Jimmy! I've got a message for you from the governor. He begs the favour of asking you to clear this lot out in your professional capacity as a barman.' 'Well, I dunno, Rugger: after all, I've got nothing prepared...' 'Didn't you yourself say that last-order-calling was an improvisational art, like jazz, etc.?' 'Yes, but even the most virtuosic jazzman depends on having a few minutes backstage to warm up...' '...I have every confidence in you. You have the floor: knock 'em dead.' 'If only knocking 'em dead were enough, in the eyes of Her Majesty...' he mutters with a sceptical head-shake, whilst nonetheless non-figuratively rising to the occasion and turning round to face the crowd. 'HEAR YE, HEAR YE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! I BELIEVE WE'VE YET TO MAKE EACH OTHERS' ACQUAINTANCE. MY NAME'S JIMMY. AS FOR MY LEARNING YOUR RESPECTIVE NAMES, I'M AFRAID THAT'LL HAVE TO WAIT FOR NEXT TIME. PROVIDED, OF COURSE, THAT THERE IS A NEXT TIME; FOR, YOU SEE, MERELY IN VIRTUE OF YOUR PRESCENCE HERE, THE PROPRIETOR OF THIS PUB IS IN VIOLATION OF THE LAW, AND WILL BE LUCKY TO RETAIN THE PRIVILEGE OF SERVING ANY OF US AGAIN THIS TIME THREE-AND-TWENTY HOUR.' Across the threshold, I can make out the governor, newly returned to the corner of the bar, frantically mouthing the words Oomschtay! Ooomschtay!, pointing to the front door and palming out a Five and hand-cupping out an O. But either oblivious or heedless of the sign language, Jimmy presses on thus:

'BUT I KNOW THIS SORT OF LEGALISTIC RETTRIC DON'T CARRY MUCH WEIGHT WITH YOU PUNTERS NOWADAYS. A PUB SHUT DOWN FOR SERVING AFTER HOURS? YOU SAY, WHO'S PRIME MINISTER NOW? IS IT BONEY TONY OR PODGY WINSTY? WELL, I COULD CITE YOU A LIST OF 20 PUBS SHUT DOWN FOR ON ACCOUNT OF THAT VERY INFRACTION SINCE THE ADVENT OF THE MILLENNIUM, BUT I WON'T BOTHER--COS EITHER YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE ME OR, LIKE THE RAKEHELL DRIVER SPEEDING OFF DOWN THE M1 WITH HIS SEAT-BELT UNFASTENED, YOU'D SAY, IT'LL NEVER HAPPEN TO US.'

Throughout this last block of capitals, the crowd has been steadly thinning itself out, as punter after punter wallets his banknotes, pockets his wallet and shuffles out the front door. This is certainly a fine how d'ye do, from YFCT's povey, for so inured am I to Jimmy's punchy, pithy Apeside last-orderly metier that it's never occurred to me that a barman could bore the clientele out of a joint after the manner of a filibustering back-bench MP. All the same, come the full stop at the end of 'IT'LL NEVER HAPPEN TO US', there are still a good pairs of feet left standing their ground and showing no signs of going anywhere; and it is for these butcher's-nine-tenth's-dozen stalwarts that Jimmy reserves the marbled meat of the oration: 'IN LOO OF SUCH ARID ARGUMENTS, I SHOULD LIKE TO OFFER YOU A MUCH MORE PRACTICAL INCENTIVE TO LEAVE, IN THE PERSON OF MY MATE RUGGER HERE [Huh?]. TO SAY THAT RUGGER'S HAD A ROUGH DAY WOULD BE TO ELICIT A PAIR OF SATISFACTION-DEMANDING GLOVE-SLAPS FROM THE VERY PRINCIPLE OF UNDERSTATEMENT. IN THE PAST TWO HOURS HE, RUGGER, HAS LOST HIS GIRL, HIS BEST PAL AND HIS DOG--IN SHORT, HE'S SUFFERED THE FULL PANOPLY OF COUNTRY-N-WESTERN-CHUNE-MYTHIFIED TRAGEDIES, BARRING THE CONFISCATION OF A PICK-UP TRUCK.' Yet another vein of the Phippsian metier hitherto unknown to me, I says to meself in wonderment, The sentimental tear-jerkerly one. And what a rich, milkable vein it turns out to be! The ambient pathos is enough to make every bloke Jack in the taproom cast his okies towards the floor and put his hands--wallets and all--in his pockets; and both blokess Jills therein dab hankies to their face-cheeks. Too bad neither blokess is a day under 50; else, in view of my conjectural newfound bachelorhood, I'd assuredly be doing a bit of milking of me own on the side. Not that Jimmy leaves me enough time for any such milkage, cos no sooner have the pocketed hands begun fidgeting and the hankies re-handbagging, than he's off tapping/mining/milking a different vein entirely, AFF: 'BUT IT IS NOT, AT BOTTOM, TO YOUR SUPERFICIALLY HUMAN SENSE OF COMPASSION OR PITY THAT I SEEK TO APPEAL IN THUS ADVERTING TO THE TRIPLE-TRAGEDY SO LATELY SUFFERED BY MY DEAR FRIEND. NO, I SEEK THEREBY, RATHER, TO APPEAL TO YOUR MORE VISCERAL, ANIMAL INSTINCT OF SELF-PRESERVATION. FOR YOU SEE, LADIES AND GENTS: RUGGER, HAVING SUFFERED THE AFORMENTIONED TEE TO THE SIXTH POWER, MAY BE SAID, WITHOUT THE LEAST WHISPER OF EXAGGERATION, TO HAVE NOTHING MORE TO LOSE. [ ] AND THIS SELFSAME ABJECT-YET-CONSUMMATELY BELLIGERENT CONDITION OF BALLS-TO-THE-WALL-DOM MAY WITH JUSTICE BE ASCRIBED TO MYSELF; INASMUCH AS, IN DEFAULT OF THE PRESENCE OF THE LIKEWISE-AFOREMENTIONED BEST MATE, AND BOLSTERED, MOREOVER, BY MY DUE AND INDURATE REVERENCE FOR HER MAJESTY'S LIQUOR-LICENSING LAWS, I STAND READY, POISED, TO SECOND WITH EQUAL FORCE EVERY BLOW HE SHOULD SEE FIT TO ADMINISTER TO YOUR SORRY CHINS AND BELLIES. ADMITTEDLY, HE'S BUT A WEE BLOKE, IS RUGGER [], AND I'M NONE OF THE BIGGEST; AND ADMITTEDLY, THE TWO OF US ARE OUTNUMBERED BY YOU LOT BY A FACTOR OF FIVE TO ONE [By now, it's more like TWO-POINT-FIVE TO ONE]--ALL THE SAME, THE UPHSOT IS THAT, AT MINIMUM, ONE OF YOU WILL HAVE HAD HIS OR HER CLOCK THOROUGHLY CLEANED BEFORE THE BALANCE OF YOUR PATHETIC CONGREGATION WILL HAVE SUMMONED UP SUFFICIENT FORCE TO RESTRAIN THESE HERE TWO CLOCK-CLEANERS. IN VIEW OF WHICH CALCULUS, I POSE TO YOU EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU THE QUESTION: FEELEST THOU LUCKY, PUNK OR PUNKESS THAT THOU ART? FEELEST THOU THUS?' Wellsir, whether it's owing on the whole to a feeling of prospective unluckiness or to an-already-ascendant feeling of futility and somnolence, I cannot say: all I know is that by the time Jimmy's posing his final question, the last butcher's-dozen punterly arse-cheeks are filing out of the pub; and that but a blink of a hummingbird's okie separates the final door-slap of against the last of these A-CPs and the emergence, from under the bar-flap, of the governor, who thereupon makes a beeline for the two of us, and starts pumping Jimmy's arm like . 'Well done, erm, Jimmy, my boy, well done! I tell you, kid, you've got moxie! You aren't, by any chance, looking for a new barmanning gig?' 'Well, erm, no, not at present...' 'Of course not. I expect it's a seller's market down there in...?' '...Actually, it's up there in...Barnet.' 'Barnet, indeed? In that case--not that I've been up that way in quite a while, so's I can gainsay any transient cachet such a frontier borough might have acquired of late--I'd say you're woefully underemployed. Anyway, here's my card: think it over. In the meantime, would the two of you, you and your friend...?' [YFCT, stroppily albeit graciously enough] '...Rugger.' '...Rugger, care to enjoy a pint or two on the house with Suzy and me?' The offer is certainly tempting to me. But Jimmy respectfully, and I daresay, wisely, declines: 'Thank you, sir, but I really think Rugger and I had best be off to a chemist's. You wouldn't happen to know of one within walking distance?' 'Oh, I get the picture: night's still young, eh? eh?' What a fucking cunt. 'That's right,' says Jimmy, blowing off the minsconstrual through a genial grin (probably by way of sucking up to his prospective employer). 'Well, if memory serves me, there's a Bootses just round the corner on the Marylebone Road. Mind you, I don't know how good their selection is...' '..Oh, I'm sure it'll suit us down to the ground, Sir.' * 'So that's it? It's all over for this post?' 'Bar the shiting, yes.' 'Splendid: then, my verdict still holds.' 'You'll have to fill me in on this verdict of yours...' 'Well, verdict is perhaps the wrong word for it, inasmuch as no strictly legal or even moral tone is implied thereby: let's just say I find it rather interesting, in view of your warmly published strictures on so-called Yank-sitcom-endings, that this very post should have concluded on such a not un-Yank-sitcom-worthy note.' 'What, you mean on account of the fact that Jimmy finally got to show off his last-orderly chops in their proper milloo, and was rewarded for his virtuosity with a job offer?' 'Even so, MDF, even so.' 'Well, I'll admit there was a certain cuntishly pat quality of prosaic justice to the winding-up of that particular strand of yarnage. But you will recall, on the other hand, how cuntishly frayedly my own yarn-strand finished up.' 'Ah yes! On account of your having undergone the full panoply of country & western-chune-mythified-tragedies...' 'Rightrightright, barring the confiscation of...Cor!' 'Whatever is the matter, MDF?' 'I just remembered: mutatis make-&-modelis mutandi, I did lose the pick-up truck.' 'You don't mean...?' 'That's right, MDFC. After Jimmy and I had gone to Bootses, and after we'd patched my knee up, we caught a cab back up to Camden Town to fetch the McGyvermobile. But when we got to the spot where I'd parked it...' 'It was gone.' 'That's right: towed, naturally. I had to go back next day to fetch it from the council impound garage.' 'Forgive me if I seem unsympathetic, but I can't help observring that there is an odd kind of poetic symmetry between Jimmy's enjoyment of the perfect sitcom denouement and your suffrance of the perfect country and western tragic denoument in the same day. In short, if one were to regard this post and the preceding one together as a kind theodicean fable in diptych, the moral thereof might best be stated as: The Almighty Scots Demiurge giveth, and he taketh away.' 'Sure, or better yet: The ASD giveth through one bloke's gob, and he giveth again through the arse of the next bloke.' 'It's all about bottoms with you, isn't it? Anyway, I've one more question for you.' 'Make it quick: I'm about ready for bed [Yes: bed as in sleep, by my lonesome randy self].' 'As your car was parked well outside the congestion charge zone--and on a Saturday, no less--on what grounds was it confiscated?' 'Well, let's see: I've still got the ticket ready to hand here at my desk. The citation reads, Vehicle was stationed in a Controlled Parking Zone during restrictive hours.' 'Pshaw! And you have the effrontery to call yourself a Londoner...'