Regent's Park Well Before Dark (UAdR: Part Three)

OK, so, to take up the thread again: It's about half-past nine. last Saturday morning, the morning of the 20th-- '--Don't you mean, It's exactly 19:45 last Wednesday evening, the evening of the 17th--?' 'No, I mean what I fucking meant: circa 9:30 BST, 20/05/2006.' 'But the Championship match was on Wednesday the 17th, not on Saturday the 20th.' 'My gratitude to you for having boned up on the football schedule since our last protracted chinwag is surpassed in warmth of feeling only by my cuntsternation with you for having apparently pulverised or dislodged the last gormlet in your brain with that there selfsame bone. Did I not avow at the close of the last post that I'd be treating of the Championship match by way of the Esmeraldan Leidenschaftsgeschichte?' 'Well, yes.' 'And did I not further avow that I had not spectated on the ol' Arsenalsarschreisung in Esmeralda's company?' 'Well...erm....yes.' 'Well, then, as surely as B follows A or Doomsday follows Arsenal UEFA Championship, it follows that I would begin this here post with an account, not of the match itself, but of the next yarn-worthy episode in my liaison with Esmeralda.' [Chastened but stroppy]: 'Well, why don't you just try keeping up with results in two sports at once and see what it does to your...thinking...can-do-thingies...' 'Powers?' 'That's right: your thinking powers.' OK, so, it's about half-past nine last Saturday morning, and Esmeralda and I are breakfasting in that tiny three-by-five-foot corner of the ground floor of the maisonette known officially, appropriately, and cuntishly, in estate-agent's arrrrgh-o, as the breakfast nook (Are you with me here, DGR? I mean, in thinking that breakfast nook is one of those coinages, like concentration camp, that pretty much unabashedly wears the shittiness of the thing it stands for on its shirtysleeve? Doesn't the very phrase breakfast nook conjure up the image of a snarky-cunted bloke in a shark-skin suit saying, 'Oh, you say you were expecting a dining room, mate? For a grand a month? Skewed me, please, for a moment, whilst I peel my okie-balls off the wallpaper'.). Anyway (to address only the reader for whom the last left bracket but one constituted something other than a KEEP RIGHT OF THE NEXT RIGHT BRACKET sign), back to the collation: this isn't one of your poncey non-Lincoln-variety continental breakfasts we're tucking into either; it's a proper English breakfast comprising all the fixins that in this day and age can be consumed in mixed company only after the prospective down-chower has mimed a clinically spot-on terminal cardiac arrest by way of signifying to his tablemates, 'Yes, yes, yes: I know exactly what I'm getting into here,' viz. not only my usual Weetabix and peanut butter, but also bangers, mash, toast, marmalade, bacon, eggs, grits, scrapple, chitterlings, &c. Oh, yeah: and of course, poor bwah, tea; straight from the tin, steeped loose and unbagged in the pot, and strained into cups partially filled beforehand, to the cusp of the handle, with milk--at least that's how it should have been. As it actually was, I was sitting there with one hand clenched round the handle of the strainer, the other round that of the pot, with the spout of the latter pointed towards Esmeralda's bone-dry cup, and poised just a cunt-hair fraction of a minute shy of the critical angle of pourage, when she interjects, just in the nick of time: 'Aren't we forgetting something?' 'Cor!' I ejaculate, setting pot and strainer precipitously, if gently, down on the table. 'Thanks for catching that. It'd have been enough to make my gran turn in her grave, my putting in the milk afterwards.' So I sprint back into the kitchen; and just after I've retrieved the milk bottle and as I'm swinging the fridge door to, my okies happen to alight on the muffled-bell-ringing profile of a child brandishing the back of his hand athwart his wide-open gob; and, subsequently, and more comprehensively, on a small piece of paper affixed with a magnet to the front of the fridge donkey's weeks ago, and long since forgotten about. 'Saturday, May 20,' I says to myself, my stubbly, uncaffeinated phiz most likely presenting the very allegorical image of Incapacity for Giving Two Shits. 'That's today, innit?' But over the course of breakfast, little turdlets of memory un-schphinctered by the sight of that there piece of paper keep percolating into the surface of my consciousness, and piecing themselves together there most unsavourily and, ultimately, un-ignorably, into a right hefty and substantial piece of excrement. First, I remember that I've not merely told Jimmy I might make it to this last orders competition thingy of his--I've actually promised him that I definitely would do. Then I remember Manish's sage words about the insurance policy against my exposure as an Arsenal-basher tacitly purchased by my prospective attendance at the competition. Finally, and most materially, I remember that, as far as I know (for, in virtue of his inside scoop on the conductivity of the Manish-to-Manisha-to-Esmeralda gossip train, the Almighty Scots Demiurge perforce and alone knows more), Esmeralda as yet enjoys no more intimate acquaintance with the Ape, with Jimmy, with my Arsenalophobia--with the whole stinking fish-'n'-popper enchalada--than with the carcass of Fanny Adams; and thence, I reel my way over to the sobering realisation that I have, as of today, arrived at a Rubicon of sorts on this enchaladic score: that I'm presented with the choice between either keeping my word as a gentlebloke with Jimmy, and thereby potentially bringing to Esmeraldan light certain potentially off-putting facets of the Ruggerswelt that have here-to-four remained hidden therefrom; or potentially cutting my ties with every actual bloke Jack of those facets once and for all, by not showing up for today's barman-to-barman throatwag. And TB unabashedly T, I did come cuntishly close at one point that morning to plumping wholeheartedly, definitively and irrevocably for that second choice. For a bloke who's been single as long as I'd been as of the last week of last month is only too vulnerable to the temptation to chuck the two-shoguns-cum-whole-shebang of his bachelor's lifeworld out of the balloon basket the moment the first blokess who'll...erm...go on a balloon ride with him comes along. On the other, equally supple-wristed (and I don't mean from playing pinball) hand, in his soberer, less tumescent moments, such a bloke is just as apt to cling with Caledonian tenacity to the most Antiques-Roadshow-unhawkable knick-knacks or relics of his celibatory past; inasmuch as for him, in contrast to his serially-hitched counterpart, the memory of the single life is not so much fresh as, IaMoS, hard-wired into his very organism: he knows, with every fast-twitching muscle cell of his schpincter, how much he had come to take for granted the proximity of every lever, knob and dial on the console of his solo-flying-Doctor's TARDIS, and to what a mewling, puking, self-soiling condition he'd be reduced should he--in the event of having received an unceremonious arse-kick out into the cold courtesy of the toe of the (Nancy) Sinatran boot--no longer find each and/or every one these little gizmoes ready to hand. But speaking, however tangentially, of time-travel, I'm afraid that by virtue of having launched myself clear on out of the space-time continuum altogether in the second sentence of that last paragraph, I've left the reader quite in the dark as to the psychic chronology of the breakfast--that istersay, as to the whens and wherefores of my passage from the first recently-single-bloke-ish attitude to the second one in this particular matutinal instance. In point of fact, it was a three-staged chronology: during the first stage, coinciding surely-uncoincidentally with my consumption of five cups of tea and two PB-schmeared Weetabix cakes, elapsed the largely passive reconstitution (as described above) of the circumstances and obligations appertaining to the flyer. The second stage marked both the scission/mastication/ingestion of my first two bangers and the high-water mark of my inclination towards the first course of action, the ballast-jettisoning one. 'Ffeined to the gills, by turns paranoid and euphoric, randy and famished, I heard out Esmeralda's proposed day-pissing-away itineraries (e.g., Lucy-walking down at the dog park at Hampstead Heath, window-shopping the antiques boutiques on Portabello Road) with the outer, collected, ever-sporting patience of a Hugh Grant, and the inner, demented, bug-okied impatience of a Peter Lorre. Just give it another hour, PL apostrophised me in completely idiomatic, if slightly and slimily German-accented, English, and this Jimmy fellow will be dead, and you will be free. Freeeee...to do what you waaaant, any old tiiiiime...! 'Free, for instance,' I apostrophised him in my turn, 'to pop upstairs for a quick one after breakfast?' (PL, rubbing his hands together lasciviously): Ye-e-e-e-ess, exaaactly. But by the time I'd polished off my fifth egg, fourth banger, third piece of bacon (belch), second slice of toast and first and last helping of taters, PL and HG had both split the scene and been replaced both on the inner and the outer shirtyfronts by a bloke of an altogether more complacently corpulent humour--someone along the lines of, say, Stephen Fry, or a less stroppy Charles Laughton; and I was well along into stage three. So, clasping her fork-free hand in mine, our elbows describing right angles to the tablecloth, I says to her: 'Esmeralda, darling.' 'Yes, Nigel, dearest?' 'There's something I really should tell you before we settle on any kind of definitive plan for the day. You see, long ago, before you and I met, I made a promise to this bloke.' 'A promise, perchance, to have and to hold, from this day forward, in sickness and in health--?' She's obviously just leading me on a completely jokey, tongue-impaling-face-cheek word-baton relay race; but my Arr Haitch is not particularly well-known for his sense of humour. Luckily, with a bit of telekenetic heave-ho, I manage to queer his shirtbound pitch into the gentlest of arm-wrestler's hand-slams, excusable, should she have any so-called issues with it on the grounds that it opens up an uninterrupted prospect of her lovely phiz. As she seems not to have any such issues, I reply, as stolidly as I can manage: 'No, nothing like that. This was a one-time commitment.' 'Oh, really?' she says, cutting me one of those Why don't you dig a little deeper into that hole you've fallen into?-type looks. That sounds so much more...wholesome.' 'Look, your first guess was cold enough, and your second one's enough to give Lord Kelvin a run for his thermometric money. What I promised this bloke--' '--Lord Kelvin?' 'No, not sodding Lord Kelvin--this other bloke; what I promised him, this other bloke, this friend of mine, was that I'd offer him what you might call moral support, at a certain event, on a certain day--today.' 'So your friend's appearing in court today, and you've told him you'd serve as a character witness.' 'No, although you are getting warmer: the event in question is a sort of public spectacle, albeit not a legal one.' 'So, your friend's in a band, and today's their first gig.' 'No. You're getting warmer--or maybe colder; I can't rightly tell.' [The ploughman of stroppiness just finishing up his first go-round of the field of her forrid:] 'Well, then, what is it?' By this point I can tell I'm really pushing the envelope with my evasive butchers'-dozen-questions-style temporising, and that if I tarry any longer, this here genial copular chinwag is bound to morph precipitously into our inaugural copular shirt-and-blouse-fest. Still, rather than spoil the gustatory afterglow of our breakfast by spilling a whole tin of Phippsian baked beans on to the table, I would prefer to let the flyer speak for itself for now; and to let the Phippsian chips fall out of the fryer-basket where they may, as the day progresses. So I says to her, 'Hang on a second,' and retrieve the leaflet from the fridge front, handing it to her on my en return route to my seat across from her at the breakfast-table-let. She studies it for a bit, then says to me (in no particular adverb-worthy tone): 'I see. This mate of yours is a...barman?' 'That's right.' 'And this last orders competition is some sort of shouting-off tournament where he'll be pitting himself against scores or hundreds of his fellow London barmen?' I spread my greasy mitts in non-plussedness. 'Erm...I guess so. He didn't really go into any detail about it; just asked me if I'd show up, and I said I definitely would do.' 'Well, I'm certainly game for attending if you still are.' 'I wouldn't say I'm exactly game...' 'Even so, a promise is a promise.' (Note to Mental Archivist: file preceding comment on the Esmeralda shelf, just behind the the folder labelled Remarks apropos of Manisha Asha: 22/04/06 .) 'Are you sure you're up for it?' 'Why wouldn't I be? It's in Regent's Park, after all--a bit farther south than Hampstead Heath, to be sure, but still prime dog-walking territory.' 'Well, then, it's settled: we'll go. In the meantime [my sense of time evaporating along with my anxiety], shall I brew us another pot of tea?' 'In the meantime?' she rejoins, unplugging the kettle peremptorily. 'What meantime?' This do of yours starts in three quarters of an hour. No, we'd better clear this lot off straightaway, or we won't have a hope of being even fashionably late.' 'So much for your queeeeck one, eh maaaaate?' Peter Lorre gloats to me five mintutes later as I'm somnombulantly washing and rinsing plate after plate at the kitchen sink (Esmeralda having skewed herself upstairs to the loo). 'No worries, mate,' I yawn back at him. 'I doubt I'd have been up to it anyway.' * Wellsir, at about 10:30 we high-tail it in the McGyvermobile down the High Road, Ballard's Lane &c., stopping by Esmeralda's digs just long enough to retrieve Lucy; then proceed southward and onwards towards the Primrose Hill/Regent's Park area, eventually resigning ourselves to a parking space on the Camden Town side of the Park, in sight of the Mornington Crescent tube station (which, incidentally, would have been the most natural point of detubation for a Lucy-less trip to the same destination). After traversing about a quarter-mile of streetage, we enter the park through its eastern flank, just south of the zoo, and gradually wend our doggie-led way to the northeastern finger of the Boating Lake. Although I don't much go in for green spaces generally--and, in any case, until quite recently, as a single, non-jogging, non-pet-owning, non-homeless, non-exhibitionist bloke, I haven't had any kind of an excuse to frequent them--I confess I've always, since my earliest days as a Londoner, had a bit of a soft spot for Regent's Park, one probably unique to non-Barnetian London locales. I think it must have something to do with its reminding me of home, particularly down here by the BL. The whole aesthetic combo of the willows disconsolately trailing the split-ends of their droopy branches in the water like jilted blokesses washing their hair in the lavatory sink; and all the ducks chipperly swimming round, pecking up breadcrumbs, quacking and shitting as only ducks can do, is enough to make you think, for a moment or two, that you've been teleported a hundred miles nor-nor-eastward, to the shore of the Mere at Diss. Then, waking from your reverie, you realise that you're not in Diss but in London, and that hence there are ready to hand and gob a gazillion superior alternatives to your usual post-Mere-stroll itinerary of getting roundly pissed at the Waterfront Inn and staggering back on stockinged feet to Mum and Dad's house, and you feel a gazillion times better than you would have done if you actually had been back home. But this is all a bit digressive, this Diss-cum-RP-quisition; inasmuch as I probably would have felt every bit as chipper at that moment--viz. 11:10 BST on 20/5/2006--had it elapsed on the Heath o' Hampstead, as per Esmeralda's original plan; or at Hyde Park, or, indeed on any patch of communal recreational turf in Greater London where the blades of grass outnumbered the syringes or crack vials by a factor of at least a hundred to one. Yessir/no ma'am, there's nothing quite like cantering along in a park on a beautiful London spring day--15 degrees centigrade, and not a naked sunbeam in the sky--with one hand in the hand of a comely blokess, the other in the loop of a dog leash, to make a bloke's spirits soar; to give 'em enough lift, indeed/I'm not ashamed to admit, to carry them clear on up into the croonerly stratosphere of pop-standard-dom (AFF): 'I like Regent's Park in May, How about you?' [Esmeralda, thank Contingency, recognizing the song straightaway]: 'I like a chune by Marvin Gaye, How about you?' [R]: 'I love a paycheck stub When the rent is due.' [E]: 'I like potato crisps, CTM and will o' the wisps, How about you?' [R]: 'I'm mad about fish 'n' poppers Can't get my fill...' [E]: '...and Kenneth Livingstone's, erm...' [R, speaking]: '..."croppers"?' [E]: 'Sure, that'll do in a pinch. And Kenneth Livingstone's croppers Drive me to kill.' [R, carried away (doh!)]: 'Jabbing wax at an Arsenal match, when Thierry H. is in the hatch may not be new, but I like it, how about you?' [E, speaking, and halting her stride]: '"How about me"? Sorry to break up the duet before we've reached a proper cadence, but whilst that lot may be old hat to you, it's new as post-graduate Greek to me. What does it mean to be in the hatch, for example?' Well, that's a relief, I says to myself: At least she's caught hold to begin with of the relatively harmless anorakish bit of the stanza. Then, aloud, I says to her: 'In the hatch? Well, firstoff, hatch is slang for the penalty box.' 'And we're talking about what sport here? Football, I assume...?' [Warming to my explicative assignment, soccer-dad-to-four-year-old-bairn-fashion, in spite of myself:] 'That's right. And to be in the hatch means to be poised on the edge of the aforesaid box and about to deliver, into the opposing side's goal, a penalty kick; a kick that--not to bore you with too much technical talk--is pretty much assured of reaching its mark, barring an earthquake or the onset of an apoplectic or epileptic fit in the goalkeeper.' 'OK, and what about this jabbing wax business?' 'Oh, that?' [Pausing for the emission of a disingenuously hearty, Tom-Bakeresque blowfish sigh, as if to say, This really isn't worth going into.] 'Well, it's a sort of simulation of voodoo ritual...wax dolls and whatnot...all in good fun, of course.' Anyway, DGR, if you’ll permit me a meta-bloggerly digression—as distinct from the proper bloggerly digressions that are my stock-in-trade—all along in these here posts I’ve been obliged to tread (for your benefit, I might add) a cuntishly fine line between presenting what you might call an artificially cinematic, or outer-camera’s-okie povey, of the events that obtrude upon my lifeworld; and the presentation of a naturally—and soporifically—introspective or naveloscopic account of those selfsame events. On the whole/in most cases, if I do suck myself off so, the compromise works out well enough. But in the case of this particular episode, the episode consisting in or pertaining to my gormless spilling of the upper layer of beans of the tin of my affiliation with the Bashers on to Esmeralda’s lap, the old two-tier system rather tends to break down. Cos you see, whereas the TTS would merely have registered the discrepancy between my outer Tom-Baker-esque nonchalance and my inner Curly-Howard-esque cowardice; the fact was that, underneath the CH-esque C lurked yet another, and ultimately more perdurable psychic stratum, the stratum of relief that Esmeralda had not turned out to be one of them, i.e., an accursed G**ner. (Admittedly, for tactical-yarn-spinnerly reasons, during my single here-to-4 4A into the hallucinatory realms of prospective romance dissolution [i.e., the wee Ape-set dramatic interlude in the last post], I was obliged to keep this particular rabid kitty well bagged and to let one of her runtier siblings have the foamy-gobbed run of the place [i.e., my psyche], inasmuch as the active solvent ingredient then in question was Ronnie Livingstone, who would obviously have been rendered as inactive as in the event of the realisation of a G**nerised Esmeraldan alternate worlds scenario.) As remote as the odds were of such an eventuality eventuating, in view of the total absence of the A-word or the G-word from her conversation during the deal-sealing period of our liaisement--a period during which, after all, the Scottish Football Team had been climbing steadily, match by match, towards the all-time zenith of their Champions League career--it had all along to be cuntenanced; for fuck any and I mean but fuck any other discovery concerning my girl, be it that she had once been a bloke or that she was a City Hall double agent despatched by Ken's minions to liquidate his mayorship's disloyal male opposition one schlong at a time (or--why not?--both, simultaneously), would have so effectually nixed any future commerce between us. After all, we're not just talking about your run-of-the-mill Shakespearean or Hillbillyean romantic spanner-in-the-works here; about pitching up stag at some masquerade or hoedown in 16th-century Verona or 19th-century Sister's-Bumfuck, Kentucky, toe-ing out a hard-on-injuicing gavotte or or square-dance with a blokess, and learning afterwards, to your cuntsternation, from her wet nurse or your cousin Cletus, that not only do you and she not have a parent in common, but that she, moreover, hails from the thrice-forsworn tribe of the Capulets or McCoys: a Gooneress by any other name--Rose or Forsythia or, indeed, Esmeralda--would still smell about as sweet as a tonne of steaming, straight-from-the-chute, pre-hammered horseshit. The one-size-fits-all inverted cross of football-widow-widowerhood was one that I could eventually, if reluctantly, be persuaded to bear in solidarity with millions of other blokes dispersed throughout the length and breadth of the Kingdom. Thus, from my povey as of that moment, as far as the spillage of the remainder of the tin of Basher’s Baked Beans went, it was simply a technical-managerial matter of postponing the unlidding of the tin till such time as Esmeralda herself disclosed her own captivation by some complementarily off-putting third-stream passion--say, crotcheting, or doll-collecting or skeet-shooting--that would afford me enough counter-leverage to excuse my weekly nip-downs to the pub for a televisual Arse-reaming. Christ, any alternative scenario was preferable to that of marking time as the whinging, cringing, smooth-sacked gigolo of a Gooneress! But, as I was saying, this was to be--and has been--a meta-digression. To revert to the old two-tiered system: I'm just now trying desperately to retrieve the top layer of Arsenalaphobic beans by way of my TB-esque nonchalance, whilst Esmeralda, without presumably knowing quite what I'm about, likewise presumably senses that it's something she won't at all approve of, and gives voice to this dual-presumption, by saying, in a tone utterly bereft of conviction: 'Of course. Nigel Wetherby McGyver, you astonish me at every turn.' ' I really wish she hadn't uttered the last two of those afore-typed capitalised character-streams; as they put me straight in mind of my mum at her most uncompromising disciplinarian moments. (A smitten-forrided memo of advice to all the blokes out there: On pain of castration, never voluntarily reveal your middle name to the blokess in your life. Pretend you don't have one, if you must.) 'Anyway,' she goes on, a bit too un-briskly and absently for my taste, 'Shouldn't we be getting on to the competition?' 'Of course.' 'Well, you've got Lucy: lead the way.' A certain schpincter-dilating/forrid-smiteworthy revelation dawns on me just before I reply, 'I'd be only too happy to do, if I knew it.' 'Why don't you check the handbill then?' 'Because 1) I didn't bring it along, and b) it wouldn't be of any use for that purpose anyway.' 'Why ever not?' 'Cos it didn't mention anyplace specific within the park.' (With a simmeringly sceptical, narrow-okied look that cuts right to the root of me schlong-bone:) 'Are you sure?--sure that a phrase like in front of the bandstand or at the top of the Inner Circle or at the bottom of the croc pit at the Reptile House wouldn't ring a bell?' 'Sure as Shaw, on all three counts,' I reply, tactically omitting to add: and you should be even surer, considering the fucking handbill was last seen in your possession. 'Well, here's a fine how d'ye do,' she says. 'Thanks very fucking much, Mr...what's your friend's last name?' 'Phipps.' '...Mr Phipps, for narrowing the coordinates of this down a bit from "Southern England" or "the Bloody Northern Hemisphere". He knew where to go, so he reckoned everybody else would know too. How absolutely typical of a bloke not to give a thought to other people's needs. And how typical of a bloke, too,' (she now turning from Mr Thinair to Mr McGyver), 'not to ask for directions.' With saintly patience, I hear out this piss-stream of invective of hers, a torrent of words that can scarcely be dignified by the name of an argument, seeing as how it's more chock-full of gaps than the combined platformage of all the tube stations along the Northern Line. Were I in any mood for rational disputation, I might point out one or two of these gaps: the gap, for instance, between the established fact of my having got the handbill from Jimmy and the chimerical assumption that he had conceived, designed or printed the same; or the gap between our shared gormlessness, as of two minutes ago, as to the inadequate specificity of the location alluded to on the handbill, and the assignment to YFCT, and YFCT alone, of the manifestly unfeasible task of travelling back in time to secure more serviceable co-ordinates from Jimmy (or whoever the fuck had them). But, as I am in no such mood I raise no such macro-quibbles, I instead take a deep breath through each lung, count to one (twice), and with a quick, seemingly insouciant flick of my leash-free wrist, unhole my top shirt-button. In her okies, of course, this gesture signifies nothing more ominous than Nigel's getting continental; but in mine it means I'm only two or three shirt-buttons away from getting intercontinental and ballistic on her denim-and-satin-swathed arse. It's DEFCOM 3, you might say, for which she ought to thank her lucky 'Gaardens: at the instance of such a degree of impertinence from a bloke, my shirt would be sailing high o'er the rooftops of Marylebone by now. This temporary sop to my shirt-shuckerly animus having been proffered and digested, I feel clear-headed enough at last to tender the one bit of sound reasoning that stands even the remotest chance of cutting ice with her: 'Look, darling,' I say, giving her left hand a little squeeze, which it neither yields to nor resists, 'it seems to me that this little fillet of land we're standing on, what with its being smack athwart the lake and the Inner Circle, is about as close to the centre of things as you can get in the park. Why don't we just keep walking southwards till we reach the tip of the lake? That'll give us the best odds of stumbling into the competition--or of at least coming within sight of it.' (She, her stroppiness abating apparently just enough to permit her to rest her chin petulantly on my shoulder:) 'And if we don't stumble into it or within sight of it?' 'Well, then, we can just turn round and head back north. We'll have done our bit, and we'll have had a good parky constitutional with Lucy. No cause for shame or regret in the worst case.' 'Yeah, well, OK. Why not?' So we set off again, this time in an absolute silence that I reckon is bound to become oppressive past the five-minute mark. After all, we've only scotched the schlong of copular discord, not killed it. It's in sitches like these, of course, that dogs can be particularly handy; cos they can always be counted upon not to let four minutes and fifty seconds pass without doing something sufficiently mystifying, endearing or exasperating to dispel the immejiate sauce of tension between you and your fellow hominid. Lucy in this case went for the mystifying angle, to wit, by stopping dead in her tracks--so suddenly that for all the metreage of leash separating the two of us I'm practically treading on her tail by the time I've taken my cue--pointing her nose perpendicular to the sky and launching into a fit of baying and howling of the sort that I'd always misreckoned as the special repertoirial preserve of wolves, . She keeps this up for, I'd say, half a minute; then sprints ahead at dachshund's-triathelete speed off to the left, towards the Inner Circle. 'Do you think she's caught scent of her quarry--some stoat or badger, for instance?' I suggest, during the next pausing and baying interval. 'N-no, don't think so. I think it's got something to do with that.' There's no need for Esmeralda to elaborate on the referent of this that: a very few millisconds' silence on all three of our parts suffice to carry it--a distant, discordant, multi-muzzled echo of Lucy's cry--by direct express to my ears and to establish it as the undubitable cause and goal of our romp. 'Quick question for you,' I pant to Esmeralda as I'm rushing ahead for my shoulder-joint's sake a minute or so later. 'Yes?' 'Amongst those butchers'-dozen diseases you get vaccinated for when you're about two and never have to worry about catching from then onwards, would one of them happen to be...' 'Rabies? No.' 'Just checking.' Anyway, by this point we've strayed quite a distance from our original cursus, Lucy having led us off to the left for a hundred metres or so, through the curved footpath marking the perimeter of the Circle and into a spot of woods. The farther into the woods we go, the louder the canine chorus gets, until finally, as it reaches its fullest pitch, we emerge into a clearing where we suddenly find ourselves at the left rear fringe of a pretty sizeable mini-stadium or amphitheatre filled to about the middle tier of seats. The baying of Lucy's fellow dogs is obviously emanating from somewhere in the audience; and the most cursory of ganders at the stage fills us in on the cause of all the bayage, to wit, a bloke in a tatty T shirt and cargo shorts who's standing there blowing through his fingers with puckered lips, silently as far as our orioles are concerned; but presumably as noisily as a kettle at full boil to those of our wretched canine co-auditors. Eventually, withdrawing his diggits from his gob, he leaves off torturing the poor critters, and, grabbing the shaft of the mike positioned at centre stage, spits therein, through a sneer of unadulterated disgust, and in a tone of seething stroppiness: 'And that goes double for your fucking owners!' Having finished up his spiel or performance art routine with that single verbal ejaculation, the bloke smiles, bows a couple of times to a modest but enthusiastic smattering of applause and huzzahs, then prances nimbly offstage on tiptoe like a ballerina, finding enough to time during his egress to shoot a couple of mooning, okie-lid-fluttering, over-the shoulder glances at his admirers in the pit. 'What do you reckon we've stumbled on to here,' Esmeralda asks me in a gratuitous whisper, 'some kind of dog-fanciers' convention?' 'I doubt it,' I catch myself whispering back. 'To judge by his parting words, that bloke didn't seem to fancy dog- fanciers too much, let alone dogs.' The well-nigh-immejiate appearance onstage of a second bloke not too differently attired from the first one clears up the mystery to our immeasurable satisfaction and relief. 'Thank you very much, Mr Cartwright,' this bloke solemnly and unctuously intones. 'Our next contestant is Mr Robert Oswald from Nutty Buddies in Waltham Forest.' 'So this is it,' I says to Esmeralda: 'the competition. We've found it.' [E, sighing and rolling her okies in mingled self-directed cuntsternation and me-directed sheepishness]: 'Right, the open-air theatre. I should have guessed it from the beginning: I saw a play here last summer. Please don't say I told you so.' 'Can't say as I ever did do,' I say with what had fuck well better be the most winsome good humour, as I re-button my shirt and scoop Lucy up into my arms the better for to speed my progress to the last occupied seat-row but one, where I reckon we'll have a decent elbow-room-to-view-quality ratio. I wait for Esmeralda to catch up, so's I can do the beardy, gentleblokely, ZZ-Top-ian thing by swooshing her ahead of me with my free hand, and we file in and settle down; Lucy falling immejiately asleep in my lap. The next contestant, the afore-announced Mr Oswald, is a frizzy-haired bloke clad apparently--and decidedly off-puttingly--in nothing but an extra-extra large jumper extending to about six inches above the knees, and a pair of trainers. To judge by his unfocussed glassy-okied gaze, and his peculiar relationship with the mike-stand--to which he clings with both white-knuckled hands, pulling it constantly and erratically away from the perpendicular towards every point of the compass, as though it's the oar of a raft buffeted by invisible subterranean rapids--this bloke isn't going to be prancing anywhere anytime soon. Both Esmeralda and I fear the worst, and we are ultimately not disappointed. 'Y-y-y-you lot.....,' he stammers, 'you lot........had better f-f-f-fucking clear off, or else...' 'Or else, what, Rob?' a heckler cries out. 'Or else I'm gonna show you...I'm gonna show you...my...what d'ye call 'em...oh, yeah--my f-f-f-fucking BAAAAALLS!' 'We ain't going nowhere, Rob,' shouts another heckler (or possibly the same one for fuck aught I know). 'All right, I warned you. Here they come!' And there they did indeed come (i.e., ahem, emerge, not, ahem...produce). I gots to say, as out-grossed as I was by the sight of those things, protruding in lumpily stark white from the pink folds of his upper thighs like a patch of mutant cauliflower from a pair of ham-stalks in a chef's salad, I admired the bloke's integrity. For whilst a less punctilious ball-flasher would have been content to lift his skirts and let the whole reproductive-cum-urinary apparatus just sort of hang there in full view, Mr Oswald took evident great pains to ensure that nary a micrometre of unadvertised schlongage should be seen: demurely scrunching up the hem of the jumper over his member with one hand, with the other he grasped the upper end of his sack and gave it a good hearty squeeze (hence the cauliflower effect) that was enough to make me cross my legs in sympathy, Lucy or no Lucy. Why, in my enthusiasm (and despite the phantom pain), I even catch myself putting two hands together for a spell, till I remember that in so doing I'm boosting Jimmy's competition. In the midst of all this adulatory hubub--which is ultimately cut short only by the appearance of two black-clad security yobbos who, after futilely attempting to prise Oswald's package from his grip, finish up hammocking him at each end and carrying him bodily off stage, horizonal and feet-first, like a corpse--I happen to hear a single quite vociferous string of boos, coming from somewhere off to the right. Purely out of curiosity, I take a gander in that direction, and fuck me with...nothing in particular just now, thank you...if the mysterious ball-flasher-basher doesn't turn out to be Jimmy himself, our nearest neighbour three seats off. 'That's him,' I say to Esmeralda, pointing him out. 'Who?' 'My mate, Jimmy: the one we're here to support.' 'Well, why don't you invite him over?' Didn't mind if I did. So, after handing over Lucy to Esmeralda and clambering round Esmeralda's knee-caps, I acquaint Jimmy with my presence, apologise for my tardiness, explain that it had partly to do with the ambiguous directions on the handbill, learn from him that he himself only thought to phone the organiser for more specific ones yesterday afternoon and tell him, with an indicative leftward jerk of the head, that I'm here with a friend ('A member of the Cambridge women's lacrosse team?' he ribs me. 'No,' I parry his rib back, 'but at least she favours their colours, sartorially speaking.'). As I wish to postpone to the last possible moment the potential transition from a back-slapping festival to a teeth-gnashing one, I save the main business-orientated question--i.e., as to how soon Jimmy himself will be taking his turn at the mike (asking the more epistemologically honest question of whether he's already been up there can only jinx the reply)--for after our we've moved over to Esmeralda's immejiate right and performed the obligatory mutual introductions. 'No worries,' he assures us, 'You got here plenty early: I'm second or third next in the queue.' Then, switching the subject (a little too breezily and abruptly considering the alacrity with which he was drumming up support at the Ape only weeks ago), he says: 'That last bloke was fucking horrible, don't you think?' [I, taking a sporting crack at playing Ken Livingstone's advocate:] 'Well, I dunno. Say what you will about his routine, it was certainly, erm, attention-grabbing...' 'Exactly. Same with the bloke before him, only in not quite as horrible a way.' 'What exactly are you driving at?' 'What I'm driving at, Rugger, is that all of the contestants so far have had some sort of schtick or gimmick ready-tailored for their own particular venue. Take, for instance, that dog-whistling bloke: the place where he tends bar, the Milton, is frequented almost exclusively by blind men with seeing eye dogs.' 'So?' 'So, from what I hear tell, he's been running through that finger-blowing routine night after night for the past twenty years, and the punters have been eating it up like Kibbles 'n' Bits every time. From who else, after all, are they going to get that kind of micro-niche-marketed royal treatment?' 'And dare I ask what micro-niche is comprised by Mr Oswald's constituency?' [Jimmy rejoining, with an absent world-weariness bordering on catatonia:] 'His base of operations...Nutty Buddies...is a gay pub catering to...large-ball fetishists.' (I really shouldn't have dared to ask. [Anyway, JP continuing, con mucho mas gusto:]) 'For fuck's sake, last-order calling is supposed to be an improvisational art, like jazz, or Indian classical music, or the lyre-cadenced odes of the Saxon bards of yore; each and every night the barman is supposed to improvise afresh an exhortation that will both amuse and edify the young and the old, the hip and the square, the gay and the straight, the lame and the able-bodied, alike; even as it accomplishes its original and still-efficient aim of getting every arse in sight on the far side of the front door in ten minutes or less. You know what my main worry was when I signed up for this thing?' (E, in full-on blokess-trademarked shrink mode:) 'That you weren't up to the average London barman's standards of last-orderly eloquence?' 'Yeah, that and then some: that I'd be so blown away, so demoralised, by the competition down here at Regent's that I'd never again have the confidence to do the LOs back there, on the job, at Woodside. Well, I'm demoralised, right enough--but at the diametrically opposite end of the scale. Now that I see what a lot of time-serving robots my fellow London barmen are--remember that London is, after all, the world capital of last-orders-calling--I'd just as soon not have anything to do with 'em. It's enough to make a self-respecting barman of the old school trade in his apron for an accountant's eyeshade, watching that lot up there.' Here Esmeralda and I cop a second or two to exchange a stroppily knowing glance signifying, Why is it these hospitality industry types always use us accountants as straw inflatable dolls in their disingenuous wet daydreams about joining the so-called straight world? Then, she says to Jimmy: 'But if you really are that much better than this lot, don't you owe it to yourself to prove it to them--to shame them, even, by showing them what a proper last-orders speech of the old school looks like, and sounds like?' (Yet another exemplar of the blokess's strong suit-stroke-bailiwick, nest pah [i.e., the Out-o'--Blue Pep Talk to Virtual Stranger]?) 'Erm...well,' Jimmy says, ruminatively frowning and tilting his head this way and that, '...I suppose so. Yeah, why not? Might as well give it the old barman's college try.' 'Well,' I say, in a semi-desperate attempt to score a corner for the side of Blokish Utility, 'now that that's settled, hadn't we better rally the troops [i.e., our fellow Ape punters, presumably scattered throughout the crowd] whilst there's still time?' 'Ah, well, you see, Rugger, you've put your finger there in the other layer of the shit sandwich: out of the twenty or so regulars who promised me they'd be here today, you're practically the only one who bothered showing up. The rest of' 'em, practically to a man and a woman, either phoned to say that something had come up, or didn't even trouble themselves to give me that old reach-around. So much for my warm and fuzzy illusions of the Apeketeers as a portable Cheers-style sitcom ensemble, what what?' 'What exactly do you mean by practically?' I quiz him, having noted the surely- significant dual up-cropping of that adverb in the preceding kvetchfest. 'Well, I mean, I did at least happen upon your mate Ronnie a bit earlier, when I was still unjaded enough to bother hanging round up front. But I got the distinct impression he'd pitched up more in the hopes of running into you than in the hopes of Jimmy Phipps's walking away with the pint glass and megaphone [i.e., I assume, the inside-dopester's nickname for the trophy awarded at this here competition].' 'Hmm,' I say, pondering various post-apocalyptic fallout scenarios of the prospectively inevitable Rugger and-Ronnie-Regent's-run-in; then adding, for the sake of no-stone-left-un-turned-dom, 'What gave you that impression?' 'Well, just that the first question out of his mouth, barring How hangs it, Jimmy?, was Have you seen Rugger anywhere hereabouts?' 'Move over Monet and Renoir,' I says to myself (so as to spare my second wheel the horrendousness of the pun), 'and make room for Phipps.' Then, aloud, and in full-on apathetic midget-speak mode, I ask him: 'What about Mr Sedule?' 'Oh, him?' Jimmy re-torts/snorts. 'It was rough enough work getting him to give me the day off. When I was so bold as to ask him if he might be interested in coming down here today, he flew into a right huff. "And who, then," he says to me, "will remain pour garder le fort? And what is to become of my cottage in the CotsWALDS if we fermons boutique even for one day?" That's all he fucking thinks about, his sodding cottage in the Cotswalds.' 'I know, I know,' I sympatise. 'Mark my words, it'll be the death of the Ape, all of his penny-and-shillinging over that fucking cot--' '--Wait, listen up!' Esmeralda shushes me. I shut my gob and peel my orioles just in time to hear the MC announcing, 'Our next contestant is Mr James Phipps, of the Sedulous Ape in Barnet.' 'Right,' says Jimmy, rising and presently nudging our knees with his, as he makes as if to start skirting by, 'I'm up. And if you two don't mind following me...well, I can assure you applause from non-sitters counts in full.' Of course it was the least we could do to follow him, position ourselves in the wings of the front row and put two pairs of hands and lips together in acclamation of his spiel. Indeed, our doing less would have constituted as close to a perfect textbook example of cuntishness as I've ever encountered. All the same, I gots to admit that inasmuch as, on Jimmy's testimony, this very front tier of seats was in all probability serving as the present haunt or lair of Ronnie Livingstone, my heart hardly yielded up, vis-a-vis the peformance, the one-hundred-and-ten-squared per cent of its all to my orioles, hands and lips that it would have rendered had Jimmy's practically been an absolutely, or had it eventuated from the presence of some other punter than the Sergeant at Pints of the North London Arsenal Bashers. Whilst, given the circumstances, an outright comprehensive survey of the phizzes arrayed in the first coupla rows was out of the question, I still couldn't quite help interrupting my spectatorship of Jimmy's spiel with the odd sidewards (and non- involving) glance in search of some telltale glimmer of the RL-ian aura. As for the rant itself, it was certainly nothing to write home about (and so I didn't write home about it). Evidently all those years working in a noisy taproom had made Jimmy a bit hard of hearing--no, make that more than a bit hard of hearing; cos it seems to me you'd have to be pretty near stone deaf to mix up two words as unlike each other as show and tell (as in 'show [not tell]... them what a proper last-orders speech of the old school looks like' quoth Esmeralda.) After approaching the mike rather diffidently, and tapping it slightly with his fingers as if to make sure it wouldn't shock him, he began, quite softly at first: 'You call yourselves barmen, when you're not even fit to clear tables at Wimpy's. Oh, what a sad pass our profession has come to! For fuck's sake, last-order calling is supposed to be an improvisational art, like jazz, or Indian classical music, or the lyre-cadenced odes of the Saxon bards of yore.' [A nit-picker might argue that here he was undercutting his own argument by cannibalising verbatim a spiel he'd delivered only minutes earlier; but it was new to the rest of them, after all, wasn't it?] 'Indeed, the connexion between this third art and last-order calling may be more than merely metaphorical; for, according to a newly-discovered eighth-century codex, Cædmon, the father of English poetry, honed his versifying chops whilst itinerating as a tæppaweard or tap-steward on the so-called mead belt circuit of East Anglia in the early 670s. It seems to me, though, that if any of you lot--the purported creme de la creme of London last-order-calling--were somehow miraculously reincarnated in Caedmon's time, you'd be qualified for employment only on the other side of the bar, if you know what I mean.' 'You mean as punters?' shouts somebody or other in possibly genuine undisingenuosness. 'No, I mean as what they called in those days sædspongean--stinking whores!' And just how do you suppose, DGR, that the creme de la creme of London's barmanning community reacted on being likened collectively to professors of the world's oldest profession--by pelting Jimmy with rotten fruit? Or storming the stage and wresting the mike from his mitts? No, they just sort of gave out a kind of low, weary, very slightly stroppy groan that I'll hazard to translate as, Tell us something we don't already know, YFC. Evidently quite disheartened by their underwhelmedness, Jimmy nonetheless presses on: 'Yeah, that's right. You, erm, you heard me. All you lot care about is the fucking almighty pound--or dollar, or euro, or yen, or dinar, or yuan, or--' 'Hurry up please, it's time!' the MC calls out from stage left. '--or...erm...whatever unit of currency your punters from across the channel or pond happen to want to pay with. In a single generation, you've reduced the noble, organically English art of last order calling to a rote, paint-by-numbers exercise, a cake-molded, freeze-dried industrialised process that's about as English as karaoke or KFC, or jalape­­no poppers, or tiramisu, or baklava, or--' 'HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME!' 'All right,' he sighs, and 'In short,' he epitomises, 'ladies and gentlemen of the Academy [?!], you can take your pint glass and megaphone...and SHOVE IT UP YOUR FREAKING BUM!' punctuating this peroraration with a deft kick to the mike stand that sends it pitching over on to the floor of the stage in a burst of low-frequency feedback. Taking this as our cue, I give a nod to Esmeralda, and we clap and cheer, I fancy, with as much amplitude as we'd be capable of mustering if Jimmy'd actually delivered a proper last-order sendoff on par with his best performances at the Ape. TBS, my heart, at least, isn't in it--all the more so on account of the lecture's glancing, on-slagging reference to my beloved poppers--but all the same I do feel I owe it to the bloke. It's during this round of applause, incidentally, that I first catch sight of Ronnie, standing about midway through the front row, and conspicuous, even from a peripheral-visual angle, as being our sole fellow Phippsophile hereabouts. To my mild shah-grin and cuntsternation, our okies meet long enough for him to register my presence and proffer me a thoroughly jollified air-plumed-cap-doffing musketeer's salute, which I perfunctorily acknowledge with a stroppified tap to the brim of my air RAF squadron leader's beret. I intend this gesture, at its most expressive extreme, as the dourest of 'So there you are, then's, one separated by a mere cunt hair's breadth from the jolliest of 'Go fuck yourself's, but predictably enough, he insists on interpreting it against the grain as the most lascivious, tongue-lolling of 'Come hither's; and clambering mostly over rather than past the knees of the intervening sitters, whisks himself thither to our side in the oughta-be-proverbial flat butcher's-dozen seconds. 'Hullo, Rugger,' he says to me. 'And, erm..' he adds, slightly taken an-arse by the apparently here-2-4 eclipsed person of Esmeralda. She, offering her hand with sunny good cheer: 'Esmeralda.' 'Ronnie. Pleased to make your acquaintance, I'm sure. So how hangs it, Rugger? Still, as it were, basking in the afterglow, I trust?' 'Basking away,' I rejoin tinnily, vamping on blood fumes. 'And also doubtlessly savouring Mental Instant Replay No. 10 to the tenth power of Mr Cole's ejection from the field?' 'Savouring it with relish.' (Tone and degree of inspiration unchanged.) 'Splendid. And does your friend, erm, excuse me, Esmeralda, share your high spirits on this score?' 'Erm, I dunno,' I say, swivelling Esmeralda-ward the most helpless, pre-potty-trained of infant's phizzes. 'Does she?' 'I'm hardly in a position to say whether I do or I don't,' she replies with the unstinting coldness of a nanny on potty-training duty, 'so long as you two keep carrying on so cryptically.' 'You mean,' says Ronnie, in a tone that merits a full-on jaw-kick, 'she doesn't know what we're talking about?' 'No, Ronnie, I'm afraid she doesn't. What we're talking about--or, rather, what Ronnie insists on our talking about--is the UEFA Championship match of the night before last.' 'Oh, yeah,' she says. I remember that. Between Barcelona and...Chelsea?' 'No, between Barcelona and Arsenal.' 'So you two are both...Arsenal supporters?' Here, Ronnie recoils as suddenly and to as great a distance as though he's just pissed on a live tube rail, and brandishes Esmeraldaward the two-forefingered upside-down cross sign. 'Back!' he screams defiantly, 'back, thou Highburyan succubus!' 'It's all right, Ronnie,' I says gently, stepping forwards and coaxing him back to us with a crooked finger round the nave of the cross. 'She's no Gooneress, I assure you.' 'Sorry, Rugger. I just couldn't help it. When anyone says the thing that is not I can't help but fear that it might become the thing that is.' 'I know, I know. But fear not: you're amongst friends here.' 'You mean, Rugger, she's one of us?' Maybe it was only because I'd still got Peter Lorre on the brain from earlier that morning, but I couldn't help detecting signs in Ronnie's phiz and vocal tone that he wasn't posing this question in a purely disinterested Arsenalophobic spirit. All the same, my RH and I gave him the benefit of the doubt, a bequest made all the easier to render on account of the distraction of Esmeralda's fairly shrieking into my free ear almost simultaneously: 'One of you? One of you who?' Gormlessness sure makes strange fuckbuddies/sibling rivals, dunnit? Ten minutes ago, Ronnie and Esmeralda had been quite probably unaware of the existence of each other, and now here each of 'em was practically salivating for a titbit of information to be dispensed from the gob of YFCT. Now it was my turn to play the nanny (albeit on sweets-apportioning rather than potty-training duty) and I gots to admit it was as much owing to my desire to savour the novelty of the role for as long as possible as to any other motive (e.g., cowardice), that I peremptorily replied to both of them in one go: 'Look, you two, I'll explain later. In the meantime, can't we all just relax and watch the sodding competition?' I wish you coulda been there for the reaction shots, DGR. The sight of Esmeralda adopting the classic Ronniean hangdong No need to get shirty about it, YFC! expression, as if by sympathetic contagion, was absolutely priceless, in a way that thou aloneth wouldsteth understandeth. The remainder of the contestants, some ten boroughs' worth, merely serve to vindicate Jimmy's withering appraisal of his calling. I'll spare you a comprehensive catagoue of their routines--which, in any case, I'd be hard pressed to reconstitute now, at a full week's distance from the event--and just treat you to the highlights, by which I mean the performances that, at least from a certain conceptual povey, deserved and got a smile from YFCT and his cohort. The first was delivered by a bloke from an obsessive-compulsives' pub, who conscientiously exhorted his clientele to head on home In case you've left the fucking gas on, or the front door unlocked; the second by some rare bird of a barwoman announcing to her dull-bikish pseudo-confederates that Scarlett Johannson [or was it Maggie Gyllenhall?] had just been sighted nude on horseback outside. Finally, the MC returns to the mike, cradling the trophy--a brick sized-and-shaped plinth on which is mounted something quite closely resembling the old HMV/RCA logo, only with the dog replaced by a life-sized pint glass--and clasping an envelope in the hand of the other. 'Well, ladies and gentlemen, we've heard from our last contestant, and the readings of our applause-o-meter have been tabulated; I am thus behooved and obliged to announce the name of our winner. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please pull your hands apart for the 2006 winner of the Stella Artois [sic?!] Greater London Barmen's Last Order Competition...' Now, if this here blog post were a so-called very special episode of a Yank sitcom, the next words to issue from the MC's gob would of course be Mr James Phipps of the Sedulous Ape in Barnet; and the absolutely space-time-continuum-rending impossibility of such an outcome would subsequently be explained away in two seconds by the apparition of some retroactive deus ex machinetta whose probable phiz I can't be bothered to shift my painterly arse cheeks to delineate; an apparition that would leave the reader free to whip out his or her hankies and to dab his tear-bedewed face cheeks with a clear quantum physicist's conscience. But this here blog post is not such a sitcom episode; it is, let me remind you, a record of real life, as it has been lived by YFCT and his'n in all of its full-bearded 1970s-style cuntishness. Hence, it should come as no surprise to you, DGR, that those from-the-MC's-gob-issuing words were, in fact/contrast: '...Mr Robert Oswald of Nutty Buddies in Waltham Forest!' As you might expect, this announcement touches off a crowd-wide murmur consisting of 32 parts boos & fucks and one part yeas & Way-to-go-Rob!s; seguing seamlessly into Oswald's beaming, DT-shimmying processional from the pit to the stage to claim his prize. But just as he's clearing our row, his progress is rudely checked and forestalled by one of the security yobs, who having materialised seemingly from out of nowhere, dashes briskly up the little flight of steps leading upwards to the stage, whispers something into the MC's ear and hands him a piece of paper. 'Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen,' the MC says, as he scans the note. Then, looking back up at us: 'I've just received a message from our panel of backstage judges. Message reads: 'As league regulations forbid the use of props by any contestant, Mr Oswald is hereby disqualified from the competition, and must forfeit the prize to the contestant second in yield of applause.' Which contestant, ladies and gentlemen, just happens to be...Mr Jack Cartwright of Milton's in Southwark!' 'Wait a goddamn minute!' a presumptive partisan of Mr Oswald calls out. 'You mean to say that a pair of balls counts as a prop, and a pair of fingers don't?' 'Apparently so. League regulations, he says,' looking back downwards at the paper whilst holding up a schoolmasterly forefinger, 'define a prop as any object or set of objects susceptible of and submitted to manipulation by the contestant's hands.' 'Oh, what a load of bollocks!' And from the epicentre of this bloke's gob the word bollocks spreads outwards in all directions to the remotest extremities of the amphitheatre, rising in pitch and volume of utterance with each passing second, until scarcely a minute later, it's morphed into a thousand-larynxed strong, foot-stomping ulululationary chant (BOL-LOCKS! BOL-LOCKS!) that's enough to make a civilised bloke reach for his pith helmet and jeep-keys and head for the hills. But this is but the beginning of the horror. For round minute one-and-a-half comes the blood-curdling, scphincter-dilating sound of the splintering of wood; the growling and howling of dobermans and mastiffs and Alsatians in full-on sick mode; the piteous screams of men and women being assailed by bone-smashing body-blows and flesh-rending dog bites, as, one by one--as if by pre-arrangement--the Oswaldians begin drubbing the Cartwrightians with their own canes, only to be assailed in their turn, and even more mercilessly, by the blind men's charges. The whole flare-up, as I've just said, comes into its own very quickly--far too quickly, TBS, for any of us to feel smug enough about our own safety to make the hoary old crack about the natives getting restless, let alone my slightly de-hoared one about a jeep and a pith helmet. That said, it takes my actually seeing a doberman burying his teeth in the trouser leg of a bloke standing not ten feet off from us, to galvanize the old fight or flight impetus in the organism of YFCT. 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-facedly. 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 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 of none other than James Phipps, seated at the far 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!