Un Amour de Rugger: Part Two (of...?)

I hope the reader will excuse my be-schmootzing of the upper panes of the editing window of the present post with a spot of commentary on the whole of the last one. Felletur lector: I by no means intend the aforesaid X-a-Jesus to be the definitive reading of, or last word on, the aforesaid screedlet; for whilst this screedlet may be my copyright, it is likewise, and beyond a doubt’s hombre, the reader’s property, and he or she may do with it as he or she will. He or she may, for example—and for all I care—butcher the fucking thing into a score or two of three-by-five-inch spam cutlets; or print it up on perforated tissue paper and fodder his or her bum with it for 20 consecutive second-species loo visitations. But insofar as my povey as the author thereof counts for anything in the okies of Dame Frances Adams, I should like to christen that there post My First Official 4A in the Literary Genre of Speculative (or Science) Fiction, specifically that subgenre of SF known as Alternate (sic) Worlds Fiction (you know, the subgenre typified by a scenario in which, say, the Germans are assumed to have won the Second World War, and where everything is pretty much exactly the same as it is now, only the blokes all sport black eye-patches and green schlongs). For you see, DGR, I conceive of that there post of 22 May, minus the pitter-patterly dialogues between Y&M-FCT, as being pretty much a carbon copy of the post I would have composed on, say, 23 April, had Arsenal been trounced by Villareal on the 19th, and had I somehow nonetheless managed to pitch up at Redford’s on the night of the 20th, make Esmeralda’s acquaintance and so on. The fact is, that for virtually every one the 43,200 waking, wanking and otherwise-spent minutes that elapsed shay mwah between 21:15 on 19 April and 21:15 on 17 May, when the Gunners finally got their long-overdue comeuppance on the turf at Barcelona, I was quite possibly literally on tenterhooks—quite possibly, i.e., inasmuch as I don't know WTF a tenterhook is—WRT the possibility of MFCT Knoweth What; and inasmuch as a good, say 240 of those minutes were comprised by my night out with Esmeralda on the 22nd of the last instant, I may be said to have taken no small degree of poetic licence in filtering all my fretting on the score of that unimaginable outcome from my account of that little tryst; in treating the frettage, in a word, as though it had never existed (hence the near-fetchedness of my speculative fiction conceit).

TBT, my timing for entering into an anti-classical (i.e., not pederastic) liaison could not have been piss poorer; for a mere three days after the two of us--Esmeralda and I--first locked gobs, I was put out of commission altogether, on the A-C and virtually every other front, by Arsenal's advancement to the finals courtesy of their admistration of the second half of the old 1-2p sequence to the chins of the Real Village Idiots. In psycho-neuro-somatic acknowledgement of this catastrophe, I cashed in the full balance of my year's sick leave and retired, a cold vinegar compress affixed to my temples, to my bedchamber, where I subsisted on nothing but a single baguette's-worth of wine-soaked bread-crusts and two 24-packs of Hoegaarden right on through to the following Sunday. Esmeralda phoned me on Thursday to see if I wanted to meet up on Friday night, but, in full consciousness of the potentially schlong-annihilating pistol shot I was thereby discharging at my crotch, I declined, disingenuously pleading 'a touch of the stomach flu; nothing too serious'. I trow, if it hadn't been for my nightly telephonic cry-sessions with Ronnie Livingstone--likewise bedridden a mere 500 metres away (so close and yet, oh, so far!)--I doubt if I'd have summoned up enough initiative to void my bladder into the toilet rather than into the already-sweat-cum-spittle-cum-snot-(but not, I must emphasise, cum-cum)-encrusted folds of my duvet cover.

But come Monday the 1st, I did manage to motor my emaciated, pasty-faced, quintuply-govered carcass up the GNR to Potters Bar, if only to punch in, cower on all fours in my cubicle for eight hours, and punch out; and by, say, Wednesday the 3rd, with the showdown of the 17th looming menacingly-but-as-yet-irrelevantly on the horizon like the lethal radioactive cloud in that quasi-Aussie post-WWIII movie from the 50s, I was starting at least to cobble together some semblance of living a so-called normal life, at least in my own very probably metaphorically cataract-bescrimmed okies. Such that, indeed, by Thursday night, my Esmeraldalust having finally got the advantage of my Arsenalangst, I phoned the former's source-cum-sauce to report that I was quite recovered from my ailment o' the aliment and to see about the possibility of our rendezvousing again and as toot as possibly sweet...that was, erm, if she was still interested in maintaining a connexion with me; if she had not, erm...that was to say, in the meantime...

'...You mean if I haven't already found another bloke?' Her candour was no less refreshing than it was read-out-able. 'Within the span of a fortnight? And as if I wouldn't have told you? Surely you know me better than that.' [During the ensuing butcher's-dozen-seconds-length pause I pitcher her coming over a bit sad and reflective on her half of the screensplit.] 'But I guess that's just it--you don't know me very well at all yet.'

'Well, then, would you be up for offering me an intensive weekend seminar on Esmeraldalogy, meeting at, say, 20:07 tomorrow?'

'Let's make it 20:10. I've scheduled Lucy for a 20-minute walk at 19:48. And as for the location...?'

Luckily, I've given no small amount of thought to this question before uncradling the blower, let alone punching in her diggits. Much inclined as I was, during those pre-telephonic moments, to parlay my first resounding success qua local upmarket culinary cicerone into a basic Sky TV-food-channel franchise (prospective show title [natch]: The Seasoned Barnetian, with all due proprietary props being granted in the closing credits to Esmeralda qua creative consultant), I realised that the fact was that, as far as the haute cuisinery domain went, I'd pretty much played my only guaranteed winning hand with Emchai; and I thought it'd be unwise, not to say borderline cuntish, to try to bluff my way through a dinner at any of the butcher's-quarter-dozen of other local hoity-toity un-greasy spoons I knew either only at second hand or, at best, through a hit-or-miss one-time firsthand grope. The next logical step, then/of course, was to initiate her into the mysteries of the Ape; but that, I thought, was a step best postponed till I had conducted at least a two-day-advance recon mission and conferred with Manish (and thereby, indirectly, with Manisha) apropos of establishing a quadrangulated buffer zone between the two of us, Esmeralda and myself, and the ambient regular and irregular puntility. Not that I in the least bit dreaded that Esmeralda would be put off by the hole-in-the-wall-ish-ness of either the pub or its menu; what I dreaded to the utmost degree, rather, was the prospect of an unhappy but cuntishly all-too-probable cuntcatenation of circumstances coming into being if we happened just to show up there on the fly and off the shirtycuff, and of this cuntcatenation amounting to an all-round irreversible cuntretemps shay-noo. If, for example, Jimmy happened to have the night off and at the same time Ronnie happened to pitch up there in the hope of running into me to the end of convening an emergency meeting of the NLABs...why, the thought was enough to set a bloke's teeth (and schlong) on edge...[obligatory harp arpeggios]:

MR SEDULE: Bon soir, mes deux petits oiseaux d'amour. May I take your or-DER?'

YFCT: Sure. For starters, we'll have a round of the fried calamaries. And for the main course, I'll have the fish and jalapeno poppers...and the lady will have...

ESMERALDA: The same.

MR SEDULE: Bon. C'est une calamare frite, et deux poissons aux pétards aux jalapeños. Et pour boire...?

RONNIE [Entering stage left]: Oh, hullo, Mr Sedule, hullo, Rugger. And, erm...

ESMERALDA [offering her hand to Ronnie]: Esmeralda.

RONNIE: Pleased to make your acquaintance, I'm sure.

YFCT: So what brings you to the Ape tonight, Ronnie?

RONNIE [with cuntishly affected nonchalance]: Oh, nothing, really. I just thought that, given the general [COUGH!] situation...and, erm....well, I've already tried reaching you at both your numbers...

ESMERALDA [gormlessly]: The general situation?

MR SEDULE [with at least a soup's son of gorm]: La situation generale?

RONNIE [having long since put two and two together and therefrom derived a cuntishly envious-cum-caution-to-the-wind-throwing infinity]: Yeah. The situation, vis-a-vis [COUGH!] ARRGHAVUHL.

ESMERALDA [cupping a hand to an ear]: What's that?

SEDGIE [likewise]: Comment?

RONNIE [with poncily-precise Yankish articulation]: Arsenal.

SEDGIE [bracing left arm against back of YFCT's chair, and scooping right arm under seat thereof]: Arsenal?! Cette fois c'en est trop!

RONNIE and ESMERALDA [in unison, as Mr Sedule carries YFCT's still-seated carcass to the front door]: WTF...?

[Cut to street scene, with entrance to the Ape in foreground, as trajectory of Mr Sedule's expulsion of YFCT describes a sphalt-incinerating, roadrunner-esque trail retreating at Mach-5-speed towards the horizon. ESMERALDA emerges from the entrance, followed by Ronnie].

ESMERALDA [tearfully]: Oh, you sodding blokes and your sodding...football obsession!

RONNIE [lighting a fag and offering a second one to ESMERALDA]: You know, there's more to us blokes than just football...

ESMERALDA [only half-absently, as she accepts the cig, along with RONNIE's proffered light]: Thanks.

Anyway, to return from the realm of the preterite counterfactual to the realm of the preterite actual: I says (i.e., said) to her:

'Do you consider yourself a seasoned enough Central Finchleyan by now to introduce me to a restaurant in that foot of the borough?'

'Erm...well, it depends on what you mean by a restaurant...but, yes, I have got to know a couple of places...'

'...Well, do both or all of 'em serve food you don't have to cook up yourself?'

'...Erm, yes.'

'And have you so far escaped coming down with anything chronic or terminal from consuming those vittles?'

'Erm, yes, so far...'

'Well, then, any or either of them'll do. Surprise me.'

'If it please you. On the other hand, if you cared to show up 22 minutes earlier and join me for my walk with Lucy, I could take some of the edge off the surprise by giving you a kerbside tour of both venues.'

So I shows up at her digs hyper-punctually at 7:45 the following evening. We hang a Roger off her street and hoof-and-paw it up north along the right side of Ballards Lane. TBS, on account of Lucy's well-nigh-incurbable inclination to have a running, sniffing and gobbing go at just about anything apart from the nearest square of pavement, our progress is slow by canine-unencumbered pedestrian standards. All the same, the Lucyan element julie accounted for, our trip to the first joint turns out to be quite a lengthy hike. Round half-past eight, by my purely inchewitive reckoning (for I daren't whip out my mobile for fear of betraying more than a soup's son of my tummy-rumbular impatience), I ask her (E not L, natch):

'How much further?'

'We're nearly there.'

'Cor, we must be more than halfway back to my place by now.'

'That's as maybe--but we're still a world away from Woodside Park; as much as Milan, say, is from southern Switzerland. The border's still a good coupla hundred feet up ahead, you see, where Ballard's Lane merges into the High Road.'

[My Woodside-Parker's translation software kicking in all of a sudden]: 'Ah, I get it. You mean, up at the vertex of the traffic triangle?'

'That's right.'

'Well, seeing as how the base of that very triangle is already coming into view, on the far side of this here bus lane we're about to cross...'

'...We must be getting close to the restaurant. Spot on. In fact [giving an arrestive tug on the Lucy-leash] we've arrived.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah. Take a gander to your right.'

To that right, I gander in a single-storeyed, yellow-mansarded, neon-festooned building flanked by a courtyard of sorts set off from the pavement by a butcher's-dozen metres of faux-cast-iron fenceage. As far as the aspect of the restaurant proper went, the proprietors seemed, perversely enough, to have gone balls deep to prevent the passing prospective puntility from catching so much as a gustlet of the atmosphere of its innards; for every square centimetre of its plate-glass fake-aid that was not occupied by a coil of light-tubeage, or a bansai cactus or an evergreen tree, was obscured in their respective steads by some portion of a handbill or flyer advertising fuck knew what. The courtyard, for its part, was dominated by a motorway-ready billboard displaying at full-length the recumbent figure of a ginormously bazoomba'd blokess in a clingy, low-cut white dress. A culo, the premises gave the impression of an all-too-successful attempt to condense the collective human and unhuman geographies of Vegas, Tijuana and Berkshire into a micro-hectare of commercial N3 real estate. It was funny how, although I must have passed this place butcher's...erm...trios of times by car since moving to Barnet, I'd remained completely oblivious of it these two years. It was funny, too, in a particularly unsettling, un-Heimlich-like way, to think that, given its walkable proximity to my digs, this place rather than the Ape might very well have turned out to be my local, had I ventured ever so slightly further south during my first lonesome, aimless pedestrian 4A into Barnet nightlife back in '04.

Meanwhile, Esmeralda is just finishing up a run-through of the classic game-show prize-presentress' tai-chi exercise--you know, the one that commences with a dynamic round of symmetrical invisible-seed-sowing and culminates in a static pose of symmetrical invisible-tray-balancing. 'Behold the scene of my first-ever night out in Finchley, a month ago come Monday: Ahir Lorenzo's.'

'I see.' I says, doing my best to keep my nose-muscles from rogering those of my eyebrows. 'And how does Sheik or Señor Lorenzo style the make or manner of grub served up in his kitchen?'

[Her EB&NMs coiting in a slightly different attitude than mine would have done]: 'I think it's called Med-Mex cuisine?'

'Med-Mex?'

'Yeah. The menu is a sort of melange of Mexican and Mediterranean recipes.'

A haunted-ballroom-ful of shades of Redford's and Bosty Drog mazurka'd their merrily cuntemptuous way, hand in hand, in couples, across my synapses; trailing in their train a bunny-hopping queue of black-eye-patched and green-schlonged Mr Sedules. Then, to top off nauseau with jealousy, my blokish hackles began to rise as I reflected on the hours of pre-Ruggerian Esmeraldan history logged in at this place; and acting on this second, more efficient, passion--acting on it, mind you, not verbalising it--I said to her: 'Do you have any particular sentimental attachment to that first night out?'

[She, with seeming gormless guilelessness]: 'No, not particularly.'

'Well, then, let's check out this other joint you mentioned, the, erm...'

'The Divan.'

'There's nowhere to go but south, right?'

'South and west!' she shouts over her shoulder whilst not so much following, as being dragged by, Lucy back towards the zebra crossing leading to the little pedestrian island connecting in turn to the opposite pavement-flank of the Lane.

The kerbside aspect of the Divan turned out to be equally off-putting in its own, east-of-the-border kind of way. In the immejiate foreground was a white-tiled, fluorescetised open kitchen reminiscent of a hospital operating theatre, where a bloke stood alternately applying a cleaver to some presumably kebab-able meats or veggies, and swivelling sidewards to set these ingredients on an arseward-situated grill. Off to the left, and in the background, you could just barely make out the incandescetised--and, indeed, candle-lit--walls and tables of a rather grotty dining room all done up in red; a dining room that had clearly, as they say, seen better days, the best of them probably no nearer to hand than the latter ones of the first Thatcher government. The Almighty Scots Demiurge alone knows why I had my heart set against our dining there: perhaps I had simply overdosed by a couple of CCs on the psychomsomatic oestrogen that invariably, in time-release fashion, tends to kick hard in my veins during the pre-date run-through of the four esses; such that I was perhaps now more susceptible to finickiness on the score of the absence of the typical blokess-mandated amenities than any blokess (including and viz. Esmeralda) would have been in my knickers. Or, per-ditto-haps, my scruples were merely those of principle; which istersay that having passed the buck of venue-choosing to Esmeralda mainly for want of upmarket alternatives to Emchai, I'd be roundly rogered before resigning myself to tucking in at an eatery that made Quadruples look like the Four Seasons by comparison. In any case, neither of these cases could properly be set forth aloud without risking an imputation of barminess on the one hand, or cuntishness on the other; so I said nothing. But Esmeralda, Cor damn/bless her, must have been wise to my disappointment, without making too much of it; for, as I launched into minute number two of my silently stroppy window-shopper's holding patten, she said to me, ever so gently:

'I know it doesn't look like much. Really it's more of a takeaway spot than a proper restaurant. But the food is top-notch.'

'So then, given that it's mainly a takeaway, is this taking away, erm, out of the question?'

'Not in the slightest. In fact, I'd prefer it. It'd save us the round trip home...er, that is, to my place...and back--you know, for Lucy's sake.'

'But seeing as how Lucy's about the least likely candidate for a seeing-eye dog impersonator...'

'...Right. One of us will have to stay out here and mind her, while the other goes in to order the food.'

'Well, I'm prepared to trust you with the menu if you're prepared to trust me with Lucy.' (Like I said in the last post, I'm partial to wiener dogs anyway.)

'It's a fair swap,' she says, handing me the leading-loop of the leash. 'I'll get us a round of mezze for a starter; and as for the main course, have you got any preferences....? Or, more importantly: prohibitions...allergies...personal or religious taboos...?'

'Just two: no MSG and...' [scooping Lucy up into the crook of my right arm, pressing my left hand against her right, non-shirt-deafened, floppy li'l ear-flap, and adding in a whisper:] '...no dog.'

Now, a dimmer or snarkier blokess, either innocently or wilfilly (and respectively) misconstruing this instance of McGyver Signature Rhetorical Ploy #28 (the Deliberate Malapropism) as the Royal Doyle, would have rolled her okies and rejoined, 'Oh, for Chrissakes! It's a Turkish not a Chinese restaurant'; the dimmer one prefatorily to smugly marching off towards and through the front door of the joint without comment, the snarkier one prefatorily to snatching the leash back from me and prissily marching her dog off into the twilight [either equally silently or with a parting slap to one of my face cheeks]); but my girl, being both clever and sporting enough to pick up on the joke and take it in stride, gives me a quick peck on the gob (Lucy exploiting the momentary proximity of our clashing chins to give each of them a quicker lick or two), and whispers back:

'Not a problem: they've a house policy--MSG and dog-flee options avairrabre on lequest.'

So, anyway, for those butcher's-dozen minutes comprised by Esmeralda's hunting and gathering 4A, I held down the fort on the Lucyan front admirably enough, if I do say so myself--the only cinch that presented itself during my interval of dog-sitting being my charge's untimely voiding of a formidable turd of about half her own length and mass at the foot of the nearest RM box; but luckily, as no cuntstable was in sight during the deposit, I was spared the subsequent trauma of scraping the stool off the pavement with, and into my bare hands (and fuck knew whither from there--my tit pocket?).

Upon Esmeralda's eventual emergence from the restaurant, cradling between both arms an immense takeaway bag whose dimensions and probable heft match up rather nicely, foreign-to-native-object-ratio-wise, with those of the aforesaid turd vis-a-vis its producer, I immejiately do the chivalrous thing and offer to disburden her of her load in exchange for the leash. But she waves--or, rather, nods and grunts--my chevalier's gauntlet away disdainfully, and thus unswapped, we traverse the none-too-formidable quarter-mile trek back up the Lane to her digs over the course of a surely-record-setting half-hour; on account of the fact that Lucy, game as she was to hang with me solo and stationarily, would apparently, on the whole, prefer to have nothing to do with me on the move and in Esmeralda's presence: for every half-minute during which I can scarcely keep pace with the WD's homing-pigeon-worthy forward-sprinting alacrity, there elapses a minute-and-a-half of WD-ian stroppiness during which Lucy clings to the pavement like a post-it note to the business (or pleasure) end of an active hoover-extension. At the irruption of each of these stropfests, I re-tender my original offer, but Esmeralda is objurate throughout on that grounds that 'She's got to get used to you.'

Well, back at her place--which, I might as well tell you up front, is a good deal more spacious and well-appointed than mine (i.e., closer in proper appalachian to a full-on maison than to a mere maisonette)--we settle down on her living-room futon and unpack and tuck into our thankfully-still un-micro-onda-needful feast. Perhaps acting on the recollection of my reactionary menu-selection at Emchai, Esmeralda has chosen for my main dish a fairly unexceptional (but equally unexceptionable) version of that hoary old kebab-stand standby of a doner wrapped in pita bread. Whilst I couldn't help but credit her applied hindsight, ultimately I finished up envying her her more adventursome choice, for herself, of some veggie dish known as an imam bayildi [Turkish for 'bald vicar'? (Why not, if we English can chow down on our toad in the hole and the Spaniards on their old clothes?)]; which, to judge by the bit I tasted of it, was mighty delicious--I mean, the fucking stuff figuratively melted (i.e., literally turned to mush through the agency of saliva alone) in your mouth.

Anyway, after we've polished off the last of the dessert, and she's cleared away all the bits of paper, plastic, and cardboard (and as Lucy, having been fatigued to the point of drowsiness by the game of catch-and-fetch I've been playing with her and one of her so-called toys [possibly, but only just, a discarded pair of knickers] throughout the clean-up operation, is at last yawning and stretching herself pre-somnolently in her little doggie bed), Esmeralda sidles up alongside me on the 'ton, tucks her stockinged up behind her, and asks, with a mischievously allusive twinkle in one or both of her okies:

'So, in toto, from mezze to baklava, how would you rate the Divan?'

'Erm...well...it was...'

'You can be honest--I don't own the sodding place, after all.'

'It was woonderful,' I concede in all candour. 'Mind you, every 50th bite or so I found myself wishing they'd gone just a fewmetlet easier on the garlic in the yoghurt sauce. I dare say, though, that that's just my inner Central Barnetian's culinarily-spoiled brat talking.'

[She, archly biting a thumb-knuckle and archly arching an eyebrow:] 'Really?'

'No, not really. We've nothing to compare to it up yonder. Yes'm, I really do envy you So-Barn-ians your range of culinary choices--Med Mex, Turkish takeaway...'

'...Save it for someplace else. Your envy, I mean.'

'Whyzzat?'

'Cos it's wasted here. As far as this South Barnetian is concerned, you are, as of tonight, one of us.'

'Madam Citizen, please ponder the matter carefully before offering me the key to the micro-district: you must bear in mind that I am, after all, in a manner of speaking, still fresh off the boat; the culinary domain aside, I remain utterly benighted on the score of your myriad South Barnetian folkways--in music, for example; or in painting, or poetry...'

[She, giving a tendentious tug at one of my lower shirty-buttons]: '...Or lawwvmaking...?'

'Erm, well, I suppose I do flatter myself that I'm not a complete fobber as far as that particular folkway goes...'

*

Well, it's not much of a yarn, I admit, the above account of my second all-Esmeraldan evening, but I trust that it at least it gets a certain idear across, however cumbriously (sic/i.e., in the shoddy, plodding-yet-digressive manner of an ancient south-of-the-Scots-border bard); the idea, namely, that as of the Cinco de Mayo, a certain de facto patten had been established chaise Esmeralda and YFCT, a patten of one of us staying over at the other's digs at the weekend; meaning that we were established, as of that date, in journalistic parlance, as an item; or, if the vulgar bureaucratise of the pop-shrinks is your preference, as the constituents of a prospectively meaningful, prospectively-long-term relationship.

But in a way, make of them however virgin-Shetlanded a batch of yarn I might have done, the ATM-CC-TV-recordable Esmeraldan-Ruggerian transactions of the past few weeks would still have amounted to a pretty piss-poor seismographic register of Esermeralda's earthquake-injuicing effect on the Ruggerswelt. Cos after all, 999,999 out of a million of the so-called meaningful relationships that come into being in this world make it well into and far beyond the moveable-slumber-party phase without either relator's losing a fraction of a minute's honest sleep over the presence or absence of his or fellow-relator along the way. TBT, if a bloke really desires to give a true and proper account of the impingement of a given blokess on his so-called inner space, he is obliged to foresake the yarn-spinning-wheel altogether and advert to a more static--or, rather, pointillistic--mode of exposition. For my part, and in this mode, I should say that I first really became aware of the extent to which Esmeralda had got under my skin, as they say, when she started assuming the de facto role of my nth wheel. Indeed, I can specifically recall the moment when I first became aware of her assumption of this role: it was at about 1 pm Wednesday before last, during one of P-Tex's bi-monthly so-called brown-bag lunches (the BBL, incidentally, being an institution I abhor on more than one count: first, and more significantly, because it obliges me to prop my okie-lids open for an hour's worth of meaningless spielage on some topic of absolutely no interest to me; secondly, because it obliges me to squander a quid-and-a-half per annum on a packet of Sainsbury-procured brown lunch sacks [to say nothing of the disruption of my routine occasioned by my having to pick up a sandwich at Quadruple's the night before, and to bag the aforesaid sandwich the morning of]). Anyway, the moment in question elapsed whilst this bloke from marketing, name of Tim Bottoms, was expostulating sententiously as follows:

'There is a certain ineluctable fact,' he says, punctuating every fourth word or so with a sort of rowing gesture, a two-handed, paunch-sweeping forward thrust, suggestive of an incipient urge to vomit, 'that us folks who have dedicated ourselves to fighting the good fight against disorders of the colon and rectum have got to confront in the new millennium; the ineluctable fact, I say that--not only in the present decade of the noughties, but, a fortiori, in the teens, the twenties and beyond--the human gastro-intestinal tract of today is not, and will never again be, our parents' gastro-intestinal tract, to say nothing of our grandparents''.

'Funny,' I says to my second wheel, i.e. Esmeralda, at the conclusion of this period, 'last time I took a shit, I was struck by the stool's uncanny resemblance to a turd my dad left in the toilet of our house back when I was about five.'

'And I noticed the same kinda thing about my last movement,' my second wheel squeaks jubilantly back at me, 'that it looked just like one of my mum's.'

Now, whether I would in fact have felt one-hundred per-cent comfortable proffering my piss-taking-cum-shit-taken aside to a corporeally, elbow-ably present Esmeralda, and whether she would have felt atoll like--or been atoll capable of--rejoining anything so perfectly symmetrical in letter and in spirit as the counter-aside proffered in turn by her phantasmagorical self, are both quite beside the point: after all, nine out of the ten things a bloke says to his nth wheel, even in cases of near-perfect alignment, are bound to be outside the circumfrence of the permissibly vocalisable; and as for the sorts of things the nth wheel tends to say back, well, that class of utterances amounts to a whole nother tin of worms named Contingency (which istersay that it's always hit or miss whether the so-called real-world manifestation of one's third wheel has the right pool of factlets or so-called life experiences to draw upon). The point is that it was Esmeralda rather than Ronnie Livingstone whom I here reflexively apostrophised, that it was to her counterfactual orioles, and not to his, that I turned for spiritual sucker at this particularly dire moment--and let it be said, without either taking a razor to one's wrists or applying that self-same razor to a verbal slab of pre-minced mince-meat pie-filling, every moment when a bloke finds himself at the syringe-end of an enema-bag-ful of grade-A high-octane bullshit is a particularly dire one. Hence, to come full circle, the usefulness of an indiwidual's assumption of the nth-wheel role as an index of their sub-dermality, of their centrality to one's lifeworld; for without the orioles of an nth wheel ready to mind's boca, a bloke is liable to be cowed or cajoled into believing practically anything, be it that black is white, or that two and two make five, or that Arsène Wenger is a human being rather than some Ken-Livingstone-sired incubus; especially when he (the bloke, not AW or Ken) finds himself in a sitch--e.g., ye olde aforementioned brown bag lunch--where the shirt-shucking-epistemological-safety-valve option is pretty much off the table.

Speaking (in reverse order of textual appearance) of the Devil's red-and-black Alsatian spawn, of coming through or on to full circles, of nth wheels and of MFCT's au-currancy on the Esmerldan sitch as of mid-May; we seem by this point to have pulled up, quadruple-seater-tandem-bicycle fashion, more or less a-tit of and level with last Wednesday's UEFA Championship match. I suppose, considering the matter from an Arsenalophic purist's standpoint, I really ought to treat of this sacrosanct subject in a hermetically-sealed ziplock bag of a post entitled Arsenalaphobeaphobe's Bank Holiday, and consisting of a more-or-less verbatim transcript of the Beeb's match report, interspersed with the odd 'my schphincter dilated/contracted when' at the appropriate Gunners-favouring/thwarting moments. But I think for cuntinuity's sake, I'd best treat of this subject under the auspices of the Esmereldan umbrella; i.e., in a post entitled Un Amour de Rugger: Part III (of...?)--and not only for the sake of cuntinuity, but also for that of efficiency; for, as I think you'll see, the two subjects ended up dove-arse-ing rather beautifully.

'You mean,' interjects My-Newly-Gender-Re-Assigned-Fucking-Cunt's-Truly, 'You and Esmeralda watched the match together? Awww, that's so sweet, so romantic.'

[Your Fucking Still-Blokish-As-All Get-Out's Truly (-Albeit Ruefully)]: 'Erm, no, I don't mean that. Still, it worked out all for the best and most beautiful. Just trust and bear with me till the next post.'