Un Amour de Rugger
My apologies, DGR, go out to MFCT for the long gap between posts--not that it's all that long as far as recent inter-postal gaps go (in fact, after you've factored out gaps between multi-postal episodes [e.g., the last three], it comes up a good bit shy of the post-new-year average); only I did rather leave you hanging there in mentioning that there'd been developments on the Esmeraldan front, only to dash off leaving the blower off the hook for a butcher's-coupla-dozen days running.
'No need to apologise, old boy,' you reassure me in that toffish chinless-wonder's drawl I can't seem to help ascribing to you in spite of my total ignorance on the score of your social condition or degree of be-chinnedness. 'You did, after all leave yourself an escape clause in the closer of the last post against the eventuating of that very genre of eventuality.'
[YFCT, scrolling through the archives furiously]: 'I did? Ah, yes, I see, the bit at the very end: "And how soon might we expect this later post?" you ask?...[p]erhaps as soon as tomorrow [or] as late as Doomsday.'
'Quite, quite.'
'Whew. Well, that's a load off my plates. Thanks for reminding me.'
'Not atoll, old boy, not atoll. Well, then, given that we're still on the nearer side of Doomsday (albeit for gad knows how long), I assume that the Outcome that Shall Not Be Named did not, er, come out.'
'Brilliant spot of deduction, Watson (or Holmes--take your pick). But surely you needn't have resorted to the former bit of brainwork to arrive at the latter conclusion; surely a bloke, er, gentleman, in your position resides in some more well-appointed locale than the hollow of a rotted-out tree stump on the Norfolk Broads; and surely such a gentleman, by way of his matutinal reading of last Thursday's number of the Times, will have learned that the Scottish football team are not the reigning UEFA champions?'
'One might think so, but one would be wrong--or, rather, right on every count save that of the intelligence communicated to me at breakfasttime last Tursday. I'm much more of a cricket man, you see; so during non-test-match stretches, I skip over the sport section and head straight for the crossword.'
(So much for the so-called self-selecting character of the readership in the so-called blogosphere, I whisper exasperatedly into the ear of my second wheel, i.e., the ear of--ah, but never mind that for now.) 'Fair enough. In any event, now that we've established your O'currance on this matter of Arsenal's ultimate defeat, do you mind if I drop the inverted commas and re-betake myself to the yarn-spinner's chair?'
'By no means, old man. Drop and sit and spin away.'
Right, then. As I was saying at the close of my last post, and iterating at the beginning of this one, come (came?) the 25th of last month, there had already been some developments on the Esmeraldan front. As from the get-go--in virtue of her having been the first to proffer the diggits--the ball was already in possession of my side, I paid scant regard to the three-day blow-off rule, and gave her a bell right after work the very next day (i.e., Friday the 21st). At my suggestion, we met at Emchai for dinner on Saturday night --'
‘Hang on, old boy. One more thing, whilst you’re still spinning slowly enough that I can stop you without losing a finger--’
‘Make it snappy.’
‘This young lady friend of yours, Esmeralda—’
‘Yes?’
‘What does she look like?’
‘What does she look like? What kind of an answer does aa question like that expect? "Like a 5-foot-four-inch-tall blancmange"? "Like the front of a bendy bus"? She looks like a girl, for fuck’s sake. That not good enough for your Grace or Lordship?’
‘Hardly, I’m afraid. I’m looking for specific physical characteristics—colour of eyes, hair and skin, size and orientation of cheekbones, figural proportions (waist, hips, bust)--’
‘All right, you potential bounder or borderline cunt, is it wanking-fodder you’re after or what-what?’
‘A gentleman is not obliged to answer such questions. TB gratuitously T, though, old boy, it’s only out of my tender, disinterested regard for the good old English spirit of fair play that I even bothered to interrupt you atoll. Do you realise, old boy, how fast and loose you’ve been playing lately with the principle the literary-critical chaps call psychological verisimilitude?’
‘You’ll have to cut those last two rump-roast-sized chunks of verbiage into smaller pieces for the benefit of this unliterary, uncritical bloke.’
‘Be all too glad to. This is the woman you’re allegedly in love with, your Dulcinea, if you will, and the best you can do by way of singing the praises of her beauty is to say she’s not too hard on the eyes? Good heavens, man!—in a darkened taproom even the face of the Duchess of Cornwall [i.e., the former Ms. Parker Bowles and future Queen of Kernevistan (RMcG)] wouldn’t occasion much ocular damage.’
‘Rest assured, MDFC, she’s a cuntish sight better looking than Camilla.’
‘Thank gad for that.’
‘And you will recall that I did fill you in on certain salient points of her coocher—the Kelly green jumper, the pointy-collared blouse, the jeans.’
‘Well, erm, quite. But it seems to me that that rather reinforces than undermines my objection; that it’s hardly characteristic of a chap in the throes of besmittenedom to make such meticulous observation of a young lady's wardrobe before noting whether she be slim or plump, tall or short, snub-or-Roman-nosed, buxom or flat-chested—’
‘—There you go again, unpacking the components of your DIY porn kit—’
‘—I’m not finished, sir. Such a modus observandi indeed seems to me, I say, far more characteristic of the poncey sort of chap you would stigmatise as a feminine-fashion anorak.’
‘Now are you finished? Have you squeezed out every last droplet of piss from the skirts of your literary-critical anorak?’
‘As you are so importunate as to require me to cast my reply in the terms of such an incoherent and bounder-ish metaphor—yes, I have done.’
‘Splendid. So then I have your Grace or Lordship’s permission to drop the iceys again? As for the yarn-spinner, I'm afraid it's going to be out of commission for at least a coupla paragraphs, what with that nasty finger-prodding you just gave it.’
'Do as you must, sir. (Gad knows if I demur any further you'll blame me for having knocked the bloody syntax or punctuation engine out of commission.)
Splendid-squared. Now, then: if there’s one spot of melon-collie wisdom the preceding dialogue illustrates, it’s that a bloke can transgress against a principle qua principle time and again without eliciting the merest soup’s-son of disapproval from ye olde all-n-sundrility. He can walk down the High Street in broad daylight with his Balzac hanging out and not receive so much as a dirty look from any of his fellow punters on parade until he happens to cross paths with a person who, in virtue of his or her institutionalised so-called social role, happens to enjoy some special title to be offended by the vice of exhibitionism—say, a mum pushing her baby along in a pram—and then, and only then, they pull up the black Maria and throw him into Wormwood Scrubs and toss away the key. But not to stray too far in my High Street promenade from the sign of Ye Olde Haitch and Enn, it is just such a transgression, on the theoretical plane, that I have been committing all along, vis-à-vis virtually every bloke Jack and blokess Jill who has figured in these pages from day one last September; that is to say, lie-in barge, I’ve never particularly gone in for the verbal-phiz-painting sub-strand of yarn-spinning, vis-à-vis any of these blokes and blokesses. And I’m willing to wager against that you, DGR, be you the UC twit I’ve made you out to be, or the chavviest Berkshire council estate matron, had yet to take stock of this omission before the apparition of Esmeralda in the last post but one; I dare say you expected no better from a knuckle-dragging hetrasexual bloke vis-à-vis those of his fellow hominids upon whose cunts and schpincters his schlong harboured no penetrative designs. But this omission was hardly the issue of an oversight or so-called brain-fart on the part of YFCT; it was, rather, part of a deliberate, calculated strategy on his (my) part. It’s not that, in my capacity as a so-called people-watcher or as a blogschmidt, I simply can’t be bothered to take mental snaps of my fellow Britons, or I derive no pleasure from translating these snaps into verbiage on my mental scribbling block; it’s just that, based on my experience as a reader, I’d say that going so far as to typeset and publish any such translation is a complete waste of effort. You see, whenever I happen across one of these spells of verbal phiz-painting in the course of my reading of, say a novel, or one of the so-called readers’ posts at Randy Nannies of the Northern Line—I’m invariably struck by the rapidity and unbudgie-like-ability with which the image of the bloke or blokess in question becomes fixed in my mind. If the character in question is a bloke, and the first of his character's features my author takes it upon hisself to catalogue happens to be an aquiline nose; why, then, I automatically start assuming that this bloke looks exactly like Harry Dean Stanton, (i.e., the dad from Pretty In Pink), and bucketfuls of phiz-in-fillment in contradiction of this involuntary inner casting-move can persuade me otherwise; if this character is afterwards said to 'pass a hand across his preternaturally flaxen forelocks; why, then, I picture Harry Dean Stanton with a platinum dye job; if he is said to heft 'a pallet-bed full of plutonium ingots with his hogshead-barelled biceps' why, then, I picture Mr Dean Stanton in a prosthetic Arnold Schwarzenegger costume from the neck down. (I'm not even positive that Harry Dean Stanton actually has or had a nose that can properly be described as aquiline, but that's the subject of a proper sub-digression in its own right). If the character in question is a blokess whom my author represents as having 'nipple-aureolae the size (and shape) of marmite-jar lids'; why then, I cannot help but think of this topless blokess as a clone of Millie 'Marmite-Mammaried' Markham, Featured Randy Nanny of Highgate for 12 December 2005. You catch?
So, you see, in keeping such details to the barest-arsed minimum in the sketches of my own personages, I am merely paying respect, in the first place, to the indiwidual therein depicted; and, in the second place, to myself by way of the reader. The courtesy one pays to a bloke in not causing him to be mistaken for a person of Stantonesque phizzage when he in fact fancies himself something of a ringer for, say, Russell Crowe, should be obvious. And as for the courtesy one thereby pays the reader, well, when I'm not given a clue as to what Joe or Jill Bloggs looks like, I am free to imagine him or her looking like just about fuck anybody I choose; and who, thence, is the writer to tell me afterwards that he pattened Jill Bloggs's portrait on the image of his fourth-form maths teacher rather than on my that of my fifth-form history teacher?
WRT Esmeralda in particular, precisely on account of the full-nelson hold she's currently got on the schlongles of my heart, I was indeed fleetingly tempted to make the paparazzo-inderiction principle explicit by taking a page from the writings of that ideenth-sintury bloke Larry Sterne, specifically and literally that blank page he offered his readers by way of obviating any attempt on his part at compassing the incomparable beauty of his heroine the widow Wadman. ('Here's paper ready to hand,' Larry said to his readerly second wheel. 'Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind--as like your mistress as you can--as unlike your wife as your conscience will--'tis all one to me--please but your own fancy in it.') But then, by way of a chain of associations worthy of Sterne himself, I thought of Mikey Waterbottom's recent adaptation of Tristram Shandy, of his casting of Gillian Anderson in the role of the Mrs Wadman, and finally of the generations upon generations of present and future first-time readers of TS wedded in advance to an incarnation of the widow as Agent Scully in a bodice and long skirts, and I chucked the whole crumpled sheet of foolscap in the dustbin. (Not that I can really suppose that the smooth-crotched robotic earthlings of the year 2241 will take the slightest interest in putting together a holofilmic version of The Angry Londoner, but there is the sodding principle of the thing to consider, intthere?)
So, as I was saying, about an hour ago as the eye crawls, at my suggestion, Esmeralda and I had our first proper chin-to-chin date on Saturday the 22nd, at Emchai, the top-notch Pan-Indochinese restaurant whose table I lauded way back last October and whose name made a cameo in my last post but one. Note well, DGR, the appositive of at my suggestion, an appositive you yourself might have found worthy of a double-takelette, had you not been so preoccupied with getting your rocks off courtesy of a full-body Japanimised caricature of my girlfriend's nude form--
'--Really, sir! Your impertinence beggars the imagination. I demand satisfaction--'
--Which, as I think I've already made abundantly plain, you won't be getting from me. Note, I say, the appositive at my suggestion, and the ledger-volumes it speaks to Esmeralda's credit and against the overwhelming debit of the feminine mobility in toto (and in partem against the debit of a certain Hitchinian co-worker of mine who right about now is vying with an A*****l UEFA Championship for pride of place in my private pantheon of unnamable entities). Not that I by any means foisted Emchai on her as a dining venue; but merely that, in answer to my julie chivalrous query of 'Do you have any particular place in mind?', she was gracious enough to say, 'No. And as I'm new to the borough, I think I'd rather leave the choice up to you, the seasoned Barnetian.' I'd put those last two words in italics, only it seems to me that in so doing I'd be putting a de facto cuntish slant on them quite out of keeping with the manifestly un-cuntish spirit in which they were uttered. TBS, in dubbing me a 'seasoned Barnetian,' she was rather taking the piss out of me, but with merely a fraction of the hoovering power brought to bear on my schlong by, say, The Unnamable Blokess's haililng of YFCT as a 'provincial Norweegian'. Hers, Esmeralda's, was a preeminently gentle instance of piss-taking, essayed with a view merely to tweaking the bladder rather than to transmogrifying the co-jones into a pair of dessicated lychee nuts fit to be trodden underfoot by the nearest pair of stiletto'd heels. Thus, indeed, had been all of her previous piss-taking sallies on the car-ride home from Redford's the night before, and thus were to be all of her subsequent ones during our zero-eth anniversary dinner-date.
Which event, on the hole, turned out rather splendiferously, if I do say so meself. TBS, its beginnings were not especially promising, emerging as they did out of the usual serial-killer-screening mutual-backround-in-filling sort of chit-chat obligatory to such first-rendezvouses, rendered all the more onerously perfunctory in this case by the entente-Kenophobiale established shay-nous two nights previously (not to mention the ten-minute-wide gustatory chasm that elapsed between our exhaustion of the crackers and dipping sauce and the arrival of our first round of Singhas). Still, this bit of chit-chat got the job done, and, having since found a shelf or two in the archives of my gourdita, it continues to putter along up there, industriously discharging the judies of the position description; for I now know precisely by how belt-notches I shall have to gird my spiritual loins against such in-the-offing ordeals as the pet-sitting gig (one notch at most, what with her sole critterly cohabitant being a miniature dachshund [name of Lucy] and my being partial to wiener dogs anyway), the long-weekend-ly visit to the volks (two to four notches: her parents, a pair of native Surreyans, have retired to some five-why'd typographic ringer for Bumfuck, Wales), and the trouser-retentive career upgrade (eight notches easily [ouch!]: she's a senior accountant at a company whose HQ has recently shifted from the City to SoWeHerts [hence the newbility of her Barnetian residence]).
From such prosaic coordinates as these, I'm embarrassed to say, the conversation wended its immejiate and sluggish way--as we tucked into our respective entrees of Charkway Chow [sp?] (she) and Pad Thai (I) and swigged on our second respective Singers--to the at-best poetasterly precincts of the provenances of our respective forenames. You are already more than fully aware, DGR, of my reservations on the score of the name Esmeralda. Well, as petty as it might seem of a bloke to hold against a girl her possession of such a burden, the assumption of which, after all, she was presumably never consulted upon in utero, I can't help but side with Oscar Wilde and Siggy Frood and, indeed, our old friend Larry Sterne, in harbouring the superstition that a bloke or blokess is more or less destined to assume in adulthood the character eternally stamped on the name by which he or she was christened in infancy. Not that in an ideal conversational setting I would ever dream of humouring such a neurotic superstition, but this was evidently not such a setting: the fact was that the back-in-filling chit-chat episode, far from paving the organic way to more intimate revelations, had, in virtue of its intrinsic artificiality, left in its wake nothing but such conversational flotsam as was afforded by this very plank of neurotic naggage. Such that I felt, then and there, at tuck-in time at Emchai, that I had best reconcile myself to this name Esmeralda by affiliating it with some more pleasing concatenation of sensations or images than that of the sanitised-loo stench it was presently conjoined to. So, I says to her:
‘That’s quite an...erm...fetching Judeo-Christian-Islamic name you’ve got there: Esmeralda. Would it be presumptuous to ask if it, erm, means anything?’
‘Presumptuous because it just might turn out to be Irish Gaelic for She whose bosoms [sic (RMcG)] defy gravity? No need to worry about turning up anything as embarrassing as that: it’s simply Spanish for emerald.’
‘So then, are your parents Spanish? Or were you born in Spain?’
‘No. My mum’s from Guildford and my dad’s from Reigate, and the closest any of us have got to Spain is Ibiza…or Mallorca, whichever one’s more westward.’
Not to spoil your appetite, DGR (or to put off a prospective customer, Mr Emchai) by descending too precipitously to netherly naughty-bitterly latitudes, but in my capacity as meteorologist of the date's ghost, I'm rather obliged to report that, notwithstanding the anti-aphrodisiacal tenor of the discussion, up until I started quizzing Esmeralda on the etymology of her JCI-name, the forecast for the evening, as measured by the barometric reading of my schlong, was pretty much consistently favourable; and further that right about the time I was initiating my inquiry, I started to notice a significant drop in pressure dyenandah; and finally that this sorry prognosis was only reaffirmed by the slight tickling in my lap undoubtedly occasioned by the total recumbent collapse of my detumescencing member on to the twin-bed-sized futon mattress of my pubes, which collapse coincided quite tidily with my date-mate's avowal of her and her'n's utter firsthand ignorance of the Iberian peninsula. What was going wrong here? As gormless as I was on the score of the answer to this question at the time, in hindsight, I feel fairly confident in chalking up my somatic symptoms to a phenomenological SOA most handily, if tritely, nominated as a kind of deja-vu on LSD (that's LSD as in Lysergic S-whatevthefuckyoucallit Acid, not as in ye olde Pounds, Shillings and Pence): which is to say that in tandem with the usual DV-ant unhomely suspicion that I'd participated in this very chinwag before, I was likewise prey to a parallel unhomely suspicion that its second participating chin had been, and by all rights ought now to be, that of a bloke. Such that, whilst, say, two fifths of my attention were consigned to keeping the chatflow pipeline open, the other three fifths were busily employed scoping out every pore of Esmeralda's pointy little undimpled chin in search of (as I only now realise) a telltale hint of stubble; the latter enterprise being one naturally calculated to put my schlong to sleep. By way of rallying the troops--or, rather, the single trooper--I desperately launch into an inversion of the old Cricket free-associating game centring on this lately unearthed etymological treasure of emerald: emerald...the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz...Judy Garland...gay Judy Garland fans of the 1970s...Tim Curry in fishnets and a garter belt. To no avail. But the show must go on, mussnitdo?
'I think it's Ibiza.'
'OK. Anyway, most of my friends call me Merle.'
'Really--Merle?' I say, in my unconcealable astonishment as the Ruggerian crest pitches schlong-long into my plate, and my schlong itself slips into a kind of borderline coma. 'But that's a bloke's name.'
[She, thankfully still chipper than Flipper]: 'Not necessarily. Cos after all, it's not a proper full-length Christian name at all: it's a mere nickname, short for...?'
(YFCT, doing a spell of air-doodling on my napkin with the handle of my spoon, then mock-dejectedly exhibiting to her the stark-naked white canvas of the finished ultra-minimalist artwork on the wall of my hand-hams) '...Dunno, I'm afraid.'
'Well, Merlin, obviously and conventionally. But wouldn't it do just as well as shorthand for the Merlin's feminine counterpart, Merlina?'
'Oh, pull the other one, Merle--'
'--Now, now, now, I haven't given you permission to call me that yet--'
'All right, pull the other one, Esmeralda: there's no such name as Merlina.'
'But why shouldn't there be?' she retorts, with a pettish, just-barely-perceptible out-thrusting of her lower lip that's more than enough to get my schlong to sit up and start feeling round for his slippers. 'If civilisation can muddle along nicely enough in coexistence with a hundred-thousand-or-so Briannas, Wilhelmenas and Samuelas, surely it can survive the superaddition of a Merlina or two.'
'And I suppose you're jockeying to be the first of those two.'
'Not in the slightest. No, I'm quite happy being li'ol ol' Esmeralda Houghington, one of a probable hundred Esmeraldas in Barnet, a thousand in London and 10,000 in the UK. But enough about me. [Just in case you're innersted: in Rugger's Third International Unabridged Dictionary of Girlspeak, the entry for 'But Enough About Me' reads, in full, See TROUBLE.] You've got quite a fetching Judeo-Christian Islamic name yourself: Rugby. Now, I can suss out the etymology easily enough--'
'--Well, as you may have already observed, Esmeralda, most of my friends call me Rugger--'
'--i.e., fans' slang for the same sport. I.e., you're begging the question.'
'Hardly. You haven't even asked it yet.'
'Very well, Mr Counsel for the Defence. "How did you come by such a...[repressed titters]...such an interesting name as that?" Was your dad on the English team in the 70s? [Now singing at a volume more than sufficient to drown out the canned sitar-cum-gamelan-cum-didgeridoo soundtrack twanging and groaning in the background:] Swing low, sweet cha-a-a-a-ri-o-ot, comin' for to carry me h-o-ome. Swing low, sweet cha-a-a-ri-o-ot comin' for to carry me HO-O-O-O-O-OME.'
Now, I gots to admit that there are few things in this world that are more charming to YFCT than the multi-sensory spectacle of a chirpy-voiced blokess attempting to accommodate her narrow little pipes to a chune traditionally rendered by a bloke with pipes as wide and deep as those of Dave Ochs. As far as I was concerned, Esmeralda was more than welcome to keep singing SLSC until she turned bright purple. But de gustibus, etc., and the gust I was getting from the okies of the elderly gent sitting alone, kitty-cornered to me, at the next table to the left, was decidedly not a friendly one; translated into plain blokespeak it read, 'Mind that woman of yours or I'll call the manager over.' So, with consummate tact, I give the codger a little nod signifying, 'I've got the situation well in hand,' then, swivelling my phiz back towards that of my crooning tablemate, I furrow my brows ever so slightly and roll my okies leftward a few times.
'Oh, sorry,' she sputters, clapping a hand to her mouth in apparently genuine cuntsternation.
'It's OK,' I say. 'And in answer to your question, no it hasn't got anything to do with my dad, or with my mum for that matter. The name they gave me, you see, was another one altogether, and as unlike Rugby as you could imagine.' (I'm hoping, you see, that in yielding the corner of embarrassment that will be occasioned by the revelation of my original given name, I'll be able to spare myself the direct kick of embarrassment that would be occasioned by the relation of the story behind my subsequent shogun christening as Rugby [a story that you, DGR, should already be acquainted with (if not, shame on you! Repair directly to my post of 21/10/05 without passing GO! or collecting 200 quid beforehand].)
'And that name would be...?'
(Affecting a sheepish mien and a sotto'd vocoder setting, the better to speed the ball corner-ward): 'NIGEL.'
(Crinkling her nose up in absolutely enchanting Ewww!-ishness): 'Really? Nigel?'
'What's wrong with Nigel?'
'Nothing. It's just that I was banking on its being something a bit blokier, like Jack or Joe or Bob or Fred. '
'Well, I did warn you. Now you understand why I prefer to answer to Rugger.'
(Dreamily): 'Yeah, I suppose I do. [Snapping to attention:] Hang on, though. That's hardly the whole story. It hardly explains why, as against all of the officially-listed blokey forenames, you came to be called by the name of a sport and a public school and a town in Warwickshire.'
Just then, the waiter shows up to clear away our entree-remains and ask us if we'd care for any dessert. After the briefest of menu-consultations and conferrals, we order a pair of sticky-white-rices-with-mango and yet another round of beers. Once he's off, I take a deep breath, count to one, and prime myself to roll the old Rush-ian bones in the one and only saving throw I've allocated for the entire evening. (You'll see the pips on the dice soon enough). And I says to her:
'I'd be happy to tell you the whole rather long and teejious story behind the assumption of my present appalachian, Esmeralda. Before I do, though, I'm judy-bound to remind you that here we are, on the last leg of our gustatory sojourn, with a right hefty passel of old scores to settle; and that it would be something of a pity if we were to part company tonight leaving them in that unsettled state.'
'Old scores? Erm...' She launches into a ringerly-perfect restaging of the opening movements of my napkin-doodling solo panto.
[I, prefacing this reply with a headmasterly Ahem!:] 'Yes, old scores to settle with a certain insular burgomeister endowed with fuehrer-esque privileges...'
[Smiting her forrid in vexation:] 'Cor! Our mad-Ken-lib-fest! [Kismet!] I'd completely forgotten about it.'
'You wouldn't happen to have the, erm, necessary equipment ready to hand?'
'Yes, I would--I've got it all right here,' she says with a tight-lipped, serves-you-right-for asking-ish half-smile, as she reaches for, and unfastens, her pocketbook.
In a second instance of hindsight, I sort of think we'd have done better, before commencing our fresh round of Ken bashing, to adjourn to the sort of place where our high-jinks would have attracted less notice--i.e., to a pub or pub-inclusive restaurant. (But then again, as the most proximate exemplar of either genre to my seasoned Barnetian's knowledge would have been Redford's, perhaps we did better to linger at Emchai after all.) For as it turned out, the two of us ended up kicking up quite a ruckus; what with our newly re-ignited Kenophobic passion receiving along the way a coupla dousings of petrol from our third, fourth and fifth Singha-rounds, such that, eventually, as I'm in the midst of fairly belting out my tenth contribution to our second City Hall freelancer's portfolio ('If you Batavians aren't a hundred per cent on board my policy of installing turd detectors in the loos of all private residences in London towards offsetting the UK's involvement in the war in Iraq, why don't you move back to Belgium, I'm sure you'd get a much better deal from the..') I catch peripheral sight not of the okies, but of the diggits, of our old pal the gent next door, alternately motioning emphatically towards his own person and pointing no less emphatically towards our table.
'Get a much better deal from who?' she hisses back at me impatiently.
'The...freemasons,' I sigh back at her detumescingly. This time round there's no need for me to explain anything to her, okie-larly or otherwise, for in no-time plus or minus a sharp or flat, the waiter's standing a-tit of our table, bill-folding thingummerjig in hand, and and beaming pseudo-servile daggers at each of us in turn: 'So solly, Monsieur, Madame--but I'm aflaid, that, as you'll distulbing celtain of the the othel puntels, we'll going to have to ask you to reeve.'
'No need for the Charlie stroke Jackie Chan impression,' I say, pulling out my wallet. 'We're vamoosing.'
'Och, well, you ken,' he explains in broad Scots and with a shrug, 'it tends to get the job done a wee mite faster than Fuck off, ye cunties!'
*
'So,' I ask her, as we're strolling hand in hand alongside Barnet Hill Road towards my digs, which are situated about two and half miles sou'-sou'west of the restaurant--just close enough to make driving or tubing the trip seem perverse and downright wet-blanketish on one of these here so-called nights as lovely as this (i.e., from a blokess's point of view, any night when the sky isn't raining hot volcanic ash), 'What did you think of Emchai?''
'It was...quite nice. Very stylish, very upmarket. And the food was top-notch too: the best Charkway Chow I've had in...months. Mind you, every tenth bite or so I found myself wondering if they couldn't have done with going just a wee mite easier on the onions and peppers, but that was probably just my inner former West-End-East-Asian-restaurant-snob talking. I dare say the culinary folkways of you northerners'll take some getting used to.'
At these words, my right hand jerks itself vaguely shirtwards, pulling her left one along in its train. In hindsight-cubed, I now see what this reflex was all about: the phrase you northerners had conjured up the banshee-esque spectre of S**** S******'s you Norweegians. But when, in the full gormlessness of face-sight, I glance over at her in paranoid quest of the usual physiognomical tokens of merciless piss-hoovering, I am relieved and ashamed to discover nothing but the most charitable of smiles dissolving into an expression of mild discomfort, the latter being immejiately vocalised thus:
'Hey, why are you tugging on my hand like that?'
Thankfully, our single-mammary drawing of Fairfield Road, on the right, has just now provided me with a second, unlooked-for, saving throw: 'Sorry. Didn't mean to be so unsubtly protective. I was just guiding you to the left, in case you were thinking of turning off to the right there, for thitherward lies the bourgie cesspit of the South Hertfordshire Golf Club. It's an all-round treacherous web of streetage in general that we're passing through as I speak, this nexus of Barnet Hill Road and the GNR. I dare say you'll find that the cartographic folkways of us northerners will make our culinary folkways seem like...'
'...Chopped liver?'
Well, surely it's not for nothing that the only difference between simile and smile is an I. 'Yeah, exactly--like the most exquisitely-minced paté, at worst.'
So those, there, are the minutes of the upbeat phase of hoof-powered pilgrimage to Woodside Park. The minutes of the second, downbeat, phase follow.
(MFCT): 'The downbeat phase? Don't tell me you were bowled out in the second innings.'
Not atoll. By downbeat, I simply mean, prevailingly sombre in tone. For, you see, there was one last bit of potentially buzz-killing bidness I had to cross off my to-do list for the evening. I was tempted, of course, to postpone the off-crossing until some more propitious moment, but in my experience, such moments never arise; and in any case, I knew my schlong would never give me a moment's rest until the thing was done. Anyway, eventually, I screws up the courage to ask her:
'So, when you said most of your friends called you Merle, were you including Manisha in that majority?'
'I should say so. Why do you ask, anyway?'
'Well, it's just that, to be absolutely frank, I've never been particularly partial to her.' (Not that I let this vaunted impartiality stand in the way of my pulling on her last New Year's Eve! That aside aside, after switching on my inner broadcaster's digital delay, so as to ensure that no unseemly tarts, sluts, cuntesses, or the like gyno-repellent vocables slipped through, I continued thus):
'Her...loudness...her...brusqueness...her...rather garish, overstated taste in clothing...her fixation on a revolving roster of handbag designers...well, again, to be absolutely frank, it's just the sort of combo of qualities that you'd swear was calculated to chafe a bloke's...'
'...Scrotum?'
'I was going to say nipples--but yes, scrotum will certainly do in a pinch.'
'I see. And, not to blow me own horn too loudly, but I suppose you were wondering what a nice girl like me was doing hanging out with such an insufferable scrotum-chafer as her?'
'Well--again not to put too fine a point on the old balzac--but yes.'
'I'm afraid I can't really help you there. I've known Manisha for going on ten years now. We were best friends in fifth form back at Guildford, and I suppose in a way we still are now. I can't really explain it. You know that old jokey proverb, You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose; but you can't pick your friends' noses?'
'Yeah.' [While Sinatrahood demands that I should say No, only the priggiest ethical anorak would insist, merely for the sake of truth with the tiniest of lower-case tees, on interrupting a blokess when she's off on a good philosophical tear.]
'Well, I've never really bought the first bit of it. I imagine it's actually probably easier to pick your friends' noses than it is to pick your friends. It's more like fate, or whatever you want to call it, assigns you your friends; and once you've acquired 'em, you're pretty much stuck with 'em, however awful they may turn out to be afterwards. Cos the alternative is even more awful.'
Alas, the official tone of the convo--not to mention the absence of the requisite props--rather precludes my doing another run-through of the blank-drawing panto. 'The...erm...alternative?'
'Yeah, the alternative of simply sloughing off whole mini-eras of your past, like they never even existed.'
This claim was certainly debatable (after all, I seemed to be coping swimmingly enough with having sloughed off the whole of the Winckelmannian mini-era last Christmas) . But at least it was a sconelet for thought, in contrast to the all-you-can-eat buffet for septic tank microbes comprised by the aggregated bulk of general observations on so-called life that I'd come across in the past coupla years. I guess I must have been noshing a little too ruminatively on that there sconelet for her patience, because after an interval of silence that might have been ten seconds or ten minutes for all I knew, I hear her chiming in, back in her far-from-rare chirpy form:
'Anyway, the point is, just because I'm friends with Manisha doesn't mean you need fear her kind of chafing from me--at least not in the same region.' [She accompanying these last words with a gentle--and, TBT, rather titillating--free-handed sock at my left pectrals].
By now, we're practically within spitting distance of the Ruggermobile. Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to call our arrival at this checkpoint a decisive moment, it is, undoubtedly, and at bare-arsed minimum, a potentially indecisive one. For whilst her indication of a preference for my driving her back to her digs in Finchley Central won't necessarily betoken any stormy weather in the offing shay noos, it will, at minimum, at least leave things up in the air on that front for the excrutiating ten-odd-minute-duration of the drive down. I would much prefer to get things down on a terrestrial level much sooner, viz. by means of her acceptance of an invitation to step inside the maisonette for a kite-nap. But it's all rather out of my hands, innit?--and in a quite literal sense for, by the time we're past spitting and approaching knocking distance of my hoss, she has arrested our stroll and performed the old disco-partner yo-yo reconfiguration move on me, and the two of us are standing vis-a-vis, gob-a-gob, schlong-a-cunt, with respective pairs of arms akimbo and a mere square decimetre of pavement separating our respective pairs of plates.
'So, then, Rugger,' she says to me, bowing with winsomely affected ceremoniousness.
'So, then, Merle,' I says to her, bowing with as much winsomely affected ceremony as I, in my capacity as a bloke, can muster. 'Sorry, milady--Esmeralda. That is, erm, unless I've been admitted to the inner circle of Merlites.'
'Oh, you've been admitted all right, sir. Strictly on probationary terms, of course...' She languidly smiles, closes her eyes and leans back, offering me the most unambiguous of cues, which I, for my part, am certainly game enough to take, only my schlong has once again perversely taken other notions into his head. Now, I could, at this point, remonstrate with his/my Membership thus: 'Look, JT, just because she calls herself Merle, a de facto bloke's handle, doesn't mean there's a compatriot of yours, together with his glandular cohort, concealed under the flies of them there jeans of hers. If you're that much of a method actor, just pretend her name's Millie Markham for the time being, and we'll work out the fine points of the nomenclature later.' But time is at a premium, and I can't help thinking that a more expeditious, albeit less chivalrous, means of reconciling my differences with H/MM would be to act as his envoy, and to convey his grievance directly to its source, namely my little emerald herself. So I says to her:
'Look, would you mind very much if I waived the privilege and just kept calling you Esmeralda? Truth be told, the name's rather grown on me--and as for Merle, well, truth again be told, I'd just rather not be put in mind of a Boys' Own Adventure novelist or a sodding Okie-Okied Blokie from Muskogee every time I...'
By now she's got both hands round my shoulders and is leaning forwards so close that I can feel her forrid-hairs touching mine, and that, from my perspective, her phiz has been practically transmogrified into that of a cyclops under a magnifying glass--and yet, as grotesque as this spectacle undoubtedly is (from a purely aesthetic pov) by comparison with that of a headshot of either of the two gents alluded to in the last paragraph, my schlong is somehow, and all of a sudden, well enough pleased by it (as is, come to think of it, my schpincter). 'Every time you what?' (she asks.)
'Every time I, erm, k-kissed you.'
'You mean, every time like now?'
[Pairs of okies shade themselves, gobs meet, two hearts beat as three-quarters, etc.]
'No, I wouldn't mind it a bit,' she whispers afterwards into my tit pocket whilst cradling her forrid in the hollow of my left shoulder. 'I'm beginning to think it's high time I started answering to Esmeralda again, Nigel.'
FINIS POSTIS.
'The devil it is!' you, DGR, stroppily interject. 'What happened after that?'
'What happened after that? Sir, a gentlebloke is not obliged to answer such questions.'
FINIS FUCKINGIS POSTIS!
'No need to apologise, old boy,' you reassure me in that toffish chinless-wonder's drawl I can't seem to help ascribing to you in spite of my total ignorance on the score of your social condition or degree of be-chinnedness. 'You did, after all leave yourself an escape clause in the closer of the last post against the eventuating of that very genre of eventuality.'
[YFCT, scrolling through the archives furiously]: 'I did? Ah, yes, I see, the bit at the very end: "And how soon might we expect this later post?" you ask?...[p]erhaps as soon as tomorrow [or] as late as Doomsday.'
'Quite, quite.'
'Whew. Well, that's a load off my plates. Thanks for reminding me.'
'Not atoll, old boy, not atoll. Well, then, given that we're still on the nearer side of Doomsday (albeit for gad knows how long), I assume that the Outcome that Shall Not Be Named did not, er, come out.'
'Brilliant spot of deduction, Watson (or Holmes--take your pick). But surely you needn't have resorted to the former bit of brainwork to arrive at the latter conclusion; surely a bloke, er, gentleman, in your position resides in some more well-appointed locale than the hollow of a rotted-out tree stump on the Norfolk Broads; and surely such a gentleman, by way of his matutinal reading of last Thursday's number of the Times, will have learned that the Scottish football team are not the reigning UEFA champions?'
'One might think so, but one would be wrong--or, rather, right on every count save that of the intelligence communicated to me at breakfasttime last Tursday. I'm much more of a cricket man, you see; so during non-test-match stretches, I skip over the sport section and head straight for the crossword.'
(So much for the so-called self-selecting character of the readership in the so-called blogosphere, I whisper exasperatedly into the ear of my second wheel, i.e., the ear of--ah, but never mind that for now.) 'Fair enough. In any event, now that we've established your O'currance on this matter of Arsenal's ultimate defeat, do you mind if I drop the inverted commas and re-betake myself to the yarn-spinner's chair?'
'By no means, old man. Drop and sit and spin away.'
Right, then. As I was saying at the close of my last post, and iterating at the beginning of this one, come (came?) the 25th of last month, there had already been some developments on the Esmeraldan front. As from the get-go--in virtue of her having been the first to proffer the diggits--the ball was already in possession of my side, I paid scant regard to the three-day blow-off rule, and gave her a bell right after work the very next day (i.e., Friday the 21st). At my suggestion, we met at Emchai for dinner on Saturday night --'
‘Hang on, old boy. One more thing, whilst you’re still spinning slowly enough that I can stop you without losing a finger--’
‘Make it snappy.’
‘This young lady friend of yours, Esmeralda—’
‘Yes?’
‘What does she look like?’
‘What does she look like? What kind of an answer does aa question like that expect? "Like a 5-foot-four-inch-tall blancmange"? "Like the front of a bendy bus"? She looks like a girl, for fuck’s sake. That not good enough for your Grace or Lordship?’
‘Hardly, I’m afraid. I’m looking for specific physical characteristics—colour of eyes, hair and skin, size and orientation of cheekbones, figural proportions (waist, hips, bust)--’
‘All right, you potential bounder or borderline cunt, is it wanking-fodder you’re after or what-what?’
‘A gentleman is not obliged to answer such questions. TB gratuitously T, though, old boy, it’s only out of my tender, disinterested regard for the good old English spirit of fair play that I even bothered to interrupt you atoll. Do you realise, old boy, how fast and loose you’ve been playing lately with the principle the literary-critical chaps call psychological verisimilitude?’
‘You’ll have to cut those last two rump-roast-sized chunks of verbiage into smaller pieces for the benefit of this unliterary, uncritical bloke.’
‘Be all too glad to. This is the woman you’re allegedly in love with, your Dulcinea, if you will, and the best you can do by way of singing the praises of her beauty is to say she’s not too hard on the eyes? Good heavens, man!—in a darkened taproom even the face of the Duchess of Cornwall [i.e., the former Ms. Parker Bowles and future Queen of Kernevistan (RMcG)] wouldn’t occasion much ocular damage.’
‘Rest assured, MDFC, she’s a cuntish sight better looking than Camilla.’
‘Thank gad for that.’
‘And you will recall that I did fill you in on certain salient points of her coocher—the Kelly green jumper, the pointy-collared blouse, the jeans.’
‘Well, erm, quite. But it seems to me that that rather reinforces than undermines my objection; that it’s hardly characteristic of a chap in the throes of besmittenedom to make such meticulous observation of a young lady's wardrobe before noting whether she be slim or plump, tall or short, snub-or-Roman-nosed, buxom or flat-chested—’
‘—There you go again, unpacking the components of your DIY porn kit—’
‘—I’m not finished, sir. Such a modus observandi indeed seems to me, I say, far more characteristic of the poncey sort of chap you would stigmatise as a feminine-fashion anorak.’
‘Now are you finished? Have you squeezed out every last droplet of piss from the skirts of your literary-critical anorak?’
‘As you are so importunate as to require me to cast my reply in the terms of such an incoherent and bounder-ish metaphor—yes, I have done.’
‘Splendid. So then I have your Grace or Lordship’s permission to drop the iceys again? As for the yarn-spinner, I'm afraid it's going to be out of commission for at least a coupla paragraphs, what with that nasty finger-prodding you just gave it.’
'Do as you must, sir. (Gad knows if I demur any further you'll blame me for having knocked the bloody syntax or punctuation engine out of commission.)
Splendid-squared. Now, then: if there’s one spot of melon-collie wisdom the preceding dialogue illustrates, it’s that a bloke can transgress against a principle qua principle time and again without eliciting the merest soup’s-son of disapproval from ye olde all-n-sundrility. He can walk down the High Street in broad daylight with his Balzac hanging out and not receive so much as a dirty look from any of his fellow punters on parade until he happens to cross paths with a person who, in virtue of his or her institutionalised so-called social role, happens to enjoy some special title to be offended by the vice of exhibitionism—say, a mum pushing her baby along in a pram—and then, and only then, they pull up the black Maria and throw him into Wormwood Scrubs and toss away the key. But not to stray too far in my High Street promenade from the sign of Ye Olde Haitch and Enn, it is just such a transgression, on the theoretical plane, that I have been committing all along, vis-à-vis virtually every bloke Jack and blokess Jill who has figured in these pages from day one last September; that is to say, lie-in barge, I’ve never particularly gone in for the verbal-phiz-painting sub-strand of yarn-spinning, vis-à-vis any of these blokes and blokesses. And I’m willing to wager against that you, DGR, be you the UC twit I’ve made you out to be, or the chavviest Berkshire council estate matron, had yet to take stock of this omission before the apparition of Esmeralda in the last post but one; I dare say you expected no better from a knuckle-dragging hetrasexual bloke vis-à-vis those of his fellow hominids upon whose cunts and schpincters his schlong harboured no penetrative designs. But this omission was hardly the issue of an oversight or so-called brain-fart on the part of YFCT; it was, rather, part of a deliberate, calculated strategy on his (my) part. It’s not that, in my capacity as a so-called people-watcher or as a blogschmidt, I simply can’t be bothered to take mental snaps of my fellow Britons, or I derive no pleasure from translating these snaps into verbiage on my mental scribbling block; it’s just that, based on my experience as a reader, I’d say that going so far as to typeset and publish any such translation is a complete waste of effort. You see, whenever I happen across one of these spells of verbal phiz-painting in the course of my reading of, say a novel, or one of the so-called readers’ posts at Randy Nannies of the Northern Line—I’m invariably struck by the rapidity and unbudgie-like-ability with which the image of the bloke or blokess in question becomes fixed in my mind. If the character in question is a bloke, and the first of his character's features my author takes it upon hisself to catalogue happens to be an aquiline nose; why, then, I automatically start assuming that this bloke looks exactly like Harry Dean Stanton, (i.e., the dad from Pretty In Pink), and bucketfuls of phiz-in-fillment in contradiction of this involuntary inner casting-move can persuade me otherwise; if this character is afterwards said to 'pass a hand across his preternaturally flaxen forelocks; why, then, I picture Harry Dean Stanton with a platinum dye job; if he is said to heft 'a pallet-bed full of plutonium ingots with his hogshead-barelled biceps' why, then, I picture Mr Dean Stanton in a prosthetic Arnold Schwarzenegger costume from the neck down. (I'm not even positive that Harry Dean Stanton actually has or had a nose that can properly be described as aquiline, but that's the subject of a proper sub-digression in its own right). If the character in question is a blokess whom my author represents as having 'nipple-aureolae the size (and shape) of marmite-jar lids'; why then, I cannot help but think of this topless blokess as a clone of Millie 'Marmite-Mammaried' Markham, Featured Randy Nanny of Highgate for 12 December 2005. You catch?
So, you see, in keeping such details to the barest-arsed minimum in the sketches of my own personages, I am merely paying respect, in the first place, to the indiwidual therein depicted; and, in the second place, to myself by way of the reader. The courtesy one pays to a bloke in not causing him to be mistaken for a person of Stantonesque phizzage when he in fact fancies himself something of a ringer for, say, Russell Crowe, should be obvious. And as for the courtesy one thereby pays the reader, well, when I'm not given a clue as to what Joe or Jill Bloggs looks like, I am free to imagine him or her looking like just about fuck anybody I choose; and who, thence, is the writer to tell me afterwards that he pattened Jill Bloggs's portrait on the image of his fourth-form maths teacher rather than on my that of my fifth-form history teacher?
WRT Esmeralda in particular, precisely on account of the full-nelson hold she's currently got on the schlongles of my heart, I was indeed fleetingly tempted to make the paparazzo-inderiction principle explicit by taking a page from the writings of that ideenth-sintury bloke Larry Sterne, specifically and literally that blank page he offered his readers by way of obviating any attempt on his part at compassing the incomparable beauty of his heroine the widow Wadman. ('Here's paper ready to hand,' Larry said to his readerly second wheel. 'Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind--as like your mistress as you can--as unlike your wife as your conscience will--'tis all one to me--please but your own fancy in it.') But then, by way of a chain of associations worthy of Sterne himself, I thought of Mikey Waterbottom's recent adaptation of Tristram Shandy, of his casting of Gillian Anderson in the role of the Mrs Wadman, and finally of the generations upon generations of present and future first-time readers of TS wedded in advance to an incarnation of the widow as Agent Scully in a bodice and long skirts, and I chucked the whole crumpled sheet of foolscap in the dustbin. (Not that I can really suppose that the smooth-crotched robotic earthlings of the year 2241 will take the slightest interest in putting together a holofilmic version of The Angry Londoner, but there is the sodding principle of the thing to consider, intthere?)
So, as I was saying, about an hour ago as the eye crawls, at my suggestion, Esmeralda and I had our first proper chin-to-chin date on Saturday the 22nd, at Emchai, the top-notch Pan-Indochinese restaurant whose table I lauded way back last October and whose name made a cameo in my last post but one. Note well, DGR, the appositive of at my suggestion, an appositive you yourself might have found worthy of a double-takelette, had you not been so preoccupied with getting your rocks off courtesy of a full-body Japanimised caricature of my girlfriend's nude form--
'--Really, sir! Your impertinence beggars the imagination. I demand satisfaction--'
--Which, as I think I've already made abundantly plain, you won't be getting from me. Note, I say, the appositive at my suggestion, and the ledger-volumes it speaks to Esmeralda's credit and against the overwhelming debit of the feminine mobility in toto (and in partem against the debit of a certain Hitchinian co-worker of mine who right about now is vying with an A*****l UEFA Championship for pride of place in my private pantheon of unnamable entities). Not that I by any means foisted Emchai on her as a dining venue; but merely that, in answer to my julie chivalrous query of 'Do you have any particular place in mind?', she was gracious enough to say, 'No. And as I'm new to the borough, I think I'd rather leave the choice up to you, the seasoned Barnetian.' I'd put those last two words in italics, only it seems to me that in so doing I'd be putting a de facto cuntish slant on them quite out of keeping with the manifestly un-cuntish spirit in which they were uttered. TBS, in dubbing me a 'seasoned Barnetian,' she was rather taking the piss out of me, but with merely a fraction of the hoovering power brought to bear on my schlong by, say, The Unnamable Blokess's haililng of YFCT as a 'provincial Norweegian'. Hers, Esmeralda's, was a preeminently gentle instance of piss-taking, essayed with a view merely to tweaking the bladder rather than to transmogrifying the co-jones into a pair of dessicated lychee nuts fit to be trodden underfoot by the nearest pair of stiletto'd heels. Thus, indeed, had been all of her previous piss-taking sallies on the car-ride home from Redford's the night before, and thus were to be all of her subsequent ones during our zero-eth anniversary dinner-date.
Which event, on the hole, turned out rather splendiferously, if I do say so meself. TBS, its beginnings were not especially promising, emerging as they did out of the usual serial-killer-screening mutual-backround-in-filling sort of chit-chat obligatory to such first-rendezvouses, rendered all the more onerously perfunctory in this case by the entente-Kenophobiale established shay-nous two nights previously (not to mention the ten-minute-wide gustatory chasm that elapsed between our exhaustion of the crackers and dipping sauce and the arrival of our first round of Singhas). Still, this bit of chit-chat got the job done, and, having since found a shelf or two in the archives of my gourdita, it continues to putter along up there, industriously discharging the judies of the position description; for I now know precisely by how belt-notches I shall have to gird my spiritual loins against such in-the-offing ordeals as the pet-sitting gig (one notch at most, what with her sole critterly cohabitant being a miniature dachshund [name of Lucy] and my being partial to wiener dogs anyway), the long-weekend-ly visit to the volks (two to four notches: her parents, a pair of native Surreyans, have retired to some five-why'd typographic ringer for Bumfuck, Wales), and the trouser-retentive career upgrade (eight notches easily [ouch!]: she's a senior accountant at a company whose HQ has recently shifted from the City to SoWeHerts [hence the newbility of her Barnetian residence]).
From such prosaic coordinates as these, I'm embarrassed to say, the conversation wended its immejiate and sluggish way--as we tucked into our respective entrees of Charkway Chow [sp?] (she) and Pad Thai (I) and swigged on our second respective Singers--to the at-best poetasterly precincts of the provenances of our respective forenames. You are already more than fully aware, DGR, of my reservations on the score of the name Esmeralda. Well, as petty as it might seem of a bloke to hold against a girl her possession of such a burden, the assumption of which, after all, she was presumably never consulted upon in utero, I can't help but side with Oscar Wilde and Siggy Frood and, indeed, our old friend Larry Sterne, in harbouring the superstition that a bloke or blokess is more or less destined to assume in adulthood the character eternally stamped on the name by which he or she was christened in infancy. Not that in an ideal conversational setting I would ever dream of humouring such a neurotic superstition, but this was evidently not such a setting: the fact was that the back-in-filling chit-chat episode, far from paving the organic way to more intimate revelations, had, in virtue of its intrinsic artificiality, left in its wake nothing but such conversational flotsam as was afforded by this very plank of neurotic naggage. Such that I felt, then and there, at tuck-in time at Emchai, that I had best reconcile myself to this name Esmeralda by affiliating it with some more pleasing concatenation of sensations or images than that of the sanitised-loo stench it was presently conjoined to. So, I says to her:
‘That’s quite an...erm...fetching Judeo-Christian-Islamic name you’ve got there: Esmeralda. Would it be presumptuous to ask if it, erm, means anything?’
‘Presumptuous because it just might turn out to be Irish Gaelic for She whose bosoms [sic (RMcG)] defy gravity? No need to worry about turning up anything as embarrassing as that: it’s simply Spanish for emerald.’
‘So then, are your parents Spanish? Or were you born in Spain?’
‘No. My mum’s from Guildford and my dad’s from Reigate, and the closest any of us have got to Spain is Ibiza…or Mallorca, whichever one’s more westward.’
Not to spoil your appetite, DGR (or to put off a prospective customer, Mr Emchai) by descending too precipitously to netherly naughty-bitterly latitudes, but in my capacity as meteorologist of the date's ghost, I'm rather obliged to report that, notwithstanding the anti-aphrodisiacal tenor of the discussion, up until I started quizzing Esmeralda on the etymology of her JCI-name, the forecast for the evening, as measured by the barometric reading of my schlong, was pretty much consistently favourable; and further that right about the time I was initiating my inquiry, I started to notice a significant drop in pressure dyenandah; and finally that this sorry prognosis was only reaffirmed by the slight tickling in my lap undoubtedly occasioned by the total recumbent collapse of my detumescencing member on to the twin-bed-sized futon mattress of my pubes, which collapse coincided quite tidily with my date-mate's avowal of her and her'n's utter firsthand ignorance of the Iberian peninsula. What was going wrong here? As gormless as I was on the score of the answer to this question at the time, in hindsight, I feel fairly confident in chalking up my somatic symptoms to a phenomenological SOA most handily, if tritely, nominated as a kind of deja-vu on LSD (that's LSD as in Lysergic S-whatevthefuckyoucallit Acid, not as in ye olde Pounds, Shillings and Pence): which is to say that in tandem with the usual DV-ant unhomely suspicion that I'd participated in this very chinwag before, I was likewise prey to a parallel unhomely suspicion that its second participating chin had been, and by all rights ought now to be, that of a bloke. Such that, whilst, say, two fifths of my attention were consigned to keeping the chatflow pipeline open, the other three fifths were busily employed scoping out every pore of Esmeralda's pointy little undimpled chin in search of (as I only now realise) a telltale hint of stubble; the latter enterprise being one naturally calculated to put my schlong to sleep. By way of rallying the troops--or, rather, the single trooper--I desperately launch into an inversion of the old Cricket free-associating game centring on this lately unearthed etymological treasure of emerald: emerald...the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz...Judy Garland...gay Judy Garland fans of the 1970s...Tim Curry in fishnets and a garter belt. To no avail. But the show must go on, mussnitdo?
'I think it's Ibiza.'
'OK. Anyway, most of my friends call me Merle.'
'Really--Merle?' I say, in my unconcealable astonishment as the Ruggerian crest pitches schlong-long into my plate, and my schlong itself slips into a kind of borderline coma. 'But that's a bloke's name.'
[She, thankfully still chipper than Flipper]: 'Not necessarily. Cos after all, it's not a proper full-length Christian name at all: it's a mere nickname, short for...?'
(YFCT, doing a spell of air-doodling on my napkin with the handle of my spoon, then mock-dejectedly exhibiting to her the stark-naked white canvas of the finished ultra-minimalist artwork on the wall of my hand-hams) '...Dunno, I'm afraid.'
'Well, Merlin, obviously and conventionally. But wouldn't it do just as well as shorthand for the Merlin's feminine counterpart, Merlina?'
'Oh, pull the other one, Merle--'
'--Now, now, now, I haven't given you permission to call me that yet--'
'All right, pull the other one, Esmeralda: there's no such name as Merlina.'
'But why shouldn't there be?' she retorts, with a pettish, just-barely-perceptible out-thrusting of her lower lip that's more than enough to get my schlong to sit up and start feeling round for his slippers. 'If civilisation can muddle along nicely enough in coexistence with a hundred-thousand-or-so Briannas, Wilhelmenas and Samuelas, surely it can survive the superaddition of a Merlina or two.'
'And I suppose you're jockeying to be the first of those two.'
'Not in the slightest. No, I'm quite happy being li'ol ol' Esmeralda Houghington, one of a probable hundred Esmeraldas in Barnet, a thousand in London and 10,000 in the UK. But enough about me. [Just in case you're innersted: in Rugger's Third International Unabridged Dictionary of Girlspeak, the entry for 'But Enough About Me' reads, in full, See TROUBLE.] You've got quite a fetching Judeo-Christian Islamic name yourself: Rugby. Now, I can suss out the etymology easily enough--'
'--Well, as you may have already observed, Esmeralda, most of my friends call me Rugger--'
'--i.e., fans' slang for the same sport. I.e., you're begging the question.'
'Hardly. You haven't even asked it yet.'
'Very well, Mr Counsel for the Defence. "How did you come by such a...[repressed titters]...such an interesting name as that?" Was your dad on the English team in the 70s? [Now singing at a volume more than sufficient to drown out the canned sitar-cum-gamelan-cum-didgeridoo soundtrack twanging and groaning in the background:] Swing low, sweet cha-a-a-a-ri-o-ot, comin' for to carry me h-o-ome. Swing low, sweet cha-a-a-ri-o-ot comin' for to carry me HO-O-O-O-O-OME.'
Now, I gots to admit that there are few things in this world that are more charming to YFCT than the multi-sensory spectacle of a chirpy-voiced blokess attempting to accommodate her narrow little pipes to a chune traditionally rendered by a bloke with pipes as wide and deep as those of Dave Ochs. As far as I was concerned, Esmeralda was more than welcome to keep singing SLSC until she turned bright purple. But de gustibus, etc., and the gust I was getting from the okies of the elderly gent sitting alone, kitty-cornered to me, at the next table to the left, was decidedly not a friendly one; translated into plain blokespeak it read, 'Mind that woman of yours or I'll call the manager over.' So, with consummate tact, I give the codger a little nod signifying, 'I've got the situation well in hand,' then, swivelling my phiz back towards that of my crooning tablemate, I furrow my brows ever so slightly and roll my okies leftward a few times.
'Oh, sorry,' she sputters, clapping a hand to her mouth in apparently genuine cuntsternation.
'It's OK,' I say. 'And in answer to your question, no it hasn't got anything to do with my dad, or with my mum for that matter. The name they gave me, you see, was another one altogether, and as unlike Rugby as you could imagine.' (I'm hoping, you see, that in yielding the corner of embarrassment that will be occasioned by the revelation of my original given name, I'll be able to spare myself the direct kick of embarrassment that would be occasioned by the relation of the story behind my subsequent shogun christening as Rugby [a story that you, DGR, should already be acquainted with (if not, shame on you! Repair directly to my post of 21/10/05 without passing GO! or collecting 200 quid beforehand].)
'And that name would be...?'
(Affecting a sheepish mien and a sotto'd vocoder setting, the better to speed the ball corner-ward): 'NIGEL.'
(Crinkling her nose up in absolutely enchanting Ewww!-ishness): 'Really? Nigel?'
'What's wrong with Nigel?'
'Nothing. It's just that I was banking on its being something a bit blokier, like Jack or Joe or Bob or Fred. '
'Well, I did warn you. Now you understand why I prefer to answer to Rugger.'
(Dreamily): 'Yeah, I suppose I do. [Snapping to attention:] Hang on, though. That's hardly the whole story. It hardly explains why, as against all of the officially-listed blokey forenames, you came to be called by the name of a sport and a public school and a town in Warwickshire.'
Just then, the waiter shows up to clear away our entree-remains and ask us if we'd care for any dessert. After the briefest of menu-consultations and conferrals, we order a pair of sticky-white-rices-with-mango and yet another round of beers. Once he's off, I take a deep breath, count to one, and prime myself to roll the old Rush-ian bones in the one and only saving throw I've allocated for the entire evening. (You'll see the pips on the dice soon enough). And I says to her:
'I'd be happy to tell you the whole rather long and teejious story behind the assumption of my present appalachian, Esmeralda. Before I do, though, I'm judy-bound to remind you that here we are, on the last leg of our gustatory sojourn, with a right hefty passel of old scores to settle; and that it would be something of a pity if we were to part company tonight leaving them in that unsettled state.'
'Old scores? Erm...' She launches into a ringerly-perfect restaging of the opening movements of my napkin-doodling solo panto.
[I, prefacing this reply with a headmasterly Ahem!:] 'Yes, old scores to settle with a certain insular burgomeister endowed with fuehrer-esque privileges...'
[Smiting her forrid in vexation:] 'Cor! Our mad-Ken-lib-fest! [Kismet!] I'd completely forgotten about it.'
'You wouldn't happen to have the, erm, necessary equipment ready to hand?'
'Yes, I would--I've got it all right here,' she says with a tight-lipped, serves-you-right-for asking-ish half-smile, as she reaches for, and unfastens, her pocketbook.
In a second instance of hindsight, I sort of think we'd have done better, before commencing our fresh round of Ken bashing, to adjourn to the sort of place where our high-jinks would have attracted less notice--i.e., to a pub or pub-inclusive restaurant. (But then again, as the most proximate exemplar of either genre to my seasoned Barnetian's knowledge would have been Redford's, perhaps we did better to linger at Emchai after all.) For as it turned out, the two of us ended up kicking up quite a ruckus; what with our newly re-ignited Kenophobic passion receiving along the way a coupla dousings of petrol from our third, fourth and fifth Singha-rounds, such that, eventually, as I'm in the midst of fairly belting out my tenth contribution to our second City Hall freelancer's portfolio ('If you Batavians aren't a hundred per cent on board my policy of installing turd detectors in the loos of all private residences in London towards offsetting the UK's involvement in the war in Iraq, why don't you move back to Belgium, I'm sure you'd get a much better deal from the..') I catch peripheral sight not of the okies, but of the diggits, of our old pal the gent next door, alternately motioning emphatically towards his own person and pointing no less emphatically towards our table.
'Get a much better deal from who?' she hisses back at me impatiently.
'The...freemasons,' I sigh back at her detumescingly. This time round there's no need for me to explain anything to her, okie-larly or otherwise, for in no-time plus or minus a sharp or flat, the waiter's standing a-tit of our table, bill-folding thingummerjig in hand, and and beaming pseudo-servile daggers at each of us in turn: 'So solly, Monsieur, Madame--but I'm aflaid, that, as you'll distulbing celtain of the the othel puntels, we'll going to have to ask you to reeve.'
'No need for the Charlie stroke Jackie Chan impression,' I say, pulling out my wallet. 'We're vamoosing.'
'Och, well, you ken,' he explains in broad Scots and with a shrug, 'it tends to get the job done a wee mite faster than Fuck off, ye cunties!'
*
'So,' I ask her, as we're strolling hand in hand alongside Barnet Hill Road towards my digs, which are situated about two and half miles sou'-sou'west of the restaurant--just close enough to make driving or tubing the trip seem perverse and downright wet-blanketish on one of these here so-called nights as lovely as this (i.e., from a blokess's point of view, any night when the sky isn't raining hot volcanic ash), 'What did you think of Emchai?''
'It was...quite nice. Very stylish, very upmarket. And the food was top-notch too: the best Charkway Chow I've had in...months. Mind you, every tenth bite or so I found myself wondering if they couldn't have done with going just a wee mite easier on the onions and peppers, but that was probably just my inner former West-End-East-Asian-restaurant-snob talking. I dare say the culinary folkways of you northerners'll take some getting used to.'
At these words, my right hand jerks itself vaguely shirtwards, pulling her left one along in its train. In hindsight-cubed, I now see what this reflex was all about: the phrase you northerners had conjured up the banshee-esque spectre of S**** S******'s you Norweegians. But when, in the full gormlessness of face-sight, I glance over at her in paranoid quest of the usual physiognomical tokens of merciless piss-hoovering, I am relieved and ashamed to discover nothing but the most charitable of smiles dissolving into an expression of mild discomfort, the latter being immejiately vocalised thus:
'Hey, why are you tugging on my hand like that?'
Thankfully, our single-mammary drawing of Fairfield Road, on the right, has just now provided me with a second, unlooked-for, saving throw: 'Sorry. Didn't mean to be so unsubtly protective. I was just guiding you to the left, in case you were thinking of turning off to the right there, for thitherward lies the bourgie cesspit of the South Hertfordshire Golf Club. It's an all-round treacherous web of streetage in general that we're passing through as I speak, this nexus of Barnet Hill Road and the GNR. I dare say you'll find that the cartographic folkways of us northerners will make our culinary folkways seem like...'
'...Chopped liver?'
Well, surely it's not for nothing that the only difference between simile and smile is an I. 'Yeah, exactly--like the most exquisitely-minced paté, at worst.'
So those, there, are the minutes of the upbeat phase of hoof-powered pilgrimage to Woodside Park. The minutes of the second, downbeat, phase follow.
(MFCT): 'The downbeat phase? Don't tell me you were bowled out in the second innings.'
Not atoll. By downbeat, I simply mean, prevailingly sombre in tone. For, you see, there was one last bit of potentially buzz-killing bidness I had to cross off my to-do list for the evening. I was tempted, of course, to postpone the off-crossing until some more propitious moment, but in my experience, such moments never arise; and in any case, I knew my schlong would never give me a moment's rest until the thing was done. Anyway, eventually, I screws up the courage to ask her:
'So, when you said most of your friends called you Merle, were you including Manisha in that majority?'
'I should say so. Why do you ask, anyway?'
'Well, it's just that, to be absolutely frank, I've never been particularly partial to her.' (Not that I let this vaunted impartiality stand in the way of my pulling on her last New Year's Eve! That aside aside, after switching on my inner broadcaster's digital delay, so as to ensure that no unseemly tarts, sluts, cuntesses, or the like gyno-repellent vocables slipped through, I continued thus):
'Her...loudness...her...brusqueness...her...rather garish, overstated taste in clothing...her fixation on a revolving roster of handbag designers...well, again, to be absolutely frank, it's just the sort of combo of qualities that you'd swear was calculated to chafe a bloke's...'
'...Scrotum?'
'I was going to say nipples--but yes, scrotum will certainly do in a pinch.'
'I see. And, not to blow me own horn too loudly, but I suppose you were wondering what a nice girl like me was doing hanging out with such an insufferable scrotum-chafer as her?'
'Well--again not to put too fine a point on the old balzac--but yes.'
'I'm afraid I can't really help you there. I've known Manisha for going on ten years now. We were best friends in fifth form back at Guildford, and I suppose in a way we still are now. I can't really explain it. You know that old jokey proverb, You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose; but you can't pick your friends' noses?'
'Yeah.' [While Sinatrahood demands that I should say No, only the priggiest ethical anorak would insist, merely for the sake of truth with the tiniest of lower-case tees, on interrupting a blokess when she's off on a good philosophical tear.]
'Well, I've never really bought the first bit of it. I imagine it's actually probably easier to pick your friends' noses than it is to pick your friends. It's more like fate, or whatever you want to call it, assigns you your friends; and once you've acquired 'em, you're pretty much stuck with 'em, however awful they may turn out to be afterwards. Cos the alternative is even more awful.'
Alas, the official tone of the convo--not to mention the absence of the requisite props--rather precludes my doing another run-through of the blank-drawing panto. 'The...erm...alternative?'
'Yeah, the alternative of simply sloughing off whole mini-eras of your past, like they never even existed.'
This claim was certainly debatable (after all, I seemed to be coping swimmingly enough with having sloughed off the whole of the Winckelmannian mini-era last Christmas) . But at least it was a sconelet for thought, in contrast to the all-you-can-eat buffet for septic tank microbes comprised by the aggregated bulk of general observations on so-called life that I'd come across in the past coupla years. I guess I must have been noshing a little too ruminatively on that there sconelet for her patience, because after an interval of silence that might have been ten seconds or ten minutes for all I knew, I hear her chiming in, back in her far-from-rare chirpy form:
'Anyway, the point is, just because I'm friends with Manisha doesn't mean you need fear her kind of chafing from me--at least not in the same region.' [She accompanying these last words with a gentle--and, TBT, rather titillating--free-handed sock at my left pectrals].
By now, we're practically within spitting distance of the Ruggermobile. Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to call our arrival at this checkpoint a decisive moment, it is, undoubtedly, and at bare-arsed minimum, a potentially indecisive one. For whilst her indication of a preference for my driving her back to her digs in Finchley Central won't necessarily betoken any stormy weather in the offing shay noos, it will, at minimum, at least leave things up in the air on that front for the excrutiating ten-odd-minute-duration of the drive down. I would much prefer to get things down on a terrestrial level much sooner, viz. by means of her acceptance of an invitation to step inside the maisonette for a kite-nap. But it's all rather out of my hands, innit?--and in a quite literal sense for, by the time we're past spitting and approaching knocking distance of my hoss, she has arrested our stroll and performed the old disco-partner yo-yo reconfiguration move on me, and the two of us are standing vis-a-vis, gob-a-gob, schlong-a-cunt, with respective pairs of arms akimbo and a mere square decimetre of pavement separating our respective pairs of plates.
'So, then, Rugger,' she says to me, bowing with winsomely affected ceremoniousness.
'So, then, Merle,' I says to her, bowing with as much winsomely affected ceremony as I, in my capacity as a bloke, can muster. 'Sorry, milady--Esmeralda. That is, erm, unless I've been admitted to the inner circle of Merlites.'
'Oh, you've been admitted all right, sir. Strictly on probationary terms, of course...' She languidly smiles, closes her eyes and leans back, offering me the most unambiguous of cues, which I, for my part, am certainly game enough to take, only my schlong has once again perversely taken other notions into his head. Now, I could, at this point, remonstrate with his/my Membership thus: 'Look, JT, just because she calls herself Merle, a de facto bloke's handle, doesn't mean there's a compatriot of yours, together with his glandular cohort, concealed under the flies of them there jeans of hers. If you're that much of a method actor, just pretend her name's Millie Markham for the time being, and we'll work out the fine points of the nomenclature later.' But time is at a premium, and I can't help thinking that a more expeditious, albeit less chivalrous, means of reconciling my differences with H/MM would be to act as his envoy, and to convey his grievance directly to its source, namely my little emerald herself. So I says to her:
'Look, would you mind very much if I waived the privilege and just kept calling you Esmeralda? Truth be told, the name's rather grown on me--and as for Merle, well, truth again be told, I'd just rather not be put in mind of a Boys' Own Adventure novelist or a sodding Okie-Okied Blokie from Muskogee every time I...'
By now she's got both hands round my shoulders and is leaning forwards so close that I can feel her forrid-hairs touching mine, and that, from my perspective, her phiz has been practically transmogrified into that of a cyclops under a magnifying glass--and yet, as grotesque as this spectacle undoubtedly is (from a purely aesthetic pov) by comparison with that of a headshot of either of the two gents alluded to in the last paragraph, my schlong is somehow, and all of a sudden, well enough pleased by it (as is, come to think of it, my schpincter). 'Every time you what?' (she asks.)
'Every time I, erm, k-kissed you.'
'You mean, every time like now?'
[Pairs of okies shade themselves, gobs meet, two hearts beat as three-quarters, etc.]
'No, I wouldn't mind it a bit,' she whispers afterwards into my tit pocket whilst cradling her forrid in the hollow of my left shoulder. 'I'm beginning to think it's high time I started answering to Esmeralda again, Nigel.'
FINIS POSTIS.
'The devil it is!' you, DGR, stroppily interject. 'What happened after that?'
'What happened after that? Sir, a gentlebloke is not obliged to answer such questions.'
FINIS FUCKINGIS POSTIS!
posted by Rugby McGyver | 4:31 am
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