The Angry Londoner's 2006 World Cup Special

So, DGR: now that I've brought the rough contours of the terrain of the Esmeraldan sector of my official, publicly-available lifeworld-map in line with the most up-to-date private lifeworld-geographical survey data; I can finally get round to doing the same with respect to the Arsenalophobic sector, as I've been hankering to do for going two weeks now--namely (to refresh your memory) by recounting in full the trials and tribulations I underwent in my capacity as a lonely, diehard Arsenalophobe throughout that month-long nationalistic reign of terror that was the World Cup.

Here, of course, you'll be quick to interject, 'Surely, sir, this outburst of cartographic self-satisfaction is, to say the least, premature. Surely, sir, you ought not to boast of having brought the Esmeraldan map-sector up to date as of the start of the Cup when that inaugural moment is separated from the most recently occuring Esmeraldacentric event narrated in these pages--to wit, your so-called patching-up date of late last May--by (give or take a day or two) a full fortnight.'

To which I will rejoin, 'You're missing the gist of the metaphor. If what'd I'd meant to get across had been I've apprised you of the particulars of every meeting that took place between Esmeralda and me up to the first day of the Cup, I'd have written (more simply), Now that I've dropped a schlongtaphone tape labelled "R&E: 31/5, 1/6, 2/6...9/6" into your lap...[.] The whole point of using a bendy-bus-shaped metaphoric vehicle--of splitting the thing between a public map and a private survey--was to emphasise that the last post had provided you with a pretty clear picture of my general view-of-stroke- disposition-towards the Esmeraldan SOA, nothing more, nothing less; and as this VSD did not substantially change between 27 May and 21 June, I am indeed well within my rights to say that you are now fully a-tit of the phenomenon in question.'

To which riposte I dare say you, being your cuntishly captious self, will reply in turn, 'Your clarification of the cartographic metaphor notwithstanding, the tele-screen-shot of your general-view-stroke-disposition towards the Esmeraldan SOA at any point from 26 May onwards remains murkier than that which might be supplied by a 400-line black-and-white telly of early 1960s vintage. What of your anxieties on the score of ******, which cost you so many hours of inward and outward deliberation prior to the so-called patch-up rendezvous on the 27th (and which were resolved neither implicitly nor explicitly as of the close of the last post)? To say nothing of the presumptively arse-chafing animadversions on ****** introduced by Esmeralda during the rendezvous itself (the chafing having been duly noted by MFBT; the prospective remedy thereof as yet not so much as hinted at)? And the ******, Good heavens, the ******! [Sorry about all the f***ing asterisks, DGR, but to give legible names to the referents of your ascribed omissions would be to concede the justness of your suit in advance of the judgment.] How ever, in the light of your aversion to ******, did you two survive as a couple for those two long weeks?'

In answer to which I'll firstly refer you again to the opening paragraph, and the merely rough contours alluded to therein; and secondly remind you that, as the exposition of the most recent Esmeraldan bit of the narrative was originally conceived a coupla posts (and weeks) ago as a mere post-script or dessert to the main Cup-centric meat of the thing, you really ought not to take the Esmeraldan emphasis of the last two posts for anything but gravy, or to begrudge me for sopping up its residual driblets in a single humble bap of a post devoted to the Cup.

‘Touché, MDF, touché,’ you'll say (or at least had fucking better well do). 'My memory having been refreshed on the score of my most material reservation, I begrudge thee not. All, the same, and talking of sops, I should be ever so grateful to you if you could somehow contrive to start out the main body of the post with an episode in which at least one of the Esmeraldan mysteries is somehow clarified, deepened, enriched or what have you.'

'Nothing—save, perhaps, falling off a duck’s arse—could require less contrivance, DGR. In fact, just watch; here I go typing the first Cup-centric words that pop into my gourdita: I was lounging about Esmeralda’s place…How about them palmers!'

'A most impressive piece of sop-augury. I thank you from the bottom of my Esmeralda-curious (and Cup-indifferent) heart. Pray continue.'

Naw, I’ll just start over again, if you don’t mind. Cos on further reflection, I recall I wasn’t actually lounging about Esmeralda’s place in general on the day and moment in question; rather, I was sitting—or, at the slackest, slouching—at her dining room table. Esmeralda had just cleared away the remnants of dinner…

‘…Ah! So Mystery Number Three is about to be solved!’

Not in this post, DGR. As I was saying: She had just cleared away the remnants of a dinner whose constituents and kitchen of origin shall remain nameless, whilst I had just started furiously poring over the previous day’s Cup results as printed in that morning’s Guardian, when the phone started ringing, as I allowed it to continue to do--not out of laziness (for the receiver was within easier reach of me in more than one respect) but out regard for the principle that so long as this was not, even by any semi-official stretch of the imagination, our house, I should by default leave all the on-site liaising with the outside world to the mortgage-holder--until finally, round about the fifth chirp, Esmeralda circled over from the kitchen and, tea-towel in one hand and forearms still awash in soap-suds, uncradled it and answered it with a resolutely chipper Hullo! (along with a contradictorily stroppy glance directed at YFCT, one which suggested she'd rather I had answered it myself [It is, alas, the inevitable fate of your most conscientiously practised virtues of omission to be mistaken now and again for their sinful brethren.]).

Anyway: 'Hullo!' she says (as I do my level, furrow-browed damndest to seem to re-immerse myself in results-perusing). And then: 'Oh, hi Susan! Lovely to hear from you. How's tricks? [Silence for roughly 30 seconds.] Tomorrow night? Well, of course, I'd be delighted to attend. Of course, I will have to run it by Nigel. [ibid. minus 20 seconds.] Yes, that's right, Nigel--you know, my partner. ['Bloke's the word, dearie,' I mentally apostrophise her. 'If it's a partner you're looking for, I suggest you take up bridge or doubles tennis.'] Howzabout I tell you tomorrow morning at the office...? [ibid. plus an anxious glance at the wall-clock, which reads roughly half-past eight.] By ten o' clock tonight, you say? Well, I'll do my best. [ibid. minus the clock-checking.] Right, I'll ask him about the marmite roll. [ibid. plus five seconds.] Yes, I understand how these caterers are; they want an exact count. Well, as I said, I'll do my best. And if you don't hear from me, please don't put yourself out of pocket on my account. OK, bye for now.'

'So,' I say, glancing up in sunnily apparent semi-distraction as she cradles the blower, 'has this call brought any tidings I should be apprised of?'

'Indeed it has. Susan--you do remember Susan, my friend from work, don't you?'

'Of course,' (i.e., about as clearly as Susan apparently remembered me).

'Well, on Saturday afternoon, she and her husband are hosting a party, a World Cup party to coincide with the big match [i.e., the quarter-final between England and Portugal]. Do you think you'd be up for attending it?'

'Well,' I say, gruffly enough, despite my efforts to keep the sunny side up, 'that depends.'

'Depends upon what?'

'Well, first of all upon...' [I hem and haw inwardly before pitching upon a criterion for bailing out that just might conceivably cut mustard with both Esmeralda and the hosts] '...upon where they live.'

'Right, of course. I quite agree there's no reason to drive out to bumfuck Hertfordshire or Berkshire for a sodding football party. As it happens, though, they live just round the corner, in East Finchley--I'd have said no straightaway myself if they'd lived much farther off.'

'East Finchley, eh? Not far at all. We could probably walk there, I dare say?'

'I dare say, unless we were running especially late.'

'Right, and why would we be? Punctuality is our shared middle name. Any word on the refreshments?'

'Refreshments?'

'OK, I admit it: I couldn't help overhearing a mention of the Em-word on your end.'

'The Em-word?'

'Yeah, you know [in a whisper]: marmite. You see, I'm deathly allergic to the stuff; and yet, of course, I wouldn't dare risk causing a scene by saying "No thank you: I prefer jam" at a marmite-fest (any more than I would do by asking for tofu dogs at a pig-roast)...so perhaps it would be best if I sat this one out.'

'Don't be silly, Nigel. You're hardly alone in your marmite-aversion. That was the whole point of her bringing it up: she wants to know which of her guests won't be partaking of the roll so she can tell the caterer how long of one to prepare.'

Wellsir, that about did it. Now that both my reserve feints had been deftly parried, I had no choice but to move in for the kill. So I rose from the table, turned round, and, crossing my arms dramatically across my tits (and equally dramatically, if pointlessly, flexing my arse cheeks), announced to the wall:

'I'm sorry, Esmeralda, darling, but I can't go. And when I say can't, I mean shan't. But please, by all means, if my company can be dispensed with, go on your own; for under no circumstances would I have you think that I resented or otherwise bregrudged you this choice opportunity to rub red-and-white-nylon-swathed elbows with your colleagues and to cheer on...the stinkin' English national home team!'

'Oh, Nigel, dearest, is there something in your history that you've been keeping from me?--say, that one of your parents is a Portuguese-passport-holder?'

'No, darling: rest assured that, like you, I am a loyal English citizen and British subject; and that my refusal to attend this do issues from no facet of my history or ethos with which you are not already well acquainted.'

'Surely you don't mean...,' she hesitates for a bit--not, I assume, in at-a-loss-ness for an explanation, but, rather, in befoxedness as to the connexion between an already-pitched-upon explanation and the thing to be explained thereby, '...your longstanding animus against Arsenal?'

'I'm afraid that that's exactly what I mean.' [BTW, DGR, now's as good a time as any, if you're in the mood, to move Mystery Number Two from the 'Unsolved' side to the 'Solved' side of the your police-room whiteboard. (You:) Surely you don't mean...? I'm afraid that's exactly what I mean: implausible as it might seem, this here spot in the convo marked the very first time since the patch-up 'vous that either of us had made explicit mention of my Arsenalophobia. (I think you'll find, though, that a spoonful of recollection of the fact that the intervening period was one of official Gunnerly hibernation makes the implausibility go down in a most delightful way.)]

'But why should that have anything to do with it? Arsenal won't be playing in the match on Saturday. For fudge's sake!--it's not even a...what d'ye call it...'

'...a Premier-or-Champions-League match?'

'You know the taxonomy better than I do. The point is, this isn't about a one-off match between two mere teams--'

'--Clubs,' I reminded her, in a kind of gesture of toking spiritual solidarity with Ronnie Livingstone.

'All right, two mere clubs. It's about the squaring off of two nations, England and Portugal--'

'--Ah, yes,' I can't resist interjecting, all too cuntishly (and gormlessly, given my rhetorically disadvantaged situation), 'England and Portugal!--two nations sworn to mutual annihilation for ages immemorial, and all over the naming of a certain species of glorified jellyfish...'

'...OK, Mr Smart-Arse, I admit it won't exactly be a re-staging of the American war for independence, or of the Battle of Britain. But that's beside the point, which is that Arsenal will not be involved.'

'I know. That's what makes this all so fiendishly, painfully difficult to explain.'

'Be that as it may, explain it you must; lest you should look forward to my explaining your absence on Saturday by way of an avowal of my total indifference to, and oblivion of, your very existence.'

'Fair enough,' I says, turning round, resuming my seat at the table and motioning to her to pull up a chair at the opposite side, which she judifully does do. Then, after pulling my packet of Marlboros out of me trouser pocket, extracting a single rette therefrom with my teeth, and pausing, with un-tindered lighter held athwart the fag end, I add, in the matter-of-fact-est tones of voice, 'I hope, in view of the extremity of the circumstances, that you'll grant me a one-time exemption from the house no-smoking rules.'

'Certainly,' she answers. 'In fact, if you don't mind, and so long as we're fumigating the place, I'll take one myself.' (Once a smoker, always a smoker, what-what?)

So I light my fag, toss her over the packet and the lighter, wait for her to fumble through the whole initial toking routine with her self-evidently nicotine-fiending diggits and gob (fumic gallantry be rogered when one's own blokish fumic mastery can be turned to rhetorical advantage!) and eventually commence my apologia pro Arsenalophobia sua thus:

'I know how it is for you non-pedipiluphiles, and I sympathise all too keenly with your plight--or, mayhap, with your good fortune. From September of each year through to May of the following you traipse your way through the beshattened daily grind in blithe gormlessness vis-a-vis the innumerable arse-offs, triumphs and humiliations meanwhile enacted almost daily on the stadium-pitches of this island and the continent. Then, every twenty-four months, you emerge, as if on cue, like some sodding brood of biennially-hibernating locusts or cicadas, to plague the pedipilular world with your fanatically, vociferously dilettantish cheers for that most unregenerately synthetic of institutions, the home national team, against its equally synthetic counterparts hailing from across Europe or accross the globe, depending on the year. Well, I submit to you, Esmeralda darling, that for those of us in the know, these biennial international arse-off-conglomerations constitute but a trivial coda to the English Football League season-stroke-UEFA Championship; and that, insofar as we cognoscenti deign to take any interest in them whatsoever, we do so solely in our capacities as champions or scourges of the representatives of our most-favoured or most-despised clubs. I submit to you, further, and more particularly, that in my capacity as an Arsenalophobe I am incapable of taking an interest in the forthcoming match between England and Portugal qua partisan of either England or Portugal, that my utmost hope in viewing such a match would be that each participating member of the Arsenal squad, whichever side he happened to be playing on, should suffer some irretrievable setback.'

'OK, I see where you're coming from. But I don't see how it has any bearing on the question of whether or not to attend Susan's party. If the World Cup really means so little to you, then why should the viewing of a World Cup match put you off any more than would, say, the viewing of a match in the World Tiddly-Winks Championship?'

'Because, darling, in the case of this particular match my sympathies will be necessarily diametrically opposed to those of the home crowd. Just take a dekko, if you will, at this here table,' I say, pushing over to her side the matrix I've painstakingly inscribed an hour or so earlier on one of those vertically bifurcated stenographic notepads, as a proper-dudic to the viewing of this very match (a viewing I fondly expected, then, to take in on my lonesome back at the maisonette): 'See how, on the left side, under PORTUGAL, there's a gigantic nought; whereas on the right side, under ENGLAND, there are three names listed?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, that there nought symbolises, if you will, the massive yawn of indifference that I shall be obliged to let slip vis-a-vis Portugal's performance, whether they win or lose, on account of the fact that their squad is one-hundred-per-cent Gunner-free; whilst each of those names in the right column symbolises, as it were, a full-throated Apache war cry that I may very well be obliged to give ululationary voice to, in view of the fact that it is answered to by a particular Gunner. Now, in the case of Names Numbers Two and Three, Theo Walcott and Sol Campbell, the chance of my fulfilment of the obligation is admittedly slight, as these are the names of mere substitutes who will, in all likelihood, never see a microsecond of play. But as for Name Number One, Ashley Cole--there you're dealing with a different story-stroke-kettle-of-fish. For not only is Mr Cole a key member England's first squad, but he also happens to be Number Three on the Arsenalophobes' List of Most Wanted Gunners, to be, essentially, the Arsenalophobic equivalent of Dillinger or Josef Mengele.'

‘And what about the rest of the team?’

‘What about them?’

‘I mean, where do they hail from?’

‘Why, from England, of course.’

‘I meant athletic-wise or league-wise or whatever the proper terminology is.’

‘Oh, well, let's just go through the squad roster one name at a time: first, you’ve got Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney from Manchester United; then you’ve got John Terry and Joe Cole from Chelsea; next there’s Steven Gerrard from Liverpool…’

‘...and so on; each of these teams--sorry, clubs--being, I assume (and please correct me if I’m wrong, cos cor only knows I’m clearly out of my depth here) in some degree or orther a rival or foe of Arsenal.’

'Soitanly, and to the utmost degree in the case of the three clubs I've already mentioned.'

'Well then, would I also be right in assuming that every goal scored during Saturday's match by Rio-or-John-or-Schlomo What’s-His-Name would count as a fistful of sand in the eyes of Arsenal? And that, moreover, seeing as how the non-Arsenalians outnumber the Arsenalians on the English team by, say, a factor of five to one--'

'--It's actually closer to a factor of six to one.'

'All the better for the purposes of my argument. Seeing, then, as how the preponderance of the team membership is of non-Arsenalian provenance, would I not be right in assuming that, should the English be vouchsafed a victory on Saturday, this victory will amount to two a pair of black eyes for Arsenal, and a de facto triumph for the cause of Arsenal-hating?'

'Yeah...I suppose you'd be right in assuming both those things.'

I could see exactly where she was headed with this linearly-inducted train of reasoning of hers; and the truth was, as far as my current inclinations went, I was already well on board that train and positively salivating for our arrival at the destination; in saying which I don't in any respect meantersuggest that I was rationalising my way out of boarding a perpendicularly-aligned train of reasoning that would have led by an even straighter route to a less Esmeralda-pacific station-stop--no: everything she'd said so far made perfect sense to me. Whence, then, issued the mere tentativeness of my assent to the middle term of her syllogism? Well, as long as I'm on a transportational metaphorical kick, I'll say it issued from a sense of being simultaneously conveyed by some sort of as-yet-chimerical technology--say, a TARDIS or the Star Trek atom-scrambling transport thingy--to a locale I knew all too well; a locale in which I'd likewise been pitched some apparently cast-iron argument by a person likewise much less well-versed in the subject to hand than I was, and had capitulated to that argument thinking that I'd merely overlooked some okie-burstingly-obvious step along the way, to which this apparently gormless indiwidual was applying a needful torch-beam of good old-fashioned common sense; only to realise later, to my infinite shah-grin-cum-cuntsternation, that I'd merely misplaced my notes pursuant to, and ultimately rejective of, it (the argument) behind massive sheaf-stacks of more-recently-pertinent documents. To put it more concisely (whilst nominally clinging to the exhaust-pipe of the transportational metaphor), I was wary of eventually finding myself in the position of an engineer of dirigibles who, having been successfully urged by some dodgy bloke in a trench-coat and sunglasses to substitute hydrogen for helium on cost-cutting grounds, is put in mind of the negative precedent of the Hindenburg catastrophe only upon witnessing his pride and joy going up in flames on christening-day at the hangar. But in the meantime, Esmeralda was pressing on, naturally, thus:

‘Well, then, it seems to me, with all due deference to your pedipilulophilic insight, that on the whole you should be so far from shrinking from a semi-public viewing of Saturday’s match out of an apprehension of betraying your Arsenal-hating principles as to positively leap at it, as at a prospective field day for the vaunting of those very principles.'

'Yeah, well,' I says, whilst fumblingly lighting our third 'rette (as she waved away my offer of a compl-e/i-mentary fourth one), 'now that you've put it that way, so it seems to me too.' It was a strange SOA, TBS: insofar as things were, at arse, going as I wanted them to go, I wasn't lying; and yet, I do aver, by polygraphic criteria I fully deserved at that moment to be sent to the gallows on a charge of treasonous perjury. Thus, seeing as how I couldn't even vaguely suss out the nature of the final cause of my need to abstain from the match-viewing, I fell back on an efficient cause that I hoped would carry enough weight on its own, to wit-stroke-as-follows:

'But supposing that, against the statistical odds, this lone first-squad Gunner, Mr Cole, does manage to score a goal, or otherwise to comport himself in a manner worthy of home-team applause? How do you expect me to behave in the event of such an eventuality?'

'In the event of such an eventuality, I expect you to behave' she says, reaching across the table, and grabbing hold of me chin betwixt thumb and forefinger, 'with classic English slack-lower-lipped restraint, in conformity with the classic English political virtue of compromise.'

Well, she clearly had me by the short hairs (in two or more ways) on that point; she had as of then, in the baseball-imported idiom, touched all the relevant bases--ethical, mathematical, nationalistic--and there was nothing left for me to do but passively succumb for the moment and hope that the source of my Arsenalophobic paranoia either materialised in the next 46 hours or revealed itself to have been a harmless li'l ghostie all along with the chiming of the 49th one. So, I promise her sheepishly that 'I'll do my best' (i.e., to compromise), and she straightaway leaps up, dashes over to the phone and rings up Susan to tell her to add the two of us to the rolls of prospective yes-shows and the one of us--her--to the rolls of prospective marmite-rollers.


Flash forwards to 4 pm on Saturday, and Esmeralda and I are galloping eastwards to EF, YFCT for his part taking great pains to conceal his stroppiness at being thus driven like Jehu's hoss for the sake of an anorakishly early ETA of a quarter-past (cos after all, the match won't start till 5 sharp); Esmeralda for hers taking considerably less pains to conceal her outright cuntsternation at the inevitable prospect of our arriving at least a whopping five minutes wide of the mark. 'Not on your life! Don't...you see?! ' she gasps at my most tentative urging to slacken our pace to a brisk canter, 'The pre-match period plays an....integral role in the proceedings. It's been set aside...to give the guests a chance to...mingle, free of on-screen...distractions.' To which I am much of a mind to rejoin that from my povey three-quarters-of-an hour of un-telefied mingling with these people is about as welcome a prospect as a coextensive period of mingling with a waiting-room-ful of my fellow punters at a bordello, but I hold my piss; for to say as much to her would be not so much like talking to a brick wall as like talking to a buzz-saw-powered Rugger-slapping automaton.

By and by, we arrive at the house, a modest semi-detached affair that from the outside gives me equally modest (albeit ultimately ill-founded) hopes of an untaxingly unpretentious low-key do. Our--or rather my--first jab at the doorbell is met with the minute or so more of unresponsivenes-cum-muffled-party-din that, in my experience, is an infallible omen of a shitty night out. Then, a half a minute or so after my second ring, the door is flung open and we're phiz-to-phiz with a beaming, rail-thin, short-haired, pocket-T-shirt-and-jean-clad, pendulous-earringed quadragenarian blokess who immejiately pounces on my so-called partner with a squealy ejaculation of 'Merle, how nice to see you!' and delivers a pair of ye olde cuntinental-style pecks to her phiz-cheeks; then, catching sight of YFCT standing just behind her (Esmeralda), exclaims in a comparative baritone, 'And you must be Nigel!' thereupon grasping me by the forearms and subjecting me to the same full-service continental treatment. 'I must say,' she adds, ushering us into the vestibule, 'you've arrived right in the nick of time: we've just finished cutting the marmite roll.'

And from there, once we've hung up our jackets, at our hostess's bidding, in a wee closet conveniently secreted under the staircase, it's on to the front room, and thence to the packed-to-the gills dining room, at whose threshhold Susan takes her leave of us, saying:'

'Well, here we are. Assume your respective places, and I'll see you at matchtime, if not before.'

'Our respective places?' I mutter gormlessly in Esmeralda's ear.

'I assume she means at either of the two queues--the marmite-roll one and the non-marmite-roll one.'

TBT, she was being a bit charitable to both our sides in nominating the agglomerations thereof as queues; for whilst at the moment of our arrival the marmite-roll-buffet'd end of the room was being beset by an amorphous swarm of gourmandisers that completely blocked from view the much-ballyhooed MR itself (and to whose outermost fringe my girl was obliged rather pathetically to glom on like a latecoming sperm cell at an egg-fertilising party), at the same moment the non-marmite-roll-buffet'd side was being but negilently attended by a mere butcher's-quarter-dozen blokes and blokesses (two of each sex to be precise); an SOA I would have very much welcomed had the extra-marmitic foodstuffs on offer consisted of anything I rated higher than my own fingernail parings or toe jam in point of toothsomeness. But nosuchluck: the full catalogue of these foodstuffs comprised, in toto, a tub of hummus, a plate-ful of pita wedges, and a cutting-board's-breadth of schlongtail sausages. Evidently there existed at least one borough-pocket of Greater London that had yet to receive tidings of the phenomenal ice-breaking capabilities of jalappeno poppers and CTM wings. Over the course of what must have been several minutes, I shuttled bodily back and forth between the sausage-board and the hummus-tub-stroke-pita-wedge-plate, unable to determine which of the two (if either) I could more comfortably stomach; and on my ninth or tenth go-round of the cycle, I happened to find myself colliding shoulder-to-shoulder, and subsequently phiz-to-phiz with one of my buffet-mates, a quadragenarian pocket-tee-and-jean clad bloke, who, immejiately on making okie-contact with me, broke into a beaming grin, extended a shake-intended hand, and exclaimed:

'Name's Roger. Susan's husband.'

'Name's Rugger,' I said, conceding the shake with a concessionary grin of me own. 'How d'ye do.'

'You look like you could use a beer.'

'Yes, thanks. A Hoegaarden, please, if you happen to have any of them ready to fridge.'

'A Hoegaarden?' he ejaculates affrontedly, and steps back a foot or two. 'My, but don't we have posh tastes, Monsieur Tintin! Pardonnez-moi, mais je ne parle pas le Walloon. [For fuck's sake! it was just a humbly-framed conditional request, not a sodding peremptory demand.] I can offer you a Smithwick's or a Stella: take your pick.'

Loath as I was to revert to the primordial Stellan ooze (or, rather, Ouse, in view of the East-Angelinan provenance of my long-since-forsworn addiction to the Red Gold and White), I really had no other choice, given the alternative prospect of oesophigal violation by the accursed Irish brewer's third-in-command, so I meekly said, 'I'll have a Stella, please' and left it at that.

So, the bloke steps round the corner to the kitchen, and returns presently and judifully equipped with a pair of uncapped Stellas, one for him, and one for me.

'Ah,' he gasps, taking a swig from his bottle, swallowing and baring his teeth like a rutting chimpanzee, 'that really hits the spot.'

Which bit of panto I take this as an unsnubbable cue to pull on my own bottle and--ideally--to signify mimetically a corresponding spot-impact vis-a-vis my own gullet or tummy; but, try as I might, I just can't make it work. Inured as I am to the lightly-hopped, citric-and-curry-highlighted blandishments of the Hoegaardenian ambrosia, I can't help but receive my first gobful of the comparatively unsubtle Stella in six months as so much carbonated formaldehyde; or register my disgust by pursing my gob like--well, like a dyspeptic hominid.

'Whatsamatter?' my host rejoins, laying a remonstrative hand on my non-bottle-bearing forearm. 'You don't care for the beer, do you? Well, to each his own. Mind you, you've no cause to complain, connoisseur-wise. She's a perfectly respectable mid-priced continental import, is Stella.'

'Of course she is,' I say, after swallowing the last of the gobful, and prophylactically wiping away all residual traces traces thereof from my lips with the back of my bottle-bearing hand: 'Not unlike Hoegaarden.' I intend this as a well-aimed barb at his cuntish abuse of the host's weight-around-throwing privileges, and put both thumb-and-forefinger-pairs on shirt-shucking high alert accordingly; but to my grateful surprise, he receives my riposte in gentleblokishly good humour thus:

'Not unlike Hoegaarden, if not up to quite the same standard. Truth be told, I quite prefer the 'Gaarden to the Stella, but as far as laying out the extra twenty quid on a fridgeful goes--well, it'd pearls before swine in a crowd of this size. And I'm sorry about that Tintin jab atcha. I mean [leaning in, and laying the other hand confidentially aflank its mate], I'm well aware of the cloud of gossip surrounding him--you know, as to his being of the minority persuasion, and I wouldn't have you think that I was assuming anything, in one direction or the other, about you...It's just that...well...with anything having to do with the Belgians, your range of repartee is painfully straitened. [Lifting free the first hand and itemising on it diggit by diggit] You've got your Tintin references, your waffles and your sprouts, and that, [lifting free the second hand and holding aloft a trio of its diggits, JC-style] barring a half-a-fistful of antique poets and composers, just about covers it; that's the whole runnable Belgian gamut [sic?]'.

'Right,' I says, drawing a slightly-less-taxing second gobful from my bottle in attestation of the veracity of the following words: 'No offence taken' (in more senses than he could imagine; for the afore-cited cloud of gossip surrounding Tintin's sexual orientation was certainly news to me).

'You here on your own then?'

'No, I'm here with my par--erm, with my girlfriend, Esmeralda, a work-friend of Susan's.'

'Oh, she's over there, with that lot, is she? Well, as to the marmite roll: that's Susan's doing, of course. You know what they say about marmite--you either love it or hate it, and Susan happens to love it. I must say, though, that I'm a bit surprised at the rabid reception it's getting here tonight. All along, I'd assumed us marmite-haters comprised a solid majority of the English population, treated Susan's predilection for the stuff as a bloody mental disorder one or two notches shy of schizophrenia, and what have you. But taking this party as a demographic sample, why, you'd have to assume they ran this sodding country!'
'And by they, I assume you mean the marmite-lovers?'

'Of course that's who I fucking mean! And, of course, if I'd had my druthers, we'd have done something entirely different food-spread-wise. You know: order some pizza, grill up some burgers...'

'...or,' I interject, regarding such an impish addendum to his catalogue as being perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the blokish marmophobic intimacy newly established between us, 'say, rustle up some jalappeno poppers or chicken-tikka drumettes?'

To my great surprise and shah-grin he neither embraces my suggestion in classic starry-okied, shirty-sleeved, Hollywood-entrepreneurial fashion (as I half hoped he might do, given how synchronically swimmingly we've got along so far); nor laughs it off sportingly in a classic 'Well-it's-not-really-my-sort-of-thing-but-why-not?' old-school BBC manner (as I half feared he might do, in my worst dreams)--rather, he sort of winces, blinks and grimaces at it in an unclassifiable 'get-that-dirty-nappy-outta-here' kind of way, shakes his head, turns on his heel and marches off back to the kitchen without a word of explanation.

Thus, within the wee confines of a quarter-hour's pie-sliceage, did a beautiful friendship germinate, attain a full efflorescence and perish. Whether Roger's untimely snubbage of YFCT was touched off by something so prosaic
as, say, the unwitting outing of myself as the most naffish of yokels courtesy of of the avowal of my craving for a pair of delicacies whose East Finchleyan day in the sun had (in confutation of my first blush) long since set; or whether it issued from more poetic or primal causes--say the irruption of some long-repressed memory centring on a war-chum's or auntie's expiration courtesy of some windpipe-blocking bit of CTM-wing-bone, or cardiac-arrest-injuicing over-feisty popper--I cannot say; all I know is that our pre-match chinwag alongside the minority buffet marked the absolute apogee of the fest-ghost as far as I was to be concerned; that with the termination of that chinwag elapsed the very last moment of the evening in which I did not feel myself to be essentially at war with all other indiwiduals present, my own girl not being exempted, ultimately, from conscription into the enemy hordes.

Luckily, the interval between Roger's departure and Susan's holler'd--indeed semi-yodell'd--exhortation to 'gather round the telly' (i.e., in the front room) is mercifully brief; so much so, indeed, that my bottle of Stella--which I'm finally warming to--is still half-full, and, hence unreplenishable, by the time I can belatedly be arsed to heed the summons.

On the way into the FR, I briefly smooch elbows with Esmeralda, who stands lingering at the frame of the threshold, weathering the tide of her fellow marmitophiles, and gazing rather glumly down at a tit-level plastic plate bearing her meagre anatomical cross-section of the MR--which, incidentally, happens to look exactly like a raspberry pinwheel biscuit (the shite-brown colour of its filling aside, of course).

'Is that all you get?' I ask in a tone of sincere commiseration.

'I'm a frayed sew. We did arrive here unconscionably late, after all. [There's no mistaking, in the first place, the recriminatory acrimminy seeping YFCT-wards from that UL; or, in the second, the manifest contradiction between the SOA alluded to in that phrase and a certain avowal lately made to us by our hostess at the front doorstep; and if the present temporal budget admitted of the ten-minute minimum outlay required for a proper public copular row-let, I would doubtless take it upon me to draw attention to the discrepancy in righteous, if whispered, self-defence. As it is, we're but minute-fractions away from kickoff, and so the delivery of my apologia must perforce be postponed to the cuff-link-and-girdle-unfastening portion of the evening, back at the ranch.] And what about you? Aren't you going to have anything to eat?' (i.e., I conjecturally interpolate, as opposed to simply getting pissed?).

To which query I simply shrug and, capitalising on her ignorance of how the other one-tenth lives, gnomically reply, 'I would do if I could do, but I can't do, so I won't do,' and motioning her to follow, sashay onwards and FR-wards.

And a propos of this front-roomerly dispensation the other week--I hope you'll forgive the digression, DGR--it occurs to me that, square-footage-wise, most Londoners just aren't cut out for hosting full-scale parties on their own property. Take YFCT, for example: living as I do in a humble one-bedroom maisonette, I've never dreamt of having more than a butcher's-half-dozen people over at one time.

'As if,' you interject, 'you were well-connected enough to dream of enjoying a company exceeding a bare butcher's third dozen.'

To which I retroject: 'That's as maybe. But rest assured, DGR, that, for all of my ill-connectedness, were I suddenly and unaccountably to find myself the proprietor or tenant of a proper three-storey, four-up, four-middle, four-down mansion worthy of a member of the old-school London poshility, I should have no trouble at all in rounding up a butcher's gross of attendees for one of my dos, for the simple and effectual reason that the great mass of my quasi-, semi- neo- and pseudo-posh neighbours had long since grown weary of being packed arse-cheek-by-schlong-'n'-cunt into the front rooms of the refurbished workers' warrens resided in by their socio-economic confederates. I mean, Christ!--to judge by the decorative fixtures of this place--'

'--i.e., presumably, Susan's and Roger's place--'

--that's right. I mean, to judge by all the original artwork occupying every square non-televisually-accounted-for square inch of their front room, those two could well have afforded to rent out a fucking C of E cathedral for the match-viewing. But no: out of deference to the good-olde English law of hospitality they preferred to cram all 30 of us into the hundred-square-foot confines of their FR. It was enough to make you envy the millions of council-estate tenants simultaneously taking in the match from the comparative comfort of their five-quid plastic lawn chairs, in the comparatively voluminous precincts of their communal club-houses and recreation-centres.

'Was it really as bad as all that? Was your bottom really not even vouchsafed the repose of a chair for the duration of the match-viewing?'

Not even a pincushion-sized throw-pillow, let alone a chair. Of course, there was a couch on the premises, together with a coupla armchairs; but all spots in these orthodox arse-motels had long since been nabbed by the time Esmeralda and I got in there. It was, indeed, so crowded in the FR by the time of our arrival as summarily to rule out even the possibility of side-by-side copular squatting--and so, yielding to my girl the last surviving patch of telly-facing carpet in the corner nearer the front door, I parked my arse in the opposite corner, on the rim of a shrub-bearing flower-pot already half-occupied by the cheeks of a mercifully slim, curly-haired olive-complected bloke of about my age. Being by now stropped to such a point that I'd give a two-finger salute to my own gran, I resolve to treat this bloke with the coldest of lift-etiquette from now to match's end; but he, for his part, unfortunately refuses to leave me in piss.

'How d'ye do?' he says, in an untraceable foreign accent. 'My name is [here he ejaculates a drawn-out monosyllable that sounds, to my overdriven, spittle-flecked right oriole roughly like someone trying to imitate the mewing of a cat, only in a species-inappropriate baritone register].

'What's that?'

[He, repeating the noise]: 'It's espelled: Cheh, Aw, Eh, Aw, Teeldeh, Aw.'

'I see,' I said (cos what else could I fucking well say: he might as well have written his name out in Chinese characters for all the good it did me).

'You are here to support England?'

'Yeah, that's right,' I answer, whilst exploiting our profile-to-profile orientation to dart me okies back and forth like the unregenerate liar that I am.

'That's too bad. I hoped by the way you looked [?] that you might be one of my povo. So far I am the only links-fucker at this party.'

Here I would have cupped a hand to my oriole if there'd been room to do so: 'The only what fucker?'

'Lynx-fucker. A fucker of lynxes--you know, the mountain cats? Is that not what you English call us Portuguese?'

'Not that I know of.' [Mind you, on adding the assumption that Portugal abounded in lynxes to the assumption that this bloke's name was the Portuguese equivalent of Bob, I could discern a certain ineluctable logic to the imposition of this particular national slur on the poor old Portchies.]

'That is to your credit. I can already tell you are much nicer than most English people I have met so far.' ['Just wait till the numbness starts setting in down under, you lynx-fucker,' I says to him through my mind's boca, 'and you'll see how nice I really am, at arse.']

The first half of the match went uneventfully enough, vis-a-vis the perduring closetedness of my Arsenalophbia; for the perfidious Mr Cole held himself cuntishly aloof from the fray throughout, leaving me at liberty to cheer on unreservedly the progress of the English side (such as it was), and Paul Robinson's last-microsecond goal-save against Tiago alone elicited such faint coronary-cum-schphinctral sinkings and slackenings from YFCT's organism as might have portended a less private manifestation of contingently Anglophobic sentiments. At the time (i.e., at match clock reading 42:35), I thought nothing of it; but eventually, during the half-time break, as--all principled resistance to the shitiness of the buffet having long since ceded to the carpings of a beer-deprived tummy--I was furiously wolfing down dessicated schlongtail sausages whilst going through the sparest motions of participating in a triangulated convo amongst Esmeralda, the lynx-fucker and myself, a sudden, unanticipated flashback to an Arsenal-Chelsea match from way back in the '04-'05 season clued me in to the indisputable cause of my organic dismay at the goal-save, namely, Tiago's Chelsean provenance. And from this retrospective realisation, it was naturally an easy step to an atemporal vantage-point from which I was afforded a wonderfully cloudless view of the gaping logical chasm in Esmeralda's argument as to the Arsenalophobic-proof character of the present evening's match, and thence to an equally cloudless prospective view of the Arsenalophobic minefield that the second half promised to be. For if (I then realised), as Esmeralda argued, the present match afforded me ample opportunity to salute the non-Gunnerly members of the English team qua Arsenal-foes, it likewise (as she had neglected to argue) afforded me just as much, if not more, of an opportunity to salute the members of the opposing team qua-ditto. The best that I could hope for, vis-a-vis the 2ndH was that none of Portugal's Chelseans, Liverpudlians, MancUnionians, &c. would replicate or surpass Tiago's performance in the first half--a faint hope, TBS, in view of England's degeneratively anemic foot-work therein.

Of course, by far the most catastrophic moment of the second half, inasmuch as this crowd of footerly dilettantes were concerned, was when Cap'n "Gramps" Beckham's ankle started playing up in the sixth minute, thus necessitating his immejiate replacement by Aaron Lennon; but I scarcely batted an okie-lid during this cuntretemps, so negligible a Gunnercidal force had Mr Beckham been throughout the quarter-century or so since he'd last played on a north-of-the-Sleeve side. This episode of sang froid alone might have served to out me as a lynx-fucker-fucker in the okies of my fellow FR inmates to the left of the flower pot; but being silently dispassionate at its very core or essence it all but inevitably escaped such notice. Unfortunately, there did eventually--viz. roughly a quarter of an hour later--arise a moment in which my Arsenalophobic piss could not be so inconspicously held; and in which the piss thus voluminously discharged turned out to be of a chemical composition radically different to the obligatory peppermint-al one. I'm talking here, of course, about that match-outcome-determining moment when Wayne Rooney stood with foot poised aloft a semi-recumbent Ricardo Carvalho, determined to mortarise the latter's scrotum into a sacklet of farina (as scads of my fellow match viewers were in fact urging him to do, in so many words and then some); a moment when I unaccountably found myself exclaiming--as jizzim-loads of tears gushed out of me okies and streamed down me face cheeks--the following words, words hailing from a tongue I neither recognised nor understood, words that I should, now, indeed, be neither capable of recalling, let alone transcribing, without the help of a certain amigo who shall remain nameless (at least until a more opportune occasion for transcribing his name arises):

'Ricardo, meu companheiro: aguarda os testículos!'

Now, before proceeding to my flake-by-flake report on the fallout of this ejaculation, I might as well preemptively address a certain non-plussed reaction that its bare recording is more or less bound to elicit from a certain kind of reader (i.e., someone more pedipilularly informed than MFCT, DGR), a reaction that such a reader would probably articu/formu-late more or less as follows: 'WTF? Whence issues this cri des couilles on behalf of Carvalho, given that Rooney, being a MancUnionian, is (and was), if anything, more of a reckonable Gunnercidal force than was (and is) the Chelsea defender?'

And to this articu/formu-lation, I have, regrettably, no comparably concisely- articu/formu-lable riposte. It could have been that the pictoral composition of the two of them, Rooney and Carvalho, as televisually framed on the pitch at that precise moment, silhouettically--if, ultimately, untraceably--echoed a moment hailing from some Arsenal match of yore in which, say, Cesc Fàbregas, stood likewise primed to annihilate the co-jones of some hapless Wigan or Sunderland defender (and immejiately subsequent to which, for all I know, he actually succeeded in so doing!); or it could have been merely that, over the years, by a statistically engendered process of inuration, I had come prevailingly to identify more reflexively with Arsenal's opponents qua prospective underdogs than qua prospective victors--Christ! for all I know, my lynx-fucking seat-mate might have hit upon the nub of the gist of my sympathies in his first blush; perhaps and I was (and am), after all, the changeling of some Portuguese hidalgo's heir, and, accordingly, genetically predisposed to favour the Portuguese side in any trans-national foot-off.

Certainly (note, DGR, the seamless transition from the conditional to the indicative mode), this ejaculation of mine in his native language did nothing to disabuse what's-his-name of his initial hope that I might, after all, be of his party; or to restrain him, once the referee had said his piss and thrown the red card at Rooney, from wrapping an arm round my shoulders, planting on my face cheeks the second pair--and, SITS, much wetter and more passionate--pair of cuntintental smooches to sully them that evening, and ejaculating in his turn:
'Ruggero, meu companheiro: estás português não obstante!'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah; whatever you say, mate,' I mutter stroppily, as I'm reluctantly adverting to him the other cheek in exactly two senses (i.e., omitting the third and fourth ones, if you know what I mean).

But, of course, it goes without saying that this mono-gobular assault, notwithstanding its undeniable repugnance, was ultimately as Fanny Adams to the poly-ocular assault occasioned almost simultaneously by my involuntary cry of support for the Portuguese side; of course, the fact that all okies in the room (my girl's not excepted) were subsequently and devastatingly pointed towards the two of us--Sr Lynx-Meow and YFCT-- is a one-hundred-per-cent non-verbally-petrolled (albeit doubtlessly congestion-chargeable) vehicle. Such verbal-unpetrolworthiness cannot, however, be ascribed to the attendant fact that these threescore-odd okies were collectively animated not--as I, for one, might have expected--by an attitude of animosity, but, rather, by one of utter bemusement or estrangement, such as is perhaps most characteristially and proverbially evinced by the inmates of a house upon finding themselves phiz-to-phiz with the translucent figures of the ghosts of its previous inhabitants. Herein was I confronted by a quasi-metaphysical disposition that positively defied my usual shirt-shucking remedy and thereby compelled me, for the duration of the match, to cling to my newfound camaraderie with the Portchie as to my only lifeline to flesh-and-blood reality, such as it was (and is).

By which I meantersay--by way of clarifying, qualifying and retracting all at one go--that initial moment of estrangement pretty much palindromically set the mood for the remainder of the match; in other words, from that point onwards it seemed to me as though they, the rest of our fellow-spectators were the ghosts and we two were the only living inhabitants of the house; that, notwithstanding my lately-tendered militaristic metaphor, thenceforth as far as this local theatre of this here front room was concerned, it was very much a one-sided battle, throughout which my seatmate and I cheered on the Portuguese side with unflagging aplomb whilst the remainder of the room merely looked on their side's ever-flagging efforts to stem the red-and-green tide in stone-cold silence. It was as if they'd known all along, as soon as Rooney had been sent off, that England was doomed; that the spectacular match score (i.e., 0-0) belied a gaping hole in their side's morale that could never be patched up; and that (and here's the clincher) this fall from grace had been shamanistically actuated by us--the Portchie and me. Only at one point--in the final penalty shoot-off, when Hargreaves made his goal--did they show any signs of fannerly animation; and even then, they behaved exactly like a troupe of marionettes jerked suddenly into life by their puppeteer and equally suddenly left to fall, higgledy-piggledy, into various postures of grotesque prostration. And in these postures they continued to lie, right on through to the obligatory post-game, off-camera presenter-ly wailing and gnashing of teeth; through the nominalistic polemics on how England 'had been robbed' of an advance to the semi-finals in this particular instance; as well as through the realistic polemics on the all-round unsportsmanlike nature of penalty-shot-determined match outcomes, which Roger mercifully interrupted by rising from the couch and turning off the telly. Next, he circled back to the front windows, whose blinds he adjusted so as to plunge the room into a semi-sepulchral, near-total darkness. Then, turning round to face his guests, he addressed the lot of us as follows:

'My friends, my fellow Englishmenandwomen: this is now officially a house of mourning. A gathering conceived as a triumph and convened in a spirit of anticipatory jubilation, must now conclude as a wake, and, ultimately, ineluctably, disperse in a spirt of remorseful lamentation.'

'I suppose,' said a raspy, ennervated, couch-bound feminine voice, 'I'd better ring up the caterer and see if they've any extra marmite rolls to hand.'

'Thrift, thrift, Susan!' he snapped back, in a whisper. 'The triumphal bak'd weenies shall coldly furnish forth the funereal tables. [Then, soppro voce:] Now, please, friends: repair at once to the dining room, there to offer each other your mutual condolences; I shall be joining you shortly to render and receive my due share, after I have had a word in private with the Portuguese delegation.'

rybody got up and filed judifully out into the DR amidst much muffled sobbing and back-patting; everybody, that-is/no-shite, but Meow and myself, who kept close to our post at the flower pot till Roger'd beckoned us over to the front window, and then on out of the front room all of the way to the backside of the front door, for his proposed three-way chinwag--or, rather, to judge by the way he kicks it off, one-chin-to-two-chin lecture:

'Look, Rugger and...Meow: I trust you shall understand that there is not a drop of personal animosity in what I am about to say to you [an avowal that, of course, ruled in the possibility each any every one of the trillion other things he might have said to us would have been saturated with bucketfuls of animous goo (I'm thinking here, naturally, and in particular, of that milliard-strong subset of potential utterances pertaining to jalappeno poppers and CTM drumettes).] I trust, however, that you shall likewise understand that I am speaking not only my guests' behalf but on my own as well--in other words, very much from the heart--when I say that, as your very presence both serves as a living reminder of our loss and impugns the sincerity of our grief, it would not be seemly, to say the least, for either of you to remain in this house so much as a minute longer.'

I can certainly see where Roger's coming from--I did, after all, yell out 'Shoot that motherfucker clear on back to Stamford Bridge!' as the non-Carvalho Ricardo parried Frank Lampard's (and England's) last-ditch free kick--and so (all the more there-wise, as my anxieties WRT the coming minutes and hours are centred elsewhere than upon our forthcoming ejection qua ejection) I have no trouble whatsoever in taking this--ATC--rather cuntishly brusque piece of snubbage in stride, or in registering my untrippability by nudging my former seatmate and saying to him through the most sporting of grins:

'Well, seemliness is next to godliness, innit, Meow? Might as well leave the sheepdog-fuckers to lick their wounds in piss, what what?''

Meow grins back just as sportingly as if to say, Well, I don't know Francisca Adamsa about this 'seemliness' thing (perhaps it's some sort of Protestant institution?), but I've certainly had enough of this pack of sheepdog-fuckers.

Then, dropping the grin (the better for addressing the main nub of contention), I says to Roger:

'All right; fair enough: we'll leave. Before we do, though, I'd like to ask you a favour.'

'Yes?'

'Well, surely, it can't have escaped your notice that you're sending me out of here with a date of the opposite persuasion, gender-wise, to the one I arrived with.'

'And so?'

'And so, I'm just saying, well, wouldn't it be the starkest plateau of seemliness on your part to call her--my girl--back up here before you kick me out?; you know, so's I could apprise her of my impending ejection, work out our post-wake point of rendezvous and whatnot?'

[Roger, retrieving the nappy-huffing grimace from his phizzial repertoire]: 'It's entirely out of the question. At this critical stage in the mourning process, even the most momentary breach in the ranks of the bereaved could fatally demoralise the left-behinds. And, in any case...'

'...Yes?'

'I can't imagine why you should suppose that she would have anything more to do with the likes of you than the rest of us will do.'

And with that, he flings open the front door, shoves the pair of us through it and out on to the front steps, and slams it shut. And with that, preoccupied as I am by the question of where to go next--the option of returning to my point of embarkation, on the one hand, being self-evidently foreclosed by my want of keys to Esmeralda's house; the alternative option of returning to the maisonette, on the other, being complementarily foreclosed by its inescapable connotations of the severance of all copular ties--I immejiately commence a round of pocket Bogart-balls with me nutsack; a recourse that, in my experience, never fails of eventually yielding some productive course of action (albeit that that PCOA as often as not consists in repairing to the nearest secluded spot to onanise myself). Happily, in this case, the expedient presents itself sooner rather than later and equally happily--given that I am not on my lonesome--perforce involves my erstwhile seatmate and present front-step-mate. Granted, it's not a particularly inventive or even logically defensible expedient, but at least, after the manner of the worst of makeshifts, it gets the job done, inasmuch as it affords me a vital stepping stone to a cogent basis for continuing my intimacy with what's-his-name that would otherwise be lacking. So I says to him, what's-his-name (the following utterance equals the materialisation of the expedient):

'I don't suppose you could use a ride home? Mind you, my car is parked a good half-mile hike uptown from here, but if you live even farther off--'

'--Home? How can you dream of going home or taking me home at a time like this, meu companheiro? Now is the time to celebrate!'

'Ah, yes,' I concur, purely mechanically, my mind's eye and schlong being by this point so far removed from any remembrance of the outcome of the match that I cannot do otherwise, 'celebrate.' But it takes a mere millisecond longer for the aforesaid mental members to re-orient themselves accordingly; and a mere millisecond beyond that for the one to shade itself, the other to detumesce, in face of the prospect of the aforesaid celebration; and a mere millisecond longer still for my mind proper to cobble together an excuse for opting out altogether therefrom, as follows:

'But where in the 33 of these most English of boroughs are we going to be afforded the luxury of surviving the celebration of a Portuguese victory with our skins intact? Christo! The very fact that we're discussing it is enough to put me on the lookout for an English lynching posse.'

But what's-his-name is obviously unphazed:

'Where can we celebrate? Why, at any Portuguese restaurant, tu bobo.'

'Oh, yeah,' I rejoin, crushed by the bleeding obviousness of the suggestion, and by my axiomatically attendant bobo-hood. Then, recomposing myself outwardly, if not inwardly, by reverting--with some minor modifications--to my original proposal: 'So then: I don't suppose I could offer the pair of us a ride to the nearest Portuguese restaurant?'

'Tu bobo!' he laughs back at me with the cuntemptuous insouciance of a born-and-never-since-deflowered pedestrian, 'Why drive when you can tube?'

And so we tubed it down the Northern Line from Finchley Central all the way south to Camden Town, then briefly back on up the left tine of the NL to Chalk Farm, which station-stop placed us within easy hoofing distance of this glorified Portchie greasy spoon answering to the rather prosaically Anglified moniker of Nando's Chickenland.

'It is very much a restaurante a sucursal,' W-H-N apologised-stroke-explained to me during the first leg of the trip, 'a what you call a chain restaurant. At the same time, it is muito autêntico by your English standards.'

Shortly afterwards, during this selfsame trip-leg (and only then), it occurred to me, first, that the degree of autêntico-ness of this joint very probably stood in inverse relation to the length of the red carpet it would unfurl in welcome of a non-peninsular bloke such as myself; and, next, that I'd best say as much to my prospective chowing-and-tippling-mate whilst there was still time for me to de-tube and head back up to Finchley without squandering half me weekly wages on a pointless trans-zonal fare.

But what's-his-name would hear nothing of it:

'I cannot believe that you have anything to fear; your pronunciation of the Portuguese is so impeccable, so flawless. In fact, I think I am humouring you even in speaking to you in English now.'

'No, rest assured amigo,' I says back to him, with adamantine resolve, 'that outburst during the match was an inexplicable one-offer. For Christ's sake, I still can't even pronounce your name properly, let alone spell it out.'

'Surely you are pulling my, how do you say?--my third leg.'

'Not at all, be it with so much as a micro-newton of force. As you can see, my hands are well and fully planted in the pockets of me parka. Talking of which,' [here I start rummaging round ye olde pee-pees, eventually alighting upon therein and extract therefrom a biro and and ancient Sainsbury's receipt, and handing the pair of them to WHN], 'why don't you write your name down for me, and sound it out, one letter at a time, so's I can parse it out properly, phoneme by phoneme.'

'OK,' says WHN, flipping the receipt over on to its blank side, and laying it flat on one of his half-laps. 'The first letter is pronounced zh. [And he scrawls out a character that, tube-induced palsy notwithstanding, is clearly legible as a J.] And the second letter is pronounced aw [ditto, substituting O for J ]. The third letter, is a bit, how do you say, trickier, because it takes a tilde [ditto, substituting an A with a squiggly thing over the top of it] and it is pronounced aair.'

'What's that again?'

'Aair.'

'You mean ehhh?'

'No, I mean aair. Christo! I see now that you were not pulling my third leg, and that you are in for un mundo de injúria at Nando's, if you pitch up there with a Portuguese pronunciation like this one.'

'Right, then,' I says, rising and grabbing hold of the nearest support pole, 'with that in mind, I'll bid you a fond Bono noche--or however you Portchies put it--come our arrival at the next stop.'

'No,' he protests plaintively, grabbing hold of the skirts of me parka, 'stay! We have at least--what?--a half an hour of travel ahead of us. During that time, I will teach you a handful of phrases that will insure that you fit in--how do you say?--seamlessly amongst meu povo.'

'OK, 'I says, whilst obligingly, albeit reluctantly, re-assuming my seat, 'shoot.'

So, after soliciting another coupla of receipts from me, he proceeds, in his established letter-for-phoneme pedagogical manner, to teach me these selfsame phrases. These range in register from the classically straightforward and colloquial, e.g., 'Saúde! Sejan fodedos os inglês!' (rough translation: Cheers! Fuck the English!) to the baroquely recherché and elevated, e.g., 'Incontestavelmente, Senhor Rooney é um sodomita impenitente; senão que razão por se interessava assim agudamente a o escroto de o nosso meritório compatriota o Senhor Carvalho?' (RT: Doubtless, Mr Rooney is an unregenerate pederast; else, why did he take such a keen interest in the scrotum of our esteemed countryman Mr Carvalho?). The remarkable thing is I manage to cinch the lot of them, to João's triumphant satisfaction, well before our transfer to the left tine.

Anyway, having eventually arrived at the restaurant, which is naturally abuzz with paleolithic World-Cup-victory fervour, we secure ourselves a table. As near as I can tell, João isn't enough of a regular here for the ambient puntility to pose much of a molestation threat to us. Unfortunately, however, the same cannot be said of the staff; or, in particular, of our self-evidently well-south-of-the-sleeve-born waitress, who approaches our table with a trio of shot glasses held aloft her shoulder on a drinks-tray and peremptorily demands, in advance of handing us the menus, that we share a victory toast with her. Never being one to turn down a free drink, I accept my third of the round, and raising my glass aloft to eye level, shout out, after giving a just-watch-me-babe-type wink to João:

'Saúde! Sejan fodedos os inglês!'

Which toast elicits a resounding verbatim echo not only immejiately from our waitress, but presently from every corner of the room and beyond--from the neighbouring tables, from the bar--Christ, even from the kitchen. It's followed by a second toast, when she comes round again for our meal order; a third when she brings round the food; a fourth ('compliments of the cabras in the kitchen') when she carries off the dishes; and, finally a fourth ('compliments of a cabra at the bar'). With the inauguration of each toast, I get to try out another of my newly-mastered phrases, all of them seamlessly tailored to my integration into the povo, as João'd predicted they would be.

In short, in well underdue course, I more than fully acquitted myself qua one-hundred-per-cent homegrown lynx-fucker, in the okies of both the puntility and staffility of Nando’s. I dare say, if in-autentico-hood had been the sole daemon I’d had to contend with that night, I might very well have continued whooping it up with the worst of them in classic soccer-hooligan fashion well into the small ones. But alas! I was destined long before then to be put out of commission courtesy of the altogether more prosaic daemon of toxic inebriation. Mind you, it wasn’t the shots that ultimately did me in (for they were all made up your usual ten-per-cent fruity schnappses). What did me in was, rather, the great lashings of red Dao wine with which, for dear incombustibility's sake, I was obliged to wash down my main course, something the Portchies call Pinna chicken, a preparation of yardbird that makes the feistiest vindaloo taste like a tinful of Heinz cream of chicken by comparison. Come a quarter-past 10 at the latest, I was positively blotto, and concentrating with main mental force my last remaining scintilla of conscious volition on the question of whether to entrust my ineluctably-soon-to-be-comatose carcass to the uncharted vagaries of Portuguese after-hours nightlife, or to the well-plotted vectors of the London Underground travel network. In the end (i.e., by ca. 10:25), I decided that the rosiest-case scenario on the Portuguese noctuvivial side--viz. that of finishing up as a human ashtray or arse-darts target in some studio flat in Bayswater or Belgravia (and even the realisation of that grotesque scenario depended on my keeping, against all odds, the lid held fast over my English identity between now and out-passing time) was not quite a match for the worst-case-scenario tubial outcome--viz. that of being carted off, despoiled beforehand of wallet and parka alike, to the local drunk tank by some transit cuntstable in Edgware or High Barnet. And so, with this latter scenario in mind (such as my mind then was), I rose unsteadily from the table, disburdened myself thereunto of my full cargo of Her Majesty's currency--to the not un-princely heft-stroke-chune of, I believe, roughly 50 quid--bade João the fondest if muzziest of Bono noches, and staggered out of the restaurant and on to the pavement, clearing the front door just in time for the up-chuckies to begin, such that had any copper or private schlong had occasion to trace me steps later that night, or even on the following morning, he would have had no need to break out the fancy infrared binoculars, or the jizzim-sniffing canine unit; no, he should have known where I had been by the bright-pink-n-lumpy Rugger puke spoor stretching directly and uninterruptedly from Nando's to the entrance steps of Chalk Farm station.

'So, what happened next, posterior to your arrival at CFS?'

What happened next, PTYFCTA(A)CFS, DGR? Why, nothing, as far as the solar day in question is concerned. And insofar as the events of the succeeding solar day can be conscripted into an account of the posterior proceedings, I think it best, out of regard to the Ye Olde Aristotelean unities, to postpone the commencement of that account to the next post.

'As if,' you haughtily sniff, 'you'd paid even the most toking regard to those selfsame unities in the present post.'

I swear to the ASD, DGR: if my diggits weren't benumbed to the clinical threshold of gangrene from this long bout of typage, my shirt would be off and sailing straight for your okies at this very instant! [...]