The Angry Londoner's 2006 World Cup Hangover Special

'So here we are then, at the top of the next post. And before you proceed, as promised, with your chronology of the next solar day, I should greatly appreciate your filling in a couple--erm, make that a pair, for disambiguation's sake--of lacunae in your account of the prior one that have come to my notice in the interval, in other words, and to wit, erm...what the devil?!'

'Zzzzzzzzzzzzz...'

'Oh, for heaven's sake, wake up!'

[YFCT, starting, yawning, knuckling away ye olde okie-bogeys, firing off an obligatory post-reveille-ular fart]: 'What's that you say, DGR? A coupla coon-eyes? Sounds a bit racialist, to these sleepy first-blushing orioles...'

'...One would suppose a full calendrical month would constitute a more than sufficiently long respite or "break" from your bloggerly lucubrations...'

'...One would indeed naturally suppose as much. But one doesn't know what his-fucking-cunt's-truly's been through in that selfsame month...'

'...No, I suppose one doesn't do. And one is quite happy to postpone his audition of your apology on those grounds until such time as he has been vouchsafed full satisfaction on the score of his original complaint...'

'...You mean, I take it, the complaint about those two alleged gaps in the last post?'

'Even so.'

'Thanks a million, DGR. I mean, if there's one pleasure I relish, in preference to revisiting the Ruggerian-arse-reaming footage of yesterfortnight, it's revisiting the RARF of yestermonth.'

'Pray spare me the sarcasm, and take up thy shovel.' 'I.e., for the backfilling of the two holes?'

'Even so.'

'Soitanly, mister foreman, if you'll only be so kind as to point me in the direction of Hole No. 1...'

'...Hole No. 1 may be discerned in the unaccountably brusque record of your leave-taking of João, in which you entirely omit to register his disposition vis-a-vis your impending departure. Now, I should think it very much out of character--to advert to the argot of the greasepainterly tribe--for a chap who'd been clinging to my skirts (your words, not mine) a mere two hours previous to part company with me without raising at least the token semblance of a fuss.'

'But that's just it--the fuss he raised was precisely of such a ganjafied-esque semblance, and hence unworthy of recording. Oh, TBS, he did trouble himself to blurt out, 'Ruggero, meu companheiro! Pray, do not forsake me!' upon my ascension from the table, but once I'd thrown down the Isabelas, he switched to an altogether less plangent chune, one that went something like, 'Well, if you must go, then go you must.'; then, even the would-be THC-injuiced scales of companheiro-ly dissimulation fell from his okies. TBT, I think that by that point he was well glad to be rid of me. You see, back at the match-viewing, he'd been out-numbered nearly 30 to one, and hence in dire need of every friend he could get; whereas there, at Nando's, securely ensconced amongst his povo as he was, he was surrounded by ready-made friends aplenty. Mind you, I fancy I had my uses for him during that hazy intermejiate interval encompassing on the one compass point our arrival; and, on the other, say, the midpoint of our dinner.'

'Your uses?'

'Yeah, I mean my uses qua intra-national social lubricant. Cos you see--and as I've already remarked (viz. during the Nando's-centred spell of reportage proper)--at arse I don't think João was by FASI an habitué of this place, the Camden Nando's. In fact, if you ask me, I don't think he was--as of that night--particularly well integrated into the local Portuguese expat community at large, such as it may be-stroke-may have been; else why had he elected to view the match in the company of a pack of sheepdog fuckers?'

'I don't suppose it ever crossed your mind to ask him why he had so elected, and thereby to elicit from him such particulars of his history as might have furnished more solid grounds for these conjectures?'

'Of course that there pair of infinitives crossed my mind on more than one occasion during the course of the evening; in fact, it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say they were pacing, hand-in-hand, from one end of my mind to other all the while. But as questioning is not the mode of conversation amongst gentleblokes--'

'--Touché, MDF, touché--'

'--and as he never at any point volunteered the merest turd-let of personal historical info, my conjectures were left to pursue their own mud-beshattened, wellington-booted itinerary through the Joãoscape. So, anyway: I conjecture that João's undertaking of that tutorial in Portuguese phraseology was not in the main for my benefit, but for his; whichistersay I suspect that he initiated it principally with a view to exploiting my impeccabile pronunciation of his tongue and my all-round lack of reserve at one go, by way of securing an entrée into the victory festivities that he would otherwise have been excluded from, in virtue of his all-round shyness and ill-connectedness.'

'Here one would be sorely tempted to whistle the tune of a certain 1970s chart-topper addressing itself to the text of vanity, were that temptation not overmatched by one's tender regard for his reputation qua ignoramus vis-a-vis all chart-toppers post-dating the 78-RPM era.'

'Yeah, well, here YFCT would be sorely tempted to whistle the chune of a certain 1930s chart-topper addressing itself to the text of humility, were that temptation not overmatched by YFCT's sincere and none-too-tender near-ignoramus-hood vis-a-vis all chart-toppers antedating the 45-RPM era. As it stands, all I can say in mine own defence is that the thus-far-openly-proffered conjectures vis-a-vis João's motives err well on the side of that virtue by comparison with my thus-far-suppressed first-blushial one, namely--'

'--that he was aching to get into your knickers?'

'You took the words right out of my gob, with all the importunity of an old-school, pre-anaesthesia-era dentist. How ever did you guess?'

'Let me just say it's something of a leitmotiv or running theme, this knicker-guarding paranoia of yours, and leave it at that. For, after all--in your plebian idiom--time is a wastin', and there remains yet another lacuna to be filled, to wit: the question as to how, having disburdened your wallet of its full cargo of Her Majesty's currency, you managed to pay for your underground fare home.'

'How ever, having disburdened, &c., did I manage to &cc? Why, with my Oyster Card, of course, tu bobo.'

'Ah, yes, of course! Praise be to Ken in his beneficent omniscience, preemptively tallying the fall of every counterfactually-ordained drunken pedestrian!'

'Make that the withdrawal of every counterfactually-encumbered banknote. Cos, you see, DGR (here follows the deposit of a steam-shovel-load of fill dirt into a bonus third lacuna), the only reason I consented to tubing the trip to Nando's in the first place, was that I still had an outstanding balance of roughly a butcher's-dozen Isabelas on the Oyster Card I'd been obliged to purchase with a 20-quid note by way of funding my previous tube jaunt (i.e., to Camden Town, back in May, to get me car out of hock). Otherwise (i.e., if the four quid's worth of cambio I'd had on me during that Camden-bound jaunt had sufficed to cover my fare [as against the blow-job it would have procured me, tip included, at my point of destination (NB: this is a figure I quote strictly for comparative financial-analytical purposes!!!)]), I'd have insisted on driving.'

'Ah, yes--but if, on the one hand, you had tubed that very first trip to Camden Town (i.e., for the Last Orders Competition at Regent's Park), you should have spared yourself the second trip to reclaim your car; if, on the other, you had driven to Nando's on the night of the match, you should in all likelihood, come your egress from the restaurant, have found yourself in very much the same sort of automotive predicament you'd found yourself in two months previous, courtesy of the Byzantine-stroke-Draconian parking regulations of the selfsame borough council.'

'I'd swear, DGR, if it weren't for the unflaggingly posh tenor of your idiom, that you were City Hall's senior public relations official doing a bit of moonlighterly snooping in the so-called blogosphere. I mean, you've really cinched their whole MO to a tee, down to the preemptive flak-jacketing of every potential dum-dum bullet of criticism right back into the guts of the inferior local authorities.'

[MFCT, whistling counterfactually-known 1970s chart-topper]: 'As if City Hall didn't have bigger fish to fry, even in the comparatively puny kitchen of the so-called blogosphere! In any case, MDF, I was merely having a roguish go at playing Ken's advocate. Rest assured, I well remember and endorse your canine-mandated decision to make that first southbound trip by car. But as for this most recent northbound trip on the underground, I hope and trust your worst-case-scenarial nightmare was not realised?'

'No, it wasn't by half. For the walk to the station, with its attendant pukings, sobered me up at least to the point of safeguarding me against an in-transit blackout. Whether it likewise sobered me up to the point of enjoining me to pursue the wisest-of-all-possible courses of action must remain an open question; inasmuch as to this very day I don't know whether, in the first place, I would have ridden the line all the way up to Woodside Park had I been stone-cold sober; or, in the second place, things might have turned out for the better had I done so.'

'If you'll forgive me for saying so, these speculations strike me as amounting to so much if-my-uncle-had-had-b***s-he'd-be-my-aunt-ism.'

'Dare I advert your okies, DGR, to the ghostie of the parenthetical sic that ought by all rights to trail your perverse inversion of the accustomed conditional?'

'I had rather you didn't so dare, MDF, out of tender regard for the memory of my Auntie Abigail, a veritable paragon of masculine indomitability.'

'And so I shan't so do, DGR, and so I shan't. How gormless of me to forget that amongst you UC types it's the rule rather than the exception for the wife to wear the slacks.'

But anyway: having duly donned my Bizzaro-poschanschaung-correcting pleb's goggles, I get the gist of your intimation, and concede the justness of the gist. I mean, what's the fucking point of wringing me mitts over how things might have turned out if I hadn't exited the tube at Finchley Central Station, or the precise degree to which my residual intoxication contributed to my egress at that particular point. All I know is that, insofar as my memory can be trusted qua record of my motivations, I disembarked at that station wholly mechanically; thatistersay, merely out of the sheer physiological recollection of its service as my original point of embarkation. Indeed, it was only once I found myself back at street level in FC, with the echo of northbound train's re-immersion in the tunnel still ringing in my mind's orioles, that it even occurred to me that I might have stayed on for another stop or two. And then--i.e., immejiately subsequently--it occurred to me that, supposing I actually at arse wanted to sleep in my own bed tonight, I would do well to re-descend into the station to realise my ever-dimming prospects of catching the penultimate--if not the ultimate--train to Woodside Park. But just how dim were these prospects? I asked meself. Well, there was only one way to find out. So I whipped out me mobile, and consulted its time read-out dial, which judifully proclaimed in LCD-delineated diggits (that's LCD as in Liquid Crystal Display, not as in Lowest Common-Denominator, BTW) a reading of 11:53. Wellsir, given that at these late-weekenderly hours the trains circulated, by a generous estimate, at quarter-hour intervals (all-but-inevitable service interruptions aside), I reckoned that that there train I'd just de-trained from had in all likelihood been the selfsame last one, and that I might as lief piss away the next seven minutes on a spell of north-north-westward hoofage up here as on a spell of pud-pullage down under. As to the question of whither precisely I was hoofing it to; why, that didn't even occur to me till I'd hoofed it a good half-mile up the High Road, at which vaguely GPS-specifiable coordinate I happened to espy out of the corner of me left okie a cluster of buildings that looked all too familiar to me, viz. a stretch HR-addressed houses immejiately abutting on a certain cross-street, a cross-street I immejiately recognised in virtue of Esmeralda's residence therein. And at that point, of course, it suddenly seemed the most natural thing in the world to take a detour off the HR and pop by her place, as against continuing to hoof it north all the way Woodside Park. Anyway, a scant butcher's-dozen minutes later, I'm standing in front of her house, every visible window of which is darkened and blinded as much as if to say, 'Fuck off! We're away for the summer in Mallorca' as 'Fuck off! We've had a death in the family'. Faced with such an ominous portent of absenthood or unsociability, I reckon the most I can get away with is to ring the doorbell, which I do, twice and only twice. And once my second ring has been greeted by nary a footfall or curtain-rustle from within; why then, the wee ghosties of paranoia and jealousy start leasing flats and setting up house in the most ticklish crannies of my gourdita. Who knows, I says to meself, as I take a seat on the front steps and draw my knees chinward, the better to give these selfsame ghosties their due usufruct of my psychic real estate, what manner of cuntishly cultish brainwashing shenanigans my girl has been subjected to in the past three-odd hours, or what unspeakable series of enormities she might thereby have been enjoined to commit in the interval? Who's to say that she's not, at this very moment, participating, back at Roger-and-Susan's, in the rites of some kind of pedipilular-funereal orgy, and in conformity thereto licking a dollop of hummus off the schlong-head of one of her fellow (i.e., bloke-ic) mourners, to the accompaniment of her rhythmic penetration by an as-yet-uneaten schlongtail sausage?--or, that, say, having been married off by lottery to one of these selfsame fellows, she's not already off on her pedipilular honeymoon, which, for all I know, might be being consummated as I think within the walls of this very residence? Or--worst of all--that she's not bonded with one of the bigwigs from her company over their common cause of marmitophilia, and is not presently toasting him (in two or more ways), with intertwined arms each bearing a quarter-bread-slice's worth of the abominable goo, in the fo'c's'le of his Canary-Wharf-moored yacht?

It must have been towards the end of the formulation, depiction, staging, or what have you of this last CS (that's counterfactual scenario, for the benefit of you Angry Londinian newbies), that I surrendered myself to the embrace of Neptune (sic); i.e., fell asleep or, in the melodramatic alcoholophobic idiom, passed out (although, TBT, by that point I doubt drink had very much to do with it), inasmuch as I can't recall any others taking shape afterwards, and as its reconstitution has cost me an exponentially higher joule-count of brain-wringage than the other two have done.

As to my next, post-somulent memory: well, that was of a chirpy feminine voice crowing 'Oh, for heaven's sake, wake up!' a scant number of micrometres from whichever oriole it was crowing into. On second thought, I'd better recast that last sentence to read: 'ATMN, P-S M: W, TWO Esmeralda's voice crowing &c.' Cos it wasn't as if I was in any doubt as to whose voice it was, or as if I craved a government-mandated ration of reveille-ular ball-bearings qua proper-dudic to a proper Esmeraldan orientation of my thoughts; no: I knew straight away that it was her, and mentally--nay, even (why the fuck not?) spiritually--speaking I was dressed to the nines, in top hat and tails, and ready for whatever far-flinging adventure she might propose, so much so that this whole routine bidness centring on the activity of waking up amounted, in my mental-cum-spiritual okies, to a sequence of the most teejiously bureaucratic, pro-formica preliminaries. My physical okies, on the other hand (sic), had a much rougher time negotiating these preliminaries; for, in following the voice upwards to its source, they descried nothing more fixable or encouraging than a vaguely anthropocephalic blob enswathed in some sort of equally vaguely delineated cowl or hood. So, with great and instantly-commissioned aplomb, I crossed my physical okies off the list of witnesses as to the present SOA, and called upon me gob to second the initial testimony of my orioles, in commissioning it to call out, What's that, dear? by way of bridging my way to her (so I thought) inevitable proposal of a round of squash or golf or suchlike activity. But here again I was thwarted: vis-a-vis the utterance intended for them, my lips were like unto a schphincter dilated with a full box's worth of Weetabix-supplied roughage; and as for my tongue--well, it bore a remarkably uncannily close resemblance, tactically-responsively speaking, to a scaled-down, anatomically-inappropriately-placed erect schlong, inasmuch as whilst I could incline and decline it with ease at the root, from all points upwards, it was as inflexible and inarticulate as a column of marble. Such that my WTD? came out sounding more like a WAE? (short for Waah-aaeh-eeah?).

The cowléd spectre receives this inarticulate riposte with something that just might be a grimace or a scowl, thankfully accompanied by a re-riposte in the familiar Esmeraldan timbre: 'Oh, I should have known. Still pissed, are you?'

To which re-riposte, I'd of course very much like to re-re-riposte, Of course I'm not still pissed; I'm just utterly, bloodily dehydrated, as much as from sleeping out here in the open air for the past ? hours as from the drink itself. But on the evidence of the futility of my last essay at croaking out a mere three syllables, I instead essay in loo of these coupla butcher's dozen a mere two, to wit that pair comprising the English word water; accompanying the fresh spell of croakage with a hand-to-mouth tippling gesture that I hope against hope will not be mistaken for a so-called corporeal-linguistic accentuation of a cry of more booze, in the light of the incorruptible phonemic and accentual discrepancies betwixt the two utterances.

Luckily--if, perhaps, stroppily--the cowléd one seems to get the gist of my entreaty and helps me to my feet and, like one of your mendicant friars lending a supportive arm to a blind leper, ushers me through the front door of the house and thence to a chair sited somewhere in its murky interior. For about half a minute I perceive I'm entirely on my own; then, my companion returns bearing an object that I recognise only as she presses it to me fingertips for what it is, namely a sweaty-cold pint glass. Now, the elder Amis, in perhaps the most celebrated passage in the entire hangoverly literature, has likened the morning-after gobberly sensorial buzz-kill to a feeling as though one's mouth 'had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its masoleum'. And that would be an apt enough description of my morning-afterly gobberly SOA on this particular morning-after, provided you replaced the word masoleum with the phrase cryogenic freeze-dry chamber; for, as discomfiting as the petrified-schlong sensation has been up till then, upon my raising the glass to my lips with a mind to downing its contents at one go, the sheer foetid taste-bud-ular onslaught precipitated by the initial encounter betwixt my tongue and that first draught of water is such as to instigate a resolution of giving up drinking--of any liquid whatsoever--for life. But realising that my salvation, on two or more fronts, consists in my downing as much water as my tummy can comfortably handle, I weather that initial gobful, and take another swallow, and then another, and then still another; and with the ingestion of this third, glass-consummating swallow, I at last perceive that not only is the savour of foetidity at last receding, however tentatively, from me taste-buds, but that the phiz of my beloved is at last drawing equally tentatively (albeit plainly recognisably) into focus. Naturally enough, I devote my first lingually-enabled draught of exhaled air to an utterance of 'Thank you.'

'No worries,' she replies sportingly for starters, albeit with a po-phizzedness that suggests the afters will not be quite cricket by my personal standards. And so they aren't: 'I wish I could say the same about my emotional state last night. Where were you?'

Uncompromising what's-good-for-the-gander-ism, of course, would require me to echo, in tandem with the affixing of a 'PLACE GOB HERE' sticker to my schphincter, 'Where were you?'; whilst unyielding hen-peckedness would require me to detail a forthright minute-by-minute account of my itinerary, embellished with the odd karate kick to the throat of the odd would-be succubus encountered along the way. But as for the milquetoast middle-of-the-domestic-fowl-highway option I opt for, it is as follows:

'Where was I? Why, I was there, where you found me, on your front steps, for the better part of the night.'

'I see. And for the worser part of it?'

'You mean from the end of the match to, say, midnight?'

'That's exactly what I mean.'

And so I recount to her my tube-jaunt-cum-Portuguese-elocution-lesson-cum-mini-bender-cum-chowfest with João, omitting pretty much nothing apart from the homeward-bound vomit-trail. Still, she's unconvinced by the plain-faced fidelity of my narration:

'You really mean to say you rang the doorbell twice, then sat down and passed out on the front steps?'

[YFCT, swallowing his pride presumably undetectably vis-a-vis the PO-idiom]: 'That's exactly what I mean.'

'Didn't it occur to you to ring me--by phone, that is? Christ, how was I supposed to hear the doorbell from the bedroom, in my sleep?'

[ibid., miraculously managing to speak articulable English through the dental dam comprised by a full five-spread of his own metatarsals and hoof-diggits]: 'So you were up there, on your own?'

'Where else would I have been?'

'I dunno; seeing as how I was just getting back meself, I sort of thought, statistically speaking the odds weren't too bad that the joint--thatistersay Susan and Roger's--wasn't at that moment quite in its self-sauté-ing Mexican-frijolan-death-throes...'

'Oh, by...what time was your ETA again...?'

'12:15.'

'Oh, by 12:15 it had right enough died and pushed up a coupla daisies.'

'Really? With that case of Smithwick's and Stella in the fridge?'

'It wasn't for want of drink that everybody cleared off--it was for want of food.'

'I'm shocked. I mean, you lot knew up front the kind of slim culinary pickings you were working with--a butchers's dozen sausagettes and pita wedges, a microgramme of hummus--'

'--Right. We knew that, but at the same time we were all hoping right from the start for something more...something transcendently, ineffably English...'

'You don't mean...?'

'Yes that's exactly what I mean. I dare say none of us would have stuck round at all if it hadn't been for that brave proposal of Susan's to order another roll, which, if I'm not mistaken, you were present to overhear.'

'Yeah, I overheard the proposal all right; as I likewise overheard Roger's affixing of ye olde kibosh to it.'

'Kibosh, schmibosh! I'm not saying it wasn't a reasonable inference, of yours--I mean, as to Roger's having said the last word on the subject--given the greenness of your acquaintance with the pair of them. But we cognoscenti--i.e., ninety per cent of our fellow attendees plus one--knew better. We knew who at bottom wore the bottomless chaps in that relationship, and that Roger would cave in sooner rather than later; namely once we'd taken a collective stab at that n*****dly smorgasbord of his and found it wanting, and had subsequently expressed our dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms.'

'I see. And in what precisely uncertain terms did your collective dissatisfaction ultimately express itself?'

'Well, I dunno; I guess it eventually took the form of a kind of chant. Mind you, it all started out quite modestly and, if I'm not mistaken, privately; i.e., with a barely overhearable, albeit plainly ironic, remark addressed by this bloke name of Phil Collings--that's Collings with a gee (one of my fellow Occuvisionists)--to his wife apropos of the hummus; something to the effect of I can't believe it's not marmite. Whereupon this other bloke, name of Pete Gabrielle--that's Gabrielle with an ell and and ee at the end--'

'--another of your fellow Occuvisionists...?'

'...that's right--whereupon he, Pete, interjects with unbridled bumptiousness, Speak for yourself, Phil: as far as I'm concerned, pureed dog shite would stand in for marmite better than this lot ever could do.

'Where-squared-upon one of Pete's elbowmates, this third bloke, name and firm of origin unknown, interjects, loudly enough to be heard by everyone in the room, Yeah, where do they get off expecting us to sing the obsequies of old Blighty through gobfuls of this veggie-paté hailing from, wherethefuckever....Turkey, I suppose, or Lebanon or Iran...

'...Not to mention Cyprus, Roger chimes in from across the room, a certified Commonwealth member nation.

'Commonwealth, schmommonwealth! rejoins his anonymous interlocutor: The Cypriots have got their own team, haven't they? No, the only way any of us are going to be able to suffocate our nationalistic pedipilular sorrows properly is through the ingestion of a signature English culinary staple, namely---[a pause of suitable dramaturgical length]--marmite! I'll say it again: MARMITE! I'll say it a third time--are you with me here, my fellow Englishmenandwomen?--MAR-MITE!

'And thus began the aforementioned chant, which spread throughout the assembly with the rapidity of, well, a marmite-laden knife across the smooth, lilywhite expanse of a de-crusted bread slice, and in which I soon enough found myself participating.'

'And was this here chant ultimately heeded?' I ask, in momentary abstraction from my all-too-interested foreknowledge of the purported (i.e., Esmeraldan-supplied) denouement of the narrative, courtesy of its present epic sweep.

'I'll say it was. On being confronted with a roomful of us marmitophile malcontents, Roger mopped his brow with a hankie extracted from his shirt pocket, called out Right! I'll see what I can do, and dashed upstairs (whither Susan had long since repaired on the grounds of a sudden attack of migraine). Well, then, a couple of minutes later, he descends, and addresses us as follows: I've got some bad news for you lot: the caterer's fresh out of marmite rolls. [Here followed, naturally, a crowd-percolating groan.] What's more, he says, glancing at his watch, as our local Sainsbury's have shut up shop for the night, even spreadwise, we are SOL, marmitically speaking. On the other hand, if, between the score-and-a-half of you, you could come up with the princely sum of 20 quid, I would be more than happy to order a pair of extra-large pies from Pizza Express, to be delivered to these very premises for our common consumption.

‘Pizza schmizza! retorts the bloke who started up the chant: You might as well knee us in the nuts with an anthropomorphically-scaled gnoccho; for we’d sooner be ritualistically sodomised by a foot-long mortadella than partake of the nationalistic grub of a team that’s still in the running—and our own lira, at that! No: as far as we’re concerned, it’s marmite, and gratis, or nuffink.

‘Well, then, says Roger, I guess it’s going to be nuffink. I thank you all, both on my own behalf and that of Susan, for making it out here tonight, and cheering on the home team and whatnot—better luck in ought-ten [sic], what-what? Help yourself to the remaining Stellas and Smithwick’ses in the fridge; as for me, I’m thinking about turning in…

‘But by this point, no one was paying any attention to Roger; by this point, everybody had pretty much thrown in the tea-towel on the party and delivered himself or herself of his or her respective versions of FTS!; and impromptu planning committees of five or six apiece were beginning to form, against the convention of alternative post-match shindigs. As for me, as I thought I’d more than bloody well filled my annual quota of social football-gourmandizing by then, I started keeping an eye out for unassimilated strays like myself, with the aim of securing a ride home.’

‘Which, I take it, you eventually found.’

‘Yeah: eventually, if only just barely, courtesy of this girl who I'd never seen before, but who turned out to be a secretary from another division of my company, and who I managed to buttonhole on her way out the front door.’
'So, there we are then: squared away narrative-wise, on both sides of the table.'

'Yes, I suppose we are...' she agrees rather absently, whilst gnawing at one of her thumbnails.

For the sake of sheer tension-hashing (and, subsidiarily, the sake of some conjectural future version of myself who, having put this copular-upstitching episode behind him, might actually find his by-then-indulgeable idle curiosity gratified by such intelligence as might have been furnished in the reply), 'You wouldn't, I suppose, happen to know anything about this João bloke, would you? I mean, he isn't one of your lot, is he?'

'He may very well be, for all I know. It's like I was saying about this girl who gave me a lift: I didn't know her from Eve, and yet she turned out to be a fellow Occuvisionist. But the upshot is that for now I can't tell you anything about him.'

'Pbbhh!' I rejoin with an affectedtedly world-weary shake of my gover-addled gourdita that sets a twenty-kilo nine-pin bowling ball of pain crashing against one corner of my inner skull and then back up against the opposite one. 'Pity.'

‘Look, what is it you still need to me to tell you?’

‘It’s not a question of what so much as one of why.’

‘Why what?’

‘Why what? Why what? Why in fucking God’s name you abandoned me there at Susan and Roger’s in the first place!’

‘Abandoned you? What in fucking Ken’s name would lead you to think I abandoned you? Christ, when I think of all the fuss I made… [ ]. Hang on a bit, darling. Actually, it may turn to be more of a question what, after all.’

‘How pray-tell-so?’

‘Well, assuming your last recollection of Your Fuh...Your Blessed Self’s Truly at the party centres on Roger’s announcement that we wished to have a word with the Portuguese delegation…’
‘…Correctly, yes…’

‘Well, what do you think happened after that?’

‘After that? Why, that you went out and painted the town red, green and with Joao, as you’ve already told me you’d done.’

‘Right, but before that—i.e., during the interval between my egress from the front room and our setting out with tri-coloured paint-tins in hand?’

‘I dunno. I suppose that you said to Joao, Well Joao, old chum, what do you say to our tying one on in celebration of the Portuguese victory?’

Letting her tin-orioled rendition of my conversational idiom pass without comment, I say, ‘Well, what actually happened was that Roger kicked us out on our arses, on the grounds that our presence qua supporters of the victorious side was unseemly and disruptive of the mourning process. And what was more, he refused to allow me to confer with you beforehand, taking great umbrage at my implied supposition that you would have anything more to do with me than the rest of them would do.’

‘Really…?’

‘Really. I gather from your present aghastness that Roger couldn’t be arsed to supply any of the company with the minutes of this conference?’

‘No; or, rather, yes: he just walked back in, clicked on the lights, and said, Well, that’s taken care of that lot.’

‘Tuppence for your thoughts, schnookums.’

‘If you want to know the truth, I’m mentally canvassing the globe in search of some obscure republic or duchy or principality to move to; some place where the sport of football is as yet unknown; or, at any rate, not a going national concern.’

‘And the candidates so far are..?’

‘…Lichtenstein. Antarctica. And…the States?’

‘Well,’ I says, with a degree of glibness far beyond and above my de facto ’govered capabilities (not to mention the present judycall), ‘you’d better keep canvassing, cos none of those three is a viable contender. Lichtenstein, tiny as they are, have got the highest per capita professional male football enrolment in Europe; vis-à-vis Antarctica, frontbench MPs and Dumatchiks alike have been clamouring for years to have the plug pulled on the research stations down there, what with all those thousands of precious man-and-dog-hours squandered annually on five-side matches between the Shackletonians and the Vostokians. And as for the States: well, granted that alongside our lithe, balletic original their bastardisation of the sport comes across like a version of human chess executed by muscle-bound astronauts; still, for all that, it’s no less of a national obsession. I hear tell, in fact, that back in ’03 Bush postponed the invasion of Iraq so as to not to risk putting a damper on the Super Bowl fest--’ [ivities]

‘--Oh, shut up!’ she breaks in, screaming, and cupping her mitts to her orioles. ‘I’ve had it up to here [as her hands are both bespoken, she makes do with an exasperated eyebrow fillip by way of indicating the precise mambo-stick-level of her up-to-here-having-had-ness] with football in all of its varieties and manifestations—English, Portuguese, Lichtensteinan, Antarctican, American…and fucking Martian, if that suits you!’

So having screamed, she rises from the table, dashes to and on up the stairs, and slams the door of her bedroom shut with such volume and pneumatic force as to set Lucy yelping like there’s no so-called tomorrow, or whatever equivalent metaphor is conjured up in the teacup-sized-brain of a sausage dog by the slamming of doors. (You were wondering what had happened to Lucy, weren’t you, DGR, amidst all of the pedipilular-cum-pedipilophobic tergiversations of the past post-and-a-half? Well, if so, I invite you to feast your Luciphilic okies on the following paragraph [barring, perhaps, the first two sentences thereof].)

Anyway, if you’ll pardon the apparent digression, I will observe here that the knowledge imparted in driver’s education courses constitutes a much-underrated fund of general wisdom that may be as profitably applied in front--and otherwise out of interested range--of the wheel, as behind it. As far as the presently-digressed-from moment is concerned, I was done a good practical turn by a certain driversedurly principle known as the separation of hazards. In brief, and in concrete (for, in comparing notes with scores of my fellow driver’s-ed alumni, I have found that the illustrative example never varies) this principle is formulated as follows: if, whilst driving along a non-M-marked highway (for heaven forbid such a scenario should prevail on one of her Majesty’s motorways!), you happen to espy in your immejiate field of vision both a cyclist and a massive Holstein cow—with the cyclist perforce being the nearer of the two—it’s best to ease up on the petrol until such time as the cyclist has crossed the road before you contend with the passage of the cow, notwithstanding the counterfact that your collision with the cow would gore up your paint job, set off your airbag, involve you in teejious lawsuits, &c. more efficiently than a collision with the cyclist could ever do; the rationale behind the principle being, of course, that in proceeding full-vapour-ahead you’re more likely to collide with both of them than to miss colliding with either of them. So then, to re-gress from the digression, whilst reaping the full fund of analogical assets from the latter (and, at the same time, disowning in full the pantomimic-costumic liabilities thereof): in the present instance, hazardobifurcationally-speaking, Esmeralda was the cow, and Lucy was the cyclist; meaning that I realised that until I’d dealt properly with Lucy, there was no point in even attempting to deal properly with Esmeralda; that no interminable series of infinitely-plaintive Ruggerly Excuse me, darlings up above could ever receive a proper audience so long as it was seconded by an equally interminable and infinitely-plaintive series of Lucerly What’s all this then?s from down below. So, I march on up to Lucy, stoop over and offer her my right hand, which she deigns to receive with the obligatory butcher’s-half-dozen silent-wet-tongue-lashings, before breaking off and launching back into her paranoiac yelping-cum-baying schtick; as I more or less assumed she would do—but still, it was worth a try. Anyway: this nobly experimental attempt at canine-sedation through sheer trans-familial social bonding having utterly failed, I repair to the kitchen in search of a more plebian and tried-and-true canine sedative; to wit, dog food. But alas! Like a latter-day blokefied Old Mother Hubbard, I there finish up feasting my okies on a cupboard bare of its accustomed brimful bag of Alpo. The remainder of Esmeralda’s larder being stocked with manifestly undogworthy (and, incidentally, YFCT-worthy) foodstuffs—couscous, cumin, coriander, and whatnot—I resort to the fridge; which turns out to contain, in toto, a head of lettuce, a carton of milk, two eggs, and a half-full jar of marmite. The milk would do only if Lucy were a cat, the lettuce only if she were a rabbit or a guinea pig. As for the eggs—well, although I can’t imagine any self-respecting carnivore turning up his or her nose at a well-turned omelet or pair of over-easies, I’ll be roundly rogered sooner than squander such a preparation on a mere dog (love her to death though I do) whilst I go hungry. That leaves the marmite. With much hand-wringing and at great length, I temporise over the question of whether or not to proffer this noxious vegetable gelatin to Lucy’s gob—assuming, on the one arseward-bound hand, that she’ll lap it up like so much honey; and yet wishing, on the other chinward-bound one, to leave the matter in theoretical suspension, given that our shared repugnance for the majority of Esmeralda’s culinary concoctions has heretofore constituted a vital so-called safety valve for YFCT, and that so signal a departure from this norm as would be evinced by her (Lucy’s) outing herself as marmitophile would accordingly occlude the innards of that selfsame safety valve as effectually as….well, a half a jar of marmite would do. In the end, the arseward-bound hand prevails, courtesy of the arse-over-chin-turning revelation that, failing the patching up of my differences with her marmitophile mistress, each and every prospective safety-valve-off-letting communion with Lucy constitutes a mere counterfactual chimera.

So I pick up the jar, unscrew its lid, and, with a degree of hesitancy and diffidence fully commensurate with my anxiety on the score of their reception, proffer its fully-olfactorily-sussible contents to the muzzle of my canine confederate; who, to my infinitely simultaneous relief and disappointment, takes to them like the proverbial dog (or is it duck?) to water. From the very first tongue-lap, I discern that Lucy is, as it were, a born marmitophile; and accordingly, that my work here on the ground floor is done for the so-called foreseeable future. Indeed, immejiately on my releasing my hold on the base of the jar, she kicks her head back and bears the former aloft and athwart her snout for the better ease of extruding every last dollop of the toxin therefrom into her gullet.

So then, Hazard One having been pretty well summarily sideswiped, I dash forthwith upstairs to negotiate the evasion of Hazard Two. I give a coupla tentative knocks to the still-firmly-shut bedroom door, and without daring to knob-and-nudge it (however inconspicuously) into a jar-esque state by way of amplifying my entreaties, call out, 'Esmeralda, darling! Would you mind very much if I came in?'

[Uninterrupted silence for (my mobile being ready-to-hand, I have no need of your 'approximately's or 'round about's or other chronographic qualifiers) five minutes and thirty-five seconds, at the end of which I see fit--with thumbs pressed against the corners of me gob, and pinkies pressed against the door--to renew my plaint thus:]

'Look, it may very well be that you're fast asleep right now; and if so, all of my nattering is in vain--but if you're not, well then, please to peel your ears for the following proposal: if you let me in, I promise not to mention the F-word in your presence from now straight on through to doomsday, save at your express insistence. [There ensues another three minutes and twenty-two minutes of silence, at the end of which I begin to suspect that she actually is asleep, and at the same time think it in my best interest, against the increasingly remote possibility that she isn't, to sweeten the deal as follows:]

'OK, then,' (again through the manual megaphone), 'how do you dig these here palmers? (:) If you let me in, I promise not only not to so much as whisper the F-word; but also to refrain from any mention of F-word-affiliated vocables. That's right: courtesy of my gob you'll hear nary an allusion to the WC, or the AFC, or the UEFAC, or DFKs, or WR or TH or AW--look, as I'm fast running out of acronyms, I think I'd best leave off for now. I'll try you again in another hour or--'

Here the door is flung open with such suddenness and force that I find myself uttering my sentence-out-rounding 'so' directly into the cotton-swathed cushion of Esmeralda's right tit, and fit to come a right nose-breaking cropper on to the bedroom floor; but she breaks my fall by flinging her wrists under my pits just in the nick of time (as I, for my part, and out of a reflexive, complementary motive, fling my arms round her shoulders), and no sooner have we resolved ourselves into a less grotesque copular posture (i.e., one of erectness on both sides [let's leave my schlong out of the narrative picture for just this once] and involving the mutual encirclement of waists and upper tail-bones by clasped pairs of hands) than she's whispering into my ear, 'Consider your proposal accepted,' and subsequently tugging me along by the wrists all the way to the bed, on to whose lengthwise door-ward edge we settle our respective arses--she in an immejiately palpable attitude of amorous friskiness, I in a Sinatra-esque attitude of utter bemusement on the score of this unanticipated access of connubial good fortune.

'Well, here we are then.'

'Yes, here we indeed are. And it's all thanks to your rhetorical resourcefulness.'

'Howdjyer mean?'

'I mean that--and, mind you, I was wide-awake from the instant your turned up--whilst your initial proposal to avoid all mention of the F-word hardly phased me (predictable enough as it was), your subsequent cataloguing of F-word subsidiaries really got me to thinking, Well, supposing this catalogue should eventually number into the hundreds. Would that not still leave us with four-hundred-and-seventy-thousand-odd OED-sanctioned lexemes to work with? For example (I thought, just before making a beeline for the door): the L-word ['lubrication'?], or the M-word ['mortadella'?], or even...the S-word.'

'Ah, yes, the S-word,' I finally chime in, on hearing the first non-interrogative bell-rining alpha in the catalaogue, 'Well, if you need to excuse yourself to spend a penny, by all means, be my guest--'

'--Not that S-word, you dummkopf: the other one.'

'Ah, yes,' I ruefully-cum-gratefully sigh, finally getting the nub of her gist: 'the other one.'

At which point, to misquote ever-so-slightly a minor classic-schlong-rock auteur, we dim the lights, and you can guess the rest. And if you can't fucking do, DGR; well, then, that's your fucking problem. For fuck's sake, this is a fucking certifiably family-friendly slice-o'-life blog, not a bleeding inline Kama Sutra or Joy o' Fuckage!

Anyway: round about two hours later, I'm awakened from the most peaceful of 'gover-free slumbers by a most dreadful bout of caterwauling streaming directly into my pillow-free ear.

'Nigel,' this caterwauler eventually articulates in intelligible human speech, and from a more welcome aural distance, 'I dunno know about you, but I'm starting to feel awfully peckish.'

At last, I brave the okie-peeling ordeal to discover Esmeralda lying lengthwise alongside me, with phiz orientated directly and imploringly towards mine own, and both hands rubbing a presumptively ravenous tummy.

‘Peckish?’ I rejoin briskly, whilst glancing at the clock on the end-table. ‘Well, no wonder: it’s half-past four. ‘Let me see if I can rustle us up some vittles for us.’ So saying, I clamber no less briskly into me trousers and even less unbriskly clamber on downstairs.

Of course, none of the aforementioned briskitude has fanny adams to do with the remotest prospect of such rustling-up; in fact, every last francis-edwardsian bit of it has everything to do with secreting every last trace of evidence appertaining to my marmite-baiting of Lucy a coupla hours previous. So, anyway: I get downstairs and find Lucy slumbering in her wee bed, with the empty marmite jar still fixed athwart her pointy snout. Luckily, the rim of the jar is still well enough lathered with doggy-spittle that I manage to slip the jar off without eliciting so much as a somnolent tongue-fillip or paw-swipe from the slumberer.

Then I head for the kitchen, and after placing—that’s placing, mind you, not chucking—the jar in the dustbin in the side-cupboard, immejiately set about opening, slamming shut, and re-opening the top cupboards; rattling the boxes of some of the more pebbly and loosely-packed foodstuffs contained therein; and playing cymbals with the lids of the two saucepans parked ready to hand on the cooker—all to the end of creating upstairs a plausible auricular image of the genesis of the meal I have ostensibly repaired hither to prepare, without compelling myself—for the moment, at least—actually to cook, and hence eventually (ugh!) eat a gramme of Esmeralda’s macrobiotic rabbit chow. I keep this ruckus going for maybe a half a minute, and then proceed to Phase Two, the visual simulacrum, by installing a randomly-selected (and still-unopened) box alongside me on the countertop, lowering an un-lidded saucepan into the sink, and running the tap into the pot at a dribbling octogenarian-schlong’s volume; saving the coup-de-grace of a crank-up to full-on fire hose volume to the moment—some two minutes later—when I finally hear the first of Esmeralda’s slippered footfalls on the patch of linoleum separating the front room from the kitchen.

‘It’s awfully sweet of you to go to all this trouble, Nigel,’ she says, semi-catatonically entering the room and pausing a-flank the fridge, ‘but to tell you the truth, I doubt if I can hold out long enough for a proper cooked meal.’

‘Are you sure?’ I rejoin, switching off the tap; then hefting the by-now-nearly-full saucepan above sink-level with me right hand, and the box up to okie-level with me left one. ‘Are you sure you can’t hold out another…’--here I glance at the instructions on the side of the box—‘…93 minutes for a delicious bowlful of…’—here I flip the box round for product-identification’s sake—‘…organic Bulgar wheat pilaf?’

‘93 minutes?’ she says, popping open the fridge door and commencing an ocular inventory of the innards. ‘I’d just as soon wait 93 hours. No, if you’ll just put down the pot and the box and hand me over a spoon from that top drawer under the sink, I’ll be…’

‘…You’ll be what…?’

‘…All...set,’ she gratuitously rounds out the sentence after closing the fridge door and whilst approaching me with hang-dog phiz and slumped shoulders.

‘Oh, darling,’ I sigh, as I belatedly (and gratefully) following her instructions vis-à-vis the saucepan and the box. ‘You aren’t by any chance wondering what happened to the marmite?’

‘Yes.’

Now here follows the most complicated bit of attitudinal shamming as yet recorded in the by no means slender Ruggerian Arse-Covering archives; a veritable phizziognomical hat trick requiring me to radiate great waves of guilt alternating in one-to-one proportion with equally potent waves of shame; without exuding so much as a micro-curie of the relief or fear I am, in likewise equal proportions, actually feeling, as I perfidiously utter the following untruth:

‘Well, I confess: it was me wot filched it; filched it and, what’s more, et every last microgramme of it.’

‘Oh, Nigel,’ she coos empathetically, as she approaches me and crooks a hand round half of that most underrated pair of erogenous zones; namely, those tender fleshy bits between the forearms and biceps (i.e., the nutcracker-worthy inner complements to the elbows), ‘Don’t you see what this means? It means you’re one of us after all.’

‘Well, erm,’ I gruffly mock-concede, ‘I suppose I am after all, despite meself.’

To which concession I might have appended, had the candour of the moment been given its due, and despite me schlong, whose stirrings down under, just then, in point of attention-grabbing, trumped every one of YFCT’s gustatory dispositions, both pro and contra, vis-à-vis marmite, Bulgar wheat, CTM, jalappeno poppers and all other culinary delicacies and crudities as yet known to him (i.e., me/YFCT). In arse-sight-stroke-at-arse, though, I’m inclined to think it a good thing that my third leg got the upper hand just then; for had it not done so, the void of deliberation would undoubtedly have been filled by the infinitely more nettlesome issue of the contrivance of plausible stratagems for re-outing myself as a marmitophobe—forged doctors’ notes attesting to my deficiency of a crucial marmite-analysing enzyme and the like—against the re-introduction of the accursed goo at some all-too-proximate Esmeraldacentric chow-down. As it so happened, after attending to the hyper-immejiate problem of de-tumescing my member, my thoughts continued to follow a correspondingly pragmatic and here-and-now- orientated cursus, in devising extra-marmitic cures for Esmeralda’s tummy-rumbles.

‘As I recall, there are two eggs in the fridge, out of which I’d be happy to rustle you up an omelet-lette—estimated time of preparation, ten minutes; whichistersay roughly one- ninth the time required for the preparation of the aforesaid BWP—’

‘—A two-egg omlette? That hardly sounds particularly satisfying by itself. Besides, you must be feeling fairly peckish yourself by now—’

‘—I was just getting to that, by way of my alternative suggestion, namely, for yours truly to hop on the blower forthwith, and ring up the Divan, just like in the old days, and place an order for two baldy imams—estimated time of delivery thereof, courtesy of my wheels, 20 minutes hence, or roughly two-ninths of the BWP benchmark.’

‘Oh, sod the benchmark! Now that you’ve mentioned takeaway from the Divan, I’ll settle for nothing less, even if I have to wait till sunset for it, and chug raw eggs garnished with dry Bulgar wheat in the meantime.’

'Fine, fine: whatever you say!' I exclaim in mock-concessionary alarm, slowly backing away from the sink with palms turned downwards, as though gunpoint-to-phiz with an armed copper or terrorist; then adding, as I exit the kitchen arse-backwards, in the same attitude and at the same pace, 'Please remain calm and refrain from making any sudden movements: the grub'll be up in a trice.'

So, out in the front room, I ring up the restrunt, as I said I'd do; modifying my initially-proposed order only by way of Esmeralda's peremptory demand, shouted off-camera from the kitchen, that I should 'throw in a helping of mezze--you know, in tribute to the old days'; and inside of a half an hour the two of us are tucking into our takeaway-procured (and YFCT-conveyed) feast at the dining-table.

And this selfsame clubbable silence continues judifully to do his atmospheric-particle-aerating bit for another good ten minutes or so; in other words, till we’ve polished off the mezze and are tucking into the main course, at which point he perversely takes it into his head to swap places with his infinitely-more-PR-savvy—whichistersay, infinitely more familiar and recognisable—evil twin, Mr Awkward. I don’t know why he had to go buggering off like that, Mr CS, as I’d have been quite happy to endure his company clear on through to Monday morning. But then again, my shoulders were lucky enough at that time to be unburdened by that metaphysical-cum-interpersonal-cum-simian cargo answering to the appalachian of Unresolved Issues. Had my shoulders not been so fortunate; well, I dare say that in that case, whilst I would not have exactly welcomed the changeling, I would at any rate have yielded to his presence in his capacity as a potential simian-disburdening middleman, as Esmeralda in fact seemed to be doing when, during the en-gulleting of our respective first few gobfuls of baldy imam, she suddenly left off her picture-perfect Harpo-Marxian mirrorings of my sportive, quasi-onanistic This-is-TDAHYCSBAPOSWDF-expressive mime's commentary on the food; and, having laid her fork down, began staring down at her plate in an attitude of apparently monastic contemplation. Now, I knew as full well then as you must surely do now, DGR, the identity of the subject she wished to be broached; but as I was determined to evade every last taint-let of formal--whichistersay, verbal--responsibility for the broaching, to say nothing of the subsequent unleashing of the Alsatians of copular discord into this still-nominally convivial copular setting, I put down my own fork and fished out of one of me trouser pockets a coin, which I then nudged croupier-style across to her side of the table.

She takes up the coin, holds it up to the light and exclaims, 'Two pounds!' then adds, whilst subsequently ensconcing it in the pocket of her jeans, 'Why, that's a two-thousand per cent markup of the going rate! Well, fair enough: I'm sure I've got in store at least two thousand times as much as you've bargained for.'

I reply with a stroppy-cum-indulgent mafia-donnish frown-cum-shrug-cum-shoulder-to-shoulder-head-wag-cum-belly-to-thin-air-palm-wag, as if to say, 'Basta WRT-a your accountant's anorakismo: say your piace, and hava donna withitta.'

'Well then,' she begins (hesitantly, at first, I wish I could say, but no: she launches into the oration full steam ahead, as though she's got it all written down in front of her), 'whilst in all candour I can't say I'm in the least bit sorry for remorseful over my outburst this morning, I likewise wouldn’t have you suppose that the brunt of that outburst was directed at you, or that I hold you principally to blame for the events that touched it off. Cos the fact is, there’s more than enough blame for yesterday’s debacle to go round from here to Woodside Park to East Finchley and back [NB, my fellow bird-watchers, the forthcoming apparition, just to the right of the colon, of that rarest of avisses; i.e., an instance of the blame-apportioning trope that doesn’t amount to a de facto paraphrase of, ‘You’re to blame for every natural and human catastrophe in human and unhuman history, whilst I’m to blame for deigning to inhabit the same space-time continuum as you’]: I was wrong to go all casuistic in on you in talking you into going to the party instead of accepting up front your reasons for not wanting to go—reasons that, seen in the barmy light of your Arsenal animus were perfectly coherent; you were wrong not to do a better job at curbing the expression of that animus once we’d got there; and Roger was of course wronger than the both of us put together for booting you out of his house so ceremoniously unceremoniously after the match.

‘Ultimately, though, it’s quite beside the point who’s to blame for the whole to-do; cos whichever culprit in the line-up you care to finger, you’ll find that he fesses up in the interrogation room to being in the pay of a silent collaborator and patron by the name of Football; and you’ll be bound to conclude both that absent the support of this patron he never would have committed the crime, and that so long as he continues to consort with this dodgy character he can be counted on to commit crimes of parallel enormity in the future. Which is why I said from the start that I didn't in the least bit regret my outburst; insofar as it was as much an outburst against the inevitable, ineluctable psychic-football-instigated depradations to come as against the football-instigated depradations I'd already undergone.'

'Well, darling,' I ever-so-gently-and-tentatively rejoin, whilst taking hold of her hand, 'at the risk of touching off a reprise of this morning's performance via a low-key rehearsal of the incendiary monologue, I must in all candour remind you that not only is the sport of football a veritable and venerable English institution on par if with, if not in not in excellence of, such other hallowed English institutions as Bl---erm, skewed me--Guy, Falkes Day, tea and crumpets and [Cor help me for admitting as much!] marmite; but that it is likewise, in some form or other, an institution of parallel import in the overwhelming majority of nations encompassing the globe; such that if you really and truly wish to escape once and for all its by-no-means-merely-metaphorical sphere of influence—well, then, I was barely exaggerating this morning: you really almost might as well start saving up for the purchase of an unclaimed South Pacific island, or go into training to be an astronaut on the forthcoming Mars expedition. Truth to tell (i.e., in all parallel candour), I’m finding it rather hard to fathom how, blokess though you are, you’ve survived as long as you have done as a bona fidee English pedipilular-indifferent. Surely at least in your nipperhood or maidenhood down in Surrey you must have been a fan of one of the local County Leauge clubs, if only in the most toking fair-weatherly sense of the word.’

‘I can do you two or three better than that: in my single-digit years, I was a die-hard Wimbledon supporter--all thanks to my Dad's brainwashing, of course. The two of us were religious home-match-attendees in those days; and I still cherish many a memory of sitting next to him in the stands, of me munching on my hot dog whilst he, drunk out of his skull, bellowed at our side, 'Pulverise the scrota of the lot of 'em, you fucking cunts!' and suchlike adjurations. But that all ended, predictably enough, once I hit puberty. From that point onwards there was, as they say, a tacit understanding between the two of us that I ought to devote the bulk of my extracurricular hours to the company of my girlfriends, and reserve the exercising of our shared Wimbledon-mania for occasional weekend televisual offerings. And the older I got, the rarer these front-room match viewings likewise became; to the point that it came as a total surprise to me last Christmas, when Dad, as a rueful addendum to his lament on the demise of our old routine, happened to add, "Well, in any case, the club relocated to Milton Keynes five years ago, so we haven't been missing out on much lately".’

‘And notwithstanding this tacit understanding between you and your dad, you never felt any pressure to come back into the Wimbledonian fold from exogenous members of the community--say, your headmaster or vicar or postman?’

'Uh-uh, not in the slightest from any quarter. Truth to tell, from second form right on through to university, I more or less assumed that, at least as far as us girls were concerned, football fandom was something everyone had pretty much grown out of, got out of her system, or what have you. That all changed, of course, once I moved to London proper. Within weeks of settling down in the capital, I came to perceive that in general grown-ups of both sexes up here took the whole sport much more seriously than we'd done down there; although, of course, I never quite realised how much more seriously you lot took it until last night.’

'Until last night, you say?--i.e., courtesy of that pack of biennial pedipilular dilettantes? Why, by comparison with them, you're a saint, in virtue of your thoroughgoing pedipilular indifference--'

'--Dilettantes they may be, by your exacting standards. But what is that to me? Am I to regard a werewolf as being any less of a lycanthrope on account of the fact that he comports himself as a normal, law-abiding biped on 28 out of every 30 nights? And, in any case, what protection will your canonisation of me afford during the ensuing two years' regular season play? Oh, sure, on the macro-social level, I'm sure I'll be able to keep shrugging off invitations to match-viewings as I have done for the past two years without suffering a ding in the carapace of my self-esteem, but as for the micro-social level...'

[YFCT, in all candid gormlessness:] '...The micro-social level?'

'I'm talking about you, you big lug; or, at any rate, those episodes of my existence you've generally been figuring in lately. What am I to do, come the end of the summer, when your Arsenal-hating hackles start to rise, and you're excusing yourself for a nip-down to the pub every third night or so?'

'Well,' I rather lamely--albiet gamely--counter-pose, 'surely you'll always have the institutionalised feminine safety-valve of the girls'-night out to fall back on.'

'--Of course I shall do, and I expect I'll have plenty of occasions to throw it open at full throttle. But setting aside the purely bureaucratic, procedural difficulty of scheduling these hen sessions to coincide cleanly with each and every Arsenal match, there'll be a far more nettlesome difficulty to contend with, namely the bleed-over of your Arsenal-inspired moods into so-called off hours. I can only assume, as things stand now, that when Arsenal are in the cellar, you'll be all atwitter about walks in Hampstead Heath and dining out at Emchai; and that when they're in the attic, you'll be all a-cower about staying in and boozing it up on your lonesome back at Woodside Park.'

'So what you're essentially asking me to do,' I say, quite Sinatra-esquely astonished at the sheer equability with which I seem to be initiating the solicitation of my copular walking-papers, 'is to renounce my Arsenal-bashing tendencies and principles too-core, or else...' (Here I dot-dot-dot out, unable to bear the utterance of the words renounce you, or their effectual equivalents.)

'...No,' she dot-dot-dots in, catching my gist, and evidently quite touched by my speechlessness, seeing as how she takes up my free hand in hers, and leans forward across the table, before qualifying this negation through an exasperated sigh, 'I'm not asking you to renounce anything. Look, Nigel: if there's one point I've been trying to drive home throughout the present chinwag, it's that all football-orientated obsessions are, without exception, uniformly repellent to me. And seeing as how, statistically speaking, every bloke--and virtually every woman--in London is prey to some such obsession, be it Chelsea-fandom or Tottenham-fandom or sodding Manchester-United-fandom, the odds are that if we were to part ways, and I were to enter the lists of singledom, I'd finish up saddled with a bloke at least as exceptionable as you from my pedipilular-indifferent point of view, which would be a shame, seeing as how this statistically all-too-probable bloke would likewise be lacking in most, if not all, of those qualities you and I all-too-self-evidently share.'

'For example,' I eagerly hazard, 'our unstinting hatred of Mayor Ken?'

'Absolutely,' she affirms, whilst seconding her affirmation with a vigorous pair of nods. 'Likewise our unstinting commitment to the vocation of accountancy. And, last but not least, the most recent addition to the predilectory canon: [here I feel a decidedly unwelcome re-clenching of her grip on my mitts] our unstinting passion for marmite.'

'Well, erm, yes,' I hem back, whilst masking my nausea under an assumed phiz of the utmost businesslike solemnity, 'It's an impressive catalogue, to be sure. But,' I continue, seeking relief in the re-mooting of a topic that I would have done anything to avoid discussing in the first place a scant ten minutes previous, 'back to my Arsenalophobia. If you don't expect me to renounce it, what exactly would you have me do with it?'

'I dunno. Curb it, I suppose. Or moderate it, or sequester it, or, Christ! taxiderm the sodding thing, for all I care--whatever it takes to keep it from being an effectual presence here, or at your place, or wherever else we happen to be together.'

'Hmm: I see,' I say, casting a knitted-brow'd sidewise glance in the direction of the nearest patch of wainscoting, as though taking furious notes on a mental scribbling-block. 'On the one ends-orientated hand, it seems altogether reasonable, kosher--nay, cricket--the realisation of this demand of yours. On the other means-orientated one, that's a mightily abstract-cum-poetic barrage of verbal grapeshot you've just let fly at me: curb, moderate, sequester, taxiderm. By way of reconciling the two hands, I could really do with some sort of concrete prescription, something along the lines of--mind you, I essay this example for purely illustrative purposes--enrol in a course of yoga lessons--'

'--But that's just it!' she cuts in, tearing free of our handclasp and letting both palms lie, diggits splayed willy-nilly, on the tabletop in rhetorical resignation. 'I haven't any such concrete prescription for you. Lame as it is, this off-the-cuff yogan proposal of yours is a good deal more plausible than anything I've so far managed to come up with on my own. This is something we're going to have to work on together, and if you truly value my companionship, you must swear to let me know the very instant any remotely-practicable Arsenal-animus-curbing stratagem occurs to you, and likewise to give a fair hearing to any such stratagem as occurs to me.'

By this point, copular-ly speaking--foreseeing as I do a full sunny two solid months of Arsenal-free pitch-time by the end of which interval, with any luck, Esmeralda's qualms will have been either hashed out into an irksomely glutinous (from her povey as well as mine) tissue of irrelevance or transmogrified into at least the toking semblance of Arsenalophobic solidarity--my schphincter is being tickled by the uppermost tufts of a harvest-ready cotton-shrub. And so, yielding to the ticklage, as I can't but do, I let drop the following steaming puddle of disingenuous-cum-gormless coprophasiac slurry:

'Oh, by all means: if in the course of your researches you happen to turn up some sort of psychopharmaceutic treatment for Arsenalophobia, an Arsenalophobe's answer to Ziban or the nicotine patch, please do let me know, as I shall naturally be all too happy to give it a whirl.'

To parse the prefatory styling of this utterance for the benefit of the dis-bereft-ingenuous or gormless (among both of which I must, alas and by default, class you, DGR): it was, in the first place, thoroughly disingenuous of me to pretend that I regarded my Arsenalophobia after of the manner of a smoker vis-a-vis his habit, a habit that the habitué sincerely wishes to kick; when I in fact regarded it rather after the manner of an Amish or Hasidic-Jewish bloke vis-a-vis his creed, a creed that he shivs nary a git about as far as its propagation amongst the masses goes, but that he will defend to death on the score of its embodiment in his own person. And in the second place, it was thoroughly gormless of me to assume, based on the bald-faced absurdity of the notion, that no drug custom-engineered to 'cure' such a 'pathology' as Arsenalophobia yet existed, or ever would exist; inasmuch as, in our day, scarcely any non-tax-deductible preoccupation escapes the schphinctral probings of the psychiatrist's stethoscope.

At any rate, and much to my shah-grin, in her reply Esmeralda evinces every sign of taking me at my word, with equal regard to the practicability as to the desirabilty of effecting a cure: 'Oh, believe you me,' she says, with steely-okied imperiousness, 'you'll be the first to know if I do turn up anything of the kind.'

Well, with any luck it won't come to that, I in all probability would have nervously rejoined to this avowal, seeing as how a pair of vague unformulated ghosties of the reservations articulated in the last paragraph but one were already being catalysed into Ruggerian mental numinousness courtesy of the coldly uncharitable--nay, well-nigh-unhuman--tone of this selfsame avowal itself; I say I IAP I would have rejoined as much or something to its effect, had not a more exigent circumstance come into play just then, and thereby nudged the whole Arsenalophobic controversy on to the proverbial back burner. Cos you see, at that very moment--that istersay during the interval of silence when I was leisurely-ly digesting Esmeralda's dish of Arrsenalophobiaphobic coldness--all four of our orioles were suddenly and involuntarily acchuned to a sound emanating from towards the rear of the front room, to wit a plaintive yelping interspersed with bouts of coughing and retching whose P of O was unmistakable. And a mere okie-blink later, in advance of the most toking pre-diagnostic conference, the two of us are crouched down on our haunches at Lucy's bedside, looking on helplessly as our beloved dachshund, shuddering on all fours, spews gobful after gobful of brown goo on to the carpet.

'What should we do?' Esmeralda desperately queries me.

'Call the vet!' I shout, emboldened by guilt as much as by fear of the prospective outcome of my enormity. So Esmeralda grabs the blower, whilst I, for want of any more obvious expedient, take up Lucy's water bowl and dash to the kitchen tap. Returning to her side, I kneel down and lift her up bodily to chin level with one hand, and with the other hold the replenished bowl up to her snout. For the first half-minute or so, she takes absolutely no notice of the bowl, and merely discharges another coupla cataracts of vomit on to the floor. Next, her thirst evidently getting the better of her nausea, she takes in a few tongue-loads of water, only to puke up the lot a butcher's half-dozen seconds later. Finally, though, she manages to lap up a coupla-butcher's dozen tongue-loads in succession without regurgitating; such that, once she's drunk her fill, I can with a semi-clear conscience return her to the bed; and once within its confines she immejiately settles in a lazily recumbent posture that--barring the occasional hiccup--bids fair to eventuate in an untroubled puppy-snooze.

Meanwhile, Esmeralda, now blowerwardly-engaged, has returned bearing a paper napkin in her phone-free hand. 'Uh-huh,' she says, bending over and daubing the puke-puddle with the napkin, then standing up and holding the newly-besmirched napkin up to okie-level, resumes: 'OK, I've got it. It's dark brown in colour, and sort of pasty and semi-granular in texture.' [A butcher's coupla-dozen ensuing seconds of silence.] 'Well, I certainly didn't feed it to her. Mind you, though, I've a pretty good notion of who did [here she cuts me me a pair of co-jone-snipping ocular daggers from on high]. Would you mind hanging on just a minute, Dr Singh? Thanks ever so much.'

And so, clasping the blower to her shoulder she hisses, again YFCT-ward, 'One of us, you dared to style yourself. Why, I should have known better. As far as I'm concerned, we're through--'

At this point, you’ll doubtless be expecting to me interpolate, DGR, my schpinctral tissue gave out like the waistband of a pair of toddler’s knickers suddenly and untowardly called upon to accommodate the full girth of an 18-stone dull-bike; but no: the fact was that the old ST at this particular moment held firm and fast, courtesy of a well-nigh untrump-able trump card I had ready to hand in the most literal sense of the idiom.

‘Ah yes,’ you say, ‘by this untrump-able trump card I assume you mean your water-tight case for having served up marmite to Lucy on the grounds that no more obviously canine-friendly comestible had been ready to hand on the premises.’

‘No, MDFC, I mean nothing of the kind. For duck-sphchinteredly water-tight as such a case undoubtedly would have seemed according to our pragmatically blokish lights, from Esmeralda’s irredeemably idealistic feminine point of view it would equally doubtlessly have cuntstituted an outright rhetorical by-word for a colander or sieve. From such a povey as the latter one, you see, any course of action a bloke might have taken by way of obviating the present SOA can in hindsight be magically transmogrified into the obviously ineluctable one, irrespective of the degree of inconvenience—nay, danger to life and limb—it would have presented. Say the lights have gone out in your shared abode, and you’re rummaging round in the cupboard for candles and matches: well, the odds are your girl will interrupt your rummagings by demanding why you haven’t, first, sussed out the source of the outage and, second, kept the connection going by interposing your person between the two severed live ends of electric cable. Accordingly, in this particular case, had I essayed the indisputable cupboard-bereftness of dog-chow in defence of my feeding of marmite to Lucy, Esmeralda doubtless would have unhesitatingly countered, Well, why didn't you nip down to Sainsbury's for a refill? (yesyesyes: notwithstanding the fact that, as Lucy was her primary charge and not mine, she [Esmeralda] should have seen to such replenishment beforehand). In any event, DGR, the precision of my phraseology rules out such an interpretation as yours. For by the most literal sense of the [RTH] idiom I meant just that: a concrete and temporally un-transpose-able entity, namely--’

'--Lucy herself?'

'Bingo, in four places, DGR. I knew that, as Lucy herself was utterly gormless on the score of the potentially mortal danger I had put her in, I could count on her perduring affection for YFCT as on nothing else in this coldly unaffectionate world; and that Esmeralda could not but cave in to the most toking tokens of such affection, in view of her own quasi-maternal attachment to her pet. And so:'

'Darling, darling,' I says, scooping the as-yet-steadily-snoozing Lucy up into cradling position; then, rising and approaching Esmeralda, with one doggie-earflap dangling ever-so winsomely over one of me forearms, I continue thus: 'Look at it this way: on the one hand, sure, on account of this kerfuffle over Lucy and the marmite you've had to cross one item off your list of things we have in common, and I apologise most sincerely and heartily for the imposition. But on the other hand, and in exchange, you've got a fresh new item to add to the list.'

'Oh, Nigel,' she says, dropping the phone, as Lucy, now clenched between our four tits, delivers a semi-somnolent--yet, for all that, no less whallopping--tongue-lick to each of our chins, 'I suppose you have got a point.'

HEART-SHAPED CAMERA-STENCIL IRISES INTO A TRIPTYCH COMPRISING A GOB-LOCKED ESMERALDA AND RUGGER TOGETHER WITH AN UPTURNED INTRUSIVE DOGGIE-SNOUT PRESUMPTIVELY QUERYING 'WHAT'S ALL THIS THEN?'

CUT TO SHOT OF DISCARDED PHONE RECEIVER. AUDIO [DR SINGH]: 'HULLO? HULLO? CAN YOU GIVE ME ANY UPDATE ON THE STATUS OF THE PATIENT?'

Finis Postis.