Take Back the Night (Again)

'You really do try my patience, MDF.'

'How so, pray tell, DGR?'

'Well, in first prematurely cutting off the last post on the grounds of "sleepiness"--not, however, without first promising me a post-haste summary of the narrative backlog--and then in popping off to parts unknown for a full two weeks without so much as a BYL.'

'For the umpteen-thousandth time, DGR, I must insist that all dilations, elisions and deferrals of certain swaths of the narrative texture on my part have ever here-24 been and shall ever after be undertaken solely and ultimately with a view to your greater readerly comfort and delectation; and for the first and last time, I must beg you to take my word for it that the present admittedly rather snot-clotted tissue of all three narrative techniques cuntstitutes no exception to the general programme.'

'You may beg all you like, MDF; but the proof of the Yorkshire pudding is, after all, in the Eton.'

'Ah, yes: a fat Yorkshire pudding of a pun whose sub-crustial significance naturally eludes the tongue of this county-council-school educated bloke.'

'Naturally. Well, you see, the sub-crustial significance of the pun issues from the fact that the Eton upper-form kitchen's Yorkshire puddings are widely held to be the finest in the Kingdom.'

'This despite the fact that Eton is situated in what county...Essex?'

'Buckinghamshire--but yes, in any case, a good three-hours' train-ride sou'-sou'-east of Yorkshire. Apparently, from what I learnt in my fagging fourth-form days, the tradition dates all the way back to 1608, when one Maeve Brennen, a toothless Yorkshire spinster of threescore, was taken into service as head cook. Rumour then had it that Goody Maeve was a practitioner of the so-called black arts, and that she'd pinched the recipe off Old Nick himself--'

'--Enough, DGR! Talk about your digressive pot calling the dilatory kettle black!'

'TBS. I stand duly chastened, aitch't by mine own pee, &c. Nonetheless-stroke-and so, I demand that you redeem this otherwise inexcusable episode of silence by way of a substantial remittance, to my order, of the only thing that counts as L.S.D. in this bl*****rly realm, to wit--'

'--to wit, a post coked to the gills with farcical high-jinks, pratfalls, about-faces and suchlike episodes?'

'Even (albeit afraidly) so.'

'Well, I hope that the meat of the present post answers to those very specifications. But before we tuck in, I have a confession to make. The sad fact, you see, DGR, is that I was fudging a bit when I proclaimed at the start of the last post that you were about to be treated to an essay in the genre fully worthy of its name, fully "'O Koran of the date of its posting"; that on the eve of the very eve of the penning of that selfsame post--thatistersay, on Saturday, 28 October--there befell me an event truly worthy of recording in these Ruggerian annals, particularly from your own especial Merrie-Olde England-rogering povey.'

'Well, then, why the devil didn't you incorporate it into the text of that selfsame po--?'

'--Hear me out, DGR, if you will. The reason I forbore including an account of this event in that post was that I instantly foresaw that it wouldn't bear properly ripe narrative fruit of whatever species until a good week and a day subsequent; i.e., a good six days posterior to that fortuitous off-night (i.e.e., an Esmeraldan girls' night out) in which I was vouchsafed the luxury of a few blessed blogospheric hours to myself. And so, during those precious butchers' quarter-dozen hours of solitude, I brought everything up to date as best I could to the 27th, and preemptively earmarked everything from the 28th to the 5th inclusive for the next post.'

'To the 5th inclusive, you say?'

'That's right.'

'Why the 5th and not, say, the 3rd or the 7th?'

'My, but aren't you too thick by thirds, DGR! Well, anyway, for all your thickness, I'm sure you'll suss the import of this particular month-straddling time-bracket soon enough after I've launched into the narrative portion of the post proper, as I shall do just to the right of the approaching colon-'n'-inverted comma, as follows:'

On the evening of the 28th of October, Esmeralda, Lucy and I were trotting along Ballard's Lane en route, as is our Saturday-evening constitutional wont, from E's place to the Divan--mind you, though, we'd set our time of embarkation forward an hour, so as to enable our eventual chow-down time to coincide as closely as possible with the kick-off of the Arsenal-Everton match at Emirates--when there issued from me right side a plaintive, squeaky, infantile cry of--get this--'A penny for the bloke!'

Upon hearing these words, so familiar and yet so strange--or, to be more precise, four-fifths relatively unfamiliar yet utterly unstrange and one-fifth utterly familiar yet utterly strange--I naturally enough stopped short and glanced over me shoulder to pinpoint their precise point of origin. Esmeralda, too, stopped short and glanced backwards, but seemingly more by way of following of my cue than on her own aural account (as for Lucy, she naturally kept merrily-cum-obliviously trotting along until she'd exhausted the slackness of the lead, the masterly end of which was looped round my wrist). Anyway, the PPOO in question proved to be this wee knee-high nipperess of no more than seven years of age, standing forlornly betwixt the two nearest shop-fronts to the back of us, her hands crossed behind her arse in Chuck-Atlas-worthy support of the twin handles of an adult-size wheelbarrow.

'Fancy that,' came Esmeralda's blandly noncommittal reaction to the discovery: 'a Guy-child. It's been simply ages since I last saw one.' She might as well have been talking about an old 6 d. tanner that had turned up in her daily residue of pocket change for all it seemed to matter to her, and I got the distinct impression that she was all for pressing on rather than for back-tracking and tarrying even long enough to humour the poor li'l waif with the traditional complement of small-talk-cum-cambio. In other words-stroke-as I immejiately realised, I was by default more or less on my own on the auditory fact-checking front; which, as far as I was concerned, was all to the good, inasmuch as I was in no mood to argue my way clear of a certification of barminess (as if anyone on Cor's GE has ever been in such a mood), should it in fact have turned out that I had misheard the un-mis-hearable phantom bloke for the actual guy. So, by way of preempting such a disastrous SOA--albeit at the risk of precipitating a merely humdrum copular-rowish one--I handed the dog-lead over to Esmeralda and excused myself on the 'sentimental' grounds of my relative age and provincial provenance; dashed back over to the girl, squatted down on me haunches so as to be facing her at optimum near-okie-level from the get-go, and posed to her point-blank the question:

'Are you you absolutely sure you didn't mean to say "A penny for the guy?"'

With a world-weary air that was enough to break your heart in virtue of its emanating from one of such tender years, she replied, 'No, I said and meant to say "A penny for the bloke." It's all to do with Bloke Fawkes Day, the fifth of November.' And here, by way of further explanation, she extracted from one of the pockets of her mini-hoodie, and thereupon proffered to me, a leaflet, which principally read as follows:

'COME JOIN US, STARTING AT 5 PM, FOR THE BURNING OUT OF THE SECOND OFFICIAL BLOKE FAWKES DAY: 5 NOVEMBER 2006.' This main stretch of text was disposed in an Olde-English black letter font alongside a bit of crude woodcut clip-art depicting a pair of beardy blokes in baggy knee-breeches and clown-collars immersing an oversize marionette-type-thingy in a vat of stylised flames, and above a subsidiary stretch of text in smallish modern italics reading: 'The Sedulous Ape / *** Barnet High Road. / For details, call 020-***-*****.' And even yet below this stretch one could discern a wee glyphic coronet along with-stroke-side the words By Official Charter of H. R. H. , the Queen.'

Well, I could hardly consider myself surprised by any of the intelligence disclosed in the leaflet--shocked, yes, but not surprised: for the real and unique jaw-slackening-cum-schphincter-dilating moment of this episode--to wit, the reaffirmation of her enunciation of the bloke vocable--had already done come and gone. From that point onwards (which point had handily and reinforcingly coincided with my spot-ocular survey of the bloke presently in tow, whose bidness-suit attire and shop-hoover-hose neck-scarf--along with such Johnny-on-the-spot un-fabricatable embellishments as stitched-in Chinaman's okies, combed-over toupee and ready-to-hand fake Red Leicester cheese wheel--had cued me in to his Kennian original), it had simply followed as a matter of course that this girl's presence here would have something to do with that inaugural Bloke Fawkes Day of '05; and from this point onwards, I saw no reason to comport myself towards her any differently than I would have done towards any random anachronistic Guy-child--that is, apart from prefatorially clearing up as best I could, by way of her testimony, a certain mystery conjured up by the phone number displayed on the leaflet, which sequence of diggits corresponded neither to those of the Ape nor to any others that I had dialled in surviving memory.

'Now, I'm going to ask you a question, and if you answer it truthfully to my satisfaction, I promise to award your guy--erm, your bloke--a sum a good deal greater than a penny. That question is: Who sent you here?'

'Why, an't please yo,u guv'ner, my grandpa.'

[Well, that at least narrowed it down to one-fifth of the male population of the Kingdom, dinnit?] 'I see. And what do the grown-ups you know call your grandpa?'

'Erm, well, that depends. When they're stroppy with him they call him bastard, or shithead...or sal-O.'

'And when they're not stroppy with him?'

'Why, then, they call him mate, or granddad...or mong view.'

Well, that pretty much narrowed it down to one male inhabitant of the borough of Barnet. And so, giving the crown of her head an avuncular tousle, then rising to my feet, I said to her, 'You're a very good girl, erm..'

'...Albertine.'

'Pleased to make your acquaintance, Albertine,' I says, shaking her wee right hand in mine whilst fishing a five-pound note out of my wallet and chucking it into the wheelbarrow with my left one; 'and please, if you will, to give my regards to your grandpa from Monsieur McGuy-VERR.'

'Oh, I will do, sir, I promise,' she says, turning round immejiately thereafter to forage in the till of the wheelbarrow, and thereby giving me my cue--which I duly take--to turn round in my turn and proceed back up the HR. Before I've taken so much as a butcher's half-dozen steps in that direction, though, I hear her screaming at my arse, as irate as could be, in her wee, pippish soprano, 'CHEAPSKATE!' thereby giving me full licence to turn back round and scream 'INGRATE!' at her face in my resonant, manly baritone. But I forbore to claim that licence and opted rather to keep hoofing it on taking immejiate remorseful cognizance of the fact that more than anything else it was surely brute monetary inflation that was to blame for the death of the venerable tradition of kerbside Guy-dunning, and that, taking into account the cumulative devaluation of the penny since 1605, I really ought to have given her a tenner at least for her pains. This newly re-tapped well of reflections on the Guy-stroke-Bloke-Fawksian constellation tided me over, preoccupationally-speaking, to my re-rendezvous with Esmeralda ('I trust you've filled your annual quota of provincial-cum-microgenerational nostalgia?' she asked me jeeringly, whilst handing me back the lead; and I, for my part, absently replied, whilst taking it up again, 'Yeah, yeah: of course.'), and, indeed, clear on through past the moment of kick-off and tuck-in back at her place. You will, I trust, DGR, appreciate the especially low pH index of the pickle I'd now got myself into. For, having only just recently got one row of Esmeraldan ducks (viz. the Arsenalphobic one) all lined up, I was now confronted with a fresh chaotic assortment of ducks (viz. the Bloke-Fawksian one) requiring the same laborious sequencing, and then some: cos whereas the last assortment had consisted entirely of your common run of inanimate fairground decoys (inasmuch as Arsenalophobes--de facto and de jure inclusively--numbered in the thousands if not millions), the present one comprised a veritable living, breathing, eating and shitting litter that I had pretty much given birth to; such that to ignore their pathetic quackings now would constitute a veritable act of infanticide, whilst to heed them would be--well, to risk imposing on Esmeralda the job of part-to-full-time Ruggerian duck-sitter. NB, though, that I say risk rather than resign myself to: for the whole answer to the question as to whether she'd greet this duck-sitting gig as an imposition or as a CV-expanding opportunity hinged in turn on yet another pair of questions, the first being that of the degree of prestige that had accrued to BFD during the three-hundred-and-fifty-some-odd days of my absentee-motherhood, the second being that of the degree of probability of my being recognised by the present-day BFD cognoscenti for the cardinal founding father of the holiday that I in fact was. If, on the one extremely optimistic hand, BFD had blown up into the biggest UK-wide sensation since Big Brother, and, come Bonfire Night, I could count on being greeted by the charter Ape contingent like one of those dukes in a Shakespeare play who, after a presumptive year-long holiday in Bumfuck, Poland, pitches up in the last scene to dole out great heaping dollops of whoopass to his negligent deputies and retainers; why, then, I could hardly imagine Esmeralda's resenting her appointment as my personal assistant on a minimum salary of the mid-six-figure complexion. If, on the other extremely pessimistic hand, BFD had dwindled into Woodside Park's extremely local real-world alternative to World of Warcraft, and I could count on being greeted by the fistful of pimply anoraks devoted thereto like some sort of Benedict Arnold figure pitching up at the original American Cuntstitutional Convention; why, then, I could hardly imagine Esmeralda's tolerating any sort of connexion with me thereafter, even on the most exorbitant financial terms entailed thereby (say, the full payment of our bill at the alternative venue of Emchai, pre-first-course champagne and post-third-course prawn shlongtail included). In any case, the sole potential means of even approximating the point along the hand-spanning spectrum occupied by the current BFD-ian SOA, in advance of Bonfire Night itself, inhered in the dialling of the mystery phone number displayed on the leaflet. And so, I devoted the best part of my attention during the first half of the match to brooding over a massive tree-ful of 'When'- and 'How'-prefixed questions centring on this matter of the dialling, and divaricating into the following branches and sub-branches: 'When to do it? Tonight? And thus risk spoiling the otherwise untrammelled Arsenalophobic Abe-end's ghost of the present evening? Or tomorrow, and thus ensure myself a bout of intervening insomnia intermittently punctuated by nightmares starring a knife-wielding Blokefawkesophobic Esmeralda?' 'If tonight, then how? By way of a transparently duplicitous piss-run? Or by way an-only-marginally-less transparently duplicitous phone-break "to check up on the [fictitious] goings-on back at the plant in preparation for Monday's [fictitious] meeting?" Or by way of a full-on, candid, tit-hoovering preface recounting the authentick particulars of the genesis of Bloke Fawkes Day, and setting forth the rationale behind the exigency of my re-engagement with my festive progeny?' 'If the last of these, then when? 20 minutes hence, during the half-time-break chinwag or 200 minutes hence, during the post-coital one?', &c. Luckily enough, Esmeralda herself unwittingly delivered the first of an ultimately fatal series of axe-blows to the very trunk of the thing, when, just as the first half of the match was rounding itself out to the limping rhythms of Justin Hoyte's welcome exit for the full duration, she said to me--apparently noting a certain lack of enthusiam in my mimcry of her red-Indian-style ululations against the restoration of match-worthy functionality to JH's hamstring--'Hey, what's eating at you? Surely you're not still fretting over that first goal? For Chrissakes, Cahill tied up the score over a half an hour ago and they haven't reclaimed a foot of pitch ever since.'

'Eh? What's that? Which goal?'

'Which goal, you dare ask me? Why, van Persie's goal way back in, I dunno, minute five and tuppence!'

'Oh, yeah, of course.'

'Don't you "oh, yeah, of course," me! I can tell you haven't been paying attention. Whodathunkit? A scant two months ago, wild horses couldn't have dragged me to the kickoff of a football telecast, and now here I sit, plumb in the middle of just such a telecast, happy as a pig in shit, as they say, and obliged to drag you by the nose of all noses back to the pedipilular grindstone--or, rather, trough.'

'Yeah,' I agreed with a smile, my pedipilular-pedagogic pride momentarily getting the better of my Blokefawksian jitters: 'Whodathunkit?'

And then me mind's telescope involuntarily swivelled round and focussed itself on one of the highlights of that first tutorial in Arsenalophobia 101; a tutorial which had centred, for want of more apposite viewing fare, on a grainy camcorder video of a 1997 match between the Gunners' and Spurs' respective Girls' Polliwog League sides. The mise-en-scene is squarely and statically fixed, at nipper-eye level, on Tottenham's goal. From out of the right edge of the frame appears a girl of no more than five years of age, togged out in the trad Gunnerly away hues of yellow and blue, and driving the ball forward towards the goal with a cuntishly fierce single-mindedness. An inch or two shy of the penalty box, though, she suddenly stops short, grabs the goalkeeper by the throat, completely immobilising her with a veritable Venusian karate death-grip, and then, and only then, delivers the net-pulverising coup de pied-cum-grace. Next, from the left edge springs into view a ref, who in no uncertain terms (i.e., with wildly exaggerated hand-gestures and violent head-jerks) signals 'RED CARD PENALTY'. Whereupon, a pair of trousered adult legs ambles into the frame from behind the camera, to be immejiately pounced upon and embraced by the penalised nipper. 'You'll save me, won't you, papa, from that howwible, big bad wef?' she sobs. 'Of course I will, sugarplum,' booms a masculine voice from above. Taking her into his arms and hefting her over one of his shoulders (the camera pans upwards and advances forwards to track the whole sequence from behind), the bloke approaches the ref and says to him, 'Now what's all this about a fucking red card?' 'What's all this about?' says the ref, with arms akimbo and lower lip enviably slackened: 'It's about your Number 22's laying hands on the goalkeeper, a clear case of interference if I ever saw one.' 'Laying on hands, you say?' says the bloke. 'That's right,' says the ref. 'Well, I,' says the bloke, depositing his presumptive daughter alongside him on the pitch as if in preparation for something ugly, 'saw only one hand being brought to bear on the goalkeeper; hence, this is a clear case of non-interference if I ever saw one.' 'Oh, come off it, mate,' says the ref. 'It's a transparently inclusive figure of speech: hands for one hand, two hands, a hand and an elbow, a knee and a forearm, etc.--all of them being equally inadmissible.' 'Look, mate, if you want to fucking get shirty over it,' says the bloke, beginning to doff his wind-cheater--

--And here, at mid-doff-point, I press the pause button on the remote and approach the telly with laser pointer in hand. 'Now,' I says, encircling the nipperess with a virtual halo of LED -esque pinpricks, 'if you can just bring yourself to imagine that she is Thierry Henry and that he,' encircling the bloke in like fashion, 'is Arséne Wenger, then you'll have got a pretty fair idearrof the fundamental cuntishness of the Gunnerly ethos.'

‘That’s enough for today, thank you,’ Esmeralda categorically pre-empts, rising from the couch, then beginning to make a beeline for her bedroom via the stairs. Naturally, I drop my pointer and hasten after her.

‘Might as well cut my losses,’ she adds in a faux undertone, from about five stairs ahead of me, whilst keeping her gaze orientated doorwards and upwards.

‘Cut your losses?’ I gormlessly query her threshold-clearing arse from the top stair.

‘Yes, my losses,’ she repeats, turning round at last to face me from within her newly-secured sanctuary, and with one hand poised on the inner door-knob: ‘At least as things stand now, when I’m on my deathbed I’ll be able to console myself with the thought that I squandered only one half of a youthful weekend afternoon on a nine-year-old video of a girls’ polliwog league football match.’

Then comes the inevitable rhetorical door-slam, followed (AFF) by the inevitable damage-controlling apostrophe to the invisible Esmeralda:

‘Look, darling, it does get better. Trust me: I’ve watched the whole thing through to the end. [30 seconds or so (I happen not to have my mobile ready to hand just now) of silence.] I understand full well how childish it must appear to you--Christ, how literally childish it actually is--but just picture it to yourself, if you will, as a kind of miniature monochrome engraving of the vast, room-spanning, particoloured canvas that is your typical full-scale Premiership Arsenal-Tottenham match.'

But it was only in the course of our next tutorial, centring on a professionally-recorded broadcast feed of a 2002 match between the Arsenal and Chelsea Ladies' sides, that I made the slightest degree of headway with my art-historical analogy. Here, we were, after all, dealing with adults if not with full-fledged Premier-league blokish professionals; hence, if you will, with a kind of poster-sized mezzotint of a full-scale Premiership Arsenal-Chelsea match--'

[DGR:] '--You will, I trust, forgive me for cutting in like this, inasmuch as it is for your own writerly benefit that I am taking the liberty of doing so; for I am at last beginning to see the point of your building-industrial analogy involving the spectatorship of drying paint.'

'Oh you are now, are you? Well, inasmuch as saying "I told you so" cuntstitutes a clear violation of the gentleblokey code, I won't say "I told you so."'

'Indeed, MDF: I am only too grateful for your elision of that four-word-long phrase of reproach.

'And a propos of elisions, DGR: as I assume your interruption was orientated towards this very resumption, I likewise assume you will not object to my resuming the account of my conversation with Esmeralda of last 28 October.'

'Indeed not, MDF.'

'Very well, then. As I was saying to Esmeralda, prior to the digressive flashback:'

"'Yeah, whodathunkit?'"

'And am I right in assuming,' (says Esmeralda), 'as you haven't been the same since, that your abstraction from the match has got something to do with our late encounter with that guy girl on the High Road?'

'Yes you're right: it has got something, and, indeed, everything, to do with it.'

'And I likewise assume that whatever it is has got to be of a pretty serious nature to pull you away from undividedly attending to a Gunners match.'

'Organically pretty and serious as a myocardial infarction, and, try as it might, incapable of being otherwise .'

'OK. Well, I might as well peg my first guess to the worst-case scenario and work backwards along the Richter scale: this girl is your daughter by an ex-girlfriend, and has been turned out on to the streets to collect alms in support of her mother's heroin or crack-cocaine habit.'

[Christ! What kind of a potential deadbeat recreant does she take me for? (Mind you, I'm hardly inclined to look the collateral gift horse of a conjecturally capacious romantic CV in the mouth)]: 'No. Thankfully, no.'

'Then she's your long-lost niece, turned out on to the streets, etc.'

'No. Look, you're barking up a whole wrong forest here, let alone the particular tree. You see, it's got nothing--or at least practically nothing--to do with the girl per se--'

'--Then what, for Chrissakes, has it got to do with? Surely not with Bonfire Night per se--'

'--You've now, at last, crossed into the precincts of the relevant National Trust site. You see, long ago, before I ever met you--to wit, a full year ago minus a round half-fortnight--'

'--You ran into this anonymous bloke at the pub who asked you, "Have you got any plans for Bonfire Night '06?" And you said to him, "Not as of yet," whereupon you committed to attending an "old-school" Bonfire Night celebration way off in in the Bumfuck Isle of Skye or Egg, and you're just now thinking to yourself, "Christ! I forgot to book my ticket! And oh, for shame! I'll never live it down in Whatshisbollocks's eyes if I don't show up--'

(The composition of the multi-volume theoretical treatise provisionally entitled De Amicitia Blokorum Sub Specie Blokessitate, and effectively abstracted in the forgoing interjection, I leave as an exercise for the [DG] reader, whose researches will doubtless derive incalculable benefit from a [re]visitation of my post of 27 May, definitively entitled 'Regent's Park Well Before Dark [UAdR: Part Three]'. Vis-a-vis my own practical purposes, though, at this instant, it sufficed for me to clue Esmeralda into her abuse of her blokesserly privileges, into the uncalled-for driving-home of the supernal insight into the blokish psyche she supposed herself to possess, by adverting to a familiar formula of our coupledom, AFF:)

'--Late blow, Esmeralda, late blow.'

[E, duly chastened]: 'I'm sorry. Go on.'

And so I indeed went on to recount to her the genesis of Bloke Fawkes Day, more or less as it has already been recounted in my first "TBtN"-eponymised post, the more-ish bit of the recap being super-added by way of explicit and particular causal linkage of today's streetside encounter to the inaugural BFD (including an explicit proffering of the handbill to Esmeralda's hurried scansion), the less-ish bit being subtracted from the original pedipilular-cum-randy-bacheloric-specific post-frame (together with certain of Ronnie Livingstone's more gormless intervening interjections). To my great surprise and relief, she greets the account, and, indeed, the very idearrof Bloke Fawkes Day, in an attitude of unqualified approval bordering on outright enthusiasm:

'It certainly sounds like a bankable idea to me. And yet you say you let it drop, without ever giving a subsequent thought to following up on your meta-petition to the Her Royal Highness?'

'Well, yes. But as a fellow Arsenalophobe and accountant, you must surely appreciate how all competing obsessions tend to abate in severity as one approaches the mid-season mark and the end of the second fiscal quarter.'

'Well, yes: provided one hasn't founded a sodding national tradition in the meantime.'

Oy vey! I can't believe what I'm hearing, my dad might have exclaimed just then, whether in jubilation or cuntsternation is anyone's guess at this point. 'So you really take this bill at its word, that the Queen herself endorses the holiday?'

'By default, yes, I do. And even if she hasn't yet endorsed it, who's to say she won't do in future? In that case, it all depends on you, Nigel.'

'Correction, Esmeralda: in either case, it all depends, rather, on the current organiser of this year's festivities; to wit, whoever resides at the receiving end of this phone number, a bloke or blokess whom I'm none too keen to talk to, let alone meet.'

'Fair enough,' she says, reaching for her mobile, 'if you're not man--erm, bloke--enough to make the call, then I am.'

'Oh, I'm bloke enough, all right,' I says, reaching for, and obtaining, my mine, along with the leaflet. I'm all set to punch in the diggits, substantially importunate schpinctral tremors notwithstanding, when a two bird-shaped idea suddenly pops into my gourdita. 'Hang on a bit. Do you mind if I use yours instead?'

'What ever for?'

'You'll see.'

She hands her 'bile over to me with a decidedly dubious look. I dial the number, and before the first ring-tone has sounded, am hailed by the following crisp salutation, uttered by a voice I instantly recognise:

'Thank you for ringing the Bloke Fawkes Day information hotline. This is Ronnie speaking. How may I help you?'

To which I reply, in the plummiest U accent I can muster, 'Good afternoon to you, Mr--ahem....?'

'...Mr Livingstone.'

'...Mr Livingstone. Waldo Houghington, Bart. speaking. I'm calling from the Palace.'

'The P-p-palace?'

'That is correct, sir. I am her Majesty's Privy Home Secretary for Public Appearances and am calling to make a few--in point of fact, merely two--enquiries against her Majesty's prospective assistance at the forthcoming festivities.'

'B-b-b-y all means, M-m-m-ilord--thatistersay, y-y-y-our Grace--thatistersay, your W-w-worship--'

'"Sir Waldo" will do. We baronets are, after all, mere commoners, albeit not mere misters such as yourself.'

'Yes, of course, Sir Waldo. What can I do you for?--I mean, rather, if your Baronetship--erm, if you, Sir Waldo, would be so gracious as to spell out your two enquiries in the vernacular--'

'With pleasure. The first centres on the scale of the event.'

'The scale of the event?'

'Yes, to wit, the number of prospective fêteurs. There's no need for you to carry it to the second decimal point, i.e., to particular body parts of a specific subject; a ballpark estimate, as the Yanks say, rounded off to the nearest ten or hundred or thousand, will suffice.'

'Well then, Sir Waldo, based on a conservative tally of ringers-up to this here hotline, I'd say you may expect something in the neighbourhood of 500 attendees.'

'Very good, sir, very good. In that case, her Majesty may make do with her customary glove of polyester-nylon lace, and need not don her ever-so-less comfortable emergency glove of polystyrene ceramic lace, guaranteed one hundred-percent impervious to the acidic incursions of a thousand subject-lip-pairs' discharge of spittle. Now, my second query centres on the frankly rather delicate matter of the state of the public facilities in your establishment.'

'The public facilities, Sir John? Do you mean what we churls call the ladies'?'

'That's right, Mr Livingstone. Specifically, I should like to know something of the static and inductive capacities of that vessel vulgarly known as the toilet. You see, her Majesty requires of any such vessel that she may have cause to avail herself of, that it shall be capable of accommodating, and forthwith dispatching, at a single flush, a mass of no less than .5 stone or 3.18 killogrammes. Not that her Majesty by any stretch of the imagination anticipates depositing a load of such gargantuan heft in the course of this or any other public appearance; but merely that, for reasons of state, the most extreme precaution must be taken against betraying, by way of the merest suspicion of a skid-mark, any trace of the late immanence of the Royal Stool to subsequent users of the aforementioned vessel.'

'Of course, Sir Waldo, of course, I understand. Well, I promise you that, in the unlikely event that the facilities do not meet this rigorous standard as of now, they shall be brought up to this standard well in advance of the festivities--' [In the unlikely event, my arse! Last time I checked (i.e., upon having been locked out of the gents' for an unconscionably long waiting-period [come on, lads, we've all done it!]) the Ape's ladies' toilet would have had a hard time accommodating the cloacal reserves of a single constipated pigeon.]

'--And in the unconscionable event that they haven't been as of three days prior to the festivities, I should jolly well expect you to ring--' Here, prudence suddenly dictates, just in the nick of time, a modification of the prescription, and I break off for a coupla seconds, provoking Ronnie to rejoin:

'What was that you said just now, Sir Waldo? I'm afraid you cut out for a coupla seconds.'

'I said, "I should jolly well expect you to bring them up to the mark within two days of the festivities".'

'And quite rightly, Sir Waldo. Are you absolutely sure you have no other enquiries to make on her Majesty's behalf? Say, as to the menu...or, or, the decor?'

'Absolutely. Her Majesty is stridently catholic with a lowercase cee on both those counts, and presumably equally so on any others you might care to advance. You may expect her punctual arrival at the inaugural moment of the solemnities: to wit, 17:00 GMT.'

'And so I shall do. Thank you, Sir Waldo, and--and--and...'

'And what?'

'And God Save the Queen...?'

'God save her indeed, and [switching over into my earthiest guttersnipe's register just before ringing off] Goddamn you, you fucking cunt.'

'Well, you see why I opted to use your phone instead of mine: in the event that the person on the other end of the line turned out to be some Ape regular--and, as you will have dejuiced by now, that person turned out to be the regularest of all possible such regulars--I didn't want them to be tipped off to my identity courtesy of the caller ID.'

'Yes, I understand that full well--not that I have deduced the slightest thing about your interlocutor--

[Right. She was, after all, introduced to him as Ronnie, not as Ronnie Livingstone.] '--Well, he was none other than Ronnie Livingstone, whom I'm sure you'll remember from the Last Orders Competition and its aftermath--'

'--Yeah, sure, I remember him, but getting back to my main point, what I don't understand is why you chose to style your Palatial persona Sir Waldo Houghington.'

'Well, because I couldn't very well plausibly have styled myself Dame Esmeralda Houghington. I mean, my falsetto is passable enough; but even so, surely I was right in thinking that whoeverthefuck would more readily be imposed upon by the fiction that I was Dame Esmeralda's hubby speaking through her phone than by the fiction that I was Dame E herself.'

'Fine, but why of all the male Christian names that you could have availed yourself of did you have to pitch upon Waldo?'

'Well, I dunno. I suppose, off the shirtycuff, I'd say I reckoned it as the forename that would yield the highest product out of the equation Obscurity-times-Plausible Genuine Englishness. How many people, after all, in the whole factual-cum-fictional universe, can you think of that are actually named Waldo? There's the Philadelphian bloke in that Velvet Underground song; and the stripy-shirted eponymous hero of those picture books of our nipperhood; and then, I suppose, if we're counting middle names, there's Ralph Waldo Emerson and then--'

'--And then there's my Dad, Waldo Houghington, Esq.'

'Ah yes, of course!' I exclaim melopenitentially smiting me forrid. 'Talk about your Freudian slips.' In point of fact, I couldn't recall her ever having divulged her old man's first name to me (after all, it isn't the sort of thing a blokess has any cause to divulge to her beau prior to the final inward-bound leg of that inaugural trip the parental homestead, when it might suddenly occur to inform him, for example, that 'Dad can't bear being addressed as "Mr Houghington" by his juniors; it makes him feel old, you see; so you must remember to call him by his Christian name, Waldo, right from the start, even before you've properly been introduced to him.'). But in the circumstances, it seemed wiser and less taxing to shed a river of crocodile tears over the spilling of this kitty's serving of phantom milk than to try to convince her that I'd never had the fucking saucer in my hand to begin with. 'Oh darling! I'm so sorry.'

'As you bloody well should be. Can't you see what a walloping albatross you've slung round his neck? How he, a bloke who doesn't know Bloke Fawkes Day from Thanksgiving, is, in all probability, for each and every hour of the next week, going to be badgered by return calls from your mate Ronnie, asking him if the bloody "plumbing of the site of the forthcoming festivities meets her Majesty's exacting specifications"?'

'In all probability, darling--and with all due contrition--I think not. Surely, in the unlikely event that Ronnie does nergle upon your dad's name in the course of his researches into the whereabouts of her Majesty's Privy Home Secretary for Public Appearances, he's going to realise straight away that in this Wales-dwelling pensioner he's got hold of the wrong man. And, in any case, as far as albatrosses go, this is one that any bloke in his right mind would kill to have slung round his neck. Not that my heart don't go out to the old gentleman all the same--cos TBS, I can only imagine how carrying round a stone or two in gold bullion night and day would play up your lumbago something fierce.'

'What do you mean, a stone or two in gold bouillon?'

'Well,' I rejoin with cuntish disingenuousness, 'perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration vis-a-vis this year's Bloke-Fawkesian revenues. But if one reckons the minimum claimable founder's fee at a modest 10 quid per subject-head, and multiplies that by 500, one arrives at the by-no-mean-unprincely sum of five grand; and if one further projects this year's prospective tenfold increase in attendance into next year, and into the year after that, and so on--why, then, as far as claimable founder's royalties go, this guy's--skewed me, this bloke's--the limit!'

'Waitwaitwait, back up there just a bit. From what precise empirical source are you deriving this factor of 500?'

'Why, from Ronnie's own testimony, of course. Surely you remem--' [Here I once again smite me forrid, in more or less the same manner as the last time round] '--Oh! I forgot. You wouldn't have overheard that bit, now, would you have done?'

'No, of course, I wouldn't have done and didn't do. But anyway, you're saying that Ronnie said he was expecting roughly 500 people to pitch up at this shindig?'

'Even so.'

'But even so, you did, as I recall, ask for a mere ballpark estimate--'

'--which, in light of the Palatial provenance of his phoney interlocutor, more likely than likely erred well on the side of smallness. Your royal types are, after all, notorious claustro-cum-agora-phobes.'

'OK. Let's assume, then, that at least 500 people will be in attendance. That still leaves to be answered the question of whence you're deriving this figure of a 10 quid per capita founder's fee.'

'Well,' I shuffle and sniffle, 'I suppose it only seems fair--'

'--Yes, as fair as the thin air from which I presume you filched the very notion of a founder's fee, a fee that I reckon you'll have your work cut out for you in trying to claim even if you mark it down to a halfpenny. After all, what concrete, documented evidence can you produce in proof of your paternity of the holiday?'

'Well, none, I suppose. But there were witnesses--'

'--Namely?'

'Namely, firstly and most obviously Ronnie himself.'

'Oh, phffft! He doesn't count. He's already of the Devil's camp. Don't you assume that if he'd given a rat's arse about sharing the founders' booty with you he'd have got in touch with you by now?'

'Yeah, I suppose in that case he would have done by now, the fucking cunt. Well, what about Mr Sedule, and Jimmy--and Manish and Denise and Claudia?'

'Well, as to them: if I recall your account aright, Mr Sedule was introduced to Bloke Fawkes Day by way of your report of a collaborative chinwag between Ronnie and yourself, the proper minutes of which are as much a secret to Ronnie as to you; and the rest of that lot heard about it either through Mr Sedule or through the two of you in tandem.'

'Yeah. I've got to hand it to you, you've definitely filled in every rat-hole in the room. I suppose that, as of now, come what may of Bloke Fawkes Day--even if it eclipses Xmas itself in point of retail sales volume--the most I can hope for in recognition of my paternal claims is a piddling Wikipedia stub article vying for world-record-low nergle-tallies with those of such spectacular losers as that ill-connected antipodial bloke who discovered the theory of evolution a week before Darwin, or that equally-isolated madman who alighted upon the twelve-note method of composition a year before Arnie Schoenberg; the sole contributor thereunto being one RWMcG@couldabeenacontender.co.uk. And yet--' I break off, suddenly espying a potentially empty rat-hole that might, after all, turn out on closer inspection to be nothing other than an especially large knot in the lower wainscoting, a knot artificially blackened into false relief by the finisher's brush.

'--And yet what?'

'And yet, well: I dunno. I suppose, there is, after all, the petition.

'Ah, yes, of course! The petition. I assume you were prescient enough to make a photocopy of it before popping it in the post?'

'No. The thought never crossed me mind.'

'Oh, you git!'

'And even if it had done, I'm sure I wouldn't have acted on it. Christ, can you even begin to imagine what a thorough, freeze-drying hoovering to my billowing rhetorical sails it'd have amounted to? I mean, if I'd actually paused at the threshold of the pub and said, "Now, if you lot'll be so kind as to excuse me for a half an hour or so, I'm just going to hoof it up the High Road in search of a 24-hour copy shop"? Why, I'd have been lucky to find a straggling 10th of my fellow-petitioners still on the premises by the time I'd got back--assuming, that is, that Sedgie would've been charitable enough to let me back in after closing time. And then, of course, there would have been no subsequent burning of the Ken bloke; hence no precedent for Bloke Fawkes Day '06.'

'I take your point, and I apologise for calling you a git. You did the right thing.'

'Albeit in an ultimately futile, pathetic, tragic-heroic sort of way, I assume you're going to add?'

'Not just yet. After all, as you seem to have ascertained, this endorsement by "H.R.H. The Queen" printed on the leaflet isn't pure tommyrot; that is, although Ronnie was taken aback by your call, he wasn't completely nonplussed by it; which suggests that since you posted the petition there has been some sort of communication from the Palace to someone having to do with Bloke Fawkes Day; which suggests in turn that they did indeed receive the petition and that they presumably have it filed somewhere.'

'That's all well and good, but how are we to get at it within the span of the next butcher's half-dozen days?'

'You disappoint me, Nigel. I should have thought that an accomplished amateur scholar of constitutional law such as yourself, aware of his constitutional right to petition the monarch, would have likewise been apprised of his constitutional right to audit petitions to which he has served as a signatory. That said, according to normal due process, you'd be lucky to get hold of your copy of the thing by next Whitsuntide. Fortunately, I do have a connection at the Palace Archives who might be able to expedite the process for us.'

'Who he or she?'

'Tamsin. No, not Occuvisual Tamsin; the other one--'

'--your college roommate.'

'That's right. I'll give her a bell straight away. I can't imagine she'll be obliged to keep us waiting more than three days. You see, not only is she personal assistant to the Royal Archivist; she's also, erm, romantically involved with the Master of the Stole...'

*

Wellsir, in letter-perfect fulfilment of her prophecy, Esmeralda received a copy of the petition from Tamsin's hands at the Palace gates, in plain view of the eternal complement of impassive Beefeaters, at 7 pm on the following Tuesday. From that point onwards, the two of us were at last afforded the luxury of devoting our undivided BF-Day-oriented strategic and tactical attention towards the strategic means and the tactical timing of the disclosure of the aforesaid certificate of paternity. As first to the means, we debated the the question of whether we should boldly announce our possession of the petition or simply leave it lying about on some random table for the adventitious discovery of one our fellow-500, eventually ruling out the second option as 'too risky (albeit infinitely rich in rhetorical potentiality)'. Second, as to the timing, we bandied about the pros and cunts of letting the secret out, on the one hand, immejiately upon our entering the pub; on the other hand, at some intermejiate and as-yet utterly unanticipatable moment--say, when Ronnie was about to launch into some speech to the effect of '18 score and five days ago, our father--i.e., me--brought forth on this here island a new notion...' etc.; or, on the third hand, at that last-possible (hence, in many ways, the very best) moment, the moment just before the torch would be plunged into the humble synthetic innards of the Ken bloke. Finally, tried as we might(ed?), we could hardly avoid a glancing, forrid-smiting, en-route blow from the old spanner in the works cuntstituted by the incalculable possibility that H.R.H. or one of her representatives might, after all, make an appearance at some point in the evening. (Tamsin, incidentally, for all of her file-javelinning prowess, proved absolutely useless on this score; for, according to her, neither she, nor anybody else at the archives nor, indeed, the Master of the Stole himself had ever heard of Bloke Fawkes Day, let alone of any royal preparations thereunto.) It was rather contingently apropos of this aforementioned spanner that Esmeralda mooted the idearrof our showing up incognito, i.e. togged out in some pair of slightly post-seasonable fancy dress costumes. I immejiately vetoed the proposal on the eminently rational grounds that even through the thickest stratum of latex, crepe wool and greasepaint, Ronnie or anyone else atoll acquainted with our respective phizzes would immejiately suss out our identities; only to be met by the eminently rational counterproposal that even through the thinnest stratum of latex, &c., neither Ronnie nor anyone else howsoever intimately acquainted with our respective phizzes was atoll likely to pick them out of a crowd of 500; whereas if we were to pitch up in a crowd of that size undisguised and in our customary weekend mufti, we'd be statistical sitting targets for a substantial subpopulation of all the blokes and blokesses who'd complimented us on the cuts of our respective jibs at random watering holes and parties over the past butchers' eighth-dozen years. There remained the choice of costume, and of the attendant so-called cover story. We eventually settled on presenting ourselves as Andrei and Natasha, a Romanian couple on holiday in London and drawn on a whim to the BFD event out of touristic curiosity about authentic English folkways. Why a Romanian couple, you ask, as against, say, a German or Javanese one? Well, DGR, firstoff because it seemed the least physiognomically-cum-biographically-cum-geographically-cum-culturally-cum-economically-cum-linguistically

falsifiable of all the alternatives that occurred to us. As a pair of Javanese or Togoans, we reasoned, we'd have been much more likely to get away with lying through our teeth about the notable sights of our home town, about our jobs, about the performance of our national cricket team, etc., and with passing off a few syllables of gibberish as a sample of our mother tongue; but we obviously lacked the basic genetic equipment to pass for a citizen of either of these countries at first blush. On the other hand (WR'd), although we could easily have passed at first blush for Germans or Italians, the odds were in that case that at some point along the way some git would have wanted to try out his German or Italian on us, or to ask us if we were personally acquainted with some auntie or cousin of his resident in Hamburg or Florence, or to wax inquisitorial about the height of the spire of Cologne Cathedral or the going market rate of Calabrian copper, or (worst of all) to take the piss out of us for our woefully incomprehensible ignorance of the original Guy Fawkes holiday ('Christ! You lot come up here every other year; it's about time you caught on.'). As Romanians (WR'd), we could probably coast along well enough on a generic Eastern European accent and the odd vapid reference to Bucharest or the Black Sea. Secondly, our immejiately exploitable wardrobe options seemed to sort particularly well with the Draculean mythos of the place: on my end, there was my only proper suit, a ghastly jet-black four-button Lurch Adams-style ensemble that I'd last worn to my nan's funeral back in '02; on hers, an equally ghastly jet-black low-cut Morticia Adams-style gown that she'd last worn to her grandpa's funeral back in...well, somewhere in the early-to-mid oughties. Top the former off with a pirate's beard and the latter with a vampira wig--procurable at two quid apiece at Tesco's post-Halloween clearance sale--and we'd be good to go, as they say.

And, indeed, we were consummately good to go as of 8 pm sharp on the N in Q, and accordingly set out for the Ape at roughly a quarter past. (From a founding-father's povey, I naturally would have preferred to arrive at a quarter of four, with mobile-phone cam ready to hand and pockets well stocked with reserve batteries, so as not to miss a second of the unfolding of the whole thing, from pre-soup to post-nuts; but alas! such a pre-thick-of-thingsian-timed touchdown would inevitably have eventuated in the blowing of our covers in NTF.) The sight that greeted us upon our rounding that final bend on to the High Road--to wit that of the Ape's familiar purple-'n'-gold sign swinging merrily in the breeze aloft and athwart a good hundred yards of pristine, pedestrian-free pavement, as per usual on any mid-Sunday evening--immejiately aroused in me a suspicion that Ronnie had grossly overestimated the prospective turnout. Cos you see, DGR--as if you could ever be so thick as not to have surmised as much by now from the numerous clues thereunto that I've dropped over the past 14 months (in the form, e.g., of numerous allusions to the minuscule size of its staff, and of that one-off mini-paean to its participation in the venerable pubular ideal of the 'watering hole-cum-larderia')--the Ape is the sort of joint that, even when stretched to its gill-perforating, fire-code-violating limit, can accommodate no more than a hundred arses at a time. Hence, if even half of Ronnie's 500 had turned up by now, a good three-fifths of them would of necessity have been disporting themselves outside the premises proper--i.e., on the pavement and/or street.

'There's always the possibility that they're revelling out back,' Esmeralda wishfully consoled me as we drew level with the front door: 'You know, in the courtyard or in the alley, in deference to council regulations.'

I knew full well that the pasty-faced fiat of a borough council could hardly check the publicity-hungry streetward-thrusting impetus of 200-plus drunken yobbos, but in deference to her solicitude, I held my piss whilst giving the door the most tentative--and, at the same time, the most desperate--of shoves.

No sooner, though, had our collective arse-cheeks cleared the threshold of the pub, than I began to wonder whether Ronnie had aimed so wide of the mark after all, vis-a-vis the turnout. Not that either my schlong or Esmeralda's tits were then in any immejiate danger of becoming uninvitedly acquainted with the hindquarters or shoulder-blades of anyone present; but that they decidedly would have been thus imperilled had we gormlessly trodden onwards to the chune of a single yard: for not only was every bloke Jack of a table-chair in the house apparently bespoken, but also the residual standing puntility were clustered round the bar three-or-four deep, like a mob of importunate spermatozoa round an apparently impermeable egg.

'So what's next?' I shouted into my girl's ear above the demographically unremarkable (albeit locally uncharacteristic) torrent of voices.

'Dunno,' she shouted back: 'Or, rather, I guess before proceeding farther we might as well learn as much we can from this lot [i.e., our neighbours, i.e.e., the doorward-tending fringe of the bar mob].'

'Yeah, might as well,' I selectively echoed without conviction or enthusiasm: for I was no more hopeful (for some un-pin-pointable reason) of gleaning any useful intelligence from that lot than I was eager to engage any of them in conversation (for the easily pin-pointable reason that, as usual, I wasn't in the mood for a chinwag on any topic with any random bloke or blokess). But having assented to the proposal, I was, qua our party's sole representative of the foul sex, more or less judy-bound to actuate it; which I did by timidly tapping on the shoulder of the thinnest of a nearby trio of shaved-headed, leather jacket-swathed, 15-to-20-stone blokes, and equally timidly crying out, 'Excuse me, sirrrr!' [Here and hereafter, BTW, the multiple arrs signify a trilled cuntinental pronunciation of that normally silent terminal consonant.]

'Yeah?' the bloke grunts back, swivelling his originally profiled head a noncomittal butcher's- dozen degrees towards me.

'Excuse me, but my wife and I are arrrriving kheer for the Blawk Fawkes Day celebrrration.'

'Come again?' he says, whilst squinting not unamicably, and cupping his pint-free hand to his chinwag-free ear.

'Blawk Fawkes Day. It khappens khere, so we have kheard. Do you know if it khappens now?'

'Well,' the bloke rejoins, 'firstoff, it's not Bloke Fawkes Day, it's Guy--hang on a bit. Where are you two from, anyway?'

'Romania.'

'You don't say!' he exclaims, whilst breaking into an oriole-to-oriole grin. 'Why, I've got a cousin lives in Sofia; perhaps you know him: name's Roger Bid--'

'--Naw, naw, naw, not Bulgaria, Romania.'

'Oh, sorry. You're right: now that I recollect, it was the Bulgar and not the Roman republic that Rog told me he was popping off to. I always get them two mixed up, same as I do Bolton and Boston back here. Anyway, as I was saying, the proper name of the festival is Guy Fawkes Day, and, as far as I know, there's nothing special going on here Guy-Fawkes-Day-wise. Are you sure you've got the right pub, mate?'

'Erm, I mean, akhem, perkheps not.'

'Yeah, you're probably looking for the 5 Oceans just round the corner; or Ahir Lorenzo's a half a mile down the High Road. Exploit each and every excuse to make an extra ten quid per head, be it Cinco de Mayo or Kasmir Pulaski Day, is that lot's motto. Here at the Ape, thank Cor, we order things differently. Here, admission is free, and a pint's a pint's a two-quid pint, come what may, 365-and-a-quarter days a year. Guy Fawkes Day, Schmuy Fawkes Day, is the Apeketeer's motto. What use, after all, is a classic English pub like this one, if it don't afford a bloke the opportunity of hefting his plates up and relaxing in an atmosphere of timelessness, like there was no yesterday and won't be no tomorrow...'

And so onwards droned the fatuous old windbag, solipsistically enough to allow the two of us take French leave of him without fearing the slightest injury to shirt or shin in recompense for the snubbage.

'So much for the punters,' Esmeralda equably inaugurates the so-called regrouping session back at our former station: 'Now it's on to the staff.'

'Whatjjearmean, So much for the punters?' I says, miffed to say the least by the rakish liberties she's taking with the virgin schphincter of the principle of induction: 'We've only talked to one out of a hundred-plus of 'em so far.'

'Yes, and at this rate, in relying exclusively on them, we might be here till next Bloke Fawkes
Day before we'd learnt anything useful. Whereas, given that your kerbside Bloke Girl is a direct descendant of the proprietor of this establishment, one assumes that a single interview with any member of the staff would suffice for our purposes.'

'B-b-but what,' I futilely splutter, 'about our covers?'

'What about 'em? They're going to be blown sooner or later anyway.'

'Yeah, but I'm sure you'll agree there's a difference between a cover blown from a distance, and at the precise strategically-cum-tactically apt moment, and one blown prematurely and point-blank. Christ, do you really imagine that Mr Sedule could be taken in by this lot [gesturing first towards my beard, then towards my suit] at close range? Or, a fortiori, by your costume, given that he's seen you undisguised as recently as a scant month-and-a-half ago?' (TBT, by this point, seeing as how my principled initial logical objection to her staff-orientated proposal has long since been quashed by her eminently practically logical counter-objection, I'd as Erikson confront Sedgie stark naked, in all of my unambiguous Ruggerian ignominy, as risk a shirtfest with yet another Apean greenhorn possessed of sufficiently massive co-jones to pass himself as an old-school Apeketeer, but by this selfsame point I'm already in for a pound anti-staff-wise, and am accordingly obliged to hold down the argumentative fort on my side; even as, pseudo-ironically and cuntishly-annoyingly enough, Esmeralda is finally coming round to my way of seeing things, a(n) SOA evinced by the following:)

'You're right: I hadn't thought of it that way.'

Just at that otherwise impasse-able moment, though, we happen to be rescued from our dilemma by the appiration of a lanky, tow-headed youff no more than 20 (Jimmy's replacement?) skirting by us en route from the bar with a tray-load of pints in palm.

'Speak of your anonymous guardian devil on the house payroll,' she says, giving me an altogether gratuitous shove in the pint-bearer's direction.

'Excuse me, young sirrr,' I says to him, upon my tit-a-tit arrival at my destination: 'would you kheppen to know--that is too say, my wife and I khev arrived khere for the Blawk Fawkes Day celebration--'

'--Third table from the front, just next to the gents',' the blokette laconically replies, evincing not the slightest seismographically detectable degree of astonishment or stroppiness or relief or gratitude-- or, indeed, any other emotive species of shit-giving-ness--in reaction to the question, before proceeding on his un-shit-giving, un-merry, pint-burdened way towards the back.

'There you are: problem solved!' comes Esmeralda's unwarrantedly smug, air-handwashing, felicitation back at base.

'Whateverjyear mean, "problem solved"? "Problem set"'s more like it, IMHO.'

'How so?'

'How so? Note the cuntish specifity of the coordinates: "Third table from the front": meaning a butcher's half-dozen celebratants at most, meaning in turn a decidedly awkward and disappointing situation on all fronts for ours truly.'

'Oh, nonsense. I'm sure he simply meant that the fesivities were headquartered at that table, not that they were circumscribed by it.'

'Oh, how silly of me; of course that's what he must've meant,' I says, seizing her hand and thereby decisively actuating our jaunt towards the fabled third table; nonetheless, throughout the whole of our sluggish, miserable, genitally-cum-mammilarily invasive progress thither, I maintained a steady, under-the-breath burden of Fee Fie Foe Fawke / I smell the blood of an anorawk, for the benefit of my third wheel (meaning you by default, I guess, DGR).

In the end, it wasn't the tabular-cum-looular coordinates as such, but rather the sighting of a fragment of Ronnie Livingstone's tell-tale phiz situated some 20 degrees below the mean shoulder-level horizon, that clued me in to the fact that we'd arrived as near to our destination as we were likely to get, absent a good bit of further, and potentially cover-blowing, nudging and jostling. And to Esmeralda's credit, a goodly portion of the two-deep human buffer-zone between us and the table proper did seem to be taking a more than casual interest in whatever proceedings had been convened round its immejiate circumference; and I bethought myself at this point of gathering what intelligence I could from one of these apparently-not-uninterested bystanders, AFF(amiliarly)F:

'Excuse me, sir: we are khere for the Blawk Fawkes Day celebration--'

'--Shh!' the bloke stroppily and wordlessly remonstrated without looking round, before straight away shoving me forward by the shoulder and whispering distractedly into my ear, 'You're just in time for the re-enactment of the scene of discovery.'

And so, at the bloke's behest and invitation, and tugging Esmeralda along with me in my train, I arrive at the inner sanctum of the table, just in time to hear a distinctly familiar--albeit equally distinctly non Ronnie-Livingstonian--voice chiming in off-frame, AFF:

'Are you one Brutus Caius Fawkes, otherwise known as Bloke Fawkes, of Yorkshire?'

'I am,' replies Ronnie, at the obvious prompting of a script he's presently poring over.

'Why, then,' answers the off-camera voice, which I've now identified as the property of me old mate Manish Shah, 'by the authority vested in me by his Majesty Jacobus Rex, I hereby place you under arrest on suspicion of capital treason and attempted regicide.'

[Ronnie:] 'Oh, shit.'

'Next,' whispers the anonymous, and still-proximate, bloke, 'comes scene of the trial.'

Whereupon I hear yet another off-camera voice, this time hailing from the opposite end of the table, and equally familiar to me as the property of me equally old mate Jimmy Phipps, intoning: 'I hereby sentence the defendant, Bloke Fawkes of Yorkshire, to be hanged by the neck until he be dead; and afterwards to be drawn and quartered; and yet afterwards still to be abandoned to the sodomitical mercies of the choicest, pox-afflicted cohort of his Majesty's hounds. Have you anything to say before the sentence is carried out?'

[Ronnie]: 'Yeah: It's a fair cop, but, an't please your M'ludship, that cunt Monteagle's ultimately to blame.'

'Right, then: let's have at this bloke!'

And with this all-too-familiar war-cry of Jimmy's, the seated company all rise to their feet; all, that is, save one: namely, a haggard, dejectedly slumped scarecrow of a figure whom I identify as my not-so-old mate, the Ken bloke from the kerbside, only belatedly; thatistersay, a butcher's-dozen seconds later, whilst Jimmy and Manish are together hoisting him aloft, one forearm-to-armpit apiece, from his perch, and gingerly-ly setting him down, still fully erect (personwise, not schlongwise), on to the patch of floor just behind the table. Next, the three of them swivel round in tandem and, still locked arm-in-arm-in-arm-in-arm and shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder-to-shoulder, commence a slow, stately, Frank-Kafka-style excecution march towards the rear exit; the remainder of the Fawkesian contingent, such as it is, gradually falling into queue behind them.

'I think we missed our chance,' Esmeralda says to me, as we begin trailing the procession by a discreetly remote metre or so.

'Nonsense,' I says to her, patting her half of the handclasp: 'if anything, we arrived too early. You see, it's the lighting of the bonfire that's the real rhetorical high point of the evening. I say we wait till whoever the fuck it turns out to be is standing there, with lit match in hand, poised to ignite the pyre. Then, and only then, should we make our move.'

Out back, in the courtyard, all is initially dark, without form and void; but even out of this pitch-black chaos, in my virtual blindness, I immejiately manage to suss out, with a drop-dead degree of certitude and precision that somehow eluded my full-sighted self back in the interior of the pub, the salient SOA that the turnout for Bloke Fawkes Day '06 is more or less exactly half that for Bloke Fawkes Day '05. TBS, I've already been vaguely underwhelmed by the unitabular constituency of the reenactment, and by the meagre extent of the processional queue, but, at arse, nothing could have driven home the pathetic unpopularity of the whole affair so effectually as does our present audible, two-tail-to-tail-cats-swingable distance from our nearest fellow-Bloke-Faweksians, out here in this dedicated Bloke-Fawkesian domain, as against the genitally palpable one-Manx-mouse-unswingable distance thereto and herein last year. So disheartened am I by this all-too-palpable proof of the limited staying-power of my Apean legacy, that I am much of a mind to slink off inside, out the front door and back to the maisonette, there to drown my sorrows in 76 ounces or so of Hoegaarden; but, regrettably, as I have certain standards of masculine slack-lower-lippedness to uphold for the benefit of Esmeralda's okies, I'm obliged to tough the thing out, come what ignominiously may.

But anyway, as I was saying, things were only initially dark, &c. out there in the courtyard; and by intially I suppose I mean for about the first half-minute or so; after which, with a great convective sonic whoosh, a full-on--no shit--mediaaaeval-style torch is lit and subsequently borne aloft by one who turns out to be none other than Mr Sedule himself, in all of his beschmootzed-apron'd glory. Whether I've simply failed to spot him in the crowd or the queue, or whether he's sneaked out here on his lonesome after the exit of the processional proper, I can't say; all I know is that this sudden incandescent revelation of his presence in our midst somehow immejiately alleviates the whole of the burden on my lower lip; that with his kindling of the torch, my faith in the whole Bloke-Fawkesian project is likewise rekindled. And once he's borne the torch to centre-stage, as it were, and thereby granted it its full, sporadically-nook-and-cranny-illuminating licence, why, I can't help being positively moved by the spectacle unveiled thereby; comprised as it is not only by Ronnie, Manish and Jimmy; but also by Denise and Claudia; by Sedgie's granddaughter, the Bloke girl from the kerbside; by my anonymous informant from back indoors, together with a supernumerary quartet of equally anonymous fellow Bloke-Fawkesian enthusiasts; and, last, but not least, by the Ken-bloke himself, newly re-deposited in his wheelbarrow, which is now situated immejiately in front not of our shabby 3 cubic-metre-capacitied dustbin of yore, but rather of an imposing, 24-square-foot-circumferenced Texas barbecue-type apparatus. 'This may,' I inwardly conclude, not without an attendant slight blearing of me okies, 'be a rather paltry contingent of Bloke-Fawkesians; and yet it is, for all that, a decidedly dedicated one.'

But now, just as I'm wrapping up me old internal monologue, in sprints Ronnie from the wings, to take his place between Mr Sedule and the Bloke-barrow, and to commence the following oration:

'Firstoff, I'd like to thank you all for coming out tonight, in courageously unanimous opposition to the sundry so-called traditional Bonfire Night celebrations taking place in remoter districts and boroughs, to say nothing of such wholesale festive snubbages of the very date of 5/11 as are being exemplified, even as I speak, within the very walls of this very pub back of us. Secondly, in answer to the judicious quibble mooted by Mr Jules Sedgwick of Bermondsey, and centring on the discrepancy--'

'--You can call it a discrepancy, if you like!' a member of the aforesaid anonymous quintet somewhat rudely, and more than stroppily, cuts in, 'but I call it a bleeding travesty.'

'Very well, Jules: as to the travesty occasioned by the discrepancy between the properly Fawkesian identity of the villain of our re-enactment and the improperly Livingstonian identity of our prospective ignitee; well, what can I say but that we're still ironing out the kinks occasioned by the overlapping of two distinct traditions: namely, the venerable four-hundred-and-one-year-old tradition of Bonfire Night proper, and of the nascent, pre-inoculated, one-year-old traditional babe that is Bloke Fawkes Day. Mind you, Jules, I feel your pain; inasmuch as for purely personal reasons that do not warrant disclosure in this public setting, I would much prefer that this bloke were togged out in authentic first-Jacobean doublet and hose as against his present second-Elizabethan two-piece suit. But the fact remains that last year's bloke was a Ken bloke; and that, so long as we're committed to maintaining a semblance of continuity between Bloke Fawkes Day '05 and Bloke Fawkes Day '06, this here bloke has likewise got to be a Ken bloke.

'Secondly, as regards our publicly-touted endorsement by Her Majesty, the Queen: let me make it perfectly clear that, notwithstanding the singularly conspicuous absence of any royally-delegated surrogate, let alone that of the person of H. R. H. herself, our host Mr Sedule did receive, approximately eight weeks posterior to our posting to the palace of a petition to make Bloke Fawkes Day an official national holiday, a very gracious letter, subscribed to official palatial letterhead, a missive stating that Bloke Fawkes Day had indeed been designated such a national holiday by Her Majesty, and signed by one Cyril Twit-Thornwaite, Bart., Her Majesty's Privy Home Secretary for Public Appearances. Mind you, this selfsame letter contained nary so much as a hint of a promise of participation in our present festivities by Her Majesty either in person or by proxy. Hence, we were acting in perfectly good faith--'

Here my attention to Ronnie's speech is momentarily divided by a tug at my coat-sleeve, and a subsequent Esmeraldan whisper into my ear, AFF:

'Look, seeing as how, at this rate, the bloke-burning proper can't be less than ten minutes off in the future, do you mind if I excuse myself for two of those minutes to pay a visit to the ladies'?'

'Course not,' I grunted back (as if I could do otherwise, and although I did in fact mind quite a bit; but, in any case, all copular tergiversational efforts on my part would only have postponed my full re-achunement to the speech, which continued, during Esmeralda's interruption, and after her exit, and as near as I can reconstruct, AFF:)

'--when we advertised this event as "endorsed by H. R. H. The Queen." Interestingly enough, though, a few days ago, I received a phone-bell from a person identifying himself as one Waldo Houghington, Bart., likewise Her Majesty's Privy Home Secretary for Public Appearances. Now, from my conversation with this Sir Waldo I gathered, not only explicitly and certainly that Sir Cyril had either retired or been replaced, but also implicitly yet no less certainly that we should expect Her Majesty to assist at our festivities not by proxy but in person. So what I'm getting at, at bottom, vis-a-vis those of you who were expecting such a royal visitation--'

Here Esmeralda returns to my side, a good minute or two ahead of schedule, thereby prompting me to remark, despite my Ronnie-attentive self, 'Well that was a short trip.'

'Yeah, well,' she replies, 'it would have been an even shorter one if I'd managed to get everything to go down in single flush. I thought Ronnie was supposed to have taken care of that--'

'--Shh!' I cut in: 'mind the speech.'

And so, Ronnie continues (reconstructed bit in square brackets) '--[is that, whilst I abjure any share of responsibility for the absence thereof,] I nonetheless claim with you a full lion pride-member's share of disappointment at this absence; that, in four short words, I feel your pain.'

'And auquel propos of my pain?!' rejoins Mr Sedule: 'Bordel de Dieu! I am basting myself with this fucking torsh like a fucking cochon au jus. Can we not get on déjà with the burning in of the bloke before I burn moi-même to a fucking croustillant?'

'Of course, Mr Sedule,' Ronnie equably assents, 'of course. If Jimmy will be only so kind as to deposit the bloke in the pyre, I'll be only too happy to relieve you of your torch-bearing duties.'

'Well,' says Esmeralda to me, whilst the depositing of the bloke and the handing-over of the torch are in progress, 'it's now or never, I suppose.'

'Yeah.' And so, no sooner has Ronnie re-taken his solitary stand, with torch in hand, in front of the now-bloke-stoked pyre, than I leap out of the darkness, petition brandished athwart me tetons, ready to exclaim 'Hold on there a second, mister!' (or, rather, 'Khold on wahm moment please, sirrr.' [No point in blowing me cover one gratuitous instant earlier than necessary, is there?]).

But Ronnie beats me to the rhetorical punch, in unanctipateably appending another period to his oration, AFF:

'There's just one more topic I'd like to address before the burning-in proper--and I trust, that, as I promise my treatment of it will be shorter by half than that of either of the previous two; and that, as I'm now literally taking the heat for it, no one will object. I introduce it mainly for the edification of you lot who weren't here last year: Jules and his mates, for example; or this gentleman standing up front [i.e., YFCT]. You see, I can only assume that, judging by appearances as you inevitably must do, you lot have concluded that this here festive occasion was some Frankensteinian brainchild of a coalition of us presiding officials--Mr Sedule, Jimmy, Manish and myself. But in point of fact the sole individual who may justly lay claim to the paternity of this event is one--and only one--Rugby Nigel Wetherby McGyver, or Rugger for short. It was Rugger, you see, who first felt the stirrings of the restorational-cum-revolutionary impetus that constitutes the unique and irrefragable spirit of Bloke Fawkes Day; Rugger who indeed coined the very name of the holiday; Rugger who penned from header to footer the entirety of that noble petition that ultimately secured us our present hard-won royal charter. In short, Rugger is our George Washington, our Tom Jefferson, our Ben Franklin, all rolled into one; we humble presiders are mere Sam Adamses, Lewis Morrises and Button Gwinnetts by comparison with him.'

'OK,' shouts back that inveterate heckler, Jules, 'so just how do you account for the absence from our midst of this Swiss-army founding father of ours?'

Ronnie does as much as he can do in the way of nonplussedly spreading his hands and shrugging his shoulders without dropping the torch or setting his head on fire. 'Your guess is as good as mine, Jules. Numerous attempts were made to get in touch with him, via email and phone, but to no effect. In any case, that's neither here nor there, in contrast to this presently exigent bit of bidness, namely--'

And with these words, he casually, and almost too abruptly for comment, flings the torch over his shoulder into the pyre, thereby immejiately surrounding and obscuring the bloke with a manifestly chemically pre-prepped halo of foot-tall flames; whereupon every bloke Jack and blokess Jill present--YFCT and Esmeralda not excepted--presses forward to witness the gradual, inch-by-inch progression of the flames from the perimeter of the pyre towards its centre, and the correspondingly incremental immolation of the bloke. The Red Leicester wheel, affixed to his left hand, is the first bit to go; setting little rivulets of molten red wax scurrying in every which direction even as it hastens the propogation of the fire up the bloke's arm to his left shoulder. Meanwhile, 45 degrees clockwise of us, one gunpowder-charged shoe, then another, explodes, setting off two no-less precipitous counter-offensives scurrying up each of his legs. Soon enough, the only discernibly intact portion of the whole monstrous edifice is the head, which gormlessly totters forwards and backwards a few times on the axis of its incinerated trunk--as if noddingly signifying, with cuntishly Kennish smugness, a sentiment to the effect of ,'Yes, never you worry: the Oyster Card and the congestion charge will soon put all that to rights'--before ultimately losing its perch and pitching forward--again, in a consummatetly Kennish (and now literally) autofellationary gesture--plumb into what's left of the bloke's crotch. And, as if this weren't enough, to the visual delights of the pageant were superadded certain indescribably intoxicating olfactory ones: for, this year's pyre, in contrast to the burnt-marmite stench exuded by yesteryear's, wafted over all and sundry a wondrous bouquet of mingled wheat, rose-hips, coriander and orange-peel; a bouquet which, whether by accident or by design, just happened to correspond, inner-nose-follicle-by-inner-nose-follicle, to the gust exuded by a properly-hexagonally-englassed draught of Hoegaarden. Once again, one couldn't help marvelling at the all-stop-out-pulling dedication of this year's wee mystic Bloke Fawkesian crew, nor being moved thereby--this time round to the chune of a good butcher's-dozen outright face cheek-inundating tears. Indeed, so thoroughly wrapped up am I in my private emotional orgasm, that my non-Esmeraldan neighbour has to devote more than a coupla shoulder-taps and straight-into-the-horn 'Skewed me!'s to rouse me from it and divert my semi-divided attention from the fire to him.

'Skewed me, sir,' he--i.e. (as it turns out), Ronnie-- says, 'you're not by any chance weeping because--hang about [he breaks off, proffering me his RH]: it's awful bloody rude of me to put the interrogatory thumbscrews on you before we've even been properly introduced to each other. I'm Ronnie.'

'I am Andrei,' I says, submitting to his clammy yet vigorous hand-pump.

'Pleased to meetcha, Andrei. And who, if I may be so presumptuous as to ask,' he adds, in his characteristically smarmy would-be homebreaker's register, 'is this lovely lady?'

'This is Natasha, my wife.'

'Enchanté,' he blushes in acknowlegement of Esmeralda's distant curtsey, 'Natash--erm, Mrs Andrei. Well, anyway, Andrei,' he continues, for my ears only, 'between men, I was about to ask you if you were weeping on account of the fact that I'd cut you off with my eulogy to my absent chum Rugger.'

(YFCT, momentarily forgetting the whole point of my front and centre-orientated mad dash): 'Khaht me off?'

'Yeah: you seemed to be on the point of saying something.'

'Oh, well, yes--but 'tweren't--erm, eet was not nothing.'

'So, in other words, it was something?'

Cor, but the fucker seemed to be being willfully thicker than the cornerstone of a Jesuit abbey. 'Yes, it was something, but something of no importance. I wanted simply to thank you for introducing me and my lovely wife to an authentic English folk-festival. As you may be guessing from our names and from my accent, we are not from this kahntry.'

'Yes, I had rather guessed as much. And as to your specific homeland of origin, I was thinking Bulgaria.'

'You are very clawse: Romania.'

'Ah, yes: Romania,' Ronnie contentedly half-echoes, without subsequently segueing into any of the sorts of questions his possession of the conversational ball certainly entitle and practically beg him to ask (e.g., 'So how does our humble Bloke Fawkes fest compare to similar festivals in your native land [say, Lad Dracula Day?]'). Which is fine by me, insofar as it lets me solidly off the Romanian national traditional-bullshitting hook; but decidedly less so, insofar as it leaves my carcass still hanging high on the host festival-fellating one. Fortunately, during the last decorously permissible second or two of silence on my end, a third hook--namely, the auto-fellating one--comes spontaneously into view, and I hoist myself on to it with gusto, by way of the following quasi-question:

'This Rugger person you were telling us about: it sounds as though he must khave been quite a blawke.'

'Oh, yes, indeed he was--and is one still, I assume. And not just with respect to Bloke Fawkes Day, I'll have you know. Oh, no; he's a real renaissance man in the classic enlightenment sense of the term, is Rugger: a discriminating beer connoisseur [Check!], a top-flight accountant [Check!], a shrewd observer of the local London political scene [Check!], a diehard Millwall F.C. supporter [Ch-WTF?!], accomplished amateur electric tuba player [WT-F-ing-F?!!!] (in chamber, orchestral, jazz, and rock ensembles)...'

I don't know what Ronnie's on about vis-a-vis these surreal last two items in the catalogue of Ruggerian renaissance virtues; but, SITS, their appendage is enough to send me right hand involuntarily scurrying up to me shirty-collar, leaving the preemptive Romanian character-saving labour to my trusty left-hand-cum-brain tag-team wrestling combo; but even before the aforementioned TTWC has a chance to get its dual arse in gear, me RH freezes upon encountering, on its upper surface, and in the general vicinity of its target top button, an eerily unresistant swath of ticklish hairiness. And at this selfsame moment, Ronnie, encountering this selfsame swath, albeit at a greater remove, and from a visual perspective, breaks off his catalogue (hence the above ellipsis) to remark to me, whilst sporting an apparently genuinely bemused expression on his phiz:

'...Excuse me, Andrei, but something seems to have gone wrong with your beard.'

'My beard?!' I exclaim, whilst the palm of me left hand, summarily forsaking its character-saving judies, claps itself on to me right face-cheek, where it meets with the precise obverse of the SOA already met with by its knuckular right counterpart, viz: a patch of freshly-shorn man skin. Whereupon I immejiately dejuice that, on account of its exposure to the ambient heat exuded by the fire, the adhesive affixing the right side of my false beard to the right side of my face has all but completely melted away. Now, a less dedicated and more cravenly cowardly spirit than myself, on having his cover thus half-blown, would immejiately have proceeded to demolish the remaining half--thatistersay, by admitting outright, then and there, that he was not, after all, Andrei What'shisnutsescue from Bumfuck, Romania, but Rugby Wetherby McGyver of Woodside Park, Barnet, London, England, UK; whilst a no less dedicated but much less inventive spirit would have fabricated an excuse along the lines of 'My wife and I were at a fancy dress ball earlier in the evening; this isn't really my beard (although, for continuity's sake, if you don't mind, I'll do my best to slap it back on)'; but I, being neither a coward nor a dullard, pitch upon what really--or so I flatter meself--would have cuntstituted, in any other Londinian setting, a cast-iron-ological explanation of this untoward detachment of my half-beard from its facial mount, to wit:

'Akh, well, you see, Ronnie, I suffer from a condition known as male-pattern facial folicular deficit--a condition, alas! all too common amawng my fellow kahntrymen, owing to that tyrant Ceascescu's willful "experimental" poisoning of our water-supply with oestrogen in the airrrly 1980s. We Romanians of my generation, you see, make up for the khyumiliation of being otherrrwise permanently beardless by sporting these kheer prosthetic bearrrds.'

'Oh, come off it, Rugger,' says Ronnie (you see what I mean now, DGR, about any other Londinian setting), suddenly dropping all phizzionomical pretence of bemusedness, and simultaneously reaching forward to give a brutal tug to the still-attached left side of the beard, which, not having been previously mollified and marinated by the fire, breaks free of its moorings at considerably greater cost of pain to YFCT.

'Cor's whores!' I ejaculate, even as my right hand, all character-saving stratagems having (obviously) been newly rendered null and void, is brushing aside the twin locks comprising me newly-barbered scurvy Fu-Manchu goatee, and making its post-haste way once again to me top shirt-button: 'That really fucking hurt!'

'Serves you fucking right,' spits back Ronnie, even as his RH is making its way towards its chemisial counterpart, 'you bloody impostor.'

Wellsir, by this point the stage had been more or less completely set for a resumption of our untimely-ly broken-off shirtfest of last May; and I dare say the ever-dwindling audience of Bloke-Fawkesians would have been treated, willy-nilly, to the remaining three acts thereof, had not Esmeralda, in unwitting mimesis of Ronnie himself on a certain occasion, seen fit to step forward, and interpose an arm athwart the two of our respective carcasses, whilst interjecting:

'OK, guys, guys! Or, rather [she abashedly corrects herself, upon her single pair of okies' crossing paths with our pedantically smouldering two pairs], blokes, blokes! I bid you restrain yourselves--either that, or make it a two-to-one match. Cos, don't forget, Ronnie, that Nigel and I have imposed ourselves on you in disguise as a couple, and, accordingly, that you're obliged to reckon with us as such, by fist or by mouth.'

'Erm, well,' says Ronnie, stroppily enough, whilst reappointing both his hands to the perfunctory judy of straightening out the skirts of his parka, 'now that you've put it that way, Natasha--erm, Esmeralda--I think I can hold off for the time being.'

'Splendid. Now, provided I can trust you two to keep your hands off each other for five minutes, if you don't mind, I'd like to excuse myself for a bit of catching up with an old pal of mine, Pierre.'

And with these words, she sashays off in the direction of Mr Sedule, who's now busy hose-piping into extinction the last protesting embers of the bonfire.

'Cor!' says Ronnie as soon as she's out of earshot, 'since when was Esmeralda on a first-name--or any-name--basis with old Sedgie?'

'Since sometime late last summer, when she and her boss dropped by here for a nightcap sans mwah.'

'And sans mwah too OC, evidently.'

'Evidently. Anyway, Ronnie, about this whole impostorial charade: well, in hindsight I admit it comes across my okies as a none-too-gentleblokey, manoeuvre--nay, an outright dastardly manoeuvre. But what choice did I have but to fight dastardly fire with its equivalent, inasmuch your complete and total exclusion of me and Mayan from the loop of Bloke-Fawkesian preparation amounted, ultimately, to a studied policy of imposture by omission and malign neglect? Numerous attempts were made to get in touch with him my sanctified schphincter! A cuntishly artful use of the passive voice, that. I can't help speculating as to the identity of this wee telecommunicative birdie that was repeatedly despatched on this fool's errand. Was it, perchance, the blokess who keeps ringing me about those all-expenses-paid package tours of Mallorca? Or, on the other hand, the bloke who keeps emailing me about increasing the girth of me schlong? One thing I can say for certain: it wasn't Ronnie fucking Livingstone! I guess, though, that such brazenly cuntish fibbing came easily enough to you, via the assumption that my carcass was safely absent and rotting in a ditch or gutter in some far-flung corner of the postcode.'

'Erm, well,' says Ronnie, immejiately in advance of a diplomatic fist-cough, 'firstly, my use of the passive voice wasn't as artful as it might have seemed. It was sort of an improvised extra layer of protection, you see--a sort of rhetorical adult nappy, if you will, insulating my arse against the semantic liberties I was taking with the use of the word numerous. You see, about a month ago, I did in fact email you--mind you, not via your personal address, but your work one--an invitation--'

'--An invitation that you bloody well should have known, from past experience, would be routed directly into my junk mail folder like any other message issuing from a non-Proctologitexan source.'

'Yes, I should have known that, and perhaps in all candour I actually did do. As for my telephonic attempts: at about the same time, I did give you a bell, only I rang off after a few rings--that istersay, well before either you or your voice mail got round to answering. So, inasmuch as I did make two half-hearted attempts to reach you between the two media, and inasmuch as two is a plural number, I wasn't technically fibbing when I said that numerous attempts had been made.'

More exhausted than infuriated by this anorakish digression (but perhaps that's the whole point of the thing), I wearily sigh out 'All right, all right, all right: let's just get on to the secondly-ly portion of your apology before Bloke Fawkes Day '07, shall we?'

'OK, let's do: secondly--and I know my whole MO is bound to seem infinitely more cuntish and dastardly in the first-blusherly light of this fact--I was already well aware of your presence here when I began my pre-ignitionary speech; hence also, a 40-orey, when I got to the bit of it centring on my communicative attempts.'

'Why you little--!' I sputter out in an access of rage and accompanying prospective shirtiness; but luckily I have enough presence of mind to glance round on all sides before undoing me top button; whereupon my okies alight on those of Esmeralda, who is now submitting to a suffocating Sedulean bear-hug, and who apparently has enough presence of mind
--and brain-oxygen--in her own right to counter my gaze, over the deck of Sedgie's massive forearm, the upper-facial portion of a glare signifying Don't you dare so much as think of it!

Meanwhile, Ronnie's put his own anti-shirt-shucking plan into operation by stepping back a foot or two, thrusting his palms forwards and outwards in an attitude of semi-surrender, and saying, 'Now calm down a bit, Rugger; I'm sure you'll at least feel the stirrings of second thoughts about pounding me to a pulp once you've heard out my defence.'

'Well, we'll see. Please proceed.'

'OK. Well, as I was saying, I already knew you were here incognito; and I was kicking myself for so half-heartedly trying to reach you during the run-up to the event, and desperately wanting to involve your cognito'd self in the proceedings before the night was out; and yet, I was loath, say, an hour ago, to simply march up to you and say, "Hullo, Rugger. Long time no-see. What's with the fancy dress?" Firstly, and most obviously, because I had no idearrof how you'd take it; and secondly, because even in the best-case-scenarial event that you took it--and me--with open arms, the ensusing catch-up period would necessarily have thrown the whole itinerary of the evening off the rails. I mean, I ask you, in your capacity as the one person in the world who cares more about the spectacular integrity of Bloke Fawkes Day than I do, just to picture to yourself what the newcomers would have thought of it?'

'Oh, I'm picturing it to myself, right vividly enough. I'm picturing them saying to themselves, It seems like these two lovebirds are more interested in each other than in the event that we've hoofed and tubed it all the way up from Bumfuck, Bermondsey to celebrate.'

'Exactly. Whereas if I'd managed to draw you out by indirect means during the expiring final minutes of the itinerary--as I attempted to do via my pyre-side speech--why, then, we, oldtimers and newcomers alike, would have been graced by a consummately spectacular denouement, as you, like some long-absent duke from one of them Shakespeare comedies, sprang forward to unbeard yourself as the actual presiding genius of the holiday; whereupon I, in embracing you, would have been obliged to drop the torch, like the proverbial hot potato, directly into the pyre, and the catching-up module of our reunion could have taken its leisurely cakewalkish stride to the soothing accompaniment of the bonfirely crepitations.'

'Well, Ronnie, I guess I can make no other answer but sorry, and sorry.'

'There's no call for any apologies on your part, Rugger old boy--for regrets aplenty, perhaps, but not for ary an apology. Christ, if anything, it's me who should be apologising to you, what with my having so brutally and unceremoniously semi-unbearded you a coupla minutes ago, for having personally and concretely taken out on you the violence that was entirely and impersonally due to the missed opportunity in the abstract.'

'Oh, for Chrissake's don't bovver, Ronnie old boy,' I says to him ['And yet,' I says to meself, 'what harm could there be in checking up on the prognosis of the old wound, via a quick pap-schmear of the site of injury with me trusty suit-pocket handkerchief?'], 'It was a mere trifle, nothing ['Gorblimey!' I ejaculates to meself, fairly swooning at first contact with the hankie-clotting pointillistic study in crimson gouache that greets me okies afterwards]--nothing a good 20 minute douche of Haitch-Two-Oh-Two and a cubic foot or two of elastoplast won't put to rights ['Or,' I mercifully forbore to add, 'should that fail, and the wound begin to putrefy, a partial mandibulectomy followed by an arduous course of reconstructive surgery.'].'

In point of fact, though, even the censored minutes of my reaction to the full severity of the facial injury rather overblow the degree of my hypochondrial hysteria thereupon; for the actual F&C object of my preoccupation at this moment--i.e., now that Ronnie has redrawn my attention to the disguise by dint of apologising for his demolition thereof--is a very different one, namely a certain punctillio of vanity that I attempt to satisfy by posing to him the following question, immejiately upon repocketing my hankie:

'But anyway: you've already told me you knew whom you were addressing when you began your speech; and then, you also said something about the possibility of addressing me as my Ruggerian self an hour ago. What I want to know is, at exactly what earlier moment in the proceedings did you manage to suss out that it was me and not some random beardy punter who was in your presence?'

'Oh, I dunno, Rugger,' says Ronnie, wincing and grimacing as if at the sudden onset of an attack of wind: 'Is there really any need for me to get so specific as all that?'

'Yes, I'm afraid there is, Ronnie. Cos Cordammit, Esmeralda and I put a considerable amount of time, money and effort into these costumes; and it'd be flattering to her and me alike to learn they'd at least enjoyed their 15 mintues in the shade, as it were. So when was it, eh? Was it out here, in the courtyard, whilst the audience was assembling?'

'Earlier, earlier,' he says, still grimacing, whilst also shaking his head and insouciantly spinning air-candyfloss with his RH.

'Why, then, back at the table inside, during the scene of re-enactment.'

[Ditto, from the first inverted comma to the full stop.]

'Why, then, for Christ's fucking sake, when else earlier than at our ingress into the pub, as the starkly twilit silhouette of my head, obscured though it was by a five-fathom-deep scrim of cigarette fumes, could nonetheless not help betraying--in virtue of a certain irrepressibly resolute setting of the jaw, a certain devil-may-care heavenward jutting of the chin, its Ruggerian prov--'

'--Look, Rugger, as far as the present evening is concerned, you can fast-rewind all the way back to the instant when you set out from your front doorstep, and retrospectively transmogrify me into your nearest street-corner CCTV camera; cos even then, and in that capacity, I would have been on to you. The fact is--and I really was hoping to spare you this revelation, but now that you've pressed me to it, here it goes--the moment when I first discovered I was being imposed upon by you should be specified not in terms of a certain number of hours or even days ago, but, rather in terms of a full week and then some ago, namely--'

'--Surely, you don't mean--?'

'--Yes, I mean the moment when you rang me up in the character of one Waldo Houghington, Bart.'

'But what about me accent?--and intonation?--and vocabulary?'

'All three transparently see-through-able as those of Rugby Wetherby McGyver, C. A., from your inaugural "ahem" onwards. Face it, Rugger: when it comes to doing Posh, you ain't exactly David Beckham. No, you're far closer, I'd say, to a kind of a blokey analogue to Molly Sugden.'

'Late blow, Ronnie, late blow.'

'Oh, OK: I admit it wasn't as unconvincing as all that. In fact, I fancy any random bloke would have fallen for it Haitch Ell and Ess, at least for the first coupla minutes or so. But that's the thing: I'm not just any random bloke, but rather, a bloke who's as attchuned to the peculiariaties and idiosyncrasies of your vocal timbre as anyone could be. Anyone, that is [here, he suddenly raises his voice and diverts his gaze to some point on the arseward horizon], except, perhaps, for the lady now approaching us.'

And here, before I've had time to process, as they say, the meaning of this last clause, I feel almost simultaneously the tug of Esmeraldan arm-hook round both me shoulders and the impress of an Esmeraldan gob-smack against me left face-cheek; the two of which in tandem oblige me to say:

'Welcome back, darling. And how did your reunion with Mr Sedule go?'

'Swimmingly. Apart, that is, from the concluding bear-hug--I mean, medically speaking. Depending on how I'm feeling tomorrow morning, I might very well have to schedule an appointment with my GP to check for fractured ribs.'

'That's the trouble with Sedgie,' says Ronnie: 'he don't know his own strength.'

'I'll say,' says I, in toking deference to the nominal Esmeraldan magnitude of the Sedulean episode, before proceeding to my own particular peace of copular-solidfying bidness, by addressing Esmeralda AFF: 'Do you know what Ronnie's just been telling me?'

'No idea, dearest.'

'That he wasn't taken in for so much as an instant, over the blower, by my Sir Waldo spiel.'

'Well,' she says, exchanging with Ronnie a glance the dagger-wielding character of whose Esmeraldan component I can readily dejuice from its utterly abashed and deflated Livingstonian counterpart, 'that certainly goes a long way towards accounting for the historically unreconstructed state of the ladies' toilet.'

'Yes,' he says, 'I suppose it does do, and then some.'

At this point (at least as far as my own conversational resources went), there doubtless would have ensued a rather nasty, tape-worm-lengthed specimen of that entity known as an awkward silence--seeing as how Esmeralda had entirely beaten me to the rhetorical punch on the Ronnie-bashing front, and I had nary a non-Ronnie-bashing alternative rhetorical card secreted up me shirty-sleeve--had not Jimmy just then emerged from the back door of the pub, sidled up to Ronnie and injected a welcome botoxial note of administrative jollity into the anarchically sagging face-flesh of our chinwag by announcing to all three of us:

'Well, friends, as it's now getting on 11, I must insist that you return indoors. After all--not that we're in any imminent danger of a nose complaint this time round--we don't want to risk a repeat of what happened last year.'

'No, I dare say n--hang about, Jimmy! Since when have you been working again back up here in Woodside?'

'Christ, Rugger! You really are out of loop. Only since, I dunno, mid-September or thereabouts.'

'So I take it the gig at the Milton didn't quite pan out?'

'No, it certainly didn't. Mind you, the pay was good, to the chune of a 50 per cent rise over what I was making here; but working-condition-wise, I was easily a hundred and 50 per cent in the red, what with my having to keep a constant watch on all them dogs--you know, so as to make sure none of 'em either chewed or fucked any of the other ones to shreds. "Cordammit," I said to the governer on the night of my resignation, "I'm a barman not a fucking pet-psychologist-cum-relationship-counsellor--"'

'--Oh, c'est vrai, vraiment?' Mr Sedule, now suddenly louring over our humble quartet, cuts in: 'Then why are all these fucking punteurs still standing here outside at five mintues before closing time?'

'Good point, Mr Sedule,' says Jimmy, thereupon encircling Esmeralda and myself with one arm and Ronnie with the other; then subsequently and ever-so-gently swivelling the lot of us 180 degrees anti-clockwise; and finally whispering, as all four of our united pairs of feet begin marching tentatively, in Sedgie's train, and under Jimmy's guidance, back towards the arsehole of the Ape, 'so what do you lot say to joining Sedgie and me for a good old-fashioned English lock-in?'

'I'm certainly game,' says Ronnie.

'Me too,' says Esmeralda.

'So, it'll be just us five then, counting Mr Sedule?' queries YFCT, in de-facto rat-sniffing mode.

'I'm a frayed sew,' says Jimmy, as he disburdens us of the arm-yoke, now that we're standing at the threshold of the exit, 'at least as far as the Bloke Fawkesian class of '05 (honorary members included, of course [he parenthesises, with a chivalrous nod to Esmeralda]) is concerned. Manish and Denise and Claudia all seem to have scarpered a while ago.'

[YFCT (who else?)]: 'And as far as the non-Bloke-Fawkesian contingent is concerned?'

'Difficult to say. During my last sweep of the pub I counted about 20 punters who expressed at least a half-hearted inclination to stay on.'

'20?!'

'That's right, Rugger. A pretty modest remainder, I'd say, considering that at peak-turnout-point we were all the way up to about a fire-code-violating 150 or thereabouts.'

'Have you an idearrof of so much as a soup's son of a conjecture as to why the Ape would be graced by such a munificent turnout on a Sunday night of all nights?'

'As to why? Well, that's easily enough explained, innit, Rugger? It was a Torchwood-viewing night.'

'Torchwood? You mean that craptacular, pointless, stillborn, next-generational Doctor Who spinoff--?'

'--Actually, I quite like it,' cuts in Esmeralda.

'Me too,' nods Ronnie, assenting, methinks, too much and too abruptly for my conjugal comfort.

'Case in two points, Rugger. Mind you, as a dyed-in-the-wool classic Who fan, I can't stomach the show myself, but there's no denying its popularity, at least in our humble corner of this particular postcode.'

'But it's only been on the air for a fucking month-and-a-half, if that long!'

'Be that as it may, Rugger, in those scant four-to-six weeks, and for Cor knows what reason, the Ape has blossomed into a veritable Mecca of Torchwoodmania. Yessir-stroke-by-jiminy, nowadays the Torchères--that's what they call themselves--can't seem to get enough of this place. But like I was saying earlier, Rugger, you have lately been rather out of the Apewise loop.'

Anyway, back indoors, the lock-in party almost immejiately and predictably, if dishearteningly, splinters into two festive factions: a Torchwood-episode-debriefing one, comprising a butcher's dozen or so assorted specimens of riff-raff, along with Esmeralda, Ronnie and Mr Sedule, clustered round the arseward end of the bar; and a Bloke-Fawkes-Day-eulogizing one, comprising Jimmy and myself, bisected athwart the front end, he erect on the bidness side thereof--and occasionally breaking from my company to shuttle provisions to the enemy--and I sedentary on the pleasure one, with one leg lugubriously splayed atop the nearest three or four intervening empty seats, as though they collectively comprised a single, mighty, articulated gout-stool; and one hand-and-elbow propping up my inconsolable forrid, whilst all the while the other H&E repeatedly succors me gob with bottle after Phipps-administered bottle of me beloved Hoegaarden.

'It's like fucking feeding-time at the zoo!' I ejaculate, come the uncapping of Hoegaarden No. 8 or 9, momentarily (and unwisely) disengaging my forrid-propping hand just long enough to form it into a defiant arseward-orientated fist, at the instance of the 20th or so roundly-applauded Cap'n Jack impersonation of the night down under. 'I mean, honestly, Jimmy, whodathunkit?--that a venerable Apean tradition of a solid year's standing could be usurped, upstaged, drowned out, obliterated or what have you, by some ephemeral bit of televisual flotsam?'

'Yeah, whodathunkit?, indeed, Rugger,' says Jimmy--or, at any rate, the bits of him that I can manage to make out through one okie at a time, whilst futilely attempting to square my gyrospcoping cranium with the horizon courtesy of a pinball-playeresque alternating application of both hands to their respective temples--'But the way I sees it, as a sympathetic fellow-Bloke Fawkesian, you've got to consider the whole present contretemps from two points of view. Firstly--'

'--the philosophical one--?' I gormlessly, reflexively interject, on the naive, stupefied basis of Jimmy's having assumed a mien that, what with its narrowed-okie-liddedness, its schlonged-back-headedness, its momentary, opposite-wall-penetrating utter disregard of YFCT, can only be described as philosophical.

'--No!' he vigorously retrojects, whilst suddenly thrusting his phiz downwards within chin-whisker-frisking distance of mine, and resolutely planting both fists in decidedly unphilosophical fashion upon the surface of the bar: '--the anthropological-cum-sociological-cum-biochemical one. I mean, you've got to consider that a positively chronic Torchwood jones on a given person's part by no means prohibits or precludes the cohabitation of an equally potent Bloke-Fawkesian addiction within the organism of that selfsame individual. Consider, for example, the far-from-hypothetical case of the heroin junkie who doubles as a respected wine connoisseur--or, even more appositely, and closely to home, that of the Bloke-Fawkesian arch-founding father who moonlights as Barnet's most ardent scourge of Highbury's Foulest [i.e., Arsenal].'

SITS, the adhominemal gist of this rhetorical sally does not elude me, and in even marginally soberer circumstances I would doubtless take the rhetorical trouble of audibly articulating the counter-sally that then occurs to me--viz., that 'there's a qualitative difference between an anthropological-cum-sociological-cum-biochemical affiliation with a subculture with bone fide legs and roots (i.e.-stroke-e.g., Bloke-Fawkesianism and-stroke-or Arsenalaphobia) and a corresponding affiliation with a mere zoosporic subculture (I.E.-S-E.G. Torchwoodmania)', but as every last microjoule of my will but one is currently bespoken by the effort to keep both arse-cheeks squarely affixed to naugahide, the most I can do with the remainder is but feebly to nod in feigned recognition of meself, and rejoin, 'OK: Fair enough. And as to your second point of view?'

'Well,' he says, springing back from the bar and briskly honing one palm against the other (one can't help envying him his utter, naturally-caffeinated sobriety, and the majesterial command of his own person that it affords), 'that'd be the economic one. I mean, who do you think pays the bills of your--sorry, make that our--festival?'

'--The bills?'

'Yeah, I mean, where do you think all the money for those nose-complaint-proof combustibles came from?'

'Christ, I dunno, Jimmy: as you've pointed out more than once already tonight, I have been altogether out of the Apewise loop of late.'

'Well, I'll tell you where it came from: straight out of the wallets of those instrinsically-justifiably-malignable Torchères at the other end--from their wallets and from those of their absent confederates. I'll have you know, Rugger, that well into the third fiscal quarter of the present year, the accounts of this joint were auditably in the red. Such that when Ronnie and I, about a month-and-a-half ago first proposed a re-celebration of Bloke Fawkes Day, Mr Sedule would have no truck with it. But then, come a week or so later, we were suddenly aflush with punters on Sunday nights, all thanks to this Torchwood programme. And then--and only then--did Sedgie begin to countenance the idearrof of financing Bloke Fawkes Day '06.'

Once again, I am wise to the whole AHRG of Jimmy's parley, the difference this time round inhering in the fact that I am, at least in principle, chuned into the appropriate auditory wavelength--meaning that I not only see Jimmy's point but am in full agreement with it. I mean, he's clearly in the right: in hindsight my railings against the Torchères do look rather cuntishly petty--not that I can atoll be blamed for not having assumed all along that it was they in particular who'd bankrolled the whole Bloke-Fawkesian extravaganza, but rather that I can, and, indeed, should be blamed for not having taken stock of the obvious general fact that somebody had bankrolled it, and that that abstract somebody axiomatically excluded YFCT, inasmuch as (prior to the present after-hours binge and its inevitable wallet-hoovering aftermath) it'd been a good six months since I'd contributed so much as a tanner to the Ape's coffers. And yet, at arse, the prevailing emotion washing over me brain-pan at this particular moment is not one of contrition, but rather, of pity or compassion; PoC, that is, for Jimmy, on account of his being cursed, in the person of YFCT, with such a sorrily unresponsive audience for what is obviously a well-rehearsed speech. But how, I reason to meself, can it be otherwise, given the present extent of my inebriation--an extent that, in a professional capacity, Jimmy must be fully aware of, in view of my recent hourly rate of consumption--? Such that from my original emotional SOA of piteous compassion there is an easy transition to one of outright stroppy resentment, which I am just on the point of giving voice and shirt to, when out of the blue, as they say, a pair of peals issuing from the the Ape's cheeringly anachronistic doorbell--which comprises a mechanism exactly like that of one of them old-school wind-up alarm clocks, with the two circles and the circle-thwacking thingermmijig planted squarely betwixt them--immejiately puts paid at one go both to Jimmy's settled, schlong-sure "Well, what have you got to say for yourself?"-ish glare and to my still-nascent, tentative "I dunno yet, but whatever it is, it ain't gonna be pretty"-ish counter-one.

'Bordel de diable!' exclaims Mr. Sedule from across the way: 'Who in the fuck can this be, at this immonde hour of the evening?'

Whereupon Jimmy summarily, in advance of any explicit prompting from his boss, hoists himself over the end-flap of the bar and makes a caffeinated beeline for the front door; a beeline that I subsequently endeavour to trail in my own good codeinated, exegetical time and fashion--not so much out of any degree of anthropological-cum-sociological curiosity vis-a-vis the generic chav posse or homeless bloke doubtlessly lurking out on the pavement, as in exploitation of this one-off opportunity to give me sea legs a dry run for the looming LSH (or Long Shimmy Home).

Anyway, when I finally do make it up front, I am bemused to find myself peering out, over Jimmy's shoulder, at a pair of the most demographically-improbable of all lock-in gate-crashers: viz. a thin, tallish, bowler-crowned, brolly-toting sexagenarian bloke togged out from chin to ankle in a buttoned-up beige raincoat (along with a smattering of protuberant shirty-collarage-cum-necktieage, as if by way of certifying that this isn't all he's wearing, if you know what I mean), and a rather dowdy old octogenarian blokess less flatteringly clad in a buttoned-up, off-puce hooded parka, white tights and bright orange trainers.

'Indeed, sir, we are already well aware of that fact,' the bloke is just now saying, presumably in reply to Jimmy's boilerplate shoving-off spiel about the Ape's being 'a pub that observes a traditional schedule of hospitality', 'and yet, I can but hope that once you have been apprised of the nature and provenance of our visit--both of which we shall gladly disclose to you once we are safely indoors and clear of the prying gaze of his Yeoman Mayorship's surveillance cameras--you will find that it behoves you to make an especial exception in our case.'

'All right,' says Jimmy, now sauntering outside, whilst imprudently leaving the front door swinging wide-open for my eavesdropping, slipstream-dogging exploitation, 'I'll let you in: for a drink.'

'For a drink, sir?' the bloke gormlessly rejoins; 'But surely, in your capacity as barman you have no need of--'

'--Not literally, but figuratively. You know:' (He makes the money sign.)

'Very well,' sighs the bloke, and then immejiately commences fumbling round under the skirts of his coat in search of his wallet. But the blokess stops him short with a coupla well-aimed palm thwacks to the under-elbow, leaving him frozen with both hands embarrasingly thrust deep into the fronts of his trousers, as if he'd just been caught in flagrante delicto, during a spirited bout of pocket-pinball.

'Look, you two,' firmly remonstrates Jimmy: 'you've got to understand that I'm going to have to do a good bit of explaining to my boss so as to account for your presences; and that if that bit of explaining should fail to convince him, I'm looking, at minimum, down the twin barrels of a two-day suspension of pay. Now, if it were just the one of you seeking admittance--meaning you, sir; why, I'd be fine with letting you in gratis. Cos, you see, I could always explain you away after the fact as "the local police inspector-stroke-borough council president just popping round for a look round the place-stroke-to borrow a phone". Whereas when it comes to you, madam--no offence, but--"

'--But what?'

'Well, I mean, you're hardly dressed for official business of any sort, are you?'

'What do you think this is?'

And so saying, she gingerly-ly nudges back either side of her parka-hood just far enough to reveal, sitting atop her grizzled and rather mingey coiffure of curly locks, a swathe of diamond-encrusted tiarage, centring, just above the knitting point of the eyebrows, on a particularly keratin-rich triangular peak.

'Oh, Your Majesty,' Jimmy exclaims, whist not so much falling, as collapsing, on to his knees, 'I do most humbly and abjectly beg Your Majesty's pardon, and apologise for my altogether gormless misprision of your royal person. Believe Your Majesty's me, if I'd had any idearrof the fact that it was you--'

'--Rise, fair subject [whereupon Jimmy does do], and accept of our pardon, whilst sparing us your apologies--which, after all, serve only to prolong the term of our exposure to the depradations of this--well, we ought not to impugn the prognostications of our meteorologists by terming it unseasonable--but, at any rate, even the seasonable meteorological depredations of an English November night do rather tend to take their toll on the constitution of a woman of fourscore and tuppence such as ourself--'

'--'Nuff said, Your Majesty. I shall forthwith conduct you and Sir, or, perchance, Lord--?'

'--Sir Cyril, thank you very much,' says the bloke, who is only just now assuming an appropriately royal mein, with each hand splayed palm-downwards against its appropriate outer skirt of his coat.

'--Sir Cyril, into the humble precincts of our establishment.'

Now, here's the moment--i.e., just as Jimmy's about to swivel round to lead them indoors--when I suddenly bethink myself to do some pre-emptive swivelling and hoofing of me own; in simultaneuous order to escape detection qua eavesdropper (I mean by Jimmy, not by the royals--who, although they have presumably already spotted me, can be counted on not to breathe a word of the spottage [for such, after all, is the essence of what they call good breeding, innit?--viz., not to bother with mixing yourself up in quarrels whose outcomes will never stand a chance of touching on your immejiate interest]) and to be stationed at the head of the royal hand-kissing queue, well to the front of the foremost of the accursed Torchères. But just as I've cleared the threshold--and, hence, more or less attained the first of my objectives--I happen to overhear, courtesy of Sir Cyril's gob, a scrap of dialogue that just now arrests my steps, a dialogue whose conclusion--alas!--is destined to put paid to the attainment of my second objective before I've trodden another inch:

'There's just one other matter I should like to broach with you, Mr Phipps, before we send our car off and proceed within.'

[Jimmy, natch:] 'Yes, Sir Cyril?'

'Her Majesty maintains certain minimum standards for public appearances.'

'You mean, I suppose, as regards the, erm, quality of company?'

'Good heavens, no! Do you seriously imagine that she who has deigned to swap skin-grafts with sub-Saharan chieftans and to rub noses with Eskimo peasants shall be put off by the prospect of a handful of mere chinwags with the admittedly reeky denizens of a good-old-fashioned English pub? No, the standards I am adverting to appertain to the state of your, erm, public facilities.'

'Our public facilities?'

'Yes: specifically, the maximum flushing capcity by mass and volume of your ladies' toilet.'

FINIS POSTIS