Had Meself a Shi(r)ty Little Xmas: Part Two
Not to let the reader down after all that angsty build-up at the end of the last post, but I must confess that my first night at the old parental abode passed agreeably enough. Not that, on the other hand, in so confessing I mean to recalibrate downwards the reading of the angstometer of two days ago insofar as it registered my general attitude towards the McGyverhaus during my first Mazda-cocooned moments in Diss, or to suggest that that attitude was without legitimate foundation. It's just that even in the most inhospitable of locales, the sensation of being unreservedly welcome on the premises tends, for a time, to forestal or overwhelm any misgivings you might have otherwise had about being there. In this case, the era of good feeling lasted almost through to bedtime. First off--I mean, as soon as I stepped in--there was the usual sentimental, lovey-dovey bullshit: the hugs, the face-cheek-pinches, the proffered verbal insistences that 'You're looking quite healthy!' ('cos what else can they say now that you've stopped growing--at least upwards?).
Next: dinner, consisting of my mum's signature Bosty-Drog-trouncing, rosemary-and-garlic-basted Cornish game hens, accompanied by liberal dollops of couscous and all-too-illiberal lashings of Beaujolais. And there was nothing too traumatic about the meal's midget-speak, which centred on such eminently unstroppifying topics as my drive over; life in the respective salt mines of Proctologitex, UEA and Palgrave Primary School (where my mum has a gig as a kiddie psychologist); and preliminary preparations for next summer's Party in the Park, Diss's one-horse answer to the Notting Hill Carnival. It was only in the last quarter of our time at table together, as my dad was clearing away the last of the dinner cooter-mints and my mum was cutting up the rhubarb crumble, that the ghost of awkwardness decided to pull up a chair and join us for dessert. It was just then, you see, that I happened to notice we were one person short for a four-handed, all-familial, post-prandial game of Cluedo; and thoughtlessly opened my gob to inquire into the whereabouts of Sidney, my still-at-home residing nineteen-year-old kid brother.
'I expect he's out on the town somewhere...carousing,' answered my mum through the merest soup's son of a grimace. 'Isn't that right, dear?' she asked my dad, as if seeking affirmation of her choice of this last word, 'carousing,' in preference to the hundreds of other available alternatives in Mr and Mrs McGyver's Private Thesaurus of Euphemisms.
'Mmm,' he answered gruffly with a nod, as he bit into his first gobful of rhubarbage--such that, until he resumed speaking a half-minute later after chewing and swallowing, I wasn't sure whether it was the word or the crumble that thus elicited his approval. 'I suppose that's about as good a word for the activity as any other, carousing. Nice Krauty-sounding word that, don't you think?--carousing. Frenchy-looking, but Krauty-sounding. Mind you, in this instance, I should have gone for something both Krauty-sounding and Krauty-looking--something along the lines of...mmm...I don't know................whoring?'
'Stanley!' my mum shouted across the table at him with outraged peremptoriness.
'Sorry, doveling. I admit I was well out of line there, in point of both civility and linguistic precision. Must be the Beaujolais talking. The nub of the whole crux of the thing, Nigel,' he continued, turning to me, 'is that Sidney's not far away tonight, and that he's promised to join us for dinner on Christmas day, so you'll be seeing him soon enough.' And then, back to mum: 'Will that do for a subject-closer?'
'To a turn, dear, to a turn.'
And that, bar the shouting (or, rather, in this case, silence), was it for dinner. Whatever Sid was up to, whether it was carousing or whoring or sheep-buggering, I didn't care to get involved, and so I held my piss, as did they, until after the last of the crumble was polished off. Then, with surprising, and, indeed, slightly hurtful promptitude, they bade me good night and hurried off to bed, leaving the washing up for next morning and me to settle down on to the front-room couch for a spot of telly. But even before switching on the set, I felt that something was missing from this particular run-through of the old familiar couch-cous-cous's passing-out routine, my appetite for that something having been whetted, and yet not half satisfied, by the two glasses of wine I'd had over dinner. And so, without quite knowing what I was about, I stumbled into the kitchen and popped open the fridge--and lo! What did I behold on the bottom tray, just above the crisper drawer, but an integral, un-torn-into four-pack of my beloved Stella! Awfully prescient of mum and dad to have seen to that provision, I said to myself en route back to the couch, scratching my pubes with one hand and cracking open my newly-filched tall bloke with the other.
My last memory of that night centres on a scene from some sort of seasonal claymation movie with talking mice (produced, perhaps by the Wallace and Gromit team?), and my first memory of the following morning centres on my dad standing in front of me, dressed in shorts and a V-necked cricketer's jumper, and flailing rather theatrically about in all directions with some sort of oversized fly-swatter.
'Have you taken up Tai-Chi since I was last here, Dad?' I ask him, shielding my eyes with one hand against the all-too-cheerily bright rays of sunlight passing from Bourgie Dawn's arse cheeks and through the unblinded front-room windows.
'Tai Chi? Good heavens, no!' he answers, stopping short and laying the fly-swatter down on the coffee table. 'Just practising my backhand. Care for a game of squash this morning, Nige?'
'Eventually, Dad, eventually,' I mutter, getting up from the couch and staggering into the bathroom to perform my morning 'blutions (i.e., the first three of the four esses). And afterwards, back in my old room, I rummage through the chest of drawers in search of some squashworthy togs. The only halfway serviceable things I manage to dig up are a pair of orange-on-yellow polka-dotted Bermudas that I haven't worn since fifth form (and that I can barely squeeze into) and a rather moth-eaten blue sailor's pullover that, as I've never set me okies on it before, presumably belonged to my grandfather or some other relative now long deceased. Back in the kitchen, I find the coffee pot full and freshly piping, and the table laid out with a fresh box of Weetabix cakes and a jar of peanut butter along with the necessary cutlery and dishery. First the Stella, now the Weetabix, I said to myself as I prepared the first of my eventual four Weetabix schmears, This is starting to get a wee bit cloying.
After breakfast, I step out front and find Dad, squash gear slung over his shoulder, chatting with one of the neighbours, a quadragenarian or quinquagenarian blokess whom he introduces to me as Jane Trippett-Jones. 'Jane's on the planning committee of the Town Council,' he explains, after we've taken leave of Ms T-J and are hoofing it up Louie's Lane in the general direction of the Squash Club, 'and she was just telling me of a proposal a certain bloke had the temerity to present to them, a proposal to turn a barn on Walcot Green into a garage for his car-repair shop. Can you imagine that--a glorified indoor scrap-heap taking up residence on such a sanctified preserve of old-style English country living? What an eyesore and earsore it would be! Why, it was worth vetoeing on grounds of proximate traffic congestion alone. The confounded cheek of the fellow!' Christ but these provincial geezers sure do seem to have an arse-load of time on their hands! I couldn't forbear ejaculating to myself, or adding: Back in London, I doubt I'd bat an eyelid if all of Hampstead Heath were converted into a giant 300-acre car park.
Aloud, I say: 'And what about Mum?' This is the question I've had in my mind's front pocket all along--I mean pretty much since waking up.
'What about her?'
'I mean, where's she got to?'
'Oh, she went up to Earsham to fetch Aunt Agatha.' (Agatha, my mum's widowed aunt, being the only living relative of the older generation still resident in the area.) 'The two of them will be back round lunchtime, I expect.'
Up at the Club, it would be fair to say that Dad wiped the court with my carcass. We played three games, and in one of them, I managed to score a measly two points; in the other two, he nixed me nine-love. The shogun-marriage-diet of Ms Stella Artois and the Duke of Marlboro hadn't exactly done wonders for my athletic prowess, especially at a sport I hadn't played regularly since fifth form. At least Dad, gorblessim, had the good grace not to gloat over the whole thing, as geezers of his generation are wont to do over the most cuntishly slight proofs of their enduring june-ness.
Then, that afternoon, all four of us (Mum, Dad, Aunt Aggie and YT) drove down to the cinema at Bugger St. Edmunds to take in a matinee showing of the new Disney adaptation of C. Staples Lewis, Sr.'s Lion, Witch & Wardrobe. In childhood, I'd taken to the Narnia books like a so-called duck to water, after the fashion of all nippers who are force-fed that sort of pre-juvenalial tripe. Later, though, at some point in my early teens I was tipped off to the whole Christological subtext of the books, and the magic was gone, as they say. And Disney's efforts to heathanise the whole thing retroactively--a la Peter Jackson on Tolkein--did not impress me. The whole thing fairly oozed the unsavoury odour of re-hydrated beef jerky, if you know what I mean. Still, I couldn't exactly blame Mum and Dad for thinking this was the sort of thing I'd cotton to; for what else did they have to go on, as far as my so-called current interests went? After all, I'd never breathed a word to either of them about my Stellaphilia or Arsenalophobia, as though I'd always assumed that in their eyes these passions would have figured as veritable by-words for Paedophilia and Hydrophobia.
Well, back at the ranch, I was still so knackered from my squash-workout that I conked out right after dinner (Chinese takeaway from Hing Lee on Mere Street) without first even availing myself of a second Stella tall bloke. Luckily it was an off-night for the Gunners, so in being absent from the telly I didn't miss out on my weekly dose of Arsnelsschadenfreude. Next morning, from the aforementioned BD arse-crack onwards, the whole house was abuzz with preparations for Christmas dinner. Mum was inermittently at the oven, first turning the scones then prodding the turkey; Dad almost constantly at the cooker, stirring his secret-recipe Christmas posset; while Aunt Agatha manned the micro-onda, feeding into its torpedo-bay a succession of side-dishes from the fridge (including, regrettably if inevitably, her perennially inedible plum pudding). I helped out mainly by staying out of the way. Too many Indian chefs spoil the kheer, as the saying goes, especially in a kitchen the size of a third-class compartment of a Calcutta to Delhi express train.
At 2 p.m., the appointed dinner hour, the table is set, everything that's meant to be piping hot is there, piping away; whilst everything that's meant to be cold is also there, chilling out; and the only thing that's holding us up from tucking in is the arrival of my brother. Come a quarter past, there's still no sign of Sid; nor come half-past. Dad starts beating a tattoo on the table to the accompaniment of a whistled rendition of 'Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,'--and not in a poncey Bertie-Woosterish kind of way, as if to say, 'Tut-tut. Unpunctuality is such a frightfully underrated vice'; more of in a blokey Cecil-J.-Rhodesish kind of way, as if to say, 'I'm fittin' to teach this fucking savage Boer a lesson in punctuality!'; whilst Mum and Aunt A start, as they say, exchanging nervous looks.
Then, as the grandfather clock in the front room is just striking a quarter of three, I hear the front door being flung open so violently that the inside knob makes an audible crack against the opposite wall of the vestibule; and my brother barges in, visibly pissed and reeking like a lorry-load of well-fermented nappies.
'About bloody time, Sidney,' Dad reproaches him without raising his voice or twitching a nostril; which co-jonic self-mastery on his end of course makes the reproach all the more ominous. For a second or two I start to think a cross-generational shirtfest between the two of them is in the offing, and I glance over my mental notes on Ronnie’s comportment during my recent near-scuffle with Herbie Hancock at the Ape, preparing myself to step in with a letter-perfect copy of that performance. But Sid obligingly tweaks the tension just enough to postpone, if not preempt, an outright confrontation in answering, 'Yeah, well, sorry, Pops. But this ain’t exactly the first stop on the holiday slop-crawl for me, if you know what I mean. What are you lot drinking today, anyways?' He then scoops up our still-unopened fresh bottle of Beaujolais from the table and takes a gander at the label, painfully sounding out the words as he reads: ‘Jacks de Bof Boojolays Nowvoo. Two-thousand-ought five. Funny, innit, that "2005" is the same in French and in English? [Here Dad presses a thumb and forefinger into his okies in apparently unspeakable consternation.] Anyways, I’ll stick to beer, if youse don’t mind.’ Whereupon, having re-placed the bottle, he traipses off to the kitchen, whence, a moment later I hear issuing the stentorian ejaculation, lifted straight out of the Goldilocks story, 'WHO’S BEEN DRINKING MY STELLA!’ As I’m pretty sure that at this point a dining-room-to-kitchen shouting match between the two of us would serve as a veritable Archduke-Fritz-Ferdie-assassination-type catalyst to an all-out McGyverworld War involving everyone present, I diplomatically excuse myself from the table and join Sid in front of the fridge.
‘Well, of course it was me,’ I fess up to him with, as they say, disarming simplicity. ‘I’m sorry—I didn’t know you had dibs on the Stellas.’
‘And who the fuck else would have done, you shaved pit? Dad? You know he’s no beer-drinker.’
In hindsight it all made sense. As to his cuntish meanness on the score of the single-can-filching itself, well, there was no need of hindsight to explain that—it was totally characteristic of him. He’d always been a proprietary anorak, ever since he was a knee-high to a sausage dog. I remember particularly vividly one occasion, dating from his fourth year and my tenth, on which, having been presented by our grandma with a roll of Smarties to share with me, he’d meticulously counted out exactly half the contents into my hand and then proceeded to swallow the lot of the other half right there on the spot, ‘to make sure,’ as he'd said, ‘you don’t get your teef into any of my stash.’ So, then, knowing as I do that there’s no way of pacifying him but to repay him in kind and toot sweet, I pull out my wallet and hand him a tenner. ‘There,’ I say. ‘Knock yourself up. Buy yourself a whole 'nother four-pack, and keep the cambio.’
'Ooh,' he taunts me, pocketing the note and screwing up his face into a sneer startlingly reminiscent of the phiz of his could-have-been namesake, the Sex Pistols' second bassist, 'His Grace the Duke of Moneybags stoops to throw a farthing to the grubby li'ol guttersnipe! I'm sure it's a great sacrifice for you, you cunting wax-jobbered pit.' For just an instant my right hand jerks reflexively towards my top shirt button, but luckily just in time my left hand intervenes Dr-Strangelove-style to check it before it quite reaches its destination. 'No, my dear FC,' the voice of my left hand says to me, 'You shall not suffer yourself to become shirty over this piffling pseudo-contretemps. You shall not even suffer yourself to make the Unprodigal Son's set speech, which, you will remember, commences thus: You think I have it easy on my 30 grand a year? Well I, unlike you, have rent to pay; I, unlike you, YFC, have to cover the costs of my own car insurance, etc. Admittedly, the Unprodigal Son is the role of a lifetime, and equally admittedly you are fast approaching the age beyond which it is quite impossible play the part gracefully. Nonetheless, I must strenuously insist that you keep your gob zippered, lest from your liberated tongue should fly the verbal spark that blows to pieces the very 1914-vintage powder keg in the interest of whose perduring wholeness you have repaired hither.' He talks a bit too posh for my taste, does my old El Haitch; and his metaphors are a bit screwy, but he generally offers pretty good advice. So I hold my piss, and simply say, 'We'd better be getting back to the table, Sid. The turkey's getting cold,' and leave the kitchen, waiting for him to catch up in his own good time (i.e., a full minute later, after he's pounded his first tall bloke and cracked into a second one).
The convo gets off to a pretty sluggish start, as it seems Auntie and Sid are much more up-to-date on (or indifferent to) the goings-on in Mum and Dad's life than I've been lately, and I'm not, as I've already hinted, particularly game on volunteering any info on my life back in London. I eventually think to take a rather lame crack with the ice pick myself and ask Sid how things are going over at Just Beds, this furniture shop on the south end of town where, according to Mum and Dad, he's been working part-time since last summer.
'Well, druths, the pay is shite, but, on the other hand, lolling about all day in a showroom filled wall to wall with mattresses does have its perks. It has its ups and downs, you could say. Its ins and outs, too: you know what I mean? Eh? Eh? Ups and downs and ins and outs; ins and outs and ups and downs--'
'Yes, Sidney,' my Dad wearily cuts in. 'I'm sure he knows exactly what you mean. And so, I'm sure, do the rest of us.' I can tell that by now the wind, as they say, has been taken out of his sails, and he's simply biding his time till the whole sodding holiday blows over. Aunt Aggie's segue is hardly calculated to lighten the mood, especially for your-fucking-cunt's truly: 'Speaking of, ahem, seksyooal congress, have you got yourself a young lady friend back in London, Nigel?'
Just the kind of question her gossip-hungry, wool-gathering widow's arse would ask. 'Not at the moment, Auntie, but I have been working on it. To be honest, I've been going through a bit of a rough patch lately--'
'What he means,' my brother says, 'is that he's queer but that he just ain't got the balls to admit it.'
'Now, Sidney, you know that word has been scientifically discredited,' says Mum. 'We don't call them queers anymore: we call them persons of diverse sexual orientation.' (Note well that her first impulse is to rush to the defence of her shrink's anorak rather than to the defence of her older son's masculinity.)
'No,' I jump in, doing what I must say is a pretty creditable impression of Dad two minutes earlier, 'You nailed it, Siddie old boy. That's me in a nutshell. Queer as a three-pound note. As the pitch of the High Street of the Castro District in gay old Frisco. As Schlong's hatband. Oops, did I say schlong? So sorry to drag the level of conversation upwards from the toilet to the lower waistline.'
Whereupon I start balling up my napkin in my lap in preparation for my Unprodigal Son's righteous exit (which, properly executed, will culminate in my slamming my bedroom door behind me and blasting classic schlong rock at Level 11 on the hi-fi), as Aunt Aggie, totally oblivious of the ambient knife-sliceable tension, (Gorbless her gormlessness), asks no one in particular, 'I'm afraid I don't understand. What is the meaning of this word schlong?--I've never heard it before.'
'Schlong,' says my dad, with what I guess you'd call an impish smile that suggests he's been waiting for a chance to explain this for years, 'is a slang word, of Yiddish provenance, for the membrum virile.'
(AA): 'The membroo whateelay?'
'The membrum virile: the male member, the rod or yard, better known in these pedantic times as the penis.'
Thus commences a most captivating open university lecture on the etymology of the word schlong [from the German Schlange = queue, tail, snake or serpent] delivered by Dad, veering occasionally into the adjacent territories of psychoanalysis and theology, and followed up by a no less captivating Q&A session. Whodathunkit?--that the broaching of such an off-colour topic would serve to nix Mum's prudishness, Aunt Aggie's gormlessness, my own stroppiness and Sid's all-around cuntishness all at one go? But that's exactly what it does do, such that, come 4:00, as the whole discussion rounds itself out in a satisfying conclusion, just as we're polishing off the last of the grub along with a second bottle of wine (of which even Sid deigns to partake), the old mine-shaft's ghost is of exactly the right temperature and texture for us to proceed without interval into the front room and to settle round the tree for the exchanging of presents.
There are few surprises on my end of the Santa delivery lorry: from Aunt Aggie, I receive her perennial bequest of a five-quid book of McDonald's vouchers. Back in the late 80s, I could stuff my tykish self to the verge of puking three times over with one of these voucher-books of hers; now, the whole sheaf, with an extra quid thrown in, barely covers the cost of curing a single case of the tummy-rumbles. It's hardly worth making the trip anymore. From Mum and Dad I get the usual assortment of ill-fitting fashionless togs that'll go straight from the boot of the Mazda to the return register at Mark's and Spencer's, along with, from Mum alone, a sodding self-help book penned by that walking fart Dr Phil, the ninth one she's given me so far. But I've pre-empted this perennial interventionist sally of hers in having chosen as my gift to her a satire on self-help books entitled Release the Imbecile Within that I came across at the a couple of weeks ago at the Hampstead Waterstone's. Hopefully, she hasn't had every humorous atom in her body chemo'd out of her by her professional life, and will take some pleasure in reading the book. To judge by the expression on her phiz as she tore off the wrapping she was not amused by the title. Anyway, fuck her (in a strictly non-Oedipal sense, natch) if she can't take a joke. As for Dad--I mean the gift, I'd chosen for him, it was a 10-CD boxed set of the complete D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's Gilbert and Sullivan recordings, the ones I remember him playing to death in their LP format in days gone by. I'd worried he'd already bought the reissue years ago; but, no, he says, he's still only got the LPs, and he seems to be genuinely touched by the pains I've taken towards the care and feeding of his G&S-ian hobby horse. Then, vis-a-vis Sidney, as I'd no idea what to get him, I'd gone the Aunt Aggie route--albeit on a grander scale--via a 30-quid HMV voucher.
'Thanks, druths,' he says, clutching me in a nose-stopping, piss&shit-permeated hug. 'With this, I can get the new Arctic Monkeys CD, and the next one too, probably. But ain't you going to open my present? It's the last one of the heap, innit?'
And fuck me with a knobbily-barked, 50-growth-ring-thick Yule Log if the solely unopened package, a circular, shoebox-sized thing wrapped in overlapping lengths of loo paper didn't have my name (and his) on it! And in this box is contained the only real surprise of the whole parcel-shucking session (I'm afraid a fudged a bit when I said there were few surprises on my end): namely, a tan-and-gray chav's cap, just like the one sported by those blokes who roughed me up on Halloween night. My gag reflex, as they say, is to vomit; and yet, for all of Sid's cuntishness, I can tell on account of all this beaming he's doing that he's put no small amount of forethought into this choice. So, for the time being, I'm speechless.
'Don't you like it, Nige? You want to ride all o' the new jet, dontcha?'
'Ride all of the new jet?'
'You know, sport the trendiest clothes. All the lads in Diss and Thetford and Norwich are wearing them there hats. I got 20 of 'em meself.'
'Well, of course I like it. I'll wear it with pride.' (omitting to add, of course, but only indoors and when you [and no on else] are around.)
After clearing away the confetti, all four of us adjourn to the front room and take our places round the coffee table; Dad brings out great mugfuls of the posset--which has been simmering on the stove at a scalding 99-degrees-centigrade all through dinner--Mum brings in a plateful of scones; and, munching and dunking, we launch into the final module of the traditional McGyver Christmas, the all-family, least-common-denominator, soporific telly-viewing session. Aunt Aggie isn't shy about commandeering the remote--probably in the hope of ultimately subjecting the rest of us to some pre-historic holiday cine-screed featuring Bing Crosby or Perry Como--and no more than five channels into her ten-seconds-per station bout of channel-browsing, she happens to alight on the isolated image of a bloke sporting yet another one of those Sherlock-Holmesian chav hats.
'Do you see, bro?' Sid ejaculates, pointing at the screen. 'He's wearing one of 'em.'
'Yes, I see.'
But back to the bloke himself. He's pacing up and down some kind of stage with a microphone in his hand, like he's in the middle of a rant or sermon. A stationary electro-banner at the bottom of the screen reads: 'YOU'RE WATCHING THE JEFF CHAVWORTHY HOLIDAY SPECIAL.' It obviously doesn't take the powers of deduction of SH himself to see that this fellow is a stand-up comedian, and one of some fame or notoriety (although none of us seems to have heard of him).
Mum, doubtlessly anticipating nothing but wall-to-wall pottymouthism in this quarter says, 'Go on, Auntie. Skip ahead to the next channel.'
But Sid will have none of that. 'No. Stay here, Double-A. I want Nige to see what riding all o' the new jet is all about.'
For my part, I gots to admit, my sociological interest vis-a-vis the greater phenomenon of chavvism has been piqued. So, in the absence of further vetoes from Dad or Auntie, we hear out Mr Chavworthy.
'Us chavs,' he's just then saying, when we show up, 'get no respect. No ffffffffffucking respect! And the fing that really gets on me tetons about all this is, you lot out there--yeah, you lot: you pits down there in the pit and you pits lounging on your fat arses at home and munching on your Christmas scones--are a fuckofalot more like us than you'd ever care to admit.' On the whole the act is pretty convincing. Every now and then, though, he lets slip a hard 't' or a round 'o' that betrays his origins in the poshility, that proves he's just another one of those wanking Oxbridge posers like S. B. Cohen.
'I mean,' he continues, 'a lot of people seem to fink that being a chav is purely a matter of style, that clothes make the chav. Take my hat, for instance. No, take it please!'
So saying, he doffs his cap and flings it into the crowd like a frisbee. The camera cuts to a teary-eyed blokess, a tarted up harlot in a pink terry-cloth track suit, who without taking her eyes off the stage, scoops up the hat from the floor and clutches it to her tits in a manner reminiscent of a man-knicker-collecting Tom Jones fan. When the camera's back on him he's crowning himself with another, identical cap, which he's presumably just extracted from the pocket of his hoodie or somewhere thereabouts.
'No worries. Them fings only cost a quid-and-a-half at Tesco's. But like I was saying, a lot of people fink being a chav is all about dressing a certain way, that if you don't wear one of these here Burberry hats, or gold-pound coins on your diggits, that somehow lets you off the hook of chavdom. But the way I sees it, it ain't like that at all. Being a chav is more of a kind of a spiritual fing. It's a whole way of looking at the world, innit? Meaning, irregardless [sic] of the way you dress, if you fink a certain way, like it or not, you are a chav, and you'll just have to live wivvit, for the rest of your cunting natural. It therefore follows, if you're one of these pits who've fought all along that you wasn't a chav, you really ought to take a good gander at yourself, and into yourself, and ask yourself, "Mightn't I hav been a chav all along wivvout knowing it, at my insoo?" And that's where I come in, you see. I've devised an, ahem, chav's checklist [reaching into his his hoodie hold, and producing and unfolding a sheet of paper], a one-hundred-and-fifty-four-point catalogue of chavworthy qualities itemised in a handy dandy if...then format. If you do or are any one of these 154 fings...you might be a chav. Get it? Oh, and one more fing: the list is arranged in order of ascending chav-clinchingness, meaning the higher the number, the more chavvish the quality associated wivvit. Here's just a little sample. [Pretending to read off the paper, whilst resuming his pacing routine.]
'Number 5: If you've fucked your sister in the last 24 hours, you might be a chav.'
'Number 24: If you've ever taken a chip kebab to a job interview, you might be a chav.
'Number 35: If a copper, or some other such quote-unquote authority figure asks you for identification, and you show him some article of jullery hanging round your neck, you might be a chav.'
'Number 87: If your richest relative changes flats, and he don't bovver to call you to help him wivvah move, on account awvvah fact that he's forefeited all of his furniture to the local council........you might be a chav.
[I can't repress a chuckle here. I say to myself, This bloke ain't half bad.]
'Number 95: If you fink marmite is the other dark meat.................you might be a chav.'
'Number 117: If you fink a five-course meal is a bucket of KFC and a four-pack............................you might be a chav.'
But now, after this last one-liner, for just a second or two, the camera cuts to a close-up centred on Chavworthy's phiz, and during that briefest of instants, his virtual okies make contact with my actual ones; and, absurd as it seems, I get the distinctly schphincter-dilating, un-Heimlich-like feeling that he's looking straight at me, and addressing me alone. And he resumes:
'Number 127: If you're under the age of 70 and regularly wear a string vest..................you might be a chav.'
('O come off it!' I can't resist interjecting aloud. 'I thought you said it wasn't clothes that made the chav,' and Mum motions 'Hush!' to me in sign language.)
'Number 134: If you fink Stella Artois is a perfectly respectable mid-priced continental import beer..............................you might be a chav.
'Number 146: If you fink fish and halapenyo poppers are the dernier cri in English cuisine....................................................you might be a chav.'
'Number 150: If you went to college at some Johnny-come-lately university like, I dunno, the University of East Anglia [?], and look down your nose at alumnuses of such venerable ex-polytechnics as, say, the University of Luton [?!]...............................................................................you might be a chav.'
By now, Sid, Dad, Aunt A, Mum--everybody but me--is positively in stitches over this well-nigh-otherworldy cunt's shenanigans, whilst I'm holding on for dear unshirtiness with both hands to the front cushion of the sofa, practically impaling my palms with my fingernails through the fabric.
'Number 151: If you've ever walked out on a dinner date with a girl 'cos you fought the restaurant was too quote-unquote trendy or ersatz, then guess what?'
'YOU MIGHT BE A CHAV?' the crowd call back in unison.
'Spot-cunting-on, you pits!'
This is all too much for me. I leapfrog right over the hurdle of SHIRTINESS on the rage-o-thon track, and alight smack dab athwart my co-jones on the hurdle that reads PALEOLITHIC MURDEROUSNESS. Crying out in a voice choked with rage, as they say, 'FUCK YOU CHAVWORTHY, I AIN'T NO FUCKING CHAV!' I seize on the nearest object to hand--in this case, the last remaining scone--and hurl it with all the fury I can muster straight at the power button of the telly; only I miss by about a half a foot and the scone goes crashing into, and through, the screen. (They're none of your namby-pamby, borderline spongecakes, those scones of my Mum's.) Its tube smashed to bits, the darkened telly starts smoking and sending off sparks like an overheated toaster. But as if to spite me, with a cuntish, zombie-like tenancity worthy of the Terminator, JC gets one last dig in before the sound cuts out:
'Last, and certainly not least, Number 154: If you've ever had occasion to protest that you weren't a chav........well, I rest my case.'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TBC yet again, I'm afraid (YFC).
Next: dinner, consisting of my mum's signature Bosty-Drog-trouncing, rosemary-and-garlic-basted Cornish game hens, accompanied by liberal dollops of couscous and all-too-illiberal lashings of Beaujolais. And there was nothing too traumatic about the meal's midget-speak, which centred on such eminently unstroppifying topics as my drive over; life in the respective salt mines of Proctologitex, UEA and Palgrave Primary School (where my mum has a gig as a kiddie psychologist); and preliminary preparations for next summer's Party in the Park, Diss's one-horse answer to the Notting Hill Carnival. It was only in the last quarter of our time at table together, as my dad was clearing away the last of the dinner cooter-mints and my mum was cutting up the rhubarb crumble, that the ghost of awkwardness decided to pull up a chair and join us for dessert. It was just then, you see, that I happened to notice we were one person short for a four-handed, all-familial, post-prandial game of Cluedo; and thoughtlessly opened my gob to inquire into the whereabouts of Sidney, my still-at-home residing nineteen-year-old kid brother.
'I expect he's out on the town somewhere...carousing,' answered my mum through the merest soup's son of a grimace. 'Isn't that right, dear?' she asked my dad, as if seeking affirmation of her choice of this last word, 'carousing,' in preference to the hundreds of other available alternatives in Mr and Mrs McGyver's Private Thesaurus of Euphemisms.
'Mmm,' he answered gruffly with a nod, as he bit into his first gobful of rhubarbage--such that, until he resumed speaking a half-minute later after chewing and swallowing, I wasn't sure whether it was the word or the crumble that thus elicited his approval. 'I suppose that's about as good a word for the activity as any other, carousing. Nice Krauty-sounding word that, don't you think?--carousing. Frenchy-looking, but Krauty-sounding. Mind you, in this instance, I should have gone for something both Krauty-sounding and Krauty-looking--something along the lines of...mmm...I don't know................whoring?'
'Stanley!' my mum shouted across the table at him with outraged peremptoriness.
'Sorry, doveling. I admit I was well out of line there, in point of both civility and linguistic precision. Must be the Beaujolais talking. The nub of the whole crux of the thing, Nigel,' he continued, turning to me, 'is that Sidney's not far away tonight, and that he's promised to join us for dinner on Christmas day, so you'll be seeing him soon enough.' And then, back to mum: 'Will that do for a subject-closer?'
'To a turn, dear, to a turn.'
And that, bar the shouting (or, rather, in this case, silence), was it for dinner. Whatever Sid was up to, whether it was carousing or whoring or sheep-buggering, I didn't care to get involved, and so I held my piss, as did they, until after the last of the crumble was polished off. Then, with surprising, and, indeed, slightly hurtful promptitude, they bade me good night and hurried off to bed, leaving the washing up for next morning and me to settle down on to the front-room couch for a spot of telly. But even before switching on the set, I felt that something was missing from this particular run-through of the old familiar couch-cous-cous's passing-out routine, my appetite for that something having been whetted, and yet not half satisfied, by the two glasses of wine I'd had over dinner. And so, without quite knowing what I was about, I stumbled into the kitchen and popped open the fridge--and lo! What did I behold on the bottom tray, just above the crisper drawer, but an integral, un-torn-into four-pack of my beloved Stella! Awfully prescient of mum and dad to have seen to that provision, I said to myself en route back to the couch, scratching my pubes with one hand and cracking open my newly-filched tall bloke with the other.
My last memory of that night centres on a scene from some sort of seasonal claymation movie with talking mice (produced, perhaps by the Wallace and Gromit team?), and my first memory of the following morning centres on my dad standing in front of me, dressed in shorts and a V-necked cricketer's jumper, and flailing rather theatrically about in all directions with some sort of oversized fly-swatter.
'Have you taken up Tai-Chi since I was last here, Dad?' I ask him, shielding my eyes with one hand against the all-too-cheerily bright rays of sunlight passing from Bourgie Dawn's arse cheeks and through the unblinded front-room windows.
'Tai Chi? Good heavens, no!' he answers, stopping short and laying the fly-swatter down on the coffee table. 'Just practising my backhand. Care for a game of squash this morning, Nige?'
'Eventually, Dad, eventually,' I mutter, getting up from the couch and staggering into the bathroom to perform my morning 'blutions (i.e., the first three of the four esses). And afterwards, back in my old room, I rummage through the chest of drawers in search of some squashworthy togs. The only halfway serviceable things I manage to dig up are a pair of orange-on-yellow polka-dotted Bermudas that I haven't worn since fifth form (and that I can barely squeeze into) and a rather moth-eaten blue sailor's pullover that, as I've never set me okies on it before, presumably belonged to my grandfather or some other relative now long deceased. Back in the kitchen, I find the coffee pot full and freshly piping, and the table laid out with a fresh box of Weetabix cakes and a jar of peanut butter along with the necessary cutlery and dishery. First the Stella, now the Weetabix, I said to myself as I prepared the first of my eventual four Weetabix schmears, This is starting to get a wee bit cloying.
After breakfast, I step out front and find Dad, squash gear slung over his shoulder, chatting with one of the neighbours, a quadragenarian or quinquagenarian blokess whom he introduces to me as Jane Trippett-Jones. 'Jane's on the planning committee of the Town Council,' he explains, after we've taken leave of Ms T-J and are hoofing it up Louie's Lane in the general direction of the Squash Club, 'and she was just telling me of a proposal a certain bloke had the temerity to present to them, a proposal to turn a barn on Walcot Green into a garage for his car-repair shop. Can you imagine that--a glorified indoor scrap-heap taking up residence on such a sanctified preserve of old-style English country living? What an eyesore and earsore it would be! Why, it was worth vetoeing on grounds of proximate traffic congestion alone. The confounded cheek of the fellow!' Christ but these provincial geezers sure do seem to have an arse-load of time on their hands! I couldn't forbear ejaculating to myself, or adding: Back in London, I doubt I'd bat an eyelid if all of Hampstead Heath were converted into a giant 300-acre car park.
Aloud, I say: 'And what about Mum?' This is the question I've had in my mind's front pocket all along--I mean pretty much since waking up.
'What about her?'
'I mean, where's she got to?'
'Oh, she went up to Earsham to fetch Aunt Agatha.' (Agatha, my mum's widowed aunt, being the only living relative of the older generation still resident in the area.) 'The two of them will be back round lunchtime, I expect.'
Up at the Club, it would be fair to say that Dad wiped the court with my carcass. We played three games, and in one of them, I managed to score a measly two points; in the other two, he nixed me nine-love. The shogun-marriage-diet of Ms Stella Artois and the Duke of Marlboro hadn't exactly done wonders for my athletic prowess, especially at a sport I hadn't played regularly since fifth form. At least Dad, gorblessim, had the good grace not to gloat over the whole thing, as geezers of his generation are wont to do over the most cuntishly slight proofs of their enduring june-ness.
Then, that afternoon, all four of us (Mum, Dad, Aunt Aggie and YT) drove down to the cinema at Bugger St. Edmunds to take in a matinee showing of the new Disney adaptation of C. Staples Lewis, Sr.'s Lion, Witch & Wardrobe. In childhood, I'd taken to the Narnia books like a so-called duck to water, after the fashion of all nippers who are force-fed that sort of pre-juvenalial tripe. Later, though, at some point in my early teens I was tipped off to the whole Christological subtext of the books, and the magic was gone, as they say. And Disney's efforts to heathanise the whole thing retroactively--a la Peter Jackson on Tolkein--did not impress me. The whole thing fairly oozed the unsavoury odour of re-hydrated beef jerky, if you know what I mean. Still, I couldn't exactly blame Mum and Dad for thinking this was the sort of thing I'd cotton to; for what else did they have to go on, as far as my so-called current interests went? After all, I'd never breathed a word to either of them about my Stellaphilia or Arsenalophobia, as though I'd always assumed that in their eyes these passions would have figured as veritable by-words for Paedophilia and Hydrophobia.
Well, back at the ranch, I was still so knackered from my squash-workout that I conked out right after dinner (Chinese takeaway from Hing Lee on Mere Street) without first even availing myself of a second Stella tall bloke. Luckily it was an off-night for the Gunners, so in being absent from the telly I didn't miss out on my weekly dose of Arsnelsschadenfreude. Next morning, from the aforementioned BD arse-crack onwards, the whole house was abuzz with preparations for Christmas dinner. Mum was inermittently at the oven, first turning the scones then prodding the turkey; Dad almost constantly at the cooker, stirring his secret-recipe Christmas posset; while Aunt Agatha manned the micro-onda, feeding into its torpedo-bay a succession of side-dishes from the fridge (including, regrettably if inevitably, her perennially inedible plum pudding). I helped out mainly by staying out of the way. Too many Indian chefs spoil the kheer, as the saying goes, especially in a kitchen the size of a third-class compartment of a Calcutta to Delhi express train.
At 2 p.m., the appointed dinner hour, the table is set, everything that's meant to be piping hot is there, piping away; whilst everything that's meant to be cold is also there, chilling out; and the only thing that's holding us up from tucking in is the arrival of my brother. Come a quarter past, there's still no sign of Sid; nor come half-past. Dad starts beating a tattoo on the table to the accompaniment of a whistled rendition of 'Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,'--and not in a poncey Bertie-Woosterish kind of way, as if to say, 'Tut-tut. Unpunctuality is such a frightfully underrated vice'; more of in a blokey Cecil-J.-Rhodesish kind of way, as if to say, 'I'm fittin' to teach this fucking savage Boer a lesson in punctuality!'; whilst Mum and Aunt A start, as they say, exchanging nervous looks.
Then, as the grandfather clock in the front room is just striking a quarter of three, I hear the front door being flung open so violently that the inside knob makes an audible crack against the opposite wall of the vestibule; and my brother barges in, visibly pissed and reeking like a lorry-load of well-fermented nappies.
'About bloody time, Sidney,' Dad reproaches him without raising his voice or twitching a nostril; which co-jonic self-mastery on his end of course makes the reproach all the more ominous. For a second or two I start to think a cross-generational shirtfest between the two of them is in the offing, and I glance over my mental notes on Ronnie’s comportment during my recent near-scuffle with Herbie Hancock at the Ape, preparing myself to step in with a letter-perfect copy of that performance. But Sid obligingly tweaks the tension just enough to postpone, if not preempt, an outright confrontation in answering, 'Yeah, well, sorry, Pops. But this ain’t exactly the first stop on the holiday slop-crawl for me, if you know what I mean. What are you lot drinking today, anyways?' He then scoops up our still-unopened fresh bottle of Beaujolais from the table and takes a gander at the label, painfully sounding out the words as he reads: ‘Jacks de Bof Boojolays Nowvoo. Two-thousand-ought five. Funny, innit, that "2005" is the same in French and in English? [Here Dad presses a thumb and forefinger into his okies in apparently unspeakable consternation.] Anyways, I’ll stick to beer, if youse don’t mind.’ Whereupon, having re-placed the bottle, he traipses off to the kitchen, whence, a moment later I hear issuing the stentorian ejaculation, lifted straight out of the Goldilocks story, 'WHO’S BEEN DRINKING MY STELLA!’ As I’m pretty sure that at this point a dining-room-to-kitchen shouting match between the two of us would serve as a veritable Archduke-Fritz-Ferdie-assassination-type catalyst to an all-out McGyverworld War involving everyone present, I diplomatically excuse myself from the table and join Sid in front of the fridge.
‘Well, of course it was me,’ I fess up to him with, as they say, disarming simplicity. ‘I’m sorry—I didn’t know you had dibs on the Stellas.’
‘And who the fuck else would have done, you shaved pit? Dad? You know he’s no beer-drinker.’
In hindsight it all made sense. As to his cuntish meanness on the score of the single-can-filching itself, well, there was no need of hindsight to explain that—it was totally characteristic of him. He’d always been a proprietary anorak, ever since he was a knee-high to a sausage dog. I remember particularly vividly one occasion, dating from his fourth year and my tenth, on which, having been presented by our grandma with a roll of Smarties to share with me, he’d meticulously counted out exactly half the contents into my hand and then proceeded to swallow the lot of the other half right there on the spot, ‘to make sure,’ as he'd said, ‘you don’t get your teef into any of my stash.’ So, then, knowing as I do that there’s no way of pacifying him but to repay him in kind and toot sweet, I pull out my wallet and hand him a tenner. ‘There,’ I say. ‘Knock yourself up. Buy yourself a whole 'nother four-pack, and keep the cambio.’
'Ooh,' he taunts me, pocketing the note and screwing up his face into a sneer startlingly reminiscent of the phiz of his could-have-been namesake, the Sex Pistols' second bassist, 'His Grace the Duke of Moneybags stoops to throw a farthing to the grubby li'ol guttersnipe! I'm sure it's a great sacrifice for you, you cunting wax-jobbered pit.' For just an instant my right hand jerks reflexively towards my top shirt button, but luckily just in time my left hand intervenes Dr-Strangelove-style to check it before it quite reaches its destination. 'No, my dear FC,' the voice of my left hand says to me, 'You shall not suffer yourself to become shirty over this piffling pseudo-contretemps. You shall not even suffer yourself to make the Unprodigal Son's set speech, which, you will remember, commences thus: You think I have it easy on my 30 grand a year? Well I, unlike you, have rent to pay; I, unlike you, YFC, have to cover the costs of my own car insurance, etc. Admittedly, the Unprodigal Son is the role of a lifetime, and equally admittedly you are fast approaching the age beyond which it is quite impossible play the part gracefully. Nonetheless, I must strenuously insist that you keep your gob zippered, lest from your liberated tongue should fly the verbal spark that blows to pieces the very 1914-vintage powder keg in the interest of whose perduring wholeness you have repaired hither.' He talks a bit too posh for my taste, does my old El Haitch; and his metaphors are a bit screwy, but he generally offers pretty good advice. So I hold my piss, and simply say, 'We'd better be getting back to the table, Sid. The turkey's getting cold,' and leave the kitchen, waiting for him to catch up in his own good time (i.e., a full minute later, after he's pounded his first tall bloke and cracked into a second one).
The convo gets off to a pretty sluggish start, as it seems Auntie and Sid are much more up-to-date on (or indifferent to) the goings-on in Mum and Dad's life than I've been lately, and I'm not, as I've already hinted, particularly game on volunteering any info on my life back in London. I eventually think to take a rather lame crack with the ice pick myself and ask Sid how things are going over at Just Beds, this furniture shop on the south end of town where, according to Mum and Dad, he's been working part-time since last summer.
'Well, druths, the pay is shite, but, on the other hand, lolling about all day in a showroom filled wall to wall with mattresses does have its perks. It has its ups and downs, you could say. Its ins and outs, too: you know what I mean? Eh? Eh? Ups and downs and ins and outs; ins and outs and ups and downs--'
'Yes, Sidney,' my Dad wearily cuts in. 'I'm sure he knows exactly what you mean. And so, I'm sure, do the rest of us.' I can tell that by now the wind, as they say, has been taken out of his sails, and he's simply biding his time till the whole sodding holiday blows over. Aunt Aggie's segue is hardly calculated to lighten the mood, especially for your-fucking-cunt's truly: 'Speaking of, ahem, seksyooal congress, have you got yourself a young lady friend back in London, Nigel?'
Just the kind of question her gossip-hungry, wool-gathering widow's arse would ask. 'Not at the moment, Auntie, but I have been working on it. To be honest, I've been going through a bit of a rough patch lately--'
'What he means,' my brother says, 'is that he's queer but that he just ain't got the balls to admit it.'
'Now, Sidney, you know that word has been scientifically discredited,' says Mum. 'We don't call them queers anymore: we call them persons of diverse sexual orientation.' (Note well that her first impulse is to rush to the defence of her shrink's anorak rather than to the defence of her older son's masculinity.)
'No,' I jump in, doing what I must say is a pretty creditable impression of Dad two minutes earlier, 'You nailed it, Siddie old boy. That's me in a nutshell. Queer as a three-pound note. As the pitch of the High Street of the Castro District in gay old Frisco. As Schlong's hatband. Oops, did I say schlong? So sorry to drag the level of conversation upwards from the toilet to the lower waistline.'
Whereupon I start balling up my napkin in my lap in preparation for my Unprodigal Son's righteous exit (which, properly executed, will culminate in my slamming my bedroom door behind me and blasting classic schlong rock at Level 11 on the hi-fi), as Aunt Aggie, totally oblivious of the ambient knife-sliceable tension, (Gorbless her gormlessness), asks no one in particular, 'I'm afraid I don't understand. What is the meaning of this word schlong?--I've never heard it before.'
'Schlong,' says my dad, with what I guess you'd call an impish smile that suggests he's been waiting for a chance to explain this for years, 'is a slang word, of Yiddish provenance, for the membrum virile.'
(AA): 'The membroo whateelay?'
'The membrum virile: the male member, the rod or yard, better known in these pedantic times as the penis.'
Thus commences a most captivating open university lecture on the etymology of the word schlong [from the German Schlange = queue, tail, snake or serpent] delivered by Dad, veering occasionally into the adjacent territories of psychoanalysis and theology, and followed up by a no less captivating Q&A session. Whodathunkit?--that the broaching of such an off-colour topic would serve to nix Mum's prudishness, Aunt Aggie's gormlessness, my own stroppiness and Sid's all-around cuntishness all at one go? But that's exactly what it does do, such that, come 4:00, as the whole discussion rounds itself out in a satisfying conclusion, just as we're polishing off the last of the grub along with a second bottle of wine (of which even Sid deigns to partake), the old mine-shaft's ghost is of exactly the right temperature and texture for us to proceed without interval into the front room and to settle round the tree for the exchanging of presents.
There are few surprises on my end of the Santa delivery lorry: from Aunt Aggie, I receive her perennial bequest of a five-quid book of McDonald's vouchers. Back in the late 80s, I could stuff my tykish self to the verge of puking three times over with one of these voucher-books of hers; now, the whole sheaf, with an extra quid thrown in, barely covers the cost of curing a single case of the tummy-rumbles. It's hardly worth making the trip anymore. From Mum and Dad I get the usual assortment of ill-fitting fashionless togs that'll go straight from the boot of the Mazda to the return register at Mark's and Spencer's, along with, from Mum alone, a sodding self-help book penned by that walking fart Dr Phil, the ninth one she's given me so far. But I've pre-empted this perennial interventionist sally of hers in having chosen as my gift to her a satire on self-help books entitled Release the Imbecile Within that I came across at the a couple of weeks ago at the Hampstead Waterstone's. Hopefully, she hasn't had every humorous atom in her body chemo'd out of her by her professional life, and will take some pleasure in reading the book. To judge by the expression on her phiz as she tore off the wrapping she was not amused by the title. Anyway, fuck her (in a strictly non-Oedipal sense, natch) if she can't take a joke. As for Dad--I mean the gift, I'd chosen for him, it was a 10-CD boxed set of the complete D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's Gilbert and Sullivan recordings, the ones I remember him playing to death in their LP format in days gone by. I'd worried he'd already bought the reissue years ago; but, no, he says, he's still only got the LPs, and he seems to be genuinely touched by the pains I've taken towards the care and feeding of his G&S-ian hobby horse. Then, vis-a-vis Sidney, as I'd no idea what to get him, I'd gone the Aunt Aggie route--albeit on a grander scale--via a 30-quid HMV voucher.
'Thanks, druths,' he says, clutching me in a nose-stopping, piss&shit-permeated hug. 'With this, I can get the new Arctic Monkeys CD, and the next one too, probably. But ain't you going to open my present? It's the last one of the heap, innit?'
And fuck me with a knobbily-barked, 50-growth-ring-thick Yule Log if the solely unopened package, a circular, shoebox-sized thing wrapped in overlapping lengths of loo paper didn't have my name (and his) on it! And in this box is contained the only real surprise of the whole parcel-shucking session (I'm afraid a fudged a bit when I said there were few surprises on my end): namely, a tan-and-gray chav's cap, just like the one sported by those blokes who roughed me up on Halloween night. My gag reflex, as they say, is to vomit; and yet, for all of Sid's cuntishness, I can tell on account of all this beaming he's doing that he's put no small amount of forethought into this choice. So, for the time being, I'm speechless.
'Don't you like it, Nige? You want to ride all o' the new jet, dontcha?'
'Ride all of the new jet?'
'You know, sport the trendiest clothes. All the lads in Diss and Thetford and Norwich are wearing them there hats. I got 20 of 'em meself.'
'Well, of course I like it. I'll wear it with pride.' (omitting to add, of course, but only indoors and when you [and no on else] are around.)
After clearing away the confetti, all four of us adjourn to the front room and take our places round the coffee table; Dad brings out great mugfuls of the posset--which has been simmering on the stove at a scalding 99-degrees-centigrade all through dinner--Mum brings in a plateful of scones; and, munching and dunking, we launch into the final module of the traditional McGyver Christmas, the all-family, least-common-denominator, soporific telly-viewing session. Aunt Aggie isn't shy about commandeering the remote--probably in the hope of ultimately subjecting the rest of us to some pre-historic holiday cine-screed featuring Bing Crosby or Perry Como--and no more than five channels into her ten-seconds-per station bout of channel-browsing, she happens to alight on the isolated image of a bloke sporting yet another one of those Sherlock-Holmesian chav hats.
'Do you see, bro?' Sid ejaculates, pointing at the screen. 'He's wearing one of 'em.'
'Yes, I see.'
But back to the bloke himself. He's pacing up and down some kind of stage with a microphone in his hand, like he's in the middle of a rant or sermon. A stationary electro-banner at the bottom of the screen reads: 'YOU'RE WATCHING THE JEFF CHAVWORTHY HOLIDAY SPECIAL.' It obviously doesn't take the powers of deduction of SH himself to see that this fellow is a stand-up comedian, and one of some fame or notoriety (although none of us seems to have heard of him).
Mum, doubtlessly anticipating nothing but wall-to-wall pottymouthism in this quarter says, 'Go on, Auntie. Skip ahead to the next channel.'
But Sid will have none of that. 'No. Stay here, Double-A. I want Nige to see what riding all o' the new jet is all about.'
For my part, I gots to admit, my sociological interest vis-a-vis the greater phenomenon of chavvism has been piqued. So, in the absence of further vetoes from Dad or Auntie, we hear out Mr Chavworthy.
'Us chavs,' he's just then saying, when we show up, 'get no respect. No ffffffffffucking respect! And the fing that really gets on me tetons about all this is, you lot out there--yeah, you lot: you pits down there in the pit and you pits lounging on your fat arses at home and munching on your Christmas scones--are a fuckofalot more like us than you'd ever care to admit.' On the whole the act is pretty convincing. Every now and then, though, he lets slip a hard 't' or a round 'o' that betrays his origins in the poshility, that proves he's just another one of those wanking Oxbridge posers like S. B. Cohen.
'I mean,' he continues, 'a lot of people seem to fink that being a chav is purely a matter of style, that clothes make the chav. Take my hat, for instance. No, take it please!'
So saying, he doffs his cap and flings it into the crowd like a frisbee. The camera cuts to a teary-eyed blokess, a tarted up harlot in a pink terry-cloth track suit, who without taking her eyes off the stage, scoops up the hat from the floor and clutches it to her tits in a manner reminiscent of a man-knicker-collecting Tom Jones fan. When the camera's back on him he's crowning himself with another, identical cap, which he's presumably just extracted from the pocket of his hoodie or somewhere thereabouts.
'No worries. Them fings only cost a quid-and-a-half at Tesco's. But like I was saying, a lot of people fink being a chav is all about dressing a certain way, that if you don't wear one of these here Burberry hats, or gold-pound coins on your diggits, that somehow lets you off the hook of chavdom. But the way I sees it, it ain't like that at all. Being a chav is more of a kind of a spiritual fing. It's a whole way of looking at the world, innit? Meaning, irregardless [sic] of the way you dress, if you fink a certain way, like it or not, you are a chav, and you'll just have to live wivvit, for the rest of your cunting natural. It therefore follows, if you're one of these pits who've fought all along that you wasn't a chav, you really ought to take a good gander at yourself, and into yourself, and ask yourself, "Mightn't I hav been a chav all along wivvout knowing it, at my insoo?" And that's where I come in, you see. I've devised an, ahem, chav's checklist [reaching into his his hoodie hold, and producing and unfolding a sheet of paper], a one-hundred-and-fifty-four-point catalogue of chavworthy qualities itemised in a handy dandy if...then format. If you do or are any one of these 154 fings...you might be a chav. Get it? Oh, and one more fing: the list is arranged in order of ascending chav-clinchingness, meaning the higher the number, the more chavvish the quality associated wivvit. Here's just a little sample. [Pretending to read off the paper, whilst resuming his pacing routine.]
'Number 5: If you've fucked your sister in the last 24 hours, you might be a chav.'
'Number 24: If you've ever taken a chip kebab to a job interview, you might be a chav.
'Number 35: If a copper, or some other such quote-unquote authority figure asks you for identification, and you show him some article of jullery hanging round your neck, you might be a chav.'
'Number 87: If your richest relative changes flats, and he don't bovver to call you to help him wivvah move, on account awvvah fact that he's forefeited all of his furniture to the local council........you might be a chav.
[I can't repress a chuckle here. I say to myself, This bloke ain't half bad.]
'Number 95: If you fink marmite is the other dark meat.................you might be a chav.'
'Number 117: If you fink a five-course meal is a bucket of KFC and a four-pack............................you might be a chav.'
But now, after this last one-liner, for just a second or two, the camera cuts to a close-up centred on Chavworthy's phiz, and during that briefest of instants, his virtual okies make contact with my actual ones; and, absurd as it seems, I get the distinctly schphincter-dilating, un-Heimlich-like feeling that he's looking straight at me, and addressing me alone. And he resumes:
'Number 127: If you're under the age of 70 and regularly wear a string vest..................you might be a chav.'
('O come off it!' I can't resist interjecting aloud. 'I thought you said it wasn't clothes that made the chav,' and Mum motions 'Hush!' to me in sign language.)
'Number 134: If you fink Stella Artois is a perfectly respectable mid-priced continental import beer..............................you might be a chav.
'Number 146: If you fink fish and halapenyo poppers are the dernier cri in English cuisine....................................................you might be a chav.'
'Number 150: If you went to college at some Johnny-come-lately university like, I dunno, the University of East Anglia [?], and look down your nose at alumnuses of such venerable ex-polytechnics as, say, the University of Luton [?!]...............................................................................you might be a chav.'
By now, Sid, Dad, Aunt A, Mum--everybody but me--is positively in stitches over this well-nigh-otherworldy cunt's shenanigans, whilst I'm holding on for dear unshirtiness with both hands to the front cushion of the sofa, practically impaling my palms with my fingernails through the fabric.
'Number 151: If you've ever walked out on a dinner date with a girl 'cos you fought the restaurant was too quote-unquote trendy or ersatz, then guess what?'
'YOU MIGHT BE A CHAV?' the crowd call back in unison.
'Spot-cunting-on, you pits!'
This is all too much for me. I leapfrog right over the hurdle of SHIRTINESS on the rage-o-thon track, and alight smack dab athwart my co-jones on the hurdle that reads PALEOLITHIC MURDEROUSNESS. Crying out in a voice choked with rage, as they say, 'FUCK YOU CHAVWORTHY, I AIN'T NO FUCKING CHAV!' I seize on the nearest object to hand--in this case, the last remaining scone--and hurl it with all the fury I can muster straight at the power button of the telly; only I miss by about a half a foot and the scone goes crashing into, and through, the screen. (They're none of your namby-pamby, borderline spongecakes, those scones of my Mum's.) Its tube smashed to bits, the darkened telly starts smoking and sending off sparks like an overheated toaster. But as if to spite me, with a cuntish, zombie-like tenancity worthy of the Terminator, JC gets one last dig in before the sound cuts out:
'Last, and certainly not least, Number 154: If you've ever had occasion to protest that you weren't a chav........well, I rest my case.'
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TBC yet again, I'm afraid (YFC).
Labels: Aunt Agatha, Dad, Diss, Jeff Chavworthy, Mum, Sid, Xmas
posted by Rugby McGyver | 3:14 am
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