Ape Night Afterdusk: Part Two

'So, you're saying,' Steve hazards, 'that we might as well pack it all in, disband, and--horribile dictu--encourage our dispersed membership to report to their respective local Gunners'-fan-club recruiting offices?'

'No, I'm simply suggesting that, out of respect for those of us who regard an Arsenal-spearheaded English UEFA championship as the least of eight evils, we should postpone our next meeting till Arsenal are eliminated from the rounds, or till May 17, whichever comes first.'

About midway through the preceding sentence, I start to sense through the table and the hams of my hands a vibration such as you might feel during the initial seconds of a Richter-Level Nine earthquake, and notice that the surface of the Hoegaarden in my half-empty pint glass is gently seesawing a few degrees upwards and downwards of the parallel. Taking cognizance at once the catastrophe these signs portend, I spring to my feet just in time to catch hold of Ochs's canteloupe-circumfrenced, shirtbound right forearm, wrestle it back down to table level and throw the full weight of my arseward-orientated carcass on to it; whilst on Ochs's left flank Lou, having been likewise tipped off, does the same to the other forearm. During the next few seconds, as I'm fighting the opening round of an undoubtedly hopeless bout against Ochs's still shirtward-hankering sinews, I cry out as loudly as I can do, 'CODE PUCE, JIMMY!' in the general direction of the bar.

Then, Cyril continues, a bit antsily, 'I foresee no alternative to my plan other than our splitting permanently into insular and Pan-European factions--unless, of course, I'm being overly presumptuous in speaking of an "us," and this grudging support of Arsenal as a pis aller is my own execrable private perversion, in which case I shall gracefully secede from the Bashers on my lonesome and withdraw to the nearest well-appointed hermit's cave. But I suspect that the Baron is right. [The italics on the phrase the Baron signify the condescending smirk through which Cyril can finally afford to utter it, now that Jimmy has arrived on the scene and is beginning to force-feed Boddington's to Ochs through a massive two-litre bottle stoppered with a rubber nipple.] Indeed, in my view, his estimate of the number of us potential insularists is shockingly conservative.'

By and by, as Dave is downing the second litre of his serving of Boddington's, the five-strong column of steel girders under my arse cheeks assumes a texture more akin to that of an uncountable column of modelling-clay or bubble-gum ridges; and when at last Jimmy is withdrawing the nipple of the empty bottle from the Baron's lips, I feel secure in relinquishing my seat on the forearm, and in signifying to Lou with a nod to do the same on his end. Then, reaching behind Dave's shoulders, I fold the two arms together crosswise on the table just in time to let them serve as a pillow for his downward-pitching forehead.

Meanwhile, Jake, having doubtlessly taken heart from Och's progressive incapacitation, has started to chip in his tuppence's worth: 'No, you're not alone, Ruhl. Don't get me wrong, I fucking hate the Gunners. Cor, you know, last December I was losing so many hours of peaceful sleep to nightmares of hand-to-hand knife fights with Thierry Henry and Jans Lehmann that I had to ask my GP for a fucking Xanax prescription (luckily, being a ManU fan, he was more than sympathetic to my plight). But unlike the vast majority of you lot, I remember the last time we Brits found ourselves stewing in this particular jar of pickle juice. I'm speaking, of course--or, rather, FYI--of the spring of '95, when Arsenal were last in the running for the old European Cup. I hated the Gunners back then every bit as much as I do now, but when it came to a toss-up between them and an assortment-pack of Frogs, Krauts, Sprouts and Dagoes, I bit the so-called bullet and cheered 'em on alongside the Arsenlophilic riffraff at my local. Of course, like I was saying, most of you lot were still in short trousers back then, so you just wouldn't understand.'

'There you have it,' concludes Cyril with cuntish triumphalism. 'Exhibit B: Insularist Arsenalophobe Number Two. Might I solicit the testimony of a certain Mr Ian Three?' [Ned raises his hand.] 'Excellent. And is Mr Ian Four present? [Same hand-signal from Ted.] What about Messrs Five and Six? Seven and Eight? [Here so many hands go up that I lose track of the identities of their respective owners.] You may lower your hands, gentlemen. I trust I've made my point. We insularist Arsenalophobes constitute, at minimum, two-fifths of the membership of this chapter, a substantial minority to say the least. And if secession is the only recourse you Pan-Europeanists are prepared to offer us, then secede we reluctantly shall do. But I believe that our very presence here tonight attests to our collective preference for keeping this particular bone of contention well hidden within the bosom of the family, so to speak. Look, sooner or later every organisation devoted to a great cause has been faced with a crisis of this kind. And it is on the basis of its capacity to weather such a crisis that it has either thrived or withered and died. Take the Catholic Church, for example: forty-some-odd-years ago, they confronted a groundswell, a veritable tsunami, of angry voices issuing from the great unwashed masses of their communicants, and calling for the abandonment of the traditional Latin liturgy in favour of texts in the vernacular languages. So, Pope What's-His-Nuts caved in, tossed out the missals chock-full of Kyrie Eleisons and Credos and printed up new ones chock-full of Lord-a-mercys and You-bet-your-fucking-cunt-I-believes. And look at the bloody Papists now. They need state-of-the-art irrigation systems just to pipe in enough holy water to keep up with the christenings. And take as another example the Anglican Church: back in the 80s, one Anglican in three was like, "Ordain women priests or I'm fucking turning Unitarian." So the old AB of C caved in, consented to the frocking of a couple hundred female vicars and curates, and twenty years later the C of E are...well, they're hanging in there at least. So, I submit, must the Great Church of Aresenalophobia heed the stirrings of Insularism within its breast; lest it pitch over stone-dead of a Pan-Europeanist-induced arythmia whilst lounging complacently in the shagreen-upholstered armchair that is this very room. In short, my fellow Bashers, if we want things to stay the same, things will have to change. I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Tottenham [meaning Mitch].'

'Well,' Mitch says, 'inasmuch as there's no precedent in the annals of our common law for coping with a crisis on this scale, I suppose by default we should defer to the opinion of our Chief Executive on the matter.' Thereupon he turns, with a glance over the rims of his spectacles, towards Reg, who throughout all of the foregoing proceedings has been uncharacteristically silent, his attention and fingers wholly absorbed in poring over and riffling through a midget's-pocket-sized book placed alternately, from one minute to the next, on the uppermost knee of his crossed legs, and on the patch of table directly in front of him. As neither the allusion to the post of chief executive nor the glance suffices to rouse Reg from his readerly lucubrations, Ned, who is seated to the latter's immediate left, takes it upon himself to prod Reg with a well-aimed forefinger to the ribs.

'Che?' Reg queries, laying the book open and face down on the table, and craning his phiz jerkily and hapharzardly about like that of a startled bunny rabbit.

'We were all wondering, Reg,' says Mitch, in a world-weary tone that I somehow associate with that of an Oxbridge-accredited pedant of yore entrusted with the tutelage of a particularly thick and unpromising scion of the poshility, 'what your thoughts were on this matter of Insular-versus-Pan-European Arsenalophobia.'

Whereupon, Reg shrugs nonchalantly and replies, 'Sono italiano. Questo soggètto non m'interessa. [Then, setting the book face-up and briskly riffling through a few pages.] Sono del Turino. Sono grande fan di Juventus. Spero che noi diámo martedi prossimo un grande colpo di piede ai vostri culi inglesi. [Riffling again, at a more furious pace.] Scusa, signora. Dove è il prossimo medico prottologistico? Mi cola sangue dallo sfintère. [Chucking the book on to the table in disgust and cuntsternation.] That's not right--fuck it. Might as well fess up in my native tongue. Lads, in view of the Gunners' late success on the continent, I can no longer in good conscience remain a resident or subject of this Kingdom, let alone a member of this Association so long as it remains based here. I've booked a compartment on a Turin-bound train leaving Waterloo Station at 1AM. Any of you lot care to join me?'

Well, I dare say I for one did very much care to join him. Problem was, I couldn't very well afford to do so, in view of my conflicting obligation to report to Proctologitex HQ bright-eyed and bushy-schlonged next morning. Oh, it was all very well for Reg to take the high tone, coming as he did, as they say, from money (as he had had occasion to let slip to me in an unguarded moment during one of our butcher's-half-dozen post-adjournment cul-a-culs); he'd find it well within his means to loaf about Italy right on into the second quarter of the century if it came to that. In any case, it would be an understatement to say I was not alone in my non-up-taking of Reg's offer. In fact, whether owing to motives of parallel nobility to mine own, or to sheer cuntishly craven cowardice, none of my butcher's-dozen fellow Pan-Europeanists evinced any more willingness than I did to board the presidential protest train--indeed, our table-flush palms, laid tumb-to-thumb-to-pinkie-to-pinkie, would have sufficed in the aggregate to onanise a largish sperm whale; and the one bloke who I assume would have signed up, if only out of sheer gormlessness, Ochs, was dead to the world at that moment.

And so, Reg, newly animated, it would seem, by our (in his okies) cuntish indifference to the Cause, rises, reaches over to take up his Italian phrase book, kicks his chair clean on back to the wall and resumes speaking whilst beginning to stride slowly, purposively, deliberately, clockwise round the table, like General Patton or some other such martinetish military cunt reviewing the troops, with arms folded behind his back, and hands fanning his arse cheeks with the phrase book, all the while: 'I thought as much. You're nothing but a pack of yssups, and believe you me, I'm hardly likening you to the bloke who wrote "The Ant and the Cicada" (sic) [sic]." That said, the question is, what's to become of you yssups after I'm gone? Oh, TBS, it's a bit perverse of me even to deign to preoccupy myself with such a subject--rather as it would be for God Almighty to preoccupy himself with a local by-election in Hell. But let's fantasise just for a moment that I actually still shiv a git about the north-canular destiny of the Bashers. That fantasy having been granted a due degree of indulgence, I can picture to myself no more suitable a candidate for carrying on the Reggian spirit of Arsenalophobia--albeit in a radically etiolated form--than Rugger here.'

By this stage of his circuit he is, in fact, standing right behind me, and he takes advantage of the presumably well-timed coincidence between his position and the allusion to my name to give me a coupla hearty thumps on the right shoulder (the last of which thumps happening to round itself out in a none-too-gentle burst of thumb-kneading that sets off my schlong's tortoise-head-retraction reflex at full panic speed, such that in two seconds flat I can feel the glans flush against my lower abdomen like a second navel.)

'Yes,' Reg continues, mercifully letting go of my shoulder and resuming his gait after a merely suitably rhetorical span of pausage, 'what Rugger lacks in seniority he more than makes up for in passion. On the other hand, unlike some of our other more devoted members [again leaving off walking, and with a glance of scornful repugnance down at Ochs], he can keep his hands clear of his shirt front when the occasion requires it.' [Finishing his circuit of the room at a brisk near-trot.] 'Well, I've said my piss, such as it is. Here's hoping at least a few of you grow a pair of coglioni between now and next Tuesday, and that we meet again in Turin. Arrivederla, voi fottente fichelle!' And with that, after pocketing the phrase book and cuntemptously waving at us a fist penetrated by a thumb between the first and middle fingers, he makes a beeline for the front door.

Well, some blokes, as the saying goes, thrust their well-lubricated schlongs into the cunt of Greatness; whilst others have the schlong of Greatness thrust into their all-too-poorly-lubricated schphincters. Obviously, as I then realised, the moment of Reg's egress from the Ape coincided with my initiation into the second coitional rite, and on account I thought I'd best rise to the occasion toot sweet, lest my flaccidity should encourage the insatiable yet fickle hermaphrodite to withdraw and go off in search of a more accommodating fuckbuddy. The handiest, so to speak, means I could contrive just then towards the attainment of the aforesaid state of tumescence involved the timely claiming or exercising of my already-official prerogative as Sergeant-at-Pints with a suitably presidential bearing; such that (so I hoped) having caught the deferential bug in the act of rendering unto me what had already been mine for a month running, the rest of the lads would succumb altogether to the virus when I subsequently began to throw my weight around on matters not strictly within the bailiwick of the SAP.

So, even before the two slices of air brought into existence by Reg's departing carcass had resandwiched themselves together, I took it upon myself to query the room, in a tone intended to suggest a Reg-worthy obliviousness of the political cuntretemps that had just befallen us, 'Is everyone OK pint-wise at the moment?' [An all-too-brief apathetic murmur of Yeahs ensues.] 'Well then, how are we for popperage? I can't help noticing that the bowl at the far right end of the table is in sore need of refreshment.'

'That's all right,' says Jake, who's seated a mere cunt-width's remove from the aforesaid bowl. 'We're all [hiccup] poppered out over here.'

'Right, then, what do you lads say to our proceeding forthwith to the ceremonial lighting of the Arsenalabrum? Lou, would you care to do the honours? ['Delegate, delegate,' is, after all, the cardinal rule of executive leadership.] I'm afraid I'm all out of matches, myself--'

'Not so fast, Rugger,' says Mitch, whisking off his spectacles in the cuntishly effective, albeit cliched, rhetorical fashion vouchsafed only to the four-eyed tribe. 'You're not President yet. Let us not forget that, by tradition, the Presidency of this association reverts to the longest-standing member. And now [repeatedly thwacking his upper shirty-front with all five diggits of his right hand] I am that member. Reg himself implicitly deferred to this tradition when he remarked that what you lacked in seniority you more than made up for in passion. Well, with all due deference in turn to Reg, I ask: "What does passion count for in the absence of experience?"'

(YFCT, cue-cummer-tempratoored): 'Nada mucho, Mitch, I admit--again with all due deference to Reg. But as a matter of fact, I've got scads of experience. I'll have you know that I was talking shit about Arsenal when you were still in...well, when you still had half a thatch of hair and a non-bifocal ocular prescription.'

(Mitch, wincing, then shaking his head more in sorrow than in stroppiness): 'Late blow, Rugger, late blow. But that's beside the point. The point is, as far as this club is concerned, hours clocked in at non-official Arsenal-bashing, number though they may in the thousands, do not count as transfer credit hereunto. Christ, for all of the half-schlonged Arsenalophobic broadsides you've seen fit to let fly over the past few months, do you have any idea of what a risk to life and limb being a member of this association constitutes--and in this chapter more than in any other? It's all very well being, say, a Croydon-based Arsenal-Basher. Down there, across the river, it's a number-league never-neverland. Down there, they could burn a Thierry Henry wicker man as tall as the fucking Gherkin and no Aresnal supporter would bother to make the crossing for the sake of pissing on the fucking thing. But up here, a stone's throw from Highbury, it's a whole nother bowl [sic] of wax. We could be barged in on by a pack of Gooners at any moment. You weren't around yet the last time that happened, Rugger, and I think the four or five others who were will back me up when I say it wasn't exactly a love-in, or a toad-in-the-hole-recipe-swapping session. I've got the scars to prove that it wasn't. See this here mark on my arm? [He holds up the back of his right forearm to the light and with the forefinger of the other hand traces a crescent-shaped white mark stretching practically all the way from his wrist to his elbow.] That's from when the doctors sewed me up after re-setting my ulna. The bone was jutting three inches out from the flesh. And then, [standing up and reaching for his flies], I've got another scar down here...'

'...That's all right, Mitch. I hope I'm not being prematurely presidential in urging you to keep your trousers zipped. Well, lads, Mitch has certainly got a case for contesting my candidacy. I can't say as I find it at all convincing, but there it is. So then, what say ye? Do any of you lot cotton to the notion of a Mitchian presidency?'

'I'm certainly all for it,' says Stu, before I've even properly re-stoked my lungs with the first post-interrogatory draught of air. 'Mitch has drawn blood in the cause of Arsenalophobia, which in my eyes, at least, counts for a helluva lot more than passion or pure verbal bashing-experience. TBS, he's got my vote.'

Now, although I was as at least as shocked as the next Basher at Reg's departure, now that he was gone I couldn’t very well say the same on the score of this particular post-Reggian development, viz. the splintering off of a newly-whittled Anti-Ruggerian faction under the leadership of Mitch and Stu. I could hardly in good conscience say Et tu, Mitch or Stu to either of them; or affect to suppress the slightest soup’s son of surprise or disappointment in face of my discovery of this here coup or putsch. For I had always got a decidedly so-called negative vibe from the two of them from the earliest days of my membership; a vibe that was easily up-chalk-able to their shared roots in that supposedly elite fraternity of lifelong Tottenham supporters, 'born' as neither of them tired of boasting, 'within the sound of the halftime cheer at White Hart Lane'. Native-born Tottenham fans, let it be said, constitute by far the most cuntishly snobbish subspecies of Londonogenetic Arsenal-bashers; the most unapologetically jingoistic or racialist National Party agitator or Ku Klux Klansman can’t hold a protractor to their noses when it comes to looking down on those people hailing from the wrong side of the postcode boundary. Hence, I had always simply assumed, at no great cost either to my imagination or to my goodwill, that Mitch and Stu harboured fantasies of transforming our association into a kind of puppet or client statelet of the Spurs' fan club, and that they could be counted on to take advantage of any political crisis chaise nooz towards the effecting of that selfsame end. I had indeed been known to muse, on more than one occasion, in hearing of Ronnie and Lou alone and strictly on the LD, that if it ever came down to a choice between, on the one hand, remaining an official Arsenalophobe under the aegis of a Spursophilic administration and, on the other, going it alone once again as a freelance Arsenal-basher, I would very probably plump for the latter alternative. Little did I know how soon, and in what cuntishly deadly earnest, this very choice would be forced upon me.

Well, in short, I certainly saw no point in keeping my piss-stream clear of this particular third rail, as Ochs might have put it. So, addressing the group in toto, but with both okies joined pointedly to Mitch's now-re-spectacled pair, I say: 'I'd have expected as much, Stu. Let me amend my last proposal: "What do the rest of you lot think of the notion of doffing your respective colours and donning the lilywhite livery of Tottenham?"'

'N-n-n-now, Rugger,' Mitch remonstrates, the gathering beads of sweat standing out on his pate like drops of quicksilver, 'I th-th-th-think you're being just a wee bit p-p-p-paranoid. It h-h-h-hardly follows automatically from the fact that Stu and I are Tottenham supporters that we wish to transform the Bashers into a Spurs-only association.'

'Oh, really?' chimes in this teenage bloke name of Eddie (who usually keeps his gob well zippered), with a mystifyingly crestfallen phiz. 'You two had really got my hopes up.'

'But Eddie,' I say, in mingled befuddlement and cuntsternation, 'You're wearing a Liverpool shirt.'

'And you're wearing a Wigan shirt, Rugger. What of it? We're both just conforming to Reg's barmy club regulations. Fact is, I tried to join up with the Spurs, but they wouldn't have me. They said that, seeing as how I was from Highgate, I didn't qualify for membership in their club. So I joined up with you lot instead. I know this line of quizzing is getting a bit old at this point in the evening, but WTF: "Am I really alone in wishing this club were a de facto annex of the Spurs?" Show of hands, please?'

And fuck me with one of those wiry, ten-inch-circumfrenced bottle brushes they tamp down cannonballs with if two-fifths of the right hands in the room didn't immejiately all go up in unison at the instigation of Eddie's query. After factoring the insularists out of the tally of non-raisers, I concluded with no small amount of dismay that the surviving army of pure Arsenalophobes comprised a total of, at most, four souls: Ronnie, Lou, myself and, most probably, the still-out-for-the-count Ochs.

(Eddie again): 'Right, then. I am pleased hereby to announce that the inaugural meeting of the North London Shadow Spurs will convene in 45 minutes, at midnight sharp, at the sign of my local, the Indolent Lemur, in Highgate. Mitch, you can be our President; Stu, our Secretary and--if there are no objections--I'll be our Sergeant at Pints.'

And with that, Eddie rises and exits the premises, followed by a practically goose-stepping procession of his eight-strong Spur-humping minions. As the last coupla pairs of jackboots of the aforesaid detachment are clearing the Ape's blessed threshold, I turn to Cyril and say to him, with a phiz marked by lines of pure desperation and contrition, 'I don't suppose you're having second thoughts about your insularism?'

'Not at all,' says Ruhl. 'If anything, the secession of the Shadow Spurs has topped off the petrol tank of my first ones. What do you say, Rugger? Shall we call it a night, and play it by result-ratio between tomorrow and mid-May?'

For the briefest of time-spans, amounting to a butcher's coupla hummingbird-eyeblinks, I find myself groping, however tentatively, towards the ignition switch of Cyril's newly re-tendered hatchet-burying steamshovel. Then, fortunately, I remember Reg's parting words, and am thereupon assaulted down under by a veritable fusillade of pins and needles, as my scrotal tissue smoothens itself out as though newly injected with 50 ccs of Botox; and fuck me once again with the above-mentioned cannon-brush if I don't feel my chin-stubble extending its length by a micrometre or two. And I answer Cyril in a voice well within Ochs's upper range:

'Not just yet, Ruhl. I revert to the last tabled item on the agenda: the ceremonial lighting of the Arsenalabrum. Lou, do you still fancy doing the honours (as I'm afraid I'm still out of matches)...?'

Lou, gorblessim, is game enough to take his cue, and begins Harpomarxically patting down his pocketless shirtyfront, turning his trouser pockets inside out and taking off and knocking against the table one of his shoes, all in ostensible search of 'tches. Cyril, practically exuding visible steam, patiently if stroppily sits out this panto up to shoe-knock number two or three, then says:

'I suppose you two must have your little joke. Very well, have it. But not at the expense of my party. [Turning to Jake qua nearest-to-hand-fellow-traveller.] What do you lads say to our adjourning to Redford's up in Chipping for the inaugural meeting of the North London Insularist Arsenal-Bashers' Association?'

Well, I need hardly say that Cyril's fellow insularists answered this question pretty much as they would have done if it had been an announcement that, say, Scarlett Johannson was about to pull up stark naked on horseback out front; in their devil-take-the-hindmost-spirited stampede abandoning Lou, Ron and myself for a trio of disconsolate Ochs-sitters. In finding myself so suddenly in this hyperpathetic condition, I didn't know whether to cry, rend my JR-emblazoned mantle to shreds or wax philosophical. So, with a WTF-ish sigh, I opted impulsively for the third alternative:

'Whodathunkit a mere two hours ago?' I pontificated. 'That it would have come to this: our twoscore-strong phalanx reduced to a puny scouting party of four? That three-quarters of the pride of North-London Arsenal-Bashing would turn out to be Tottenham-lovers or cuntinental Arsenal-fellators? Och, it's a dark day in the Kingdom of Arsenlaphobia indeed when counterfeit Isabelas outnumber the coinage of the Royal Mint three to one.'

'Well, Rugger, there is at least one bright spot in all of this,' says Ronnie.

'What's that?'

'You were promoted to President.'

'What makes you say that? In the first place, nobody ever seconded Reg's nomination [here I cut him a dirty, guilt-trip-shanghai-ing 'I'm not gonna name any names'-ish look"]; and in the second place, even if that nomination on its own counted as a de facto appointment, I don't see how there can be so much as a cunt's-shadow of significance to the notion of being president of a defunct club.'

'What d'ye mean a defunct club? If memory serves me, neither the Tottenham-lovers nor the Insularists walked out of here with a club charter in their hands.'

'That might be because we hadn't got one.'

'Hear me out, Rugger. That was a sort of...an...er...metaphor, that bit about the club charter. ['Sure,' I can't help remarking as a withering aside to my nameless, faceless and arseless wax dummy of a second wheel, 'if the natural habitat of the metaphor is the rectum of Ronnie Livingstone.'] What I meantersay is, er...well, didn't I catch each of their spokesmen announcing that they'd be meeting under the aegis of a different name-- the North London Shadow Spurs and the North London Insular Arsenalophobes, respectively?'

'Yeah, and so?'

'Well, that means they're Bashers no more; that they've effectively excommunicated themselves from our church, and that, as far as the parent organisation can in future be concerned, the Arsenalophobic archbishopric of North London remains in our--or, rather, your--possession.'

Fuck me a third time with the old cannon brush if he didn't have a point. 'Well and persuasively argued, Ronnie. You really ought to try out for a Barristership at the Old Bailey. '

(Ronnie, blushing tweren't-nothing-ishly): 'Maybe someday. Right now, I'd settle for a post as Sergeant at Pints of the North London Arsenal Bashers.'

'Well, then, Sarmajor, ten-hut! Forward march to the bar and order us a round.'
'Soitanly, Mr President.' But just as Ronnie's rising from his chair, I hear Jimmy reminding us that it's about that time (and then some) as follows:

'YODLEAY-EEE-FUCKING-HOO, MY FELLOW MOUNTAINEERS AND BLUEGRASS ENTHUSIASTS! SORRY I'M A BIT SLOW ON THE DRAW TONIGHT, VOLKER--YOU CAN BLAME IT ON THE BASHERS. IN ANY CASE, THE SEDULOUS APE IS NOW CL-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-SED! SLAM-'EM AND SCRAM-UM NO-O-O-O-O-O-W'S ALL I'VE GOTTA SAY, OR YOUR PINTS IS...ER...MY-NTS!'

So, in the next few seconds, as per usual, Jimmy makes his way round to our area, and, gesturing towards Ronnie's erect person, I say:

'I assume there's time for another round, Jimmy, and that we and our'n are welcome to stay on.'

'You'll have to snip my head off to untie me, Rugger,' says Jimmy, in more stroppy tones than are his wont, 'cos I'm a frayed knot. Fact is, you lot have been securing yourselves a chapter a minute in Mr Sedule's bad books since eight o'clock. First there was that bout of French-bashing towards the beginning, then there was that Code Puce episode with your friend here--which I, for my own part, could have done without--then, finally, there was all that talk about the possibility of a pack of yobbish Arsenal fans barging in and causing a ruckus. In short, from here on out, and starting about five minutes ago, Mr Sedule wants Fannie Adams to do with the Bashers.'

'Oh, come on, Jimmy. You and Sedgie are making fountains out of old mills. In the first place, that so-called bout of French-bashing was over faster than you could have said 'zoot all oars'--plus, the sole perpetrator of it footered the camp a while ago. Secondly, you'll have no cause to fear anyone's barging in here and getting shirty with us once that front door's locked. And thirdly, with regard to Ochs, well, that earlier outburst of his notwithstanding, he's normally as harmless as a kitten. Our former clubmate just happened to have touched a raw nerve, you know, with all that talk of backing up Arsenal's continental ambitions.'

Speaking of touching a raw nerve, it was certainly gormless beyond belief of me to carry on so freely like this, practically repeating Cyril's speech verbatim, without having beforehand taken at least a toking gander down at the table to make sure all of Ochs's nerves were still well and truly cooked. Whether it was my words alone, in wending their way down the Baron's aural canal and into his snoozing sensorium, that were responsible for touching off the mini-catastrophe that followed; or whether he would have begun bestirring himself at that moment anyway, even in their absence--courtesy, say, of the importunities of his distended bladder--I cannot say. All I know is that, no sooner had I rounded out the peroration of my case for a Bashers' lock-in, as full-stopped and unquoted above, than I was much alarmed to begin registering a familiar tremor through the hams of my feet, and that by the time my okies and fingers had finally repaired to the appropriate rendezvous point for the follow-up, Ochs, still slumped forwards but at least nominally conscious, was already reaching across the table for the candelabrum; and that by the time Lou and I succeeded in wresting the latter away from his clutches, he had already seized and devoured the upper half of the Arsène Wenger candle from the head clear on down to the waistline. Luckily, this curious snack run did not quite mark the beginning of Ochs's catching of his second wind; luckily, all it took to send him back on a second package tour of the land of Nod was a gentle re-folding of the forearms and a slightly less gentle tableward shove of the head, but I realised after the conclusion of this episode that we were only living on borrowed time as far as bearing the eventual full brunt of the Baron's shirtiness went. And thus I was almost relieved when Jimmy, who'd been spectating on the whole thing in a wide-okied state of bemusement bordering on apallment, finally came round and said:

'So much for your pussycat in Ox's clothing, Rugger. I'm warning the lot of you: if you don't want to be banned from the Ape qua private indiwiduals on top of qua Arsenal-bashers, you'd best get going.' And hitching up his trousers with one hand like a fucking gunslinger with a chronic case of builder's bum, as if to say 'Nuff said,' he steps off and back towards the bar.

So I say: 'I suppose we'd better do as he says. Looks like your inaugural sortie as Sergeant at Pints'll have to be postponed till our next meeting, Ronnie.'

'That's all right, Rugger. I can wait. 'But in the meantime, what do we do about him?' (Meaning, pah de merde, Ochs.)

'Dunno,' is all I can come up with for the moment by way of a possible solution. Thankfully, though, Lou is more resourceful; for, in virtual synch with my gormless verbalised reply, he's got one hand positioned at his ear in the classic hang-loose configuration, whilst with the other he's miming the dialing of an old-school rotary telephone. Next, air-cradling the imaginary receiver, he glides his right hand along the tabletop palm downwards for a foot or so, jerks out its thumb, and marches the first two fingers of the other hand up to it. Finally, he thrusts these two fingers into the thumb-and-forefinger hatch of the flat hand, clamps the latter fast about them; and sends the two newly united hands off on another foot-long spell of glideage. The whole post-telephonic part of the performance reminded me, on the whole, of various ethnic sign-language shorthands for buggery, but nevertheless, I got the picture:

'You think we should call a minicab for him?'

Lou nods emphatically.

'Good idea. But we don't know where he lives. How will we know where to tell the driver to take him?'

As during the preliminaries to the abortive lighting of the Arsenalabrum, Lou turns his pockets inside out.

'I was afraid you were going to suggest that. But you're right: it's our only choice. Well, Lou,' I add with a cuntish smirk, 'do you fancy doing these honours?'

He draws the diggits of his right hand up to his mouth, and begins timorously miming the biting of their nails.

'Fair enough. How about you, Ronnie?'

'No, thanks, Rugger. That's all you, as they used to say.'

'Yssups,' I mock-mutter as I approach the rear of Dave's sedentary carcass on half-bended knee (and with half-slackened schpincter). And like a young third-world medical student called upon to administer his first two prostate examinations simultaneously, I gingerly insert three fingers into each of Ochs's trouser pockets and begin probing for his wallet. Luckily, that foreign object proves to be lodged pretty shallowly in the right-side cavity, and to be extractable without my drawing anywhere near the trigger-hairs of the old family jewel-bombs. Still half-kneeling, I open the wallet and commence my search of its contents. Eventually, at the very bottom of a stack of the usual bill-foldial paraphrenalia--credit and debit cards, business cards of takeaway establishments, so-called valued customer cards issued by the likes of Sainsbury's and Tesco's--I discover a document that I suspect might just answer our present purposes, viz. a folded-up scrap of ordinary ruled notebook or scribbling-block paper. Unfurled to its full length and breadth, this here scrap turns out to be inscribed, in a seemingly feminine hand, with the following message: How d'ye do. My name is David Ochs, and I have been diagnosed as a clinically morbid Arsenalophobe. If I am at present unable to communicate my wishes or intentions to you vocally, I would greatly appreciate your telephoning the following number: ********** [diggits of the aforesaid omitted out of respect for the privacy of the Ochs family].'

Re-secreting the wallet and rising to my feet, I hand the paper over to Ronnie and, having granted him the obligatory ten seconds of perusage, ask, 'So, what do you make of it?'

(Handing the paper back to me:) 'I'd guess it was written by his wife, or, more likely, by his mum.'

'No chance this is some kind of Gooner-instigated prank, is there?'

'Sure there's a chance it is. But we might as well try ringing the number. It's our only lead, after all. Do you happen to have your mobile on you? I left mine at home, I'm afraid...'

...Which doubtlessly explained his uncharacteristically charge-taking stance at this particular moment. But no matter: I was game enough to do the honours yet again, and whipped out my phone and made the call forthwith. The first ring-tone had barely sounded before I was greeted by a woman's voice speaking in a foreign accent I at first had trouble pinpointing:

'Halloh?'

'Er...yes. I'm calling regarding a message I found in...er...David Ochs's wallet.'

'Och, Gott in Himmel, mein Bub!'

'Your...boob?'

'My child! Is he okay?'

'Yes, he's fine. I mean, he's not quite conscious, but, as near as I can tell, a good night's sleep'll put him to rights.'

'Och, Gott sei Dank! [There follows a pause of a butcher's-dozen seconds, in which I (now) retrospectively imagine Frau Ochs narrowing her eyes and placing her arms akimbo suspiciously.] Warte, nur...Where have you found him? You are not, by any chance, one of those verwuenschte Arsenal-bashers?'

'No, ma'am. Me and my mates were just walking along the pavement here in...er...Highbury, and we happened to come across your son propped up against a shop front.'

'Gott sei wieder Dank! If I give you an address, you will call a minicab, yes?'

'Jawoh--er, yes, of course.' So I flip the paper over, set it flat on the table, and, taking up the ballpoint intuitively proffered to me just in time by Lou, scrawl down Dave's lower-Barnetian address, as dictated to me by Frau Ochs. After I've read her Royal Mail coordinates back to her, and thereby verified them, she says:

'You need not worry about the charge for the cab. I will be waiting out front with the money.'

I should hope so, you fucking Krautess, is what I sort of want to say at this point. At the same time, I also sort of want to say, Gott sei Dank for your thinking of the bleeding obvious, which is more than most people can be counted on to do, when they can hoover an extra Isabella or ten out of you by not thinking of it. As it happens, I end up signing off by saying, 'And don't you worry, Mrs Ochs, he'll be home within the half hour.'

So, no sooner have I ended this call with one thumb-flick, than I'm speed-dialling the number of the local minicab company with another. And once the request for service has been made, the three of us--Ronnie, Lou and myself--find ourselves embarked on a whole new leg of the journey of this seemingly neverending night; for, of course, the matter of getting Ochs from the table to the pavement out front constitutes an ordeal in and of itself. After conferring for a bit, we conclude that it would be best not to try to walk him out, that it would be best, insofar as it's possible, not to disabuse him of the notion that he's still sitting at the table even as his arse cheeks are settling into the back seat of the cab. So, Lou hooks him under the left armpit and I hook him under the right; and betwixt the two of us we manage to lift him clear of the chair just long enough for Ronnie to come to the rescue with his extra billion kilojoules of manpower in the form of a third arm cupped across and under Dave's thighs, just behind the knees. Our progress to the front door is, TBS, slower than that of treacle in June (or January, or whichever fucking month the expression calls for), and made none the easier by our being spectated upon all the while by Jimmy and Mr Sedule, standing cross-armed in front of the bar with well-positioned toothpicks jutting from their their scowling gobs, and tapping their feet in unison, as if to say, 'We're not getting any younger, or less stroppy.' But at least for the full length of the crossing we can thank our lucky Stellas--er, Hoegaardens--that Dave is still fast asleep, and, indeed, snoring unreservedly like there's no tomorrow--or a coupla days after it, for that matter. Just as we're drawing within kicking distance of the door (the kick in question being subsequently administered by Lou), I feel against my left co-jone the welcome vibrations of my mobile, notifying me that our cab has arrived. Talk about perfect timing! I don't think I, let alone my schphincter, could have served out more than another millisecond or two of my commission as one third of Dave's human sedan chair. Wellsir, out front, no sooner has the driver caught sight of the whites of our six okies, than he's out on the street and dashing round the arse of his vehicle to open the kerbside back door, with all of the professional expedition of a bloke who's accustomed to running these sorts of errands. Leaving Lou to take up the hookage of Dave's right armpit for the duration of his installation in the back seat, I step off to the kerb, fish Frau Ochs's leaflet from my right trouser pocket and walk on over to the window of the driver, who is by now re-seated and ready to take off. And during the ten-odd seconds in which I'm handing the paper over to the driver and explaining its purpose to him, with the bony edge of my forearm resting against the blade of the half-open front window, I can't help but detect a palpable swell in the vibrations coursing through the body of the car, a swell that cannot be accounted for by the ambient hum of the engine. Thereupon, withdrawing my fingers and spastically massaging my lower lip into a requisite degree of slackness, I say to him:

'Roll down your windows--all of 'em all the way.'

'Cor, are you fucking barmy, mate? It's two degrees centigrade (36 degrees Fahrenheit) out there.'

'For the love of God, man, just do as I say!' I bawl peremptorily and dash round again to the back, where I encounter Ronnie and Lou spectating on a now merely-somnolent Ochs through the still-open back door and from the relative safety of the pavement. 'Where are they?...Let me at 'em,' he keeps muttering, his voice, register-wise, dipping every now and then below the threshold of audibility; and his hands clawing constantly, if feebly, at the hem of his shirtyfront.

'Code puce, Rugger?' Ronnie quizzes me helplessly.

'Yes, un-frayed-knottedly. But there's nothing for it. We're locked out of the Ape and bottle-less.' So saying, I kick the back door closed and, catching the driver's okies through the arse-view, I give him the cuntishly optimistic thumbs-up-cum-closed-mouth-smile signifying, 'All systems go!' Whereupon the car peels out and heads down the southbound lane of the High Road at a none-too-speedy 50 mph. But ere they drove out of sight, we--along with, I'm sure, the rest of the postcode--heard Ochs exclaim, 'WITH ME...WITH ME...NO NIGHT WILL BE TOOOOOOOO LO-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-NG!', followed by the shuddering of the perspex-and-brick fronts of all the shops along the way, like a coda rendered by a full orchestral complement of accompanying cuntrabasses.

'So,' says Ronnie, effectively and (doubtlessly) intentionally putting the kebosh on the most obvious question--viz: Will Ochs, his driver and their shared conveyance make it home in three pieces?--asks, 'should we head on up to Redford's for a nightcap?'

'Sure thing,' I say, stiff-schlonged enough, whilst Lou starts nodding and grinning with his tongue lolling out like a dog's. Then, Foreskin-Smite-Inducing Thought Number One pops into my gourdita. 'Wait: the Insularists are meeting up there. I dare say we shouldn't be welcome. And even if we should be...'

'Yes?'

'Well, there's the principle of the thing. We can't just chinwag amongst ourselves, and fully shirted, in sight of those cunts. It'd be like a chapter of the Anti-Defamation League holding a meeting at their local Shitler Youth HQ--or London City Hall, for that matter.' Then, recalling that the original idea of our going to Redford's was Ronnie's, and editorial note to self--insert copy of above passage reading 'narrowing her eyes...suspiciously,' adjusting personal pronouns as required: 'You weren't by any chance thinking of making nice with the Insularists, were you?'

This question brings Ronnie as close to the brink of shirtiness as I've ever seen him: 'Course not, YFC! If you only knew how near I was to following Reg out that door tonight...'

(No, I hadn't; but now that I did, I was blushing to the roots of my pubes for shame and remorse): 'There, there, there--it was cuntish of me to ask, and I'm sorry.'

(Ronnie, with a brisk downwards tug or two to his Sunderlander's shirty front): 'Apology accepted.' Then, after a butcher's coupla seconds of companiably silent strideage, he says, 'I'm curious to know what you make of this notion of clinically morbid Arsenalophobia, Rugger. Do you think it exists--I mean, as an officially recognised medical condition?'

'I doubt it. But even if it does, who shivs a git? Nowadays, practically any pursuit or occupation or pastime that can't somehow be tied into helping the godawful little nippers of the world is liable to have the dishonorific of medical condition clapped on to it. That Ochs might very well be morbidly obese I'll grant you; but as to whether he's morbidly Arsenalophobic, well, at arse, the question itself is of no significance whatsoever. They say with certain other of these alleged conditions--like alcoholism or drug addiction, for example, that the most important criterion for determining whether you are a sufferer is whether it interferes with your life ...' [Witness here McGyver Signature Rhetorical Ploy #52: the Tactically Pretended Petering out of Train of Thought]

'Yes?' says Ronnie.

'...Well, I submit to you, Ronnie, that Arsenal-bashing is Ochs's life. Life without Arsenal-bashing, for Ochs, would be no life at all--a living death, if you will.'

'And the same could be said about us, right, Rugger?'

'Even so,' I answer unthinkingly, only to realise a few seconds later that for Sinatraness's sake this rejoinder deserves a spot of qualification: 'Of course, though, speaking only for myself, and swapping this here Wigan shirt for an anorak of the same hue, I would consider myself only 63 per cent Arsenalophobe, the other 37 per cent of my ethical constitution being comprised by my Kenophobia. But sure: that particular mutato having been duly mutandied, you're spot on.'

As I'm rounding out this rather half-arsed, off-the-shirtycuff rationalisation of the Kenward-yearning component of my weltanschlong, we arrive at the intersection of Woodside Avenue and Woodside Park Road, whither we all three instinctively tacked as soon as it became clear we wouldn't be going to Redford's, and at which it seems likewise instinctively obvious that there should be a parting of the ways, with Lou and I heading northwards to the maisonette (whence he and I will carpool our way up to Potters Bar next morning), and Ronnie heading south-southeastwards to his flat on Lodge Lane. So, re-assuming my old presidential mien, I say to my two mates:

'Well, lads, Ape or no Ape, Redford's or no Redford's, Arsenalabrum or no Arsenalabrum, we must adjourn this meeting properly--to wit, with the singing of our fight song. Ready?' [Ron and Lou nod and grin with apparent enthusiasm and relief.] 'On the count of four: ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!'

(Gnu twah [Yes, Lou included, that mime bidness of his being pure schtick]):

Arsenal, oh Arsenal, they should have named you Cuntsenal!
Your side is such a farce and all,
It's time you died for once and all.
Down with Arsène! Down with Thierry!
Down with Jemmy Aliadiery!
Storm the stands at Highbury
And scamper down below.
Slash and burn and salt the turf
So that NOTHING--W-I-I-I-I-I-LL--GRO-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-W!

By club tradition, we're supposed to hold that last vowel in grow as long as we are physically capable of doing so--in other words, until we're more or less on the verge of fainting. Well, in this case, long after my own lungs have given up the ghost on the vowel in question, have let it expire in a quiet, death-rattle-ish gurgle, I'm flummoxed to continue hearing it issuing steadily, and at its original pitch and volume, from the larynx of one of my neighbours.

'All huh-huh-right, Ruh-huh-Ronnie,' I gasp out the obvious, 'cut it out.'

(Ronnie, wheezing and gasping a mini-fit in his own right): 'Huh-huh-it's not-huh-huh me, Rugger.'

'Huh-huh-Lou?'

Lou, conveniently reverting to his schtick, windedly nods 'NO!'

At which point, as if on cue, we all swivel our respective phizzes towards the spot of streetage to our collective immejiate left, where our respective pairs of okies happen to alight on an indiwidual who could creditably serve as Ochs's stunt-double, a mighty 22-stone bloke in a red zip-up hoodie, who, to judge by the still-rounded orientation of his lips and the faintly purple tinge of his facial complexion, cannot but be the very meejium of this ever-perduring O. After holding the note unflaggingly for another cuntishly protracted half-minute, during which I can't help but detect a mischievous twinkle rising to the surface of one, if not both, of his okies, he cuts himself short, wipes his upper lip with a sleeve of his hoodie in a cuntishly perfunctory manner, and puts his two hands together in a cuntishly condescending round of well-nigh-poncily understated applause.

(Aforesaid bloke:) 'Well sung, my friends, well sung! Of course, the lyrics could do with a bit of updating: in terms of sheer scoring-power, Cesc Fabregas clearly outranks Jeremy Aliadiere nowadays; and for "Highbury" should you not have substituted "Emirates" to reflect the imminent change in home venue?'

The cunt had a point--well, let's say three-quarters of a point; for any attempt at taking account of that whippersnapper CF's late ascendancy in the club would indubitably have destroyed the song's rhyme scheme. But even as for the incipient anachronism of the reference to Highbury, I had a riposte ready to shirt, courtesy of some recent Bashers' chingwags on the subject:

'Yeah, well, we've decided to postpone the switchover to "Emirates" till after the date of the last match at the old digs, May 7.' Then, gormlessly galvanized by the stranger's petty fault-finding vis-a-vis our signature chune, I ask the okie-burstingly obvious--if no-less-okie-burstingly-imprudent--question: 'How comes it that you're so well acquained with our fight song? I don't recall having seen you at any of our recent meetings.'

'Well,' says the stranger, 'it's a bit of a long story. Howsabout I shorten it for you a smidge?' Whereupon he unzips his hoodie to reveal a red undershirt sporting the number 15 in large white numerals, surmounted in equally large characters by the name FABREGAS. 'Allow me to introduce myself,' he grins, proffering his right hand to me in the form of a fist: 'Michael "Row the Boat" O'Schorr, veteran Arsenal-basher-basher, class of '03.'

'Run for your lives, lads!' I manage to squeal out just in time to receive a glancing chin-dusting from Em-Oh-Ess in place of the leering jaw-wrenching I would have received had I tarried a microsecond longer. Wellsir, Lou and I sprint the 500-odd metres leading to the maisonette in unofficially world-record-setting time, and Ronnie, for his part, manages to make his way chez his own Louie with commensurate expedition. In conclusion: to those of my readers who have the hoot's pah to compare the performance of the surviving North London Arsenal Bashers of March 23/24 unfavourably to that of the NLABs of yore, all I have to say is, He who bashes and runs away lives to bash another day.

Ape Night Afterdusk

Well, as promised in my letter to LaMont Mörike-Jones, the North London Arsenal-Bashers did indeed meet up at the Ape night before last. Unsurprisingly, Mr M-J himself failed to make an appearance; hence I am vouchsafed the present liberty, this Saturday afternoon, of catching up on my blog-posting (i.e. as against the counterfactual ordeal of trying on my rent-a-lederhosen tux at the tailor's). [Interesting sidenote about Herr Mörike-Jones: the day after I posted his letter and my reply to it, as I was doing a bit of inline research on the Swabo-Liberians, I came across the Mörike family's genealogy website, where I made the following rather jaw-dropping-injuicing discovery; namely, that in 1911 one Hans Mörike the Fifth, a member of the 1909 Swabo-Liberian landing party, took a wife name of Melba McGyver, elder sister of one...(drumroll)...you guessed it, Terrance McGyver, future circus contortionist and great-grandfather of YFCT. Do you hear that, LaMont? Your great grandmother is my great great auntie, meaning we're family--cousins! (A parenthetical caveat to you, LaMont, just in case you're ever so so slightly tempted to exploit our newfound consanguinity for ends of your own: whilst I am able and all too happy to recommend you to Proctologitex HR for a position in our factory stockroom, it is well beyond my present power to lend you so much as a single shilling; you will, after all, recall that I am worth the pauperly sum of negative 3000 quid [or rather, as of last week, negative 3500]).]

Anyway, that side note aside, I suppose a bit of backfilling on the NL Arsenal-Bashers themselves is in order here. I'd long been an admirer of and frequent visitor to their website, when, at some point not much posterior to the advent of the present calendar year, I finally screwed up the co-jones to email their President, one Reginald Dunn, beseeching him to take me under the wing of their Great Cause in whatever humble capacity I might be of some use; and received the following terse reply within an hour: ‘So you think you’ve got what it takes to become a board-certified Arsenal-Basher? Be at the Pissing Ninja in Hendon next Thursday at 8 p.m., sporting the home colours of one of the following clubs: Liverpool, Blackburn, ManU, Tottenham, West Brom, Middleborough or Wigan.’ So, I went out and bought myself a Wigan shirt with Jason Roberts's name and number and turned up at the appointed pub within excusable distance of the appointed time. I must confess that during my tube trip down there I was a bit apprehensive about my forthcoming initiation as an official Arsenal-basher. Not that there could be any question of my lacking the basic qualifications (i.e., of my hating Arsenal by so much as a cunt-hair's breadth less than the required amplitude); and as for that old blood-and-soil ‘It-takes-a-native-Londoner-to-make-a-true-Arsenal-basher, Johnny Norfolk' line of badgering, pecuniary considerations alone would have restrained me from seeing my brand-new 30-quid JR shirt ripped to shreds in defence of the cause of inter-regional Arsenalophobia. What accounted for my misgivings was lack of intestinal rather than testicular fortitude; for you see, I envisaged the initiation rites by default as a succession of wag-the-dog-form trials-by-gullet reminiscent of the so-called hazing processes of American college fraternities. I imagined myself being forced, for example, to devour both hind quarters (i.e., Arse-'n'-all) of a sucking pig in under a minute; or to swallow, in an equally brief interval, a goldfish-bowl's-worth of miniature lead cannonballs. Fortunately, the North London Arsenal Bashers proved far too puritanical a lot to go in for such cuntishly totemic specatcles as these. The trouble with such traditional folkways of induction, as Reg himself was explaining to me after the adjournment of that first meeting, was that they tended to solidify the individual's sense of solidarity with the group to the detriment of his sense of solidarity with the cause in whose sole service the group had been ostensibly instituted; and that on this account they were to be shunned in favour of such practices as honed his Arsenalophobia qua object worthy of perfection as a thing-in-itself. For the very raison d'etre of the Arsenal-Bashers' Association, Reg said, consisted not in providing the individual Arsenal-basher with a contingent feeling of warm-and-blokey fellowship with others more or less unfavourably disposed to Arsenal, but in providing him with a forum in which he might test the limits of his Aresnalophobia by contriving ever-more unpalatable scenarios in which he should be faced with a choice between renouncing his Arsenalaphobia and renouncing his devotion to some other cause, now newly conceived as being in competition with the former. TBS (Reg said), the lone Arsenalophobe might just as readily contrive such scenarios on his own, in the privacy of his closet, but in this setting they could always be written off on the spot as mere pipe dreams [The private Arsenalophobe who, at half-time, makes a pact with the Devil to offer up the life of his cat Tippy in exchange for an Arsenal defeat cheerfully serves up Whiskas to this self-same Tippy as the credits are rolling at match's end (so Reg)]; whereas, declaimed in public, to an audience of one's peers, they immediately materialised as de facto pledges, as declarations that must be owned up to in deed as well as in word. The efficacy of this almost criminally simple self-selective induction process, according to Reg, was attested to by the club’s staggering attrition rate; by the fact that he, Reg, an official Arsenal-Basher of a mere two years’ standing, was the senior member of the North London chapter, every single bloke Jack of his 20 his fellow class-of-’04-’ers having in the meantime jumped ship at the provocation of some other member's remark that, in his (the deserter’s) view, had ‘gone too far,’ that had, in other words, extended the imaginary frontiers of Arsenalophobia beyond his own threshold of palatability. Well, it should come as no surprise to the reader that, mine own threshhold being equivalent to that of a man born without taste buds, I was assured a bright future in the club from the very start. I arrived at the Ninja at a quarter-past eight on that Thursday night in late January to find the lads huddled secretively, mafioso-style, around a solitary table in a tenebrous, smoke-congested room to the rear of the main taproom. The dimness of the lighting and the thickness of the smoke conspired to render all assembled practically invisible; you could barely make out the outlines of heads and shoulders, let alone specific phiz-features, and I managed to single out Reg himself only as a raspy old-codgerly voice emanating from the vicinity of a glowing ember of cigar ash hovering a foot or two above the far end of the table: 'Ah, our potential new recruit. Have a seat. The fun is only just beginning. [I sat down at the only unoccupied place at the table, about halfway towards the back.] You were saying, Jake, that if you were in the market for a liver transplant...'

'...Yeah,' a voice directly across from me took over, 'I was saying that if I were in the market for a liver transplant, and the first available donor turned out to be a recently-deceased Jans Lehmann, I'd submit to the operation...' [Disgruntled murmurs of JFC! and Move back to Highbury, YFC! issuing from every corner of the room] '...No, no hear me out, lads. I'm saying that I'd submit to the operation...but that on the day of my release from hospital, I'd get hold of a butcher's knife and cut the offending organ out of my abdomen samurai style, with my own two hands, in the full clarity of consciousness.'

[Applause and Huzzahs all round.]

(Reg): 'Not bad, Jake, not bad, that one. Couldn't have done much better myself. Question is, can our new boy, Rugby, top it?'

With the posing of this question, all stogie and fag tips swivelled towards me. I gots to admit my schphincter had enjoyed moments of lesser elasticity than those first butcher's-dozen seconds in which I was obliged to frame my inaugural anti-Arsenal squib for the Bashers. But by and by it (my schpincter) pulled itself taut as I reflected that I had, after all, and in no less public a forum (viz. this here very blog), already long since hefted the destruction of Arsenal against no less ponderous a counterweight than the survival of the human race itself, and had found the latter decidedly wanting; and that hence, the mildest calumny I could improv was likely to go far with this lot, rather like even the scrawniest astrounaut's midfield kick at a lunar stadium. So, before I'd even thought the sentence through to the end, I commenced:

'If Thierry Henry were engaged to be married to my little sister...' (Of course, I didn't have a little sister, but they didn't know that.)

[Expectant Harrumph?s and Quite, quite...s]

'I wouldn't attend the wedding...'

[A chorus of Nyeeeeah!s accompanied, in my mind's okies, by the equivocating oscillation of 20 downward-orientated palms]

'...Even if...the wedding was to take place in Mallorca, and the groom, Monsieur Henry, offered to fly me there in my own personally chartered jet complete with jacuzzi and wet bar.'

[Applause, Huzzahs, finger-whistles and Arribas all round; and at a volume sufficient to provoke the barman to step into the room and shout, 'Would you cunts mind keeping it down a bit in here? We're trying to watch Little Britain out front.']

Such was the field-voiding extent of the triumph of this squib, that on the basis of it alone, and on that very night, I was nominated for and elected to the office of Sergeant at Pints (the title borne by the bloke responsible for communicating the group's drink orders to the bar [the previous holder of the office having stormed out in a huff roughly ten minutes into the meeting, before I had even arrived]); and from that point forward, my rise within the club hierarchy was positively meteoric. Come the end of February, I was effectively Reg's right-hand man, having in the meantime been elected additionally to the post of Treasurer and secured memberships for two of my own nominees, Ronnie Livingstone (of course) and Lou Philips, my Arsenal-bashing mate from the security desk at Proctologitex. I took the admission into our ranks of this latter bloke, Lou, as an especial proof of our leader's esteem and affection for me; for, you see, according to club rules, given that he hailed from St Albans, Lou was technically ineligible for membership in our chapter and should have applied to the Hertfordshire chapter instead. But upon my pointing out to the assembly that, as far as Lou and I knew, there was no Hertfordshire chapter of the Arsenal-Bashers, Reg flexed the muscle of his Presidential prerogative (much to the cuntsternation of the rest of the old guard) and decided that in this one exceptional case the rule barring membership to non-North-Londoners could be waived. ('Mind you,' he added sternly, bringing the tip of his stogie within singeing distance of Lou's goatee [facial hair reference No. 1!], 'If a second St-Albanian turns up, the two of you will have to go off and start your own chapter. Safety in geographical dispersion, not in numbers is the Arsenal-Basher's watchword.')

But for all the pull I had already acquired as of the end of February, I was then but as a petty duke-elector or princeling compared to the mighty Kaiser of North London Arsenalophobia that I was to become as of the adjournment of our most recent meeting, on the night before last.

But, not to let my capacity as a certifiably-board-certified-arch-Arsenalophobe trump my capacity as a would-be-board-certified-yarn-spinner, let me advert to the circumstances of that very evening. Much like a book group, our chapter is a roving assembly hosted cyclically by each of its members in turn at a venue of his choice and sited in his own district. Last Thursday night being my first turn at hosting, I naturally opted for my local sweet local, the Ape. In all modesty, I gots to say I really pulled out all the stops that night for the lads. Being a small-scale, single-room establishment, the Ape isn't really cut out for one of our mini-banquets. But by pushing six of the small two-person tables together, Mr Sedule and I managed to cobble together a single 20-person table, over which we draped a cloth printed with the crests and mottoes of all of the most celebrated and notorious English football clubs--or, rather, all of them save one. For at the dead centre or bull's-schphincter of the cloth, where the Arsenal crest had once been, there was a gaping rectangular void symbolising the destiny to which our confederacy collectively consigned the Gunners; and in the midst of this void I placed an eight-stemmed candelabrum in which were ensconced miniature wax effigies of such Arsenal luminaries as Arsène Wenger, Thierry Henry, Jans Lehmann, etc., each crowned, naturally, by the wick requisite to its eventual ceremonial immolation. Sure, there was something almost teejiously evocative of Bloke Fawkes Day about the whole setup, but that was hardly my fault; cos when you think about it, of the mere handful extant media of desecraction (piss, shit, jizzim, etc.), fire is the only one that can be employed in mixed company.

Anyway, after we had thus laid the table by half-past seven, I (proffering my own credit card as security for the bill) asked Mr Sedule to fry up a full gross of jalappeno poppers, so that none of us should be without solid sustenance at any point during the ensuing two-to- three-hour-long chinwag-cum-melee. At about ten-of-eight, the stalwarts started filing in, e.g.: Ned from Chelsea in his Lenny Pidgely shirt, Jake from Kentish Town in his Ruud van Nistelrooy shirt, and Mitch and Stu from Haringey (shirty alter egos: Michael Carrick and Paul Robinson, respectively). Then, at eight-o'-clock sharp came the second wave, e.g. Ronnie (stubbornly, and in flagrant violation of club rules, flying the shirtage of Sunderland's Stephen Wright), Lou (SAE: Kevin Campbell [West Brom]), Steve from Enfield (SAE: Petr Cech). Finally, at ten past, just as I was on the point of exercising my unofficial-yet-presumably-uncontestable right-hand-man's prerogative of calling the assembly to order, Reg himself staggered in, stogie-less, visibly harried, knackered and unshaven, and sporting a pair of Lennonesque sunglasses in addition to his usual Gareth Southgate shirt (along with shoes and trousers, natch--just like the rest of us. [By no means would I have the reader take the Ape for one of those trouser-optional sorts of establishments, or the Bashers for a group that swing that way, so to speak.]). With an imperious-yet-seemingly-gormless jerk of his right hand, Reg seated himself at the head of the table and thereby brought the ambient hubub to a well-nigh pin-drop-audible hush. According to custom, Mitch, our balding 38-year-old bespectacled Secretary--and, incidentally, our senior member by a purely chronological reckoning--was the first to speak:

‘The first order of business, lads, is to frame a reply to a query posted to us by the public relations liaison of our South London chapter, which query reads as follows: "Just what sort of public spin should be given to our antipathy towards the team captain, Thierry Henry, in view of the fact that, as Monsieur Henry is a gentleman of colour, the aforesaid antipathy risks being misconstrued by the community at large as a manifestation of indurate racialism?"’

‘I say fuck the community at large if they don’t get what we’re about,' replies Dave 'the Baron' Ochs, a great 20-stone bloke with a voice like a bass tuba tuned to drop E. 'If the lot of 'em want to string me up from Nelson’s balls in Trafalgar Square ’cos they think I’m a racialist, it’s fine with me; I’ll breath my last cum-shooting breath with a clear conscience, knowing full well as I do now that I’d have had it in for TH even if he’d been born an albino and a direct descendant of King Alfred.’

‘Knee-deep as I am in awe of the Arsenalophobic purity of your animus towards Thierry, Dave,' says Jake, 'I have to confess that I’d hate him a smidge less if he were an Englishman instead of an accursed Frog. And on that note, I should like to know whether a nationalist spin is out of the question in connection with the double-aforesaid antipathy?'

'It's hardly out of the question,' avers Steve. 'But in an Englishman's thesaurus the phrase taking the piss out of the French stands pretty much cheek-by-jowl with the phrase shooting at sitting canards. Why waste our time hard-bashing Thierry Henry's Frenchness when we could be directing the full force of our cudgels against the soles of the sorely underpersecuted national affiliation of the Professor himself, the fucking Monacans, er...Monacoans...er...Monacoese. Help me out here, Ronnie.'

Ronnie shrugs in an attitude of frank gormlessness.

(Steve again): 'Well, that's a strike against their pea-sized principality in itself: Oh, aren't we all high and mighty? We've got our pockets flush with revenues from our casinos, our national vanity stoked with worldwide envy of our Hollywood royal family; we're too good to waste a piddling .0000000001 per cent of our gross domestic product on coming up with a national epithet that's pronounceable by the average yob in the Anglophone street--'

'--Yes, yes, yes, I catch you, and I sympathise,' interjects Jake. 'But need I remind you that, although Arsène Wenger did indeed make his name as a player with Monaco, he was in fact born and reared in the Franco-German border city of Strasbourg, and that hence by nationality he is not, properly speaking, a Monacoan--or whateverean--but an Alsatian--'

'--So you're saying he is, in fact, a kind of of dog?' (So Steve.) 'Well, that's infinitely richer. Here, Arsène! Fetch me my slippers, Arsène. There's a gooooood boy. Let me scratch you behind the ears. Oh, I wuuuuuuuuv you, my wittle Arsène.'

My own policy in such boisterous group-chinwags as are exemplified by the one to hand is (at least when I'm afforded the luxury of doing so) to hold myself aloof from the general brouhahah until I've properly sussed out its intellectual temperature and have adjusted the kinetics of my own faculties accordingly, such that, by the time I catch sight of what in vulgar parlance is known as an in, I may rest more or less assured of leaving all and sundry assembled trailing in my spiritual dust. Well, by the time Steve was on to figuring AW as Rin Tin Tin's kinsbitch, I was running full apace of the train of the convo, and was within jumping distance of the boxcar door of my in. Thus I sprang:

'You're both shooting well wide of the co-jones of the Professor's Achilles heel. Just consider for a second the graphic significance of his forename, Arsène. Chop off the accent grave and the final unvoiced e and add an a and an l, and you've got in full the name of the very club he's managing. Can we, from the most astronomical degree of remove from the blackboard, chalk up the proximity of the two names to sheer coincidence? I think not. Obviously, Monsieur or Herr Wenger's stint at Monaco was simply a stepping stone in his progress towards the attainment of his current post. Obviously, from the very naissance of his nipperhood, when he was still wearing footed pajamas, he was aiming to become manager of this club. Can't you just picture his governess or nanny asking him, circa 1952: What do you want to be when you grow up, little Arsène? And him responding, I want to be the manager of Arsenal football club. Oh my! says the nanny, you are a precociously ambitious little lad; you'll be getting an extra ration of whipped cream with your blancmange at lunchtime today. And just ponder for a moment the sheer cuntish single-minded perversity of the whole enterprise, and its cuntishly protracted timescale.’

This squib doesn't go over half as well as I hoped--in fact, assumed--it would do. Ned, the only one who bothers to comment on it at all, looks dubious. ‘I’m no fan of the Professor, but even if it is true he wanted to coach Arsenal just cos his name was Arsène—which I very much doubt—I don’t see how it can be used as a strike against him. These Shandyan sorts of bios are fivepence a dozen in the world of sport, and they’re a publicity agent’s wet dream. Did you ever hear, for example, of that American blokess who decided to become a professional swimmer when she learnt her last name meant Esther Williams in Greek?’

(YFCT): ‘No.’

‘Well, she’s practically living off the royalties from the story in her retirement.’

‘Might I remind you, gentlemen,' interjects our Secretary, 'that while the two of you are busy splitting the chlorinated cunt-hairs of the practitioner of a sport that is perforce of no concern to us, there’s a bloke down in Bermondsey or Southwark waiting with bated breath for an answer to his Thierry Henry question.’

‘Oh, fuck the guy in Bermondsey or Southwark,' spits the Baron with scornful stroppiness. 'The fact is, that even in trying to answer that original question, we were already just pissing alongside the third rail--or playing hide and seek with the 40-stone bloke in the gorilla costume--of this entire session.’

'By which you mean what?' rejoins Mitch with a poncily provocative, Dr-Evil-ish frown-cum-eyebrow-arch concisely significative of the utterance, I know as well as you do what you mean, but I can't imagine you've got the co-jones to bring it out into the open.

(The Baron:) 'I mean, your Ponciness, the Gunners' crossing the Channel into the running for the European Championship.'

(Mitch, trying futilely to keep his Mike Myers schtick going:) 'Oh, th-th-th-that old th-th-th-th-ing.'

(Ochs:) 'Cos I know full well there's at least four of five us sitting here right now who are on the point of pissing themselves in anticipation of being allowed to say...' He breaks off to draw a deep breath and to cross himself upside-down briskly, before resuming, in a daemonic larynx-shredding falsetto fit to make your flesh crawl, 'Shouldn't we all get behind Arsenal now that they're the only surviving English Champions club?' [Another five-second-long interval elapses whilst he downs half a pint to reclaim his selfhood from the forces of darkness he's just courageously suffered himself to channel. Then, in his organic bass tuba voice, he resumes:] 'Well, I say to these Judases and Benedict Arnolds in our midst, Speak now, or for ever hold your piss. But I warn you lot, for me and my shirt, no night'll be too long; the two of us don't know the meaning of the word "overtime".'

'I'll be the first,' says a bloke name of Cyril, who, in weighing in at 18 stone, is the only one amongst us who might even dream of emerging alive from the coda of a shirtfest with Ochs. 'This last month has been a time of great spiritual crisis for me. All along, from the moment when I joined up with the Bashers way back in January of ought-five, I've always thought of myself as a do-or-die Arsenalophobe. But since Chelsea were knocked out contention for the Champions Cup this year, I've begun not so much to question my Arsenalophobia as to become re-acquainted with my patriotism, with my Anglophilia. And I'm starting to wonder whether our club, under its current constitution, is really cut out to survive in this brave new world we've been living in since February 22, a world where Arsenal are the only representatives of the English fighting spirit on the continent.'

'So, you're saying,' Steve hazards, 'that we might as well pack it all in, disband, and--horribile dictu--encourage our dispersed membership to report to their respective local Gunners'-fan-club recruiting offices?'

'No, I'm simply suggesting that, out of respect for those of us who regard an Arsenal-spearheaded English UEFA championship as the least of eight evils, we should postpone our next meeting till Arsenal are eliminated from the rounds, or till May 17, whichever comes first.'

About midway through the preceding sentence, I start to sense through the table and the hams of my hands a vibration such as you might feel during the initial seconds of a Richter-Level Nine earthquake, and notice that the surface of the Hoegaarden in my half-empty pint glass is gently seesawing a few degrees upwards and downwards of the parallel. Taking cognizance at once the catastrophe these signs portend, I spring to my feet just in time to catch hold of Ochs's canteloupe-circumfrenced, shirtbound right forearm, wrestle it back down to table level and throw the full weight of my arseward-orientated carcass on to it; whilst on Ochs's left flank Lou, having been likewise tipped off, does the same to the other forearm. During the next few seconds, as I'm fighting the opening round of an undoubtedly hopeless bout against Ochs's still shirtward-hankering sinews, I cry out as loudly as I can do, 'CODE PUCE, JIMMY!' in the general direction of the bar.

[TBC. (I hear the cry of the Ape.)]

Post Baggage

I suppose it's only fitting--nay, well-nigh obligatory--for me to remark, as I launch into this here post, that it at once sets and closes out a record in the five-month-con-cambio-long history of The Angry Londoner; by which I meantersay it sets a right bookend alongside an unprecedented two-month-spanning period of blogospheric silence on my end. Not that I mean, in so remarking, to tender any kind of apology for my late close-fingeredness (for Fannie Adams alone knows who I'd be apologising to); it's just that, in view of the sheer bulk of maisonette-bound, arse-cheek-numbing chrono-hoovering necessitated by my previous posts, this disinclination to blog in and of itself constitutes something of a story worthy of a banner-headlined, front-page news article in the Mcgyverer Allgemeine Zeitung. And the thing is, the newsworthiness of this self-same story only increases with every stab I take at bashing out the copy of the article; each time I get as far as 'A high-ranking McGyver Maisonette official, who asked not to be named, attributed the delay in bloggage to...' and then tear the paper out of the typewriter and start all over again a day, two days, sometimes even a week later. It's not that there aren't scads of perfectly plausible explanations, any one of which would probably pass mustard as the explanation in the okies of the hypothetical otherbloke who gave an art's razz whether I blogged or died, but merely that none of them passes mustard as such in my own okies. Earlier today, though, I recalled that a certain uxoricidal Frog commie philosopher, a smattering of whose writings had been forced on me by one of my UEA lit profs, had a word for the SOA that eventuates in these sorts of explanatory imp-arses; he dubbed it overdetermination. In lowfalutin terms, what overdetermination amounts to is this: if a cow farts in your face whilst you're milking her, there's no point in trying to suss out after the fact whether it was the hay she ate earlier that morning, or the thorough rogering she got from your stud bull the night before, or indeed your own all-too-indelicate handling of her tetons that caused the aforesaid noxious gaseous discharge. You just have to lump it and realise that it was all of these things, and, at the same time, none of them, that precipitated the fart, which thus may be described as an overdetermined event. As far as actually explaining fuck all goes, of course, this notion of overdetermination is about as useful as a Heinz Salad Cream coupon in a Stateside Safeway's, but at least in terms of philosophical pedigree it beats my usual 'Fuck me with schlong-shaped object X if I know' hands down. And even more important than that, if I hadn't recollected it this morning, I very probably wouldn't be typing this here post atcha tonight. Talk about your undertermined events...

'On this here overdetermination tommyrot,' the nonexistent reader nudges me.

'Yes?'

'Would counsel care to approach the bench and explain its relevance to the price of chee in China?'

'Ah, yes, M'lud. M'lud was referring, I take it, to potential alibis for my client's blogger's block.'

'Even so, counsel. Please proceed.'

'Thank you, M'lud. I proceed thus:'

Vis-a-vis my own late diggital impotence, I'd say that the overdetermining analogues to the hay, the rogering and the rough-milking are, respectively, as follows. In the first place, writing up the account of my Christmas sojourn in East Anglia rather soured me on the notion of my day-to-day life as a subject of reflection and remembrance. The hypothetical reader may recall that I started out this here blog philosophically rather ill-disposed towards this very notion; and he may also have subsequently remarked that by and by, in spite of my initial prejudices, I rather warmed to the putting of the notion into practice. Well, by the time I reached the end of that last rather lengthy four-poster, I had come full circle to the philosophical GO! square on the Monopoly (or Chavopoly) board. That whole blow-by-blow, soup-to-nuts recunting of my holiday adventures started out pleasantly enough, but by the end of it I felt a bit like that Biblical bloke making a beeline out of the flaming remnants of Buggerville--minus the salinisable wifey in tow to lend at least a soup's son of metaphysical heft to the whole ordeal. In other words, I felt as though the irredeemable shittiness and outright pointlessness of my holiday experiences in culo had just been driven home to me because and only because I had been so gormless as to suppose they might be worthy any destination other than that of the Ruggerian mental wastebin. Wellsir, on top of that, within a week of my return to London and bidness as usual at Proctologitex, as if by way of punishment for my cuntish fabrication of a scenario along those very lines in service of my own cuntishly petty ends, a massively devastating explosion rocked P-Tex's factory out in Stevenage. No one was hurt, but the blast blew a hole the size of Wembley Stadium clear on through the roof, and destroyed tens of millions of pounds worth of inventory into the bargain. The final report from the insurer's investigation just came in last week: they think what happened was that one of the blokes from the floor stepped outside for a smoke, and that, on account of the fact that he was standing flush against the back wall of the building--i.e., several cunt-hair's-breadths within the no-smoking zone--a spark from his cigarette was sucked into the ventilation system and thereby brought into contact with the pure-oxygen atmosphere of the cooling room, where the newly-manfactured examination gloves, tampons, etc. are allowed to rest for a spell in the open air before they're packaged. Of course, as there were no injuries, I was not, as in my counterfactual version of the event, conscripted for factory work. In hindsight I rather wish I had been. You see, what with all of the fiscal calculations necessitated by the purchase of new materials subsequent to the disaster, the accounts payable people were absolutely swamped with work, and I was obliged to take up the slack on my end; such that every one of my formerly several-hundred-strong wanking and snoozing minutes was now completely consumed by report-running and spreadsheet-updating, and that, right on through to the beginning of the present week, I would arrive back at the maisonette well and truly knackered, with just enough energy to crack open a single Hoegaarden, park my arsecheeks on the futon and flick on the telly. But at least as far as recent weeks are concerned, if I were asked to pin my blogger's block to one particular cause, if someone were holding the proverbial schlong-shaped jizzim pistol to my head and ordering me: Press Button A, B or C or your hair is nair'd, I'd have to go with Button C, namely, Aresnal's late entry into the run for the European Championship. How, I ask you, if there were any justice in this world, would this tatty pack of cuntinental swashbucklers have been suffered to slip through the elimination rounds like an armadillo-sized rat through a cunt-hair-wide gap in the floorboards, to emerge at the other end transmogrified into England's last best hope in ought-six, a veritable batallion of Winston Churchills decked out in the armour of St. George--and this at the very moment when they were only just beginnning to get their long-overdue comeuppance at home? People are always going on about these cataclysmic events--the Holocaust, 11/9, the Boxing Day Tsunami--that make them question whether an essentially benevolent God is calling the shots up there and down here. Well, the reader already knows with what gusto I am capable of besmirching the butcher's-half-dozen squares of printed loo paper comprising this very question; he knows what manner of cuntishly depraved demiurgal bookie has rigged the whole cosmic schlongfight in my okies. All the same, I have never quite managed to let go my grip on what you might call the negative cosmological hope that if only and for once in my adult life Arsenal would finish the season closer to the bottom of the heap than to the top, things might turn out to be not so bad after all in the long run. All along, a culo, it's been this hope that's impelled me to shift my arse cheeks out of bed and up the GNR each weekday morning in loo of lying there for days on end waiting for the white-coated blokes with the butterfly nets to turn up at the front door--and a fortiori, in the evenings, to devote myself to such less spiritually corrosive pursuits as this here blog. But now that the Gunners are the sole UK team in the running for the European Championship, that hope has precipitously dropped down to just-barely infernal levels. Granted, depending on the outcome of the showdown with Juventus on the 28th, the hope-o-meter could spike up as high as the purgatorial reading before the end of the month, in which case I suspect you'll be hearing from YFC's truly quite a bit more often than of late. On the other hand, in a worst-case scenario in which Arsenal (Hoegaarden forbid!) win the Championship, come 17 May, the whole hope-sprung mechanism could blow itself to pieces, in which case, most likely, the sole question I'll be capable of posing to myself for the indefinite future will be, Out of which side of my tranquiliser-slackened gob am I going to drool today?

On a lighter note, I thought that as long as I had the editing window open, I might as well include in the present post an open letter--only the second I've received to date--that arrived in my personal inbox towards the end of last month. The author of the following appears to have made a much more thorough exploration of the AL than that undertaken by my correspondent of last December, Mrs Trippett-Jones--sorry, Ashby-Jones (keeping up with all the Joneses in my lifeworld has certainly got to be a bit of a pain in the co-jones). Indeed, to judge by the sheer breadth of reference of his letter, he seems to have pored over every word publicly composited herein since opening day last September; which implication, I must admit, doesn't quite give my desperate spirits the lift they've been craving. For, not to look a readerly gift-horse in the mouth, as off-putting as the thought that I might be typing into a void undoubtedly is, the alternative thought that I might be typing straight into a single not-entirely-sympathetic pair of fenokies watching me every move is isn't exactly on-taking. But enough of my paranoiac ravings: I'm already violating blogojournalistic etiquette in not letting my correspondent speak entirely for himself from the get-go. As with the last OL, my own piss follows post-scriptically, this time in a more conventional titty-for-tatty format.

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Wassauf, Hünden?

Or, as your people would put it, How do you do, sir? I write to you today on behalf of the Greater London and Home Counties Swabo-Liberian Diaspora (GLHCSLD [quite a mouthful isn't it, meine liebe Hünden?]), a community numbering a whopping 300 souls, all resident within the scant 500-kilometre circumfrence of the London commuter belt. We Swabo-Liberians enjoy a rich cultural heritage worthy of vying with that of any people who have yet pitched camp or driven plough on this earth since the Mesopotamian era--a heritage to be proud of, nay, smug about. For each of us may boast not only of cententially-strong genetic and cultural ties to the erstwhile and present Republic of Liberia, in virtue of our direct descent from some member of that famous nonet of Liberian expatriates who, having been obliged regretfully to flee their homeland in the wake of the waves of insurrections precipitated by the bankruptcy and virtual collapse of the Monrovia government, disembarked at Dover in the autumn of 1910; but also of sesquicentennially-strong genetic and cultural ties to the ancient Helvitio-Teutonic region of Swabia, in virtue of the direct descent of each of the aforesaid nine from one Hans Mörike, who, having been obliged equally regretfully to flee his homeland in the wake of the waves of general stroppiness precipitated by German unification (precipitated in its turn, need it be said, by the egomaniacal machinations of that vile Prussian parvenu Bismarck), disembarked at Buchanan in the summer of 1872. When one does the genealogical maths, factoring the Swabian tree by the Liberian one, the results are quite staggering: there is not a single Katze Johannes or Hünden Juliette among us who cannot claim some international luminary of the past three hundred years as near or distant kin. I alone can count among my cousins and/or grandsires such leading lights of the eighteenth-through-twentieth centuries as Charles Schwab, Benjamins Banneker and Franklin, Alberts Einstein and Sharpton, and Oprah Winfrey.

But I did not elect to put mitt to keyboard this instant for the purpose of crying up my own people's unimpeachable claims to singularity and greatness. I write today ultimately in the wholly disinterested service of a cause in which, I trust, I stand united with all Londoners worthy of the civic epithet, namely, that of cultural diversity.

You see, for all of our undeniable and scarcely-overstateable world-historical importance, we Swabo-Liberians constitute but a single tile in the vast multicultural mosaic comprised by the 33 boroughs of Greater London. Indeed, according to the latest white paper issued by the City Hall Task Force on Diversity, Greater London is home to the representatives of no fewer than 20,000 cultures and ethnicities, each possessed of its own absolutely unique heritage; on which account our Mayor has seen fit to dub our august Capital the Most Culturally Diverse City in All of Human History. (Do you hear that from across the pond, New York, New York? You so-called Cutting Board of the American Melting Pot, with your piddling 500 spoken languages? You Big Apple-achians might as well start drawing up your annexation application for submission to the Arkansas State House, and in future direct all of your self-promotional literature to the prospective producers of the next Beverly Hillbillies or Dukes of Hazzard movie; because henceforth all modifutuacious spirits in search of the true embodiment of enlightened cosmopolitanism will be shopping elsewhere, namely on the High Streets of our principal districts.)

I advert at last, Herr McGyver, mein Hauptmann, to the central topic of my epistle, namely the relevance of this formidable aforementioned demographic finding to your own blogospheric activities. The first salient attribute of your blog to claim the attention of the casual browser (e.g./viz. myself, a week and a half ago) is its title: The Angry Londoner. One might—and, indeed, did—well suppose that any individual endowed with Kugeln of the mass and thickness requisite to one styling himself the Angry Londoner would be endowed supernumerarily with the degree of acuity and curiosity vis-à-vis his fellow townsmen requisite to one arrogating to himself the task of speaking in and on their behalf. And as our Mayor has effectively proclaimed cultural diversity the main nub, the keynote, the Stadtsgeistsgrundgedanke of the London of the third millennium, one is only entitled to expect that such acuity and curiosity should manifest itself in the form of at least a smattering of attention to our multicultural mosaic, and of some sampling of the 20-myriad-fold tesselae of which it is comprised [sic (RMcG)]. Understand, Herr McGyver, that I choose my words carefully here; that it is not for nothing that I write of a smattering and a sampling rather than of an exhaustive survey or a so-called full Monty; for I am at Arsch a Praktischesmensch who appreciates that it would scarcely be possible for a single human being to canvass the entirety of our Kulturschaft on his or her own, that by such a reckoning, even at the penurious rate of a blog-post per culture per day, one of your comparatively tender age would have attained his octagenarity by the time he had paid off his balance in full (and even then, he should be obliged to take out a second loan of treble the principal balance of the first; for, if current projections are to be trusted, by 2050 the number of cultures resident here will total roughly 80,000, or one for every ten Londoners).

But in perusing The Angry Londoner in its present state, as of this Valentine's Day 2006, one looks in vain for the vaguest adumbration of a smattering or sampling of the London Kulturschaft; one is tempted, indeed, to cry out to the author/editor, in unspeakable agony, on behalf of the entire local Kultursübergemeinschaft, 'Has the concept of a reach-around ever penetrated your calcified chav's brainpan?' In five month's worth of posts, from September to January inclusive, its only acknowledgment of the mere existence of a multicultural scene in London takes the form of a merciless hatchet-job on the poor Kernevistanis; who, I have lately learnt, are about to close up their restaurant in Hoxton due to a 'recent decline in volume of clientele'. (Viel danke, Herr McGyver! Whither am I now to repair for my hebdomadal mabyar kernewek fix? To your Mum's kitchen in Diss? Nachbar, bitte! As if by Fickensalles's stretch of the imagination an insular East Angelina could be counted on to cotton to one of our kind darkening her doorstep.)

To be sure, Herr McGyver, you yourself have already evinced in passing some sense of the fatuousness of your blog's claims to geographical exemplarity, in joshingly suggesting, as you did on one occasion, that it might more properly be entitled The Something (What was it--Pacific? Feisty?) Barnetian than the Angry Londoner. But I submit to you, Herr McGyver, that on the evidence of the tenor of your performances to date, even styling yourself an exemplary Barnetian would be an act of civic hubris; that your blogospheric cursus has been too narrow-ranging even for one presuming to speak for his own borough; that only an epithet as redolent of unregenerate hickishness as, say, The White Male East-Anglian Transplant would do justice to the shameless parochiality of your authorial ethos.

To be sure, even by marmite-on-whitebread standards of north London, Barnet is a dispiriting desert of cultural homogeneity, yet even within this desert there are to be found oases of genuine diversity--particularly on its southeastern fringes, in the West Indian communities of the Two Finchleys--oases that it should be incumbent upon every Barnetian worthy of the name to explore. But on your personal 15th-century mariner's map of the borough, these oases essentially figure as uncharted waters inscribed with the legend Here Be Dragons; holed up in the cosily WASP-ish confines of your precious Woodside Park local, and of your Potters Bar office cubicle, you rest content to wallow in blokishly bibulous oblivion of them. And on those rare occasions when diversity dares to rear its lovely particoloured head in your painfully straitened monochromatic Lebenswelt, you waste no time in brusquely ushering it out of the room with the tip of your chav's walking stick. I am thinking here in the main of an episode of your post of 7 November, surtitled 'Take Back the Night,' where a handful of individuals hailing from non-Anglo-centric cultures--Manish Shah, Jay Gulati, et al.--are mentioned by name without being vouchsafed so much as a few inches of web-space in which to speak for themselves qua representatives of their respective cultural cohorts. Here, solipsitically immersed as you were in the account of your jingoistically anorakish fabrication of the so-called Bloke Fawkes holiday, you let slip a saffron opportunity for wafting over to your readers' noses a gust of the doubtlessly uniquely aromatic Punjabi or Upper-Pradeshian perspective on Woodside Park nightlife.

But am Arsch I do not intend this letter to serve as a conduit of negative energy, and I shall accordingly perorate on a positive note. Am Arsch, we should always regard the diversity of our Capital as an occasion not for napalm-torching the rivers that already divide us from our fellow Londoners, but rather for building bridges of communication across these divides. The realisation of this cultural-cum-spiritual civic works project is, need it be said, all the more exigent in the light of our imminent hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games. It is vital that all of us--Black and White, Jew and Gentile, Gay and Straight, Sikh and Hindu, Chav and Toff, Kernevistani and Swabo-Liberian--should close ranks with all speed, and in a spirit of Stadtsbruderundschwesterschaft, so that, six years hence, we may put on a jolly good show fit to make those tatty foreigners fairly retch with envy of our multicultural bounty; and thus, in conformity to this selfsame spirit, I hereupon extend to you, Herr McGyver, an invitation to attend GLHCSLD's next Märzfest, to be held at 19:00 next Saturday week at the Swabo-Liberian Union Hall located directly opposite the soon-to-be defunct Bosty Drog restaurant at Hoxton Market. The evening commences with all assembled--dressed, natürlich, in the traditional folk costume of our people--(for women the Dirndl, for men the Loden and Lederhosen)--betaking themselves to the dance floor to cut a rug or ten's worth of Greenvilles to the accompaniment of the toe-tapping strains of our traditional folk music, die Blauen. There follows a buffet banquet of traditionally delectable Swabo-Liberian delicacies--Heisshunden, Schweinshängebacken, Bratkartoffeln, washed down with great steinfuls of Märzenlager and Verrückthund; and punctuated, at evening's end, by a rousingly traditional Tortespaziergang, undertaken in competition for the grand prize of a magnificent Buchananertorte concocted beforehand by one of our more culinarily-gifted Huasfrauen. Our Märzfest is indeed a spectacle fit to dazzle the Augen of the uninitiated, seeing as how it has have late become, in effect, the signature Swabo-Liberian holiday, having long since eclipsed in point of popularity its equinoctial counterpart and erstwhile festive centrepiece of our calendar, Oktoberfest. To be quite heisshundlich, Herr McGyver, our Oktoberfest has in recent years devolved into something of a Knackwurstfest (I trust, in view of your evident familiarity with this particular conceit, I may dispense with the explication thereof). It's hard enough to get the Fleischersdutzend women of our community to turn out once a year, in the Fickendestage of springtime, let alone in the autumn. But I digress. I was, after all, supposed to be wrapping up. And so, to attend to the aforesaid Einpackung, Herr McGyver, till the 25th--and, I hope, not a day later--I wish you a heartfelt auf Wiedersehen.

Sincerely,
LaMont Mörike-Jones
President, Treasurer and Sergeant-at-Arms
GLHCSLD

P. S. I'll be sure to keep an extra Heisshund and batch of Bratkartoffeln warm for you.

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The Angry Londoner replies:

Dear Mr Mörike-Jones:

First off, thanks for the invite to your little do down in Hoxton. Second off, to deliver a walloping sock in the co-jones or mainspring of your whole tirade, fuck Ken and his task force. Fuck them with a diverse, 20,000-strong, array of culinary and surgical instruments. I'd sooner trust a white paper issued by the Third Reich's propaganda office than I would one issued by those KL-patsies down at City Hall. (Yeah, I know Ken himself is given to these same sorts of Nazi-derived shit-slinging sallies; I suspect, indeed, that before it's all over every journalist or building-contractor who's dared to look sideways at him will have been assigned his own personal stand-in drawn from the historically-verifiable ranks of Hitler's inner and outer circles. Well, I say, if Ken wants to dish out Swastika-shaped spagghetioes, he should expect to receive gobfuls of the same in return.) I don't know where, apart from their own cavernous anal cavities, Ken's minions could have pulled this statistic of 20,000 unique cultures and ethnicities. It sounds mildly to wildly inflated to these orioles. But even supposing Ken & Co. are right, and we are indeed living in the Most Culturally Diverse City in All of Human History, I believe that I am entitled to reclaim at least a sliver of umbrage from your county-fair caricaturist's adumbration of YFC's truly as a kind of latter-day Alf Garnett or East-Atlantic David Duke; in other words to protest your chalking up of my admittedly scrimpy treatment of the local multi-culti scene to a kind of congenital allergy to all things culturally diverse, or to a virtually antiseptic lack of contact with them. The fact is that there are all manner of phenomena that flit past my okies each and every day, but that I have seen fit to pass over in silence in these here pages, for one reason or another--sheer co-jone-numbing apathy being the most prevalent among them. You may have noticed, for example, that with two hardly notable pseudo-exceptions--my brief metaphorical Portrait of the Bloggist as a Young Dragoonsman in my post of 7 January, and my account of a run-in with a certain fake-beardy trick-or-treater in my post of 1 November--I have yet to make mention of a single person's sporting a moustache, or indeed any other form of facial hair. Would you then be justified in concluding, on the basis of this sweeping omission, that every bloke who crossed my path from September to January was clean-shaven? Or that I somehow have it in for the mostachio'd and bearded blokility as a class? I think not. (But if I am mistaken, and if, perchance, in addition to being the President &c. of GLSWLD you are also a member of the Greater London Bearded and Moustachio'd Gentlebloke's League; and are thereby impelled to seek satisfaction from me on account of my egregious and repeated slighting of your fraternity, I say, Step up! I've got a wardrobe full of old shirts that I'd just as gladly consign to the gutters of Shoreditch as to my local Salvation Army shop.)
In brief, in my lifeworld I put the whole multi-culti bidness on par with moustaches and beards, and treat it accordingly in these here pages. Thus, just as you shouldn't expect to learn the facial-hair-bearing status of any of my mates until, say, one of them decides to grow a 'stache or beard or to shave off whichever of the two he already has, so you shouldn't expect to learn just how culturally diverse any of them is until this diversity becomes a matter of at least some cuntishly slight degree of dramatic interest.

Third, but not least, off: from the point of smell of this rabbit, the carrot of your argument is too puny and too far off down the patch to be worth hopping after, especially after a judiciuos comparison-sniffing of a certain schlong-sized alternative carrot dangling within biting distance of his bunny's incisors. You write of the need for all of us Londoners to close ranks in preparation for the Olympics in 2012. Well, a lot can happen in six years, Mr. Mörike-Jones, to upset the best-laid plans of mice and Ken--a bird flu pandemic, for instance, or the outbreak of a Sino-American war (a.k.a. WWIII). And in the meantime, much nearer to hand, we have another cause that IMOSHO is much worthier of your noble rank-closing, namely the derailing of Arsenal's cuntishly all-but-ineluctable progress towards the European Championship. It is vital that all of us Londoners--Black and White, Jew and Gentile, &c.--should close ranks to extirpate the tumour that is Arsenal from the colon of our civic body politic; that we should join together in one unanimous cry of NOT IN OUR NAME! loud enough to carry clear on over to Spain, reverberate from the stands of the stadia of Turin, Milan and Madrid and echo thence back in our own ears; that we should ultimately flood the streets in a mighty procession bearing aloft the decapitated heads of Arsène Wenger and Thierry Henry to the Tower gate. And it is in this spirit, the spirit of Stadtsantiarsenalschaft, that I hereupon extend to you, Mr Mörike-Jones, an invitation to attend the next plenary session of the North London Arsenal-Bashers' Association, to be held at 8 pm next Thursday week at the Sedulous Ape in Woodside Park. The evening commences with all assembled--dressed, naturally in number shirts culled from the liveries of teams who have scored at least one victory over the Gunners in the past six months--getting liberally pissed to the accompaniment of whatever happens to be playing on the house jukebox. There follows a round-robin exchange of anti-Arsenal jokes, anecdotes and rants; punctuated, at evening's end, by a blind-drunk but heartfelt choral rendition of our Association's fight song, 'Arsenal, O Arsenal, They Should Have Named You Cuntsenal'. Whether you are already a confirmed-if-closeted Arsenalophobe, Mr Mörike-Jones, or are merely a sceptical fan of a non-Arsenal club, your presence at our session would be decidedly welcome; and if, upon adjournment of that session, you shall be pleased to accept a bequest of a sealed letter of induction into our central London sister association, you shall have in exchange a pledge from me, redeemable on my word as a gentlebloke, to be present at your Märzfest from the cutting of the first Greenville rug to the devouring of the last crumbs of Buchananertorte. If, however, you prove so unregenerately deaf to our gospel as not to make an appearance at the Ape on the 23rd, rest assured that I shall not be darkening your Union Hall's doorstep on the 25th; and that, having in virtue of your absence excommunicated yourself in advance from our church as a de facto Arsenalophile, you may subsequently, and in good conscience, consign that Heisshund you would have set aside for me to some other purpose, preferably that of the passionate and repeated violation of your anal schphincter.

I am, Sir, TBS, your most humble Servant,
Rugby W. McGyver, Esq.
Treasurer and Sergeant at Pints
The North London Arsenal-Bashers' Association