Basher's Delight: Part Three

'I'll tell you what it is that marks it as uniquely Kennish,' a chirpily stroppy feminine voice twitters in from my immedjiate right. 'It's that it doesn't make any bloody sense.'

I swivel my head in the direction of the twittering, and my okies alight on the person of a blokess who, on the testimony of Mr Firstblush can only have been hoisted thither through a trap-door-panel of the fibreboard drop ceiling, as the main points of her coocher alone--a V-necked kelly green long-sleeved jumper, pointy-collared white blouse and blue jeans--attest to her manifest affiliation with some other tribelet of femininity than the Ashan one. Fortunately, to the greater good of the gazelle shaft's ghost, Mr Secondblush steps up just in time to urge the more plausible conjecture that as the spot of chairage now occupied by this blokess was only lately eclipsed by the formidably endowed figure of my neighbour the mammilar nape-groper, she's actually been sitting there all along.

Manish seems, or affects to seem, as pleasantly taken an-arse as I am by this interjection. 'Come again?' he and I shoot back in eagerly beflummoxed unison.

'Well, the Reuben brothers have never had anything to do with Iran. They were born in India, and their parents were Jewish Iraqis. If he'd told them to go back to India or Iraq or Israel--well, that would have been bloody rude, to be sure--but at least it would have been intelligibly rude. But to tell them to go back to Iran--well, you'd think he came up with that one by just blindfolding himself and chucking a dart at a world map.'

I like what she's saying, all the more so as she's a girl who's not too hard on the eyes; but in the disinterested service of refining the science of Kenophobology, I feel obliged to play Devil's advocate (bearing in mind all the while that the very logic of the idiom is compromised by the fact that Ken is the Devil), thus: 'So you're saying it's merely a scrawny little linguistic tongue bone us Kenophobes have been picking at in his company all these years?'

'Of course not. The main reason we hate Ken' [Ah! What music to my ears inhered in that single syllable we!] 'is that he's a bloody tyrant. But it's certainly a cellarful of salt in the wound--a bone-deep wound, if you will--that he can't even throw his weight around gracefully, with a bit of elan. Take that jab at the American ambassador that you two were just discussing [So she'd been paying more attention to our Kenophobic convo than to the hen session. Encore, maestro encore!]: you chiselling little crook. Well, crooks don't chisel; they filch. It's misers and skinflints that chisel. You filching little crook, or You chiselling little skinflint--that would have been one for the next edition of Bartlett's. But You chiselling little crook--it's pure tat, obviously cobbled together not so much on the spot as on the breath, as if he'd launched into the sentence without having the foggiest notion of how he was going to end it. Similarly vis-a-vis that undeservedly notorioius quip to the journalist from the Evening Standard, last autumn: Were you a Nazi concentration camp guard in a former life? Oh, that's inventive. Haven't heard that one once in the past sixty years. Even Winston Churchill, back in the 50s, would have found it a bit old hat. I think, by the way, that Ken could learn a thing or two in the political face-thwacking department from old Winsty. You remember what he said about his rival Mr Atlee--A sheep in sheep's clothing? Now that's a certifiably witty and certifiably devastating bit of piss-taking, one that's well beyond the reach of Mr Livingstone's present chops. Coming up with it obviously involved a bit more brainwork than just thumbing through Roget's to the entry for evil bastard.'

Speaking of brainwork, I've certainly been putting my old continuously-looped noodle through the mangle over the course of the minute or two comprised by the preceding diatribe. For, as pleasurable as it undoubtedly would have been to allow myself to be passively swept up into the hoover entrails of this girl's Kenophobic dynamism; to sit there all the while with jaw hanging loose Jacob-Marley style and drool spilling over my none-too-slack lower lip and on to to the tabletop like water out of an unattended bathtub, from round about the 20- second mark of the diatribe onwards I was clear on one thing about this little spitfire, namely (NSS, nest pah?) that I was in love with her; and that, hence, I was not afforded the luxury of simply basking in her Kenophobic aura; that if I wanted to advance to the hemi-semi-finals of the UEFA Championship season of my prospective liaison with her, a mere corner or two against her already-netted three or four goals would never do, that, as the match clock of the evening very probably read something like 1:20 [Cor, it actually probably was round about 1:20 a.m. that our inaugural chinwag took place], I had to score at least a goal or two of my own and toot sweet. I cast the metaphor of my plight in footerly terms because those are the ones that spring immejiately to mind, although in all in all candour I gots to say that a three-dimensional chess metaphor would probably be more apt. I hesitate to make use of such a metaphor, though, on account of the fact that 1) I don't know the rules of three-dimensional chess, and b) assuming it's got this much in common with two-dimensional chess, the checkmate analogy is probably as piss-poor an analogue for the outcome I've got in mind as is the match-result analogy imported from footie. The point is, I know I've got to append to my Kenophobic inamorata's diatribe something that nearly--but not quite--matches the diatribe in point of cleverness, but that yet hails from an entirely different register. So, as hard-going as I'm finding it to take stock of the various particular upshots of her Kenophobic squibs, the one thing that I manage to suss out that they have in common is that they all hail from a register of, as it were, theoretical or analytic Kenophobia; that they generalise about the common shortcomings of things that Ken has already said or done. I thereupon conclude that my rejoinder had best hail from the register of practical or synthetic Kenophobia, that it had best consist in a practical prognosis of things Ken might plausibly one day say or do, on the basis of the principles adumbrated in this here theory of hers.

But, of course, it’s absolutely out of the question to preface the exposition of my practical programme by presenting its difference from her theoretical one in starkly actual terms, to say, ‘I admire the sublime philosophical detachment that enables you, as though from stratospheric heights, to take in all of the salient shortcomings of the Livingstonian worldview at a single glance; but as for me, I prefer to get down there at ground level and submerge my bare arms up to the elbows in the nitty-shitty of the Livingstonian manure heap, you know, put my Kenophobia into practice’: that would come off sounding too much like a lecture. Rather, I have to work my way round to the programme obliquely, by initially appearing not even to lay a diggit on the longest head-hair of her argument; that is, namely, by availing myself of McGyver Signature Ploy #78, The calculated pseudo non-sequitur, also known as the logician's trump- the-okie, as follows:

‘Do you reckon Ken’s got a team of professional speechwriters, or that he comes up with this stuff all on his lonesome?’

‘That’s a good question. I’ve never given it much thought. I should hope he wasn’t actually paying anybody to produce rot like that, but you never know…But why do you ask, anyway?’ she asks, a trifle mistrustfully.

Why indeed? Such is the question I must set about answering with all speed; for the greatest danger inherent in the deployment of the calculated pseudo-non-sequitur is that, sitting out there in the boggy rhetorical open like a turd, it is apt all too readily and incontrovertibly to be taken by one's interlocutor (or interlocutress) for an instance of the real fake deal, and thereupon to effect all too effectually the diametrically cross-purposive rhetorical outcome of the same (you’ll recall, DGR, that the last time I let fly a calculated genuine non-sequitur it was as a proper-dudic to kicking a bloke out of my car)--unless, that is, the deployer benefits from a split-secondly simultaneous access of the co-jones, acuity, dexterity and stamina requisite to scooping that seeming turd up into his hands, sussing out the three or four spots of intervening dry ground, hopscotch-skipping across these (the spots) and flattening it (the turd) out into a paving stone abutting directly on the terminus of the high road of his chinwag-buddy's argument. I leave it you, DGR, my bog-trot-competition jury, to judge whether or not my subsequent performance, recorded below, amounted to a score of a perfect ten on all four counts:

'Er, well, because it seems to me that if the hallmark of the Livingstonian rhetorical metier is, as you claim, one of irrationality, that the surest means of putting this claim to the test must be to to take a stab at composing a Livingstonian speech through the consistent application of that hallmark or principle.'

'Can you be a bit more specific, a bit more concrete?' She looks intrigued but a mite sceptical.

'Er, well, yes, I think so. Say you divided the typical Kennian tongue-lashing into a certain number of salient categorical segments--Mayoral Policy to Be Steamrolled In, Identity of Would-Be Opponent of Said Policy, Slur to Be Applied to of Said Opponent, Country of Prospective Exile of Said Opponent, etc.--and sort of plopped down randomly-selected instances of such categories into a template sentence, consisting certain dead connectors--if, then, why don't you, you might find it easier, etc.--'

'--You mean so as to make a kind of Livingstonian Mad Lib?' she jubilantly interjects, whilst laying a hand on my arm.

I couldn't have concretised my project more efficiently myself. (Nor could she have concretised a certain other thing of mine more efficiently than by laying that hand of hers on me as she had just done, but that's a whole 'nother trowel of cement.)

'Yeah, that's right. Spot on. And if you were to get together a whole slew of the things, slip 'em in an envelope addressed to City Hall, along with a cover letter of application to the position of his Mayorship's free-lance speechwriter--'

'--Let's do it. Right here, right now.'

In toking obeisance to the most obvious out-of-context acceptation of this last sentence, I suffer my phiz to dilate itself into an aghast-clown's-faced expression signifying 'Well, mademoiselle, if that's the sort of thing you're in the market for, I suppose I could oblige you,' and orientated towards a patch of wall appropriately adorned with a snap of a munificently-pubed, doe-naked blokess sitting high astride the seat of an ancient penny-farthing bicycle--but only for the most cunt-hairishly-splitted of milliseconds. Then, scrunching it--my phiz--up into an altogether more businesslike expression orientated towards the starry-okied phiz of my newly-discovered partner in Kenocide, I says to her:

'OK. Have you got any paper on you?'

'No,' she replies, reaching over to her right not for a handbag, but for a kind of oversized feminine wallet known, I believe, in Yank parlance, as a pocketbook, 'but I have got a pair of biros, and a pair of scissors. This'll do for paper.' And by this, she means our table-compound's assigned customer-service plank, which she's just now scooping up and flipping over to reveal a 150-square-inch-strong backside of blank scribbling surface. So, after un-snapping her pocket-book, and producing therefrom all three needful implements, she sets about cutting the card in two, then hands me over my half-plank-'n'-biro.

I shall spare the reader whose wardrobe lacks a navy-blue Kenophobic anorak an exhaustive account of our enumeration of the categories, our crafting of the model sentence, our clumping together of the various segments of verbiage into a butcher's dozen little heaps of paper-shavings disposed more or less uniformly all round the circumfrence of the pivot-table, and leap ahead to the moment when we were ready to compose our first Mad Ken Lib; not, however, without first remarking Manish's silence throughout the whole of the proceedings, barring the occasional suggestion of Steamrollable Policy X or Country of Exile Y--a silence that might, on the one hand, have very well been premeditated, in view of his foreknowledge of this blokess's presence on the scene; but that might likewise have been accounted for by his interminable efforts to keep Manisha awake--through numerous bouts of cajoling, face-cheek-slapping, higball-glass-off-fending--in face of the dual phenomena of the constant haemmoraging of her contingent out of our vicinity and the galloping progession of her blotto'd-ness.

'So Ken says,' the girl says, reaching from pile to pile, and composing as she goes along, "If you...proctologists are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of....instituting a 10 per cent rise of the council tax...to pay for civic improvements against our hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games, why don't you move back to...Mauritania--I'm sure you'd get a better deal from the... Mormons."'

'Solid gold Kenologia. He'd kill for a speech with a line like that in it. Shall I hazard my own inaugural contribution to the portfolio?'

'By all means.'

'So Ken says, "If you Swabo-Liberians are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of...assessing a 25-quid charge on all wide-axial vehicles entering the city centre--'

'Oh, come on,' Mansih leaves off Manisha-face-slapping to interject, 'This defies imagination. He'd never go that far.'

'Never put any reg or leg past Ken, however draconian it might be. So, anyway, Ken says, "If you Swabo-Liberians are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of assessing a 25-quid charge on all wide-axial vehicles entering the city centre...to offset London's .00000005 per cent annual contribution to global warming, why don't you move back to... Lapland--I'm sure you'd get a much better deal from the...Rosacrucians."'

Just then, the PP is pounding out a succession of chords that is all too familiar to me, albeit in a rather unfamiliar timbre--something like Dah-Dahhhhh-dah-nah-nah-nah-nah--Dah-Dahh-Dah-Dahh-nah-nah-nah-nah--oh, fuck the onomatopoeic-transcriptive hoss-shite; why don't I just go ahead and say what'll cut a zillion times more mustard or salad cream with the average sub-sexagenarian reader anyway, namely that in this sequence of chordage I immejiately recognised the opening synth-riff of Van Halen's 'Jump'.

I feel a tug at my shirtycuff as Manny pipes up thus:

'Lucky hit, this song turning up in the rotation, and late enough that the mike's free to boot. If you'll excuse me for a minute or two, and keep an eye on her [meaning Manisha, who has by now passed out with arms folded and head down on the table], I've got a spot of business to attend to. And, oh, Rugger, if you don't mind--'

'Yes?'

[Motioning towards my earward-abutting grammaphone horn:] 'Take a sock out of it.'

Without quite knowing what I'm in for, I brace one hand against the base of the horn, and whip out the napkin with the other hand. Manish mounts the stage, puts the microphone to his gob, and through the newly-unmuted horn issues the following dedication:

'This one goes out to my mates, Rugby and Esmeralda.'

'Esmerrugba?'perpexedly queries the two-larynxed-critter the girl and I have untowardly just metamorphosed into. Then: 'Rugberaldy? Who (s)he?'

'That's me.' the TLC rejoins in its first intelligibly-transcribable issue of verbiage.

Blimey! Evidently we've both been so caught up in the heat of the Kenophobic moment that it hasn't occurred to either of us to ask the other's name--which, perversely enough, it seems to me, bodes beautifully for our prospective future together. What doesn't bode so well for the same object is the name, her name, itself, which, IDMTY(MDFC), has never been a favourite of mine; indeed I've always thought Esmerelda made a much better name for a household disinfectant than for a girl. Well, anyway, in the meantime we've both directed our attention towards the stage, where Manish is just starting to croon, chunefully enough--albeit in vocal stylings that to my orioles seem to owe more to Eddie Vedder than to David Lee Roth--thus:

I get up, and nothin' gets me down.
You got it tough, I've seen the toughest around.
And I know, baby, just how you feel.
You got to roll with the punches and get to what's real.
Ah, can't ya see me standin' here I got my arse against the Protex machine.
I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Ah, can't ya see what I mean?
Ah, ya might as well skip. SKIP!
Might as well skip!
Go ahead and skip. SKIP!
Go ahead and skip.
Skip the fuck on outta Dunedin, baby... (etc.)

Prevailingly, his attitude is that of your average karaoke-ing punter bereft of grander foot-lighterly aspirations; in other words, he's content by and large to stand in place, arse against the playing-machine, with the microphone held throughout in one hand athwart his intermittently-breached gob. Occasionally, though, he sees fit to step clear of the piano and launch into a brief, right-foot-favouring jig that I at first take for some kind of choreographic analogue of the song's eponymous refrain, until, midway through the second verse, I happen to notice that there is, in fact, absolutely no correspondence between the recurrence of these terpsichorean episodes and that of the word skip. Anyway, at the song's conclusion, Manish bows to an all-too-brief smattering of applause, thanks his pathetic remnant of an audience, relinquishes the mike and returns to our table.

'So that,' I ask him, after Esmeralda and I have given him an obligatory thump on the back and a handshake, 'I take it, was...?'

'...Yeah, that Testicular Atrophy song I was telling you about back at the Ape.'

'Funny, it sounded an awful lot like...'

'"Jump"? Well, I'm sure it was, as far as the piano-roll manufacturer was concerned. You see, two years after the release of the "Skip" EP, Van Halen nicked the lyrics off TA and changed the tune. And the boys down under never saw a dime of royalties. A crying shame, really, when you think about it.'

'My heart goes out to them.' My brain, on the other hand, goes out to Manish thus: 'But "Jump" isn't even a 70s song--not by a long stretch.'

'Ah, well, you see, Rugger, this is 80s night: they slip in a song from that exogenous decade every half hour or so.'

80s night at an 1890s-themed 70s bar? I quiz myself rhetorically. The chronological bleedover is enough to make you vomit, innit? Still, I suppose the coarse art of wallet-hoovering knows no aesthetic limits.

'Anyway, Rugger,' Manish resumes, administering a rousing quintet of jostlings to each shoulder of his so-called romantic partner, 'it's high time Manisha and I were heading home. Will either of you be wanting a lift?'
For my part, I'm all for staying put at table with Esmeralda and exhausting all the remaining Ken-Lib-ic permutations over a butcher's dozen more phosphates, and pulling a sickie the next morning (interrupting whatever amorous adventures might ensue just long enough to hand over to Lou my trusty schedules for the 84 and 383, together with sufficient bus-fare to cover the trip up to Potters Bar); so I 'er' and 'well' a bit whilst waiting to follow Esmeralda's lead. But Esmerelda, for her part, at the moment, seems to have orioles only for Manish; for, fixing upon him the sunniest of grins, she says, 'Yes, thanks, I'd appreciate it ever so much.'
'And as for our...em...game,' I lamely interject, doing my best to keep my upper lip from outdoing the lower one in point of slackness.
'Oh, we can continue it some other time,' she says, turning her still- heliomorphic phiz towards mine whilst raking the shavings from all corners of our table-quadrant into the gaping maw of her pocketbook.
'Well, then,' says Manish, playing an arseward-orientated airbourne pair of air-castinets by way of catching the attention of our waiter, 'we'll just settle up and be off.'
The waiter presently returns to present us with our bill and--once the papoose thereof has been duly stuffed with the requisite volume of Isabelas--to divest us of our anklets. We're all four of us--Manish, Manisha, Esmeralda and YFCT--on the point of setting off towards the front entrance, when Manish suddenly winces all over and, relinquishing his shoulder-support of Manisha (Esmeralda immejiately thereupon stepping in to supply the absence thereof with admirable timing), stoops over to massage his right ankle.
'The bastards,' he gasps, his phiz contracted into, as they say, a mask of pain. 'They shocked me. Over and over and over and over again, they shocked me.'
'So the piano was outside the limit of the anklet?' I quiz him as I wrap his free hand round my own shoulders.
'Evidently so.'
'And that's why you were hopping about so much during your performance?'

‘That’s right. It’s OK, Rugger, I can walk on my own, if you’ll take over escort duties for Manisha, Esmeralda. I’ll tell you one thing, though: first thing tomorrow morning I’m writing a letter to the management of this place, and sending a copy to the CMO.’

The crowd has thinned out quite a bit over the past hour or so of our time in the dining room. Half the tables are either empty or occupied solely by members of the staff, gossiping in couples or trios or lolling solitarily with their clip-ons unclipped on one side and savouring post-shift fags. One block of tableage, though, at the very front of the room, is conspicuously full. At first, as we're just setting out, the party there assembled give the vague impression of being a mini convention of court jesters; then, as we're skirting round the bell of the player piano, they're clearly distinguishable as a troop of football fans of various clubberly affiliations; and finally, just as we're drawing level with them, my okies fix on the 18-stone backside of the most conspicuous of their number, and, adding those 18 stone to the 2 of the Gary Neville shirt swathing their better part, I immejiately suss out the identity of the ManU fan in question as that of my erstwhile fellow Arsenal-basher Cyril, and a quick spot-scoping of the his neighbouring faces and arses injuices the subsequent deduction that this here assembly cannot but be the Third Plenary Meeting of the North London Insularist Arsenal-Bashers' Association. I know we're going to be within gobbing distance of the lot of them for all of, at most, ten seconds; but that's certainly more than long enough for me to think it worth my while to shade the left side of my phiz with my hand until we're back out front in the anteroom. (As I'm in mufti, my phiz alone is the only part of my profile likely to tip them off.) That would have been a real poser, what-what?, the choice between; on the one hand, dishonouring myself as an Arsenal-Basher by openly feigning not to recognise Cyril and his crew; and, on the other, alienating my Kenophobic chums with a ban-worthy display of righteous Arsenalophobic shirtiness?

Back out front in the car park, I follow Manish over to the driver’s side of the Bug and climb in to take my place in the cut-throats’s corner, whilst Esmeralda, after helping the nearly-comatose Manisha into the shogun seat, presently sidles up alongside me into the back-seat driver’s perch. And by and by we're off on a southbound course along the High Road, one tending ultimately (NS) towards my digs. Whether Esmeralda's digs will mark a penultimate stop or a post-ultimate one it is beyond my present (and naturally non-Livingstonian) ken to ascertain; and somehow, I feel that it would cuntstitute a breach of etiquette to try to hone my gormlessness on this score by prying into the whereabouts of her chaise Louie less than an hour after having learned her first name, desperately though I am hankering after some sort of convo-re-ignition agent, and as readily-to-hand in this very capacity such prying presents itself. As for such perhaps-no-less-into-prying subjects as the nature of her job, her place of birth, the number and species of her pets, &c.; their potential intrusiveness is pretty much soundly trumped by their practical unbroachability, in view of the 10-minutes-maximum conversational breathing-room afforded by the commute from Redford's to the maisonette. Thus, I piss away roughly the first two of those minutes alternately staring out the window in seeming cuntemplation of the fugitive commercial and residential street-frontage, and nodding towards my bench-mate with a vacuous 'So-there-you-are-then'-ish grin; in each case to the monotonous soundtrack of the engine, punctuated every now and then by Manisha, somnolently wailing, She was carrying a Fistoulari handbag. Esmeralda, for her part, is game enough to meet the first butcher's half-dozen of these grins with a kind of ironically comprehending mirror-grin of her own signifying (so, at least, I flatter myself), So here I am, then (Do you want to make something of it?). But as for the eighth or ninth of them, she flash-freezes it by observing, poker-phizzed as, er, the world poker champion (whose name, regrettably escapes me at the moment):

‘I see you go for the continental look.’

‘Eh?’

She makes a vague, sweeping forefinger-gesture in the vicinity of her throat, as though presenting goitre symptoms to an invisible physician.

‘Oh, that,' I say, taking stock for the first time in hours of my gaping shirtyfront, and, to judge by the scorching sensation I'm getting in my temples at the point where they're touched by my ear-tops, blushing to the very roots of all half-million of my head-hairs. 'Lost a button back at the restaurant as I was, er, combing my hair in the gents [Sorry to disappoint you, DGR, but you haven't caught me asleep at the yarn-spinningwheel: I never visited the men's room during our sojourn at Redford's. I'm simply banking on the likelihood that she wasn't enough acchuned enough to my whereabouts throughout the earlier part of that sojourn to call bullshit on me now.] They don’t sew ’em on like they used to do, that’s for sure.’

‘Actually,’ she says, with an inscrutable little smile, ‘I rather like it.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. I find it quite fetching.’

Now, DGR, I wasn’t born yesterday. Admittedly, in some of my gloomier, more beflummoxed moments, I’m prone to wondering whether I wasn’t born the day before yesterday, but this isn’t one of those moments. I know that she doesn’t actually find my string-vest-scrimmed upper torso in the least bit fetching; I know that in claiming she does she is, not to mince words, taking the piss out of me. The question is, which of the two piss-stand takeaway orders has she ticked off the menu at the moment: No. 1, ‘I know full well you’re holding your breath against the moment when you get to see the verso of my knickers, so let me spare your pulmonary-cardiac system a bit of trauma by giving you permission to let go of those two lungfuls of air,’ or No. 2, ‘I don’t quite know as yet whether you’re holding your breath to see the verso of my knickers, so let me give your co-jones a little through-the-flies skeeter bite to remember me by’; which, of course, may be in turn sub-off-ticked as House Speciality No. 2a., ‘because I’m an unregenerate cuntess who gets off on giving random blokes scrotal skeeter bites,’ or House Speciality 2b, ‘because for my part I’m holding my breath against the moment when I get to see the verso of your knickers, and I see you’re wanting a bit of injuicement to pull them off’? And if I may be permitted to do a bit of piss-taking of my own out of the episstemology of flirtation, I would defy a Barry White or a James Brown or any one of our other widely-fellated latter-day Don Joouhnns, placed in a parallel sitch, vis-à-vis a blokess he’s known for as short a span of time as I’ve known Esmeralda, to arrive at a greater degree of certitude vis-à-vis this blokess’s amorous intentions or lack thereof.
Had Esmeralda been of a more die-latery temperament, I might to this very moment still be in the dark as to which of the three possibilities was manifested by her pseudo-admiration of my continental coocher. But to her credit on more scores than one, she seems to have foreseen the necessity of steering me towards a less ambiguous epistemological SOA before we part company tonight; for, just as we're rounding the corner of Woodside Park Road--from which it's but an ant's trek to the very doorstep of my digs--her lips swap the inscrutable smile for a slightly-more-scrutable frown as she snaps open her pocketbook and lowers her okies towards its innards with enough eyebrow-ballast to suggest she's searching intently in there for some specific item or object. At last--and I mean the very last, as we're idling kerbside at my RM coordinates--she lowers a tweezerly-gingerly thumb-and-forefinger into the pouch and extracts therefrom a cookie-fortune-thin sliver of paper, which she then immejiately, without even giving me enough time to mouth a courtesy mute WTF, reaches over and deposits in my tit-pocket.
Wellsir, there was evidently nothing for it but for me to suss out what this contraband-handover was all about afterwards on my lonesome; if the de facto generic constraints imposed by the third-party drop-off set piece hadn't sufficed to check my impulse to linger, then Esmeralda's own seconding of those constraints by means of a mechanically repetitive, retarded-hand-puppet-style goobye wave, accompanied by the return of the inscrutable smile (highlighted this time round, if my okies don't deceive me, with discernable traces of sheepishness), would have done so on their own. I stepped out of the car, hemmed my way through the 'Thanks for the ride/don't be a stranger' valedictory routine with Manish as blasely as though I'd been his only passenger all along; shouted out a jaunty 'Night Manisha; Night Esmeralda' in the general direction of no one in particular and waved the lot of them off on their U-turning way back towards the High Road.
No sooner is the air clear of the sound of the Manishmobile's engine, than, without even searching out a decent patch of light beforehand, I stick a coupla right-handed fingers into my TP, and, after an irksome encounter or two apiece with Jimmy's flyer and my shirt-button, manage to seize and tweeze out Esmeralda's sliver and nudge it over to the flats of my palm. Inscribed on the paper appears to be the single word 'dervishes.' Hoping against hope that the darkness is to blame for this apparent misreading, I walk on over, with palm still cradled upwards, to the git-proof illumination of my front-doorstep-light, and take a second gander downwards. Dervishes, the li'l cutting stubbornly snaps back at me; this time, though, in my own spidery handwriting, thus snapping on a so-called inner lightbulb identifying itself as remnant of the Ken-Lib game (i.e., as a component of a sentence that would read, e.g., '...move back to Utah--I'm sure you'd get a much better deal from the dervishes.').
'So that cinches it,' I says fumingly to myself. 'It's basically a sub-sub tick-off of 2a, i.e., "Let me give you something else, something material to remember me by, to no apparent fucking purpose."' Fortunately, my hand--perhaps in virtue of its greater degree of commerce with my schlong--is a good deal more open-minded on the subject to, er, hand than my mind itself, for it takes it upon itself to scrunch itself up in such a fashion that, once I've caught on to its shenanigans and have ordered it to uncurl itself, I see that the paper has been flipped over on to its backside, where there is to be descried not the word 'dervishes,' nor indeed any other composite of Roman characters, but a string of numerals, which, on account of its 020 prefix, I immejiately identify as a London telephone number.
'So it was 2b after all,' I can't help saying aloud through a belly-laugh. Then, louder: 'She loves me!' Then, louder still, 'SHE LOVES ME!' Then, loudest, of all, 'SHE LO-O-O-O-O-O-VES ME!'
At the termination of this last (and admittedly asbo-worthy) outburst of amorous triumph, I hear a window being flung open up above and a stroppy masculine voice calling down, 'Hey, you, down there--pipe down and fuck off! Some of us have got work tomorrow, you know.'
I glance up and am at once relieved and cuntsternated beyond belief to identify the plaintiff as none other than Lou.
'Hey, you, up there," I call back to him, thrusting upwards my conveniently- already-partially-unshirted chest. 'What the fuck are you doing in my bedroom?'
He wastes a good quarter-minute of my time on his finger-gnawing schtick before slamming the window shut. Then, after leaving me on my hyper-stropped lonesome for the remaining three-quarters of that minute, he re-appears downstairs in the front doorway, clad only in a string vest and pair of shorts, and bowing and scraping apologetically in all directions, towards every corner of the aperture, as if to block my view-cum-way into the house for a strategically-mandated span of time; not so efficaciously, though, that I don't manage to espy the terry-clothed dressing-gowned figure of a blokess high-tailing it down the stairs and through the kitchen towards the rear exit. Well, suffice it to say, DGR, that that's the last time I trust him with my house keys.
Suffice it also to say that, as I'm typing this here post a full five days after the events recounted herein, there have in the meantime been developments, as they say, chez Esmeralda and myself. But as I'm a bit preoccupied at the moment by the outcome of tonight's Villareal-Arsenal match, I think it'd be best to postpone an account of those developments to a later post. And how soon might we expect this later post? you ask. Well, let's check the fixtures: in the event of an Arsenal defeat tonight, perhaps as soon as tomorrow; In the event of the Outcome That Shall Not Be Named, perhaps as late as Doomsday.

Basher's Delight: Part Two

‘No, no, no,' says Manish. 'Let me explain: We’re not asking for a new table, an unoccupied table. We’re asking to be shown to a pair of unoccupied seats at an occupied table. We’re expected, you see. The name on the reservation should be be Manisharrr…rrorrr…Asha, party of seven.’

‘Correction,' rejoins our shapeless, 23-stone dull-bike of a hosting wench, with the contrived patience of a sainted cunt, 'Asha, party of five, lately party of seven. Effective the first instant of the present month, we have instituted a ten-minute straggling limit for each party comprising fewer than 50 persons, with all empty chairs to be confiscated and reallocated, and the table reconfigured accordingly, at ten minutes, one second after the time of the reservation. And you two appear to be about…oh...let’s say 92 minutes the farther side of the limit, give or take 30 seconds.’

‘So I guess perching on a barstool at the corner of the table is…’

‘…Absolutely out of the question. There is literally not a vacant seat in the house. You are, however,’ she adds, her phiz suddenly coming over all cuntishly sunny, ‘welcome to stand yourself at the bar—two lovely patches of wall-space have just opened up there.’

'Err...,' he says, repaying my dubious glance in kind and then some, 'we'll think about it.'

'Think about it, schmink about it. Do you want them or not? Going...going...'

'Err...well...'

'...Gone! to the couple just behind you in the queue. Stand aside, please, gentlemen, to make way for them.'

‘Cor,' I say to Manish, as we edge our way over to the side of the room and plant an arsecheek apiece on a red-velvet-upholstered setee just broad enough to compass the combined girth of a pair of anorexic pygmies, 'is it ye olde friendly neighbourhood ice cream parlour or Studio 54 they’re trying to do up here?’

‘Studio 54? More like Soylent Green, I’d say. Anyway, Rugger, are you up for waiting round for another patch or two of free wall space?’

'Up's not really the word for it...'

'...inasmuch as your second wind is by now--?'

'--giving up the fart's ghost, and my sails are deflating faster than a pre-
Viagra-era octagenarian pensioner's schlong.'

'Same with mine. Unfortunately, I've got to hang round at least long enough to get a word in to Manisha, preferably in person rather than by phone, so's to obviate racking my brains over the first question of the Chipping Catechism: "How do I know you're actually here and not a hundred miles away in the arms of a 10-quid hooker?"'

'I catch you. Well, I suppose I could always cab it back down-district, and we could push our Ken-bashing chinwag back another night or two. It does seem a bit like keeping indoors during a thrice-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse, though, the idea of passing up the opportunity to bash in the company of this blokess you mentioned. What would you say the chances were of the four of us meeting for a quasi-or-pseudo half-blind double date at, say, Emchai?'

'Half-fair to decent,' says Manish, a trifle absently, his phiz orientated away from mine and towards the hostess's station. 'But maybe it won't have to come to that. Look.'

I hop on board the train of his gaze just in time to catch the arse-end of a whispered chinwag betwixt the bike and one of her draughts-board-uniformed confederates of the male suasion, accompanied on her part by a series of jerky Sicilian-farewell-style hand-twitches evidently intended for our okies solamente. Perhaps I've been wrong all along about this blokess's sexual orientatedness and she fancies one of us; or, per-equally-haps, the Byzantine regulations of this place, quite in spite of their cuntish selves, have left a once-in-a-blue-moon-exploitable loophole open to such indiwiduals as find themselves in our particular plight; or, perhaps then again, a little bit of both of these phenomena is at work here--perhaps it's all overdetermined. At any event, after we've heeded her summons and moseyed our way back to within shouting distance of her lectern, she happens to deliver up to our orioles the following dispatchlette of good news:

'Gentlemen, you're in luck: we've had a death at Table 5.123657, and an apoplectic seizure at Table 4.23852; such that, posterior to the obligatory five-minute window of table-reconfiguration-and-seat-appropriation, you may join your party.'

Naturally, it did cross my mind's belly that it might be a bit crass, and indeed, a bit well-nigh cuntish, to take advantage of the misfortunes of two of our fellow punters in such a fashion as we would be doing in claiming this prerogative. On the other hand, I was more than a bit loath to lose arse with Manish by backing out at this stage of the evening, after all of my aforesaid quasi-astrological vaunting. Mind you, if Manish himself had voiced the merest soup's-son of a scruple on the score of our claim, I'd have fallen right in line behind him. But since, in his capacity as my cicerone, he evinced all too much eagerness to do in Chipping as the Chippingians did--since he in fact pounced on the hostess's proposal (not, let me be perfectly clear, on the hostess herself) like a proverbial lion on a Christian, by drooling back unctuously, 'Thank you ever so much; we're ready whenever you are' without so much as a consultive glance back in my direction--I was willing, if not actually content, to do the same.

'Splendid,' says the hostess. 'Whilst your places are being prepared, you may--and, indeed, must--proceed to our VIP lounge,'--she gestures vigorously over her right shoulder with her Biro as though doing a panto-ist's impression of a geezer scratching his back--'for the affixing of your homing-anklets. Have a wonderful evening, and thank you for choosing to spend it with us at Redford's.'
'Homing-anklets?' I says to Manish, as we're hoofing it to the lounge. 'I don't like the sound of that.'

'Me either.'

'So you haven't been initiated into this ritual already?'

'Nope. Must be another policy implemented on April 1.'

*

'On April 12, actually,' says the affably mesopmorphic 17-stone youth assigned to homing-beacon-affixing detail, as, having already graced one of Manish's trouser-cuffs with the same dubious adornment, he's crouching at my feet and velcro-fastening a hefty plastic shackle to my ankle. 'It was a bit before my time, so I can't vouch for the truth of the legend; but the old salts say the reason management decided to do this was that they were having a lot of trouble with the dine-and-dashers, with people taking advantage of the press of the crowd to slip out before settling up their bills. They say the serving staff and the CCTV cameras weren't really up to the job; that between the two of 'em they were only managing to catch 90 per cent of the offenders. Only 90 per cent? Cor, I'd say the Met could've learned a thing or two from that lot.' Then, rising to his feet, and switching into boilerplate queen-bee-channelling mode, he says, 'You will wear the anklet at all times. Should you stray beyond a 20-foot circumfrence of your table, you will be administered a mild electric shock, certified to within a microvolt of the legally permissible standards established by the Chief Medical Officer's Interdepartmental Quango on Health, Trade and Industry. At the third infraction of the straying-limit, you will automatically forfeit your place in the dining room and be assessed the full total for all outstanding orders placed or comsumed. Any attempt to remove the anklet will likewise eventuate in the forfeiture of your table and the assessment of the full total of the bill, together with a 50 pound anklet-replacement fee. Do you have any questions?'

'Er, no, I guess not.'

'Splendid. Have a wonderful evening, and thank you for choosing to spend it with us at Redford's.'

'A question's just occurred to me,' I say to Manish, as we're limping out of the lounge, 'namely, how will they know how to nick us if we do stray beyond the perimeter, etc? I mean, apart from resorting to the old-timey low-tech methods they've apparently abandoned?'

'That's a good point. Er, no, hang on a bit. Have you ever filled out one of their customer service quality control cards?'

(Let it be said that these so-called cards were actually 8-by-12-inch cardboard planks that took longer to complete than your average O-level exam, and were more chockful of cuntishly intrusive questions than an application for employment to the MI5.)

'Yeah--but only once or twice, when my server happened to be a comely lass, and I thought I might get some extra pulling points in by flattering her in the Miscellaneous Comments section.'

'Well, there you have it. Once is enough: you gave them your address, and they know where you live.'

That about does it, Mr Redford, I said to meself: Just you see if I'm ever again seduced into offering up even the most trivial declassified national secrets of the Ruggerswelt--say, my preference for poppers over chips--to one of your polyester-trousered Mata Haris.

Wellsir, as I was in the midst of saying, we were limping from the lounge, through the bar and into the dining room, past a wall-ful of punters groaning--so it seemed to me--in wretched envy of our prospective sedentariness, past a quartet of paramedics bearing a pair of covered stretchers towards the front entrance, and up and into to an alcove of Tetris-tesselated chunk of tableage, to which, just as we're arriving, a male member (sic) of the staff is fastening another square module so as to transmogrify the ensemble from a '7' figure into a kind of heavy-metallic 'S'. The bloke thereupon departs, and for a half-minute or so, we're left standing--and fanning our respective pairs of arse-cheeks in default of any more productive use of our time--until he returns with a pair of chairs. Being nearer to the wall than Manish, by default I take my seat at the left side of the upper prong of the S, to my immejiate and infinite cuntsternation and regret; for my chair has been apparently and cuntishly strategically placed within blower-receiver-earpiece's distance of one of the speakers of the house stereo, housed in a casing mimicking the flared horn of a fantasy-eccle acoustic grammaphone yet mounted to the wall, in appropriately anachronisic fashion, by means of a bracket-cum-plastic-coil mechanism suggesting that it's meant to be detached after the manner of the speakers of one of those trans-pondial so-called drive-in cinemas.

At the moment, the piped-in player-piano soundtrack consists of a rendition of that hoary old ragtime standby 'The Entertainer' (a.k.a. the theme to the motion picture The Sting) with accompanying tuneless vocals screechingly supplied by one of the female punters. For the benefit of those of you who bothered to read my last post, I must apologise for neglecting to mention therein a salient (and supplementarily off-putting) feature of Redford's house schtick: namely its round-the-clock karaoke policy. With respect to the tunes of 1970s vintage, which are to the last bloke of them at least proper songs, the conception of this policy would appear to be eminently rational--at least vis-a-vis the inherently flea-brained ethos and aesthetic of karaoke enthusiasts. But as far as these chunes from the last-century-but-one go, one must assume that their de facto integration into the karaoke block at Redford's constitutes something of a so-called brain-fart on the part of the management, inasmuch as the better part of them were written, published and performed in their day as instrumentals, bereft of vocal obbligatoes; such that any punter gormless or co-jonic enough to proffer his or her pipes in the service of filling out one of these compositions is obliged to improv lyrics for them on the spot and off the shirtycuff. Mind you, for a certain sort of person, a torchsong-enthusiast-cum-old-timey-pop-music-anorak--a budding Tiny Tim if you will-- this sort of forum is probably just the ticket. But what do you suppose the odds of such a bloke or blokess turning up at a Chipping theme bar on a preekend night are? Exactly: about a trillion to one against. Such that, as I settled my arsecheeks into the aforesaid chair, I was treated to a pungently tinny earful of the following:

Yeah, the name of this song is 'The Sting,'
And I don't thing it means anything.
Yeah the name of this song is, the name of this song is, the name of this song is The 'Sting'! [x 8 or 9]
Ahh...thayouvermuch!

Meanwhile, during the obligatory scoping out of the immejiate scene, I take in nothing particularly surprising. Arseward and to the left of Manish sits Manisha, holding court, as it were, and flanked on all remaining sides by her butcher's-half-dozen-strong junta of blokesses, cackling over Christ knows what; and accoutered, like her, in chube-tops of various equally off-putting pastel shades, hooped earrings the size of schlongtail coasters, and--between the lot of them--a hectare or two of eyeshadow.

Then, just as the piano is striking up the opening bars of Elton John's "Saturday Night" [preceding which the song's poncier-than-Noel-Coward karaokist announced, 'I've taken the liberty of amending the title to "Thursday Night"], a bloke finally comes round to take our drink orders. Manish asks for a busman's holiday (i.e., a dirty vodka martini, hold the olives but not their juice [ugh!]), and I my Redford's usual, a sidecar phosphate (brandy, triple-sec, lime juice and soda).

And hereupon we--Manish and I--are catapulted into that social-tippler's-no-man's-land comprising those butcher's-quarter-dozen-or-so minutes wherein you've been vouchsafed the promise of drink but are as yet still bereft of that vital conversational prop that is the brimful pint or highball glass itself. Not that, physiologically speaking, even so much as a nanolitre of tongue lubricant can be accounted for by the imbibement of those first microlitres of alcohol; it's just that, psychologically--or rather, perhaps, aesthetically--speaking, should your chinwag be interrupted by the entrance of, say, a troop of ski-masked Uzi-wielding bandidoes or terrorists, you always want to be able to say after the fact, to the TV reporters or your mum and dad, 'Soandso and I were in the midst of a so-called heated discussion on Topic X, over drinks, when in traipsed these Uzi-wielding blokes in ski masks,' rather than, 'Soandso and I were in the midst of a so-called heated discussion on Topic X, over a great heaping stack o' thin-air pancakes, when,' etc. You catch?

Therefore, it was thus, ever so tentatively, whilst we were waiting for, respectively, our busman's holiday and sidecar phosphate, that I re-broached the official subject of our convo, as though launching into the opening of a joke:
'So Ken says to the American ambassador, You chiselling little crook...'

'Yeah, what was that all about?' shouts back Manish. His spirit is game for the convo, but his flesh thereto is weak, as I can tell by the leftward orientation of his head--and the occasionally corresponding orientation of his okies--as he utters these words. And for all of my own verbalised enthusiasm for getting down to Kenophobic bidness, I find myself catching a touch of the henophilic bug from him, as I twitch my right oriole likewise in the direction of the girls and, my attention momentarily captivated by the following scrap of dialogue, voiced by Manisha herself:

'So Sarah shows up at the reception clutching--get this--a Fistoulari handbag--'
Tittering cackles from all round.

'Why is that such a faux pas?' I shout towards Manish in what I take to be an altogether vain effort to re-unite his bifurcated attention, 'Last I heard from Manisha this Fistoulari bloke's wares were the dernier cri in women's accessories.'

I'm more successful than I ever could have hoped. 'Schtumm, Rugger, schtumm...' he says, furrowing his forrid vexedly and dribbling in fast-motion an invisible miniature basketball from a half a foot above the table. 'That was then, this is now.'

'Oh, don't sweat it, Manny. There's no way any of 'em heard me. TBT, I can barely hear myself over the din emanating from this contraption' (i.e., the grammaphone horn). 'Say, that reminds me...you're familiar with that idiom put a sock in it, the great-grandaddy of our beloved shut your CTM hole, right?'
'Of course.'

'Well, in case you've ever wondered what manner of object the it in question originally referred to...' [Here I reach for an un-disposable napkin rolled ready to hand on the tabletop, unfurl it and shake it clear of its cargo of cutlery; then, detaching the horn from its bracket and laying it on my lap like a newly-poached stoat cub, plunge the napkin as far up into its flared arsehole as I can reach. '...Get a little action in,' the horn at first protests with feisty stroppiness, during the first microsecond or two of the operation. Then, more feebly: 'Thursday night's a night for swiving.' And finally, with whimpering acquiescence: Thursday night's mmm-pmmpff, mmm-pmmpff!] '...Ah, that's better. [Re-mounting the newly tampon-sock'd horn] Stone-age recording engineer's slang. "PASII," that is.'

'One learns something new every day doesn't one?'

'Yepper. Pity one also always forgets two in the same interval. So, anyway,' I happen to feel safe in up-thread-re-taking as I espy the us-ward-tacking person of our waiter about fifty feet off, 'Ken says to the American ambassador, You chiselling little crook...'

'Yeah, what was that all about?' Manish says again, seasoning this spot of dialogue with a rather different flavour of distraction than during our first dry-run through the scriptlet--i.e., with the flavour of cuntsternated impatience, as though he's trying to make the utterance do duty for its virtual carbon-copy of 'What is this all about?,' i.e. 'Where's my fathermucking drink?'; an interpretation bourne out by his snapping to as follows when the long-craved holiday almost immejiately materialises at his elbow: 'Oh. Yeah, where does Ken--a glorified pocket-borough councilman--get off thinking he's within his rights to go toe-to-toe with the executive branch of the most powerful nation on earth? And to talk like he's the one with the bigger toe, no less! As though any proper head of state--of state, mind you, not city--has ever dared to dress down Uncle Sam in such a fashion. As though Jack Chirac or Vladdy Putin, in the stroppiest throes of Ameriphobic PMS, would ever dream of taking such a tone with Bush. Crikey! As though Leonid-freaking-Brezhnev, with an average monthly balance of 20,000 nuclear warheads in his arse's personal checking account, ever dared to call Richard Nixon an anydoing little anything?'

'Dittissimo, dittissimo,' I nod as I quaff the head off my phosphate. 'And above all, for him to claim the moral high ground in this matter, is un-fucking-conscionable. As though resistance to paying the sodding congestion charge is something anyone ought to feel guilty about. Oh, I do apologise ever so humbly Mr Highwayman, for the fact that I can only pay you in single-pound coins. I promise my wallet'll be flush with ten-pound notes the next time my equipage is arrested at this checkpoint. Thank you ever so much for not shivving me in the belly this time round, dear, dear Mr Highwayman, sir! Oh, thank you, Sir--thank you, thank you! That's the only attitude that'll cut ice with Ken.

'Mind you, though,' I cuntinue, twisting my top shirt button fretfully all the while, 'he's a wily cunt, is that Ken; like all politicians he knows which side of the bread his butter is...er...buttered on. Supposing the congestion-charge protestor is some nonagenarian old biddy of a chat-show-phoner--some menace to drivers and pedestrians alike who shouldn't even be allowed within sight of a car--well, then he hums a different chune altogether; he treats the plaintiff with kid gloves: I'm terribly sorry madam; rest assured that my staff and I are working on establishing an exemption for persons in your situation, etc. Fuck Ken Livingstone! Fuck that fucking cunt!' I take another phosphate sip, and amidst all the fizz, my tongue catches on something solid about the size of a watermelon pip. I spit the little foreigner into my hand as discreetly as I can manage. It's my shirt button, which must have snapped loose and fallen into my glass. Easy does it, Rugger, easy does it, I say to myself, and count to one; and, slipping the button into my tit pocket (just behind Jimmy's flyer) with one hand, hasten demurely to cinch together the two halves of my newly-gaping upper-upper shirtyfront with the other.

Manish registers his stock-taking of this embarrssing little cuntretemps on my end with the lowest-key of fisty-coughs, then says, 'Well, I suppose we should move on to, er, Irangate, before we run out of time.'

'Yeah, I suppose we should,' I concede, out of regard more for my shirt's well-being than for the clock's. 'I'll let you draw first blood on that one.'

'Thanks, Rugger. I'll do my best. So Ken says to those two building contractors, the, er, whatstheirnames...'

'The Reuben brothers.'

'Right. He says to them, if you're not happy with the way I'm handling this Olympic Sports complex thingy, you can go back to Iran and see if you can do better under the Ayatollahs.'

'Yeah, how characteristically, cuntishly Kennish, that line of rhetoric.' (Meanwhile Manisha's entourage has started to thin out. A couple of minutes ago, a girl on Manish's side skewed herself, perhaps merely to step out to the ladies, but more probably for good; whilst the blokess to my right has, by secreting her fags in her handbag, just given a surer sign that she's out for the count, and is just now scooting behind me close enough to bring the tips of her ginormous 'zoombers into contact with the upper nape of my neck; and at the instance of this contact I can sense my schlong stirring, yawning, stretching its arms [use your imagination, DGR, if you dare] and saying 'What's all this, then?' 'Down, won ton, down! I order him. Can't you see I'm trying to have a conversation here?) Mean-squared-while, Manish is rejoining:

'Indeed. But the thing is, Rugger, I'm just now realising that I can't quite put my finger on what about it is so specifically Kennishly c****ish [sic (don't ask)]; on what sets it apart from the myriad other c****ish rhetorical metiers we're confronted with day in and day out in the media. I mean, as punchily pleased as I am from a pragmatic Kenophobe's point of view that the Standards Board are going after him on this, I can't really see what anti-semitism has to do with any of it.'

'I'll tell you what it is that marks it as uniquely Kennish,' a chirpily stroppy feminine voice twitters in from my immedjiate right. 'It's that it doesn't make any bloody sense.'