A Rugger's Xmas in Wales

Yeah, it's been a while, I know. Naturally you lot are probably still wondering whether anything ultimately came of H.R.H.'s belated cruise-by of the Ape on Bloke Fawkes Night--

'--I beg your pardon for interrupting, MDF; but what is the meaning of this anomalous, plebeian, pluralised dishonorific of "you lot"?'

'The meaning of it, DGR, insofar as you are concerned, is--not to put too fine a point on it--that you've been sacked.'

[DGR, sputtering, and purple, as they say, with rage:] 'Sacked, indeed? As if I had ever been in your official employ to begin with!'

'As if, indeed. And yet, for want of a bit of lingo more precisely and genteelly denotative of the termination of our admittedly rather special relationship, how else can I phrase it?'

'I shall be gracious enough to take that for an apology.'

'Thank you, DGR: for for (sic) such, in a roundabout kind of way, was it intended to be taken.'

'And yet, I don't suppose you will be so gracious, whilst I'm packing up my things, as to subscribe an explanation--the more hypocritically smarmy the better--to that apology?'

'Indeed, I shall be; although in preemptive deference to the higher thingy-in-itself that is the bloggic metiér, in essaying that explanation, I'm afraid I may be obliged to go a bit easier on the salad cream of smarminess than will be to your liking. But anyway-stroke-to hew a rather longish, gownish story down to its appropriate readerly skirt-length: when I embarked on this here blogospheric enterprise way back in the big large ones of ought-five, I was naive enough to imagine the blogosphere as a kind of 24-7 Wembley Stadium, packed to the gills at any given moment with tens of thousands of impatient spectatorly readers; such that by default-stroke-extension I imagined my bloggerly scribblings issuing out of the writerly equivalent of a 5(0?)00-watt-strong tannoy, and hence requiring a declamatory tone and mode of address commensurate with the nature and reach of the technology. Whence the ubiquitous "you lot"s of my first butcher's-first-half-dozen posts. But when, round post eight or so, courtesy of the sheer dearth of comments and profile-views, I was finally brought round to the sobering realisation that the blogosphere--or, at any rate, my 500-millionth share thereof--was more akin-able to the reading room of the Barnet council library on a Sunday afternoon; why then, I thought that perhaps it'd be better to whisper rather than to shout, and to address myself as if to one reader rather than as if to thousands. And then, of course, was when you, DGR, sprang into such timely being.'

'Why timely?'

'Well, cos I was just then on the point of having to confront the dreadul SOA that, minus the occasional one-offer who'd been lured to this URL-dom courtesy of some nergle-powered investigation centring on some pet topic of his (e.g. [or, TB-dismally-F, i.e.], "Rugby League", "binge-drinking", or "Kernevistani cuisine"), I was pretty much writing exclusively for the readership of mine own okies; an SOA that, admittedly, I probably wouldn't have found atoll dreadful had I known that I was in for it from the get-go--after all, the great diarists of old, your Pepyses and Boswells and the like, seemed to take it in their stride.'

'Ah, but you see, DGR, herein lies the rhetorical difference between you and any one of these great diarists of old: he, as a matter of course--and notwithstanding the foregone conjecture that he might have been writing with the ghost of posterity standing over his shoulder all the while--could address his diurnal scribblings to himself, and himself alone, in perfect good faith, knowing as he did that the comprising volume was securely shelved under lock and key in his private library alongside, say, his bound collection of state-of-the-art, French-imported pornographic engravings. Whereas you, as a contributor to the universally-accessible open library that is the blogosphere, can never tell who might be popping round for a peek.'

'That's a fair and rational point, DGR; and one that I'll have occasion to return to before tearfully administering the final, decisive coup-de-pied to your door-jamb-flanked backside. For now, I beg your patience to consider that SOA, at that particular moment, as it were, from an irrational addict's povey. You see, having at the outset caught a jones for addressing a mass of actual someones presumed to be religiously chuning in to each and every one of my posts, I was physiologically loath to give up the ghost of a cuntinuity of readership. And if I couldn't count on a mass of such actual someones; or, indeed, even on a select few thereof--why then, I reckoned, the only practical shift, vis-a-minimum-vis the partial gratification of my jones, lay in addressing myself to a single imaginary someone. And that someone, for better and for worse, turned out to be you, DGR. I give you dibs on which of the two catalogues appertaining to either side of the and I should launch into first.'

'Why, the for better-side-appertaining one, of course, if only for the sake of rhetorical symmetry.'

'And as for the sake of your personal psychic well-being?'

'Tush to that. A true gentleman is always braced for the absolute worst, and accordingly takes the mere relative worse in his stride.'

'Very well. You asked for it. As to for the for betters: the first you already know about, viz. the easy assumption that the reader is already fully a-tit of what's been recounted here-24, and lactating in anticipation of what's yet to be recounted. Secondly: that in virtue of your srident poshness you evince an unflagging sociological-cum-anthropological curiosity WRT the daily grind of my humdrum North-Londinian existence, a curiosity that would be (and in manifest fact is) lacking in my de facto fellow-average-blokish readerly constituency. Thirdly, that IVO this selfsame SP, and the attichude of poised reserve enjoined thereby, you rather tend to curb my outpourings of what I guess you'd call plebemes--'

'--e.g., c**t, f**k, sch****g--'

'--that's right: and as I was saying--or would have better said--you tend to keep the overall proportion of such words to my total textual output within a certain manageable readerly limit--shall we say eight per cent?'

'Yes, let's: if only by way of more expediently pressing forward to the worse-ward catalogue.'

'Well, as to that: firstly--and admittedly from a certain brutish commie accountant's povey such as would inevitably be scorned by a true bloggerly artiste--you've got to consider the sheer number of bloke-hours devoted to the care and upkeep of the poshile veneer of your persona. SITS, this sort of performance don't come naturally to one of my humble ([upper-lower]-middle) middle-class origins (as Ronnie L. has sagaciously, albeit cuntishly, noted). Do you have any idea, for example, of how long it took me to cinch all those bits about Eton towards the top of the last post--vis-a-vis, I mean, the precise geographical situation of the school, its cafeterial cultchah and traditions, &c.?'

'Oh, I dare say no more than 20 minutes.'

'20 minutes? Why, I've a fair mind to guillotine your arse like those class-of-'89 Frog revolutionaries did to that poncey aristo scientist who thought it took a dozen eggs to make an omelet; although, SITS, you're erring on the opposite side of the quantitative divide: it took me a four full fucking hours to compose that bit of the post; four hours devoted to a seemingly-interminable round of nergling, gazetteer-thumbing and alumni-website-browsing --in other words, a full 11 per cent of the full-fathom 44 hours devoted to the composition of the entire post. And when you consider the fact that the eventuating DGR-ian episode amounted, in terms of sheer verbiage, to a mere 4 constituent per cent of the final product; why, then, you're looking, roughly, at a 230 per cent markup of the going rate--all in service of what cannot be described in all candour as anything other than as a rhetorical luxury.

‘Secondly, to re-advert to that point of yours: I cannot, indeed, and after all, ever be even approximately sure of who might be stopping by. And when I pause, as I do in fact do, every now and then, to settle me hooves into the moccasins or flip-flops of one of these conjectural by-stoppers, I can’t help wondering at the degree of off-putting-ness that must be occasioned in his or her okies by the spectacle of the two of us squaring off every coupla paragraphs or so like a pair of old queens. I can’t help imagining this otherwise potentially loyal reader spectating upon this spectacle and saying to him/herself: “All right: it looks as though these two have already got enough on their plates as far as dealing with each other goes: there’s clearly no point in my hanging about.”.’

‘Indeed not. And let me conscientiously remind you here, MDF--knowing full well though I do that this reminder amounts effectively to the discharging of a round of birdshot into my own left foot—that the scenario you have just adumbrated cannot be wished away into some species of counterfactual never-neverland; that on one—though admittedly only one—occasion, the two of us were accordingly embarrassed by just such a stopper-by, namely one Mr Caleb Stanhope of Carbondale, Illinois, USA.’

‘Whereupon, of course, I was obliged—much against my own cosy, blokey inclinations, I’ll have you know—to bundle you off unceremoniously into the kitchen, in order to make room in my bloggerly salon for your real-world counterpart. And who can predict when the next such untoward invasion of our bachelorly, Holmes-and-Watson-ian household will occur? And more to the point: what gives us the right to fashion this here bloggerly chimping ground into such an inviolable household? Granted: we might as well be airing our dirty laundry plumb in the bumfuck schphincter of the Sahara Desert or the Antarctic as in the blogosphere for all of the unwanted publicity it actually exposes us to; but what of that? Supposing the two of us were in fact camping on our paired lonesomes in the SD or the Antarctic; surely in such a sitch you'd be all in favour of our drying our socks, string vests and pants on a rack inside the tent, rather than on an outside clothesline, lest some improbably proximate Bedouin or Russian scientist should espy our heel-holes, pit-stains and skid-marks at sniffing-distance resolution, through the view-scope of his binoculars?'

'As to the heel-holes and--ahem--skid-marks, yes; as to the so-called pit-stains, no: inasmuch as any proper string vest, being devoid of fabric at that anatomical juncture, has no more to do with the armpit than with the appendix.'

'Just so. You know, DGR, I think that, over and above your many other Hoegaardenal qualities, that's what I'm going to miss most about you: your perspicacious, non-anorakish attention to detail. Why, the sheer pathos of your impending absence is enough to make me reach on over and give you a great crushing bear-hug--'

'--A simple handshake will do.'

'You're quite right, DGR. Please to forgive me: I quite forgot meself--and the slack-lower-lipped restraint due to one of your posh status--you know, in the heat of the tearful moment. [Tendering my paw to him:] Put her right there. [And thereupon he does do, albeit with a cuntish digital passiveness that ill beseems the occasion, methinks.] Good luck to you, DGR.'

'And good luck to you, sir.'

'Hang about--'

'--No, I really must be on my way, sir--'

'--What's with this sudden access of sirring?'

'Why, MD--erm, sir--it's simply tit for tat; for if this parting marks the extinction of the DGR for you, then it perforce must likewise mark the extinction of the MDF for me. Good day and farewell, sir.'

And with these words, he hoists his rucksack on to his right shoulder--no, strike that: a bloke of the DGR's standing would (much) sooner be caught dead toting a lady's handbag than a rucksack, at least on this side of the Alps--for hoists his rucksack &c. substitute takes up his briefcase--Christ, no! That's even worse: what do I take him for, some fucking rubbishy CIA agent or City stockbroker?--oh, I dunno, let's just say he buggers off out the front door after pausing rhetorically to heft whatever bit of baggage your average country gentlebloke of means keeps in tow nowadays.

I heartily apologise to you lot for the roughness of that last paragraph; it's just that these last 20 minutes or so--thatistersay, the first 20 minutes of my post-DGR-ian stint as a mature blogger--have been, SITS, pretty traumatic. I mean, Christ!: when you consider the sheer acreage of thickets of experience the two of us have bushwhacked through together, hand in hand, over the past half-year or so--'

'--Oh, for Chrissakes, save it for your fucking psychiatrist!'

'--What churl is it that dares to interrupt this sweet summoning up of RMOTP?'

'--What churls is more like it. It's us lot: your newly reclaimed implied readership.'

'Of course, of course. Please, do make yourselves at home; and have a go or to at fucking yourselves while you're about it.'

'Don't mind if we do, on both scores: first, we'll take our respective places on the sofa or whatever the fuck you've furnished us with in the way of arse-cushionage; and then, on the count of three, we'll all stand up, drop pant and do our level best to impale the points of our respective schlongs upon the crowns of our respective schphincters.'

'Anyway, to get back to what you was talking about at the top of the post, before that poncey toff barged in: 1) as a matter of fact, we couldn't give a bat's about whether or not Haitch-Arr-Haitch stuck round that night or not, and b) even if we could do, you needn't be arsed to tell us whether or not she did do, cos it's already plain to us as the schphincter 'tween your cheeks that she didn't.'

'How so? Were any or all of you (Cor forfend!) then present at the Ape?'

''Course not, your Royal Thickness! But, of course, we were present throughout the whole of the last post. And ain't that enough? For fuck's sake, among the butcher's gross of us we may not have two O-levels to rub together, but we've all of us, to a cunt, at least managed to slog our way through elementary maths. And what could be nearer to the right side of the old 2 + 2 + 2 equation than the assumption that the Queen didn't join you for afters? We mean, it's all more or less explicitly implied, innit? You tell us a third of the way through the post that "the Ape's ladies' toilet would have had a hard time accommodating the cloacal reserves of a single constipated pigeon"; then, two-thirds of the way through, you inform us, via the report of your trusty sauce Esmeralda, that the LT still can't get a full load "to go down in one flush"; and then, finally, at the very end of the post, this cunt Sir Humphrey asks you about the "state of the facilities", i.e., the "LT". Ergo: the Queen immejiately turns on her trainer'd heel and limoes it on down the High Road back to Westminster.'

'OK, you lot: I admit that you have twigged the narrative sequel of the last post; and, further, that I knew all along that this twigging didn't exactly demand of the reader a tripos in brain surgery or rocket science. But even so, I had rather counted on yall's being at least a coupla cuts above the common run of mere plot-fuckers--you know, the sort of riffraff who won't even dream of seeing a movie once they've penetrated the hymen of its Wikipedia-entry's spoiler warning.'

'Sorry to have to break the news to you, guv; but we are in fact just that sort of riffraff.'

'Do you really meantersay, then, that you haven't the slightest degree of interest in--Christ, I dun-properly-(k)no(w) what to call it--let's say, for want of less pompous verbiage, in the spiritual residue of my account of H.R.H.'s departure?'

'Not the slightest. You see: we've all been de facto republicans for a long time now, pretty much ever since Princess Di snuffed it back in '97. Mind you, if it'd been Kylie or Madam Beckham who'd been cooling her heels out on the pavement that night, why, of course, we'd be all ears for every spiritual detail of the shove-off, however small--'

'--Oh, come off it, you geriatric retro-geezers!' some dissenting you-lotterly faction interjects. 'At least have the common cuntish decency to call for a vote before sending our cooperative TARDIS carreening off down the old space-time continium towards destination 1995 A.D.'

'We ever-so-humbly beg your fucking pardon,' rejoins the elder faction, 'for having presumed to assume that those two veritable national treasures still held a special place in our cooperative heart. We suppose it'd take the lattest-day likes of Amy Winehouse to keep your lot's trend-fucking gaze affixed to the spiritual residue of the narrative.'

'Yeah, that's right. Either AW or Feist or pretty much any other female celebrity not already pickled in 12-year-old mothballs.'

[YLFCT]: 'All right, you transgenerational pack of fucking tabloid-fucking turds!' (That certainly got their attention, dinnit?) 'Regardless of which Page 5 (sic) micro-zeitgeistial Queen Bink you'd prefer to read about in these here pages, the fact is, I can't count myself cursed to have crossed paths with any of 'em in recent memory.'

'Oh, so then you have crossed paths with at least one of 'em in ancient memory?'

'Well, yeah,' I says, blushing for shame more than pride (I hope), 'I suppose in a sort of roundabout vicarish way I have done. You see, back in '03, during my stint at the Bush House chippiecaff, I did once--and only once--have occasion to make a frappucino for Charlotte Church.'

[The whole transfactional lot of 'em--'skewed me, you--hanging on me EW with B'd B]: 'You don't say? What was she like?'

'Short. Waifish. Long-haired. Rather ta(r)ttily attired. Manifestly 'gover'd to the gills.'

'I.e., just like in every universally-available snap in print or line. Is that really all you can tell us about her?'

'Look, you cucking funts: I said I made the drink for her, not that I sold it or served it to her.'

'Then how'd you even suss that it was her you were making it for?'

'Well, 'cos Maggie--that's Maggie Elms, my coworker and immejiate superior, whom some of you oldtimers might remember from my very first post, and who was manning the till that day--happened to lean over me shoulder just as I was plunging the old steam-spigot into the glass, and to whisper to me, all confidential-like, "You know who that's for, don't you? Charlotte fucking Church. No: mind the spigot, and don't look round just yet. But if, after you've finished, you do a discreet 78-degree anti-clockwise turn en route to the serving-station, you'll spy her sure enough." And so I did do, and so I did subsequently spy her unmistakeable full-body profile; erect, hunched over a table, and puking the undigested remnants of what looked to be our house salade grecque into the second stomach of her handbag. Oh, those were the days..'

'...We're sure they were. (Christ! As if his pseudo-encounter with CC could compare to our actual physical encounter with Madge back in '04, when we were so blessed as to happen to tread in a puddle of diarrhoeic poo depostied on Oxford High Road by one of her Alsatian studs.) But you were saying--'

'--I was saying that on account of this fact that I haven't crossed paths with any of these tabloid headline-filchers in recent memory, and that as this here blog does after all nominally cuntstitute a record of my experiences, such as they are, I can perforce accommodate your fantasies only negatively, thatistersay by omitting to write about my rencounters, elbow-burnishings, chinwags and the like with such blokes and blokesses as you would prefer not to read about. If the pan-flashing likes of Kylie or Amy--or, indeed, Charlotte--trump a genuine historical figure like H.R.H. in point of your readerly interest, that's no skin off my schlong. I'll happily save the remainder of all savoury experiential data appertaining to her for my private old-school paper diary, knowing as I do that they securely await their ultimate, posthumous repository in the grateful bosom of the Bodlean or the British Museum.'

'And good inter-tit-ular riddance to it, we say. Let 'em rot there, in the mouldering storage lockers of the BL or the BM, amongst all them sheaves of mediaeval estate charters or jars of mummified cat's bollocks.'

'Let 'em rot there, indeed, I say: but that still leaves unanswered the question of what I should fill the remainder of this here post-window with in their loo.'

'Oh, does it fucking do, indeed? And you have the cuntish presumption to call yourself a Kenophobe?'

'I'm afraid I've quite missed the Bakerloo-to-Northern Line connexion insinuated by your last remark.'

'Well, we mean that we should think that any self-accredited Kenophobe worth his salt would be above stooping to the rhetorical depths of that consummately Kennish technique known as opportunistic amnesia.'

'I'm afraid I'm afraid (sic) I'm still not following youse.'

'Why, FFS!, that's even worse. Are you really so thick that we have to spell it out for you? This here post, let us remind you, is entitled "A Rugger's Xmas in Wales"--'

[YFCT, thumping his forrid in genuine, infinite, self-directed cuntsternation] '--Yes, of course it is.'

'And yet the nearest we've come to Wales so far--and even there, indirectly--is fucking Essex--'

'--You mean, I suppose, by way of my chinwag with the DGR in the opening paragraphs--'

'--That's right--'

'--Well, in that case, you really ought to have said "Buckinghamshire", which county is, as the crow embarks from randomly-assigned GPS coordinates, even farther off from Wales than is London itself--'

'--Whatthefuckerever: you advertised this post as an account of some holiday junket of yours in Wales, and to Wales you are accordingly judy-bound to transport us. Not that we're expecting much, beyond the usual Beebish shit-bucket-derived splatterings of so-called local colour--'

'--And not that I can promise anything better. But anyway, to launch into the giving it of my judy-bound old UAE try:'

Some of the more senior, long-in-the-toofish of you lot may happen to recall that as anciently as last summer, it was in the gloomy potential offing that I would be spending the the then-following (and now-last) Xmas in Wales, discourtesy of the hospitality of Esmeralda's parents.

'Hang about. Some of us almost twice as long in the toof, and as per another of your crystal-bollocksing prognostications within the confines of that very same anniversary special, were rather looking forward to at least a half-a-post's-worth of reminiscences of your reunion with your old Leedsian mate Herb-AIR Hancock; a reunion that, if we recollect aright--we mean, if it actually did take place--would have already done come and gone as of a coupla weeks before Xmas Day.'

'Erm, well, sorry to disappoint you sub-lot, but--'

'--but it didn't ultimately pan out. Pity, that: cos we'd taken, we confess, more than a bit of a shine to that doughtily stroppy West-Yorkshireman.'

'As had I done, and then some. Which was why, on the very first occasion I was granted the wee-est respite from my Proctologitextual judies wide of a piss-break--thatisersay, at the lunch interval of the very first day of the conference--I summarily high-tailed it over to a pub just round the corner from the hotel for a quick pint-and-a-half-cum-catching-up-session with HH.'

'So then it did pan out after all, you fucking n*****dly pixel-pincher. Oh, don't bovver to apologise again. Cos we've got you sussed, Shaw-'nuff. We can read between the lines--or, rather, the absence thereof.'

'Howdjermean? I'm afraid you (sub-) lot are at least one up on me in that regard.'

'Well, obviously, we mean that during your northern sojourn something happened to (or between) you and Herb that you, for some reason or another, are embarrassed or ashamed to commit to these here pseudo-pages.'

'And to think that certain front-bench-warming Torisaurs still have the cuntish effrontery to affirm that the old Etonminster-to-Oxbridge conveyor-belt-girded class system has long since been disassembled; that we now live in a fully-fledged, perfected meritocracy, wherein, 99.999 times out of a hundred, the door of official educational accreditation slams squarely aflush the jamb of intellectual capacity with a gratifying, inner-ear-popping hermetic whoosh!'

'Spare us your wannabe-toff-ish sarcasm, you orange-brick uni washout; and give us the terminally-emaciated on what it was you'd rather not have told us. What was it, eh? Was it that the two of you rounded out the night in some sort of compromising situation, in the red-light district of Leeds--i.e., an episode that, Cor forfend!, your precious Esmeralda should ever get wind of, in the all-too-likely event that she should stumble upon this here blog-post in the course of an office-boredom-powered nergle-search centring on your name? Or was it a compromising situation of a different sort, involving, say, the two of you and a back at his flat--'

'--No. Black as is the picture sketched by either of them two conjectural scenarios, you'd really have to apply your crayon-box's spectrosopic equivalent of Spinal Tap's Amplifier Setting No. 11 to do justice to the overwhelming awfulness of the scene to be depicted. The fact is, you see, that to my unfathomable cuntsternation and disappointment, my one and sole interview with HH during that trip turned out to be--get this--too boring for words.'

'Oh, come off it, YFC! You've already subjected us to a virtual stool-by-stool account of your pooch's anti-Marmite treatment. How much more boring than that could it be?'

'Do you really want to know?'

''Course we fucking do!'

'Very well, then: just south of the asterisk, you shall be treated to a letter-perfect, jaw-motion-by-jaw-motion transcript of that very interview--and please, by all means, feel free to cry "Uncle" when you've had enough of it.'

*

HH: Rugger, me old fruit! So good to see you!

RMcG: Herbie, me old vegetable! So good to see you!

HH: So, anyway: how's tricks down in Loondon?

RMcG: Fine, fine. And how's tricks up here in Leeds?

HH: Couldn't be better. How's Ronnie doing?

RMcG: Well, I should think you'd have a clearer idearrof that SOA than I would do.

HH: You mean, on account of our having been best mates back in college?

RMcG: That's right.

HH: Well, I should think your living within a literal stone's throw of him now would automatically trump my having lived within a figurative--thatistersay, a testicular--stone's jostle of him way back when: I mean, of course, with regard to our respective qualifications for the title of Ronnie Livingstonian bureau chief of the news department.

RMcG: Well, skewed me for having been so gracious as to give you first dibs on appointment to the post. But now that I've been saddled with that selfsame appointment, I suppose I'm judy-bound to report to you that Ronnie is doing just fine--or, rather, was doing so, way back in the irrecoverable mists of early November, when I last saw him.'

HH: That's good to hear.

RMcG: That's good to hear, indeed! Surely you're bluffing.

HH: And by that I suppose you mean I'm concealing the conjectural fact that I've heard from him since?

RMcG: Spot-fucking-on.

HH: Well, I might as well lay me full handfool of randomly suited and numerised spades, diamonds and cloobs on the table and admit to you that I haven't heard from him since; nor, indeed, more recently than last July.

RMcG: Cor! Whodafuckingthunkit?

HH: I know. But, after all, it's all me own fooking fault. Cos what choice does a bloke--i.e., Ronnie--have, but to assume he's been given the final high-hat shove-off from a correspondent, when he's addressed not one, not two, nor, indeed 10 but 18 emails to that selfsame correspondent, without having received so much as a single, curt automatised 'What'shisnuts will be out of the office until the **th of such-and-such a month' by way of reply?

RMcG: Christ! I can't imagine what Ronnie might've done to you to deserve such a firewall of snubbage.

HH: Nor can I do. The pure and simple fact of the matter is, Rooger, that I've always been absolute pants when it comes to keeping in tooch with people, and that, with the passage of years, I've only got worse at it .

RMcG: And yet, somehow, against your slothful panterly inclinactions, you've managed to keep in touch with me.

HH: Well, that's easily enoogh explained: you see, your coommunications have always centred on the prospect of your visiting me up here in Leeds, whereas Ronnie's have always centred on the prospect my visiting him once again down in Loondon.

RMcG: So then, at arse, it's not so much your actual diggital resistance to the keyboard as such, as your full-bodied resistance to boarding a southbound train by way of the keyboard, that accounts for your recent wholesale snubbage of our dear mutual friend RL?

RMcG: So, anyway: how's tricks over at Ipimmywyf?

HH: Well, I dunno: decent to rotten, I suppose.

RMcG: I take it my West-Yorkshire rhyming slang proposal never got off the ground--assuming that is, that you weren't just humouring me when you said you'd "moot it to the lads down at the Institute"?

HH: Oh, no, I wasn't just humouring you. It got off the ground like a fooking late 1970s Concorde, and I mean with respect to the coomunity at large, not just the lahds at the office.

RMcG: Really?

HH: Really. For ee-gee-erly starters, just take a quick gander at that there handbill posted behind you, just above the wainscoting.

RMcG: What of it?

HH: What oov it, indeed?

RMcG: I mean, it's obviously just an out-of-date advert for some local charity's regular Halloween shindig.

HH: You're not looking closely enoogh. Have a quick read-through of the bit at the bottom, why don't you?

RMcG: 'We promise it'll be the right templest Halloween experience you've ever had.' Cor! It really has taken off, hain't it?--assuming, of course, that you're not in any way personally affiliated with the Leeds-Bradford Junior Scientologists' League.

HH: Never heard of 'em before that there poster went oop two moonths ago. No, it's all been by word of mouth--truth be coontishly told, of woon single mouth: mine.

RMcG: So just what sort of logistics are involved in this process of mouth-to-mouth presuscitation? Do you just sort of barge into some random pub along the High Street, at 10 pm of a Friday or Saturday, and bawl out at the top of your lungs, 'THIS PLACE IS RIGHT FOOKING TEMPLE!' like some sort of latter-day town crier, and then proceed to the next station along the way like some sort of rhyming slang-dispensing Father Xmas?

HH: 'Course not! Of course its an ever more soobtle process than that. No: firstoff, I dedicate an entire night out to each poob. I arrive poonctually at 8 p.m. of a Tuesday or Wednesday; I stake out my turf on soome lonely barstool, and pretend to be poring over the latest noomber of the Yorkshire Post. (Mind you, this is a twofold pretence, 'cos not only am I not actually reading the paper in question; boot also, like as not, the noomber in question hails from a coopla weeks back, if not earlier.) And so I sit there, waiting for the next oonsuspecting punter to take his seat beside me; and no sooner has he doon so than, with YP-article ready to finger-jab, I'm launching into soom grapeshot diatribe broadly centring, say, on the futility of the proposed trollyboos system, or on the current, ignominious performance and league status of Leeds United as unfavourably contrasted with their glory-days in the mid-'90s. Of course, there's no any guaranteeing that this particular topic'll get the doodgeon of this particular poonter up: in which case, it's on to the next topic-cum-broadleaf and so on; but as like as not something I've got to rant about will eventually pique his sympathetic ire; and once I've got him hooked, why then, it's simply a matter of incorporating at least a smattering of West Yorkshire rhyming slang into each fresh burst of invective.'

RMcG: All well and good, but how do you make sure that they 1) remember that bit of RS, and b) subsequently go on to use it properly?

HH: Why, by simply soobmitting to the natural give-n-takerly rhythms of barside chinwagging. You've done there-stroke-been that, right? I mean, you know as full well as I do that the red -arrow-level of one's co-chin's petrol tanks of patience and curiosity--not to mention a certain good-natured sort of envy--with regard to oneself, rises in direct proportion to the sheer acreage of common ground established between you vis-a-vis the topic nominally to chin, right?

RMcG: TBS, and then some.

HH: Well, then: as in each of these cases, I've seen to it that the acreage in question--I mean, vis-a-vis this or that hot-button local issue--positively dwarfs that of, say, the Yorkshire Dales, any such patch of esoteric verbiage as I see fit to launch into--be it in Biblical Hebrew or Upanishadal Sanskrit--is pretty much guaranteed to be interroopted, at the least charitable end of the spectroom, by a toking 'Coom again?'-coom-manual ear-trumpet. And as regards the explication of these bits of rhyming slang--I mean, seeing as how noothing could be more exoteric, more here-and-now-orientated than they--the dividends of the interrooption are as predictable as they are positively incalculable: I oonpack the meaning of the word, along with its logical rhymic parcelling, to the bloke; and before I know it, he's going through all sorts of ridiculous argumentative contortions in order soomehow, by hook or by crook, to work it into the living stooble of his side of the chinwag. And at that point, I can rest easy knowing that my work is doon; knowing that this time tomorrow, give or take a pie-slice, the bloke in queue is going to be remarking to woon of his mates, 'It's positively temple, the dearth of talent in this place tonight,' or, 'Are you about ready for anoother--'

BARMAN: --Are you two about ready for anoother round?

HH: Yeah, anoother Stella for me, and for him...what was it...a Ho-something-or oother?

RMcG: Hoegaarden.

HH: Foony, Rooger: last time I saw you, you were a dyed-in-the-wool Stellaphile.

RMcG: Well, the thing is, Herb: Stella and I have rather fallen out since, subscribed ourselves to a mutually amicable treaty of separation, you might say--

HH: --No need to make any prudish excuses, Rooger: I know what thaht's all about.

RMcG: You do?

HH: 'Course I do. Every long-term Stella-drinker has to coom to terms sooner or later with the so-called arsetral winds stirred up by her; and, however relooctantly, to oopgrade
to a less, shall we say, effervescent brand of brew, provided sooch an oopgrade is within his boodgetary means. Mind you, in view of the present state of my boodgetary affairs, I'm more inclined to downgrade to Boodweiser, praying to Cor it proves an exception to the fartiness-to-price index. Which brings me fresh, full-circle-wise, to me original plaint--

BARMAN: Gardee coods, gents: here coomes your latest snarkly, head afloosh the rim on both sides.

RMcG: 'Our latest snarkly?'

HH: Yeah: that's snarkly for round, by way of Roundley Park, anoother of my insinuations. I know, of course, that according to the strict rules of rhyming-slang composition, the eventuating slangeme is supposed exclusively to echo the second term of the master dyad, thereby obviating all tracings of the former to its source in the first term of the lahtter--but, Corfookit, there's a reason rhyming slang never took off here the way it did down in your parts; namely, that we've always lacked the sheer plenitude of local landmarks you sootherners take for grahnted. And so what can I say?--as mooch as it abahshes me to say it--boot that I've had to foodge a bit with the rules, for the sake of getting the good words out.

RMcG: 'Fuck the rules,' I say, if the offspring of my fuckage is a bouncing baby of a Neil O' Jizzm that stands a fair chance of finishing up in the next edition of the OED. It sounds to me, by your own account, that you're positively shittin' in high reels--

HH: 'In high reels'--?

RMcG: Yeah, reels: as in 'reels o' cotton'; rhyming slang for...but never mind that. To be Sinatra-esque witcha, Berry, I can't see what you've got to kvetch about, career-wise.

RMcG: Oh, come off it Herb. Surely you’re bright enough to have sussed by now that geographical landmarks do not cuntstitute the sole, majesterially chartered mint of rhyming slang. What about your local celebrities?

HH: Name woon.

RMcG: Well, I dunno…I suppose there’s Jimmy Saville for starters—

HH: --Yeah, and for finishers. And as look would have it, Saville happens to rhyme with exactly four—count ’em four--OED-listed words—

RMcG: --Please don’t itemise them just yet; let me guess: ‘gravel,’ ‘travel’ and…I give up.

HH: As well you might do; cos the oother two are ‘rahvel’ and ‘cahvil’: words that I wager even the most toffish or bookish West Yorkshireman has cause to use in a spoken sentence woonce or twice a decade at most. And as for the first two: sure, they’re universally oonderstood, but when you coom right down to it, demograhphically speaking, the sampleable section of the population for whom they figure as part of the daily verbal furniture—navvies and pet-shop clerks in the case of ‘grahvel’, airport workers and radio announcers in the case of ‘trahvel’—hardly amount to a proverbial hill of beans or drop in boocket.

RMcG: Yes: granted, they hardly do do; and yet, for all that, I still don’t see what cause you’ve got to be hankering after a Londinian situation. You’re apparently forgetting that whilst the overall mint down there is much larger, so too is the…I dunno…circle of circulation. I mean you’ve got to consider that at gob-to-gob velocity any word you let drop in my neck of the metropolis’ll be lucky to make it as far as the Marylebone Road, let alone across the river. Such that the only practicable means I can see of your plying your trade in London would necessitate a radical scaling down of your ambitions; it would involve say, your setting up shop as the official councilally-anointed rhyming-slang smith of a specific borough. In which capacity—at least insofar as my home-borough of Barnet counts as a typical one—you’d be stuck looking for rhymes for the likes of such mummified third-tier celebrities as Spike Milligan, or of such fifth–tier National Trust sites as that parish church up the High Road that Harry the Sixth popped into for 10 minutes to shake a tit en route to the Battle of St Albans way back in 14-when-the-fuck-ever. No, Herb, I gots to say, I’m adamant on this point: if you’ve found your true calling in this local-folkway-propagating bidness, you’re much better off sticking it out up here than starting anew down in London.

HH: Oh, aye, aye, if I've found my true calling therein: that is indeed the question-stroke-roob. Look, I haahv to confess to you, Rooger, that I was either whining oop the wrong tree or trying to kill two mighty ostriches with a single puny slingshot-round o' Jimmy when I launched off on that tangent about West-Yorkshire versus Loondon rhyming slang. Cos at arse, what I most rahbidly envy you down there is not the sheer fecoondity of your ambient foond of rhyming slang fodder--which, in spite of your well-adjoodged animadversions on the circle of circulation, I still hold to be infinitely richer than our doostbowl's harvest thereof--boot, rahther, the sheer degree of economic security you moost surely enjoy in virtue of your pursuit of a career pahth that tidily bypahsses the quangofied quagmire of the semi-private not-for-profit sector.

RMcG: Economic security, schmeconomic security-stroke-my arse! Do you have any idearrof the third-world-skirting standard of living one can actually enjoy (if that's the word for it) in London on 32-grand a year nowadays?

HH: No, boot I've a fairly clear idearrof the fourth-world-hemline-strahddling standard of living I currently and actually enjoy oop here in Leeds courtesy of my 15-grand-per-annum Ipimmiwyf-allotted salary. Mind you, I'd take all the hardship on the chin-stroke-in my stride, provided there were any long-term prospect of my advancement to the position of senior research fellow; or, indeed, any short-term prospect of my being reimbursed for these nocturnal sallies. Boot alas! the old guard of Ipimmiwyf, being the righteous heirs of the ancient ladies' temperance movement that they are, have their own restrictive, officially-chartered MO for getting the good word out; an MO centring on such stratagems as lahvishly-catered so-called professional development workshops for the local teachers, and full-colour posters spanning the height and breadth of one out of every 20 bus-stop shelters. SITS, this MO is counterproductive in the extreme, cooming across as it must do to the local younkers like their respective grans' encouraging them to take up smoking or booze, boot there you have it, in all of its resplendant irrationality.

RMcG: And all the while, you've been out there, in the trenches, so to speak...

HH: ...Thaht's right: spreading the good word, after me own vigilante-like fahsion.

RMcG: Albeit, I assume, on the eventual reimbursement-checque-remitted dime of the Institute?

HH: Christ, Rooger, can you really be as thick as all thaht? In fahct, I really do fahncy that if any of those faht-caht Pollyahnas-stroke-Goody-Two-Shoeses in our top brahss ever got wind of this here MO of mine, they’d serve me my walking papers straight away; not so mooch on account of its bypassing of the officially chartered channels of project approval (although, of course they’d be oobliged to couch the grounds of the sacking in such verbiage), as on account of its aggressively family-oonfriendly domain of execution.

RMcG: Do you then really meantersay, Herb, that you’ve been clocking in all these proselytising hours purely, as they say, ‘for the benefit of the front-man of U2-stroke-Cher’s long-dead ex-hubbie’?

HH: Thaht’s right, and, moreover-stroke-what-coomes to the same thing—cos where there’s a pay-checque stoob or a tahx return there’s a name, right?—completely anonymously.

RMcG: I admire your heroism [‘pity your suckerism’ is more like it]. And yet I am judy-bound to add, by way of a sort disheartening footnote to my admiration, that the answer to my question as to whether ‘you’d found your true calling in this local-folkway-propagating bidness’ can but be a resounding ‘Aye!’; that, for all of your understandable short-term envy of my situation down under, and come what eventually may of your situation at Ipimmiwyf, I guarantee, in view of what you’ve just confessed to me, that 10 years from now you’ll still be routinely pitching up at this here pub and at its neighbours along the Leeds High Road, whether to squander the last tenner of your dole cheque or to strip-mine an hundred-quid layer or two off the upper hillocks of your geologically-deep credit limit, all out of your disinnersted love of West-Yorkshire folkway propagation.

HH: I rahther doubt it. Look, Rooger, this is all a bit complicated, boot I might as well hahve a go at explaining it. Ahnd joost to give you fair warning: certain portions of what I’m about to say may initially seem, in a quite flagrant fahshion, to contradict certain portions of what I’ve already said today, and so I moost beg you not to interroopt me until I’ve said my piss, howsoever many open-flies-espying-like occasions for interroopting should present themselves along the way.

RMcG: Scout’s honour: I shan’t interrupt.

HH: Mooch obliged. Anyway, for starters: I’m as true-blue and authentic a native West Yorkshireman as any folkway-ferreting anorak could dream of unearthing in this most Loondon-ocentric of all epochs in recorded English memory. And with good reason: it’s in me blood, you see, the whole West Yorkshirean ethos. I’ll hahve you know that me fahmily can trace its ancestry in these parts all the way back to time of the Danelaw—in oother words, as far back as 1.2 millennia, give or take a century.

RMcG: Cor! Why, my East Anglian family tree of three-generations’ standing crouches like a puny shrub in the shade of this mighty West Yorkshirean oak of yours. And yet, I do seem to recall—

HH: --I thought you’d promised not to interroopt.

RMcG: And so I did do, but only as regarded contradictions within the context of the present chinwag. Whereas what you said just now did seem rather stridently to contradict two bits of genealogical data you let slip during our last chinwag, to the effect, namely, that your mum hailed from Bradford, and your dad from Newcastle—

HH: --You soothern hayseeds don’t haaf crahck me oop. First off, I don’t suppose you could tell me which of them two burghs, Newcaastle and Brahdford, is nearer to our four presently-situated arse-cheeks, as the crow flies?

RMcG: Well, erm, Newcastle, of course.

HH: Oh, hahve I got an itinerary for you, southgob. Step outside the precincts of this here poob, head north to the nearest intersection, coop your hands over your eyes, hang a Louie and march forwards for 81-odd minutes; then uncoop your hands and--voila!—you’ll find yourself surrounded by all the city-centrely hoostle and boostle of Brahdford, the second city of West Yorkshire, a veritable St Paul to Leeds’s Minneahpolis. Whereas getting to Newcaastle on foot would probably take you a good two or three days. So, strictoo sensoo, I'm talking only about me moom's side of the fahmily. Not that I couldn't make a open-and-shut, albeit rather ahnorakish, case for the West Yorkshirean integrity of me dahd's side, on taking into account the historically estahblished fahct that in the Danelavian era practically all of England betwixt the Wash and the Tweed was included in Yorkshire, along with certain bits of hotly-contested historical evidence suggesting that between ca. 800 to 950, Leeds temporarily eclipsed York as the de facto capital of the entire region. Boot right now, I can't be arsed--and, indeed, needn't be; cos what's really in point for our present purposes is not my genealogical entitlement to regard meself as a West Yorkshireman's West Yorkshireman, boot rather the inelooctable material fahct that I always have doon. And when I say always, I mean always, to the farthest extent of the word's meaning within the coompass of a single human life; I mean that it dates from so far back into my nipperhood that I caan't even pessonally remember when it all started. My parents trace its origin to my first year at school, specifically to a so-called disciplinary incident arising out of a conflict between my five-year-old self and his English teacher--some Croydonian or Wimbledonian bloke name of Haalf- or Hooff- something.

RMcG: Houghington, perchance?'

HH: Perchahnce. Moom and Dahd'll know; aafter all, they hahve a copy of the headmaster's report of the incident on file--or, raather, proudly on mount--in my baby-album [?], sahndwiched somewhere between me first permanent tooth [?!] and me foreskin [!?!]. Boot anyway, they say that on this particular day this teacher of mine, this Mr Hoofhisnoots erected, by way of an instrooctional aid to the day's vocahbulary lesson, this easel-type thing with this sheaf of great big cardboard squares vertically propped up on it, and on each of these squares was cartoonishly depicted soom relevant vocahbulary object, together, I suppose, with the name of the thing spelt out underneath. And so he starts working his way through the sheaf, naturally enoogh beginning with some A-words--e.g., 'Aardvaark,' 'Ahmbulance,' and 'Ahntithesis'; and proceeding on to such B-words as 'Baht', 'Booton' and 'Behemoth'; and finally winding oop (as far as my attendance was concerned) with such C-words as 'Caht,' 'Cahtafalque' and 'Croompet'. (My sole surviving memory of the whole affair, incidentally, centres on the picture served in illustration of this last word, viz. a rather booxom and tightly-laced lahss with facial features immejiately recognisable, even in stylised cartoonish strokes, as those of Felicity Kendall.) And, nahturally, this exercise being in the tried-and-true call-and-response format, he announces at the beginning of it, ‘Okeye clahss, now I’d like you all to repeat after me..’ in his twangy Estuary accent, and with the introdooction of each new word (enoonciated likewise in that selfsame accent), together with its attendant photogramme, the rest of the class, impressionable-and-stroke-or-apple-polishing sheep, the lot of 'em, chime back a grahmmaphonic echo of his pronunciation, viz. 'Aambulance,' 'Baat,' 'Cruhmpet,' &c. I alone, out oov their score-and-a-hahlf, stook to me goons, and pronounced each word as I'd learnt it at me moom's teat. Needles to say, by the time we'd got round to 'croompit', my single, sustained dissonant pedal-point in the northern register was beginning to grate on the ears of the teach, who called me to the froont of the room, and rang oop the froont office on the inter-tannoy; sooch that inside of the next quarter-hour I was bent over the headmaster's desk with both hands splayed atop its surface, and with the virgin white orb of me arse-cheeks--as yet uncharted save for a single, lowermost-backbone-to-perineum-spanning meridian--ripe for meticulous cartographic demarcation courtesy of the unsparing cane of the aforesaid Haitch-Em.

RMcG: Ripe for a caning, you say? How old are you, anyway?

HH: Joost barely old enoogh, from what Ronnie tells me, for the two of oos not to paas as hahlf-broothers by the distahff: in oother words, 29 coom next Whitsun. Oh, I know that according to official parliamentary fiat caning went out soom 30 years ago, close on the skirts oov the repeal of the sodomy laws; boot these sorts of statutory prohibitions and licences tend rahther to take a long time to catch on oop here in Leeds. I don't suppose you're familiar with Mark Twain's quip about Cincinnahti, Ohio?

RMcG: You mean, I take it, the one to the effect of 'If I ever got wind of intelligence that the world was about to end, I'd immejiately hop aboard the next Cincinnati-bound train, seeing as how everything seems to happen there about ten years later than in any other town in the Union?'

HH: Thaht's the woon. Well, I've long fahncied that in that regard--oov which the persistence of corporal poonishment well into the 1980s is boot woon amoongst a hoondred or more salient instances--that Leeds should be nominated the Cincinnahti of the UK; although, to be sure, I've met many a Sheffieldian and Glasweegian [not to mention at least one Norweegian] who would usurp the title on behaalf his own home burgh, and would have oos oopgraded to the pseudo-provincial rank of a Tahmpa or Baltimore, little realising, of course--gormless twat thaht he is--thaht it is he, and not oos, who enjoys the jubious fortune oov inhabiting joost sooch a milquetoast limbo in the kingdom-spahnning urban hierarchy. Boot woonce again I digress. You see, my main aim in introjuicing this second-hahnd ahenctdote froom me nipperhood was to bring home to you the fahct thaht the linguistic peculiarities of this region, together with its objurate resistance to the so-called latest trends--as set by Whitehall, Hollywood and Loondon--hahve kept me bound to it, literally from time immemorial, as fahst as a baited bear shahckled to its stake.

RMcG: Are you really quite sure about that, Herb? Cos if memory serves me--and again, inasmuch as the memory-reserves in question are of ought-five vintage, I'm sure you'll pardon my pointing out the apparent discrepancy brought to mind thereby--you did ultimately, albeit temporarily, sunder yourself free of them there shackles for a minimum four-year frolic, on her Majesty's dime, in a foreign county.

HH: I assume you're alluding to my university years in Mahnchester?

RMcG: Even so.

HH: Erm, well, regarding that rahther embarrassing episode, I suppose a bit of retroahctive fine-chuning of the nomenclature is in order. Let's joost say then thaht oop until about age 18 I regarded myself not so mooch in the light of a West Yorkshireman's West Yorkshireman as in the light of a Northerner's Northerner; in oother words, thaht I more or less took it for grahnted thaht all of the unique virtues of my native micro-region were to be found evenly dispersed throughout the whole of the North. Ahnd so, ahcting on thatht admittedly naive assoomption, I sought to try my fortunes in the universally-acknowledged capital of the north, Mahnchester. Ifahckins, was I in for a bit of a shock. To further draw out the stateside conceit, I arrived in Mahnchester expecting it to be the Chicaago to Leeds's Milwaukee, and I left it knowing it to be the right-pondside equivalent oov Washington, DC or Atlahnta--in oother words, a soothern (i.e., northern) town in geographical situation alone, in all oother respects a piddling boom-licking sahtellite of New York (i.e., Loondon). I stook round joost long enoogh to collect me MA in pooblic policy, and then high-tailed it out of thaht Sodom bahck to Leeds, knowing--or, at any rate, believing--that woon way or anoother, my true destiny as a Northerner both had to and could be met at home, within the confines of me native county.

RMcG: And so, when you landed this gig at Ipymmiwyf...?

HH: ...it was like receiving a full-service body massage at the hands and gob of Providence herself. I fondly imahgined that I was, vocationally-speaking, set for life. I've coom to realise that it all hinges on a certain inescapable ahmbiguity inherent in words like 'local' and 'regional' and 'cooltural'. For me, 'local and regional coolture' has always centred on whatever me particular fellow-West-Yorkshirepeople happen to get up to during their off hours; whereas for them it's always centred on whatever sooch ahbstract entities as the county council or the health board or the regional PTA or RSPCA--or, indeed, Scientology--chahpter hahppen to get oop to during their on-hours. It's sort of a reverse-play version of the old throwing-out-oov-baby-with-bahthwater scenario: insofar as, by virtue of me own longstahnding sentimental attahchment to these particular words, I'm obliged to sook oop the connotative swill of what these words mean to them. Ahnd yet, if I'm to be perfectly honest with meself, I moost admit thatht a goodly proportion of net volume of the bahthwater was oov me own pouring and brewing; cos if my real and ooltimate aim had simply been the sheer disinnersted mooltiplication and propagation of local folkways per se, why then, aht the terminus of me final Manchester-to-Leeds train commute, I'd have simply made a beeline for the nearest poob, with a view to soobmitting the vocational ahspect of me career to the hahzard of the next available poonter's chin-'n'-ear, ahd its ahlimentary ahspect to the hahzard of the job-centre queue. Boot, as I'm now all-too-belatedly realising, what I've really been hankering ahfter all along is recognition.

Ahnd froom those first oblivion-buried moments of primary school right on through to grahduation froom university, the satiation oov thaht selfsame recognition went more or less hahnd-in-hahnd with the affirmation of me West-Yorkshirean identity. I could always be counted on, you see, during that blissful 15-year interregnum, to be the woon single individual, amongst any gahthering oov however many doozens oov persons, to be possessed oov both the couillons and the competence to stahnd oop for the authentic West-Yorkshirean way oov life. To be sure, the recognitionary gestures in question more often took the form of open-faced sniggerings than ooper-hahnd-prostrated hosannas; boot at arse, they were all more or less interchangeable, inasmooch as they all singled me out froom the herd via woon method of cooling or anoother; whereas now, in the institutional eyes of Ipimwyf, I am the scape-goated delegate oov the herd; in their eyes, it’s they who have assumed the proper, anointed mahntle of West-Yorkshirean self-preservation, and I who am the hopeless, hickish, intransigent stick-in-the-mood who would retard our progress towards the rear flank oov the almighty daemon of the South, in virtue of my perversely ahntiquated chahmpioning oov these—let’s face it—working-claas idioms and usages. On account of-stroke-actuated-by which snoobage, I say: Fook Ipimmiwyf! Ahnd fook the whole cause of West-Yorkshirean solidarity. If I’m to garner the merest whisper of recognition of my—to boot call a spade a spade—unique poetic gifts—then let me do so courtesy of the open-handed cosmopolitan abundance of the South, rather than of the provincially quangophilic miserliness of the North; let me, indeed, armed with my encyclopaedic knowledge of the folkways of my home-region, and heralded by my newly-donned southern colours, lay siege to that selfsame region after the fashion of that banished Roman hero of that second-tier Shakespeare tragedy; let me, in a word, ask you, Roogger—skewed me, Rugger--if you’ve recently heard of any openings in your coompany’s advertising or marketing department?

RMcG: Not directly as sooch--skewed me, as such; although I have learnt through the old grape-mill that just last week a senior member of the public relations team popped off in a huff, without even giving her two weeks' notice, to go and work for Oxfam; and I assume HR are scrambling for a replacement even as we speak.

HH: Well then, if you would be so kind as to provide me with contact information for your senior human resources officer...?

RMcG [riffling through his wallet in search of the relevant business card]: ...Soitanly. But are you really sure that a career in the medical supplies industry is quite up your alley--thatistersay, that it constitutes an appropriate venue for the efflorescence of your unique poetic gifts?

HH: An appropriate venue, you dare to ask? As if there could be any question of its being anything short of the ideal venue for such an efflorescence? Christ, can you even begin to imagine the comic potential inherent in a scenario centring some octogenarian geezer's wrestling with his trooss--skewed me, truss--and all the while cursing the antiquated mechanism of the thing in broad, one-hundred-per-cent authentic Yorkshire dialect?

RMcG: Sure I can do, Herb, sure I can do. But I'm afraid that at Proctologitex we've little to do with such front-of-centre apparatuses as trusses; they're more the proper bailiwick of our sister firm, Urovision. Now, if you can manage to nose out the merest whiff of comic potential in such back-of-centre engines as suppositories, shunts, tents, tampons, enemas, &c.--which, Christ knows is more than I can do--

HH: Oh, believe you me Rugger my boy, I’m positively huffing up great lungfuls of comic potential from each and every one of them. Why in degree of intrinsic hilarity, a trooss is to a suppository as a Christmas crahker is to a hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb in explosive mahgnitude.

RMcG: Now, now, Herb, don’t let’s start detonating our hydrogen bombs before we’ve properly mined our uranium. Remember that this is, after all, a public relations position and not an advertising one; meaning that even if you get the job, your range of comic-cum-poetic expression is going to be radically curtailed—one might even say positively gelded. The bluest of your hypothetical West Yorkshire-lampooning suppository bits may not raise an eyebrow amongst the in-house censors at Channel 4, but even the brownest of them is hardly likely to constitute suitable copy for a Proctologitechnical press release or annual report. Suppositories and enemas are, it goes without saying, no laughing matters to our clients and shareholders.

HH: Oh aye, aye, of course; all of what you've just said goes without saying. But presumably there is a potential for lateral movement into the advertising shop-floor?

RMcG: I would assume so—six months, a year, two years hence. But in the meantime, so long as you’re operating on the public relations shop-floor, you’re going to have to be on your best—in other words, your blandest, most prosaic, most literal, most po-faced and least local-colouristic—behaviour.

HH: As if I've been graced by a single occasion to be on any other sort of behaviour at Ipimiwyf! In any case, Rugger: I can only imagine that compared with the bevy of blue-noses I've been kowtowing to these past four years, your clients and shareholders'll seem to me like a virtual stag-party of open-collared, cigar-smoking regular blokes.

RMcG: Perhaps they will do, Herb, perhaps they will do. But only time will tell. The proof of the West Yorkshire pudding is, after all, in the Eton.

HH: Coom again?

RMcG: Nothing, Herb, nothing; just communing with meself aloud, over a private joke not worth the breath of explication. Anyway, Herb: here's the card. I of course wish you all the best of luck in your Proctologitechnical endeavours, for my own sake no less than for yours; cos Cor knows my arms are already spreadeagled to the full 180 in welcome of the potential prospect of rechristening the spirit of '05 in yours and Ronnie's company.

HH: Thanks a million; and likewise, respectively.

RMcG: And now, Herb, if you'll be so kind as to 'skewed me, it's about a quarter-past high time that I was getting back to that godawful conference.

HH: By all means, Rugger, by all means. Christ!--coom to think of it, I was due back at the office a half an hour ago for a conference call with the Baton Rouge chapter of the North American Daughters of West Yorkshire.

RMcG: I.e., your stateside benefactors?

HH: Indeed. You wouldn't believe the amount of conquistadorial globe-trotting and fund-sniffing that's needed to keep a modest provincial quango such as ours afloat. But that's neither here nor there. You will, I trust, give me a bell if you happen to be free of conferential obligations during the balance of your sojourn in our fair city?

RMcG: Of course I shall do, of course I shall do.

HH: Thanks, Rugger.

RMcG: Well, then, good night--erm, good rest-of-the-day to you, Herb.

HH: And good rest-of-the-day to you, Rugger.

*

So there you lot have it: the full unedited, unexpurgated minutes of my intercourse with Herbert Hancock during my late sojurn in Leeds. Not that there's any point in my arseing about these up-wrapping formalities, seeing as how presumably the lot of you lot have been fast asleep since Minute Eight or thereabouts--

'--Oh cunt rare, the lot of the lot of us have been all ears--not to mention bright-okied-cum-bushy-arsed--from Minute Eight right on through to Minute Eighty-Seven.'

'So then, I take it, it wasn't half as boring as I made it out to be?'

'Naaw, not even a quarter as much. Besides, you've already milked the nodding-off subroutine for all it(')s worth, courtesy of the ears of our toffish predecessor. And at all costs, in our collective capacity of the old vox populi, surely we mustn't be lumped in with his ilk?'

'No, of course you mustn't be so his-ilk-lumped-in-with; and I must confess, with all due FS rendered unto your toffish predecessor, that what you lack in manners you more than make up for in wit and sheer pertinacity of recollection. But now--seeing as how the above-transcribed transcription cuntstitutes, at arse, a petty digression from the nominal topic of the present post--to return to which: pack up your shillelaghs—erm, thatistersay, rather, your ready-made meals of Welsh rarebit, your Dylan Thomas first-editions, and your…erm…Tom Jones LPs. it's onwards and north-northwestwards to Wales!'

'In due good time, mate, in due good time.'

(RMcG): 'Whateverthefuckdjiermean, "in due good time"? Surely the doogooderly time in queue elapsed some two hours ago at the recentest.'

(YL): 'That's as maybe, the "maybe" in queue being entirely subordinated to our readerly curiosity.'

RMcG: Your 'readerly curiosity' as to what?

YL: As to how you cuntrived to piece out the remaining five modules (i.e., the two ensuing lunch-breaks and three ensuing night intervals) of leisure afforded you during your Leedsian sojourn.'

RMcG: Begging your readerly pardon: is that really any of your corddam bidness?

YL: Well, yeah, we think so: in fact, in view of the intrinsically confessional nature of the genre and the meejium, the lot of it is. Now, we already know you didn't piece these modules out with further instalments of Herb's company, which can only mean one of two things--either that they were pieced out in full by a succession of utterly snoozeworthy Proctologitextual-centred functions, or that they were pieced out at least in part by some diversion or succession of diversions even less snoozeworthy--hence even more postworthy--than your single chinwag with Herb.

RMcG: As a a matter of fact, with all due FS-ary deference to your Holmesian powers of deduction, those five remaining extra-conferential modules were devoted to neither genre of milieu: the lunchtime ones being centred on a pair of solitary CTM-downwolfings at an Indian takeaway sited conveniently just round the corner of my hotel, and the overnight ones on a trio of Arsenal-match-highlight-viewings taken in from the recumbent, cross-legged, stockinged-feeted, fag-ash-flicking perspective of my hotel-room bed.

YL: Oh thou magistereal cunt of cunts! What of your promise to Herb 'give him a bell if you happen[ed] to be free of conferential obligations during the balance of your sojourn in [his] fair city'?

RMcG: What of it? Look, I Sinatra-esquely confess to having forsworn my solemnly-avouched oath to Herb, but only to avoid forswearing an oath no-less-solemnly-avouched to a higher liege-lord exacting a more reverent degree of fealty--namely, myself; an oath, morever, of far greater anitquity, its terms having been sealed the day before whilst, with overcoat slung insouciantly over me right arm, last-minute fag apathetically dangling from the left corner of me gob and right plate resolutely planted on the bottom step of a Leeds-bound Midland Mainline carriage--the whole pictorial ensemble amounting to a criminally-missed B&W photo-op redolent of 1950s Life-magazine spreads centring on the likes of Al Camus and Jack Osbourne--

YL: --In other words, you're saying--daft as it sounds--that before setting off on this Proctologitexan walkabout--'

RMcG: --Walkabout, you say? Since when did you lot morph into a passel of strine jackaroos?

YL: --Since, well, never. It's just that--sorry, occasionaly, just to keep the tone of the idiom plausibly streetworvy, we're obliged to smuggle in slangemes from other corners of the Commonwealth, for lack of insular equivalents.

RMcG: I understand the rationale, but I by no means approve of it. So, if you'll only please to revise and resume your interruption, according to the native lights of your insular idiom--

YL: --Shawnuff: 'So, in other words, you're saying--daft as it sounds--that before setting off on this business trip you swore to yourself not to spend more than X number of hours in Herbert Hancock's company, and that come the end of that lunchtime chinwag, you’d already met or exceeded the allotted balance.'

RMcG: In my honorary-native Barnetian idiom, 'you're well on your way to Edgeware' with that inference. No: rather, just as I was setting of on the trip--as depicted above--I swore to meself that, as I'd been roped into making it quite against me thoroughly-routinised Potter's-Bar-centred inclinations, I would not squander so much as a microsecond of me free time therein on Proctologitexan matters; and the sole aim and objective of my seeking out Herb's company at the earliest practicable opportunity was to put a sojourn-spanning kibosh on all importunities that might tempt or effectively oblige me to forswear this selfsame oath--as, for instance, 'Oh, Nigel, we're heading off to a "battle of the bands"-style karaoke session at the Hilton with the folks from Anusette; please do join us'; to which I would have been well within me rights to rejoin, on every such occasion (had Herb only seen fit to do his goddam ciceronial judy), 'Sorry, loves, but no can do tonight: you see, there's this old college mate [sic] of mine in the area who I've got a lot of catching up to do with. Rendezvous with you lot on the flip-flop, what-what?' But Herb, cunt that he was, effectively put the kibosh on my kibosh, by effectively transmogrifying our de-facto casual, blokish-neutral lunchtime reunion into a de-jure Proctologitexan pre-job interview pep session; i.e., in thereby insuring that all subsequent interviews with him would prospectively centre less on the sort of ‘This-is-my-domain’-esque peacock struttings that I’d come to expect of him by default (I mean, inasmuch as he’d presented himself at our last interview as a veritable specimen of pig-in-shit contentedness), and more on the sort of whinging, canine ‘What’s your [i.e., company-koocharul] domain all about?’-esque grovellings that I dreaded (and still do dread) above all other things. Hence, what choice did I have but to give Herb the widest imaginable berth for the juration of my Leedsian sojourn?—I mean, inasmuch as nothing could more nearly have approached an OED-certified illustration of the entry for ‘busman’s holiday’ than a randomly-selected 50-word excerpt from any of the so-called conversations that inevitably would have ensued had I seen fit to pick up the blower on any of the butcher’s-two-dozen occasions when Herb’s telltale Caller ID subsequently emblazoned itself across its LCD-screen?

YL: All right, mate, all right: no need to play Houdini with the knickers of your conscience about it; it ain’t like this is a bleeding seance, or us the presiding chanelliers of Herb's living ghost. But anyway, did he get the job?

RMcG: Well, erm, I believe so.

YL: You believe so or you know so?

RMcG: All right, I know so. But what’s it to you ostensibly impersonally disinnersted lot?

YL: At arse’s bum, zilch, FA, nix, nada. We mean, it ain’t anything we’re going to miss a wink of sleep over it one way or the other. But by that same toke-in, we’d tuck into our baked-beans on-toast with perfectly routine gusto the very instant after reading in our dinnertime Sun or Daily Mail that ‘Rugby W. McGyver, aged 26, of Woodside Park, Barnet, was run over by a bendy bus at 8:28 Tuesday morning.’ In other words, we care about it as much as we can do about anything having to do with your schlongamamey, tuppenny-ha’penny lifeworld.

RMcG (sardonically, TBS): Much obliged to you lot for your 2.5’-pee’s worth of earnest for my services.

YL: Anytime, mate, anytime. So, now that we’ve established that he did ultimately land the gig, we’ll take the liberty of asking to what extent he’s holding his own vis-à-vis that selfsame company kooh-cha we mentioned a bit earlier.

RMcG: Well, as near as I can gather, he's more or less holding his own.

YL: Whateverthefuckagaindjiermean, 'as near as you can gather'?

RMcG: I mean, as near as I can gather--and so far have gathered--from my station down in the bowels of bidness services, separated by a full three flights of stairs (or roughly 20 vertebrae) from his station up in the pineal gland of public relations. Which, unsurprisingly, in the light of the Everestian heights involved, ain't a fuckofaheckofalot.

YL: That schlong won't fight. Cos after all, you never would have heard about the opening in PR in the first place if you hadn't somehow managed to keep a-tit of the goings-on on the fifth floor.

RMcG: But that was a different kettle of kippers. In that case, I went out of my way to keep so a-tit, seeing as how I had a vested personal interest in seeing the position in queue voided as toot as sweet possible.

YL: Rightrightright, on account of its being occupied by that bink who gob-lashed you in full view the massed puntility of Hoxton Market way back in the autumn of '05. But surely (at least according to our admittedly bloke-centric lights) the fortunes of your best mate's best mate cuntstituted a vested personal interest in their own right? And what of your solemnly-avouched desire to 'rechristen the spirit of '05' in Ronnie's and Herb's company? Was that ever realised?

RMcG: Well, I dunno if 'realised' is quite the right word for it; but, yes: in bare terms, the three of us did eventually convene over a nonet or two of pints...

YL: ...during the course of which convention, even supposing the two of you (i.e., you and Herb) had in the meantime been as effectually severed from mutual communication as a paraplegic's head from his pinkie-toes, Herb must have had occasion to kvetch or rail or descant or buttonhole about, against, upon or apropos of his Proctologitexan situation?

RMcG: What exactly are you lot driving at with this steering wheel-encumferencing string of question marks?

YL: What we're driving at is, it sounds to us as though in the debris issuing from a head-on responsive collision with our questions, you'd have all the makings of a proper post; a post that, come what may, minus such cuntishly pointless digressions as the present one, ought easily to rival the present post in point of length.

RMcG: Why, so I would have; and so it ought to do, and so--if I have any say in the matter--it shall do, come Valentine's Day or thereabouts. But in the meantime, we--you lot and I both--have got to slog through a hundred or so Wellington-boot-drenching paragraphs centring on my slightly-less-recent sojourn in Wales--

YL: --But have we really got to do?

RMcG: Why of course we have; for these paragraphs shall serve as nothing less or other than a complete record--a veritable Passion According to St. Rugger, as it were--of my personal incarnation of the mythic Arthurian hero of that harrowing, definitive, Rubicon-crossing moment in a bloke's so-called relationship with a blokess, viz. the moment wherein he pits himself against his prospective in-laws, on their home turf, in non-Texan plain view of their sole-begotten progeny, who is at one in the same time his Dulcinea--

YL: --Yeahyeahyeah, we know it must have been harrowing enough for you. But what about us?
RMcG: What about you lot?

YL: Well, we mean, does your prospective Wales-centred post, at arse, and from a reader's povey, stand FA's chance of being effectually different to certain of your other posts centring on other provincial precincts? Take, for instance, your prospective father-in-law, Mr Houghington.

RMcG: What about him?

YL: Well, in 10 or more words, how would you summarise his whole ethos-cum-habitus?

RMcG: Well, he's a retired schoolteacher from Wimbledon.

YL: And?

RMcG: And a fanatical collector of Wimbledon FC memorabilia.

YL: And?

RMcG: And a perpetual denouncer of the local council's so-called economic development initiatives; e.g., the introduction of a closed-air shopping centre complete with multi-level car-park on the outskirts of the county; and of a local-greengrocer-annihilating Sainsbury's on the village High Street.

YL: And what of Mrs Houghington?

RMcG: Well, she's a retired social worker, likewise and obviously from Wimbledon--

YL: --And?

RMcG: --and who seems to expend the better part of her breath on belittling her hubbie's admittedly futile, sepia-tinted nostalgia for the good old days of Wimbledon FC.

YL: In short, between the two of 'em, they seem to cuntstitute a near-perfect mirror-image of your own kin back in East Anglia--minus, of course, the perenially-underachieving younger sibling--

RMcG [with suitably rue-laden phiz]: --in actual point of fact, that 'minus' should be a 'plus'.

YL: Cor, you don't say?!

RMcG: Indeed, I do do, inasmuch as they share quarters with their other daughter and Esmeralda's younger sister, a 20-year-old O-level washout name of Griselda, who ekes out the fag-portion of her beer-'n'-chips per-diem (the main portion thereof being supplied by the local male chavvility) through her services as cashier at a local retail establishment known as 'Just Baths'.

YL: Well then: that only goes to reinforce the point we were about to make, which was that to our readerly okies an account of your '06 Xmas sojourn in Wales would pretty much amount to a cutted-'n'-pasted recap of your '05 Xmas sojourn in East Anglia; and that, as far as we're concerned, you might as fucking well skip over it altogether.

RMcG: OK, as far as the domestic sitting-room aspect of the whole trip goes, I concede your point. But what about the whole natural-historiographical aspect thereof?

YL: May your cuntship be prevailed upon to restate the question in plain English?

RMcG: Gladly: What about my explorations of the purely inhumanly-geographical lie of the Welsh land? I’m thinking here in particular of my Father Houghington-escorted hike up the crags of Mount Somethingorother, from whose summit we were vouchsafed a TDF-worthy twilit prospect of the snowcapped northern three-fifths of the Cambrian range? Surely you’re not going to claim that an account of anything of the kind is to be found in my East Anglian diaries of yesteryear.

YL: Surely not, and thank Cor it ain’t to be found there. Christ, if we were even remotely innersted in reading that sort of amateur-Sir-Edmund-Hilaryish rot—which we ain’t—we’d sooner turn to our borough-council library’s copy of the Rough (or Lonely Planet) Guide to Wales than to this-here blog of yours. No: we say, stick to what you’re good at, or, at any rate, less shitty at—thatistersay, the recording of jokey interchanges and pratfalls involving characters of varying degrees of cuntishness and gormlessness—and fuck the rest.

RMcG: So, in short, you’d have me scuttle the whole Welsh-holiday-expeditionary episode and press on to the Hancockian-Proctologitexan-sea-leg-finding one?

YL: ’Tsroi’.

RMcG: Skewed me?

YL: We said, ‘THAT’S RIGHT.’

RMcG: Oh, of course. But what makes you lot think—I mean, even after setting aside the typological redundancy of the dramatis personae of the first episode—that the second episode will be any richer in these sorts of ‘Oops, there went my trousers’-type moments that you seem to prize so highly?

YL: Nuffink, really, aside from a vague hunch arising out of Herb’s especially low gorm quotient as evidenced by his behaviour in this here post.

RMcG: Very well. Vox populi, &c., as they say. So, then, just so's I can be sure we’re all, as they say, on the same so-called page: firstly, I will devote my next post to an account of the HH-stroke-PT-centred episode unfettered by any guarantee that this post shall be any more ‘O,TWMT’-rich than, say, last week’s instalment of The Archers. Agreed?

YL: Agreed. And secondly?

RMcG: Secondly: You lot shall keep your gobs fast-zipped throughout the entirety of that selfsame post, however obviously-stroke-urgently-called-for your yielding to the temptation to interrupt might therewithin prove to be. Agreed?

YL: What? Don't you fancy us?

RMcG: 'Course I do, and please don’t take this second proviso of mine personally: cos it’s got nothing to do with you lot qua you lot—thatistersay, I don’t particularly mind your interruptions qua interruptions; it’s just that, well—

YL: --Yeah?

RMcG: --It's just that you lot sound a fuckofalot too much like me for me own writerly comfort.

FINIS POSTIS