The Education of Esmeralda Houghington: Part Two
Well, it's AFT, wouldn't you say, DGR?
'I'm sorry,MDF? "AFT"?'
'"About Fucking Time."'
'About F****ing Time that what?'
'AFT that you're being graced with a post fully O'Koran with the calendrical date of its header; and hence, truly worthy of being designated a post in the proper journalistic-cum-Royal-Mailian sense of the term. You would, after all-stroke-I-trust, feel yourself well and truly cheated of your 50 p's worth of news if, upon purchasing a copy of the 30 October 2006 edition of the Sheffield Evening Post, you discovered its top front-page headline proclaiming "KING HAROLD TROUNCED AT HASTINGS" or even "THE KING [i.e., Mr Presley] IS DEAD"; as I trust you would likewise feel cheated of your monthly report of high-jinks at the old folks' home if, upon unsealing an envelope from your gran postmarked the same, you discovered her nattering on, in the letter contained therein, about rationing vouchers and the latest Cary Grant picture or Frank Sinatra 78.'
'Well, TBF, with respect to the latter example, I shouldn't so much feel cheated as worried about the onset of senility...'
'...Understandably, yes; just as, with respect to the former example, you'd be equally well within your rights to gather that the editor of the paper had a few chairs missing from his front room. But it all comes to the same thing, as far as the application of these two examples to the present bout of auto-flagellation goes: for two or three posts running, I've been mired, narratively speaking, in the events of last July and August, all the while allowing each post to default to its Blogger-assigned date of publication. Now, when I was recounting the events of late July in early August, such a mis-synchronisation of dates could have plausibly inconvenienced you, DGR, no more than, say, the Old-School postmark of a letter penned by Shakespeare or Liz the First in 1590-something would have inconvenienced his or her New-School-dating cuntinental correspondent. But come the publication of my last post, by which point the gap had widened to one of a full two months; why, by then, I found myself occupying an altogether more embarrassing position akin to that of some late-nineteenth-century Petersburger or Muskovite corresponding with a Parisian or Londinian contemporary. For Chrissakes, my Parisian or Londinian correspondent would have been well within his rights to write back, Pope Greg's been in his grave for going on three hundred years. When are you Russkies going to get with the fucking trans-national calendrical programme? And so, with the inauguration of this here post, dated 30 October 2006, I've firmly resolved to bring the Ruggersweltian chronicle fully abreast of the events of the 29th of that selfsame instant.'
‘All to the good, MDF, all to the good; and yet, talking as we were just now of anachronistic headlines, is it not rather incumbent upon you for consistency's sake to bring the headline—that is to say, the title--of this post fully abreast of its dateline?’
‘Why, yes, of course ittis; and so I have done: the last post was entitled “TEoEH: Part One”, and this one is entitled “TEoEH: Part Two”.’
'Good heavens! Surely something in the course of the past two months and sixpence has displaced Miss Houghington's Aresnalophobic education as the keynote of your lifeworld?'
'I'm a frayed knot, DGR. Nay, come to think of it, why should I affect the merest soup's son of pusillanimity on this score: I'm positively proud to aver that as of 30/10/06 I remain unswervingly devoted to my heaven-sent vocation of Arsenalophobic pedagogue. Surely you didn't imagine that such an arduous course of study, a veritable pedipilular Gradus ad Parnassum could be comprehensively swotted in a single evening's micro-chinwag.'
'Erm, well, of course not. But I was rather assuming it could be got out of the way over the course of two or, at most, three such micro-chinwags.'
'Here you show your true colours: viz., those of a dyed-in-the wool pedipilulophobic cricket snob. There's absolutely no call for you to assume, on the basis of the fact that our matches are played out over the course of a compact hour-and-a-half as against the average week and a half required by one of yours, that a full understanding of the rules of the game alone--to say nothing of the infinitely more complex sociological-cum-anthropological study of a particular pedipilular subculture that is now in point--ought to be correspondingly foreshortened. Indeed, as far as the subcultural considerations go (thatistersay, from my admitted cricketophilically benighted standpoint), I'm inclined to think that things are a good deal less complex on your end. After all, doesn't your fandom at arse, for you lot, amount simply to a continuous unison thwacking of the okies of a fistful of former imperial dependants with a massive St-George-Cross or Union-Jack-patterned beach towel? Whereas for us pedipulophiles, its a wee bit more complicated. Say, for example, you're a 45-year-old chippy-proprietor from (and in) Salford: on the one hand, you've never wanted to have anything to do with Manchester City, on account of its official municipal affiliation with the awful, satanic Big Marmite Jar to the south; and yet, on the other hand, you're all too keen to disassociate yourself from the MU Premiership bandwagon, brimming full as it is by now of Gucci-walleted, Blue-Tooth-sporting Londinian latecomers advertising their solidarity with the so-called working class by way of their support of a northern club; and then, on the third hand, you don't want to give offence to your mum, a die-hard Blackburn supporter on account of dear old great-uncle Fred's two-month stint as a winger for that club just before the war--'
'--I thought we were confining ourselves to the consideration of a single pedipilular subculture, namely the Arsenalophobic one.'
'Why, so we are in the main DGR, so we are; only I thought it was high time that you got at least a fleeting first-class train-compartment's view of how the other 999,999 /1,000,000 live, lest you should continue supposing (as I suppose you have supposed all along) that the extreme pitch of pedipilulomania evinced by us Arsenalophobes is unique to our subculture.'
'I have never supposed anything of the kind, and my resentment of your last digression springs not in the slightest from my ignorance of the state of affairs alluded to therein, but rather entirely from my utterly imperturbable indifference thereunto. Believe you me, MDF, I can never be moved by any laundry list of the travails of the beleaguered football fan, be it ever so so long or tear-stained; and to recite such a list in my hearing is but to bring coals to Newcastle--or, rather, to perform the perfectly antithetical act--'
'--say, to bring dog turds to Marseilles or inner London?'
'I couldn't--for two or more reasons--have come up with a more serviceable metaphor myself. But in any case, and by way of obviating any premature divagations on the subject of Arsenalophobia qua subculture, let me remind you here that as of the narrative stage reached at the end of the last post, whatever it may have transmogrified into since, your Arsenalophobic education of Miss Houghington was merely a one-off tactical feint intended to eventuate in the latter's strictly professional placation of her boss, Mrs Todd. And so, from my DGR-ian shop steward's point of view, the question immediately to be posed and answered is Was this feint successful?'
'Erm, well, I dunno; thatistersay, the answer rather depends on your definition of success.'
'My definition--viz., the maintenance of her Occuvisual situation--is as succinct and categorical as can be.'
'Why, then according to that definition, it was resoundingly successful. On the other hand, according to my (and presumably her) rather more nebulous and yet rather more exacting definition--viz., the shoring up or boosting of her Occuvisual situation--it fell rather wide of its intended mark. Indeed, according to my lights (if not hers), it was a colossal schlong-up or even outright failure. You see, when Esmeralda and I next rendezvous'd, an hour or so after the ensuing workday--i.e., well after her presumptive preparation and submission of the accursed report alluded to in the last post--'
'--Surely now is as good a time as any to drop the inverted commas and commence the observance of strict, non-conversational narrative decorum--'
'Surely ittis, DGR, surely ittis. So, anyway, as I would have said had I been observing SN-CND from the beginning:'
When Esmeralda and I next rendezvous'd, an hour or so after the ensuing workday, &c., (and, refreshingly contrary to custom, at my place) she was, as they say, in a right huff.
'Now don't tell me you didn't finish the report.' [I knew full well shed've been in an exponentially righter huff if such had been the case, but as I'd slept in a full conjectural hour after her departure in the morning, this was a perfectly tenable ice-breaker.]
'Oh no: I finished the report, all right, and handed it punctually and personally to Tamsin at 8:45. It was with the aftermath of the handing-in that my troubles began--or, rather, re-began.'
'So, then, she wasn't fully satisfied with the report?'
'Well, at first, she seemed to be, and then some: "Impressive work," she said whilst thumbing it through, all the while sporting this sort of...I dunno...smugly dictatorial...'
'...Mussoliniesque might just be the word you're looking for--'
'--Yes, that's it: she was sporting this Mussoliniesque frown of...I dunno...grudging approval. And then, whilst riffling towards the back cover, she suddenly broke out into a veritable beam of parental triumphalism and, looking back up at me, exclaimed--'
'--Let me guess: "Not so impressive as to be too impressive to be true, but--"'
'--No, she said, "Diabolically impressive work! In my 12 years at Occuvision, I've never seen its like, in point of proficiency, professionalism and presentation within such a rapid turnaround time-frame. Indeed, I'm hard-pressed for an adequate comparison to anything I've seen within these walls or without them. It's like...like.."
'And here, Nigel, I honestly don't know what came over me. I guess I just got a bit headstrong, or started feeling my Arsenalophobic oats or whatever. In any event, I somehow couldn't resist interjecting, verbatim, "...like a hat-trick worthy of the diabolical Thierry Henry?''
'At which point, her beam collapsed into the glummest, the most glowering, of grimaces, and, with her thumb resting literally on the last page of the report, she laid the thing spreadeagled flat on her desk, and beckoned me downwards for an inspection of its contents. "Now, lookee here," she said. "Column JJ, indicating the non-adjustable shortfall in revenues for allowable expenditures, is highlighted in burnt vermillion. Now, as you surely must know by now, courtesy of our last brown-bag luncheon on report-formatting--correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall seeing you there--in official company reports all non-adjustable shortfalls are to be highlighted in raw ochre, the better to showcase their intrinsic, metaphysical, oil-and-water-like incommensurability with their adjustable counterparts. No, I'm afraid this just won't do. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to re-do the lot."
'And by when?' I had the confounded...balls to ask her.
'"By when?!" she snarled back. "Why, by last Tuesday week, of fucking course!"
'And so I re-did the report for her, by as close to last Tuesday week as I could manage; namely, about an hour-and-a-half ago. Christ! What a bitch of a time I had, highlighting one column after another, page after umpteenth-hundredth page, and trying to make sure all the while that I didn't mistake the burnt ochre square in the colour-palette for the raw one. Do you think there's such a pathological condition as burnt-ochre-stroke-raw-ochre colour-blindness?'
'I hope there isn't.'
'Me too. Cos if there is, my arse is neutral-ochre grass, etc.'
Here, I let about a half a minute of silence elapse, so as to grant the ochre-hued particulate bits of Esmeraldan paranoia-cum-resentment their due settling interval, before venturing to ask:
'Not to sound like a broken 78-RPM record playing through the wormhole-stroke-horn of a 22-hour-transcending time-warp, but is there any chance that it was, at bottom, your violation of this official chromatic policy rather than her erect Arsenalophobic hackles that occasioned her re-commissioning of the report?'
'Not a chance.'
'You mean you either know or conjecture that she was making all that bit up about burnt vermillion-versus-raw ochre highlighting?'
'I dunno if she was actually making it up--after all, as her memory correctly served her, I had skipped out on the last brown-bag luncheon, the last half-dozen or so of them actually. But I do know for a fact that her own attendance at these luncheons had and has been spotty at best; indeed unapologetically so: you see, it's pretty much an idée recue in the finance division that these brown-bag luncheons are nothing but off-season pantomimes--you know, opportunities for the drama-school washouts in marketing and advertising to let off some steam and strut their stuff, with no material short-term or long-term effect on company policy. Our motto--that is, her motto as well as mine--is: Blow it off unless or until it shows up in a mass-circular email memo. So it was decidedly out of character for her to fall back on a BBL-originating directive like that. But even supposing against supposable supposition that my violation of this so-called policy had really mattered to her--well, then: how could she have scanned through literally hundreds of columns of brilliant, retina-scorching burnt vermillion without taking notice of their burnt-vermillion-ness at some early point along the way?'
'OK: you've made your case, and a stainless-steel fire-'n'-waterproof jobber of a one it is. Now, I know you've been champing at the bit all along to stampede into my Arsenalophobic confessor's booth, but you must understand that it hasn't been in a n****rdly nit-picking spirit that I've been posing to you these non-Arsenalophobic counterfactual scenarios. You see, insofar as it's possible, I'd like to spare you any deeper water-mark of immersion in my subculture than you'd be game for independent of your present Occuvisual crisis.'
'I understand that, darling, and I'm incomparably grateful for it. But seeing as how a deeper immersion is called for, towards the solution of this crisis--'
'--I'm not atoll sure that it is. You see, it seems to me that it wasn't on account of any Arsenalophobic obliviousness evinced by your riposte to Tamsin that it failed of achieving its desired effect. Indeed, taking it on its own, I'm most impressed--and, indeed, floored--by its more general pedipilular aptness.'
'How so?'
'How so? Do you really need to ask? You likened your report to a hat-trick comprising the triple virtues of proficiency, professionalism and presentation.'
'I'm afraid I still don't understand.'
'Don't you see? Are you utterly gormless on the score of your own metaphor-fabricating brilliance?'
'I'm a frayed sew.'
'Three virtues in one report pulled off by a single reporter equals three goals achieved by a single player in a single match equals an Occuvisual hat-trick pulled off your gorgeously fleet diggits.'
'I'm afraid I had no idea that a hat-trick had anything to do with doing things in threes.'
'Well, you do now--not that I lend the wee-est degree of credence to your profession of ignorance on that score. Doubtless you remember a good deal more of the rules and folkways of the game from your Wimbledonian days than you're consciously aware of--or, more likely, than you're willing to admit.'
'Perhaps. [She, incidentally, presenting the very allegorical image of enigmaticness in so placidly declining to opt for either of my posited alternatives by way of this simple Perhaps.] In any event, clearly the aptness of the hat-trick metaphor either went quite over her head or was drowned out by the apparent un-aptness of the Arsenal reference.'
'Clearly.'
'Well, now that I trust I am finally ensconced in the Arsenalophoic confessor's seat, I ask you: "What element or aspect of the reference was it that rendered it so positively un-apt?"'
'Why, the reflective metaphorical glory it shone on M. Henry, of course.'
'Whatjermean, "reflective metaphorical glory"? She termed my performance on the report "diabolical": you can't get much more unglorious than that.'
'No, you can't: but all the same she did so by way of praising you, however ironically or mock-enviously; and in likening the praiseworthy qualities of your report to Thierry Haitch's performance on the pitch, you transitively ascribed these selfsame praiseworthy qualities to that performance.'
'I see. Or, rather, I saw it all along; only I rather assumed the fundamental negativity of diabolical would somehow shine through the wash of irony.'
'So it doubtless would have done, had your common Arsenalophobia been a clubbish given from the get-go, along the lines of our common Kenophobia. Remember how, about a week and a half ago, you reminded me that we had to return a coupla videos to the rental shop, so as to avoid a trifling two-quid late fee, and I said to you, "Christ! You're a regular Ken Livingstone, hal'pennying and shillinging me to death like this"?'
'Yeah.'
'Well, I could get away with likening you to Ken then without any fear of your resenting the likeness, inasmuch as I knew full well that you hated him full as much as I did. But Tamsin knows nothing of the kind on the score of your Arsenalophobia and, indeed, has assumed by default that you are of the opposite camp; hence the path of least mental resistance for her consists in construing any potentially positive appraisal of a Gunner on your part as an actual, wholehearted endorsement of said squad member or club affiliate.'
'So you're saying we should throw in the J-Cloth on this one: that your Arsenalophobic coaching so far has been and always will be all pretty much for naught? That Tamsin's motto is pretty much Once a Crypto-Gooner always a Crypto-Gooner, and that I might as well start applying for a new position at Arsenal club HQ?'
'Now you're simply being a perverse shag, cos you know full well that I'm saying no such thing. What I'm saying is what I'm sure you know full well I can't help saying: namely, that you're going to have to be far more selective, far more judicious, in your Gunnerly name-dropping; that you're going to have to save your next Arsenalic reference for an occasion when you find Tamsin categorically, unironically denouncing, inveighing against or carping at some bête noire of hers.'
'But it might be weeks before such an occasion arises.'
'Yes, or even months. Naturally, I'm sympathetic to your impatience; naturally, I understand you're hoping to get this whole Occuvisual shit-blot squared away by the end of the week. But it just ain't gonna happen. As we Arsenalophobes are wont to say when the Gunners happen to be levitating over the table-top a coupla weeks into the season: Neither was Emirates built nor shall Highbury be demolished in a single day.'
'I'd better add that proverb to the repertoire: it could come in useful.'
'Indeed, but only--'
'--Yesyesyes, I know: but only in its proper, non-ironic, categorically deprecatory context. So that's it? You've said your peace? The session's adjourned sine die and its back to the dreary old drawing board for my miserable, lonely Occuvisual self?'
'Well, not just yet. In fact, at bottom, the contextually-centred bit of my critique of your performance was really just a digression from this main acontextually-centred bit that's about to follow; and, to be frank, it was mostly for the sake of letting off some Arsenalophobic steam on my end that I homed in on the context to begin with--cos if I had damned the old torpedoes and stampeded full speed ahead towards the bull's-okie according to my red-filtered Arsenalophobic bull's lights, well, believe you me it wouldn't have been pretty (here, phrases like "restraining order" spring to mind); but luckily I was clear-headed and perspicacious enough to realise that what was okie-burstingly obvious to me qua inveterate Arsenalophobe might not be so obvious to you qua pseudo-Arsenalophobic greenhorn--'
'--namely--'
'--Namely, that one must never--nay, that it should never even cross one's mind to do so--advert to a Gunner's pedipilular prowess as a thing-in-itself, in the course of an Arsenalophobic slur or diatribe.'
'Why not? Or, rather, how not? Isn't that one of the main things--if not the main thing--you lot hate about Arsenal, that they're so bloody competent?'
'Yes and no,' I semi-concur, through clenched teeth and whilst tucking me right hand under me left arse cheek. 'To be sure, in the absence of that selfsame sheer bloody competence the gloriously incendiary, endlessly re-catalysing chemical reaction that is Arsenalophobia could never take place. But as a thing-in-itself it is something that can command only admiration. You see, it's only in solution with the sheer, unsportsmanlike depths of mendacity and puerility to which the Gunners habitually descend in their efforts to close the gap between mere competence and outright mastery or supremacy (which unsportsmanlike conduct, for its part, would be merely laughable in a squad of lesser pedipilular prowess)--that this competence can come into its true Arsenalophobic own; such that to allude to an instance of Gunnerly competence in the presence of an Arsenalophobe without throwing in a complementary allusion to an instance of Gunnerly unsportsmanship is like...I dunno...help me out here: you passed an A-level in chemistry didn't you--?'
'--it's like...erm...puffing hydrogen-powered cars in the presence of someone who's allergic to water?'
'Well, I'd like to think we Arsenalophobes aren't such rare freaks of nature as these aquaphobes whereof you speak, but yes: I think you get the gist of it.'
'Good. So then, to filter what you said earlier about proper contexts through what you said just now about chemical constituents: what I really should be looking out for, vis-a-vis my next bout of Gunnerly name-dropping, is a moment when Tamsin happens to complaining about the simultaneous competence and childishness of some person or institution within the company?'
'Ideally, yes.'
'So when you said I might have to wait months for my next pseudo-Arsenalophobic opportunity, you really ought to have said years, or possibly even decades?'
'No. In all candour, I ought to have said a fortnight at most, only I didn't want to get your hopes up before I'd fully apprised you of what you were up against. Trust me: you needn't be long in waiting; for, in the immortal words of Sir Thomas More, Every organisation hath its Machiavel or Wenger....'
'--it's about football. Yes, I know; no need to remind me. But insofar as "football" for you equals "aggressive football fandom-stroke-antifandom" equals "full-grown blokes screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs"--and in light of your accounts of your Wimbledonian experiences with your old man, I can't help thinking that's very far indeed--you will, to a corresponding degree, find the trauma of your Arsenalophobic initiation alleviated by this friendly, and occasionally non-Gunnerly, context. For my part--and, TBF, whose other part matters as long as we're spectating in the privacy of our own front rooms rather than in the publicity of some smokey pub?--I can testify that I've never uttered an imprecation stronger than "Footfuck thyself with thine offending hoof, Henry!" during a pre-season Gunners' match; and that during non-Arsenal friendlies I'm as habitually, dispassionately well-behaved as a robotic kitten. So, what do you say?'
'Oh, all right. I suppose I might as well give it a go.
'Yeehaw!'
'--Provided, firstly, that not merely the first, but the initial full weekend of these friendly-viewing sessions is comprised by non-Arsenal-involving matches.'
'Well, that shouldn't be too hard to arrange.'
'I don't care how hard it is to arrange: if the broadcasting schedule won't cooperate, then find another source, be it a 200-quid video of a 20-year-old junior-league match on E-bay. And, secondly, provided you agree to take full responsibility for any regressive traumatic symptoms that might manifest themselves on my end along the way.'
'Well, of course I shall do. Never fear: in the person of me, your ever-patient tutor, you'll always have at your disposal a shoulder to cry on, an ear to scream baby-talk curses into, a face to slam a door into, Christ! even the occasional fatherly 50 p outlay on candyfloss if it should come to that--'
'--I'm not just talking here of short-term emotional support, Nigel. I'm talking also of short-term and potentially long-term financial support [as if my lately-pledged 50 p minimum didn't count as such!], in compensation for any missed workdays (I'm at the end of my sick-leave balance, you see, on account of this surreptitious five-day trip to Mallorca I took with Manisha last March), NHS-allotment-exceeding therapy hours, and the like.'
My, but aren't you laying it on a bit thick, to the chune of a full jar's-worth of your beloved Marmite! I was tempted to interject here, but I swallowed me old pride and held me equally-old piss, in laconically retrojecting the single disyllable, Agreed.
And the rest, as they say (or fucking well ought to say), is another glorious chapter in the annals of Arsenalophobic history. As of the date of this posting, Esmeralda's and YFCT's hearts beat as a single (albeit regrettably ruby-hued) organic unit--Christ! If anything, her ventricular half of the organ has been doing the lion-heart's share of the pumping of late. I would have you know, DGR, that just the other night, in the midst of a dream centring on the chicken-tikka pizza I grudgingly planned to share with her the following evening, I was rudely awakened by an Esmeraldan finger-prod, prompted by her insomniac musings on the question of--get this!--my pet question of whether the alphabetical overlap between Arséne Wenger's Christian name and the name of the side in his custody was sheer coincidence or the manifestation of some diabolical Arsenalophilic cosmic anti-entelechy. In short, I can but hope that it be merely a matter of time--i.e., the time requisite to our smoothing over our admittedly nettlesomely divergent attitudes to that ghastly viscosity answering to the proprietary name of M*****e--until these pseudo-pages are intermittently blackened by the typographical equivalent of the pitter-patter of tiny feet, accompanied, naturally, by such winsome, halting first baby-vocables as Fuck Thiewwy Ennui! And from there, of course, it'll be on to a full wardrobe of toddler football togs--duly patterned, according to exacting North-London-Arsenal-Basherly specifications, after the colours of the current roster of Gunner-besting clubs.................................................................................................................................................................[....]
'Whence issues this seemingly interminable ellipsis, MDF?'
'Whence? Why, from the sight of the droopy, comb-and-wax-neglected corners of your here-2-4 unfailingly impeccably twirled and upturned moustache, of course. Is something eating at you?'
'Well, truth be told, yes.'
'Say on.'
'Well, the title of the present post is, after all, "The Education of Esmeralda Houghington: Part Two."'
'Natur-like. What of it?'
'Why, then: assuming that the goal of that eponymous Education was Esmeralda's initiation into the true path or inner sanctum of Arsenalophobia...'
'...Even so, TBS, even so.'
'...well, confound it, then! Aren't you rather depriving us--or, more namely, me--of the main morsel of dramatic interest we've been craving all along, in (your) simply J-clothing over the whole transformation of this hard-line pedipiluphobe (i.e. Esmeralda) into a born-again pedipilulophilic Arsenalophobe?'
'Hardly.'
'Hardly, you have the confounded cheek to protest: Hardly? You who have essentially, thus far, provided me with the equivalent of a two-volume Divine Comedy gutted of everything save the first canto of the Inferno and the last twenty lines of the Paradiso?'
'I beg to differ, DGR. It seems to me that what I've done is given you the unabridged and unbowdlerised whole of the one really innersting book of the DC, the Inferno, and winnowed down the remaining two utterly boring ones to their respective one-sentences essences, viz. It took a whole lot of turrryin' to get up that hill and They all lived happily ever after up yonder in paradise. BYM, DGR: the whole ordeal of simply bringing Esmeralda round to submit to that inaugural match-viewing, as recounted above, cuntstitutes the prime meat of the drama; by comparison with which an equally exhaustive account of the ensuing tutorial itself would be about as engaging as a half-speed slow-motion video of the drying-out of the freshly-painted Emirates stadium, especially in your pedipilular-indifferent okies.'
'Doubtless it would be. But damn and blast it all!: at bum what's in point here is not the satisfaction of my dramaturgical curiosity, but, rather the avoidance of an insult to my readerly intelligence. Surely, you could be suffered to cull, out of the mass of Esmeraldan match-viewing footage, a few exemplary thingummies--Pardon me, but what's the proper televisual term for them...?'
'...Highlights?'
'...Thenkyaw, highlights, by way of proving to me that this lately-attested transmogrification of ethos is well-founded.'
'Well, I'll see what I can do, come the next post.'
[You, DGR, livid with well-nigh apoplectic rage:] 'Come the next post?'
'Yeah, through the judicious use of flashbacks and suchlike cinematic artifices. In the meantime, as I'm feeling a bit sleepy and have--say what you will otherwise--long since discharged the letter of my obligation to bring this post up to date with the current Ruggerian SOA, I bid you, DGR, a fond and fair Good Night, by way of my usual Soupy-Twistian formula, viz.:'
'I'm sorry,MDF? "AFT"?'
'"About Fucking Time."'
'About F****ing Time that what?'
'AFT that you're being graced with a post fully O'Koran with the calendrical date of its header; and hence, truly worthy of being designated a post in the proper journalistic-cum-Royal-Mailian sense of the term. You would, after all-stroke-I-trust, feel yourself well and truly cheated of your 50 p's worth of news if, upon purchasing a copy of the 30 October 2006 edition of the Sheffield Evening Post, you discovered its top front-page headline proclaiming "KING HAROLD TROUNCED AT HASTINGS" or even "THE KING [i.e., Mr Presley] IS DEAD"; as I trust you would likewise feel cheated of your monthly report of high-jinks at the old folks' home if, upon unsealing an envelope from your gran postmarked the same, you discovered her nattering on, in the letter contained therein, about rationing vouchers and the latest Cary Grant picture or Frank Sinatra 78.'
'Well, TBF, with respect to the latter example, I shouldn't so much feel cheated as worried about the onset of senility...'
'...Understandably, yes; just as, with respect to the former example, you'd be equally well within your rights to gather that the editor of the paper had a few chairs missing from his front room. But it all comes to the same thing, as far as the application of these two examples to the present bout of auto-flagellation goes: for two or three posts running, I've been mired, narratively speaking, in the events of last July and August, all the while allowing each post to default to its Blogger-assigned date of publication. Now, when I was recounting the events of late July in early August, such a mis-synchronisation of dates could have plausibly inconvenienced you, DGR, no more than, say, the Old-School postmark of a letter penned by Shakespeare or Liz the First in 1590-something would have inconvenienced his or her New-School-dating cuntinental correspondent. But come the publication of my last post, by which point the gap had widened to one of a full two months; why, by then, I found myself occupying an altogether more embarrassing position akin to that of some late-nineteenth-century Petersburger or Muskovite corresponding with a Parisian or Londinian contemporary. For Chrissakes, my Parisian or Londinian correspondent would have been well within his rights to write back, Pope Greg's been in his grave for going on three hundred years. When are you Russkies going to get with the fucking trans-national calendrical programme? And so, with the inauguration of this here post, dated 30 October 2006, I've firmly resolved to bring the Ruggersweltian chronicle fully abreast of the events of the 29th of that selfsame instant.'
‘All to the good, MDF, all to the good; and yet, talking as we were just now of anachronistic headlines, is it not rather incumbent upon you for consistency's sake to bring the headline—that is to say, the title--of this post fully abreast of its dateline?’
‘Why, yes, of course ittis; and so I have done: the last post was entitled “TEoEH: Part One”, and this one is entitled “TEoEH: Part Two”.’
'Good heavens! Surely something in the course of the past two months and sixpence has displaced Miss Houghington's Aresnalophobic education as the keynote of your lifeworld?'
'I'm a frayed knot, DGR. Nay, come to think of it, why should I affect the merest soup's son of pusillanimity on this score: I'm positively proud to aver that as of 30/10/06 I remain unswervingly devoted to my heaven-sent vocation of Arsenalophobic pedagogue. Surely you didn't imagine that such an arduous course of study, a veritable pedipilular Gradus ad Parnassum could be comprehensively swotted in a single evening's micro-chinwag.'
'Erm, well, of course not. But I was rather assuming it could be got out of the way over the course of two or, at most, three such micro-chinwags.'
'Here you show your true colours: viz., those of a dyed-in-the wool pedipilulophobic cricket snob. There's absolutely no call for you to assume, on the basis of the fact that our matches are played out over the course of a compact hour-and-a-half as against the average week and a half required by one of yours, that a full understanding of the rules of the game alone--to say nothing of the infinitely more complex sociological-cum-anthropological study of a particular pedipilular subculture that is now in point--ought to be correspondingly foreshortened. Indeed, as far as the subcultural considerations go (thatistersay, from my admitted cricketophilically benighted standpoint), I'm inclined to think that things are a good deal less complex on your end. After all, doesn't your fandom at arse, for you lot, amount simply to a continuous unison thwacking of the okies of a fistful of former imperial dependants with a massive St-George-Cross or Union-Jack-patterned beach towel? Whereas for us pedipulophiles, its a wee bit more complicated. Say, for example, you're a 45-year-old chippy-proprietor from (and in) Salford: on the one hand, you've never wanted to have anything to do with Manchester City, on account of its official municipal affiliation with the awful, satanic Big Marmite Jar to the south; and yet, on the other hand, you're all too keen to disassociate yourself from the MU Premiership bandwagon, brimming full as it is by now of Gucci-walleted, Blue-Tooth-sporting Londinian latecomers advertising their solidarity with the so-called working class by way of their support of a northern club; and then, on the third hand, you don't want to give offence to your mum, a die-hard Blackburn supporter on account of dear old great-uncle Fred's two-month stint as a winger for that club just before the war--'
'--I thought we were confining ourselves to the consideration of a single pedipilular subculture, namely the Arsenalophobic one.'
'Why, so we are in the main DGR, so we are; only I thought it was high time that you got at least a fleeting first-class train-compartment's view of how the other 999,999 /1,000,000 live, lest you should continue supposing (as I suppose you have supposed all along) that the extreme pitch of pedipilulomania evinced by us Arsenalophobes is unique to our subculture.'
'I have never supposed anything of the kind, and my resentment of your last digression springs not in the slightest from my ignorance of the state of affairs alluded to therein, but rather entirely from my utterly imperturbable indifference thereunto. Believe you me, MDF, I can never be moved by any laundry list of the travails of the beleaguered football fan, be it ever so so long or tear-stained; and to recite such a list in my hearing is but to bring coals to Newcastle--or, rather, to perform the perfectly antithetical act--'
'--say, to bring dog turds to Marseilles or inner London?'
'I couldn't--for two or more reasons--have come up with a more serviceable metaphor myself. But in any case, and by way of obviating any premature divagations on the subject of Arsenalophobia qua subculture, let me remind you here that as of the narrative stage reached at the end of the last post, whatever it may have transmogrified into since, your Arsenalophobic education of Miss Houghington was merely a one-off tactical feint intended to eventuate in the latter's strictly professional placation of her boss, Mrs Todd. And so, from my DGR-ian shop steward's point of view, the question immediately to be posed and answered is Was this feint successful?'
'Erm, well, I dunno; thatistersay, the answer rather depends on your definition of success.'
'My definition--viz., the maintenance of her Occuvisual situation--is as succinct and categorical as can be.'
'Why, then according to that definition, it was resoundingly successful. On the other hand, according to my (and presumably her) rather more nebulous and yet rather more exacting definition--viz., the shoring up or boosting of her Occuvisual situation--it fell rather wide of its intended mark. Indeed, according to my lights (if not hers), it was a colossal schlong-up or even outright failure. You see, when Esmeralda and I next rendezvous'd, an hour or so after the ensuing workday--i.e., well after her presumptive preparation and submission of the accursed report alluded to in the last post--'
'--Surely now is as good a time as any to drop the inverted commas and commence the observance of strict, non-conversational narrative decorum--'
'Surely ittis, DGR, surely ittis. So, anyway, as I would have said had I been observing SN-CND from the beginning:'
When Esmeralda and I next rendezvous'd, an hour or so after the ensuing workday, &c., (and, refreshingly contrary to custom, at my place) she was, as they say, in a right huff.
'Now don't tell me you didn't finish the report.' [I knew full well shed've been in an exponentially righter huff if such had been the case, but as I'd slept in a full conjectural hour after her departure in the morning, this was a perfectly tenable ice-breaker.]
'Oh no: I finished the report, all right, and handed it punctually and personally to Tamsin at 8:45. It was with the aftermath of the handing-in that my troubles began--or, rather, re-began.'
'So, then, she wasn't fully satisfied with the report?'
'Well, at first, she seemed to be, and then some: "Impressive work," she said whilst thumbing it through, all the while sporting this sort of...I dunno...smugly dictatorial...'
'...Mussoliniesque might just be the word you're looking for--'
'--Yes, that's it: she was sporting this Mussoliniesque frown of...I dunno...grudging approval. And then, whilst riffling towards the back cover, she suddenly broke out into a veritable beam of parental triumphalism and, looking back up at me, exclaimed--'
'--Let me guess: "Not so impressive as to be too impressive to be true, but--"'
'--No, she said, "Diabolically impressive work! In my 12 years at Occuvision, I've never seen its like, in point of proficiency, professionalism and presentation within such a rapid turnaround time-frame. Indeed, I'm hard-pressed for an adequate comparison to anything I've seen within these walls or without them. It's like...like.."
'And here, Nigel, I honestly don't know what came over me. I guess I just got a bit headstrong, or started feeling my Arsenalophobic oats or whatever. In any event, I somehow couldn't resist interjecting, verbatim, "...like a hat-trick worthy of the diabolical Thierry Henry?''
'At which point, her beam collapsed into the glummest, the most glowering, of grimaces, and, with her thumb resting literally on the last page of the report, she laid the thing spreadeagled flat on her desk, and beckoned me downwards for an inspection of its contents. "Now, lookee here," she said. "Column JJ, indicating the non-adjustable shortfall in revenues for allowable expenditures, is highlighted in burnt vermillion. Now, as you surely must know by now, courtesy of our last brown-bag luncheon on report-formatting--correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall seeing you there--in official company reports all non-adjustable shortfalls are to be highlighted in raw ochre, the better to showcase their intrinsic, metaphysical, oil-and-water-like incommensurability with their adjustable counterparts. No, I'm afraid this just won't do. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to re-do the lot."
'And by when?' I had the confounded...balls to ask her.
'"By when?!" she snarled back. "Why, by last Tuesday week, of fucking course!"
'And so I re-did the report for her, by as close to last Tuesday week as I could manage; namely, about an hour-and-a-half ago. Christ! What a bitch of a time I had, highlighting one column after another, page after umpteenth-hundredth page, and trying to make sure all the while that I didn't mistake the burnt ochre square in the colour-palette for the raw one. Do you think there's such a pathological condition as burnt-ochre-stroke-raw-ochre colour-blindness?'
'I hope there isn't.'
'Me too. Cos if there is, my arse is neutral-ochre grass, etc.'
Here, I let about a half a minute of silence elapse, so as to grant the ochre-hued particulate bits of Esmeraldan paranoia-cum-resentment their due settling interval, before venturing to ask:
'Not to sound like a broken 78-RPM record playing through the wormhole-stroke-horn of a 22-hour-transcending time-warp, but is there any chance that it was, at bottom, your violation of this official chromatic policy rather than her erect Arsenalophobic hackles that occasioned her re-commissioning of the report?'
'Not a chance.'
'You mean you either know or conjecture that she was making all that bit up about burnt vermillion-versus-raw ochre highlighting?'
'I dunno if she was actually making it up--after all, as her memory correctly served her, I had skipped out on the last brown-bag luncheon, the last half-dozen or so of them actually. But I do know for a fact that her own attendance at these luncheons had and has been spotty at best; indeed unapologetically so: you see, it's pretty much an idée recue in the finance division that these brown-bag luncheons are nothing but off-season pantomimes--you know, opportunities for the drama-school washouts in marketing and advertising to let off some steam and strut their stuff, with no material short-term or long-term effect on company policy. Our motto--that is, her motto as well as mine--is: Blow it off unless or until it shows up in a mass-circular email memo. So it was decidedly out of character for her to fall back on a BBL-originating directive like that. But even supposing against supposable supposition that my violation of this so-called policy had really mattered to her--well, then: how could she have scanned through literally hundreds of columns of brilliant, retina-scorching burnt vermillion without taking notice of their burnt-vermillion-ness at some early point along the way?'
'OK: you've made your case, and a stainless-steel fire-'n'-waterproof jobber of a one it is. Now, I know you've been champing at the bit all along to stampede into my Arsenalophobic confessor's booth, but you must understand that it hasn't been in a n****rdly nit-picking spirit that I've been posing to you these non-Arsenalophobic counterfactual scenarios. You see, insofar as it's possible, I'd like to spare you any deeper water-mark of immersion in my subculture than you'd be game for independent of your present Occuvisual crisis.'
'I understand that, darling, and I'm incomparably grateful for it. But seeing as how a deeper immersion is called for, towards the solution of this crisis--'
'--I'm not atoll sure that it is. You see, it seems to me that it wasn't on account of any Arsenalophobic obliviousness evinced by your riposte to Tamsin that it failed of achieving its desired effect. Indeed, taking it on its own, I'm most impressed--and, indeed, floored--by its more general pedipilular aptness.'
'How so?'
'How so? Do you really need to ask? You likened your report to a hat-trick comprising the triple virtues of proficiency, professionalism and presentation.'
'I'm afraid I still don't understand.'
'Don't you see? Are you utterly gormless on the score of your own metaphor-fabricating brilliance?'
'I'm a frayed sew.'
'Three virtues in one report pulled off by a single reporter equals three goals achieved by a single player in a single match equals an Occuvisual hat-trick pulled off your gorgeously fleet diggits.'
'I'm afraid I had no idea that a hat-trick had anything to do with doing things in threes.'
'Well, you do now--not that I lend the wee-est degree of credence to your profession of ignorance on that score. Doubtless you remember a good deal more of the rules and folkways of the game from your Wimbledonian days than you're consciously aware of--or, more likely, than you're willing to admit.'
'Perhaps. [She, incidentally, presenting the very allegorical image of enigmaticness in so placidly declining to opt for either of my posited alternatives by way of this simple Perhaps.] In any event, clearly the aptness of the hat-trick metaphor either went quite over her head or was drowned out by the apparent un-aptness of the Arsenal reference.'
'Clearly.'
'Well, now that I trust I am finally ensconced in the Arsenalophoic confessor's seat, I ask you: "What element or aspect of the reference was it that rendered it so positively un-apt?"'
'Why, the reflective metaphorical glory it shone on M. Henry, of course.'
'Whatjermean, "reflective metaphorical glory"? She termed my performance on the report "diabolical": you can't get much more unglorious than that.'
'No, you can't: but all the same she did so by way of praising you, however ironically or mock-enviously; and in likening the praiseworthy qualities of your report to Thierry Haitch's performance on the pitch, you transitively ascribed these selfsame praiseworthy qualities to that performance.'
'I see. Or, rather, I saw it all along; only I rather assumed the fundamental negativity of diabolical would somehow shine through the wash of irony.'
'So it doubtless would have done, had your common Arsenalophobia been a clubbish given from the get-go, along the lines of our common Kenophobia. Remember how, about a week and a half ago, you reminded me that we had to return a coupla videos to the rental shop, so as to avoid a trifling two-quid late fee, and I said to you, "Christ! You're a regular Ken Livingstone, hal'pennying and shillinging me to death like this"?'
'Yeah.'
'Well, I could get away with likening you to Ken then without any fear of your resenting the likeness, inasmuch as I knew full well that you hated him full as much as I did. But Tamsin knows nothing of the kind on the score of your Arsenalophobia and, indeed, has assumed by default that you are of the opposite camp; hence the path of least mental resistance for her consists in construing any potentially positive appraisal of a Gunner on your part as an actual, wholehearted endorsement of said squad member or club affiliate.'
'So you're saying we should throw in the J-Cloth on this one: that your Arsenalophobic coaching so far has been and always will be all pretty much for naught? That Tamsin's motto is pretty much Once a Crypto-Gooner always a Crypto-Gooner, and that I might as well start applying for a new position at Arsenal club HQ?'
'Now you're simply being a perverse shag, cos you know full well that I'm saying no such thing. What I'm saying is what I'm sure you know full well I can't help saying: namely, that you're going to have to be far more selective, far more judicious, in your Gunnerly name-dropping; that you're going to have to save your next Arsenalic reference for an occasion when you find Tamsin categorically, unironically denouncing, inveighing against or carping at some bête noire of hers.'
'But it might be weeks before such an occasion arises.'
'Yes, or even months. Naturally, I'm sympathetic to your impatience; naturally, I understand you're hoping to get this whole Occuvisual shit-blot squared away by the end of the week. But it just ain't gonna happen. As we Arsenalophobes are wont to say when the Gunners happen to be levitating over the table-top a coupla weeks into the season: Neither was Emirates built nor shall Highbury be demolished in a single day.'
'I'd better add that proverb to the repertoire: it could come in useful.'
'Indeed, but only--'
'--Yesyesyes, I know: but only in its proper, non-ironic, categorically deprecatory context. So that's it? You've said your peace? The session's adjourned sine die and its back to the dreary old drawing board for my miserable, lonely Occuvisual self?'
'Well, not just yet. In fact, at bottom, the contextually-centred bit of my critique of your performance was really just a digression from this main acontextually-centred bit that's about to follow; and, to be frank, it was mostly for the sake of letting off some Arsenalophobic steam on my end that I homed in on the context to begin with--cos if I had damned the old torpedoes and stampeded full speed ahead towards the bull's-okie according to my red-filtered Arsenalophobic bull's lights, well, believe you me it wouldn't have been pretty (here, phrases like "restraining order" spring to mind); but luckily I was clear-headed and perspicacious enough to realise that what was okie-burstingly obvious to me qua inveterate Arsenalophobe might not be so obvious to you qua pseudo-Arsenalophobic greenhorn--'
'--namely--'
'--Namely, that one must never--nay, that it should never even cross one's mind to do so--advert to a Gunner's pedipilular prowess as a thing-in-itself, in the course of an Arsenalophobic slur or diatribe.'
'Why not? Or, rather, how not? Isn't that one of the main things--if not the main thing--you lot hate about Arsenal, that they're so bloody competent?'
'Yes and no,' I semi-concur, through clenched teeth and whilst tucking me right hand under me left arse cheek. 'To be sure, in the absence of that selfsame sheer bloody competence the gloriously incendiary, endlessly re-catalysing chemical reaction that is Arsenalophobia could never take place. But as a thing-in-itself it is something that can command only admiration. You see, it's only in solution with the sheer, unsportsmanlike depths of mendacity and puerility to which the Gunners habitually descend in their efforts to close the gap between mere competence and outright mastery or supremacy (which unsportsmanlike conduct, for its part, would be merely laughable in a squad of lesser pedipilular prowess)--that this competence can come into its true Arsenalophobic own; such that to allude to an instance of Gunnerly competence in the presence of an Arsenalophobe without throwing in a complementary allusion to an instance of Gunnerly unsportsmanship is like...I dunno...help me out here: you passed an A-level in chemistry didn't you--?'
'--it's like...erm...puffing hydrogen-powered cars in the presence of someone who's allergic to water?'
'Well, I'd like to think we Arsenalophobes aren't such rare freaks of nature as these aquaphobes whereof you speak, but yes: I think you get the gist of it.'
'Good. So then, to filter what you said earlier about proper contexts through what you said just now about chemical constituents: what I really should be looking out for, vis-a-vis my next bout of Gunnerly name-dropping, is a moment when Tamsin happens to complaining about the simultaneous competence and childishness of some person or institution within the company?'
'Ideally, yes.'
'So when you said I might have to wait months for my next pseudo-Arsenalophobic opportunity, you really ought to have said years, or possibly even decades?'
'No. In all candour, I ought to have said a fortnight at most, only I didn't want to get your hopes up before I'd fully apprised you of what you were up against. Trust me: you needn't be long in waiting; for, in the immortal words of Sir Thomas More, Every organisation hath its Machiavel or Wenger....'
*
There now ensued a decidedly tense week-and-a-half throughout which my girl proved, on the whole, to be as consistently stroppy and uncuddleable as a PMT-afflicted she-porcupine; proved on the whole to be so, I say, most quantifiably and empirically in virtue of the fact that she rang me up on six of those ten consecutive nights--among which six figured two consecutive weekend ones--to let me know (and only to let me know, before ringing off immejiately afterwards) 'that I needn't come round [i.e., to her place].'
[DGR:] 'Even so, the glass remained two-fifths full; i.e., you were suffered to come round on the remaining four nights.'
'Why, so it did and so I was, DGR; and, TBS, on each and every one of those four she started out brimming full of such ardent self-recriminations on the score of her neglect of YFCT as toasted me heart schlongles to sublime perfection. Nonetheless, with each successive rendezvous, the proportion of the stayover devoted to the initial self-recriminatory module (including its coitional sub-module) grew ever slimmer in relation to its inevitable Nigel-recriminatory sequel, such that by Rendezvous No. 4, I'd scarcely time enough to strip down to my string vest and shorts before being obliged to weather the onslaught of her boilerplate lecture on the subject of "this is all your fault." And as for the solo off-nights back at the maisonette; well, whilst I managed merrily enough to piss away the first two of them in a Hoegaarden-cum-Pizza-Express-saturated attitude of rationalised bachlelor-ly devil-may-care-ness, by the third of them I'd pretty much inaugurated a pizza-free routine of frenzied beer-swilling and chain-smoking, fearing as I did by then, and not without reason, that I had lately embarked not on a mere Woolwich ferry day-trip of quasi-bachelorly semi-celibacy, but on a veritable transatlantic Queen Mary-voyage devoted to that selfsame semi-monastic lifestyle. Luckily enough, though, just after dusk on night number 11, I received an Esmeraldan bell not merely inviting, but positively exhorting me to come over toot sweet, on account of a certain development that required my immejiate input.'
'What's this all about, then?' I stroppily queried upon my arrival, from just inside the front doorway, whilst enduring the usual round of Lucy-issuing trouser-cuff chompings.
'What it's all about,' Esmeralda says, whilst prancing up to me, peeling off my jacket and hanging it up on the coat rack, quite in defiance of recent custom, 'is I think I'm finally beginning to make some Arsenalophobic inroads.'
'How so?' I says, through a sceptical, sideways, schlong-eyed squint worthy of a Columbo.
'Well,' she replies, luxuriantly flinging herself on to the couch and motioning me to do likewise (which I do do, albeit in an altogether more wooden, spartan attitude), 'towards the end of the afternoon today I happened to walk in on Tamsin whilst she was in the midst of a phone conversation with this guy by the name of Steven Milliband, vice president of product planning. "Oh, yes Mr Milliband," she was saying when I pitched up, "by Friday at the latest. No, that shouldn't be a problem. Of course I will do, Mr Milliband. Thank you." Then, she rang off and exclaimed to me, in an imploring sort of tone, "That contemptible little shit!" "Which contemptible little shit?" I naturally asked. "Why, Steve Milliband, of course," she said. "He just expects me to drop everything I'm doing, and, at two days' notice, bugger off to fucking East Anglia with a custom-tailored Power Point presentation in tow. Of course, it's absolutely and exclusively typical of him to make such exorbitant demands of a sister division. "Ton Koopman [that's our CEO at the parent company down in Amsterdam] will have me out on the carpet if my prognostications aren't underpinned by a solid foundation of numbers," he wines; as if I should care! Would Susan Acheson [VP of marketing] or Jan Haitink [VP of product production] dare demand anything of the kind of me, at such short notice, regardless of whatever torments Meynheer Koopman might have in store for them? I don't think so: they know their respective places, exalted enough though these may be. But Stevereno, just because he's the golden boy newly arrived from Visitech, whose footsie position he managed to jack up by a few fractions of a point courtesy of his introduction of the oil-absorbent, non-slip nose-guard (which wasn't even his invention, by the way), has somehow got it into his puny little skull that he's above the usual professional courtesies." And here I had the good genius to chime in, "The little brat's a regular Thierry Henry." Whereupon Tamsin fixed me with the most appreciative, and, at the same time, the most searching gaze, and exclaimed, "Why, so he is! But where did you get that from? I'd have hardly expected such an apt comparison from a crypto-Gooner such as yourself." At which point, before I was obliged to elaborate the comparison (as if I could have done!), the phone started ringing again, and Tamsin presently found herself mired in a second bout of conversational rigmarole with Mr Milliband, from which I circumspectly recused myself amid much bowing and scraping.'
'Which moment of rigmarole-cum-self-recusance, I take it, marks the end of your most recent interview with Tamsin.'
'Even so.'
'Splendid. Now, I can tell straightaway that what Tamsin was looking for when she asked you "where you'd got that from"--and what she'll be looking for tomorrow, assuming another Milliband-bashing moment arises during the course thereof--'
'Oh, I'm sure it will do. This Milliband bloke's her bête noir, and now that he's got her by the presentational short hairs, I can't imagine she'll manage to--'
'--Good. You've told me more than enough, darling. As I was saying, what she's going to be looking for is a match-specific citation.'
'You mean a reference to some particular moment in some particular match when M. Henry behaved in this characteristically puerile manner?'
'That's right.'
'Ugh! Just the level of pedipilular nitty-grittyism I was hoping I could avoid altogether. After all, I'm totally at sea when it comes to that sort of thing, seeing as how I haven't seen a match--apart from that World Cup one back at Roger and Susan's--for going on ten years.'
'Pshaw, what arrant self-derogating nonsense! Remember Wimbledon! It's just like riding a bike: it'll all come back to you when you're back on the pitch; you'll see. In any case, if we script and choreograph this properly, any such nitty-gritty-istic lapses on your part won't ever come to light. But before we can even move on to the scripting and the choreographing, we need a commensurately exemplary moment in the annals of Gunnerism to script and choreograph. Now, my personal favourite is this T. H. kvetchvest in the final seconds of an Arsenal-Blackburn match dating from way back in '02. It's perfectly tailored to Tamsin's present situation in so many respects, not the least respectable of which being the match's inter-league setting.'
'How so?'
'Well, because, assuming this Visitech company that Mr Milliband hails from occupies a slightly higher position on the corporate totem pole than the one occupied by Occuvision--correct me if I'm wrong, but I did read as much between the lines of your conversational recap--'
'--Yes: you read as much aright. Go on.'
'Why, then, Tamsin'll be cast by implication in the role of the driver of the plucky little Championship-side of a steam engine (i.e., Blackburn/Occuvision) who managed to overtake the pompous Premiership state-of-the-art bullet-train (i.e., Arsenal/Visitiech).'
'Sounds fucking brilliant!' she says, whilst dashing over to the dining-room table to grab her scribbling block and biro (in case I forgot to mention it, we were sitting on the front room couch, just like last time round). The butcher's dizaine seconds comprised by her round trip, however, are enough to give me second thoughts as to the aptness of this admittedly fucking brilliant similitudinal vehicle to the present scheme, which 2ndTs are ultimately vocalised as follows:
'On second thought, I'm not so sure this particular example is best suited to our purposes, admittedly fucking brilliant though it is.'
'And why not?'
'Well, because--and here, at the risk of coming off like a 1970s-style male chauvinist pig, I'm going to have to draw on a feminine stereotype (but what choice do I have knowing as little as I do about the specifically Tamsinian Arsenalophobic habitus?)--stereotypically your female football fans don't really go in for the exhaustive hoarding of eldritch archival club lore, which savours rather too gamily of masculine anoraksim in their nostrils. In the fancy of one of these amazons, the mere mention of a phrase like "back in '02" is likely to conjure up the horrifying spectre of an interior-design-blighting mural collage of posters, autographed photos, ticket stubs, match programmes, drug-test results and the like. No, your stereotypical female pedipilulophile likes to travel light, and to keep her frame of reference squarely focussed on the old Haitch and Enn. Such that if you start hearkening back to a five-year-old match in Tamsin's presence, she'll in all not-unlikelihood suss that you've been briefed beforehand by a bloke (i.e., me), and possibly even resent the hearkening as a thing-in-itself, supposing (as I have at least a half-arsed reason to do, knowing as much as I know of Cuthbert's Arsenalophilia) that it is this selfsame stereotypically masculine aspect of Cuthbert's Goonerism, rather than its Gunnerly provenance eo ipso, that lies at the root of her Arsenalophobia.'
'What a fine textbook definition of "mixed signals" this is turning out to be! First you're telling me I need to be more specific, and next you're telling me that if I'm too specific I'll give the game away. '
Fuck me with two-thousand volts of alternating current if she wasn't on to something there! And yet, seeing as how she'd managed to hit the main bull's schphincter of the appropriate course of action only by way of missing the subsidiary one by a mile, I had no choice but to preface my reply with a modest corrective, AFF (inclusive of the first full stop within the next inverted comma-bracketed stretch of text): 'No, in point of fact, the signals I was sending were as unmixable as those of BBC1 and Radio 4: the main shortcoming of the Arsenal-Blackburn reference that I was trying to get at was not its specificity but its antiquity, and I was about to go on to suggest an alternative reference to a no less specific but much more recent match-moment. Still, it seems to me, now that you've made an issue of it, that excessive specificity on its own might serve, in your words, to give the game away. So here--in light of your insight--is what you do. When the next Milliband-bashing occasion arises, you say to Tamsin, "he's behaving just like Thierry Henry did at the Champions Final on 17 May"--no, strike the date (it's too specific), and let it simply read "at the Champions Final".'
[E, scribbling:] '...At the Champions Final . OK, what next?'
'Next: "'...when he started pissing his pants in the presence of Terje Hauge"--no make that simply "in the presence of the referee" (pity, though, that you won't be able to advert to the poetic justice inherent in the idearrof T.H. being bested by a bloke sharing his initials) "over Sammy Eto's supposedly 'offside' goal at a convenient 14 minutes shy of match time..."--no, make that "at a conveniently late moment in the match"...'
'What's this all about, then?' I stroppily queried upon my arrival, from just inside the front doorway, whilst enduring the usual round of Lucy-issuing trouser-cuff chompings.
'What it's all about,' Esmeralda says, whilst prancing up to me, peeling off my jacket and hanging it up on the coat rack, quite in defiance of recent custom, 'is I think I'm finally beginning to make some Arsenalophobic inroads.'
'How so?' I says, through a sceptical, sideways, schlong-eyed squint worthy of a Columbo.
'Well,' she replies, luxuriantly flinging herself on to the couch and motioning me to do likewise (which I do do, albeit in an altogether more wooden, spartan attitude), 'towards the end of the afternoon today I happened to walk in on Tamsin whilst she was in the midst of a phone conversation with this guy by the name of Steven Milliband, vice president of product planning. "Oh, yes Mr Milliband," she was saying when I pitched up, "by Friday at the latest. No, that shouldn't be a problem. Of course I will do, Mr Milliband. Thank you." Then, she rang off and exclaimed to me, in an imploring sort of tone, "That contemptible little shit!" "Which contemptible little shit?" I naturally asked. "Why, Steve Milliband, of course," she said. "He just expects me to drop everything I'm doing, and, at two days' notice, bugger off to fucking East Anglia with a custom-tailored Power Point presentation in tow. Of course, it's absolutely and exclusively typical of him to make such exorbitant demands of a sister division. "Ton Koopman [that's our CEO at the parent company down in Amsterdam] will have me out on the carpet if my prognostications aren't underpinned by a solid foundation of numbers," he wines; as if I should care! Would Susan Acheson [VP of marketing] or Jan Haitink [VP of product production] dare demand anything of the kind of me, at such short notice, regardless of whatever torments Meynheer Koopman might have in store for them? I don't think so: they know their respective places, exalted enough though these may be. But Stevereno, just because he's the golden boy newly arrived from Visitech, whose footsie position he managed to jack up by a few fractions of a point courtesy of his introduction of the oil-absorbent, non-slip nose-guard (which wasn't even his invention, by the way), has somehow got it into his puny little skull that he's above the usual professional courtesies." And here I had the good genius to chime in, "The little brat's a regular Thierry Henry." Whereupon Tamsin fixed me with the most appreciative, and, at the same time, the most searching gaze, and exclaimed, "Why, so he is! But where did you get that from? I'd have hardly expected such an apt comparison from a crypto-Gooner such as yourself." At which point, before I was obliged to elaborate the comparison (as if I could have done!), the phone started ringing again, and Tamsin presently found herself mired in a second bout of conversational rigmarole with Mr Milliband, from which I circumspectly recused myself amid much bowing and scraping.'
'Which moment of rigmarole-cum-self-recusance, I take it, marks the end of your most recent interview with Tamsin.'
'Even so.'
'Splendid. Now, I can tell straightaway that what Tamsin was looking for when she asked you "where you'd got that from"--and what she'll be looking for tomorrow, assuming another Milliband-bashing moment arises during the course thereof--'
'Oh, I'm sure it will do. This Milliband bloke's her bête noir, and now that he's got her by the presentational short hairs, I can't imagine she'll manage to--'
'--Good. You've told me more than enough, darling. As I was saying, what she's going to be looking for is a match-specific citation.'
'You mean a reference to some particular moment in some particular match when M. Henry behaved in this characteristically puerile manner?'
'That's right.'
'Ugh! Just the level of pedipilular nitty-grittyism I was hoping I could avoid altogether. After all, I'm totally at sea when it comes to that sort of thing, seeing as how I haven't seen a match--apart from that World Cup one back at Roger and Susan's--for going on ten years.'
'Pshaw, what arrant self-derogating nonsense! Remember Wimbledon! It's just like riding a bike: it'll all come back to you when you're back on the pitch; you'll see. In any case, if we script and choreograph this properly, any such nitty-gritty-istic lapses on your part won't ever come to light. But before we can even move on to the scripting and the choreographing, we need a commensurately exemplary moment in the annals of Gunnerism to script and choreograph. Now, my personal favourite is this T. H. kvetchvest in the final seconds of an Arsenal-Blackburn match dating from way back in '02. It's perfectly tailored to Tamsin's present situation in so many respects, not the least respectable of which being the match's inter-league setting.'
'How so?'
'Well, because, assuming this Visitech company that Mr Milliband hails from occupies a slightly higher position on the corporate totem pole than the one occupied by Occuvision--correct me if I'm wrong, but I did read as much between the lines of your conversational recap--'
'--Yes: you read as much aright. Go on.'
'Why, then, Tamsin'll be cast by implication in the role of the driver of the plucky little Championship-side of a steam engine (i.e., Blackburn/Occuvision) who managed to overtake the pompous Premiership state-of-the-art bullet-train (i.e., Arsenal/Visitiech).'
'Sounds fucking brilliant!' she says, whilst dashing over to the dining-room table to grab her scribbling block and biro (in case I forgot to mention it, we were sitting on the front room couch, just like last time round). The butcher's dizaine seconds comprised by her round trip, however, are enough to give me second thoughts as to the aptness of this admittedly fucking brilliant similitudinal vehicle to the present scheme, which 2ndTs are ultimately vocalised as follows:
'On second thought, I'm not so sure this particular example is best suited to our purposes, admittedly fucking brilliant though it is.'
'And why not?'
'Well, because--and here, at the risk of coming off like a 1970s-style male chauvinist pig, I'm going to have to draw on a feminine stereotype (but what choice do I have knowing as little as I do about the specifically Tamsinian Arsenalophobic habitus?)--stereotypically your female football fans don't really go in for the exhaustive hoarding of eldritch archival club lore, which savours rather too gamily of masculine anoraksim in their nostrils. In the fancy of one of these amazons, the mere mention of a phrase like "back in '02" is likely to conjure up the horrifying spectre of an interior-design-blighting mural collage of posters, autographed photos, ticket stubs, match programmes, drug-test results and the like. No, your stereotypical female pedipilulophile likes to travel light, and to keep her frame of reference squarely focussed on the old Haitch and Enn. Such that if you start hearkening back to a five-year-old match in Tamsin's presence, she'll in all not-unlikelihood suss that you've been briefed beforehand by a bloke (i.e., me), and possibly even resent the hearkening as a thing-in-itself, supposing (as I have at least a half-arsed reason to do, knowing as much as I know of Cuthbert's Arsenalophilia) that it is this selfsame stereotypically masculine aspect of Cuthbert's Goonerism, rather than its Gunnerly provenance eo ipso, that lies at the root of her Arsenalophobia.'
'What a fine textbook definition of "mixed signals" this is turning out to be! First you're telling me I need to be more specific, and next you're telling me that if I'm too specific I'll give the game away. '
Fuck me with two-thousand volts of alternating current if she wasn't on to something there! And yet, seeing as how she'd managed to hit the main bull's schphincter of the appropriate course of action only by way of missing the subsidiary one by a mile, I had no choice but to preface my reply with a modest corrective, AFF (inclusive of the first full stop within the next inverted comma-bracketed stretch of text): 'No, in point of fact, the signals I was sending were as unmixable as those of BBC1 and Radio 4: the main shortcoming of the Arsenal-Blackburn reference that I was trying to get at was not its specificity but its antiquity, and I was about to go on to suggest an alternative reference to a no less specific but much more recent match-moment. Still, it seems to me, now that you've made an issue of it, that excessive specificity on its own might serve, in your words, to give the game away. So here--in light of your insight--is what you do. When the next Milliband-bashing occasion arises, you say to Tamsin, "he's behaving just like Thierry Henry did at the Champions Final on 17 May"--no, strike the date (it's too specific), and let it simply read "at the Champions Final".'
[E, scribbling:] '...At the Champions Final . OK, what next?'
'Next: "'...when he started pissing his pants in the presence of Terje Hauge"--no make that simply "in the presence of the referee" (pity, though, that you won't be able to advert to the poetic justice inherent in the idearrof T.H. being bested by a bloke sharing his initials) "over Sammy Eto's supposedly 'offside' goal at a convenient 14 minutes shy of match time..."--no, make that "at a conveniently late moment in the match"...'
*
I could tell the instant I answered the blower at 7 pm next day that things had not gone well back at Occuvision, and accordingly hunkered down for another spell of enforced celibacy, this one being (seeing as how, Occuvisually speaking, I'd cast my last saving throw the night before) to all appearances prospectively permanent.
'Oh, Nigel, dearest,' Esmeralda commenced on the other end, 'I fucked up. I royally fucked up.'
'Oh, Nigel, dearest,' Esmeralda commenced on the other end, 'I fucked up. I royally fucked up.'
'Oh really?' I said, trying to sound concerned, whilst fretfully scouring my desk-drawers in search of that perennial bachelorly cooter-mint, the so-called Little Black Book (a decided misnomer on both adjectival counts in my case, as my LBB happens to be both palm-Bible-sized and bound in a particularly deliciously U hue of well-scuffed, off-orange shagreen). 'Howjermean?'
'Well, predictably enough, Tamsin did make mention again of Steve Milliband, and I dutifully sprang into action with my Champions League final reference, as per your instructions.'
'Oh, yeah?' I absently replied, momentarily distracted as I was by the apparition of the very volume-let I was seeking; then, recollecting where I was and to whom I was speaking, I added, 'I mean, there's a good girl. So how did she react?'
'Quite promisingly at first. I mean, I got as far as mentioning Thierry Henry's behaviour at that particular match; whereupon she began to smile encouragingly, just as she'd done the last time round, and then...?'
'And then...?'
'...And then, well, you see, as vague as your account of the match was, it did include a specific mention of a specific name...you know, the name of that player from Barcelona...'
'...Sammy Eto.'
'That's right. And so, you see, out of fear that I'd forget the name--which I did do--I'd biro'd it down on my inner wrist, taking care, mind you, to wear a long-sleeved jumper today so as to keep it concealed until I needed have recourse to it--'
'--And then Tamsin caught you having recourse to it.'
‘Yeah, of course. Mind you: at first she put a totally different spin on the consultation, cos you see, I’d written the name down in red ink; so when she caught me peering down at a bare wrist criss-crossed with red lines, her first thought, naturally, was that I’d tried to off meself for some reason or other; and so she naturally came rushing to me crying out, “Merle! What have you done?” and seizing hold of the adjoining hand, she started going on about how she understood that this was a stressful time for all of us, what with this and that and the other, and yet, of course (she said) that was no reason to resort to such extremes of desperation, etc.; all the while, of course, peering down at the supposed wound, which, of course she eventually managed to construe as the upside-down sequence of capitals that it in fact was, and to decode the name denoted thereby; whereupon she fetched me a right hefty slap against my right cheek, exclaiming, “I should have known! You’ve been briefed. Crypto-Gooner, avoid my sight.” What could I say? I'd been caught literally red-handed--'
Meanwhile, I had begun and completed my thumb-actuated survey of the contents of the old BB, and been dismayed--albeit hardly surprised--to discover that the overwhelming majority of numbers contained therein were prefixed by East Anglian dialling codes, that the underwhelming Londinian minority appertained almost exclusively to various takeaway establishments, and that the sole, straggling, female-hailing exception to either category was comprised by the diggits of that fat old doxy Maggie Elms, recorded not in the midst of our most recent disastrous encounter at the Ape (which was, in any case, of practically prehistoric provenance), but some two years' previous, during my Bush House chippying days. Clearly the whole BB-unearthing enterprise had been an exercise not so much in wishful as in wistful thinking.
'Well, predictably enough, Tamsin did make mention again of Steve Milliband, and I dutifully sprang into action with my Champions League final reference, as per your instructions.'
'Oh, yeah?' I absently replied, momentarily distracted as I was by the apparition of the very volume-let I was seeking; then, recollecting where I was and to whom I was speaking, I added, 'I mean, there's a good girl. So how did she react?'
'Quite promisingly at first. I mean, I got as far as mentioning Thierry Henry's behaviour at that particular match; whereupon she began to smile encouragingly, just as she'd done the last time round, and then...?'
'And then...?'
'...And then, well, you see, as vague as your account of the match was, it did include a specific mention of a specific name...you know, the name of that player from Barcelona...'
'...Sammy Eto.'
'That's right. And so, you see, out of fear that I'd forget the name--which I did do--I'd biro'd it down on my inner wrist, taking care, mind you, to wear a long-sleeved jumper today so as to keep it concealed until I needed have recourse to it--'
'--And then Tamsin caught you having recourse to it.'
‘Yeah, of course. Mind you: at first she put a totally different spin on the consultation, cos you see, I’d written the name down in red ink; so when she caught me peering down at a bare wrist criss-crossed with red lines, her first thought, naturally, was that I’d tried to off meself for some reason or other; and so she naturally came rushing to me crying out, “Merle! What have you done?” and seizing hold of the adjoining hand, she started going on about how she understood that this was a stressful time for all of us, what with this and that and the other, and yet, of course (she said) that was no reason to resort to such extremes of desperation, etc.; all the while, of course, peering down at the supposed wound, which, of course she eventually managed to construe as the upside-down sequence of capitals that it in fact was, and to decode the name denoted thereby; whereupon she fetched me a right hefty slap against my right cheek, exclaiming, “I should have known! You’ve been briefed. Crypto-Gooner, avoid my sight.” What could I say? I'd been caught literally red-handed--'
Meanwhile, I had begun and completed my thumb-actuated survey of the contents of the old BB, and been dismayed--albeit hardly surprised--to discover that the overwhelming majority of numbers contained therein were prefixed by East Anglian dialling codes, that the underwhelming Londinian minority appertained almost exclusively to various takeaway establishments, and that the sole, straggling, female-hailing exception to either category was comprised by the diggits of that fat old doxy Maggie Elms, recorded not in the midst of our most recent disastrous encounter at the Ape (which was, in any case, of practically prehistoric provenance), but some two years' previous, during my Bush House chippying days. Clearly the whole BB-unearthing enterprise had been an exercise not so much in wishful as in wistful thinking.
'--Well, in fact, literally red-wristed --'
'--Oh, please do spare me your anorakish hair-splitting for once, Nigel. After all, grim and meagre as it is, it's the only scrap of consolation I've managed to salvage from this whole fracas--the thought of having been caught literally red-handed.'
'Yes, yes, yes, of course, and far be it from me to wish to rob you of it: anorakish reservations aside, it's a real gem worthy of permanent display in your jeweller's showroom of anecdotage.'
'A jewel which I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities to retail in the coming weeks and months--i.e., to my queue-mates down at the unemployment office.'
'Oh, please do spare me your perverse-shaggish hand-wringing for once, Esmeralda. After all--well, in fact, for all I know not after all after all, in light of the fact that you haven't brought me fully up-to-date yet--but, anyway, assuming that Tamsin's next move after fetching you a blow across the chops wasn't to give a bell to security requesting your immejiate removal from the premises--'
'--No, I assume not--not that I really have any way of knowing one way or the other, seeing as how I immejiately fled the room and haven't seen Tamsin since--'
'--a goodly portion of that since being comprised, presumably, by the remainder of the work day; during which you were, again presumably, suffered, by the confederated inertia of the powers that be, to cower unmolested in your cubicle.'
[E, through a receiver-overdriving sigh:] 'Yes.'
'From all of which I conclude--and please correct me if I'm adverting to an overly-anorakish definition of any salient term of the following--that for the moment your job at Occuvision remains nominally secure.'
'Yes. And I suppose you're now going to argue that I have nothing to worry about; that, Tamsin's repugnance to my alleged Crypto-Goonerism notwithstanding, unless and until she can come up with a solid professional case for my being fired, it'll be smooth sailing for me at Occuvision from here on out.'
'Whoa, Nelly! I was about to argue nothing of the kind. TBS, I imagine she'd already had such an allegedly solid professional case collated and three-ring-bound for ready reference, after the fashion of any boss worth his or her pound-of-flesh-hungry salt, long before she learnt of your alleged Crypto-Goonerism; and I can but assume that she's already faxed a few of the most incriminating pages therefrom to the axemen up at HR by now. Even so, it'll surely take at least a week or two for the axe to be properly whetted and primed for the dismissive death-blow, which--if you'll do me the favour of stomaching this noxious metaphoric schlongtail--gives us more than enough time to reconfigure our side and plot a new match-plan.'
'Now, here you're being the perverse shag. No--strike that: it goes beyond being perverse--you've crossed over into the realm of sheer barmyness! What side--what match-plan--can you possibly be thinking of? Didn't I make it clear enough earlier? She knows you're behind all of my Arsenalophobic posturing. There's nothing more we can do. We've hit rock bottom.'
'Why, so we have done. But as this bloke name of Tim Bottoms said at our most recent brown-bag luncheon--'
[E, with evident envy bordering on outright cuntish malice] '--Oh, I see, that's the secret of your success: you attend the brown-bag luncheons.'
'No: it's just that I gather we've a different corporate culture to yours--you lot are like the Russians under Krushchev, whereas (as you'll see) we're more like the Chinese under Mao--but anyway, as Tim said, apropos, incidentally, of our lowest-ever ebb in enema revenues, "The Chinese have a proverb: "Lock bottom" is simpry anothel wold fol "loof of mighty pagoda".'
'Yeah, and so? The relevance of this fortune-cookie proverb to the price of the tea I'll be serving up to Tamsin for the fag-end duration of my Occuvisual career rather escapes me, I'm afraid.'
'As well it might escape anyone who, unlike meself, has not already plunged through the tradesman's trap-door of the aforesaid roof, nor beheld the majestic vaulting interior of the pagoda in all of its luminescent oriental splendour.'
'Oh, for Chrissake! You speak liddres, glasshoppel. What fucking pagoda? What fucking splendour?'
'Why, the splendour of the magnificent pagoda of genuine Arsenalophobia, darling.'
'Oh, Christ!' she exclaimed [and here I fancied I heard an actual gasp on the other end (not that it's particularly easy to distinguish a gasp from a belch over a phone line)], 'Surely you don't mean--'
'--I'm afraid I mean just that, dearest: you are among us, and you must become one of us.'
'Why, that's...that's horrible!' she rejoined via a choked-up delivery worthy of a Doctor Who
heroine about to be cannibalised into cybernetic spare parts (as she surely could not have helped doing, given that I myself had just unthinkingly cannibalised verbatim a speech delivered by the Cyber Controller in the 1967 classic Troughton serial Tomb of the Cybermen [they constitute a kind of collective race memory for us Brits, dontcherknow, these classic Who scripts]).
'To the contrary, it's wonderful--or, rather, it will be. You know, Esmeralda, at this moment I really do feel like one of those so-called inspirational fourth-form English masters--like Mr Chips, say, or that bloke played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets' Society--standing at the threshold of his own classroom on the first day of term and nervously thumbing his tweed lapels for sheer maniacal envy of those young charges of his, in whose bosoms he is about to kindle the first flame of discovery of the genius of Shakespeare or Whitman. Cos you see, when you come down to it, just as all of humanity can pretty much be divided into those who adore the Bard and old Walt and those who have yet to read either of them, so they can in like fashion be divided into those who loathe Arsenal and those who have yet to see the Gunners in action on the pitch.'
'But surely,' says Esmeralda, recovering her pluck amidst much residual sniffling, 'there's a third category?'
'A third category?' I says, whilst quite failing to catch the nub of her gist, and panickedly wondering whether I've, in the Stateside idiom, covered all my bases.
'Yeah: that surely not-demographically-insubstantial category comprised by genuine Arsenal fans.'
'Oh, that lot,' I concede, through a great belly-laugh of surprise and relief. 'Well, they're hardly human are they?'
'If you say so. But look: even supposing your comparison of Arsenal-hating to Shakespeare-and-Whitman-loving holds up, it nonetheless must remain the case that just as there are hundreds if not thousands of millions of people who manage to live long and happy lives without encountering a single foot of Shakespeare or Whitman along the way, there exists a correspondingly massive population of happy-go-lucky total Gunnerly ignoramuses, among whom I fully intend to dwell for the duration of my natural. And anyway, as I seem to have to keep reminding you, this isn't about my potential aversion or lack thereto to a specific football club; it's about the peculiar significance that football as a whole has for me, its significance as a token of a particular prepubescent phase of my life that I've got, at all costs, for my sanity's sake, to keep cordoned off from the present. To plunge back into the whole weekend-consuming match-viewing lifestyle now, at this point in my life, would be as creepily unsettling as to devote every hour of my spare time to marathon screenings of 15-year-old Blue Peter episodes. But far be it from me to nip your promising career as an Aresanalophobic pedagogue in the bud: I'm sure with your charismatic enthusiasm you'd have little trouble persuading our borough community centre or local YMCA to offer a course in Arsenalophobia to some of our more impressionable hobbledehoys--you know, by way of getting them off the streets and back indoors and in front of the telly where they belong.'
'Erm, well, you must do what you feel is right, of course. In fact, I can't help standing agape in face of your sheer slack-lower-lipp'd pluck, your courage in the face of adversity, your cleavage to the old gun-holsters now that the going's got definitively tough, &c. Besides, far be it from me to nip in the bud your promising career as a job centre-queue stand-up raconteur--'
'--Late blow, Nigel, late blow--'
'--Not atoll, dearie, not atoll: I'm simply telling it like it is, straight-up on the rocks and sans chasseurs. But rest assured, I can play good cop as expertly as bad in the service of my cause. Picture yourself, if you will, a good month or two hence, sitting at your desk of the wee small minutes of a business morning, bright-okied and bushy-tailed, and furiously scanning the results pages of the BBC sport site, according to your matutinal wont, when Tamsin comes staggering in, a half an hour late, frazzle-coiffured, self-evidently knackered and 'govered to the gills, and poking her protuberant schnozz into your bidness en route to her office according to her Em-Double-ewe. "Good morning, Merle," she'll say, and then add, "What's that you're reading?, assuming the answer to consist in an allusion to whatever work-irrelevant bit of news-screedage you do in fact habitually and casually browse of the wee small minutes of a business morning nowadays--'
'--That'd be the Fortean Times--'
'--Ah, yes, of course: that veritable institutionalised apotheosis of work-irrelevancy, the venerable non-financial FT. But, as I said, you are, in fact, in the present prospective-world scenario, not so much casually browsing as furiously scanning the results pages of the BBC, specifically that page thereof appertaining to the Arsenal FC; scanning it, in fact, so furiously, that in framing your reply you can hardly be arsed to switch over to the deferential forelock-touching mode of address required of a professional subordinate. Instead, you snap back at her over your shoulder, in an attitude of well-nigh autistic heedlessness that simply cannot be faked by any mere pseudo-Arsenalophobe or potential crypto-Gooner, "Can you believe what that cunt Fàbregas got away with last night? Two goals and one assist in the teeth of initial referee'al opposition?" Whereupon, she immejiately recoils, with hands crossed horizontally, palm-outwards, in front of her okies, like some silent-movie vampire untowardly impaled in the gut by a shaft of sunlight, and feebly stammers out "I'm s-s-s-so s-s-s-orry Merle, I'm afraid I m-m-m-m-missed last night's m-m-m-m-match," and staggers backwards into the relative sanctuary of her office, there to lick her poseurly Arsenalophobic wounds for the duration of the workday. Hence, inductively and conclusively I submit to you, darling, the following question: Can you conceive a more apt anecdotal illustration of the phrase "cat-bird seat" than that furnished by the afore-narrated scenario?'
'--Oh, please do spare me your anorakish hair-splitting for once, Nigel. After all, grim and meagre as it is, it's the only scrap of consolation I've managed to salvage from this whole fracas--the thought of having been caught literally red-handed.'
'Yes, yes, yes, of course, and far be it from me to wish to rob you of it: anorakish reservations aside, it's a real gem worthy of permanent display in your jeweller's showroom of anecdotage.'
'A jewel which I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities to retail in the coming weeks and months--i.e., to my queue-mates down at the unemployment office.'
'Oh, please do spare me your perverse-shaggish hand-wringing for once, Esmeralda. After all--well, in fact, for all I know not after all after all, in light of the fact that you haven't brought me fully up-to-date yet--but, anyway, assuming that Tamsin's next move after fetching you a blow across the chops wasn't to give a bell to security requesting your immejiate removal from the premises--'
'--No, I assume not--not that I really have any way of knowing one way or the other, seeing as how I immejiately fled the room and haven't seen Tamsin since--'
'--a goodly portion of that since being comprised, presumably, by the remainder of the work day; during which you were, again presumably, suffered, by the confederated inertia of the powers that be, to cower unmolested in your cubicle.'
[E, through a receiver-overdriving sigh:] 'Yes.'
'From all of which I conclude--and please correct me if I'm adverting to an overly-anorakish definition of any salient term of the following--that for the moment your job at Occuvision remains nominally secure.'
'Yes. And I suppose you're now going to argue that I have nothing to worry about; that, Tamsin's repugnance to my alleged Crypto-Goonerism notwithstanding, unless and until she can come up with a solid professional case for my being fired, it'll be smooth sailing for me at Occuvision from here on out.'
'Whoa, Nelly! I was about to argue nothing of the kind. TBS, I imagine she'd already had such an allegedly solid professional case collated and three-ring-bound for ready reference, after the fashion of any boss worth his or her pound-of-flesh-hungry salt, long before she learnt of your alleged Crypto-Goonerism; and I can but assume that she's already faxed a few of the most incriminating pages therefrom to the axemen up at HR by now. Even so, it'll surely take at least a week or two for the axe to be properly whetted and primed for the dismissive death-blow, which--if you'll do me the favour of stomaching this noxious metaphoric schlongtail--gives us more than enough time to reconfigure our side and plot a new match-plan.'
'Now, here you're being the perverse shag. No--strike that: it goes beyond being perverse--you've crossed over into the realm of sheer barmyness! What side--what match-plan--can you possibly be thinking of? Didn't I make it clear enough earlier? She knows you're behind all of my Arsenalophobic posturing. There's nothing more we can do. We've hit rock bottom.'
'Why, so we have done. But as this bloke name of Tim Bottoms said at our most recent brown-bag luncheon--'
[E, with evident envy bordering on outright cuntish malice] '--Oh, I see, that's the secret of your success: you attend the brown-bag luncheons.'
'No: it's just that I gather we've a different corporate culture to yours--you lot are like the Russians under Krushchev, whereas (as you'll see) we're more like the Chinese under Mao--but anyway, as Tim said, apropos, incidentally, of our lowest-ever ebb in enema revenues, "The Chinese have a proverb: "Lock bottom" is simpry anothel wold fol "loof of mighty pagoda".'
'Yeah, and so? The relevance of this fortune-cookie proverb to the price of the tea I'll be serving up to Tamsin for the fag-end duration of my Occuvisual career rather escapes me, I'm afraid.'
'As well it might escape anyone who, unlike meself, has not already plunged through the tradesman's trap-door of the aforesaid roof, nor beheld the majestic vaulting interior of the pagoda in all of its luminescent oriental splendour.'
'Oh, for Chrissake! You speak liddres, glasshoppel. What fucking pagoda? What fucking splendour?'
'Why, the splendour of the magnificent pagoda of genuine Arsenalophobia, darling.'
'Oh, Christ!' she exclaimed [and here I fancied I heard an actual gasp on the other end (not that it's particularly easy to distinguish a gasp from a belch over a phone line)], 'Surely you don't mean--'
'--I'm afraid I mean just that, dearest: you are among us, and you must become one of us.'
'Why, that's...that's horrible!' she rejoined via a choked-up delivery worthy of a Doctor Who
heroine about to be cannibalised into cybernetic spare parts (as she surely could not have helped doing, given that I myself had just unthinkingly cannibalised verbatim a speech delivered by the Cyber Controller in the 1967 classic Troughton serial Tomb of the Cybermen [they constitute a kind of collective race memory for us Brits, dontcherknow, these classic Who scripts]).
'To the contrary, it's wonderful--or, rather, it will be. You know, Esmeralda, at this moment I really do feel like one of those so-called inspirational fourth-form English masters--like Mr Chips, say, or that bloke played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets' Society--standing at the threshold of his own classroom on the first day of term and nervously thumbing his tweed lapels for sheer maniacal envy of those young charges of his, in whose bosoms he is about to kindle the first flame of discovery of the genius of Shakespeare or Whitman. Cos you see, when you come down to it, just as all of humanity can pretty much be divided into those who adore the Bard and old Walt and those who have yet to read either of them, so they can in like fashion be divided into those who loathe Arsenal and those who have yet to see the Gunners in action on the pitch.'
'But surely,' says Esmeralda, recovering her pluck amidst much residual sniffling, 'there's a third category?'
'A third category?' I says, whilst quite failing to catch the nub of her gist, and panickedly wondering whether I've, in the Stateside idiom, covered all my bases.
'Yeah: that surely not-demographically-insubstantial category comprised by genuine Arsenal fans.'
'Oh, that lot,' I concede, through a great belly-laugh of surprise and relief. 'Well, they're hardly human are they?'
'If you say so. But look: even supposing your comparison of Arsenal-hating to Shakespeare-and-Whitman-loving holds up, it nonetheless must remain the case that just as there are hundreds if not thousands of millions of people who manage to live long and happy lives without encountering a single foot of Shakespeare or Whitman along the way, there exists a correspondingly massive population of happy-go-lucky total Gunnerly ignoramuses, among whom I fully intend to dwell for the duration of my natural. And anyway, as I seem to have to keep reminding you, this isn't about my potential aversion or lack thereto to a specific football club; it's about the peculiar significance that football as a whole has for me, its significance as a token of a particular prepubescent phase of my life that I've got, at all costs, for my sanity's sake, to keep cordoned off from the present. To plunge back into the whole weekend-consuming match-viewing lifestyle now, at this point in my life, would be as creepily unsettling as to devote every hour of my spare time to marathon screenings of 15-year-old Blue Peter episodes. But far be it from me to nip your promising career as an Aresanalophobic pedagogue in the bud: I'm sure with your charismatic enthusiasm you'd have little trouble persuading our borough community centre or local YMCA to offer a course in Arsenalophobia to some of our more impressionable hobbledehoys--you know, by way of getting them off the streets and back indoors and in front of the telly where they belong.'
'Erm, well, you must do what you feel is right, of course. In fact, I can't help standing agape in face of your sheer slack-lower-lipp'd pluck, your courage in the face of adversity, your cleavage to the old gun-holsters now that the going's got definitively tough, &c. Besides, far be it from me to nip in the bud your promising career as a job centre-queue stand-up raconteur--'
'--Late blow, Nigel, late blow--'
'--Not atoll, dearie, not atoll: I'm simply telling it like it is, straight-up on the rocks and sans chasseurs. But rest assured, I can play good cop as expertly as bad in the service of my cause. Picture yourself, if you will, a good month or two hence, sitting at your desk of the wee small minutes of a business morning, bright-okied and bushy-tailed, and furiously scanning the results pages of the BBC sport site, according to your matutinal wont, when Tamsin comes staggering in, a half an hour late, frazzle-coiffured, self-evidently knackered and 'govered to the gills, and poking her protuberant schnozz into your bidness en route to her office according to her Em-Double-ewe. "Good morning, Merle," she'll say, and then add, "What's that you're reading?, assuming the answer to consist in an allusion to whatever work-irrelevant bit of news-screedage you do in fact habitually and casually browse of the wee small minutes of a business morning nowadays--'
'--That'd be the Fortean Times--'
'--Ah, yes, of course: that veritable institutionalised apotheosis of work-irrelevancy, the venerable non-financial FT. But, as I said, you are, in fact, in the present prospective-world scenario, not so much casually browsing as furiously scanning the results pages of the BBC, specifically that page thereof appertaining to the Arsenal FC; scanning it, in fact, so furiously, that in framing your reply you can hardly be arsed to switch over to the deferential forelock-touching mode of address required of a professional subordinate. Instead, you snap back at her over your shoulder, in an attitude of well-nigh autistic heedlessness that simply cannot be faked by any mere pseudo-Arsenalophobe or potential crypto-Gooner, "Can you believe what that cunt Fàbregas got away with last night? Two goals and one assist in the teeth of initial referee'al opposition?" Whereupon, she immejiately recoils, with hands crossed horizontally, palm-outwards, in front of her okies, like some silent-movie vampire untowardly impaled in the gut by a shaft of sunlight, and feebly stammers out "I'm s-s-s-so s-s-s-orry Merle, I'm afraid I m-m-m-m-missed last night's m-m-m-m-match," and staggers backwards into the relative sanctuary of her office, there to lick her poseurly Arsenalophobic wounds for the duration of the workday. Hence, inductively and conclusively I submit to you, darling, the following question: Can you conceive a more apt anecdotal illustration of the phrase "cat-bird seat" than that furnished by the afore-narrated scenario?'
[E, audibly a-sighing and a-sniffling:] 'No.'
'Look, the first round of friendlies is starting up in a coupla days. That'll give you plenty of time to dip your toe in the water--and keep it there, if you like--whilst you make up your mind whether this is really for you. Heck, if you like, by way of alleviating the pressure even further, I can even program a few non-Arsenal matches into our pre-season syllabus--'
'--For the second time in the last half-hour, Nigel: this is not about Arsenal-hating--'
'--it's about football. Yes, I know; no need to remind me. But insofar as "football" for you equals "aggressive football fandom-stroke-antifandom" equals "full-grown blokes screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs"--and in light of your accounts of your Wimbledonian experiences with your old man, I can't help thinking that's very far indeed--you will, to a corresponding degree, find the trauma of your Arsenalophobic initiation alleviated by this friendly, and occasionally non-Gunnerly, context. For my part--and, TBF, whose other part matters as long as we're spectating in the privacy of our own front rooms rather than in the publicity of some smokey pub?--I can testify that I've never uttered an imprecation stronger than "Footfuck thyself with thine offending hoof, Henry!" during a pre-season Gunners' match; and that during non-Arsenal friendlies I'm as habitually, dispassionately well-behaved as a robotic kitten. So, what do you say?'
'Oh, all right. I suppose I might as well give it a go.
'Yeehaw!'
'--Provided, firstly, that not merely the first, but the initial full weekend of these friendly-viewing sessions is comprised by non-Arsenal-involving matches.'
'Well, that shouldn't be too hard to arrange.'
'I don't care how hard it is to arrange: if the broadcasting schedule won't cooperate, then find another source, be it a 200-quid video of a 20-year-old junior-league match on E-bay. And, secondly, provided you agree to take full responsibility for any regressive traumatic symptoms that might manifest themselves on my end along the way.'
'Well, of course I shall do. Never fear: in the person of me, your ever-patient tutor, you'll always have at your disposal a shoulder to cry on, an ear to scream baby-talk curses into, a face to slam a door into, Christ! even the occasional fatherly 50 p outlay on candyfloss if it should come to that--'
'--I'm not just talking here of short-term emotional support, Nigel. I'm talking also of short-term and potentially long-term financial support [as if my lately-pledged 50 p minimum didn't count as such!], in compensation for any missed workdays (I'm at the end of my sick-leave balance, you see, on account of this surreptitious five-day trip to Mallorca I took with Manisha last March), NHS-allotment-exceeding therapy hours, and the like.'
My, but aren't you laying it on a bit thick, to the chune of a full jar's-worth of your beloved Marmite! I was tempted to interject here, but I swallowed me old pride and held me equally-old piss, in laconically retrojecting the single disyllable, Agreed.
And the rest, as they say (or fucking well ought to say), is another glorious chapter in the annals of Arsenalophobic history. As of the date of this posting, Esmeralda's and YFCT's hearts beat as a single (albeit regrettably ruby-hued) organic unit--Christ! If anything, her ventricular half of the organ has been doing the lion-heart's share of the pumping of late. I would have you know, DGR, that just the other night, in the midst of a dream centring on the chicken-tikka pizza I grudgingly planned to share with her the following evening, I was rudely awakened by an Esmeraldan finger-prod, prompted by her insomniac musings on the question of--get this!--my pet question of whether the alphabetical overlap between Arséne Wenger's Christian name and the name of the side in his custody was sheer coincidence or the manifestation of some diabolical Arsenalophilic cosmic anti-entelechy. In short, I can but hope that it be merely a matter of time--i.e., the time requisite to our smoothing over our admittedly nettlesomely divergent attitudes to that ghastly viscosity answering to the proprietary name of M*****e--until these pseudo-pages are intermittently blackened by the typographical equivalent of the pitter-patter of tiny feet, accompanied, naturally, by such winsome, halting first baby-vocables as Fuck Thiewwy Ennui! And from there, of course, it'll be on to a full wardrobe of toddler football togs--duly patterned, according to exacting North-London-Arsenal-Basherly specifications, after the colours of the current roster of Gunner-besting clubs.................................................................................................................................................................[....]
'Whence issues this seemingly interminable ellipsis, MDF?'
'Whence? Why, from the sight of the droopy, comb-and-wax-neglected corners of your here-2-4 unfailingly impeccably twirled and upturned moustache, of course. Is something eating at you?'
'Well, truth be told, yes.'
'Say on.'
'Well, the title of the present post is, after all, "The Education of Esmeralda Houghington: Part Two."'
'Natur-like. What of it?'
'Why, then: assuming that the goal of that eponymous Education was Esmeralda's initiation into the true path or inner sanctum of Arsenalophobia...'
'...Even so, TBS, even so.'
'...well, confound it, then! Aren't you rather depriving us--or, more namely, me--of the main morsel of dramatic interest we've been craving all along, in (your) simply J-clothing over the whole transformation of this hard-line pedipiluphobe (i.e. Esmeralda) into a born-again pedipilulophilic Arsenalophobe?'
'Hardly.'
'Hardly, you have the confounded cheek to protest: Hardly? You who have essentially, thus far, provided me with the equivalent of a two-volume Divine Comedy gutted of everything save the first canto of the Inferno and the last twenty lines of the Paradiso?'
'I beg to differ, DGR. It seems to me that what I've done is given you the unabridged and unbowdlerised whole of the one really innersting book of the DC, the Inferno, and winnowed down the remaining two utterly boring ones to their respective one-sentences essences, viz. It took a whole lot of turrryin' to get up that hill and They all lived happily ever after up yonder in paradise. BYM, DGR: the whole ordeal of simply bringing Esmeralda round to submit to that inaugural match-viewing, as recounted above, cuntstitutes the prime meat of the drama; by comparison with which an equally exhaustive account of the ensuing tutorial itself would be about as engaging as a half-speed slow-motion video of the drying-out of the freshly-painted Emirates stadium, especially in your pedipilular-indifferent okies.'
'Doubtless it would be. But damn and blast it all!: at bum what's in point here is not the satisfaction of my dramaturgical curiosity, but, rather the avoidance of an insult to my readerly intelligence. Surely, you could be suffered to cull, out of the mass of Esmeraldan match-viewing footage, a few exemplary thingummies--Pardon me, but what's the proper televisual term for them...?'
'...Highlights?'
'...Thenkyaw, highlights, by way of proving to me that this lately-attested transmogrification of ethos is well-founded.'
'Well, I'll see what I can do, come the next post.'
[You, DGR, livid with well-nigh apoplectic rage:] 'Come the next post?'
'Yeah, through the judicious use of flashbacks and suchlike cinematic artifices. In the meantime, as I'm feeling a bit sleepy and have--say what you will otherwise--long since discharged the letter of my obligation to bring this post up to date with the current Ruggerian SOA, I bid you, DGR, a fond and fair Good Night, by way of my usual Soupy-Twistian formula, viz.:'
FINIS POSTIS
posted by Rugby McGyver | 5:02 am
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