The Education of Rugby McGyver

'It's just like chocolate,' says the good doctor, withdrawing an embrowned, latex-swathed middle diggit from me girl's poo-chute.

'Ah, yes,' I concur with a would-be-sage nod, on the basis of a hunch elicited by the doc's subsequent course of action, viz: his stepping from the examination table over to a nearby patch of laboratory counterage, taking up a wee pane o' glass from an open case situated thereupon, scraping his stink-finger on to the selfsame WPoG and (having meanwhile removed his gloves) affixing the latter on to the clipboard of some bifocular microscope-like gizmo, 'same spectroscopic profile.'

'Yes,' the doc avers whilst postponing his peerage into the eyepieces just long enough to cut me a cunt-okied over-the-shoulder look underscoring the self-evidently ironic import of his assent (a look whose cutting coincides so precisely with a sidewise kick against me right ankle that I'd assume the two gestures issued from a single spatially-transcendent organism, did I not know better), 'broadly speaking: but I am in fact alluding to the virtually identical metabolic profiles of the two substances vis-a-vis the canine digestive tract. For, you see, just as dogs are entirely lacking in the crucial enzymes that allow us humans to process the intake of a bar of chocolate, they are likewise utterly destitute of the parallel set of enzymes that allow us to ingest, metabolise and ultimately excrete the residue of a jar of marmite. In short, marmite and chocolate alike are essentially as poisonous to dogs as arsenic and cyanide are to us.'

'But how can that be?' Esmeralda queries, with all the mingled impetuosity and anxiety of one who feels herself personally affronted by another who unhappily embodies the twin persons of insufferable adversary and impassible judge. 'Marmite is a one-hundred-per-cent pure extract of vegetable tissue; it's as wholesome as mother's milk--'

'--Ah, but you see,' cuts in the doc, with okies still ensconced in the goggles, 'that's just the point: from a dog-belly's point of view it's altogether too pure, too wholesome, for comfort. Dogs, as you must surely know, are thoroughgoing carnivores; hence, all of the nutriment that we derive at first hand, and in the rough, from plants they must derive at second-hand, and in a refined state, from the flesh of other animals. Such that when their wee gentlemanly army of carnophagic enzymes is set upon by a guerilla horde of unreconstructed vegetable yobbos; why, it turns tail and retreats en masse. Yes, it's quite amazing what a finely-tuned mechanism the gastrointestive system of a particular species, or at any rate, order--'


'--Enough with your flowery generalisations, Dr Singh,' I cut in, more, TBF, in a spirit of vengeance against his withering look of old than out of any genuine impatience with his present oration, 'What's the prognosis, as of now, in the case of this particular carnivore?'

'The prognosis,' he says, detaching his okies from the goggles, switching off the lamp of ye olde scope and turning to face the two of us with mitts crossed over his white-lab-coat-swathed schlong, 'is fair to decent. On the basis of my ocular spot-check, I estimate the MPL--that's the marmitic-particular load--of the stool at 300 parts per microgramme, which places your Lacey--'

'--Lucy!' Esmeralda and I snap back at him, in mutually diggit-squeezing unison.

'--Sorry, Lucy--which, as I was saying, places her well to the far side of the benchmark 10-day threshold of mortality.'

'Which means...?'

'...Which means that if you look after her more or less as you would have done (or, rather should have done) before the onset of the present toxic syndrome--namely, by giving her a bowl of dry or tinned dog food plus a half-litre of water plus a full-spectrum vitamin supplement--why then, she's more or less guaranteed (absent, of course, the contingent irruption of some unrelated disorder) to survive the best part of another fortnight.'

'And beyond that...?'

'...And beyond that? Well, if you're really interested in hearing of means to bring her up to the next benchmark threshold--namely the 18-day one, beyond which the chance of survival asymptotically approaches that appertaining to a specimen in full health--mind you, though: speaking for myself, I wouldn't go to all that trouble for the sake of a mere pooch--'

'--Speak for yourself, doc,' I says. 'We're ready for the whole prescriptive 18 yards.'

'Well, OK, you asked for it: to bring your pet level with the 18-day benchmark threshold will necessitate your supplying her, on each and every day of the next nine days, with a litre-and-a-half of water, plus a full pound of the leanest, choicest cuts of cooked beef--I'm talking here, ideally, of filet mignon; serviceably, of minced Delmonico or prime rib; pie-in-the-sky-shamanistically of ground sirloin, whilst ruling out tout court such pathetic pis allers as London broil and ground chuck--plus the administration of a highly costly canine-tailored laxative that I would be all too happy to prescribe to you, should you be ready and willing to take the financial plunge.'

'Why, of course we're ready and willing to take it!' Esmeralda ejaculates.

'Just how deep of a plunge are you talking about?' I query at the exact same instant, paying for my Caledonian circumspection with the reception of yet another sidewise ankle-kick.

'Ah, the sweet dissension of young love!' the Doc exclaims through an insufferably smart-arsed grin. 'Anyway, inasmuch as I perceive that you're at best of half a mind on this score, let me tally for you the prospective capital outlay: the going rate of each pill is ₤2.73. Accordingly, at a minimum dosage rate of five pills per day, and a minimum dosage period of nine days, you may look to spend upwards of...let's see...₤122 on this course of treatment.'

'Blimey!' I feel obliged to ejaculate, in a deliberately audible whisper: '122 quid, all for a mere pooch.'

'She's not a mere pooch,' Esmeralda whines, this time round digging her heel into my right toe, 'she's our child.'

It's now damage-control time. Fortunately, I have enough sobering, accountancy-informed philosophy ready-to-gourdita to realise that whilst this not-unprincely sum of ₤122-and-then-some cannot quite plausibly survive metaphoric trivialisation as the poison icing on the cake, it will hardily survive metaphoric just-estimation as the thinnest of three poisonous cake layers, the other two naturally being comprised, respectively, by the ₤200 already encumbered by the present visit, and the ₤150-minimum to be prospectively encumbered by all the top-shelf beef.

And so I says to Esmeralda, soothingly patting her hand, 'You're quite right, darling. [Then, turning to the doc:] If you'll please to make out the prescription for us, we'll be gratefully on our way.'

And so were, with Lucy in tow, inside of the next 10 minutes. It was only some 20 minutes posterior to those 10, during the car-ride back into town fron the vet's office in Edgeware, that it finally occurred to me that, in the midst of my accountancy-savvy philosophical calculations, I had neglected to include a crucial spreadsheet-column, a column that in good-old-daysean parlance would have been headed LABOUR, and in more up-to-date business lingo, HUMAN RESOURCES. I had neglected, in other words, to take stock of the fact that, as these prescribed laxative pills had to be administered at regular 48-minute intervals (each of which must be exactly counterpoised with a complementary administration of a fifth of the allotted per-diem of beef! Dr Singh had pointedly insisted, whilst scribbling out the prescription), someone would perforce have to be attending Lucy's wee bedisde more or less round the clock. But just so as to forestall every conceivable vehicular mishap as might have been occasioned by copular dissent on this score--for example, my deliberately steering Chris-Walken-style into the front end of the nearest approaching car in the opposite lane--I put off the mooting of the whole bedsitting question till the three of us were safely immobile and encloistered within the confines of Esmeralda's house, by which point I'd handily hit upon the pre-packaged compromise proposal involving the two of us taking alternating leave-days. And as, after the intervening weekend had been factored out of the total, that left us with the evenly-un-splittable balance of seven days, I reflexively-cum-graciously offered up front to take off the larger portion of four if she could see fit to take off the smaller one of three--a thoroughly gormless move on my part, inasmuch as it amounted to an implicit avowal that I could afford to take off that larger portion; from which there was an all too easy transition to the plausibility of the notion of my absenting myself from work for the full business se'ennight. I'm speaking here, of course, in strictly psycho-rhetorical terms; in the terms of bare parliamentary reportage, the exchange that eventuated in my babysitting Lucy for the full duration of her treatment went, from the tendering of my 4/3-leave-apportioning proposal onwards, as follows:

E: 'That's awfully charitable of you, Nigel. And if this were only a week ago--I mean, if all this awfulness had happened a week earlier--why, I'd now happily be offering to swap you your three days for my four. But the thing is, the invoices from our new lens-suppliers in Togo are just about to come due, on Monday. And seeing as how this is a new vendor, operating according to the specifications of a freshly-signed contract, I can't afford to let a day pass without subjecting each and every invoice to my personal and minute scrutiny: the company auditors, you see, are going to be watching our whole division like hawks.

'On the other hand,' she adds as a manifestly toking afterthought, 'if you've got some comparably pressing situation ongoing or pending at your office--well, naturally, that changes everything.'

'Erm, well, no...' I says, drawing a genuine full blank pending-cum-ongoing bidness-wise, 'There's nothing particularly pressing on my end, at least as I can think of.'

Of course, five minutes later the aforesaid blank was all too fully sketched out in dour charcoal, courtesy of my sudden recollection of a parallel impending flood of invoices from P-tex's newly-contracted latex-vendor in Malaysia, but by that point I'd already agreed to serve the full seven-day bedside stint, and there was, as they say, no turning back. TBT, as of this moment--psycho-rhetorical terms be roundly posthumously sodomised--I'm inclined to believe that the whole song-and-dance, beginning from and including my 4/3 proposal and extending right on up through to the outer frame of my blank-drawing, was underwritten by our shared obeisance to that naked principle of economic self-interest known as Worthington's Law, which states (inter alia generalius) that any sacrifice on the part of a lowly 30-grand-a-year Junior Accounts Receivable Associate is of lesser intrinsic metaphysical heft than a comparable sacrifice on the part of a lordly 45-grand-a-year Senior Accounts Receivable Associate.

So, first thing next morning (i.e., at exactly 8:30 a.m., well shy of my scheduled 8:45 arrival time), I rang up Mike Ayhern to break to him the bad news--or, at any rate, a Soviet-style sanitised version thereof. For, you see, DGR, having already squandered--make that lavished--the full balance of my sick leave on the Arsenal-favouring late stages of the UEFA competition, I was now obliged, at such a short notice to cash in the better part of my as-yet-untouched ten-day hoard of bereavement leave for the sake of the bed-sitting interval. Accordingly, I had concocted a story centring on 'the death of my dear old Aunt Agatha,' and requiring me to repair post-haste to Norfolk for the funeral. (Corforgimmey for having taken advantage of Double-A in that dedidedly gruesome fashion; but I thought it comparatively prudent, in light of the possibility of Mike's giving my parents a confirmatory bell, to advert to an SOA that at least stood some actuarial potentiality of being true, rather than fabricate the decease of some mythical Bunbury whose prior existence they inevitably would have denied at first blush.) To my immense surprise and relief, Mike took it all not so much in stride as in graciously accommodating leaps and bounds: 'By all means,' he said, 'take off as much time as you need. And please, McGyver, do extend my sincerest condolences to the surv--excuse me--' [here I heard the distinctly pin-point-able sound of a schnozz being de-snotted into a hankie, off-blower] '--to the surviving members of your f-f-family.' Fuck me with the pleasure end of a sexton's spade if the perennially flinty-hearted Mike Ayhern wasn't getting thoroughly choked up over the so-called passing of a woman he'd never heard of, let alone met! But such, I have subsequently concluded, is the twisted psychology of your supervisorly types: they lose their proverbial shit if you dare hint at depriving them of so much as a micro-stone of their contractually-allotted pound of flesh for the sake of the still-living-cum-breathing-cum-shitting carcass of which it is an inalienable constituent; but when it comes to a baldfaced proposal to sacrifice a pound-and-a-half of that selfsame flesh at the altar of some inert corpse, why, they're all for it, presumably because they can thus rest safe knowing that on the day of your return to work you'll be weighing in at a half-pound less than you would have done if you'd shown up in the meantime at your regular, diurnally-appointed intervals.

Anyway, DGR, to bring you up to speed chronology-wise (seeing as how my posts have long since failed to keep pace with the events recounted therein): the vet's appointment selectively recounted at the beginning of the present post took place on Sunday, the second of July. Accordingly, the bed-sitting episode stretched from Monday the third right on through to Wednesday the 12th. In Ruggerian-experiential terms, the fruits of this episode may be enumerated as follows: 1) a comprehensive, and altogether dispiriting acquaintance with the daytime offerings of Sky's satelite television service, b) an equally comprehensive (and equally dispiriting) acquaintance with the offerings of the three Finchleys' butchers'-half-dozen butcher's shops (I'll never forget the moment when this hatchet-man down on Castle Road tried to palm off on to me a half a pound of so-called Hoboken Strip Steak [It's genetically identical to the New York cut, but we save 20p a pound by buying from a vendor west of the Hudson'] that proved, on a none-too close inspection, to be a hock of horse-flesh), c) the enhancement, solidification, apotheosis, or what have you, of the master-to-servant bond long-since inherent in my relations with Lucy.

Now, it is the last item in the catalogue that is most germane to the heading of this here post; inasmuch as I'm of the fairly solid conviction that, had it not been for the epic-heroic degree of jealously or envy incited by that item in the breast(isses) of a certain person, the eponymous re-education of YFCT would undoubtedly have been postponed a good butchers' quarter-dozen fortnights beyond its herein-to-be-recorded time-frame, if not obviated altogether.

'Who then,' you (DGR) query, 'seduc'd you to this foul revolt?'

'You mean, who was it that persuaded me to undertake this untimely and perverse course of re-education?'

'Even so, MDF, even so.'

'Well, I wish I could in all Sinatraness follow your hifalutin cue by rejoining, "Th'infernal serpent"; but--alas!--as that epithet is already jointly trademarked by Messers Wenger and Livingstone, I must make do with the humble Anglo-Saxon makeshift of "me girl".'

'I don't quite understand. You're saying that your girl Lucy was made jealous by the enhancement, &c. vis-a-vis your girl Lucy?--that she was, in effect, jealous of your attentions to herself?'

[YFCT, blushing:] 'Oh, sorry DGR. I should have been clearer there. For "me girl," please to substitute "me two-footed girl."

(') Anyway, DGR: the clincher, vis-a-vis the irruption of this jealousy or envy into my consciousness, came on the morning of my return to work, when, having stayed over at Esmeralda's house the night before, I was about to step out the front door. At this very moment, I found Lucy first yelping at my heels, then digging her teeth into me trouser-cuffs, in desperate protest against my impending departure; she having in the meantime left her mistress half a world behind, presiding silently at the dining room table over the remains of breakfast, and masochistically savouring the spectacle of her magistraial irrelevance.

'Just a moment, MDF. By what power are you or were you privy to this culinary-masochistic Esmeraldan mental SOA? Are you--or were you then--perchance possessed, say, of certain tele-empathic abilities that you have heretofore coyly seen fit to keep me un-apprised of?--or, if not these, then, at any rate, of the semi-proverbial pair of eyes on the back of the head that would have allowed you plausibly to draw certain inferences from certain physiognomical indicators otherwise un-esypable by you from your outward-looking vantage point?'

'OK, DGR, I admit you've caught me out here. I admit that I neither have nor had any empircally verifiable idearrof what Esmeralda was actually thinking at the precise moment when Lucy was yelping at my heels, &c. For all I know, at that moment she might just as well have been onanistically savouring the reverie of a full-body marmite bath as masochistically savouring the spectacle of &c. But if so, her psyche must enjoy a far greater degree of elasticity than mine or any other I've ever heard tell of; inasmuch as no sooner had I popped the semi-hermetic seal of the front door a scant butcher's-coupla seconds later, than she was crouching behind me and tugging away at Lucy's carcass with a ferociousness quite out of keeping with-stroke-in excess of your typical dog-ownerly interventions in the like sorts of sartorial incursions--tugging away, I say, with a well-nigh murderous ferocity, and upbraiding her in terms that quite defy printing even by the liberal c-word-friendly standards of this here blog.'

'And in precisely what spirit or attitude did you happen to receive this canine-chastening blue-streak?'

Why, I received it, and acted upon it, DGR, precisely as any nominally-non-canine-custodial bloke with time-sensitive bidness to attend to is judy-bound to do in such a circumstance, namely by pulling the brim of his invisible bowler hat downwards towards his okie-brows, slinging his invisible umbrella under one arm, silently marching out the front door and vowing to steer clear of local radio news for the duration of the day (domestic besticides being, after all, the bread and butter-stroke-marmite of your local radio news departments).

'Have you given any thought over the past week-and a-half to this matter we broached just before Lucy fell ill--the matter of palliating your animus against Arsenal?'

'You bet I have done,' I reply, with more candour and gusto than you, DGR, might suppose me capable of mustering on this occasion. For the fact is, I have given a great deal of thought to this very matter over the course of the past ten days. Indeed, not a single one of those days has elapsed without my having bowed at least once to the south-south-east (i.e. towards Belgium) in humbly devout gratitude to my lucky Hoegaardens for having thus far spared me an Esmeraldan re-broaching of the topic of my Arsenalaphobic re-education.

'And,' she says, her okies sparkling, as they say, in a mischievous manner that decidedly bodes nothing good for YFCT, 'have you thus far struck upon any palliatives that have struck you as being particularly promising?'

'Erm, well, no,' I says, with considerably less gusto and candour than the last time round, for obvious reasons. But for all of my consciousness of the poor showing my phiz must undoubtedly now be making qua non-verbal second to my gob, my schphincter remains as taut as the opening of a scout-knotted duffle-bag, inasmuch as (on the basis of the aforementioned mischievous sparkling) I can clearly perceive that the suggestion of any Arsenaphobic-quashing expedient on my part would, at this precise moment, merely steal thunder from the intial public offering of Esmeralda's patented and presumably foolproof remedy.

'Well, then, you've no choice but to hear me out and follow my prescription.'

[YFCT, with a forced gay-stroke-game-ness:] 'I'm all ears, as they say.'

'Right then: just to apprise you of the run-up to the prescription, seeing as how right from the get-go I recognised that any coercive means I might employ were bound to be counter-productive in the long if not the short run, I've been casting about all along for some more gently suasive remedy. There has got to be a way, I've been telling myself, of getting Nigel to put his Arsenal-animus into proper perspective without falsely representing that perspective as being inherently and fundamentally hostile to his animus. If only Nigel could be afforded the opportunity of setting forth the basic principles of his Arsenal-animus in conference with some genuinely objective third party--'

'--Lookie-here: I think it only fair to interject that for the sake of verbal economy, my mental word-processing software has its auto-correct feature set to condense the phrase "genuinely objective third party" into the single word "psychotherapist". So, if what you're about to prescribe is a course of psychotherapy--'

'--It isn't.'

'Good. Cos if it were, it'd amount to the gratuitous pouring of hundreds if not thousands of pounds into the bottomless sewer-drain that is the NHS. If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that the etiology of my Arsenalophobia has nothing to do with a two-year-old Nigel McGyver's catching his dad going at it against his mum's rump to the televisual accompaniment of an Arsenal-Chelsea match--[Here, I realise that I've gone too far; that in virtue of the over-elaborate concreteness of this purely fictitious example, I am in danger of leading my girl to believe it to be, as they say, drawn from the life; and so I hastily add:]--or any of your other classic psychoanalytic trauma scenarios.'

'No, no, darling: of course, I know full well it hasn't got anything to do with scenarios of that kind; and, in any case, vow or no vow, I never would have expected--or desired--such a free-thinking spirit such as yourself to submit to such a course of treatment. I'm thinking along altogether different lines. You see, Tamsin--you do, I assume, know who-of I speak when I drop the Christian name of Tamsin?'

'Ah, yes,' I reply, with well-nigh-lapel-thumb-stroking copular-insiderly smugness, 'Tamsin: that would be your second-year room-mate at college.'

'Yes, it--she--would be; but I'm talking about another Tamsin altogther, one of much more recent life-historical vintage.'

Newly-stoked by my copular-trivia-match free-kick, I take a so-called wild stab in the dark: 'That would be...your immejiate superior at Occuvision?'

'The same. Well, anyway, this Tamsin's husband is a professor of philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. More specifically, and to the point, he's the author of a monograph entitled A Prolegomenon Towards any Future Metaphysics of Football.'

'So, you're saying what--that you want me borrow a copy of this here monograph from our friendly local council library?'

'I doubt they'd have it in their catalogue; and, in any case, why bother, when you can get the gist of its argument straight from the horse's--I mean, the philosopher's--mouth?'

'I see. So what you're saying is that you've arranged--or, at any rate, made tentative enquiries thereto--for me to have a chinwag with this philosophising husband of Tamsin's?'

'Exactly--I mean tentative enquiry-wise, not firm-arrangement-wise.'

'I see. And on what basis do you found the assumption that such a chinwag would be fruitful on the score of a perspective-in-putting of my Arsenalaphobia? I trust that such basis consists at bare minimum in a prior cover-to-cover perusal of Mr Tamsin's--'

'--that's Dr Todd's--'

'Forgive me--Dr Todd's magnum opus.'

'No, I'm afraid it doesn't do. Still, I've been acquainted with the main thrust of the book for upwards of a year. You see, Tamsin and Cuthbert--that's her husband, the author--hosted a soiree in honour of its publication, and from what I dimly remembered of some select passages that Cuthbert had seen fit to declaim at this event, it seemed to me that it would be right up your--and our--alley.'

'Right, right right. And in spite of the fact that I missed out on this declamation, I'm pretty well sure that I can suss out its main so-called talking points--viz., an attestation to the generic group solidarity afforded by the warm-cum-fruity subculture of football-fandom qua buffer-zone against the cold anonymity of superculture of the body-politic, and to the specifically sexual-political solidarity afforded by the aforesaid subculture qua buffer-zone against potential incursions of the vagina dentata--well, believe you me, I've already heard this argument a thousand times, from innumerable beardy, tweedy, pipe-smoking, academically-accredited armchair strikers on Radio 4, and I'll have nothing to do with it.'

'But that's just it, Nigel darling: you needn't have anything to do with it on his account, as, in contrast to these Radio 4 pundits you've just alluded to, he's not a sociologist but a philosopher in the strictest sense of the term. And from what I remember of his talking points, they centered on such topics as the numinousness of the team versus the phenomenality of the individual athlete, and the trinitarian implications of the trifold apportionment of authority amongst principal shareholder, manager and captain. I should add that, according to his own testimony, he approaches these investigations not from the cold, antiseptic detachment of a scientist's laboratory but from the rough-and-tumble point-of-view of a genuine fan of the sport.'

'Oh, yeah, well,' I interject, now intrigued-by-stroke-warming-to the whole Cuthbertian programme, and yet all the same feeling julie obliged to try for a free-kick in behalf of the cause of blokility, 'if Mr Todd is such an ardent football fan, then riddle me this simple question: Which club does he support?'

'Why, how should I know? He never mentioned a specific club, as near as I can remember, on that night. And, in any case, you're one to talk, given your purely negative club-fanwards orientation [i.e., vis-a-vis Arsenal.]'

'All right, touchay and fair enough: I'll meet him.'

So, anyway: next day, my people [i.e., Esmeralda] liaised with Prof. Todd's people [i.e., Tamsin] for the purpose of setting up a mutually-amenable time and place of rendezvous. The solution of the temporal problem proved to be a so-called no-brainer, it having been established from the get-go by our feminine intermediaries that this-here pedipilular symposium should neatly coincide with a copular girls'-night-out commencing on the happiest hour of the immejiately succeeding Friday. But as to the solution of the platial problem--well, that cuntstituted another, infinitely more nettlesome, kettle of kippers altogether. YFCT was, naturally, all for our meeting up at the Ape; seeing as how, first off, it was the mother-pub of North-London Arsenalophobia, and thus vouchsafed me a certain degree of home-pitch advantage--'

'--an advantage you'd presumably forfeited some months before, thanks to the disastrous denouement of the inaugural convocation of the North London Arsenal Bashers on those very premises--'

'--OK, DGR: I admit you've half--if only half--caught me out. I admit that that "first-off"-ial clause was something of a rationalisation, but only something of one, inasmuch as, as far as I'm concerned, there's infinitely more poetry--and pathos--in the notion of being kicked out of a joint with some Arsenalophobic history on account of a one-off dropping of the A-word than there is in being suffered to Arsenal-bash ad libitum till closing time in some anonymous drinkery where no one has ever shiven a git about whom you might oppose or support, pedipilularly speaking.'

'From the degree of acrimony with which you depict this pedipilular abyss, I can only conclude that Professor Todd's counter-proposal-of-venue won out the day.'

'Again, DGR, you're half-spot-on, inasmuch as the venue we eventually settled upon met those very pedipilularly-neutral specifications. But you've yet to hear out my second-off, which reads as follows: second-off, I wished to be within staggerable distance of home, in case the fury of my argument injuiced me to consume one or more pints too many for the road. But Professor Todd, doubtless for parallel-stroke-complementary reasons, was rooting for a chinwag at a joint known as the Slow Loris, way off and up in his residential neck of the woods, viz. Harlow. In the end--again through our intermediaries--we agreed to meet up at the Oakmere in Potters Bar, it being, if nothing better, sited carwise or hoofwise within ten minutes' remove from our respective places of work (I waiving my otherwise impassible prohibition against after-hours leisurely PB-out-hanging on the grounds that this was a form of work, inasmuch as I neither had dreamt it up nor expected anything pleasurable to participate in or come out of it).'

So, anyway, I turned up at the Oakmere at the appointed post-Protologitexical-dayshift-abutting hour, and, within ten seconds of my arse's extrication from the back-draught stirred up by the swinging-to of the front door, caught sight of, and positively identified, the profile of my chinwag-mate: viz. that of a podgy, bespectacled, salt-and-pepper-bearded, corduroy-jacketed, pipe-smoking bloke seated at the very end of the bar before a pint glass three-quarters-full of a pitch-black liquid that I (correctly, as it turned out) surmised to be Guinness, and peering down at some spreadeagled, folio-sized piece of reading matter. As I have no intention of being outclassed by my opponent in virtue of his possession of any secret, however trivial, that I might apprise myself of at his insoo, I elect, in loo of making a beeline towards his right flank, to approach him initially by way of a broad arc, situated, at its apogee, a good yard or two in front of the bar, and terminating a scant half-foot behind his jacket-tails, such that I may skim or peruse at my leisure, and over his shoulder, the contents of the aforementioned folio; which, on the evidence of the tabular layout of the left page and the pictorial, deodorant-advertising layout of the right, unabashedly proclaim themselves to be comprised by an issue of Four Four Two magazine; coyly framed and undergirded though it is by some other volume of slightly larger compass and much firmer binding. Having learnt as much as I can do from this reconnaisance mission, I retrace my arc back to the entrance and execute the postponed beeline.

'Erm, excuse me, Cuthbert?' I says, coughing into my fist from a respectable, personal-space- respecting distance.

'What?' he says, reflexively glancing up at me as anyone is bound to do on hearing his Christian name mentioned, particularly when that CN is so uncommon an entity as Cuthbert.

'I'm Rugb--erm, Nigel. Pleased to make your acqu--'

I break off as he, having by all classic phizziognimical indicators taken due stock of my identity and rendezvous-ial relevance, perversely reverts his ocular attention to Four Four Two.

'Excuse me,' I persist: 'Cuthbert? Cuthbert? CUTHBERT?'

He keeps reading; or, at any rate, pretending to read; eventually, at the delivery of my third, capitalised Cuthbert, taking the consummately cuntish liberty of plugging his right oriole with his right thumb.

At last I manage to suss out what he's on about, and issue the following revised exhortation:

'Excuse me, Dr Todd?'

Whereupon he glances up, and grinning at me the most cuntishly frozen satirically-coprophagic grin, says, 'Yes? How may I help you?'

'I believe we have a meeting scheduled.'

'Oh, have we indeed? Then where's your carnation?'

'My carnation?'

'Yes, your carnation,' he repeats, emphatically thumping a white specimen of that flower residing in his buttonhole.

I shrug and shake my head in Sinatra-esque bemusement.

'You mean Esmeralda didn't tell you?'

'Not as far as I can recollect.'

'I distinctly and explicitly told Tamsin to ask Esmeralda to ask you to wear a white carnation in your buttonhole, for the sake of mutually foolproof ease of identification.'

'No worries,' I says, taking the gross liberty of patting him on the shoulder (he spectating sideways on the aforesaid patting as one would on the vivisection of an unanaesthetised infant), 'I'm sure we're entirely to blame for the mix-up on our end; and, in any case, we've found each other, so it's... [here I wring my gourdita in the hope of extracting therefrom some eight-year-old collegiate memory-droplet that I might proffer to him in toking up-suction to his philosophical metier]... all water over the old eight Kingsborough bridges, as they say.'

'Over the what?'

'Over the eight Kingsborough bridges--you know [Christ! I hope I'm right here], I mean it's making a fuss over a problem that can't be solved.'

'Are you not aware, sir,' he imperiously rejoins, whilst rearing his tits up to their full magesterial height (and thereby disclosing his gut in is full magesterial girth, as the unbuttoned folds of his jacket give way), 'that the problem of the seven bridges of Koenigsburg was solved some two-hundred-and-seventy years ago by Leonhard Euler?'

'Well, erm, now that you mention it, it occurs to me that I was aware of that fact: what I meant to say was that it was making a fuss over a problem that was solved a long time ago--but the upshot's the same, in any case.'

[Dr Fucking-Todd, tetchily and tentatively]: 'If you say so.'

'I'm afraid I do. Anyway: now that we've found each other, my carnation-bereftness notwithstanding, shouldn't we find ourselves a table?'

'Yes, of course we should do. Prefatorily to that move, though--in other words, marginal to, and hence off, the official conversational record--I must confess that I have been all too imperfectly briefed by my wife on the particulars of your predicament, and that I am thus entirely unclear as to how, and to what precise degree, I am expected to bring to bear my expertise on its solution.'

At last it finally dawns on me that his tetchiness is directed in the main not at me as such, but rather at the situation in toto-stroke-culo: that he doesn't want to be here any more than I do; he has in fact, justI have been, dragged here, as they say, kicking and screaming inwardly if not outwardly.

[You, DGR:] 'Ah, splendid: so from the very beginnning it was evident that the two of you had, as they say, something in common.'

'TBS, it was so evident from the VB.'

'And I trust the two of you availed yourselves of this patch of common ground to the fullest mutual and common advantage.'

'Well, I dunno. I suppose we did as much with it as we could have been expected to do in the circumstances: namely, fanny adams. Mind you, at that first sunriserly moment, I had the grandest expansive prospects in mind vis-a-vis this wee selfsame patch. I thought to myself then, A butcher's half-dozen pints from now, the two of us are bound to be yukking it up over the absurdity of the whole improbable gynogenetic chain of events that brought us two hapless blokes together, here in the Oakmere of all places. But in arse-sight it seems to me that we had about as much in common as a pair of London Underground commuters united only in their resentment at being tube-bound for their respective places of employment. Sure, should the train break down along the way, they'll find themselves first sharing Kenocidal fantasies, then trading unpleasantries centring on the horribleness of their respective jobs and finally (should the line outage stretch on into midday) buggering each other; but otherwise, their resentment of each other's presence will pre-empt all of the above-catalogued outbursts of fellow-feeling.'

Anyway, no sooner have found our table, parked our respective arses and placed our respective Guinness and Hoegaarden orders with the barman-stroke-waiter, than Cuthbert sets about emptying his extinguished bowl into our ashtray and restocking his pipe with a pinch of baccy from a pouch secrected in one of his jacket pockets. Not unreasonably mistaking this sequence of gestures for the inaugural salvo of a genial genteblokey smoke-off, I reach into my own tit pocket for my packet of Marlboros; but just as I'm extracting a rette therefrom with my teeth (and as he's lighting up), he cuts in, AFF:

'Just what do you think you're doing?'

'Why, I'm about to have a smoke, just like you.'

'I'd really rather you didn't. You see, I'm deathly allergic to cigarette smoke.'

Now, to this demurral a philosophically-inclined bloke such as myself might well have counter-demurred--as I was in fact strongly, albeit fleetingly, tempted to do--that, as both cigarette-smoke and pipe-smoke were alike chemical precipitants of the combustion of a plant known as Tobacco virginianis (or whatever the fuck the scientific name of the tobacco plant actually is) my interlocutor's allergy to the C-type smoke could not but be of a fundamentally aesthetic rather than physiological provenance; and that, seeing as how he had already compromised his aesthetic standards to the extent of agreeing publicly to sit out a chinwag with an unwashed plebian turd such as myself, the inhalation of a butcher's-coupla-dozen snoutfuls of my Marlboro-fumes would hardly suffice to drag him a micrometre deeper into the aesthetically-compromising muck. A certain naively anorakish version of such a philosophically-inclined bloke, on mentally rehearsing the delivery of the aforesaid counter-demurral and taking due stock of the inevitably sputtering and incoherent--and yet, for all that, ineluctably impassible--hypothetical counter-counter-demurral would have worked himself into a right tizzy over the thought of a philosopher's imperviousness to a philosophically water-tight argument. But as I was neither so naive nor so anorakish, and hardly expected a philosopher in private life to comport himself any more philosophically than an off-the-clock dustman or rat-catcher would do, I immejiately resolved--from a strictly rhetorical povey--to fight pipe-smoke with pipe-smoke, so to speak; and so, excusing myself from Cuthbert's presence ('Won't be a minute!' I promised), I dashed out of the restaurant and over to the Bootses across the street and laid out a tenner on their cheapest corn-cob along with a pouch of baccy that the cashier, in charitable remembrance of our little tryst from a coupla years back [See my post of 1 December of last year, entitled '22.5 Hour Party People'], throws in at no extra cost.

So then I dash back across the street and re-seat myself across from Cuthbert; extracting the plastic baccy pouch and plastic-and-cardboard-sheathed pipe from my Bootses-logo-bearing carrier bag during the re-seating, unpacking the pipe and baccy a scant butchers'-dozen seconds afterwards; and, finally, tamping down and lighting up a scant butchers'-half-dozen seconds later still. Luckily, I have already long since mastered the art of pipe-smoking, courtesy of my starring performance some ten years previous in a Diss High School pantomime-season production of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (in which capacity I likewise acquired competence in the proper employment of a tourniquet and hypodermic syringe, a talent that may likewise yet serve me in good stead, should I ever in future be strong-armed into chinwagging with some philosopher-junkie), and so I take to the alternative nicotine-dispatching -mejium as effortlessly as a so-called duck to water. Cuthbert witnesses my settling into this routine in an attitude not entirely dissimilar to the one he evinced on my patting his shoulder; but once again, he's either too well-bred or too cowardly to give direct verbal vent to his cuntsternation, and so he contents himself with querying me, in a faintly stroppy tone, AFF:

'Are you quite sure you're ready to begin?'

'Ready as Freddy,' I says, placidly puffing away.

'Well, first off, to essay--and summarily despatch--the most naive geographicometaphysical counter-arguments, my wife tells me that you're from Norwich.'

'Well, not exactly: I'm from Diss, a wee market town sited twenty miles and change south of Norwich.'

'All the same, you grew up well within the 50-kilometre-radiating catchment of that Norwich-based club colloquially known as The Canaries, right?'

'Right.'

'And yet, for all that, you have never evinced the slightest partiality towards that club?'

'Never. You see, my dad's a solid cricket fan with no interest in football of any kind; so, in our house, during my nipperhood, a screening of a Norwich City match would have been as exotic event as, I dunno, a screening of a Hungarian arthouse feature. I mean, I wouldn't have known what to make of it if I had seen it.'

'So, then, would I be right in surmising that your Arsenal enmity dates only as far back as your relocation to London, in your early adulthood?'

'No, it goes a ways back farther than that. I guess it was a bit misleading, my confining the account of my televisual diet of my formative years to the old homestead. Cos, you see, once a month, at minimum, when I was about nine or ten, I used to stay over at my mate Ned Stilton's house. And as Ned's family had recently relocated from London, during the season proper they watched nothing but matches between London sides--'

'--some one of which, in virtue of their prior residence in a paricular London borough, they must have favoured--'

'--you would assume so, but that's just it: I can't remember which particular club, if any, they supported. It might have been Chelsea, it might have been Tottenham, but one thing I was sure of: it sure as bloody hell wasn't Arsenal.'

'Well, at least this gives me something to work with. I have, at least, established that your Arsenal enmity dates from as far back as...how old are you anyway?'

'26.'

'Why, then, I have established on the basis of its premier-decade-straddling provenance that your Arsenal-enmity dates at the earliest from the 1990-91 season; and, at the latest, from the 1991-92 one.'

'Yeah, that sounds about right.'

'Such that, at the latest, the aforesaid provenance dates from a Premier-decade-straddling period in a different sense, that is to say, from the very last season in which Arsenal could well and truly be reckoned secundus aut tertius inter pares anglicos ; that is to say, when they were, in name at least, just another English football club, prior to their elevation, in the 1992-93 season, to the elite ranks of the newly-inaugurated Premier league.'

'And so?'

'And so, well: it's all to the better, for the purposes of my argument; an argument that--whilst its fundamentals would, from a strictly philosophical point of view, remain unshaken even if you'd only just come down with your animus last Tuesday week--will assuredly benefit from the additional rhetorical lubricant supplied by its cognizance of this animus's epoch-transcending antiquity.'

'If you don't mind, I'd much prefer your sparing me the lubricants for now and stating the bare particulars of your argument in their full arse-chafing rawness.'

'Well, as you insist: for going on twenty years now, we philosophers have been bandying amongst ourselves a certain thought-experiment known as the Swampman Scenario. I must apologise in advance for the rather pedestrian metaphorical terms in which this thought-experiment is cast--but then, my profession has never been celebrated for any kind of poetic knack.'

'Apology accepted in advance. Please proceed.'

'All right then: picture to yourself a man, let us call him Henry [pr. Awn-REE]--'

'--I assume you're talking about Cap'n Thierry here--'

'--That's right, although--again, from a purely philosophical point of view--the individual in question might just as well be you or I. Picture to yourself, then, Thierry Henry taking a hike through a swamp--'

'--What business does Thierry H. have taking a hike through a swamp?'

'I don't know. Perhaps he's just been separated from his team-mates during an overnight camping trip on, say, the Florida Everglades.'

'Or, say, the Norfolk Broads?'

'Even more plausibly. So Monsieur Henry is taking a hike through the Norfolk Broads, and a thunderstorm starts up, and in consequence he's struck dead by a lightning bolt.'

[YFCT, practically drooling over the image of TH's smoking corpse lying prone amidst a misty profusion of ferns and cat-tails]: 'If only this were a non-hypothetical scenario.'

'Indeed. Well, supposing that at this precise moment, nearby in the swamp, another lightning bolt spontaneously re-arranges a mass of molecules, such that, by sheer coincidence, they take take on precisely the same form that Henry's body possessed at the moment of his untimely demise.'

'Ah, I see. So what you're getting at is the notion that the whole metaphysical fabric of the cosmos might be at the mercy of some Arsenal-favouring demiurge who, whatever fatal accidents might befall individual members of the club, is capable of fabricating letter-perfect simulacra of these individuals at will?'

'No, I'm getting at nothing of the sort. Allow me to reiterate: the Arsenalian provenance of the illustrative individual is completely extrinsic to the philosophical purport of the illustration.'

'Pity. But what, then, may I ask, is the precise philosophical purport of the illustration, from a would-be-reformable Arsenalophobe's point of view?'

'I was just getting to that--or, rather, I shall get to that, in good time. You see, the ontological question brought into focus by the Swampman Scenario is as follows: can any entity utterly bereft of causal connection to another pre-existent entity otherwise indistinguishable from itself be said to be that selfsame pre-existent entity? Thus, specifically with regard to this posthumous, lightning-engendered Thierry Henry doppelganger the question is: given that he behaves in precisely the same manner as his now-deceased predecessor would have done--given, in other words, that he performs up to the professional standards set by that predecessor--are we to regard him as being, in essence, the same individual? It is, to be sure a contentious and nettlesome question.'

'To be sure.'

'Now, the particular phillip I have given to this question in my own work--and here, at last, your own interest as a would-be-reformed Arsenal-hater is very much in point--consists in the upward transposition of both master-entities of the scenario--I mean, the lightning-slain and lightning-engendered bodies--from the domain of the individual human organism to that of the collective organism of the team (or, to be more precise, the club); and in the corollary upward transposition of the subsidiary entities--that is to say, the molecules--to the register of the individual players that collectively comprise these master-entities' inalienable constituents.'

'Mmm, this is all most intriguing,' I muse, gazing upwards at the graceful ascent and dissipation of each of the five smoke-rings I have just now virtuosically exhaled (in arse-sight it occurs to me that the rhetorical edge furnished by the pipe was of a decidedly two-sided character; inasmuch as, at this particular moment, absent the auto-fellationary distraction of the smoke-rings, and possessed of a lighted cigarette, I'd have been sorely tempted to jab the cherry end of the thing straight into one of his okie-co-jones in rabid protest against the hopeless abstraction of his philosophical gobbledyverbiage). 'But naturally I would appreciate a concrete illustration of these transpositions of yours, along the lines of the original scenario.'

'Naturally you have every right to expect such an illustration, and naturally I have devised one, which I will expound to you as follows: Supposing that one night Arsenal square off, in an away match, against Chelsea or Manchester United--'

'--Not, of course, that it atoll matters whether or not the match in question takes place at Stamford Bridge or Old Trafford or Underhill, or whether the opposing side in question is Chelsea or ManU or the Barnet girls' league team--' [In thus interjecting, I gormlessly assume myself to be serving yet another generous sop to his philosophical metier, what with all of his prior protestations on the score of the illustrative irrelevance of Thierry Henry &c; but on this account I am sadly mistaken, for, precipitously withdrawing the mouthpiece of his pipe mid-puff, and quite patently miffed, he cuts back in:]

'--Why, of course it matters, in a most material sense and to a most material degree. For God's sake, it's the Swampan thought-experiment I'm elaborating here, not the Flying Pigs one.'

'Oh, of course,' I says, checking just in the so-called nick of time my impulse to pat him on his palm-downwards, table-resting, pipe-free mitt. 'Pray, do tell on.'

'Well, then: supposing that Arsenal are not only roundly but brutally trounced in the aforesaid match; that every one of their players who sees green grass that night suffers some injury sufficiently debilitating to render him unfit to make a showing for some days or weeks to come. Supposing, further, that on their next reconvening at home, not a single one of the players who figured in the previous match is fit to appear on the pitch; in other words, that there is nary a single atom of continuity between the team that is to engage the opposite side in this match and the team that engaged the corresponding side in the last one. Whence, then, would derive the ontological integrity of our reference to a purportedly single entity known as Arsenal, given that on two separate, mutually-abutting--and individually decisive--occasions, it finds itself effectually comprised by two mutually exclusive sets of individual persons?'

'OK, I see what you're getting at--I mean, not only theoretically but also adhominemically-speaking. You're saying that, given that it's theoretically not impossible that Arsenal should differ, man for man, from one match-night to the next as much as it would do on any given match night from the parallel line-up of any other club, that it's essentially no more rational for me to cheer consistently against Arsenal than to cheer consistently against any of its competitors?'

'Quite,' Cuthbert rejoins, in a cuntishly smug tone more appropriate to a riposte of You got it, MF.

'Well, there is, if you'll allow me to say so, a pragmatic philosophical objection to be made to this here transposition if yours--namely, to the effect that, like hurricanes in Hereford, Hampshire and Hertfordshire, these here non-squad-overlapping matches 'ardly hever 'appen. In fact, I'd go so far as to venture that they never have done, in the entire globe-cum-civilisation-spanning history of team-centred athletics, from Greco-Roman times right on through to the present.'

[Cuthbert again, this time in a perfunctorily concessionary tone more suited to his word-choice]: 'Quite.'

'And this very fact--namely, that they never have done--suggests a posteriori the institutional immanence of some deity or demiurge who favours, pedipilularly-speaking, the metaphysical integrity of the entity known as the club.'

'Here, sir, you are clearly overreaching the original pragmatic terms of your objection, and are launching yourself into a theological, nay cosmological, orbit that I had rather avoid traversing, for your sake as well as mine.'

[YFCT, in a reluctantly--indeed, borderline-stroppily--concessionary tone more appropriate to a riposte of Well if you say, so, MF]: 'Quite.'

'Thankfully, as it so happens, the philosophical integrity of my application of the Swampman thought-experiment to football does not depend upon such practically impossible scenarios as the one I have lately adumbrated. It merely depends on the pre-eminently practicable--and, indeed, universally practified [sic]--notion of the substitutability of players. You presumably will not, after all, deny that the constitution of a given club's line-up on the pitch differs materially and substantially from one match to the next.'

'Of course I won't do.'

'Nor, presumably, will you deny that the constitution of a club differs materially from one season to the next; that, inevitably, come the end of the season, for one reason or another, a member or two or more will see fit to migrate to another club--the impending warmly-litigated self-transfer of Ashley Cole from Arsenal to Chelsea being perhaps the most germane example of such a migration.'

'Of -course-not-to-the-tenth-power.'

'Why, then: will you not grant that it is an easy transition from the theoretical notion that a club may differ in every salient respect across two match nights to the practical notion that it in fact does differ in one or more salient respects across each and every match-bridge, and across each and every inter-seasonal interval?--to the notion, in a word ad hominem and inter homines, that the Arsenal of today is not, and never can be, the Arsenal of yesterday, let alone that of yesteryear, and that, accordingly your animus against this purportedly perduring entity answering to the name of "Arsenal" is directed to a mere phantom or chimera? And will you not also acknowledge the truth of the corollary proposition that, as--in consequence of the vicissitudes lately adumbrated--a substantial plurality if not outright majority of the clubs that find themselves pitted against Arsenal in the course of a season are composed in part of ex-Gunners, any Arsenal-hater worth his salt needs must recuse himself from cheering on the opposing squad on a substantial plurality (if not outright majority) of Arsenal-matches?'

I sat out the entirety of this argument, from soup to co-jones, in an attitude of simmering, sorely-tried, pipe-huffing patience, the P in Q being essly-teed by neither of the two most immejiately obvious candidates: namely, on the one hand, any kind of counterfactual overbowlingly impeccable logic evinced on its (the argument's) part; or, on the other, its actual capacity for being peccked into the logical equivalent of Swiss cheese. No: the two mutually incommensurable hands of the argument that simultaneously got a proper nipple-twisting hold on the respective tits of my patience were (respectively) its palpable troglodytic oblivion of recent Yank sitcom history or its shameless unacknowledged pilfering of the biscuit-jar of pedipilulophilosophic wisdom supplied thereby. For Cuthbert's argument, worthy though it may have been of the Good Philosophical Housekeeping seal of approval, amounted, at face-cum-arse, to nothing more or less than a transpondially-mutandi'd recapitulation of Jerry Seinfeld's 15-years-ancient, episode-framing standup oration on the absurdity of team-fandom. You root for a guy when he's on your team, quoth JS, and then he transfers to another team and you hate him. What is it you're actually loyal to? A bunch of uniforms. My own acquaintance with the argument, needles to say, was of geologically ancient standing, dating as it did from the micro-epoch of its original presentation in the Seinfeldially-allotted time-slot in Channel Four's early-90s prime-time schedule, and I have to admit that at the time, it cost my 12-year-old's budding Arsenalophobic conscience some hours of sleep. Ultimately (whichistersay well before my 13th birthday), thanks to no great degree of casuistical ingenuity, I pitched upon a thoroughly watertight counterargument that I've stood fast by ever since, and that I was accordingly primed to set forth for Cutherbert's scholastic benefit. Before so doing, though, I felt it incumbent upon me to register, however obliquely, my sense of the passéness of his whole S&D. Naturally, from a rhetorical povey, to aver outright that I'd seen-stroke-heard it all before on television was out of the question, seeing as how, in his okies, I'd thereby, in outing myself as a particulate member of the televisiually-zombified masses, irrevocably exclude myself from the lists of contention for the title of Bonerfied Amateur Philosopher; which, is after all, the highest title I can aspire to in this setting. And so, I elected instead to strike at him from such an angle that, even considering the amateurish point of origin of the blow, might actually stand a chance of doing some damage to his professional pride:

'That's an innersting argument you've just set forth there,' (I says to him in an attitude of gentleblokey forbearance), 'but I find it hard to imagine that a feller could actually get a whole book out of it.'

'And rightly so,' (he says to me in an attitude of cuntish unfazed-ness [to my cuntsternation-stroke-disappointment]), 'for the most I've managed to wring out of it is a single chapter.'

[YFCT, first smiting his inner forrid on suddenly recollecting Esmeralda's allusions to Cuthbert's Prolegomena-derived orations on the numinousness of this team versus &c. and the trinitarian implication of the trifold apportionmnent of &c.--but then recovering his poise on sussing out that neither of these chunks of the book could do Cuthbert any good in the here and now]: 'You mean there's more?'

'Ten times as much, as much, and then some. Indeed,' he adds, beating out a cuntishly-smug finernail tattoo on the green, gold-bordered leather back cover of his folio, 'we have as yet barely scratched the surface of my Prolegomenon.'

'Which, I see,' I says, out of no motive less plain-phizzed than that of paying all due homage to the bleeding obvious--apart, perhaps, from some theoretically subcutaneous ghostie of a motive emanating in turn from a ghostie of a hope of eventually wresting a free-kick out of his conjecturally imperfect mastery of his own self-penned material, should it come to that--and nodding towards the book, 'you've brought along a copy of for ease of reference.'

'Oh, no,' he corrects me, leaning forwards and embracing the non-tit-abutting corners of the volume jealously, anxiously and pridefully all at once (i.e., in a manner not unreminiscent of Gollum), 'this is something entirely different.'

Unprepared as I am for this late transmogrification of the green book into a black box, and seeing no immejiate advantage in my injuicing its second transmogrification into a lidless tin of worms of no as-yet-discernable hue, I mechanically press forward to the bridge of my counterargument thus:

'I stand corrected. But getting back to the two nubs of your case: first, that the Arsenal of today is not and can never be the Arsenal of yesterday, let alone &c; and, secondly, that, in consequence of &c, every Arsenalophobe worth his salt needs must, &c. To which I reply: of course, within certain metaphysical and ontological limits, I'll grant you both your points.'

'But what other limits are there?'

'Well, ethical ones, for a start.'

[Cuthbert, visibly flustered, to my unspeakable relief:] 'Yes, of course, there are such things as ethical limits, but I don't see how they apply in this particular instance.'

'All right, then: let me demonstrate to you the relevance of their application in this particular instance. I don't suppose you philosophers have much use for a class of thought-experiments answering to the name of "alternate world scenarios"?'

'Like bloody heck we don't. They've been part of our stock-in-trade for the better part of a century.'

'Splendid. Then you'll readily get the gist of the purport of the following AWS I'm about to lay before you, an AWS we Arsenalophobes have bandying about amongst ourselves for the better part of a decade. Let us suppose that the Germans won the Second World War, and yet that England, cosmetically-speaking, is much the same as the England we now inhabit--thatistersay, an England chock-full of soap-bar-shaped cars, Tescoses, zebra-crossings, mobile phones and the like; the only immejiately discernable difference between this counterfactual England and our own consisting in the fact that all the blokes sport black eye-patches and green schl--erm, John Thomases.'

'I see. And just why do all the blokes sport black eye-patches and green John Thomases?'

'The eye-patches are worn in commemoration of some general who lost an okie in the counterfactual Battle of the Bulge. As for the green JTs, let's say they're intended as some kind of goyish alternative to circumcision.'

'I should have thought a little expedient known as the Holocaust had long since put paid to every incentive to adopt such an alternative.'

'Look, forget the black eye-patches and the green schlongs: the main meat of the scenario is that it's 20-ought-whatever, and the Nazi party have got a six-decade-old strong majority in the British Parliament; they're still running on a platform of the superiority of the German Volk and of German Kultur, they're still one-hundred-and-one-per-cent committed to the extermination of so-called inferior races, this in spite of the fact that Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, et al. have long since croaked. Now, granted that the overwhelming majority of presently-serving Nazi MPs have had no personal acquaintance with the founding Vaters of their party; granted that a substantial minority of them were born into a world long since vacated by these selfsame founding Vaters; granted, indeed, that the present Nazi-party-affiliated mayor of Greater London, Ken Lebendstein, has imposed a brutal jack-boot-enforceable Kongestiontariff of his own initiative, in the absence of any prior seance with the ghost of the Fuehrer; why, you wouldn't, for all that, be any less inclined to pigeonhole them as the direct ethical and spiritual descendants of the instigators of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923? Now, admittedly, an especially fastidious metaphysician or ontologist would be well within his rights to assert that this is not the same Nazi party as the one that secured political control of Germany in 1933, but I hope you'll concede to me the soundness of my conclusion that such a bloke or blokess would be altogether too cold-bloodedly metaphysical-cum-ontological for decent company.'

'Why, of course I concede it.'

'Splendid. And I trust that you will further concede--again, from a strictly ethical point of view--that, supposing that the fortunes of this counterfactual Nazi party should take a turn for the worst, and it should find itself deserted in droves by fairweatherly loyal members hailing from both the front bench and the rank and file, any plea to the effect of I was once a Nazi but am now a loyal Labour or Tory or Liberal Democrat proffered by one of these recent defectees ought not to cut so much as a millimetre's depth of ice with the presiding judges at the ensuing counterfactual, sixty-and-some-odd-years'-postponed, version of the Nuremburg trials.'

'Of course it oughtn't to do.'

'Splendid-squared. And I furthest trust that you would not hold the Labour or Tory or Liberal Democratic party to account for the fact that scads of ex-Nazis had sought succor in its bosom?'

'Of course I wouldn't do.'

'Splendid-cubed. The aforesaid concessions having been granted, I now proceed to my peroration, in which the pertinence of all of this admittedly teejious counterfactual yarn-spinnage to the point at issue tonight--namely, the soundness, integrity, worthwhileness or what have you, of my perduring grudge against the Gunners--shall, I trust, be made abundantly clear.'

'Oh, I trust it shall be. But before you proceed, let me warn you that you are skating, as it were, on something less than a millimetre's thickness of rhetorical ice, and that the drawing of an explicit and unequivocal comparison between Nazism and any creed, entity or practice extant in the world of the present, be this creed, entity or practice ever-so-construably pernicious, amounts to a de facto declaration of total war to one's interlocutor, should the latter regard the creed, entity or practice in question in anything short of an irredeemably diabolical light. I essay this warning, naturally, on the assumption that, in contrast to the black eyepatches and green mebra virilia, the specifically Nazistic affiliation of the counterfactual political party is no mere adventitious component of your scenario--that, in other words, your choice of the Nazis in preference to, say, the Girl Guides or the RSPCA is to serve some salient illustrative purpose.'

'Well, of course it is. On the other hand, and in deference to your warning--which I thank you for--let me assure you that I had no design of drawing any such explicit and unequivocal comparison between Nazism and--I might as well let the old cat out of the bag here--Gunnerism-stroke-Goonerism.'

'Thank God for that.'

'On the third hand, though, I was on the point of maintaining that if one were snooping round the old zeit-stroke-volksgeist in search of some remotely plausible analogue to the Nazi party, one's nose would ultimately be unlikely to alight upon more suitable fodder for such analogisation than the twinned Gee-isms.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake: of course one's nose would be all too likely to alight upon more suitable fodder.'

'That fodder consisting in...?'

'...Why, naturally, in the British National Party.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake, do you really dare to call yourself a philosopher? Isn't the cardinal text of Philosophy 101 Thou shalt not mistake a word for a thing? Sure, the BNP call themselves a party, and the main platform-plank of this so-called party does indeed bear a certain superficial resemblance to that of the Nazis. But how much official political power do they actually have? And how much official political power do they dare to dream of having?--a coupla back-bench MP-ships and a quintile share of some continental-style coalition government, respectively. And take a gander, if you will, at the ethical-cum-demographic profile of their typical constituent--some octagenarian Yorkshire postman's-or-dustman's widow who prides herself on brewing her tea loose in the pot rather than availing herself of the accursed newfangled teabag. Clearly, the BNP constitute, at best, some moribund last gasp of nostalgic hankering after the Churchillian Britain of yore. No, Sir: in casting about for plausible present-day analogues to old-school Nazism in this fair island of ours one has to look beneath--or, at any rate beyond--the surface of party status-stroke-platformage, and put one's 'noculars on the keeve-eve for some movement that embodies not so much the publicly-ballyhooed principles of Nazism vis-a-vis specific peoples or practices, as the privately-espoused ethos or attitude of Nazism, and that, like the NSP in pre-war Germany, benefits from the wholehearted partisanship of an ostensibly-forward-looking mass of young people. And in what UK-based collectivity do we find such an attitude so fully or youthfully embodied as in the Gunners and their massive fan base? Eh? First off, you've got their all-round unsportsmanlike comportment on the pitch--their pottymouthed contesting of every green or red card that's thrown their way--which all too vividly calls to mind the Germans' blustering annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in the teeth of universal European protest. Secondly, and not unrelatedly, you've got their pathetic whinging, fist-shaking sense of aggrieved entitlement to every championship they're in the running for, which calls to mind all-too-vividly the Germans' pre-war assumption that, because their great-to-the-25th-power-grandfathers had managed to kick the Romans' arses in a handful of border-skirmishes, they'd somehow been cheated out of every victory they'd forfeited in the meantime.'

'Now, Sir,' says Cuthbert, getting a bit hot under the collar (as graphically and literally evidenced by his unbuttoning of his top shirty-button and loosening of his tie-knot), 'this is hardly fair. All questions as to the legitimacy of your ascription of a sense of entitlement aside, you can hardly equate a gap of a mere two years to one of some two millennia.'

'And why not? To quote scripture: Two years are like unto a thousand years in the eyes of a dispassionate football-spectator.'

'What rubbish! In the eyes of a dispassionate philosopher a year is like unto a year is like unto a year is like unto a year, and like unto FUCK ALL ELSE!'

'Now, now, now Cuthbert,' I says soothingly, 'keep it above the waist, if you please. Such coarsely plebian invective hardly befits a dispassionate philosopher.'

'Oh, sod the fucking philosophical dispassionateness! OK, admittedly, we've been going through a bit of a theoretical rough patch lately, what with our shameful castration by the milquetoast Wanderers in the third round of the last Cup, and the atrocious rape of our legitimate laurels at Barcelona last May. But rest assured, ve shall rise again, und zoon, to reclaim our rightful fueherschaft as ZE GREATEST FAHCKING FOOTBALL CLUB IN DIE LEAGUESGESCHICHTE!'

'Jesus, Cuthbert,' I whisper, leaning in at a halitosis-huffing angle, 'would you keep it down?! For Chrissakes, do you want to get us thrown out of here?'

'All such worries on that score and on your part,' he says, dropping into a palsy-jawed whisper, 'are superfluous, inasmuch as our interview is at an end. And in any case,' he continues at his former room-saturating volume, whilst rising and tucking the folio into his left pit, 'I should have had nothing to fear on that score or for my part, surrounded as I was and am on all sides by my Volk--in other words BY MY FELLOW GOONERS!'

Here, turning to face the bar, he raises his right, folio-unencumbered arm unbended, palm-downwards-and-heavenwards, thereby eliciting from all assembled (apart from YFCT) a resounding chorus of Sieg Heil! Next, after giving a few obliging nods to his constituents, he turns on his heel and marches--nay, goosesteps--towards the exit, I happening to take in during his egress the title printed AFF on the front cover of his folio in three-inch-high Hitlerfont capitals: 'ANNALS OF THE HERTFORDSHIRE ARSENAL SUPPORTERS' GESELLSCHAFT--1892-1935.'

Cuthbert's arse having cleared the front door, the chorus falls silent, leaving as its residue--the visual equivalent of a grumbling ostinato in the lower strings of an orchestra made audible only by the abrupt cessation of an overlying fortissimo tooty--the ever-so-more-ominous spectacle of 50-some-odd pairs of Gooners' okies glowering at me from every corner and surface of the room. (Blimey! I'd forgotten what a hot pocket of rabid Goonerism Potters Bar was.) Obviously, in such a 50-to-one sitch as this, with a five-hundred per cent guaranteed McMO [McGyverian Mortality Outcome], all brain-terminating instructions from the shirt-shucking right hand could not but have been pre-empted by those of the poo-discharging sole schphincter; which thereupon and simultaneously directed my head to pivot itself this way and that in desperate quest of some remotely friendly pair of okies, and my gob to cry out--feebly, plaintively, haltingly, as yet to no one in particular:

'Erm, I say, I say: Waiter? Waiter? can I get the bill, please?'

FINIS POSTIS