Basher's Delight: Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Err...well...'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Me either.'

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

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

*

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

'Er, no, I guess not.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The Reuben brothers.'

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

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

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

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

And facking redder!!

I'm really starting to think that Ken has it in for me personally. You say I'm fucking paranoid? Explain this coincidence, then. The Northern Line shuts down for 'safety reasons' on the very day that 1) I happen to have a doctor's appointment in Kentish Town and b) my Mazda happens to be in the shop. What do you think the statistical likelihood is that all three of these cock-ups (or two cock-ups and one cock-chafe) happening on the same day is? I put it at about 1:1,760,999.021. So, no tube service means buses in place of trains along the lines, right? Yeah, we all know the drill. Trouble is, I don't know the drill, at least not on the Northern, because the last time I had to take a tube on a down line must have been back in '02, when I lived in Whitechapel, on the Hammersmith & City and District Lines. The upshot is that it was a long time ago, so this morning as I was listening to GLR--sorry, BBC London--over my usual breakfast peanut-butter-on-Weetabix-spread (don't knock it till you've tried it), and I heard the Northern Line would be down and that service would be 'supplemented' by buses I naively thought that that meant the bus would just sort of follow the tube route, you know? Stop at every station on the line. That's what a sensible bloke would assume by default, right? So I leave about an hour earlier than I'd planned to, figuring that this bus-leg of the trip is going to add, at most, an hour's worth of stubble to the trip. I get to the station ('Woodside Park?' you ask. 'Course, YFC!' I reply) and just sort of instinctively make my way for a corner of pavement near the entrance where maybe 50 people are all sort of half-standing, half milling-about, most of them all obviously on the verge of a strop attack. I ask around a bit to see if anybody can tell me when the fucking bus is supposed to show up, but nobody is any the wiser than I am in my total ignorance. So I take a stroll round the perimeter of the station a few times, smoke a fag or two, and when I'm coming round to the front for the fourth or fifth time, I see that a red bendy bus is parked out front and that a queue has just started to form at the front door of it. I step to the end of the queue and climb in with the rest of the hoi polloi, and straightaway I can tell that the bus is already half full and I have absolutely no chance of getting a seat. The driver calls out, 'Everyone move on back, please, lots of lovely room!' and I go as far back as I can, which as my beshattened luck would have it, was right at the join between the two halves of the bus--right at the accordionated bit, in other words. I mean, literally, my right foot was in the back half of the bus and my left foot was in the front. So for the whole trip I felt like I was stuck on that Great Frisco Temblor of '06 ride at Blackpool, the one where the floorboards rub against each other under your feet, that I always used to get sick on when I was a kid. So we pull out of the station turnaround, and straight away I notice something's wrong. My sense of direction is none of the keenest, but it's keen enough to tip me off that, although, assuming we were following the Northern Line we'd be heading south, the street we were on (Woodside Park Road, I presume) was carrying us eastward. I ask the bloke standing to my right--an old-school geezer in oatmeal tweeds and a Lenin cap--to smooth out this little discrepancy for me. 'Well, of course we're headed east, youngblood,' he says, as resentfully as though I'd asked him to explain, say, what he was doing wearing oatmeal tweeds and a Lenin cap in Barnet in 2005, 'That's where Arnos Grove station is.' 'Arnos Grove?' I says. 'Isn't that on the...' 'That's right. It's on the Piccadilly Line.' 'Cor, what good'll that do me? I'm trying to get to Kentish Town.' 'And I'm trying to get to Goodge Street. So I'll detube at Holborn and catch a bus there, or, failing that, walk. You'll have to do the same, get off at the nearest stop on the Piccadilly Line to Kentish Town. It's SOP, dontcherknow, during these suspensions of service, to transport passengers to the nearest stop on an adjacent line.' 'SOP?' 'Standard Operating Procedure.' 'Oh, of course.' Right about then, as I was wrapping up my convo with this geezer, I started noticing this really horrible smell, a smell exactly like the smell of an overcooked grilled marmite sandwich. And right after that, I start to notice a plume of smoke hovering in the vicinity of the accordion join right in front of me. And I look round and see that everyone else is starting to notice it too. But contrary to the way you might expect people to behave in the presence of an outbreak of fire, no one is particularly alarmed. All I see in the faces of my fellow riders is a mixture of irritation and resignation, and all I hear coming from their mouths are words like 'Fuck,' 'Shit,' 'Gorblimey,' and 'Dagnabbit' uttered in tones not deserving of an exclamation point. And on second thought, I wasn't in the least bit surprised that they weren't more panicked. I'd already heard on the news of several of these bendy buses' catching fire, and from what I'd gathered from these reports, a fire on a bendy bus was about as unusual an occurence as a riot as a ManCity-Arsenal game. So we lumber on for maybe another quarter of a mile, then pull over at this special bus stop, with an old brick shelter and a mini turnaround of its own, and everybody files out. The bus is smoking out its sides, but, again, nobody seems to feel they're in harm's way, that there's any danger that it'll blow up or anything like that. I turn to my mate the geezer and ask him what happens next. 'What happens next, youngling, is that we wait here for another bus to carry us to Arnos Grove station.' Great. So this here scenario was pretty much a replay of the one at Woodside, except that this time I went through twice as many fags and I had nothing to stroll around unless I felt like braving the traffic to get to the Wimpy's across the street (which I didn't). Eventually the second bus showed up, and fortunately it got us all the way to Arnos Grove without catching fire, and fortunately I got to the platform just in time to jump on a southbound train that was just pulling up. In the meantime I'd lost track of Squire Tweedledum, so I had to figure out on my own exactly how far down I should ride this train. As near as I could tell from screwing up my eyes at a tube map on the wall opposite me, Caledonian Road was my best bet. On the way, of course, we passed through the Arsenal stop; and naturally being a high priest of the church of all haters of the football club bearing the A-name, I crossed myself upside-down there. On resurfacing at CR, I tried to get my bearings vis-a-vis Cuntish Town and my doctor's office. But before I'd so much as taken stock of the name of the cross-street, I felt a faint and by no means unpleasant vibration on my co-jones. It was my mobile. 'Mr McGyver,' the politely stroppy female voice on the other end addressed me, 'Your appointment with Dr Singh was for 2:00 and it is now 3:30. I regret to inform you on his behalf that, in view of your flagrant unpunctuality, he will have to reschedule.' I take a deep breath, count to one, and remind myself that, whilst it's not my fault I'm late, it's not their fault either. Then I say, 'OK. When's the nearest available time?' 'Let's see...March the 25th, 9:15 am?' 'March the fucking 25th? Get Dr Singh himself on the blower, prontissimo.' 'At this moment, Dr Singh is very busy...' 'I don't care if at this moment he's performing a colonoscopy on the Queen herself. I want to talk to him.' 'Very well.' So, Dr Singh comes on and I say to him, 'What's all this about not being able to see me before March the 25th? Christ, I could be dead by then, for all you know.' 'Could be dead, you say?' he says to me, and already I don't quite like his tone. 'Could be dead by then, you say, of an....mmm [I guess he's riffling through, or pretending to riffle through, my chart here]....scrotal rash? I doubt that very much, sir.' And he starts outright giggling, like a little girl. And so I start to scream into the blower, 'Look here, Dr Singh, I lay out muchas isabelas for health care through my taxes, and I think the least that I'm entitled to expect from you lot is...' Here he breaks in and says, 'I'm sorry, Mr McGyver, but I must go. Duty calls. I'm at this moment performing a colonoscopic examination on a person of some eminence.' Then the phone went dead, and I walked over to the first pub I set my eyes on--some shite joint called the Flounder and Firkin, where I got stroppily tanked on a dozen pints of Kronenbourg (my fallback beer [they were out of Stella, and there could of course have been no question of my drinking this pub's speciality, that sickbed piss known as real ale]). I got out of there just barely in time to catch the last outbound Piccadilly train, and to Arnos Grove no less barely in time to catch the last bus to Woodside Park. How long did the trip take? Well, I'm afraid I didn't check the time at any point along the way. I do know, though, that I was sober as an imam by the time I got home. Anyway, the moral of this story is: Fuck Ken and Fuck the National Health Service. Fuck them both through the same Texas-porn-shop-appointed glory hole.

I'm Seeing Red, Ken

This song goes out to Ken Livingstone, and it goes a little something like this:

(Verse 1):

Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!

(Chorus):

Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!

(Verse 2):

Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!
Fuck Ken Livingstone!

(Repeat chorus ad naus.)

Yeah, I know I've posted the lyrics elsewhere before, but it's one of those songs you just never get tired of hearing, isn't it? Just when you think things in this city can't be bollocksed up any worse than they already are, Ken goes and gives you another excuse to shuffle off to bleeding Buffalo (or Sheffield in a pinch). Three fucking quid for a one-way, one-zone trip, for a trip from Goodge Street to Tottenham Court, or Edgware Road to Marylebone. Cor's Boars, I could walk from one of those stations to the other for free in 15 minutes. Does Ken actually expect me to cough up £3 for the fucking privilege of finishing the trip by tube in 20? Because that's how long it takes, surface to surface on a Sunday afternoon. Try timing it sometime. 'This fare rise will hopefully bring all riders round to seeing the advantages of the Oyster Card,' he drawls in that revoltingly smug, half-pleb, half-posh south-of-the-river accent of his. Like it's so fucking obvious what these advantages are. I'll tell you some advantages I'd like to have Mr Mayor. I'd like to have the advantage of taking the tenner in my pocket right now, breaking it to pay my £2.50 (sorry, £3) fare to West Finchley, then of using the balance to buy a takeaway CTM, or a pack of fags, or a couple of pints of Stella down at my local. I'd like to have the advantage of not having to waste an hour on a wash day sorting through my trouser pockets looking for that fucking card if I want to be sure I don't throw away the other £7. Above all I'd like to have the 25-odd pounds I've laid out on Oyster Cards over the past year in my hands now instead of taking up precious space in my wallet. I want to have absolutely free use of that money so that in case I'm hit by one of Ken's cursed bendy buses tonight whilst staggering home from the pub, I'll at least die knowing that those £25 went to a good cause--the cause of my intoxication--and not to pay for another one of Ken's dopey civic-improvement projects. The Oyster Card is great if 1) you don't own a car and b) you commute to and from central London every day. But it's like fucking Bristols on a mule for those of us who drive and come into central London 5, 10--at most 15--times a year. The problem with Ken is, he's never driven a car so he doesn't know firsthand the hassle and aggravation of being stuck behind a lorry spewing diesel exhaust in your face for 45 minutes while you circle round the Hanger Lane Gyratory (make that Stationary) at the speed of an hour hand on a clock; he doesn't know what it's like to lose a dinner reservation in Islington because you've wasted an hour looking for parking, or to finish up with no money to pay for your meal because you've been mugged twice on your way to the restaurant during your half-mile walk through the ropiest stretch of road in Camden Town. (car park, unlike congestion charge, isn't a dirty word, Ken). Because he doesn't know what any of this is like (and of course, because he's a fucking megalomaniac), as long as he's mayor, day-to-day existence will be a living hell for car-owning Londoners. Yeah, I'll say it again: Fuck Ken Livingstone. Fuck him and the poncey little bike he rode in on.