Basher's Delight: Part Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'By all means.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Yes?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I see you go for the continental look.’

‘Eh?’

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

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

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

‘Really?’

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

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

Basher's Delight: Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Err...well...'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Me either.'

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

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

*

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

'Er, no, I guess not.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The Reuben brothers.'

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

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

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

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

EXTRY! EXTRY! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

For a change, I actually have a bit of news to report to you lot. Last night, after a so-called dry spell lasting a full six months, I finally nabbed a full-on, certifiable date suitable for recording in the venerable annals of McGyver Bird-Pullage. Not that it led to anything promising, but really I shouldn't get ahead of myself here, or discount the intrinsic worthwhileness of the date, a worthwhileness ascribable to it on account of the fact that, in contrast to 98.3 per cent of my prospective assignations, it actually took place. I met the the female who, along with yours truly, was to be party to this event last Wednesday at lunchtime in the queue at the office teria, where we happened to find ourselves simultaneously negotiating the spearing of a certain especially truculent slab of pot roast. As neither of us would yield possession of this trophy to the other, we ended by bearing it jointly, with our two forks, to a plate that we likewise conveyed ensemble to the nearest unoccupied table, at which, from the mundane subject of how best to divvy up the spoils of the hunt, we digressed to such other, loftier topics as 'What will you be fancying for dessert?' and 'Who the fuck are you anyway?' and 'Where are you from?' Well, by the time the back-to-work whistle (i.e., the reminder alarms on our respective mobiles) blew, we had agreed to meet on Saturday for coffee or dinner or 'something like that'. In the meantime, I'd learnt her name (Sarah Slother), what part of the Kingdom she hailed from (nearby Hitchin, Herts., where she still resided), and her position in the company (Junior Editorial Associate for Public Relations). Now, I know full well that certain Puritan business-ethicists regard fraternisation (i.e. fuckage) between or amongst co-workers at a given organisation, be the organisation in question ever so gargantuan, as a cardinal sin; and in a spirit of deference verging on abject servility, I entreat each and every one of these Fordian Cromwells to quaff a hearty and frothy draught of jizzim from the Stella tap that is my King Dong. Although this woman, by her own account, had been employed at the company a full two months longer than I had, I had never set my optics on her. Her position placed her in a completely different branch of the company hierarchy from my own, and the task of determining which of us, in theory, was senior to the other was such as would have been worthy of only the most pathetically dedicated genealogy anorak. In short, there can be no question of the daemon of sexual harrassment's having reared its horny head in connection with the arrangement of this particular tryst. So, anyway, on the evening of the following day, Thursday, I give Sarah a ring and ask her what she has in mind for Saturday. She replies: 'I was thinking we might meet up for dinner...' (dinner rather than coffee or 'something like that'--that was promising) '...at this Kernevistani restaurant that I've heard good things about.' Christ on a schlong! I groan to myself, Another fucking ethnic cuisine I've never heard of. Aloud, I say, 'Oh, a Kernevistani restaurant. I've been meaning to make my way back down to Little Kernevistan for some time now. It's one of my favourite parts of town; you could call it my second home, in fact.' She either doesn't understand, or doesn't appreciate, my little joke: 'Actually, the restaurant's in Shoreditch. Do you think you'd be up for going there?' 'Oh, I'd be more than up for it: I'd be all about it.' In fact, if I'd had my druthers, we would have gone to Emchai or Curry Paradise (see my last post), or, straying slightly farther afield of my stomping grounds, Nid Ting in Archway. But from long and painful experience I knew better than to give these druthers of mine a proper airing; I knew that, to the contrary, in my capacity as a bloke, I had to keep them well under lock and key. If a bloke is to get beyond game one of the European Cup Final that is his so-called relationship with a given girl, he needs must feign ignorance on all matters that are--rightly or wrongly--held by so-called society to be feminine territory, and haut cuisine is just one of many such areas. Unless he's a professional chef, a bloke who asks a girl he's just met out to his favourite restaurant is just priming himself at the kick-off for a final score of nil. The restaurant in question may be the poshest, most girl-friendly eatery within a five-postal-code radius, and that'll count for zip in the eyes of the female in question, who'll somehow contrive to picture it as the seediest, blokiest dive east of Detroit or north of Alice Springs. It's sort of our era's version of the Don Quixote syndrome, you see, but turned upside-down, in two or more dimensions. Well, anyway, having resigned myself to gobbing it Kernevistani-style on Saturday, I thought I might as well scout out the lie of the land as best I could, and so, as soon as I was off the blower with Sarah, I jumped on to the Time Out website--that is, the Dining Out part of the website--and did a quick nergle of the word 'Kernevistani,' which turned up the following entry:


Bosty Drog
17 Hoxton Market
N1 6HG
Shoreditch
020 7793 8221

London's first--and so far, only--Kernevistani restaurant and Shoreditch's best-kept culinary secret. Chef Kadan Korin whips up a mabyar kernewek with rosemary and garlic that's TDAHYCDAQAF (To Die And Have Your Corpse Drawn And Quartered Afterwards For). And don't forget to save some room for a dollop or two of the déhen rew, arguably the most delectable dish in Kernevistan's cornucopcic and criminally underrated national cuisine.


No surprises here, just the usual largely uninfomative hyperbolic backwash of foodcritickese. Well, I'd done my best, intelligence-wise; all I could do now otherwise was to make sure to stow an extra-large bottle of milk of magnesium in the glove compartment of the Mazda (I read 'best-kept culinary secret,' you see, as code for 'sanitation scandal in the making'--it was the only useful bit in the whole capsule). Oh, yeah, while I'm on the subject of the Mazda, I guess I might as well crack open another parenthesis--as I crack open my fourth Stella of the evening--and explain that, during the above-quoted conversation, I had agreed to drive us to the restaurant. Once again, if I'd had my druthers, we would have tubed the trip, as the Drog is sited but a brisk ten-minutes' walk from the Old Street tube station, and that station is a straight shot down the Northern Line from Woodside Park. But Sarah, being a Hertfordshire girl born, bred, and braised, was skittish about riding on the tube, somewhat understandably on account of what went down on 7/7, somewhat less understandably on account of her fear that we might be mugged along the way. I could have explained to her that the odds of our being mugged on the tube were far smaller than our odds of being mugged during our foot-trek from the car to the restaurant, given that any parking space we'd be lucky enough to land would almost certainly be much farther from the restaurant than the tube station was; but, again, for reasons not widely diverging in character from the ones cited above in connection with the choice of venue, I held my piss.

So, just after dusk of the big day, such as it was, I did the old four esses and donned my shorts, string vest, best slacks and button-up, etc., stepping into my Skechers just as the doorbell rang, announcing Sarah's arrival. As we've got a 7:30 reservation and it's coming on to a quarter of seven, I don't invite her in for a spritzer or any other sort of pre-aperatif, as I might have done if we'd had more time, but instead simply close the front door behind me and point to the Mazda--which is parked directly out front--with a sweeping, Z-Z-Top-esque 'Après vous'-type gesture. The drive into town was relatively painless, what with traffic being unusually light by London-nightlife-rush-hour standards. The only real snag was presented by a double-parked lorry at the junction of the East Finchley High Road and Fortis Green, which slowed us down to a sub-pedestrian speed for about ten minutes as we waited for the sub-competent sub-cunts ahead of us to merge into the adjoining lane. If only the conversation had been as unharrowing as the drive. Alas, before we'd even made it to the end of Woodside Avenue, Sarah was subjecting me to the old third-degree. She starts by asking me, 'So what was it that got you interested in pursuing a career in the medical supplies industry in the first place?' which, I don't mind telling you, is just the sort of question to send my fingers scurrying for my top shirt button. I went to university to be an accountant, you see, and as a newly-certified accountant, I simply took the best accountancy job I could find at the first go-round, which job simply happened to be the one I presently hold, as junior accounts receivable associate at Proctologitex, Ltd. If that job had happened to be junior accounts receivable associate at Phocicidex, Ltd, manufacturers of the clubs used for drubbing to death baby seals, I would just as cheerfully have gone to work for Phocicidex, Ltd. The so-called corporate mission of whoever I happen to be working for, you see, is of absolutely no interest to me; and I suspect that all professional accountants feel the same way about the so-called corporate missions of their respective employers. Sarah, on the other hand, as I've already said, works in public relations, in which field it is apparently part of the culture, as they say, both on the clock and off, to pretend you actually give a rancid Arsenal goalkeeper's schphincter about your bosses' ratoinale for their particular line of pound, dollar, and euro-hoovering. And so, naturally (but not in the least understandably), she's a bit put off when I tell her, in five or fewer minutes, more or less all of what I've just told you, gentle reader, about my reasons for working at Proctologitex. Fortunately, I manage to keep the conversation from lapsing into a so-called awkward silence by turning the tables on her, as they say, by asking her what it was that got her so enthused about working in the medical supplies industry, and at Proctologitex specifically, etc.; and her reply to this question keeps her jaw and my ear busy for the remainder of the trip. The gist of her rationale was that ever since she was a wee lass she'd always wanted to help people, and that she could think of nothing more fundamentally helpful to people than proctological technology, and the spreading of the good word thereabout. It sounded like absolute bollocks to me, but then who was I to judge (at least openly)? Anyway, all the while she's jawing, I every now and then, mainly when we're idling at stop lights, get a decent gander at her face from the side, and I can't help finding it a lot less appealing in profile than I found it straight-on the other day. I notice that she's got what I call a classic shark's profile, with a pointy nose and a sharply receding chin, a profile I've never been much of a fan of; not but that any female phiz might not eventually grow on you. The way things were going, though, I doubted this one ever would do.

Parking was a breeze--I snagged a spot on a side street only a couple of hundred metres farther up Old Street than the the tube station itself--and thus, so was the walk to the restaurant. The whole way, I felt as though a 20-stone bloke in a gorilla costume, the personification of stroppiness, had just been helicopter-lifted off my shoulders. Of course, from door to door we had to run a well-staffed gauntlet of junkies, hippies, prostitutes, and assorted other demimondial layabouts, but that hardly sufficed to dampen my spirits (although Sarah seemed a bit fazed by the process), because I'd expected as much in the vicinity of Hoxton, which I knew at firsthand to be one of the dodgier corners of Whoreditch. 'It's at moments like this one,' I mused aloud, 'that you wonder if maybe old Ken Livingstone isn't such a monster after all.' Sarah said she didn't know that he was supposed to be a monster in the first place. Well, there's your fucking Home Counties hothouse flowers for you, I said to myself.

Luckily, the spirit of the evening started to head cooperatively back downhill once we got to the restaurant. First, we learned from the hostess that because we'd shown up two (!) minutes after the time of our reservation, we'd lost our table, and that there'd be a '37-to-54 minute wait' for another one. Ordinarily, in such a situation, I'd have adjourned to the bar, but it turned out that there was no bar up in this piece, and so we had to spend all 58 (!) minutes of the interval shivering in a particularly draughty spot right up against the front door, deprived of the consolation of alcohol. And I certainly could have done with a few pints of Stella (Cor, I would have settled for Miller Light!) by way of fortification against the Slotherian monologic avalanche that I had unwittingly touched off a half-an-hour earlier in the car, and whose progress, presumably, had been only momentarily by checked during our walk by the ambient ropiness of the street scene. She was a veritable dynamo of terminally tedious personal anecdotage centring on such singularly uninspired topics as her dad's lumbago, her mum's bridge club, and her academic itinerary at the execrable University of Luton (or Loserton, as it's known to us East Anglia alumns). More than once towards the end of this so-called conversation, I have to confess, I caught myself tugging at my belt and panning my eyes round the ceiling in search of a rafter that might be sturdy enough to bear the weight of my 10-stone carcass.

Well, eventually, as I've already intimated, they did show us to a table, and during another unconscionably long interval between our being seated and the arrival of our waiter, I had plenty of opportunity for scoping out the place and sizing it up. What struck you immediately was the outlandishness of the costumes of the staff: the blokes were all dressed in these long, flowing gowns with headdresses, exactly like the togs of Arab sheiks, but powder-blue coloured rather than white; whilst the girls wore white silk blouses on top and on bottom, kiltish-looking skirts woven or dyed in this peculiar plaid of dark blue cross-hatched with a shade of off-yellow or chartreuse that made me glad I wasn't an epileptic. As for the architectural layout of the place--well it was impossible to guess from it what part of the world these Kernevistanis hailed from. On the one hand, you might have plausibly called it modern Scandinavian, on the other, you might have just as plausibly called it classic Polynesian. From front to back, and from floor to ceiling, the walls were panelled in horizontally-orientated black wooden beams each about a handspan wide, and the tables and even the benches flanking the tables were made of the same materials. The decor was nonexistent--there were none of the usual gegaws, knick-knacks or trinkets that in such places at least allow you to pin down the geography of the ethnic eponym to a specific continent; Christ, there weren't even any shelves to put such gegaws, knick-knacks or trinkets on, if any had been in the offing. The only remotely ornamental thing in the whole place was what I took to be a map, a four-or-five-square-metre tapestry tacked to the wall opposite us, and simply depicting, in stark black silhouette, a single landmass which I took to be Kernevistan, surmounted by what I took to be the word 'Kernevistan' printed in the fearsome characters of some alphabet I had never seen before, that might have been Armenian or Gallifreyan for all I knew. I couldn't identify the landmass with any country I'd ever seen before, although I did have the uncanny sense that I had seen it before. When you used your imagination, it looked rather like the gnarly arm and hand of some randy old geezer reaching leftwards and downwards to grope the melons of some hapless young maiden. When you didn't use your imagination, of course, it looked more or less like what all satellite's-eye views of all landmasses look like, namely, a stubby, two-dimensional turd.

So, the waiter (i.e., one of the blokes) finally came round, and I ordered a Stella--which I was delighted to see they actually had--and Sarah said she'd 'stick with water' (not a good sign); then I took a look at the menu. It was as I'd suspected: no starter under 15 quid, no main course under 30. Time to submit yet again to the depredations of the old culinary wallet hoover. What was worse, and what I hadn't expected, was that the only parts of the menu printed in Roman characters were the names of the dishes; the descriptions were all in the same Armenian or Gallifreyan script that appeared on the map. For the first--and essentially the last--time that evening I feel a sense of a genuine connection between Sarah and myself; because, you see, to my astonishment, she doesn't know how to read Kernevistani either.

'What are you thinking of having?' I ask her tentatively.

'Well, the mabyar kernewek seems a pretty safe bet.'

'Right. After all, Time Out did say that it was TDAN...'

'TDAHYCDAQAF.'

'Right. Well, I guess I'll have that as well.'

'So then, it's mabyar kernewek for two.' She laughs slightly through a smile that, in spite of all that's preceded it, I can't help but be charmed by, or but laugh and smile back at in my turn. There was a bit of gratitude mixed into that laugh and smile too, I have to admit--gratitude directed less towards her and more towards my lucky Stellas for not having put it into her head to mention starters.

Anyway, at this point, I thought I’d take advantage of the window of good feeling to divulge to her all of my aforementioned disenchantment with the furnishings, décor, etc., but to my chagrin she was not at all of my mind on this subject; to the contrary, the human and inhuman geography of the Drog were, in toto, in her words, ‘simply enchanting.’ The inauguration of a full-fledged sulkfest on my end was staved off only by the timely return of the waiter to take our orders for the main course, and subsequently, by my excusing myself for a pee break (that first bottle of Stella having by then wended its way through my kidneys to my bladder). As I was emerging thereafter from the gents, my eye happened to alight on this one sheik who, in contrast to the rest of the staff, who were all scurrying purposively from one corner of the restaurant to the other with or without trays of food, was sort of sauntering casually plumb ahead as slowly as could be, with his hands folded behind his back; and every now and then he would turn his head equally casually and slowly in one direction or the other as if contemplatively yet interestedly taking in every micrometre of his surroundings. From these details of his carriage, I immediately sussed out that this bloke had to be the owner of the restaurant, and in his unlooked-for apparition I saw an opportunity of getting some questions answered that I never would have dared ask back at the table, in Sarah’s presence. And so, seizing hold fast of this opportunity, and cutting what was, if I do say so myself, a masterly swath through the sea of powder blue and epileptoplaid, I marched straight up to him and introduced myself point-blank, and by name, as one of his customers.

‘Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr McGyver,’ he replied, offering me his hand. 'Kadan Korin, head chef and sole proprietor of Bosty Drog. I hope everything has so far been to your satisfaction this evening.’ His accent was smooth, urbane, and mainline posh; with nothing foreign-sounding about it.

‘It’s been perfect.’ (How, I’ll bet you’re now asking me, could you have said that everything was perfect, given that you hadn’t had a single bite to eat yet? Don’t be so quick to call bullshit on me, Mr or Miss Smarty-Knickers. When was the last time you had a skunk-free bottle of Stella at a restaurant in Shoreditch?) ‘All the same, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.’ As I was speaking this last sentence, I realised it made me come off sounding like a representative of the Law (in this case, by default, the Health Department), and in the cheesiest possible cop-drama-ish way, too; and with the dawning of that realisation I started to worry that old KK would clam up on me, but he did nothing of the kind. Indeed, he was the very picture of accommodation, as he answered with consummately posh unflappability:

‘Not at all.’

‘Well, first off, er,' I went on, haltingly (as nothing flaps a flapper more efficiently than unflappability itself), 'As I’m something of a newcomer to, ahem, Kernevistani cuisine, I was wondering, vis-à-vis the mabyar kernewek, what its ah…’

‘What the base of the dish is?’

‘In a nutshell, yes.’

‘Chicken. A special breed of the bird directly imported from Kernevistan.’

‘Ah, I see. Excellent.’ (Well, yes, that certainly was excellent. All along, I’d been worried that it would turn out to be a puree of yak’s bollocks, or something equally unsavoury.) ‘And next, I was wondering, vis-à-vis Kernevistan itself, what its, er, precise geographical coordinates were.’

‘Kernevistan is sited on the far, far western frontier of Europe. In all candour, I must tell you that, although the Kernevistanis are a proudly ancient people, with a language and cultural heritage that outstrip those of virtually every other European nationality in point of antiquity, Kernevistan itself, strictly speaking, as a country, with internationally recognized borders and a centralized state, does not, at present, exist.’

‘I see. So, I take it there’s some sort of armed Kernevistani insurgency, funded by Washington or Tehran, that’s due to triumph over its imperial oppressors any day now?’

‘No, not as such.’ Here his phiz took on a troubled, and dare I say it, even a brooding aspect; and, touching me lightly on the sleeve, he motioned me to follow him to a nearby table, the only unoccupied one in the joint by my reckoning.

‘It can scarcely come as a surprise to you, Mr McGyver’ he resumed, in a confidential undertone, once we were seated, ‘that ethnic restaurateuring in London is a punishingly competitive line of work to be in. It’s never been easy for us in this town.’

‘By “us,” I assume you mean “us Kernevistanis”.’

‘No, I mean “us ethnic restaurateurs.” The Italian restaurant is a peculiarly British institution. So wrote Joseph Conrad nearly a hundred years ago. My father, owner of Luna di Parma, one of the finest and most successful Italian trattorie in Islington of the 50s, used sardonically to quote that text every Saturday evening, as he wearily tallied the revenues of the house for the preceding week. Beginning round about 1960, practically without fail, each week's take was smaller than the one before it. He tried to cut corners, of course, as best he could, but by 1971, after he'd been 20 years in the business, there were no more corners to cut: he was obliged to shut up shop and put his family on the dole. It was so...humiliating for all of us...so...' Here he trailed off and pressed a thumb and forefinger to his eyes, being obviously more than a little verstimmt.

'Look, Mr Korin,' I broke in on this mini sob-fest as gently as I could manage, by now worrying less that I would come off sounding like a cop and more that I would come off sounding like Barnet's contender at the next all-England Mr Insensitive Cunt Pageant, 'I'm heartily sorry about what happened to your dad, but I've got someone waiting for me at my table, and I really shouldn't dawdle much longer. Can you please come to the point, the point I thought you were going to make about your affiliation with this place, with Bosty Drog?'

'Yes, of course,' he said, collecting himself and reaching for the napkin at the nearest setting in lieu of a hanky. 'I'm sorry. My point is this: Londoners have always been an insufferably spoilt and jaded lot as far as ethnic cuisine goes, and over the past two decades, their spoiltness and jadedness on this score have been progressing geometrically. As evidence of this tendency, witness my own career in the so-called hospitality industry: my first venture in the family biz, back in 1980, was a small Thai restaurant in Soho. I settled on Thai not because I thought it was particularly trendy, but because I liked the food and had got quite good at preparing it during an apprenticeship year I'd spent at a restaurant in Bangkok. I managed to keep my doors open for about ten years--quite a respectable run, by any standard. In the first half of that decade, which happened to correspond to a period when Thai food was still something of an unknown quantity in London, I made a good bit of money; in the second half, I lost it all and then some.

'At first, I proved much more resilient in the face of failure than my father before me; more resilient and also more prescient--or so I thought at the time. It had been unreasonable of me, I told myself, to expect to turn a profit purveying Thai food, based on the excellence of my kitchen alone, in an era when Thai food had become practically as common as Szechuan Chinese. If I'd had any business smarts, I told myself, I would have shut up shop the moment my first competitor within walking distance had appeared on the scene. I resolved that my next venture would centre around an altogether more obscure ethnic cuisine that would prove more resistant to the vagaries of the market; and so I opened an Ethiopian restaurant. That survived for about five years, and was followed by a Malaysian restaurant, which lasted a mere three. You see what was happening here: the more assiduously I sought to carve out ever-more-obscure culinary ethnic niches, the more briefly I was succeeding in staying ahead of the curve, so to speak, of Londoners' appetite for the new and the exotic.

'When my last genuine ethnic-culinary enterprise, a Malian so-called bistro at King's Cross, went belly-up a day or two shy of its first anniversary, old as I was, I seriously thought about getting out of the business altogether, of going back to university to study for accountancy [!] or some other more stable profession. And so I undoubtedly would have done, if I hadn't been graced, at the last possible moment, by an insight into the absolute futility of the whole cursus I had been pursuing for nearly a quarter of a century, and into the possibility of casting a saving throw that might just allow me to keep my hand in the game without failing yet again on an even more colossal scale, within an even more temporally-straitened horizon. I suddenly realised that in London, statistically speaking, no ethnic restaurant will ever succeed in the long run as long as, at the time of its opening, there is at least one Londoner who has heard of the country or ethnicity for which it purports to be the culinary standard-bearer. If they've heard of the place you hail from, I realised, they can copy you, and once you're no longer the only game in town, you're as good as finished. And from this revelation it was an easy step to the corollary revelation that the only foolproof means of rendering yourself inimitable in the world of ethnic restaurateuring was to set up shop as the purveyor of a cuisine hailing from a nation or a country that did not yet exist.'

'You mean,' I interjected here, 'by preparing and vending the grub of a fictional country--a version of Ruritania?'

'No, no, no, not at all. You misunderstand me. A country that does not yet exist is not at all the same thing as a fictional country. If I invent a country--my own version of Ruritania, as you've just so aptly put it--I transparently set myself up as a fraud, whereas if I posit the existence of a country that may yet come into being, I retain the semblance of authenticity. Hence, according to the second rationale, Kernevistan, hence, six months ago come Monday, the grand opening of Bosty Drog. Oh, I freely admit it's not particularly likely that Kernivstan will ever exist, but I also adamantly insist that it's not absolutely out of the question that it will exist someday. Picture to yourself the following scenario: an Islamic victory in the so-called war on terrorism, leading eventually to the establishment of a benevolent sultanate à la the former Ottoman Empire, with Europe studded from the Urals to the Atlantic by a succession of nominally autonomous Stans, granted to every two-bit self-styled sometime nation as a sop to European pride. It's not, I say again, absolutely out of the question, that such a scenario should prevail, or that Kernevistan should thereby come into its own.'

I have to say I'd rather lost the thread of his argument round about the time he stopped talking about why he'd failed with these earlier joints and started to explain how he'd come up with the idea of opening this one. My allusion to Ruritania had amounted to my last stab at registering comprehension. By now it had dawned on me that he had taken far longer to get to his point than he had earlier taken to digress from it, and that if I was to hold on to the remotest hope of saving this night-out from foundering on the shoals of cold-shoulder-dom, I had best wrap up my convo with Mr Korin here and now, by the most expeditious means possible. And so, rising from the table, I said to him:

'Well, whatever the rationale behind your establishment of the place, I have to say, it appears to be succeeding swimmingly. Congratulations.'

'Thank you. I'm afraid, though, that I am not so sanguine. It was just so, on the surface, at all of my previous ventures, at this point in their life-spans. I'm afraid you've caught me at a bad moment, Mr McGyver. You see, earlier this evening, I was graced by yet another insight--namely, that the very mainsprings of human nature that are attested to so eloquently by the present success of Bosty Drog testify equally eloquently, and by way of this selfsame success, to its imminent failure. I realised tonight, you see, that the same impulse that would lead a person to seek out a restaurant serving up food from a country he has never heard of is exactly consubstantive with the impulse to start up another restaurant serving up food hailing from this same as-yet non-existent country. I realised tonight that, among Londoners--and among people in general--the thirst for the new and the exotic is trumped only by their craven incapacity for admitting that the emperor has no clothes.'

And here he gave one of those high-pitched, hysterical titters that instantly clue you in to the fact that the titterer is missing a few chairs from his front room; and after that, he pressed his fingers to his eyes as before. Given that he now appeared to be, as they say, lost in a world of his own, I gathered I was within the bounds of decorum to take French leave of him, and so I did with all speed (not, though without first giving him a perfunctory 'cheer-up-mate' chuck on the shoulder), returning to the table just in time to catch Sarah making what was obviously not her first incision into her serving of mabyar kernewek. Although I had kept her waiting several times longer than a trip to the gents would have warranted, I still thought it a bit rude of her to have started eating without me, but I let it slide.

'Well, you certainly took your sweet time,' she says, her fork poised half an inch from her mouth.

'Sorry, love. Just having a bit of a chinwag with the owner, Chef Korin himself. The man's absolutely barmy. How's the old MK treating you?'

She thrusts the fork into her mouth, closes her eyes, and, as she's chewing, theatrically flutters the lids of the latter, before replying, a full minute after the posing of my question, in this likewise theatrically hoarse near-whisper, 'Let's just say the description in Time Out was an understatement.'

'Wonderful,' I rejoin gamely. 'I can hardly wait to tuck it into it myself.' I glance down at my plate, which supports a whole chicken small enough to rest comfortably--if it were alive--in the palm of your hand, flecked here and there with bits of green and white that I, not unreasonably, take to be chunklets of the promised rosemary and garlic. So, I cut into the bird, and spear a forkful of its flesh, which I then insert into my salivating maw; and as the flavour and aroma of that first gobful of mabyar kernewek cascades across my palate, it sets off a cluster of associations worthy of the writings of that asthmatic French geezer who lived in a cork-lined room and never went outside: Rosemary and garlic, my mum's recipe for...miniaturised chickens...an ancient language...the far, far western frontier of Europe...the shape of the landmass on the map...kilts...sheiks' gowns (?)...a celebrated dessert from a criminally underrated national cuisine... And subsequently this cluster of associations converges on an emotive focal point of outrage, and, throwing my fork down, I leap to my feet and exclaim:

'Don't you see what this is all about, Sarah? The mabyar kernewek is a cornish hen! The dehen rew is cornish ice cream! And Kernevistan--it's Cornwall! Kernevistan is Cornwall, I tell you, it's Cornwall, don't you get it? And this here restaurant, Bosty Drog, is a fucking dishonest-to-badness Cornish restaurant!'

'What on earth are you talking about?' she barks back at me, visibly stropped. 'And will you please sit down? You're making a pair of spectacles out of us. I don't know how I got it into my head that it'd be worthwhile to come here with you. You provincial types are all the same; none of you appreciate the finer things in life. I once went with a guy, a Norweegian like yourself, who was exactly the same way; I couldn't take him anywhere without causing a scene.'

'Look, Missy,' I retorted. 'The correct pronunciation is Norridgian! For the fucking love of fuck, does my accent really suggest to you that my native tongue is the language of Ibsen? And anyway, it's got fuck all to do with my being from Norwich, you...you council house trollope! It's got fuck all to do with me at all, in fact. This place is the naffest, the ersatziest thing to hit London since Jerry Springer: The Opera, and you know it. You know it as well, as I do, and you'd admit it, too, if you weren't such a rubbishy trend-fucker...'

I cut my tirade short when I notice that my listener's attitude has suddenly done a complete yooey--that from being stropped to the gills, she's suddenly gone to being abashedly amused; that she's put her fork down and is now stifling a giggle with the palm of her right hand. And as a bloke will do when he catches a girl looking at him like he has two schlongs, I did a spot-check of my personal premises to see if anything of the kind was amiss. And lo and behold, from the base of my throat to the waistline of my trousers, in place of the immaculately smooth, white, broadcloth expanse of overshirt that I'd expected to find there, I saw instead an undulating, string-vest-scrimmed expanse of pink, hairy, manflesh. Well, this was a first for me: a totally reflexive, unconscious access of shirtiness. So transported had I just now been by the manifest unconscionability of the whole situation, that my fingers had got to work on my shirt buttons without waiting for my mind to catch up with them.

Right, then, YFC, I say to myself then. Adopt, adapt, and improve. Can't very well take back that 'council-house-trollope' slur in any case, can we? And so, first, grabbing my fork, I plunge it straight up the arsehole of my so-called mabyar, leaving the latter for the moment on the plate; and next I reach in to my pocket and pull out my wallet and fish out a tenner and a twenty, and chuck them on the table in Sarah's general direction. 'That,' I say to her, 'should cover the cost of my meal, and this,' I say, throwing another two ventis after them, 'should cover the cost of your cab fare to Barnet (please don't hesitate to call me if you've forgotten the exact address), and this,' I say, adding a fiver to the whole pile, 'should cover the cost of the fork I'm about to abscond with. Good night, Miss Slother; I'm off.' And so, with cornish hen lolly in hand, I exit the premises, without giving her so much as a nanosecond to put in her next tuppence's worth. Always best to leave 'em wanting more, as some git Yank stand-up comedian once said.

Out on the pavement, I felt a strange feeling of elation--the gorilla-costumed bloke failed to re-descend on to my shoulders, and the just-cold-enough night air felt bracingly pleasant against my nipples. And the cornish hen, which I devoured the better part of before reaching the second cross-street, while clearly not up to my mum's standards, was quite scrumptious--easily the best one I'd had since moving to the capital. At one point, when I was about mid-way to the car, a rasta bloke, leaning against the outer wall of a curry stand, and obviously stoned or pheened out of his gourd, shouted out to me, 'Look who it is--it's Jerry Stringer!' I wanted to rejoin something equally caustic, but there was nothing doing, as I'd expended all of my shirtiness power-points back at the restaurant. The McGyver shirt can come unbuttoned only once in an evening, after which point I have to retire to home base to recharge; in this regard I'm much like Ultraman. On the whole, in any case, I was inclined to see the rasta bloke's accosting of me more as an omen than as a challenge: two Jerry Springer references inside of a quarter of an hour certainly didn't bode well. And so, when I got back to the Mazda I was hardly surprised--shocked, yes, but hardly surprised--to find that the driver's-side window had been smashed in. There was nothing missing from the interior of the car--in fact, the culprit had left a ten-pound note on the seat. Whodathunkit? A conscientious junkie. But, of course, this charitable thought was quickly pushed to the background by a host of more disheartening, and quite frankly, infuriating, positively maddening, thoughts. I could have stayed at home, watching my Tivo replay of the Tottenham-Arsenal game, I said to myself, as I brushed the seat clean of glass fragments with a yellowed ancient copy of the Observer. Instead, I've just wasted three hours of my life in the company of a woman I positively detest, in a place I detested every bit as much, at a cost of upwards of 50 pounds; and, collaterally, got myself another 300 pounds in the hole for repairs on my car. There was, I realized, only one person on this earth at whose doorstep the blame could be laid for the litany of injuries I had suffered tonight. But as I sat parked there in the driver's seat with the hands of my hands pressed to my throbbing temples, I was astonished as the next bloke would have been to feel the name of this selfsame blameworthy individual coursing upwards from my gut and out through my larynx; and afterwards to hear that single protracted monosyllable--
K-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-N!---resonating within the cab of the Mazda at near dog-whistle pitch and smoke-detector volume; and finally to hear the tintinnabulatory bruit of the other, passenger's side window, shattering, from the force of my voice alone, into a million tiny shards. Make that 600 pounds, I said to myself as I revved up the engine and pulled out on to the street. And so, back to Woodside Park, and--after an obligatory nightcap of five bottles of Stella--to bed.