Post Baggage

I suppose it's only fitting--nay, well-nigh obligatory--for me to remark, as I launch into this here post, that it at once sets and closes out a record in the five-month-con-cambio-long history of The Angry Londoner; by which I meantersay it sets a right bookend alongside an unprecedented two-month-spanning period of blogospheric silence on my end. Not that I mean, in so remarking, to tender any kind of apology for my late close-fingeredness (for Fannie Adams alone knows who I'd be apologising to); it's just that, in view of the sheer bulk of maisonette-bound, arse-cheek-numbing chrono-hoovering necessitated by my previous posts, this disinclination to blog in and of itself constitutes something of a story worthy of a banner-headlined, front-page news article in the Mcgyverer Allgemeine Zeitung. And the thing is, the newsworthiness of this self-same story only increases with every stab I take at bashing out the copy of the article; each time I get as far as 'A high-ranking McGyver Maisonette official, who asked not to be named, attributed the delay in bloggage to...' and then tear the paper out of the typewriter and start all over again a day, two days, sometimes even a week later. It's not that there aren't scads of perfectly plausible explanations, any one of which would probably pass mustard as the explanation in the okies of the hypothetical otherbloke who gave an art's razz whether I blogged or died, but merely that none of them passes mustard as such in my own okies. Earlier today, though, I recalled that a certain uxoricidal Frog commie philosopher, a smattering of whose writings had been forced on me by one of my UEA lit profs, had a word for the SOA that eventuates in these sorts of explanatory imp-arses; he dubbed it overdetermination. In lowfalutin terms, what overdetermination amounts to is this: if a cow farts in your face whilst you're milking her, there's no point in trying to suss out after the fact whether it was the hay she ate earlier that morning, or the thorough rogering she got from your stud bull the night before, or indeed your own all-too-indelicate handling of her tetons that caused the aforesaid noxious gaseous discharge. You just have to lump it and realise that it was all of these things, and, at the same time, none of them, that precipitated the fart, which thus may be described as an overdetermined event. As far as actually explaining fuck all goes, of course, this notion of overdetermination is about as useful as a Heinz Salad Cream coupon in a Stateside Safeway's, but at least in terms of philosophical pedigree it beats my usual 'Fuck me with schlong-shaped object X if I know' hands down. And even more important than that, if I hadn't recollected it this morning, I very probably wouldn't be typing this here post atcha tonight. Talk about your undertermined events...

'On this here overdetermination tommyrot,' the nonexistent reader nudges me.

'Yes?'

'Would counsel care to approach the bench and explain its relevance to the price of chee in China?'

'Ah, yes, M'lud. M'lud was referring, I take it, to potential alibis for my client's blogger's block.'

'Even so, counsel. Please proceed.'

'Thank you, M'lud. I proceed thus:'

Vis-a-vis my own late diggital impotence, I'd say that the overdetermining analogues to the hay, the rogering and the rough-milking are, respectively, as follows. In the first place, writing up the account of my Christmas sojourn in East Anglia rather soured me on the notion of my day-to-day life as a subject of reflection and remembrance. The hypothetical reader may recall that I started out this here blog philosophically rather ill-disposed towards this very notion; and he may also have subsequently remarked that by and by, in spite of my initial prejudices, I rather warmed to the putting of the notion into practice. Well, by the time I reached the end of that last rather lengthy four-poster, I had come full circle to the philosophical GO! square on the Monopoly (or Chavopoly) board. That whole blow-by-blow, soup-to-nuts recunting of my holiday adventures started out pleasantly enough, but by the end of it I felt a bit like that Biblical bloke making a beeline out of the flaming remnants of Buggerville--minus the salinisable wifey in tow to lend at least a soup's son of metaphysical heft to the whole ordeal. In other words, I felt as though the irredeemable shittiness and outright pointlessness of my holiday experiences in culo had just been driven home to me because and only because I had been so gormless as to suppose they might be worthy any destination other than that of the Ruggerian mental wastebin. Wellsir, on top of that, within a week of my return to London and bidness as usual at Proctologitex, as if by way of punishment for my cuntish fabrication of a scenario along those very lines in service of my own cuntishly petty ends, a massively devastating explosion rocked P-Tex's factory out in Stevenage. No one was hurt, but the blast blew a hole the size of Wembley Stadium clear on through the roof, and destroyed tens of millions of pounds worth of inventory into the bargain. The final report from the insurer's investigation just came in last week: they think what happened was that one of the blokes from the floor stepped outside for a smoke, and that, on account of the fact that he was standing flush against the back wall of the building--i.e., several cunt-hair's-breadths within the no-smoking zone--a spark from his cigarette was sucked into the ventilation system and thereby brought into contact with the pure-oxygen atmosphere of the cooling room, where the newly-manfactured examination gloves, tampons, etc. are allowed to rest for a spell in the open air before they're packaged. Of course, as there were no injuries, I was not, as in my counterfactual version of the event, conscripted for factory work. In hindsight I rather wish I had been. You see, what with all of the fiscal calculations necessitated by the purchase of new materials subsequent to the disaster, the accounts payable people were absolutely swamped with work, and I was obliged to take up the slack on my end; such that every one of my formerly several-hundred-strong wanking and snoozing minutes was now completely consumed by report-running and spreadsheet-updating, and that, right on through to the beginning of the present week, I would arrive back at the maisonette well and truly knackered, with just enough energy to crack open a single Hoegaarden, park my arsecheeks on the futon and flick on the telly. But at least as far as recent weeks are concerned, if I were asked to pin my blogger's block to one particular cause, if someone were holding the proverbial schlong-shaped jizzim pistol to my head and ordering me: Press Button A, B or C or your hair is nair'd, I'd have to go with Button C, namely, Aresnal's late entry into the run for the European Championship. How, I ask you, if there were any justice in this world, would this tatty pack of cuntinental swashbucklers have been suffered to slip through the elimination rounds like an armadillo-sized rat through a cunt-hair-wide gap in the floorboards, to emerge at the other end transmogrified into England's last best hope in ought-six, a veritable batallion of Winston Churchills decked out in the armour of St. George--and this at the very moment when they were only just beginnning to get their long-overdue comeuppance at home? People are always going on about these cataclysmic events--the Holocaust, 11/9, the Boxing Day Tsunami--that make them question whether an essentially benevolent God is calling the shots up there and down here. Well, the reader already knows with what gusto I am capable of besmirching the butcher's-half-dozen squares of printed loo paper comprising this very question; he knows what manner of cuntishly depraved demiurgal bookie has rigged the whole cosmic schlongfight in my okies. All the same, I have never quite managed to let go my grip on what you might call the negative cosmological hope that if only and for once in my adult life Arsenal would finish the season closer to the bottom of the heap than to the top, things might turn out to be not so bad after all in the long run. All along, a culo, it's been this hope that's impelled me to shift my arse cheeks out of bed and up the GNR each weekday morning in loo of lying there for days on end waiting for the white-coated blokes with the butterfly nets to turn up at the front door--and a fortiori, in the evenings, to devote myself to such less spiritually corrosive pursuits as this here blog. But now that the Gunners are the sole UK team in the running for the European Championship, that hope has precipitously dropped down to just-barely infernal levels. Granted, depending on the outcome of the showdown with Juventus on the 28th, the hope-o-meter could spike up as high as the purgatorial reading before the end of the month, in which case I suspect you'll be hearing from YFC's truly quite a bit more often than of late. On the other hand, in a worst-case scenario in which Arsenal (Hoegaarden forbid!) win the Championship, come 17 May, the whole hope-sprung mechanism could blow itself to pieces, in which case, most likely, the sole question I'll be capable of posing to myself for the indefinite future will be, Out of which side of my tranquiliser-slackened gob am I going to drool today?

On a lighter note, I thought that as long as I had the editing window open, I might as well include in the present post an open letter--only the second I've received to date--that arrived in my personal inbox towards the end of last month. The author of the following appears to have made a much more thorough exploration of the AL than that undertaken by my correspondent of last December, Mrs Trippett-Jones--sorry, Ashby-Jones (keeping up with all the Joneses in my lifeworld has certainly got to be a bit of a pain in the co-jones). Indeed, to judge by the sheer breadth of reference of his letter, he seems to have pored over every word publicly composited herein since opening day last September; which implication, I must admit, doesn't quite give my desperate spirits the lift they've been craving. For, not to look a readerly gift-horse in the mouth, as off-putting as the thought that I might be typing into a void undoubtedly is, the alternative thought that I might be typing straight into a single not-entirely-sympathetic pair of fenokies watching me every move is isn't exactly on-taking. But enough of my paranoiac ravings: I'm already violating blogojournalistic etiquette in not letting my correspondent speak entirely for himself from the get-go. As with the last OL, my own piss follows post-scriptically, this time in a more conventional titty-for-tatty format.

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Wassauf, Hünden?

Or, as your people would put it, How do you do, sir? I write to you today on behalf of the Greater London and Home Counties Swabo-Liberian Diaspora (GLHCSLD [quite a mouthful isn't it, meine liebe Hünden?]), a community numbering a whopping 300 souls, all resident within the scant 500-kilometre circumfrence of the London commuter belt. We Swabo-Liberians enjoy a rich cultural heritage worthy of vying with that of any people who have yet pitched camp or driven plough on this earth since the Mesopotamian era--a heritage to be proud of, nay, smug about. For each of us may boast not only of cententially-strong genetic and cultural ties to the erstwhile and present Republic of Liberia, in virtue of our direct descent from some member of that famous nonet of Liberian expatriates who, having been obliged regretfully to flee their homeland in the wake of the waves of insurrections precipitated by the bankruptcy and virtual collapse of the Monrovia government, disembarked at Dover in the autumn of 1910; but also of sesquicentennially-strong genetic and cultural ties to the ancient Helvitio-Teutonic region of Swabia, in virtue of the direct descent of each of the aforesaid nine from one Hans Mörike, who, having been obliged equally regretfully to flee his homeland in the wake of the waves of general stroppiness precipitated by German unification (precipitated in its turn, need it be said, by the egomaniacal machinations of that vile Prussian parvenu Bismarck), disembarked at Buchanan in the summer of 1872. When one does the genealogical maths, factoring the Swabian tree by the Liberian one, the results are quite staggering: there is not a single Katze Johannes or Hünden Juliette among us who cannot claim some international luminary of the past three hundred years as near or distant kin. I alone can count among my cousins and/or grandsires such leading lights of the eighteenth-through-twentieth centuries as Charles Schwab, Benjamins Banneker and Franklin, Alberts Einstein and Sharpton, and Oprah Winfrey.

But I did not elect to put mitt to keyboard this instant for the purpose of crying up my own people's unimpeachable claims to singularity and greatness. I write today ultimately in the wholly disinterested service of a cause in which, I trust, I stand united with all Londoners worthy of the civic epithet, namely, that of cultural diversity.

You see, for all of our undeniable and scarcely-overstateable world-historical importance, we Swabo-Liberians constitute but a single tile in the vast multicultural mosaic comprised by the 33 boroughs of Greater London. Indeed, according to the latest white paper issued by the City Hall Task Force on Diversity, Greater London is home to the representatives of no fewer than 20,000 cultures and ethnicities, each possessed of its own absolutely unique heritage; on which account our Mayor has seen fit to dub our august Capital the Most Culturally Diverse City in All of Human History. (Do you hear that from across the pond, New York, New York? You so-called Cutting Board of the American Melting Pot, with your piddling 500 spoken languages? You Big Apple-achians might as well start drawing up your annexation application for submission to the Arkansas State House, and in future direct all of your self-promotional literature to the prospective producers of the next Beverly Hillbillies or Dukes of Hazzard movie; because henceforth all modifutuacious spirits in search of the true embodiment of enlightened cosmopolitanism will be shopping elsewhere, namely on the High Streets of our principal districts.)

I advert at last, Herr McGyver, mein Hauptmann, to the central topic of my epistle, namely the relevance of this formidable aforementioned demographic finding to your own blogospheric activities. The first salient attribute of your blog to claim the attention of the casual browser (e.g./viz. myself, a week and a half ago) is its title: The Angry Londoner. One might—and, indeed, did—well suppose that any individual endowed with Kugeln of the mass and thickness requisite to one styling himself the Angry Londoner would be endowed supernumerarily with the degree of acuity and curiosity vis-à-vis his fellow townsmen requisite to one arrogating to himself the task of speaking in and on their behalf. And as our Mayor has effectively proclaimed cultural diversity the main nub, the keynote, the Stadtsgeistsgrundgedanke of the London of the third millennium, one is only entitled to expect that such acuity and curiosity should manifest itself in the form of at least a smattering of attention to our multicultural mosaic, and of some sampling of the 20-myriad-fold tesselae of which it is comprised [sic (RMcG)]. Understand, Herr McGyver, that I choose my words carefully here; that it is not for nothing that I write of a smattering and a sampling rather than of an exhaustive survey or a so-called full Monty; for I am at Arsch a Praktischesmensch who appreciates that it would scarcely be possible for a single human being to canvass the entirety of our Kulturschaft on his or her own, that by such a reckoning, even at the penurious rate of a blog-post per culture per day, one of your comparatively tender age would have attained his octagenarity by the time he had paid off his balance in full (and even then, he should be obliged to take out a second loan of treble the principal balance of the first; for, if current projections are to be trusted, by 2050 the number of cultures resident here will total roughly 80,000, or one for every ten Londoners).

But in perusing The Angry Londoner in its present state, as of this Valentine's Day 2006, one looks in vain for the vaguest adumbration of a smattering or sampling of the London Kulturschaft; one is tempted, indeed, to cry out to the author/editor, in unspeakable agony, on behalf of the entire local Kultursübergemeinschaft, 'Has the concept of a reach-around ever penetrated your calcified chav's brainpan?' In five month's worth of posts, from September to January inclusive, its only acknowledgment of the mere existence of a multicultural scene in London takes the form of a merciless hatchet-job on the poor Kernevistanis; who, I have lately learnt, are about to close up their restaurant in Hoxton due to a 'recent decline in volume of clientele'. (Viel danke, Herr McGyver! Whither am I now to repair for my hebdomadal mabyar kernewek fix? To your Mum's kitchen in Diss? Nachbar, bitte! As if by Fickensalles's stretch of the imagination an insular East Angelina could be counted on to cotton to one of our kind darkening her doorstep.)

To be sure, Herr McGyver, you yourself have already evinced in passing some sense of the fatuousness of your blog's claims to geographical exemplarity, in joshingly suggesting, as you did on one occasion, that it might more properly be entitled The Something (What was it--Pacific? Feisty?) Barnetian than the Angry Londoner. But I submit to you, Herr McGyver, that on the evidence of the tenor of your performances to date, even styling yourself an exemplary Barnetian would be an act of civic hubris; that your blogospheric cursus has been too narrow-ranging even for one presuming to speak for his own borough; that only an epithet as redolent of unregenerate hickishness as, say, The White Male East-Anglian Transplant would do justice to the shameless parochiality of your authorial ethos.

To be sure, even by marmite-on-whitebread standards of north London, Barnet is a dispiriting desert of cultural homogeneity, yet even within this desert there are to be found oases of genuine diversity--particularly on its southeastern fringes, in the West Indian communities of the Two Finchleys--oases that it should be incumbent upon every Barnetian worthy of the name to explore. But on your personal 15th-century mariner's map of the borough, these oases essentially figure as uncharted waters inscribed with the legend Here Be Dragons; holed up in the cosily WASP-ish confines of your precious Woodside Park local, and of your Potters Bar office cubicle, you rest content to wallow in blokishly bibulous oblivion of them. And on those rare occasions when diversity dares to rear its lovely particoloured head in your painfully straitened monochromatic Lebenswelt, you waste no time in brusquely ushering it out of the room with the tip of your chav's walking stick. I am thinking here in the main of an episode of your post of 7 November, surtitled 'Take Back the Night,' where a handful of individuals hailing from non-Anglo-centric cultures--Manish Shah, Jay Gulati, et al.--are mentioned by name without being vouchsafed so much as a few inches of web-space in which to speak for themselves qua representatives of their respective cultural cohorts. Here, solipsitically immersed as you were in the account of your jingoistically anorakish fabrication of the so-called Bloke Fawkes holiday, you let slip a saffron opportunity for wafting over to your readers' noses a gust of the doubtlessly uniquely aromatic Punjabi or Upper-Pradeshian perspective on Woodside Park nightlife.

But am Arsch I do not intend this letter to serve as a conduit of negative energy, and I shall accordingly perorate on a positive note. Am Arsch, we should always regard the diversity of our Capital as an occasion not for napalm-torching the rivers that already divide us from our fellow Londoners, but rather for building bridges of communication across these divides. The realisation of this cultural-cum-spiritual civic works project is, need it be said, all the more exigent in the light of our imminent hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games. It is vital that all of us--Black and White, Jew and Gentile, Gay and Straight, Sikh and Hindu, Chav and Toff, Kernevistani and Swabo-Liberian--should close ranks with all speed, and in a spirit of Stadtsbruderundschwesterschaft, so that, six years hence, we may put on a jolly good show fit to make those tatty foreigners fairly retch with envy of our multicultural bounty; and thus, in conformity to this selfsame spirit, I hereupon extend to you, Herr McGyver, an invitation to attend GLHCSLD's next Märzfest, to be held at 19:00 next Saturday week at the Swabo-Liberian Union Hall located directly opposite the soon-to-be defunct Bosty Drog restaurant at Hoxton Market. The evening commences with all assembled--dressed, natürlich, in the traditional folk costume of our people--(for women the Dirndl, for men the Loden and Lederhosen)--betaking themselves to the dance floor to cut a rug or ten's worth of Greenvilles to the accompaniment of the toe-tapping strains of our traditional folk music, die Blauen. There follows a buffet banquet of traditionally delectable Swabo-Liberian delicacies--Heisshunden, Schweinshängebacken, Bratkartoffeln, washed down with great steinfuls of Märzenlager and Verrückthund; and punctuated, at evening's end, by a rousingly traditional Tortespaziergang, undertaken in competition for the grand prize of a magnificent Buchananertorte concocted beforehand by one of our more culinarily-gifted Huasfrauen. Our Märzfest is indeed a spectacle fit to dazzle the Augen of the uninitiated, seeing as how it has have late become, in effect, the signature Swabo-Liberian holiday, having long since eclipsed in point of popularity its equinoctial counterpart and erstwhile festive centrepiece of our calendar, Oktoberfest. To be quite heisshundlich, Herr McGyver, our Oktoberfest has in recent years devolved into something of a Knackwurstfest (I trust, in view of your evident familiarity with this particular conceit, I may dispense with the explication thereof). It's hard enough to get the Fleischersdutzend women of our community to turn out once a year, in the Fickendestage of springtime, let alone in the autumn. But I digress. I was, after all, supposed to be wrapping up. And so, to attend to the aforesaid Einpackung, Herr McGyver, till the 25th--and, I hope, not a day later--I wish you a heartfelt auf Wiedersehen.

Sincerely,
LaMont Mörike-Jones
President, Treasurer and Sergeant-at-Arms
GLHCSLD

P. S. I'll be sure to keep an extra Heisshund and batch of Bratkartoffeln warm for you.

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The Angry Londoner replies:

Dear Mr Mörike-Jones:

First off, thanks for the invite to your little do down in Hoxton. Second off, to deliver a walloping sock in the co-jones or mainspring of your whole tirade, fuck Ken and his task force. Fuck them with a diverse, 20,000-strong, array of culinary and surgical instruments. I'd sooner trust a white paper issued by the Third Reich's propaganda office than I would one issued by those KL-patsies down at City Hall. (Yeah, I know Ken himself is given to these same sorts of Nazi-derived shit-slinging sallies; I suspect, indeed, that before it's all over every journalist or building-contractor who's dared to look sideways at him will have been assigned his own personal stand-in drawn from the historically-verifiable ranks of Hitler's inner and outer circles. Well, I say, if Ken wants to dish out Swastika-shaped spagghetioes, he should expect to receive gobfuls of the same in return.) I don't know where, apart from their own cavernous anal cavities, Ken's minions could have pulled this statistic of 20,000 unique cultures and ethnicities. It sounds mildly to wildly inflated to these orioles. But even supposing Ken & Co. are right, and we are indeed living in the Most Culturally Diverse City in All of Human History, I believe that I am entitled to reclaim at least a sliver of umbrage from your county-fair caricaturist's adumbration of YFC's truly as a kind of latter-day Alf Garnett or East-Atlantic David Duke; in other words to protest your chalking up of my admittedly scrimpy treatment of the local multi-culti scene to a kind of congenital allergy to all things culturally diverse, or to a virtually antiseptic lack of contact with them. The fact is that there are all manner of phenomena that flit past my okies each and every day, but that I have seen fit to pass over in silence in these here pages, for one reason or another--sheer co-jone-numbing apathy being the most prevalent among them. You may have noticed, for example, that with two hardly notable pseudo-exceptions--my brief metaphorical Portrait of the Bloggist as a Young Dragoonsman in my post of 7 January, and my account of a run-in with a certain fake-beardy trick-or-treater in my post of 1 November--I have yet to make mention of a single person's sporting a moustache, or indeed any other form of facial hair. Would you then be justified in concluding, on the basis of this sweeping omission, that every bloke who crossed my path from September to January was clean-shaven? Or that I somehow have it in for the mostachio'd and bearded blokility as a class? I think not. (But if I am mistaken, and if, perchance, in addition to being the President &c. of GLSWLD you are also a member of the Greater London Bearded and Moustachio'd Gentlebloke's League; and are thereby impelled to seek satisfaction from me on account of my egregious and repeated slighting of your fraternity, I say, Step up! I've got a wardrobe full of old shirts that I'd just as gladly consign to the gutters of Shoreditch as to my local Salvation Army shop.)
In brief, in my lifeworld I put the whole multi-culti bidness on par with moustaches and beards, and treat it accordingly in these here pages. Thus, just as you shouldn't expect to learn the facial-hair-bearing status of any of my mates until, say, one of them decides to grow a 'stache or beard or to shave off whichever of the two he already has, so you shouldn't expect to learn just how culturally diverse any of them is until this diversity becomes a matter of at least some cuntishly slight degree of dramatic interest.

Third, but not least, off: from the point of smell of this rabbit, the carrot of your argument is too puny and too far off down the patch to be worth hopping after, especially after a judiciuos comparison-sniffing of a certain schlong-sized alternative carrot dangling within biting distance of his bunny's incisors. You write of the need for all of us Londoners to close ranks in preparation for the Olympics in 2012. Well, a lot can happen in six years, Mr. Mörike-Jones, to upset the best-laid plans of mice and Ken--a bird flu pandemic, for instance, or the outbreak of a Sino-American war (a.k.a. WWIII). And in the meantime, much nearer to hand, we have another cause that IMOSHO is much worthier of your noble rank-closing, namely the derailing of Arsenal's cuntishly all-but-ineluctable progress towards the European Championship. It is vital that all of us Londoners--Black and White, Jew and Gentile, &c.--should close ranks to extirpate the tumour that is Arsenal from the colon of our civic body politic; that we should join together in one unanimous cry of NOT IN OUR NAME! loud enough to carry clear on over to Spain, reverberate from the stands of the stadia of Turin, Milan and Madrid and echo thence back in our own ears; that we should ultimately flood the streets in a mighty procession bearing aloft the decapitated heads of Arsène Wenger and Thierry Henry to the Tower gate. And it is in this spirit, the spirit of Stadtsantiarsenalschaft, that I hereupon extend to you, Mr Mörike-Jones, an invitation to attend the next plenary session of the North London Arsenal-Bashers' Association, to be held at 8 pm next Thursday week at the Sedulous Ape in Woodside Park. The evening commences with all assembled--dressed, naturally in number shirts culled from the liveries of teams who have scored at least one victory over the Gunners in the past six months--getting liberally pissed to the accompaniment of whatever happens to be playing on the house jukebox. There follows a round-robin exchange of anti-Arsenal jokes, anecdotes and rants; punctuated, at evening's end, by a blind-drunk but heartfelt choral rendition of our Association's fight song, 'Arsenal, O Arsenal, They Should Have Named You Cuntsenal'. Whether you are already a confirmed-if-closeted Arsenalophobe, Mr Mörike-Jones, or are merely a sceptical fan of a non-Arsenal club, your presence at our session would be decidedly welcome; and if, upon adjournment of that session, you shall be pleased to accept a bequest of a sealed letter of induction into our central London sister association, you shall have in exchange a pledge from me, redeemable on my word as a gentlebloke, to be present at your Märzfest from the cutting of the first Greenville rug to the devouring of the last crumbs of Buchananertorte. If, however, you prove so unregenerately deaf to our gospel as not to make an appearance at the Ape on the 23rd, rest assured that I shall not be darkening your Union Hall's doorstep on the 25th; and that, having in virtue of your absence excommunicated yourself in advance from our church as a de facto Arsenalophile, you may subsequently, and in good conscience, consign that Heisshund you would have set aside for me to some other purpose, preferably that of the passionate and repeated violation of your anal schphincter.

I am, Sir, TBS, your most humble Servant,
Rugby W. McGyver, Esq.
Treasurer and Sergeant at Pints
The North London Arsenal-Bashers' Association

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.