Un Amour de Rugger: Part Four

Yeah, perhaps you were right after all, DGR--perhaps I was (and please correct me if I'm overstating or distorting your typographical-void sayngwiching implication here) taking a dip in that notorious pop-psychological homophone of a celebrated North African, Deltic-terminating river in electing not to record the post-May-20 transactions of my lifeworld in straightforward chronological fashion. At any rate, I gots to admit that I'm having a whale's-cuntishly difficult time here getting started on the fulfillment of my commission to offer to your okies just such a chronology. There's just no getting round the fact that them were dark days, the days comprising that butcher's fortnight more or less evenly straddling the cunt of the May-June calendrical divide, days that I'd just as soon never revisit even in thought, let alone in song or story. TBS, I was in more than reasonably high spirits during the quadruple-hammered denouement of the tragedy itself--but what bloke wouldn't have been in those circumstances? Ten thousand apiece of jilting girlfriends, best mates, dogs and cars can't make up the sum (on the credit side) of a sense of being swept up in something big and important and public, a sense that I was positively intoxicated by from the moment when I re-entered the Milton after my abortive Ronnie-hunt, all the way through to the moment, a good three hours later, when I finally parted company with Jimmy on the pavement at the intersection of the High Road and Totteridge Lane--a convenient midway point between our two residences at which we'd instructed the driver of our Camden-Town-hailed cab to drop us off. So then: throughout the whole of this Biblical cinematic-epic-spanning interval, barring the obligatory Kenophobic rain-dance at the site of the former temporary resting place of the McGyvermobile, I made not a single reference or allusion to any of my misfortunes, not on account of any access of the kind of slack-lower-lipped stoicism you quasi attributed to me in the last post, DGR, but out of a sheer, unadulterated, unregenerate un-git-shivvingness vis-a-vis these selfsame misfortunes. Why then did Jimmy feel compelled, as I was shaking his hand good-night, to say to me, 'If there's anything you'd like to, erm, talk about, Rugger don't hesitate to give me a bell' [judifully thereupon dictating to me his mobile number]? Was it because I had, for all of the aforementioned prevailing Haitch-Esses, yet managed at some point or other along our way home to betray, at my utterly gormless insoo, and courtesy of some telltale phizzyonomical or so-called body-linguistic sign (say, a momentary moistening-over of the okies, or a subtle--albeit more settled--obtuseness of the shoulder-angles) a soup's son of a premonition of the spiritual cuntretemps that was about to overwhelm me? Or was it simply because he thought it was the decent, gentleblokey thing to say in the light of all the setbacks I'd just suffered, regardless of how well or poorly I was taking them? Either way, in the short-to-medium term, it turned out to be an offer wisely if (SPOILER WARNING!) gratuitously tendered.

TBS (2), for the full duration of the next day, I was still very much as Rainright as Laudon or Rufus at a Chinese takeaway--still basking in the adrenal afterglow of the night before, if you will; and still more than capable of fuel-celling that selfsame reservoir of adrenaline into a chrono-hoovering agenda of bachelorly high-jinks. I awoke at the arse-crack of bourgie dawn, miraculously un-govered and primed for the tube trip to Camden Town necessitated by my remission of the McGyvermobile from the council garage. First thing in the bohemian morning (ca. 11:00), I dragged my Thierry Henry punching doll up from the basement, where it'd been boxed up, safely out of sight of the most prying pair of Esmeraldan okies, for going on a full month; and betwixt the two walloping so-called cardiovascular workouts involved, respectively, in re-inflating the fucking thing and juking it out with it afterwards for an hour or so, come about 2:00, I was well knackered and feeling a mite peckish to boot. So, hopping on the blower, I rang up Pizza Express and ordered up an extra-extra large chicken tikka pie, which I spent the best part of the late afternoon/worst part of the early evening leisurely-ly devouring in tandem with the swillation of a butcher's- three-quarter-dozen of Hoegaardens and the spectation of my Best of the Randy Nannies of the Northern Line DVD (extras and all!). My last conscious pair of acts that day consisted in affixing to the lid of the pizza box (which, together with its offering of a single, full, untouched slice, I'd left at its original station on the coffee table, as a sacrifice to the maisonette's bachelorly penates) a post-it note, and scrawling thereupon the warning: 'DO NOT DISPOSE OF BEFORE 1/6/06!'

It was only on Monday morning, up in Potters Bar, that the whole shithouse-building-site's load of bricks comprised by Saturday's disasters finally hit me--for only then did I have to contend, for the first time, in all of my pathetic bereftness of moral support back home, not merely with the arid abstractions of matelessness, girl-lessness and doglessness, but with an all-too-concrete entity that was essentially, implacably at war with the very notion of my survival, namely the erect ten-inched schlong of Mike Ayhern, sheathed in a rawhide condom ribbed on the inside for his pleasure, and barbed on the outside for my pain.

'Oh, come now, MDF, surely you don't mean to say this chap literally buggered you.'

'Of course not.'

'Well, in that case you had best recast the sentence. For having paired Mr Ayhern's metaphorical membrum virile with a predicate--viz, all-too-concreteness--that is a veritable by-word of literality, you do rather leave yourself wide open (in a strictly metaphorical sense) to being construed as saying that the chap did in fact have one off with you over his desk on the morning of 22 May 2006.'

'Fine. For the sake of your hermetically waterproof logician's anorak (and, I might add, to the detriment of prosaic economy), let the last sentence read, from namely onwards: Mike Ayhern, who called me into his office first thing that morning to give me a right proper metaphorical drubbing in punishment of an entirely innocent error that he, with all of his characteristic cuntishness, had seen fit to construe as an index of my berkishness, gormlessness, and all-round professional incompetence and unworthiness of the title of Junior Accounts Receivable Associate at Proctologitex. The scene of the drubbing is worth dramatising in detail, if only for the sake of lengthening the nubbishly short shrift I've been giving to the Proctologitexical fifth of my existence in these pages for galloping donkey's months:

I entered Mike's office to find him not seated behind his desk, as per usual, but rather half-sitting, half-slouching on the front end of it, with his arms folded, not behind his head (APU2), but in front of his tits, against which he had a manila folder clasped in one hand, leaving the thumb of the other hand free for the spiritedly stroppy bout of nail-gnawing he was submitting it to. In discovering him in this pose, I knew straight away that I was in for something much more serious than the his stock-in-trade rhetorical rabbit-out-of-the-arse conjuring trick. I knew, in other words, that whatever misstep he was about to charge me with would be one that he, in his besotted imagination, actually believed me to have made; that it wasn't going to be a routine matter of his fabricating such a misstep for the sake of fobbing his own slackness off on to the next bloke in the chain-gang queue (i.e., YFCT). So I tautened my schphincter as best I could, twisted my gob into a suitable compromise between a coprophagic grin and a rictus of shame, and wished him a sir-punctuated good morning.

'Good mollning, McGyvelll,' he says, extracting his thumb from his mouth. Then, after taking a few seconds to tongue-gob out the residue of thumbnail shrapnel (a couple of fragments of which happen to land on my shirtyfront, doubtlessly by design), he unclasps his arms and tenders me the folder, holding it gingerly-ly, flatwise, betwixt thumb and forefinger, as if it's a dirty nappy. 'I'd like you to take a look at this document, if you would.'

I open the folder and, once I've scanned the front page of its contents, can discern no present dramaturgical mandate to forage any deeper into them.

'It wouldn't happen to look the least bit familiar to you, would it?'

'Yes. It's a printout of that report I sent you last Thursday.'

'Spot on! And what, may I ask, is the manifest subject of said report?'

'TOTAL REVENUES FOR PRODUCT NUMBER PT6467-stroke-nought-double-nine: ANISETTE TAMPON: FY06, Q3.'

'Bingo! And judged on its own merits, as a thing of its kind, it could not be more perfect--it's a report fit for inclusion in the anals [sic] of our training workshops. Why then, I ask, am I not congratulating you on a job well done, eh? Why the conspicuous dearth of champagne and cigars in this vicinity, eh? Eh?'

YFCT, after having subtracted the two supplied to me by my apparently gormless memory from the two of the perfect report: 'Because you...didn't ask me...to do a report on...revenues for...a-a-anisette tampons in the last f-f-fiscal quarter?'

'Kismet! I did not ask you to prepare for me a report on anisette tampons, i.e., a tally of the total worldwide revenues of that sole and specific product; I asked you, rather, to prepare for me a report on the Tampan's anisettes--which is to say, a tally of the total revenues of all of our anisette scented or flavoured products--tampons, suppositories, salves, ointments, lotions, douches, enemas, tents and shunts--billable to the account of one Steven Kosiba, chief purchasing agent of our main stateside distributor, which, you will of course recall, is headquartered in Tampa, Florida. Well, what have you got to say for yourself, McGyver?'

[YFCT, in all candour:] 'I thought it was an, erm...a G-g-gallicism.'

'A whaticism?'

'A Gallicism. I thought you were, erm, practising your French. You know, by pluralising the adjective, and putting it after the noun. I thought it was something along the lines of crêpes suzettes--tampons anisettes, that is.' (as, I rather assumed, my sporting rejoinder of Oui, oui, M. Ay-HERRN! made all too clear, but you know what they say about assumption [i.e., 'It ain't just a town in Illinois/'It makes an ass out of u and mption'.])

'McGyver,' he remonstrates sternly, whilst flashing each of his sweat-soaked pits at me in turn, by way of a pair of cuntishly smug body-builder's forearm-curls, 'do I look like the kind of guy who can afford the off-the-clock luxury of swotting up on dead [sic] languages, let alone the on-the-clock luxury of flouting [sic] his knowledge of said languages?'

'No, sir.'

'Indeed not--in marked contrast to you, who, based on your misinterpretation of my instructions, certainly look like the kind of guy whose spare time would wisely be devoted to a term or two of remedial courses in living English. They offer them up at Uof H, you know. And naturally, the company would reimburse your tuition. That's all by the by for now, though.' [Rising, circling back to behind the desk, collapsing into chair, planting both elbows uncharacteristically downwards on to the desktop, pressing the co-jones of each hand against their complementary okie-lid, exhaling wearily.] 'This little cock-up of yours has pushed me bum-flush against my deadline for presenting revenue estimates for FY07 to the CFO on Wednesday morning, and in relation to a market-cum-production-line-sector that I simply can't afford to play dumb about. You see, as of the close of FY05, the sale of anisette-flavoured-or-scented products accounted for a full third of our net profits, whilst the sale of products to the States across the board accounted for a full two-fifths. If the report I'd asked you to do had been on, say, the sale of chocolate-flavoured-or-scented products to Mexico (net profit contribution of our chocolate-flavoured-or-scented products in FY05: 1.4%, of our Mexican distributor in that same fiscal year: .8%), in its absence I could afford to fudge a bit (no pun intended). I could say to the CFO, We haven't got all the figures in yet; there are still a number of outstanding invoices (you, of course, know how those Mexicans are... [withdrawing fingers from okies, feigning to nod off, and snoring the word mañana into each of three or four exhaled breaths. Then, rousing himself, and assuming a mien of cuntish peremptoriness:] But as for the Stateside anisette revenues, the fudge factor there is effectively nil. I can't just traipse into the CFO's office and say, That's the total for FY06, give or take 10 or 20 millions. She'd hand me my walking papers sooner than she would a loo roll to stop the ensuing flow of diarrhoeah. Thus, my directive to you, McGyver, is, Get me that report by start of business tomorrow. I don't give a tinker's fuck about the means of execution--farm it out to the folks in accounts payable, hire a temp accountant on your own dime, just get it done, or else...'

[YFCT, hoping to secure a few curried brownie points by adverting to Mike's own idiom] '...My ass'll be grass...?' [But he evinces not the slightest appreciation of the fellationary effort, and closes up the ellipsis in an ominous whisper:]

'...No, this time round, that'll be my ass's privilege. This time round, yours'll be lucky to finish up as compost.'

So I cringe my way back to me cubicle, log on to the 'puter, crank up the Excel and start to work on the report--or, rather, try to start work on it. For, not to to try your patience, DGR, by going into the technical side of things to such an extent as would make last post's footerly digressions seem like a complete screening of the Emmanuel movies by comparison (nor to squander my own free time on the rehearsal of such work-related minutiae as won't ever see the light of utilitarian day in my private lifeworld [save, perhaps, remotely, vis-a-vis Arsenalophobic augury in the '06-'07 league season]), whilst the spreadsheet template I'd sworn by, and plied my bread-cum-butter with, for two years-con-cambio, was duly and efficiently keyed to performing client-to-product calculations, as well as calculations vectored along the axes of product and product attribute; it was utterly un-cut-out for squaring the client field with the product attribute one, as necessitated by Mike's commission. And so I was compelled to fret and fume away the remainder of the work day and then some rebuilding the fucking thing from scratch, which left the running, formatting and despatching of the report itself to be completed back at the maisonette in the great large ones of that evening and the wee small ones of the following morning. TBS, I'd taken work home scads of times before--CIP, for last week's running of the original, undesired AT report--but always for the sake of the sheer theatricality of the gesture, at the arse-end of eight-point-five leisurely hours of browsing and instant-messaging. This time round, as Mike had put it, the homework followed hard on the arse of nine-point-five hours of concentrated, schphincter-dilating workwork, which rendered its completion commensurately knackering. How often I yearned, during the first half of that lonesome midnight-oil-burning session, to hop on the blower with Esmeralda or Ronnie and kvetch to her or him, You won't believe what this cunt's put me up to! knowing full well and up front that the making of such a phone call was entirely out of the question. How often, and more pathetically, during the second half of that selfsame session did I pause, in the interval between a Hoegaarden run to the fridge and the re-ensconcement of my blistered arse-cheeks in my desk chair, to apostrophically address that selfsame plaint (i.e., YWBWTCPMUT!) to Esmeralda or Ronnie qua third wheel, only to trail off round about the second tee on realising that had either of them been present, he or she would more likely have gloated over my plight than sympathised with me in it. It didn't even occur me try giving Jimmy a bell, which, in arse-sight, I think is just as well [Ken take these unintended rhymes!]. True, strictoo sensoo, he did say I could ring him about anything, but I from the start I rather tended to construe that indefinite pronoun as shorthand for anything--and only anything--directly pertaining to the girl, the dog the best mate or the car; and, in any case, kvetching about any or all of those entities whilst I was immersed in the running of my report would have been about as pointful as inveighing against Hoegaarden or Marlboro during an all-day, bedridden 'gover...

...such as I would have submitted to by default on Tuesday, had I not already pissed away the full balance of my sick leave during the UEFA semifinals; and had I not, moreover, judged that a no-show following immejiately on the heels of my submission of the report (viz. at 11:48 Monday night) would inevitably count as an admission of defeat-cum-incompetence, if not as a de facto resignation, in Mike's rabid okies. As it was, come Tuesday morning, I had to make do with gulping down a pair of profin tablets and driving up to PB as per routine. Once there, I sat glumly at my puter and waited and waited for some blowerly indication, be it positive or negative, of Mike's appraisal of the report. But none was forthcoming on that day, or on the next. Finally, towards lunchtime on Thursday, I got an email from him that read, 'MY MEETING WITH THE CFO WENT, ON THE WHOLE, SATISFACTORILY. [Mike, BTW, prefers to compose his correspondence all in caps--presumably in cuntish emulation of the telex machines of newsrooms of yore.] SHE DID, HOWEVER, MAKE AN ESPECIAL POINT OF FLAGGING THE STATESIDE ANISETTE ACCOUNT "FOR FURTHER REVIEW". I WILL KEEP YOU POSTED AS TO WHETHER FURTHER INPUT ON THIS MATTER IS REQUIRED FROM YOUR END. M.A.'

Well, on the face of it, this was a classic Ayhernian communication, intended from the get-go to keep YFCT on tenterhooks by whatever cuntishly underhanded stratagem proved ready to hand (BTW [2], if any of you DGRs out there can be arsed to explicate for me the literal underpinnings of this metaphor of 'keeping someone on tenterhooks,' I should be much obliged to ye. The same goes for the etiologies of such equally commonplace and equally unfathomable idioms as 'red herring' and 'benchmark figures'. As you might well guess, I haven't exactly had the leisure of late to nergle 'em out for meself.). So the CFO had flagged the sector subsumed by my report for further review. What then? Who was to say she hadn't likewise flagged all 10,000-some-odd other permutation-lets of the FY06 revenues? It was only by the most wildly paranoiac stretch of Fanny Adams's imagination that this here CFO-fficial flag could be refashioned into a bandana or babushka tied snugly across the adam's apple of YFCT, ready-looped to serve as an implement of strangulation at a second's notice, courtesy of the most cuntishly understated of nods from the CFO to her henchman (i.e., Mike). But in the light of the unprecedentedly dire nature of the SOA to hand vis-a-vis both Mike and myself, I couldn't help but stretch my own imagination to such semi- or pseudo- or quasi-delusional limits. I couldn't help but think, you see, that if I actually had finally and definitively got Mike out of such an unprecedentedly tight squeeze, that at least a drop or two of the elation and relief precipitated by his escape would have spilt over into the supertext or subtext or just plain fucking text of the message bearing the intelligence thereof. That drop or two might have taken the form, say, of a digressive bit of shit-shooting or piss-taking on my perduring need for remedial English courses (qua running joke linked to our most recent cul-a-cul), or it might in equal likelihood have manifested itself under the laconic auspices of the one-word sentence Thanks. Granted, such an access of bargain-basement uncuntishness would have been completely out of character for the so-called Mike that I knew, but then these sorts of co-jones-to-the-wall sitches were ready-pneumatised to suck the milk of human uncuntishness out of the schlongs of the most cuntishly supercuntish of ingrates.

So, in short, on Thursday afternoon, I braced myself for the worst, and budgeted my time for the next day-and-a-half accordingly, swearing off all interwebbial commerce with the Randy Nannies and furiously trailing every lead I could nergle out of the verbal combination of employment, accountancy and Barnet; which combo eventually succeeded, at mid-morning on Friday, to the more desperate one of employment, service sector and Greater London, having in the meantime yielded nothing more promising than the homophonic namesake of the actor portraying the bloke who rode the Haitch-bomb down to its target in the penultimate scene of Dr Strangelove. Here again I found myself in a sitch in which Esmeralda's help would have proved indispensable, and to a much more tangible degree than WRT the first one. Long before--on the morning after our first date at Emchai, as a matter of fact--she had spoken to me of openings in the finance division of her company, and urged me to apply for one of them; but I would then hear nothing of it, not until our so-called relationship had jelled and I could assure myself of being able to work arse-cheek-by-face-jowl underneath her in the absence of any so-called hard feelings. Now that I was afforded the jubious treat of viewing the S-RC and my professional position under the same aspect--viz., at best, that of a cryogenically preserved corpse, at worst that of a long-since-worm-forsaken skeleton--I would gladly have swapped this position for that of a gainfully employed Esmeraldan underling saddled with a restraining order and alimony/child support payments for the rest of his natural.

Wellsir, as I've pretty much already intimated, my futile job-searching binge carried me clear on through to knock-off time on Friday, at which point I was much alarmed to find the usual end-of-the week combo of physical knackered-dom and mental-cum-spiritual hyper-atrophy replaced by a kind of organism-corroding, trans-PMS-ian dementia that could scarcely be put to rights by the ritualistic pre-Esmeraldan-era butcher's-half-dozen pints down at the Ape. And, in any case, as I dementedly pseudo-reflected during my white-knuckled, lead-footed commute back to Woodside Park, I couldn't very well show my ex tempore arse at the Ape without running the risk of happening upon Ronnie, and thereby commmitting myself to a second bout of shirtycuffs that I was in no fit state either to withstand or to impose. Eventually, back at the maisonette, at the probable instance of my third or fourth Hoegaarden, I recalled Jimmy's standing invitation to a chinwag; and subsequently realised that by cashing in that invitation on this very evening I might very well, or at the very least, be able to kill one bird with one telephonic stone. Which istersay that I realised that if Jimmy happened to be working that night, he'd be able to let me know whether Ronnie was, as they say, indahouse (bird #1); and that if Ronnie turned out not to be present therein, then perhaps Jimmy himself might be amenable to hanging out after hours with YFCT (bird #2), his orioles agape for the reception of gobfuls of obloquy concerning The Girl, the Best Mate and that new addition to the catalogue, The Boss (MA not BS).

But I finished up missing both birds. Mind you, at first, when Jimmy's Hello at the other end of the blower was attended by the usual pubberly background din of punterly shouts, groans and guffaws, I had no grounds for assuming anything was the least bit amiss. Only with his answer to the question of whether Ronnie was anywhere thereabouts did things started taking a turn for the shittier, by way of the twilight zony:

'Ronnie? Ronnie who?'

'Mr Ronnie Fucking Corbett. No, I mean Ronnie Livingstone, of course.'

'Why should he be here?'

'You might just as well ask why he'd be anywhere else on a Friday night.'

'What the..?' There follows a few seconds of speechlessness in which I'm mystified to pick up the sound of a drawn out, inarticulate and decidedly unhuman howl amidst the backgroundage. 'Oh, I understand now. Look, Rugger, I took the job at the Milton.'

The name Milton having entirely lost its extra-poetic bell-ringing capabilities, shay mwha, over the course of the past six days, I shoot back gormlessly, 'At where?'

'At the Milton in Marylebone, where we finished up after the competiton. I'm there right now, you see, and not at the Ape.'

(YFCT, understandably crestfallen, at least from my egocentric povey:) 'Oh. Well, then, I suppose I should let you go.'

(Jimmy, tray sympa, ATC): 'Yeah, I'm a frayed sew.' Then he breaks off to shout, off-blower, Hey, Arséne! [!] ARSÈNE! Get your lipstick out of Lady Mao's front bottom. There's a good dog. ['It's five days, max, into the gig,' I says to myself, whilst eavesdropping on this outburst, 'and he's already on a first-name basis with the canine clientele. Sic transit somethingorothera somethingi.'] 'Look, Rugger, I'm off next Wednesday. Why don't you ring me up then, when we can chat at length?'

[YFCT, massaging his lower lip into a due state of slackicity beforehand:] 'Oh, yeah, Wednesday, sure.'

'Cheers, Rugger.'

'Cheers-stroke-thanxalot, Jimmy.'

Well, I couldn't very well be sore at Jimmy for not having being available all along, round the clock, like some sort of one-man Ruggerian suicide hotline. Ken alone knew he had his own inverted cross to bear, the icey of the actual new bloke behind the counter being, after all, hewn from more or less the same strain of pinewood as the icey of the prospective new bloke on the pavement (viz. that of Potters Bar, out front of P-Tex HQ). Granted, if things turned sour at the Milton, Jimmy could presumably drag his tee between his ell back up to the Ape; whereas my only fallback option as of then (and now) consisted in the possibly mythical Greater Norwich Old Boys' Accountancy Network. But then again, I had to quiz myself, was frittering away one's late youth as an East Angelinan accountant necessarily a less enviable hemi-semi-destiny than that of frittering away one's early middle age (Jimmy, at 36, being a full decade older than YFCT) as a Central Londinian barman?

Suffice it to say, the philosophical thought-train paraphrased in the last paragraph offered scant consolation or distraction beyond the butcher's-dozen immejiately post-telephonic minutes it required to clear my brain's small intestine (the human brain manifestly lacking a large intestine, let alone a schphincter, unless the gob be taken for the latter); in its caboose it left a butcher's-odd-four-dozen hours that had perforce to be filled largely by less mentally-cum-spiritually strenuous activities. The remainder of Friday night was pretty much taken care of, as I'd already been half drunk when I rang up Jimmy; four or five additional Hoegaardens, consumed across three or four hours of televisual channel-flip-booking, carried me through to the point of comatosity. And, subsequently, Saturday day was equally prettily seen to by my having foregone the usual prophylactic regimen of two profins the night before, and thus encouraged myself to sleep away the ensuing gover through till dusk. But from Saturday evening onwards, it was a different story. Feeling peckish round about six, I walked over to Quadruples to pick up a sandwich, placing my order on-site, at the register (as against phoning beforehand), so as to hoover up the largest possible chunk of time in making the round trip--not that standing round watching the sedentarily obese mums, dads and tykes wolfing down their sandwiches in the dining room during the extra butcher's-dozen minutes did much more to raise my spirits than edging past the ambulatorily svelt couples, single blokes and single blokesses walking their dogs on the pavement had done on the way over, or would do on the way back (a backway interrupted, incidentally, by a Hoegaarden-refreshing pit-stop at Stora Market that I'd rightly written off beforehand as 110 per cent spiritual drag [there being axiomatically precious few more demoralising sitches than the SM-ial -inevitable one of being sayngwiched in a queue between, on the front slice, a pongsome toothless bloke telling out in small change his total for a shorty of Southern Comfort and, on the back one, a chirpy, wine-bottle-overladened pair of blokesses obviously bound for a poshocratic bacchanal to which you, in virtue of your boorish and loserly totage of a cargo of hops and barley, daren't dream of securing an impromptu invitation]).

As for the remainder of my inaugural full-on bachelorly weekend at the maisonette, the less said about it the better. I need only remark, itward-wise, that, in cuntishly perverse contrast to its typical counterpart in the pre-Esmeraldan days, on the Saturday nocturnal portion of it I was utterly bereft of my one infallible de facto source of spiritual consolation: viz. a televisual potential Arsenalic-arse-reaming. For the '05-'06 Premiership season, with its reliably recursive Saturday-evening arse-offs, was by now a distant memory, and the '06-'07 season was as yet but a twinkle even in the schphincterly brown okies of such cuntishly far-seeing cunts as Arsène Wenger. It could be argued, indeed, that the particular weekend I'd happened to pitch up on-stroke-into in my bachelorly singlehood constituted, indeed, the very epicentre of the Sargasso Sea of Rugger-friendly sporting, what with the World Cup still looming off on the horizon of the last weeks of the following month; as likewise loomed Wimbledon--which, I confess, I've always had something of a soft spot for, on account of all the grunting and heaving and knicker-flashing spectacularly evinced by its female combatants.

Thankfully, come the bohemian dawn of the new work week, fortune began, if not exactly to smile on me, then at least to scrunch up, YFCT-ward, the horizontal cunt of her gob on one side and the other and then back again, as if to say, 'This bloke's not quite done for yet.' First off, on Monday afternoon, Mike called me into his office to commission a fresh report on, as he put it, the liquid and semi-liquid component of our stateside anisette revenues, inclusive of douches, enemas, ointments, lotions and salves; and exclusive of tents, shunts, suppositories and tampons, due firstthing Thursday morning.

'So, th-th-then,' I stammer back to him, 'I take it my global report on st-st-stateside anisette revenues was s-s-satisfactory?'

'Oh yes,' he replies, okie-brows scrunched quizzically against okie-balls cast rightwards and downwards towards some conjectural second wheel (his daughter Brianna, to judge by the angle of contact). 'Yes, absolutely. I should have thought that fact had been made plain in the text of my email. You really,' he adds, rising and ushering me out of the room with one hand stretched threshhold-ward, the other resting on me right shoulder, 'ought to give serious consideration to this idearof mine of taking courses in remedial English at the University of Hertfordshire. The whole enterprise'd do you a world of professional-developmental good, I'm sure...' One of these days Mike, one of these days...Pow!--Right in the shitter [i.e., the poo-chute, not the gents' (Although, come to think of it, vis-a-vis the arse-footing in question, the gents would pretty much be the ideal venue, viz. a small secluded chamber, with no windows and a lockable door).].

Thus, from Monday afternoon onwards I was off the old Proctologitexan tenterhooks, and at leisure to affix my carcass properly, for the first time, to the
Esmeraldan ones; which promptly gave way in their turn upon my reflecting that if my girl had really, in all Sinatraness, wanted to be alone for a bit and only that selfsame bit, I would surely have heard from her by now. For, try as I might to extract the most whale-schlong-lengthed connotation out of this wee, ant-schlongesque word bit, canvassing every single one of its myriad 'ceptations--drill fixture and antique Yank unit of coinage included--I was unable to delude myself into making it do as a stunt-double for nine days and counting.

Hence, I was all but resigned to taking my fate as a newly prospective terminally celibate bloke in the arse, to regarding my terminally depressing itinerary of the previous weekend as a veritable template for the rest of my natural weekends; when, on arriving back at the maisonette on Tuesday evening, I was bemused and beflummoxed to discover the following message on the v-mail of my land phone:

Hi, it's...me. Listen: I heard about what you did the other night, about your...shirt-off with what's-his-name. And I have to say, I think it was rather brave of you, taking him on like that. Anyway, darling, give me a call if you're up to it. Bye.

I had to listen to a second time through to make sure it was from who I thought was from, and that it referred to the event I thought it referred to; that I hadn't misidentified the timbral fingerprints of the voice of the caller, or slept through her sales pitch for a Mallorcan holiday. But once I'd ascertained that all was as I'd taken it to be the first time round, there immediately popped into my gourdita the question, How the fuck did she learn about my abortive scuffle with Ronnie? Surely not from Ronnie himself (else why would she pay homage to my 'bravery'). And by a subsequent so-called process of elimination, that left only one other possible hog-snout as the medium of communication, namely--

--'I confess,' Jimmy said to me roughly 25 hours later: 'It was me wot done it.'

We were sitting in the so-called bar area of the 3 Oceans, a South Woodside Park-stroke-North Finchley restaurant that Jimmy had suggested as a conveniently-placed alternative meeting-site to the Ape, which each of us had his reasons for staying away from for the time being. In architecture and decor, the Oceans was--and is--a cookbook embodiment of the aesthetic known in not quite correct language as Eurotrash. The reader is doubtless familiar with the recipe: take a hospital waiting room or airport lobby of 1960s vintage, add a splash of potted greenery here to signify 'organicity', a lick of wood-panelling there to signify 'poshness', a flat-screen telly here and there to signify 'up-to-dateness' and you're ready for business. In the case of the Oceans, however, special mention ought to be made of the particular fixins of the bar area, as these impinged on--and ultimately rendered into hashed horse shite--my chinwaggerly well-being during the convo here digressed from. This here BA comprises a midgets'-dance-floor-sized patch of waxed concrete, cordoned off from the Valhallan remainder of the dining room in virtue of its uncarpetedness, and upon which the management have erected perhaps nine or ten wee schlongtail tables with top circumfrences exceeding those of so many pound coins by, say, a factor of two. Round these tables, in groups of three, are disposed ginormous padded chairs, each of whose arse-bearing portions is shaped and hued exactly like a decapitated chestnut or acorn (and hence, perforce, like a disembodied schlong-head), barring a vertical top-to-bottom incision just broad enough to accommodate the hips of a ten-year-old boy. The whole arrangement leaves sufficient residual floor space to make it a bit of a challenge to finger-fuck your neighbour at the far end of the next table whilst remaining seated. And to top it all off (in our particular case), the service was horrible: during the whole of our four-hour-long stint there, we were visited a grand total of three times by the barman. I gather the bloke was annoyed either by our squandering of our precious third chair or by our sticking to four-quid beers in preference to the 10-quid house schlongtails (or by both); in any event, it was clear from the get-go that he wanted us out of there as toot sweet as possible.

TBF, Jimmy appeared to be every bit as put off by the joint as I was; and, indeed, in his first confession of the evening, he conceded that he'd chosen it in preference to other Ape-proximate venues chiefly out of a sentimental attachment to its previous incarnation as the Torrington pub, which he described as 'a legendary London rock venue dating back to the early 70s, if not beyond.'

'You must have seen some kick-arse performances here in your day,' I said.

'Oh, yeah, did I ever!' he ejaculated, suddenly coming over all misty-okied. 'If these walls could speak...or sing, or play a musical instrument! I presume you're familiar with a certain stateside combo known as R.E.M.?'

'Of course. So you saw R.E.M. play here in...?--cor, it must have been '85 at the latest, in a place this small.'

'No, this was in '98 at the earliest. And it wasn't the Athenians themselves who graced the stage, but the next best thing: this top-notch R.E.M. cover band called, I think, the R.E.M. Traders or Raiders, or something like that. The bassist was a Tussaudian ringer for Mike Mills. And you should have been there for their version of "Strange Currencies"--it brought the house down and cleared the room in one go!'

It's really a good thing, I thought to meself just then, that Jimmy's finally getting out of the postcode with the new job of his.

But I digress from my digression. It's time to fast-forward back to the point in the convo where Jimmy has just made his confession of me-wot-done-it-ness, to which I am just about to rejoin:

'But why? And...how?'

'Well, you see, on last Monday week--coincidentally the antepenultimate night of my employment as barman of the Ape--your mate Manish stopped by.'

'I see. And then you told him, who told Manisha, who told Esmeralda.'

'Yes, well, ahem--certainly, in the case of the first link in the chain; presumably, in the case of the other two.' [I let my implacable silence do judy for the iteration of the W question.] 'Yes, well, ahem: let's just say that it didn't take me long to suss out that Manish hadn't simply stopped by on the account of his own hunger or thirst pangs, that he was on a mission of sorts, and again not on his own account, but on the account of another party or set of parties--'

'--Namely, Esmeralda by way of Manisha.'

'--That's right. And so, that set of cards being more or less face-up on the table, I felt rather obliged, on your account, for the sake of forestalling the assumption of the worst on the part of these other two parties, to tender a full and complete account of what had gone down at the Milton Saturday night after Esmeralda's departure--'

'--I'd greatly appreciate your skipping over the abstract, Jimmy, and proceeding forthwith to the full text of the article. What did Manish actually say? And what did you say back to him?'

'From front-door-arse-smack to front-door-arse-smack?'

'That's right.'

'Well, erm, let's see. As near as I can remember, it went something like--Hi there, Jimmy. Hi there, Manish. What can I do youffer? Well, says Manish, I'd like a pint of Boddington's, if you don't mind. Boddington's? I says. I wouldn't recommend it. We've just changed the keg, you see, so the first five glasses or so are going to be ten parts head to one part tail. Well, then, says Manish, howzabout a pint of Harps (sic)? Harp? I says. You should know better than to ask for that. We haven't served Harp here in donkey's months. Now there's this Yank beer name of Yuengling that I highly recommend as an alternative to Boddington's or Harp--'

[YFCT, Unstroppliy enough (I had, after all, asked him for a front-door-slap to front-door-slap transcript of the convo):]'--OKOKOK. Let's just skip ahead to the point when Manish is quaffing his first mouthful of Yuengling--'

'--Actually, he eventually settled for a Guinness.'

'Fine: "his first mouthful of Guinness" Hats off to you, Jimmy, for remembering that, as it adds an extra brush-stroke dipped in the shitty side of the palette to my mental portrait of Manish's character. But once he had his beer and you were on to the chin-wagging, fat-chewing session proper...?'

'...All right, then: at that point he says to me, I was rather hoping to run into Rugger or Ronnie here tonight. Neither one of them would have happened to stop by already, would either one of them have done? No, I says to him, I haven't seen either one of 'em all night. Note well, Rugger, that I said all night and not since last Saturday week. Which istersay that I supplied him merely with the precise quantum of truth solicited, as against the full quota of truth I had ready to rucksack.'

'Your discretion on that score is well noted and appreciated, Jimmy. Go on.'

'All right. Well, Manish says, after I've divulged to him the aforementioned minimum quantum, That's understandable, given that word of the existence of their so-called anti-Caledonian-pedipilular fraternity seems recently to have broached the lines and vertices of our inner triangle (by which inner triangle I assume he means Mr Sedule, himself and myself). Oh, is that so? I says to him. Yes it's so, says he to me. And don't play dumb, Jimmy: you were there when it happened. Oh was I now?, I says to him. Yes, you were, he says to me. Indeed, if eyewitness reports are to be credited, you were the very agent and factor of the broaching. Well, I says to him, whilst apparently utterly distracted-by-stroke-abstracted-in the task of wiping down the vacant spots on the bar, Eyewitness reports are, of course, notoriously unreliable. That's as maybe, says he. But when you come down to it, it's really all about the relationship between the eyewitnesser and the eyewitnissee, innit? And about the stake the eyewitnessee has in disabusing the eyewitnesser of whatever conclusions she--excuse me, he or she--has drawn from the witnessed events, conclusions that will perforce be founded not only upon the eyewitness's own firsthand acquaintance with those events, but upon whatever scraps of secondhand intelligence he-stroke-she has managed to garner from her counterparts in relation to consequent, incident, and subsequent events.'

Christ, how I retropsectively envied Jimmy's patience! For all of mine own dire personal interest in the outcome of the convo thus recapitulated, towards the end of it, I could scarcely avoid drowning myself through involuntary nasal immersion in my pint glass. 'So what you're saying, Jimmy, is that, bereft of further testimony from yourself, Manish seemed to have gathered, or assumed he was at liberty to gather, that the reason neither Ronnie and I were to be seen at the Ape was that the two of us had eloped to parts unknown on some sort of open-ended holiday of mutual Arsenalophobic buggery.'

'Well, I can't say as I ever pictured it to myself so graphically, but yes--a reason to that effect.'

'And so you enlightened him as to the true circumstances that accounted for our dual absence, viz. that we'd come to shirtycuffs over Ronnie's insult to my Arsenalophobia by way of an imputation of overweening gynophilia.'

'That's exactly what I did; nae mair and nae less.'

'Are you absolutely sure? There's not a cunt hair's soup's son of a chance--and mind you, Jimmy, I'm not saying this is what you should have done--that you might have led him to believe that the shirtycuffs had been precipitated by a more classical catalyst of such shirtfests, viz. an insult to the lady's reputation?'

'No such...erm...shadow of such a chance. Cos as much as my sympathies lay and lie with you in relation to the whole contretemps, I certainly had no desire to risk the precipitation of a shirt-fest of my own with Ronnie by making him out to be a different sort of cunt than he'd actually been on that night.'

[YFCT, broodingly (at any rate, I was brooding at the time, any potential voco-cum-phiz-ionommical indicators to the cuntrary notwithstanding)]: 'No, no, of course not. You did rightly by both yourself and me. But I take it you see why I thought it worthwhile to hazard the conjecture that you might have queered the pitch of your story in a certain classical direction.'

'No, not exactly, Rugger...'

'Well, because, even if at the lamentable cost of rendering you retrospectively into the most pathetically heelish of Ruggerian fall-blokes, your admission that you'd done so would have furnished me with an infallible crowbar or skeleton key into the Esmeraldan psyche.'

'I'm still not following you, I'm afraid...'

'Well, for her to have verbally fellated me for having gone shirt-to-shirt with some bloke in defence of her honour--that would have made sense. Whereas for her to perform the same oral operation, as she has done, on account of my having, essentially, gone shirt-to-shirt with some bloke in defence of my under-devotion to her...'

'...Defies all reason?'

'That's putting it mildly.'

'Well, Rugger, in the first place, if only for pure formica's sake, you mustn't discount the significance of the fact that I'm but the first Chinaman on the whisper train. I can hardly vouch for what Manish might have said to whoever...'

'...Whoever undoubtedly being Manisha--'

'--undoubtedly, but not incontestably...let alone what whoever et al. might have said to Esmeralda. In the second place, speaking 36-year-old bloke to 26-year-old-bloke, under presumptive interblokial immunity to classical duel-challenges...'

'...Aforesaid immunity granted.'

'Well, let's assume Esmeralda did in fact receive a more or less full and true account of what went down at the Milton last Saturday week. In that case, what line or arc of the dye-cast template of the generic feminine psyche would preclude her behaving as she has done?'

'I dunno anyfing about this generic feminine psychic template whereof you speak, Jimmy. That's nottersay that I'm oblivious of the fact that, with regard to a given sitch, a given blokess will tend to behave differently than a given bloke will do upon immersion in a parallel sitch; it's justersay that, from a sort of LCD-ist, age-indifferent unisex povey--which istersay, after having walked the obligatory thousand-bison's-carcass-lengths in the trainers of Anyblokeorblokess Justaboutanywhere--I can't see how, if some person of either sex or gender undertook to smear the pavement with the shirt or blouse of some random third party in the name of a cause that I not only couldn't shiv a git about, but that I viewed with outright cuntempt, I would ever view the aforesaid shirt-or-blouse-fest as an occasion for crossing paths with that person again, let alone for soliciting a fresh interview with him or her.'

'Rugger, Rugger, you're appraising the whole situation far too rationally, too philosophically, even..'

'...So you're saying I should evaluate it more emotionally--'

'--More emotionally? Cor, what sort of gynocentric self-help pap have you been reading lately? Surely nothing published under the name of one Dr Phil?'

[TBF, I had given Mum's latest Christmas offering a toking leaf-through, if only to familiarise myself with the arguments of the enemy, a minion or exemplar of whom I'd (TBEF) been fearful of Jimmy's morphing into from the inaugural minute of our chinwag onwards, given its subject matter.] 'Erm...no...of course not...'

'I should hope not. Anyway, what I'm saying is that you should be evaluating the whole situation from what for convenience's sake I'll term an anthropological
perspective. Which istersay, you should be assuming that from her point of view, you and Ronnie are just plain blokes, and the whole Arsenal-basherly dimension of the equation is just so much irrelevant subterranean carrot-stalkage--'

'--But--'

'--Let me finish. I've chosen my metaphor carefully here: for the vehicle of the carrot has decidedly phallic implications; and whilst, presumably, across the milliennia many a milliard of uprooted carrots have been employed by the fair sex as so many makeshift dildoes, in its vital state the orange member serves merely as nutriment for the green vegetable flourishing in sight of all, above ground.'

'I'm afraid I've lost you, Jimmy.'

'Understandably, perhaps. My point is that whilst for you and Ronnie the cause of Arsenalophobia may well have amounted to some kind of test of your respective manhoods (i.e. a comparison of your respective subterranean carrot lengths), in Esmeralda's eyes, all that mattered, first off, was which of the two of you was the manlier bloke to begin with (i.e., which of you two sported the more luxuriant above-ground verdage) and which of you eventually proved the manlier of the two by way of the contest.'

'So her entire storming out performance, which was ostensibly occasioned by her discovery of our shared Arsenalophobia...'

'...Was just that--a performance. Oh, sure, she was undoubtedly put off by the glimpse she got of the stalks of your respective subterranean members, by the revelation of your shared Arsenalophobia. But if the concealment or outright absence of such subterranean stalkage were to count as a sine qua non of coupledom, who amongst us blokes should escape a lifetime of onanistic self-flogging?'

'I see. And has this general observation of yours been borne out by the particulars of your own experience of the sex?'

'Has it ever! What do you think my lifelong devotion to the art of last-order calling has been in the eyes of the women I've known, if not a whole passel or bushel of carrots. Cor! I could tell you some stories, Rugger...'

…As he thereupon proceeded to do. The first one was about this ‘bird from Birmingham’ he’d dated back in the late 80s, and who’d kicked him out of her flat for keeping her up all night with his so-called elocution exercises, only to invite him back in a week later on condition he’d have his practice room in the basement soundproofed with egg-cartons. The second was about this ‘chica from Colchester’ he’d dated back in the mid 90s, and who’d kicked him out her bungalow for keeping her up all night with his so-called larynx-toning routine, only to invite him back a week later on condition he’d have his treatment room in the garage soundproofed with ‘sheets of those pointy foam rubber thingies’. Naturally, me being my gormless self, I assumed at the start of tale number two that there would turn out to be some or rationale for his telling more than one story; that, for example, the fact that the girl was from a different town this time round and that he'd known her at a later period presaged some refinement or elaboration of his overall analytics of misogyny. But having duly noted, come TN2's end, not only the differences between the home burgs of the two girls and the historical time frames of the liaisons, but also between the layouts of the blokess's living quarters, the names of the respective last-orderly routines and the respective compositions of the soundproofing materials; and corollarily sussed out a curious and indeed uncanny correspondence between the profile sketched out by these differences and that of Fanny Adams, I elected at the prologue of tale number three (concerning the dame from Durham back in the early oughties) to spare myself such instruction as could be furnished by the knowledge that feminine lightning had struck not merely twice but thrice in the same hapless blokerly spot, by interrupting him thus:

'--OK, OK, Jimmy. Sorry to cut in like this, but our time together here is finite, and I think I'm at last beginning to get the point: you think that I should ring her back up.'

'Yeah, in a nutshell. But also--and what's more important--that you should sever once and for all every tie betwixt the notion of remaining attached to her and the notion of reconciling her to your Arsenalophobia. So long as those two notions remain intertwined, you'll be letting yourself in for a woild of hoit.'

And there our chinwag might have ended, barring my tendering of thanks to Jimmy for all of his sound bloke-to-bloke advice, &c., had it not been for the popping into my gourdita, at that very moment, of a full-fledged-and-formulated reservation as to the applicability of this selfsame advice in my particular case, a reservation that I dare say would not have had the leisure to mature had Jimmy not fatigued my oriole-flexing muscles beforehand with his teejiously pleonastic account of his amatory woes (for I gots to say I've long observed that these sorts of aural workouts, for all of their apparent futility whilst one is submitting to them, have a way of clearing out the shit-pipes of the mind, rather like a kind of mental Weetabix, and thereby making room for fresh ideas):

'But who's to say, Jimmy, that she mightn't have fallen out of love with me on account of my Aresenalophobia, or that she mightn't eventually and fully be reconciled to that Arsenalophobia; given that she fell for me in the first place on account of our shared enthralment to a parallel passion, namely Kenophobia?'

'Double-you-tee-eff-ophobia?'

'Kenophobia: our shared fear, contempt and hatred of the first and current mayor of Greater London.'

'This is news to me, Rugger [as, I just then realise, it would have to be, seeing as how the name of the Thrice-Accursed-One had not once been dropped by either Esmeralda or myself during those scant butchers'-quarter-dozen hours we'd spent with Jimmy]. 'Do tell on.'

And so I tell him the story of my inaugural chin-brush with Esmeralda up at Redford's, of the ensuing Mad Ken Lib game, of her impeccably well-planned seduction of YFCT at night's end; cramming (I note with no small amount of pride) the full length of the yarn on to a time spool roughly half the width of that required for one of Jimmy's own girl tales. By yarn's end Jimmy is, if not flummoxed, at least mildly stumped:

'It's a poser, I'll admit: the apparent intensity of this girl's hatred of Mr Livingstone. Rare indeed is the woman who can be arsed to get her dander up on account of a specific person (her own bloke or a potential female rival for his attention excepted). Of course, when it comes to the pursuit of an abstract cause, your average woman can easily match us toof for toof and nail for nail, especially if the cause in question can be linked to preventing some bloke somewhere from enjoying himself on his lonesome, in the absence of some member of her tribe.'

'Oh, come off it, Jimmy! Now your woman-hating has clearly taken a turn for the delusional. Do you really mean to suggest that Esmeralda hates Ken simply because he's a bloke?'

'Of course not. In fact, I didn't mean to suggest anything at all in particular. I was just thinking aloud, as they say. And I dare say no matter how long I'd gone on thinking aloud, I shouldn't have pitched upon a more definite or positive suggestion than the following: Don't assume, just because you and Esmeralda both hate Ken Livingstone, and your shared hatred of him brought you together; that, at bottom, the two of you hate him for the same reason.'

'With your permission, Jimmy, I'll assume as much as I fucking well like. The reasons, which I've already enumerated to you, are twofold, and as plain as the bare bottom of a newborn babe: 1) that Ken's a bloody tyrant, and b) that he's incapable of making a public statement that bears logical scrutiny.'

'All well and good for now, Rugger. But who's to say some third and more fundamental reason won't eventually come to light--on your end or hers--and put paid to your cosy illusions of two hearts beating as one Kenophobic organ. You must think, if you will, of your respective Kenophobic axe-grinding agendas as standing in relation each other as do the body and soul in the metaphysics of Renny Descartes. The body says, "I'm peckish", the soul says, "I'm stroppy", and the two of 'em are in incidental agreement that a fish 'n' popper combo will satisfy their divergent ends--the one to be full, the other to be chipper. But from this incidental agreement, we ought not to gather that hunger and stroppiness are identical phenomena--it's only because the two of them are contingently in synch with one another, like two clocks set to the same hour, minute and second--'

'--Speaking of clocks, Jimmy,' I say, mindful now more than ever before tonight of time's schlongèd chariot, 'would you happen to have the time?'

'Yeah,' says Jimmy, flipping open his mobile (I having deliberately left mine at home, in evident overrating of the prospective uninterruptedness of our chinwag): 'It's exactly 11:07. Cor! 11:07! And we're both still sitting here drinking--'

'--Just barely,' I say, okie-ing the warm tenth of a pint of Hoegaarden at the bottom of my glass. 'The barman has been cuntishly neglectful of us all night.'

'I'll say: of us and of a certain basic barmanly duty that should have been attended to...oh...some 22 minutes ago at the latest.'

'You don't mean...?'

'...Yes, I do. And as he hasn't seen to it, I must, regrettably, take the law into my own hands.'

'Please, Jimmy, don't. Have you done any preparatory research on this place? If not, have you stopped to consider the possibility that...?'

I trail off on seeing that Jimmy is entirely deaf to my entreaties. Indeed, as of the beginning of my second question, he's already on his feet, hands cupped athwart each side of his gob and calling out:

'LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE? NOW, I SHOULD ADMIT UP FRONT THAT I DON'T ACTUALLY WORK HERE, BUT FEAR NOT: I AM A LICENSED BARMAN. AND IN THAT CAPACITY, AND OUT OF A TOTALLY DISINTERESTED CONCERN FOR THE LEGAL WELL-BEING OF THIS ESTABLISHMENT--A CONCERN ODDLY BUT EVIDENTLY ENOUGH NOT FELT BY ITS PROPRIETOR--I HAVE TAKEN IT UPON MYSELF TO INFORM YOU THAT WE (OR, RATHER, THEY) ARE NOW CLO-O-O-O-Y-Y-Y-SED!'

It's hard to tell whether the diphthongization of the vowel in that last word is occasioned more by the sudden, unlooked-for materialisation, behind Jimmy's back, of our waiter, or by the latter's immejiately subsequent ministering of a few well-aimed forefinger prods to ye olde Vulcan nerve-pinch zone, the hollow between Jimmy's collarbone and shoulder muscles. At any rate, the bloke succeeds in cutting him short and bending his ear to a few whispered sour nuffinks to the presumptive effect of We've got a fucking 24-licence, you git! And even supposing we hadn't got one, you've got one heck of a lot of huevos, upstaging me like this--I've a mind to have your arse disbarred from the fucking guild. Then Jimmy turns all contrite, mutters a few treacly nuffinks into the bloke's ear to the presumptive effect of I never would have dared if I'd known, and I never should have dared, in any case; and please don't have me disbarred, sir! I'll make good my infraction, just you wait and see; and, addressing the crowd once again, declaims:

'SORRY, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN--I STAND CORRECTED, AND LEAVE YOU IN THE MORE THAN COMPETENT HANDS OF MR--'

[The barman leans earwards to whisper his surname.]

'--MR WEXLER. DRINK TO YOUR HEARTS', WALLETS' AND PERSONAL CALENDARS' CONTENTS, AND TIP HIM WELL.'

[A collective groan to the indubitable effect of Is this fucking git for real? percolates up from all corners of the room, to the waiter's immeasurably apparent cuntsternation.]

'YEAH,' Jimmy resumes, oblivious alike of the crowd's and his colleague's discontent, 'I KNOW WHY YOU LOT ARE GROANING: IT'S COS YOU THINK TIPPING IS UN-BRITISH. WELL IT MAY VERY WELL BE THAT--BUT IN TANDEM WITH THE USHERING IN OF THE NEW LICENSING LAWS HAS COME THE USHERING IN OF A NEW ERA OF FEDERALISM, OF DISTINCTIVELY ENGLISH AS OPPOSED TO CLONISHLY BRITISH CUSTOMS, AND THAT MEANS BYE-BYE TO THE PENNY-PINCHING FOLKWAYS OF OUR N**GARDLY NEIGHBOURS NORTH OF THE TWEEE!ED--'

Again comes the old Vulcan nerve-pinch, followed by the peremptory proffering of one of those fold-up leatherette thingies bearing our bill, which amounts to as unambiguous a way of saying GTFOOH(YFC) as a boot to the arse or a touch of the triple-nines to a mobile keypad. It was, TBS, an ignominious end to an otherwise edifying evening. Still, you've got to look at the silver lining, haven't you: if Jimmy hadn't made such an ass (sic) of himself, we might've been left sitting there till bourgie dawn waiting for our next pint, to say nothing of our bill; whereas, what with our being thrown out of there by a quarter-past eleven, I got home in plently of time to make my Phipps-sanctioned phone-call to Esmeralda. The relation of the particulars of this call are, of course, best poned to the kick-off of the next post.

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.'