Ape Night Afterdusk

Well, as promised in my letter to LaMont Mörike-Jones, the North London Arsenal-Bashers did indeed meet up at the Ape night before last. Unsurprisingly, Mr M-J himself failed to make an appearance; hence I am vouchsafed the present liberty, this Saturday afternoon, of catching up on my blog-posting (i.e. as against the counterfactual ordeal of trying on my rent-a-lederhosen tux at the tailor's). [Interesting sidenote about Herr Mörike-Jones: the day after I posted his letter and my reply to it, as I was doing a bit of inline research on the Swabo-Liberians, I came across the Mörike family's genealogy website, where I made the following rather jaw-dropping-injuicing discovery; namely, that in 1911 one Hans Mörike the Fifth, a member of the 1909 Swabo-Liberian landing party, took a wife name of Melba McGyver, elder sister of one...(drumroll)...you guessed it, Terrance McGyver, future circus contortionist and great-grandfather of YFCT. Do you hear that, LaMont? Your great grandmother is my great great auntie, meaning we're family--cousins! (A parenthetical caveat to you, LaMont, just in case you're ever so so slightly tempted to exploit our newfound consanguinity for ends of your own: whilst I am able and all too happy to recommend you to Proctologitex HR for a position in our factory stockroom, it is well beyond my present power to lend you so much as a single shilling; you will, after all, recall that I am worth the pauperly sum of negative 3000 quid [or rather, as of last week, negative 3500]).]

Anyway, that side note aside, I suppose a bit of backfilling on the NL Arsenal-Bashers themselves is in order here. I'd long been an admirer of and frequent visitor to their website, when, at some point not much posterior to the advent of the present calendar year, I finally screwed up the co-jones to email their President, one Reginald Dunn, beseeching him to take me under the wing of their Great Cause in whatever humble capacity I might be of some use; and received the following terse reply within an hour: ‘So you think you’ve got what it takes to become a board-certified Arsenal-Basher? Be at the Pissing Ninja in Hendon next Thursday at 8 p.m., sporting the home colours of one of the following clubs: Liverpool, Blackburn, ManU, Tottenham, West Brom, Middleborough or Wigan.’ So, I went out and bought myself a Wigan shirt with Jason Roberts's name and number and turned up at the appointed pub within excusable distance of the appointed time. I must confess that during my tube trip down there I was a bit apprehensive about my forthcoming initiation as an official Arsenal-basher. Not that there could be any question of my lacking the basic qualifications (i.e., of my hating Arsenal by so much as a cunt-hair's breadth less than the required amplitude); and as for that old blood-and-soil ‘It-takes-a-native-Londoner-to-make-a-true-Arsenal-basher, Johnny Norfolk' line of badgering, pecuniary considerations alone would have restrained me from seeing my brand-new 30-quid JR shirt ripped to shreds in defence of the cause of inter-regional Arsenalophobia. What accounted for my misgivings was lack of intestinal rather than testicular fortitude; for you see, I envisaged the initiation rites by default as a succession of wag-the-dog-form trials-by-gullet reminiscent of the so-called hazing processes of American college fraternities. I imagined myself being forced, for example, to devour both hind quarters (i.e., Arse-'n'-all) of a sucking pig in under a minute; or to swallow, in an equally brief interval, a goldfish-bowl's-worth of miniature lead cannonballs. Fortunately, the North London Arsenal Bashers proved far too puritanical a lot to go in for such cuntishly totemic specatcles as these. The trouble with such traditional folkways of induction, as Reg himself was explaining to me after the adjournment of that first meeting, was that they tended to solidify the individual's sense of solidarity with the group to the detriment of his sense of solidarity with the cause in whose sole service the group had been ostensibly instituted; and that on this account they were to be shunned in favour of such practices as honed his Arsenalophobia qua object worthy of perfection as a thing-in-itself. For the very raison d'etre of the Arsenal-Bashers' Association, Reg said, consisted not in providing the individual Arsenal-basher with a contingent feeling of warm-and-blokey fellowship with others more or less unfavourably disposed to Arsenal, but in providing him with a forum in which he might test the limits of his Aresnalophobia by contriving ever-more unpalatable scenarios in which he should be faced with a choice between renouncing his Arsenalaphobia and renouncing his devotion to some other cause, now newly conceived as being in competition with the former. TBS (Reg said), the lone Arsenalophobe might just as readily contrive such scenarios on his own, in the privacy of his closet, but in this setting they could always be written off on the spot as mere pipe dreams [The private Arsenalophobe who, at half-time, makes a pact with the Devil to offer up the life of his cat Tippy in exchange for an Arsenal defeat cheerfully serves up Whiskas to this self-same Tippy as the credits are rolling at match's end (so Reg)]; whereas, declaimed in public, to an audience of one's peers, they immediately materialised as de facto pledges, as declarations that must be owned up to in deed as well as in word. The efficacy of this almost criminally simple self-selective induction process, according to Reg, was attested to by the club’s staggering attrition rate; by the fact that he, Reg, an official Arsenal-Basher of a mere two years’ standing, was the senior member of the North London chapter, every single bloke Jack of his 20 his fellow class-of-’04-’ers having in the meantime jumped ship at the provocation of some other member's remark that, in his (the deserter’s) view, had ‘gone too far,’ that had, in other words, extended the imaginary frontiers of Arsenalophobia beyond his own threshold of palatability. Well, it should come as no surprise to the reader that, mine own threshhold being equivalent to that of a man born without taste buds, I was assured a bright future in the club from the very start. I arrived at the Ninja at a quarter-past eight on that Thursday night in late January to find the lads huddled secretively, mafioso-style, around a solitary table in a tenebrous, smoke-congested room to the rear of the main taproom. The dimness of the lighting and the thickness of the smoke conspired to render all assembled practically invisible; you could barely make out the outlines of heads and shoulders, let alone specific phiz-features, and I managed to single out Reg himself only as a raspy old-codgerly voice emanating from the vicinity of a glowing ember of cigar ash hovering a foot or two above the far end of the table: 'Ah, our potential new recruit. Have a seat. The fun is only just beginning. [I sat down at the only unoccupied place at the table, about halfway towards the back.] You were saying, Jake, that if you were in the market for a liver transplant...'

'...Yeah,' a voice directly across from me took over, 'I was saying that if I were in the market for a liver transplant, and the first available donor turned out to be a recently-deceased Jans Lehmann, I'd submit to the operation...' [Disgruntled murmurs of JFC! and Move back to Highbury, YFC! issuing from every corner of the room] '...No, no hear me out, lads. I'm saying that I'd submit to the operation...but that on the day of my release from hospital, I'd get hold of a butcher's knife and cut the offending organ out of my abdomen samurai style, with my own two hands, in the full clarity of consciousness.'

[Applause and Huzzahs all round.]

(Reg): 'Not bad, Jake, not bad, that one. Couldn't have done much better myself. Question is, can our new boy, Rugby, top it?'

With the posing of this question, all stogie and fag tips swivelled towards me. I gots to admit my schphincter had enjoyed moments of lesser elasticity than those first butcher's-dozen seconds in which I was obliged to frame my inaugural anti-Arsenal squib for the Bashers. But by and by it (my schpincter) pulled itself taut as I reflected that I had, after all, and in no less public a forum (viz. this here very blog), already long since hefted the destruction of Arsenal against no less ponderous a counterweight than the survival of the human race itself, and had found the latter decidedly wanting; and that hence, the mildest calumny I could improv was likely to go far with this lot, rather like even the scrawniest astrounaut's midfield kick at a lunar stadium. So, before I'd even thought the sentence through to the end, I commenced:

'If Thierry Henry were engaged to be married to my little sister...' (Of course, I didn't have a little sister, but they didn't know that.)

[Expectant Harrumph?s and Quite, quite...s]

'I wouldn't attend the wedding...'

[A chorus of Nyeeeeah!s accompanied, in my mind's okies, by the equivocating oscillation of 20 downward-orientated palms]

'...Even if...the wedding was to take place in Mallorca, and the groom, Monsieur Henry, offered to fly me there in my own personally chartered jet complete with jacuzzi and wet bar.'

[Applause, Huzzahs, finger-whistles and Arribas all round; and at a volume sufficient to provoke the barman to step into the room and shout, 'Would you cunts mind keeping it down a bit in here? We're trying to watch Little Britain out front.']

Such was the field-voiding extent of the triumph of this squib, that on the basis of it alone, and on that very night, I was nominated for and elected to the office of Sergeant at Pints (the title borne by the bloke responsible for communicating the group's drink orders to the bar [the previous holder of the office having stormed out in a huff roughly ten minutes into the meeting, before I had even arrived]); and from that point forward, my rise within the club hierarchy was positively meteoric. Come the end of February, I was effectively Reg's right-hand man, having in the meantime been elected additionally to the post of Treasurer and secured memberships for two of my own nominees, Ronnie Livingstone (of course) and Lou Philips, my Arsenal-bashing mate from the security desk at Proctologitex. I took the admission into our ranks of this latter bloke, Lou, as an especial proof of our leader's esteem and affection for me; for, you see, according to club rules, given that he hailed from St Albans, Lou was technically ineligible for membership in our chapter and should have applied to the Hertfordshire chapter instead. But upon my pointing out to the assembly that, as far as Lou and I knew, there was no Hertfordshire chapter of the Arsenal-Bashers, Reg flexed the muscle of his Presidential prerogative (much to the cuntsternation of the rest of the old guard) and decided that in this one exceptional case the rule barring membership to non-North-Londoners could be waived. ('Mind you,' he added sternly, bringing the tip of his stogie within singeing distance of Lou's goatee [facial hair reference No. 1!], 'If a second St-Albanian turns up, the two of you will have to go off and start your own chapter. Safety in geographical dispersion, not in numbers is the Arsenal-Basher's watchword.')

But for all the pull I had already acquired as of the end of February, I was then but as a petty duke-elector or princeling compared to the mighty Kaiser of North London Arsenalophobia that I was to become as of the adjournment of our most recent meeting, on the night before last.

But, not to let my capacity as a certifiably-board-certified-arch-Arsenalophobe trump my capacity as a would-be-board-certified-yarn-spinner, let me advert to the circumstances of that very evening. Much like a book group, our chapter is a roving assembly hosted cyclically by each of its members in turn at a venue of his choice and sited in his own district. Last Thursday night being my first turn at hosting, I naturally opted for my local sweet local, the Ape. In all modesty, I gots to say I really pulled out all the stops that night for the lads. Being a small-scale, single-room establishment, the Ape isn't really cut out for one of our mini-banquets. But by pushing six of the small two-person tables together, Mr Sedule and I managed to cobble together a single 20-person table, over which we draped a cloth printed with the crests and mottoes of all of the most celebrated and notorious English football clubs--or, rather, all of them save one. For at the dead centre or bull's-schphincter of the cloth, where the Arsenal crest had once been, there was a gaping rectangular void symbolising the destiny to which our confederacy collectively consigned the Gunners; and in the midst of this void I placed an eight-stemmed candelabrum in which were ensconced miniature wax effigies of such Arsenal luminaries as Arsène Wenger, Thierry Henry, Jans Lehmann, etc., each crowned, naturally, by the wick requisite to its eventual ceremonial immolation. Sure, there was something almost teejiously evocative of Bloke Fawkes Day about the whole setup, but that was hardly my fault; cos when you think about it, of the mere handful extant media of desecraction (piss, shit, jizzim, etc.), fire is the only one that can be employed in mixed company.

Anyway, after we had thus laid the table by half-past seven, I (proffering my own credit card as security for the bill) asked Mr Sedule to fry up a full gross of jalappeno poppers, so that none of us should be without solid sustenance at any point during the ensuing two-to- three-hour-long chinwag-cum-melee. At about ten-of-eight, the stalwarts started filing in, e.g.: Ned from Chelsea in his Lenny Pidgely shirt, Jake from Kentish Town in his Ruud van Nistelrooy shirt, and Mitch and Stu from Haringey (shirty alter egos: Michael Carrick and Paul Robinson, respectively). Then, at eight-o'-clock sharp came the second wave, e.g. Ronnie (stubbornly, and in flagrant violation of club rules, flying the shirtage of Sunderland's Stephen Wright), Lou (SAE: Kevin Campbell [West Brom]), Steve from Enfield (SAE: Petr Cech). Finally, at ten past, just as I was on the point of exercising my unofficial-yet-presumably-uncontestable right-hand-man's prerogative of calling the assembly to order, Reg himself staggered in, stogie-less, visibly harried, knackered and unshaven, and sporting a pair of Lennonesque sunglasses in addition to his usual Gareth Southgate shirt (along with shoes and trousers, natch--just like the rest of us. [By no means would I have the reader take the Ape for one of those trouser-optional sorts of establishments, or the Bashers for a group that swing that way, so to speak.]). With an imperious-yet-seemingly-gormless jerk of his right hand, Reg seated himself at the head of the table and thereby brought the ambient hubub to a well-nigh pin-drop-audible hush. According to custom, Mitch, our balding 38-year-old bespectacled Secretary--and, incidentally, our senior member by a purely chronological reckoning--was the first to speak:

‘The first order of business, lads, is to frame a reply to a query posted to us by the public relations liaison of our South London chapter, which query reads as follows: "Just what sort of public spin should be given to our antipathy towards the team captain, Thierry Henry, in view of the fact that, as Monsieur Henry is a gentleman of colour, the aforesaid antipathy risks being misconstrued by the community at large as a manifestation of indurate racialism?"’

‘I say fuck the community at large if they don’t get what we’re about,' replies Dave 'the Baron' Ochs, a great 20-stone bloke with a voice like a bass tuba tuned to drop E. 'If the lot of 'em want to string me up from Nelson’s balls in Trafalgar Square ’cos they think I’m a racialist, it’s fine with me; I’ll breath my last cum-shooting breath with a clear conscience, knowing full well as I do now that I’d have had it in for TH even if he’d been born an albino and a direct descendant of King Alfred.’

‘Knee-deep as I am in awe of the Arsenalophobic purity of your animus towards Thierry, Dave,' says Jake, 'I have to confess that I’d hate him a smidge less if he were an Englishman instead of an accursed Frog. And on that note, I should like to know whether a nationalist spin is out of the question in connection with the double-aforesaid antipathy?'

'It's hardly out of the question,' avers Steve. 'But in an Englishman's thesaurus the phrase taking the piss out of the French stands pretty much cheek-by-jowl with the phrase shooting at sitting canards. Why waste our time hard-bashing Thierry Henry's Frenchness when we could be directing the full force of our cudgels against the soles of the sorely underpersecuted national affiliation of the Professor himself, the fucking Monacans, er...Monacoans...er...Monacoese. Help me out here, Ronnie.'

Ronnie shrugs in an attitude of frank gormlessness.

(Steve again): 'Well, that's a strike against their pea-sized principality in itself: Oh, aren't we all high and mighty? We've got our pockets flush with revenues from our casinos, our national vanity stoked with worldwide envy of our Hollywood royal family; we're too good to waste a piddling .0000000001 per cent of our gross domestic product on coming up with a national epithet that's pronounceable by the average yob in the Anglophone street--'

'--Yes, yes, yes, I catch you, and I sympathise,' interjects Jake. 'But need I remind you that, although Arsène Wenger did indeed make his name as a player with Monaco, he was in fact born and reared in the Franco-German border city of Strasbourg, and that hence by nationality he is not, properly speaking, a Monacoan--or whateverean--but an Alsatian--'

'--So you're saying he is, in fact, a kind of of dog?' (So Steve.) 'Well, that's infinitely richer. Here, Arsène! Fetch me my slippers, Arsène. There's a gooooood boy. Let me scratch you behind the ears. Oh, I wuuuuuuuuv you, my wittle Arsène.'

My own policy in such boisterous group-chinwags as are exemplified by the one to hand is (at least when I'm afforded the luxury of doing so) to hold myself aloof from the general brouhahah until I've properly sussed out its intellectual temperature and have adjusted the kinetics of my own faculties accordingly, such that, by the time I catch sight of what in vulgar parlance is known as an in, I may rest more or less assured of leaving all and sundry assembled trailing in my spiritual dust. Well, by the time Steve was on to figuring AW as Rin Tin Tin's kinsbitch, I was running full apace of the train of the convo, and was within jumping distance of the boxcar door of my in. Thus I sprang:

'You're both shooting well wide of the co-jones of the Professor's Achilles heel. Just consider for a second the graphic significance of his forename, Arsène. Chop off the accent grave and the final unvoiced e and add an a and an l, and you've got in full the name of the very club he's managing. Can we, from the most astronomical degree of remove from the blackboard, chalk up the proximity of the two names to sheer coincidence? I think not. Obviously, Monsieur or Herr Wenger's stint at Monaco was simply a stepping stone in his progress towards the attainment of his current post. Obviously, from the very naissance of his nipperhood, when he was still wearing footed pajamas, he was aiming to become manager of this club. Can't you just picture his governess or nanny asking him, circa 1952: What do you want to be when you grow up, little Arsène? And him responding, I want to be the manager of Arsenal football club. Oh my! says the nanny, you are a precociously ambitious little lad; you'll be getting an extra ration of whipped cream with your blancmange at lunchtime today. And just ponder for a moment the sheer cuntish single-minded perversity of the whole enterprise, and its cuntishly protracted timescale.’

This squib doesn't go over half as well as I hoped--in fact, assumed--it would do. Ned, the only one who bothers to comment on it at all, looks dubious. ‘I’m no fan of the Professor, but even if it is true he wanted to coach Arsenal just cos his name was Arsène—which I very much doubt—I don’t see how it can be used as a strike against him. These Shandyan sorts of bios are fivepence a dozen in the world of sport, and they’re a publicity agent’s wet dream. Did you ever hear, for example, of that American blokess who decided to become a professional swimmer when she learnt her last name meant Esther Williams in Greek?’

(YFCT): ‘No.’

‘Well, she’s practically living off the royalties from the story in her retirement.’

‘Might I remind you, gentlemen,' interjects our Secretary, 'that while the two of you are busy splitting the chlorinated cunt-hairs of the practitioner of a sport that is perforce of no concern to us, there’s a bloke down in Bermondsey or Southwark waiting with bated breath for an answer to his Thierry Henry question.’

‘Oh, fuck the guy in Bermondsey or Southwark,' spits the Baron with scornful stroppiness. 'The fact is, that even in trying to answer that original question, we were already just pissing alongside the third rail--or playing hide and seek with the 40-stone bloke in the gorilla costume--of this entire session.’

'By which you mean what?' rejoins Mitch with a poncily provocative, Dr-Evil-ish frown-cum-eyebrow-arch concisely significative of the utterance, I know as well as you do what you mean, but I can't imagine you've got the co-jones to bring it out into the open.

(The Baron:) 'I mean, your Ponciness, the Gunners' crossing the Channel into the running for the European Championship.'

(Mitch, trying futilely to keep his Mike Myers schtick going:) 'Oh, th-th-th-that old th-th-th-th-ing.'

(Ochs:) 'Cos I know full well there's at least four of five us sitting here right now who are on the point of pissing themselves in anticipation of being allowed to say...' He breaks off to draw a deep breath and to cross himself upside-down briskly, before resuming, in a daemonic larynx-shredding falsetto fit to make your flesh crawl, 'Shouldn't we all get behind Arsenal now that they're the only surviving English Champions club?' [Another five-second-long interval elapses whilst he downs half a pint to reclaim his selfhood from the forces of darkness he's just courageously suffered himself to channel. Then, in his organic bass tuba voice, he resumes:] 'Well, I say to these Judases and Benedict Arnolds in our midst, Speak now, or for ever hold your piss. But I warn you lot, for me and my shirt, no night'll be too long; the two of us don't know the meaning of the word "overtime".'

'I'll be the first,' says a bloke name of Cyril, who, in weighing in at 18 stone, is the only one amongst us who might even dream of emerging alive from the coda of a shirtfest with Ochs. 'This last month has been a time of great spiritual crisis for me. All along, from the moment when I joined up with the Bashers way back in January of ought-five, I've always thought of myself as a do-or-die Arsenalophobe. But since Chelsea were knocked out contention for the Champions Cup this year, I've begun not so much to question my Arsenalophobia as to become re-acquainted with my patriotism, with my Anglophilia. And I'm starting to wonder whether our club, under its current constitution, is really cut out to survive in this brave new world we've been living in since February 22, a world where Arsenal are the only representatives of the English fighting spirit on the continent.'

'So, you're saying,' Steve hazards, 'that we might as well pack it all in, disband, and--horribile dictu--encourage our dispersed membership to report to their respective local Gunners'-fan-club recruiting offices?'

'No, I'm simply suggesting that, out of respect for those of us who regard an Arsenal-spearheaded English UEFA championship as the least of eight evils, we should postpone our next meeting till Arsenal are eliminated from the rounds, or till May 17, whichever comes first.'

About midway through the preceding sentence, I start to sense through the table and the hams of my hands a vibration such as you might feel during the initial seconds of a Richter-Level Nine earthquake, and notice that the surface of the Hoegaarden in my half-empty pint glass is gently seesawing a few degrees upwards and downwards of the parallel. Taking cognizance at once the catastrophe these signs portend, I spring to my feet just in time to catch hold of Ochs's canteloupe-circumfrenced, shirtbound right forearm, wrestle it back down to table level and throw the full weight of my arseward-orientated carcass on to it; whilst on Ochs's left flank Lou, having been likewise tipped off, does the same to the other forearm. During the next few seconds, as I'm fighting the opening round of an undoubtedly hopeless bout against Ochs's still shirtward-hankering sinews, I cry out as loudly as I can do, 'CODE PUCE, JIMMY!' in the general direction of the bar.

[TBC. (I hear the cry of the Ape.)]

Take Back the Night

Old habits die hard (with a vengeance? no, with a savage cuntishness), and here I am falling back into one of mine: sporadic, un-Boswellian posting. And had my life taken a slightly different turn over the past few days, I might have put off posting even longer; but, thankfully, not two nights ago as of the moment of this typing, I was vouchsafed a bit of experience that not only met but actually exceeded my original criterion of blog-worthiness (i.e., personal memorability); as it centred on a matter that should be of great, and indeed, urgent interest not only to all Barnetians, or, indeed even to all Londoners, but to all Britons; namely, the birth of a new British national holiday.

First, the obligatory background (I call the background obligatory in view of the fact that not only was I present at the parturition of the holiday, but that in all modesty I must account myself its presiding midwife or obstetrician, and in that capacity I am obliged to tender an account of all of the circumstances pertaining to myself that also directly or indirectly pertain to that parturition. It's like in that movie about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, right?, where we're treated to ten times as much footage of Tom Jefferson trying to roger his wife as of him actually writing the fucking thing.): Round about 11 on Saturday morning I rang up Ronnie 'Anti-Ken' Livingstone to see if he'd be up for meeting up with me at the Ape to watch the Sunderland-Arsenal game. And, of course, he was up for it, because not only does he, like me, hate Arsenal (although I'd say not quite as much), but he also considers himself a Sunderland supporter; this on the flimsy grounds that he has an uncle who lives there, although Ronnie himself has never come within a hundred miles of the beshattened town (and who can blame him?). I've been known on more than one occasion to take the piss out of Ronnie for the factitiousness of his Mackemomania, but Saturday night was no such occasion; for just as surely as stone blunts scissors and paper wraps stone (and cunt wraps schlong), so, in my eyes, does true Arsenal-enmity trump false Sunderland-fandom. To be sure, though, neither of us had great hopes for Sunderland. They've been hovering or slouching at the very bottom of the table, in last place, since their promotion form the sub-tabular realm of the Championship League at the beginning of the season. If the Premiership table may be likened to a gauge of ocean depths, then Sunderland are one of those species of creepy-crawly fish only lately discovered by the most advanced and deep-diving of submarines, the type of spiny, slimy, hideous little critter that has evolved its way out of the need for eyes. That said, on Saturday the Cats fared a lot better than either Ronnie or I expected them to do, no thanks to any great exhibition of skill on their part. It was really only owing to T. Henry & co.'s cuntish forbearance that they even managed to score those two corners, and to finish down by two points instead of ten. It's fascinating to me how with the viewing of every new match, my animus towards the Gunners becomes ever-more subtly nuanced, acquires an ever richer bouquet, if you will. If, on Saturday, Arsenal had simply roundly and expeditiously trounced Sunderland, my hatred of them would have been undiluted by so much as a dram of its current strength, and yet it would have lacked something of the metaphysical richness it now posseses by virtue of the slow, depraved, Gestapo-style approach to the kill they opted for on that night. Time and again, Arsenal would taunt Sunderland, would say to them, 'You pussycats with your seasoned, callus-toed talent are obviously the real professionals here, and we're just a bunch of Johnny-come-lately hacks--come on, show us what you've got; swat us clean on up into the stands with your little back pussy paws,' only to send the kitty fur flying with the full brunt of their cuntish barrage. It was like (if you'll pardon my switching metaphors in midstream) watching a bullfighter take on a chihuahua or a dachshund with specially wrought burrito-or-sausage-dog-sized skewers.

But to take up the thread of my narrative here and now lest I lose it courtesy of a state of total absorption in my one true passion: the game had just ended, and Ronnie and I were glumly and silently nursing our respective fifth Stellas, when I heard the announcer say: 'And that's all she wrote, ladies and gents. The Gunners shut down the Black Cats three to one, and Thierry Henry extends his goalscoring record by an impressive three points here at Highbury on the fifth of November, 2005.' It was his allusion to the date, couched in that precise format, that set me off, that instantly set my mind's I-Pod playing the first line of the first stanza of that most perdurable songs of my childhood, a song that I would have learned at my wet-nurse's tit if I'd had a wet-nurse: Remember, remember the Fifth of November. But that, I realised, as I listened to this fragment of tuneage in my head, was just the point: this year, for the first time in my life, I had forgotten the fifth of November; or, to be more precise, I had allowed the best part of that day to elapse without reflecting on its significance. My shame was indescribable; it was as though I'd just realised I'd forgotten my mum's birthday. (And as I in fact tend to do with my mum's birthday, I'd noted the significance of the day in question a few days in advance [i.e., in this case, as I was typing my last post on the first] only subsequently to forget it on the day itself.) But was it entirely my fault that here I was, a slender span of six hours away from my passage into the utterly insignificant calendar date of November sixth, and only just now recalling what the fifth was supposed to be all about? Had anyone here at the pub tonight broached the subject? Had, for that matter, anyone at work in the course of the preceding week, thought to ask me, 'Have you got any plans for the big holiday on Saturday?' No and no. Could it be, I wondered, that my inadvertent snubbage of the fifth was not the result of a personal, individuated mental eructation, but rather that it participated in a general syndrome afflicting the British people (or at any rate, those Britons residing along the Barnet-Potters Bar corridor) at large? Well, there was only one way to find out. So, after draining my Stella to the lees and signalling to Jimmy to pour us another two, I said to Ronnie:

'So, it's the fifth of November. You know what that means, right?'

Absolutely dumbstruck incomprehension on his side. 'Only 50 shopping days left till Christmas?'
'No, you stupid cunt. I mean do you know what the date in itself means, without reference to any other date.'

'Hmm,' he says meditatively, matching me on the Stella count as Jimmy brings us the next round. Then, setting his glass down before taking sip number one from it, and slapping the table with an air of triumphal smugness that sorely tempts me to reach for my shirt, he exclaims: 'No, I've got it! The tenth anniversary of the first game in Aresnal's all-time longest losing streak.'

'Wrong again, YSC-squared!' (Truth be told, though, I'm flattered by this second guess qua well-gravied sop to my Arsenalophobia.)

'Well, I give up then.'

'Remember, remember, the fifth of November,' I sing along to my mental I-Pod, conducting an air-choir with my Stella-free hand,'the gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot. Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent, to blow up King and Parliament. Three score barrels were laid...'

'Cor!' he exclaims, laying down his Stella once again and cruelly, almost audibly, smiting his forehead. 'It's Guy Fawkes Day--Bonfire Night!'

'Exactly!' I say, laying down my own Stella and reaching across the table to give his forehead a painless stuntman's smite of my own.

'You know what else...?' he says, ignoring my gesture of gentle piss-taking, and suddenly coming over all pensive, and biting a thumbnail. 'I just remembed that this year's Guy Fawkes Day isn't just any old Guy Fawkes Day. I hear tell, from something I was reading in the Daily Mail last week [Ronnie, you've been reading that downmarket sanitary napkin? Neighbah, please!], that 2005, in fact, marks the four hundredth anniversary of the gunpowder plot.'

'You don't say!' (That sounded about right. Jimmy the First, Will 'Shakes' The Bard, Guy himself and all that lot flourished in the 16-oughties, didn't they?) 'Well, that quadruples the severity of the infraction, dunnit? Here it is, the quadracentennial of the original Guy Fawkes Day--'

Here Ronnie has the co-jones to interject, 'Is quadracentennial a real word? I thought it was just the title of a Who-album-cum-movie-tie-in.'

'All right, you little linguistic cunt-hair-splitter. I thought it was a real word, but maybe it isn't. I'll look it up in my compact OED when I get home. So, then: here it is, the four hundredth anniversary of the original Guy Fawkes day, and what are you and I, two red-blooded Englishmen--'

Ronnie con mas co-jones: '--Don't forget I've got some blue blood coursing through me not-so-old veins. I am, after all, 35th in the line of succession for the Earldom of Shaftesbury, via my direct descent from Susan De Coverley, second cousin twice removed of the Second Earl.'

(Just like a Croydon chemist's son to whip out his posh credentials at the slightest little provocation!) 'Here we are, then, two full-blooded Englishmen--'

'Woah, woah, woah, don't pour so free-handedly with the full bottle, mate. Remember your Scots great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, the bloke who was Davie Hume's valet de chambre?'

(Fuck me ever so gently if the cunt didn't know my family tree better than I did!) 'Here we are, then, two native-born Englishmen, in a pub flush with native-born Englishmen and Englishwomen--'

'--Flush seems a bit hyperbolic to me. First off, you've got the owner himself, Mr Sedule, a Frenchman; then old there's Manish Shah (Punjab, India) and Jay Gulati (UP, ditto) up at the bar, plus Denise the Cypriot and Claudia the Italian at the next table; not to mention that Yank Van Adams back in the kitchen...'

I'd had about enough of Ronnie's sophistic shenanigans. He's too clever by half sometimes, is that Ronnie. So, giving a few rhetorical tugs to my shirt front (but without raising my voice above the optimal pub-din volume), I break in with: 'All right, you've made your fucking point. And I think right about now I'm making mine, extra-verbally, with equal pellucidity. [He looks down at his glass as if to say, in a stroppy-yet-mollified tone, No need to get shirty about it, YFC!] So, if you'll allow to me continue: Here we are, a pubful of people who, regardless of whatever piece of turf we happen to have been squeezed out on to from the womb, regard England, in our adult years, as a better piece of turf on which to piss away a Saturday night than fucking Portugal or Malaysia or Togo; here we are, I say, on the four-hundredth anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day, and how are we keeping this anniversary? By watching a sodding football match!'

'An it please your worship (and as your worship must appreciate), this wasn't just any old football match. It was an Arsenal match.'

'Cor's whores, I haven't forgotten that! But if we'd remembered we'd surely have found time for both--for the Arsenal game and for bonfire night. Up here in the lower fringes of the Arctic Circle, we are, after all, graced by seven full hours of pre-midnight darkness in November. My point is that we forgot Guy Fawkes Day altogether, we let it slip by us without so much as a "Take care not to let the door hit you on the arse on your way out of the pub". That's my point, and the question I would like to pose to you, my stalwart comrade at pints, is why?'

'Well,' Ronnie says, as he begins to zamboni his patch of table fretfully with the bottom of his pint glass, 'Again, as they said in the Daily Mail, apparently it's got something to do with terrorism, or, rather, with the fear thereof. On account of 11/9 and 7/7 and whatnot.'

'What has, the fact that you and I've forgotten about Guy Fawkes Day?' (Note here the essaying of McGyver Signature Rhetorical Ploy #52: Pedantic Disengenuousness. Direct free kick for the Rugger!)

'Course not, YFC! I mean the general unpopularity of the holiday this year.'

'Pull the third one, Ronnie, it's got balls on it! Terrorism schmerrorism; this little access of amnesia of ours has been a long time in coming. When was the last time you attended a Bonfire Night celebration?'

'Let's see...must have been about ten years ago, in Regent's Park. I've only been to two or three of 'em in all of my 27 years. The whole shebang was always considered a bit old hat in Croydon, you know.'

'Well, I remember going to a Bonfire Night as recently as eight years ago, in Norwich. And the crowd that year was maybe half the size of the crowd at the one I'd gone to before that, in '92 or '93. And when you compare the GFD/BN scene in the early '90s with the one of late 80s--well, Christ, there is no comparison. Back then, in my late single-digits, all of Norfolk celebrated Guy Fawkes Day like it was 1699. Of course, as my dad likes to joke, Norwich is the Cincinnati of the UK--'

'--Yeah, yeah, yeah, and Diss is the Cincinnati of Norfolk.'

'How'd you know I was going to say that?'

'No special powers of divination needed in the present instance. The Cincinnati joke is one of your paternal hobby horse's oldest tricks, innit?'

If stone blunts scissors, etc., then sentimentality blunts shirtiness. 'Well, then,' I continue, contenting myself with a 'Shut-your-CTM-hole!'-ish glare at him en pissant, 'I'll set off on this here trip down Memory Lane on foot. I still get choked up every time I think about my first Guy Fawkes Day, you see. Cor, Ronnie, I couldn't have been more than five or six. With what loving, painstaking care my mum and I stitched together my first guy! (A Margaret Thatcher effigy, natch.) It must have taken us a week of pattern-cutting and sewing, well into the small hours every night. I remember standing against a shop-front on Mere Street, shivering in the unseasonably cold early November air, and pathetically calling out "Penny for the Guy!" to the passersby like a sodding homeless nipper from a Chuck Dickens novel. I remember a pack of lads twice as old (and tall) as me sauntering up to me and saying, "That's a girl not a guy, you fucking pansy!," filching all the cambio from my bucket, and leaving me blinkered with the latter planted upside-down (and unbudgeable) over my head. I remember driving up to Norwich in our old clunker of a Mini on bonfire night itself, the infernal majesty of the bonfire in Eaton Park, comforting in its provision of warmth and, at the same time, sublimely terrifying. I remember the surge of elation, the sense of sheer omnipotence, I felt as I single-handedly lobbed my guy into the flames and saw it consumed to a cinder in the span of a minute. I remember just afterwards a little girl of about my age lobbing her own guy, a dummy sporting a brown business suit and a preternaturally russet and immaculately-coiffed toupee, into the fire; and asking my dad who that was supposed to be. "That, son," he said, "is supposed to be Ronald Reagan." "And who's Ronald Reagan, dad?" "A very, very naughty man, I'm afraid." Oh, you don't know what you missed out on, Ronnie. Alongside those bonfire night memories my Christmas memories seem like...'

'...Thanksgiving memories?'

'Exactly. Like memories of a total non-holiday. And yet, somehow, I've let Guy Fawkes Day slip away from me. We've all of us, collectively, let it slip away from us, including you lot who never celebrated it much in the first place.'

'Well, as you were telling your story just now, another possible explanation for the decline of the holiday popped into my head.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah, I mean the coinciding ascendancy of Halloween. Yet another manifestation of the creeping American supersedence of--pardon me [belch]--hallowed British traditions.'

'Well, there is that, of course,' I say, feeling a twinge from the old war wound of the other night in the right corner of my mouth, 'but let's not forget that Halloween, unlike Thanksgiving, isn't a proper stateside-genetic festival. Of course, it's only very recently really taken off nationwide in the UK, but all the same, here and there, in pockets dispersed throughout the Kingdom, Guy Fawkes Day and Halloween have co-existed as local celebrations for centuries. Still, in bringing up the Yanks you may be on to something, Ronnie, I'll grant you that.' [You see, once again, my mind's I-Pod was cranking into play mode and setting me off on the trail of a hunch.] 'Ronnie, is your dad by any chance anything of a Gilbert and Sullivan buff?'

'No, by fuck all chance. His tastes run more towards Rodgers and Hammerstein.'

'So, then, I suppose you've yet to make an acquaintance with the Gilbertian-Sullivanian corpus.'

'Och, by fuck all stretch of the imagination. I practically know the whole bleeding thing by heart, from Thespis to The Grand Duke, courtesy of my uncle Milton.'

'The Sunderland uncle?'

'That's him. Yeah, every time he visited for Christmas he'd commandeer the stereo and subject the whole household to a round-the-clock aural diet of G&S. It was horrible, put me permanently off ever taking a trip to Penzance or Japan.'

'I know what it's like. There's one in every family, isn't there, scarring us young 'uns for life? Well, anyway, do you remember when you first heard Ko-Ko the Lord High Executioner's song from the Mikado, and in particular that couplet in the song that goes:

And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy,
And who 'doesn't think she waltzes, but would rather like to try'? '

'Yeah, what of it?'

'Well, what did you think the executioner was saying when he drew that comparison between the provincial chica and the guy?'

'Dunno. Well, yeah, come to think of it, I do know: I thought he was saying she was some kind of female tranny--that she was a lady who looked like a dude, to misquote Aerosmith.'

'And it probably struck you as a trifle...anachronistic, right?, this Anglo-Japanese gent of the Victorian age bandying about the word guy with the ease of a Premiership centre forward?'

'You bet it did.'

'And you were so flummoxed by the anachronism that you just had to ask your uncle for an explanation. Am I right?'

Right now he's looking pretty much how I imagine I must have looked when he finished my Cincinnati quip for me.

'Yeah, you're right.'

'And then he explained to you that guy was being employed here not qua synonym for bloke, but rather in allusion to the figure burnt on Bonfire Night, a grotty scarecrow-ish dummy. Am I still right?'

'Right on all three scores and tied with T. Henry tonight. So you're saying you likewise mistook the guy-line for an inverted Aerosmithism on hearing this tune in your nipperhood?'

'Even fucking so.'

'Well, that surprises me a bit. I mean, I'd expect a virtual Fawkesian ignoramus like myself to have made a mistake like that; but for you, steeped since infancy in the rites of Bonfire Night to have made it...'

'...speaks volumes about the sea-change the de facto meaning of the word guy underwent in the British Isles during the period stretching roughly from 1960 to 1980; a sea-change that was more or less complete by the time we were born. In my case, as in yours, guy-as-bloke-synonym was what I picked up first; and it was only afterwards, thanks to all those Norwich Bonfire Nights, that I partially unlearned that sense of the word and became acclimatised to the other, more ancient, sense. Cor, I wonder what it was like for the average full-grown bloke during the period of the switchover between the two senses; what it was like for him to unfold his morning Times or Torygraph of the sixth of November of, say, 1975, and come across a story reporting that "this year, for the first time on record, the UK-wide total of guys incinerated at Bonfire Night celebrations was exceeded by the number of uses of guy-as-bloke-synonym in the combined prime-time schedules of the BBC and ITV. Our correspondent counted ten such uses in yesterday's episode of The Sweeney alone". It must have come as a right hefty sock in the co-jones of his blokish national pride, mustn't it have done, to read such a so-called news-item?'

'Great heaping gobfuls of whatevs to you. You weren't that bloke, that guy, so why do you give an art's raz about the switchover? It was a done-to-death deal 30 years ago. And you've arrived on the scene 30 years too late to undo it.'

'Oh, have I now, clever schlong? I see no reason why this treason against the good name of Guy should--or need--ever be forgot.' By this point, you see, I'd bypassed the hunch and was just shy of pouncing on a full-fledged conviction. 'I'm convinced that all Guy Fawkes Day needs in order to endure--nay, prevail--is the slightest bit of tweaking to its public image, of a tactical re-branding, if you will.'

'What are you getting at? Some sodding in-your-face 24-7 public relations campaign a la Cool Britannia, spearheaded by a correspondingly berkish slogan, e.g. He's Just a Fawking Regular Guy or Guy Fawkes Shit Up, TBS!?'

'No, no, no. You're well on to your way to Edgware with that tube-line-tine of speculation. I'm talking about, so to speak, rebritifying Guy Fawkes Day, about replacing the name Guy with some other vocable as yet untrammeled by Americanisation.'

'Like, for instance, Jeff or Steve or Bill?'

[Into my hand, as if through the tannoy of a tube-train]: 'Next stop: Edgware Station. No! Another forename will never do, for the simple reason that not even the most certifiably English of of forenames--Ethelred, say, or my old handle of Nigel--are nailed-to-the-ground English property. Christ, just think of all the continental nobs throughout history who've sported the consummately English Christian name of Edward. No, what I'm saying is that for Guy we should substitute a word that no one outside the Commonwealth would ever dream of availing himself of save for satiric purposes, for the sake of impersonating a Brit in the context of some sort of joke or panto. And there's really only one word that'll do. And that word is--'

'--Chap.'

'No: too posh-sounding.'

'Well, then: lad.'

'Uh-uh: too juvenile.'

'Mate?'

'Too familiar, and sexually ambiguous to boot. No, the only word that will do for this purpose is a word that I have, for ten years running, studiously and conscientiously employed in lieu of lower-case guy; a word that has already turned up a dozen or more times in this very convo; and that word is bloke.'

'So, you seriously propose rechristening Guy Fawkes Day Bloke Fawkes Day?'

'Yepper.'

'You're absolutely barmy. It'd never fly.'

'O cunt rare, it'd soar like a gossamer dirigible. Just do a quick find-and- replace on all the history books, substituing this bloke for every instance of Guy and no one will be any the wiser; but, for all that, everyone will be all the merrier to be reading about the events recounted therein; and, come November 5th, all the more proud to be paying homeage to an exemplar of that most archetypally English of human types, the bloke, in the person of a bloke who would henceforth be known as the original bloke, Mr Fawkes himself.'

'Paying homage to him by burning him?'

'Burning, roasting, toasting, boasting--it all comes to the same thing, dunnit? No publicity is bad publicity, as P. T. Barnum or some other carnie cunt once said.'

'I reiterate in 14-point-bold caps: YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY BARMY.'

'You still think so, YFC? Well let's do a little straw poll then. Here's pollee Numero Un--Mr Sedule [who happens to be passing by en route to the bar from the kitchen with a plate of fried calamaries in one hand]. Oh, Mr Sedule!' I call out to him.

'Oui, Monsieur Meck-Eye-VAIR?'

'Bit of a queer question, but does today's date, November 5, mean anything in particular to you?'
'Bien entendu, Monsieur. C'est la nuit des grands feux...how do you say...Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes Day!'

'At least somebody round here noticed it,' I shout aside to Ronnie. Then, to Mr Sedule again: 'Ronnie and I've been chinwagging the idea of changing the name of the holiday to Bloke Fawkes Day. What d'ye think of them there palms?'

'O, Monsieur, I think it is a splend-DEED idea. And bloke, it is a splen-DEED word. Enffectivement, 'bloke,' c'est le fond de la langue anglaise. Alors, au moins, so it was, once upon a time. I remember the first time I came to Lon-DON, in 1959, and I did not know a word of English. En tout cas, I am...a bit, how do you say...peck-EESH, I walk into a peub, I sit down, I listen to the people, I try to understand something that they are saying. And all I hear is this word bloke; everybody saying bloke this bloke that, bloke au cul. I am so relieved, because it to me seems that with très peu you can go très loin in English. So, for ordering my meal, I have an idea. I call to the garçon du maison, 'Eh, bloke! bloke!' and make a gesture, comme ça [here, he opens wide his mouth, his tartine hole, if you will, and pokes his free forefinger into it a few times] and the garçon, he makes a frown, comme ça, like I have just broken the wind in his face [I can see where this is going], and carries me to the door and throws me out on to the pave-MENT. Quelle outrage! But this is all by the side of the point. The point is: now I do not hear bloke quite so much. Today in place of bloke what I hear is--'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah: guy this, guy that, guy up the arsehole...'

'Oui, bien sûr, guy--mais en plus, I hear this phrase...fucking cunt. Fucking cunt this, fucking cunt that, fucking cunt à la con. The whole fucking country has gone absolument merde du singe over fucking cunterie. Décidément, fings ain't wot zey used to be in merrie olde Eng-LAND.'

[Here, I want to say to him, 'Why don't you move back to Frogistan, you old garçon de Nancy, if the way we talk nowadays on this side of the sleeve gets on your nichons so much?' But it would be impoltic, to say the least, for me to say such a thing to the pubmeister of me local.] 'Well, messy, Mr Sedule, for your vote of confidence in our little proposal. Could you ask Jimmy to bring us another round of Stellas?'

'De rien, et bien sûr, respectivement, Monsieur Meck-eye-VAIRR!' he answers with a curt bow, and heads off to the bar.

Well, a minute or two later Jimmy comes round with our booze, having been briefed on Bloke Fawkes day by Mr Sedule; and he is, if anything, even more enthusiastic about the idea than his boss. 'I've always resented the g-word, but felt I had to use it because of peer pressure and whatnot. Christ, I'd give up me left bollock for the chance to come out of the closet as a regular bloke.'

'No need to break out the scalpel and the anaesthetic, Jimmy; rest assured, we'll make it happen.'

Next, I pitch my proposal to Denise and Claudia, who prove to be twice as game as you could hope a pair of continental blokesses to be about a piece of UK legislation having fuck all to do with the Euro or the labelling of sodding chocolate or wine; and having by now canvassed the premises as thoroughly as I can without shifting my arse cheeks, I've pretty much won Ronnie over to the sanity of the notion of Bloke Fawkes Day, and it's now just a matter of persuading him the practicability of, as I was just saying to Jimmy, making it happen.

'Cos after all,' Ronnie reminds me, with his characteristic knack for pointing out the fucking noseonyourfaceous, 'a straw poll at the Ape does not a Royal Proclamation make.'

'Course it doesn't! But is that the last word on the matter? Is this the DDR? Is this the PRC? Is this the FDA? I thought it was the fucking UK. Have we not been entrusted by the Bill of Rights of 1688 with the power of petition of our Monarch?'

'Yeah, but--'

'--I don't want to hear any buts from your gob. Butts are for ashtrays--and prudish Yanks.'

And so, calling for pen and paper, which were both delivered to me forthwith by Mr Sedule himself, I indited the following screedlet:

'We, the underfigned refidents of the N12 poftcode, having unanimoufly agreed that

WHEREAS the Chriftian name of Guy, which whilom denoted, in the minds of Your Majefty's fubjects, the eponym of that auguft British national feftival known as Guy Fawkes Day, otherwife known as Bonfire Night, has of late come, courtefy of the perfidious agency of the media of cinema, radio and televifion, to denote in these felffame minds, the whilom ftrictly American acceptation of "a human individual of indeterminate fex"; and that

WHEREAS the common noun of bloke, which whilom ferved as the de facto token of the narrower acceptation of "a male human individiual" in thefe Your Majesty's realms, has lately in that capacity fallen into defuetude, likewife courtefy of the aforementioned agency, and that

WHEREAS, for fome years now, owing to the circumftances alluded to in the two foregoing claufes, Your Majefty's fubjects have been forely wanting for occafions for the fêting of their national identity as Britons, (we) hereby humbly implore Your Majefty to iffue a Royal Proclamation to the effect that the aforementioned feftival fhall henceforth be known as Bloke Fawkes Day in all of your dominions lying both north of the 42nd degree of latitude (including the Bailiwicks of Guernfey and Jerfey [the latter being coextenfive with the ifland that ferved as the fetting of the BBC televifion programme Bergerac and exclufive of the American State of nativity of Meffrs Springfteen, Willis, &c.]) and eaft of the 58th degree of longitude (including the ifland of Barbados but excluding the Canadian province of Newfoundland).

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.

Defpactched from the fign of the Sedulous Ape, November the 5th, 2005.'

Then I circulated the document round the premises for the affixing of John Handschlongs. TBS, there were a fistful of blokes and blokesses who put up a show of not wanting to sign, but each of them was soon brought round to a adopting a more complaisant attitude by the judicious offer (on my dime) of a complimentary Stella. That in itself is a venerable British political institution, innit--the swapping of pints for petition signatures? Well, when the bottom half of the page was fairly swarming with cursive up to its very margins, I asked Mr Sedule for an envelope and stamp, and having duly sealed the missive and addressed it to 'H. R. H. THE QUEEN, BUCKINGHAM PALACE, LONDON SW1A,' I popped outside and slipped it in the postbox at the kerb. And when I got back inside, I could perceive from the general gazelle-shaft's-ghost, that no one was quite prepared to wait for a phone call from the Palace to initiate the inaugural celebration of the holiday, that, as far as this crowd were concerned, Bloke Fawkes Day the First was already in full swing. Nonetheless, I couldn't help being momentarily taken aback when Jimmy, grinning and aflush with newly unkennelled desire like a Stonewall Day debutante, clapped an arm round my shoulders and said, 'Let's go find ourselves a bloke.'

'Come again?'

'A bloke. To burn on the bonfire.'

Christ, to think that I, of all people, the George Washington of Bloke Fawkes Day, should have thought he meant anything else! 'Oh, yeah, of course. I'm right with you there, mate. But it's a bit late in the day to talk of breaking out the sewing machine, innit? Maybe next year.'

'We don't need no stinking sewing machine! Just take a gander round you.'

And strike me red-as-Ken if he wasn't right! Suspended from the rafters at every corner of the room was a bloke-sized-and-shaped figure just screaming to be burnt: here a Dracula mannequin, there a Frankenstein, here a mummy, and there a Wolfman. Mr Sedule, I just then noticed, had yet to take down his Halloween decorations.

'Let's go for the mummy,' I said decisively. 'It's the most adaptable, the most nondescript.'

So Jimmy drags a chair up to the mummy-anointed corner, steps up, pulls down the poppet and starts waving it menacingly round the crowd like it's a fucking red-hot poker or a firehose. 'All right, you lot!' he howls. 'Are ye with me or agin me?! Are ye with me or agin me?!'

'WE'RE WITH YOU, JIMMY!' we all scream back.

'Right then, let's have at this bloke!' And he rushes towards the back exit, with all assembled (yours truly among them) in tow. Along the way I catch myself singing aloud, And the lady from the provinces who dresses like a bloke / And who doesn't fancy cannabis but thinks she'll have a toke...

Well, once we're out back, in the courtyard, Mr Sedule pulls up an old metal dustbin, and everyone sets to work filling it with leaves and twigs for kindling, of which, given the time of the year and the prevailing verdure of the Woodside Park area, there is an abundance. One issue remains to be decided, though: namely, the identity of the person whom the bloke is supposed to represent. It should come as no great surprise to my readers that I mooted our mayor as the most suitable candidate, nor should it come as a great surprise to anyone familiar with the general political climate of our borough that I was eagerly seconded by everyone present. So Manish generously gives up his suit jacket and tie, and Jimmy bravely gives up his trousers, and the rest of us, once the dummy has been clad, unhesitantly tape our Oyster Cards to its lapels, skirts, cuffs, etc., and Mr Sedule wraps a length of corrugated shop-hoover hose round its shoulders, like a scarf, as a symbol of Ken's bendy-bus-iness; and together we all lob our Ken bloke into the dustbin, into which Jimmy tosses a lit match. And in the succeeding three-or-four odd minutes, deaf to the cheers of my fellow Barnetians, I relive my first Bonfire Night celebration in Norwich. That and then some, for whilst the evils of Thatcherism were naturally merely an abstraction for my five-or-six-year-old self, as a sentient tax-paying adult I have felt each and every one of the depredations Ken has visited on this devoted town as a sentient, tax-paying adult all too concretely; I have, indeed, taken them quasi-personally. The incineration of this here Ken bloke--first the costume, then the dummy itself, and last of all the shop-hoover hose--thus amounted shay moi to an instance of what that ancient Greek drama queen Aristotle called catharsis, the feeling you get when you see some kingly motherfucker getting his comeuppance on stage (minus the pity that old Aristy posits as an essential constituent of this emotional compound, as I can be said to pity Ken only in the loosest of senses, the sense in which Mr T was known to pity his prospective arse-kickees).

Yeah, so, the shop-hoover hose was the last bit of the bloke to go up in smoke, discharging in its consummation an unbearably pungent acrid chemical smell that sent everyone scattering to the corners of the courtyard. (And it really did smell uncannily like the interior of that burning bendy bus last month.) The fucking thing had been smoldering for, I'd say, a good ten minutes when I hear the sound of an approaching siren coming from up the back alley, and then see a police car pull up more or less level with the back gate of the courtyard. An officer emerges from the car, steps up to the fence and gives the gate a rattle.

'What is all this then, offic-AIRRR?' Mr Sedule asks him.

'A few of your neighbours have phoned in a nose complaint, sir. Phugh!' he ejaculates, producing a hanky from the breast pocket of his jacket and covering his nose. 'And I don't blame 'em. What are you lot barbecueing out here, a bloody hogshead of marmite? I've never smelled anything so horrible.'

'No, Monsieur offic-AIRRR, there are no marmites here. We are simply having a petit feu de Bloke Fawkes Day.'

'A what?'

'A bone fi-AIRRR.'

'A bonfire? Look mate, this isn't Bumfuck, Norfolk. This is London. Round here, you can't just go burning cartloads of rubbish outdoors without a permit.'

Mr Sedule just composes his phiz into a sheepish 'Hey, babe, what can I tell you?' kind of look and spreads his hands and shrugs.

'What's more,' the copper continues, 'it's after hours. [I check my mobile. Blimey! He's right: it's 11:40.] I'm off for now, but I'll be back--with reinforcements--to check out the sitch round midnight. By that time, this fire had best be out, and every one of your customers who doesn't want lodgings at government expense tonight had best be gone--and by gone I mean gone as in Bon [i.e., the original frontman of AC/DC, the long-deceased Mr Scott? (RMcG)], not gone as in gone back inside the pub for a nightcap.'

I couldn't help cursing my sodding shitty timing. If I'd only been a bit less digressive in my convo with Ronnie, I tell myself, or written my petition a bit more quickly, we could have all been safely indoors and downing our ninth Stella by a quarter of eleven. Well, no use crying over spilt suds. Time to make this here feast mobile. I go up to Ronnie, who alone among the assembly has taken no particular interest in the bloke-burning and who as of now is in fact sitting with his head against the back wall of the pub, fast asleep, and nudge him with my foot.

'Eh?' he grunts as he comes to life and looks blearily up at me.

'How are you for Stellage back at your place?' I ask him.

'Dunno. I've got maybe a twelver and a half.'

'Well, that beats my half-empty twelver. Come on. Up and at 'em.'

'What?'

'Afters at your place.'

'Whatevsissimo,' he says with stroppy resignation as he pulls himself up off the ground.

Ronnie and I and a butcher's dozen of stragglers then hoofed it to his flat, where, metaphorically speaking, we kept the flame of Bonfire Night alive in '05 for another two hours. In spirit, though, I have to admit, it felt a bit more like Oktoberfest, if you catch my meaning; all the girls having bolted through the back door of the pub--and presumably right on out the front--with the arrival of the copper.

And so ended the first ever Bloke Fawkes Day, Bloke Fawkes Day 2005. Pending the approval of Her Majesty and the borough council, I hope to see each and every one of you lot down at the Ape next year for the burning in of Bloke Fawkes Day 2006. I'm especially looking forwared to meeting some of the comelier blokesses amongst you. OK, make that any of the blokesses amongst you.