Had Meself a Shi(r)ty Little Xmas: Part the Last

Well, suffice it to say, I arrived back at McGyver Manor at seven o'clock-con-cambio on Christmas Day Eve with considerably less fanfare than I had seen fit to accompany me at the same hour two days earlier. On second thought, waiter, hold the suffice it to say on that there Well...I sayngwich: I know full well that a considerable minority, if not an outright majority, of blokes and blokesses amongst my readership must hold that the proper way of re-introducing yourself to a social do you've alienated yourself--and subsequently absconded--from consists in marching in with floodlights and sirens blaring and your hands behind your head; in other words, in treating yourself at once, vis-a-vis the affronted party, as copper and suspect in a single fluid succession of gestures. At any event, regardless of the cuntishly cowardly aspect in which the blokility might view my comportment on this occasion, I chose then to re-introduce myself into the old home-world as inconspicuously as I could manage, viz--once I had given the knob of the front door a twist and thereby ascertained that it was unlocked--by creeping in through the vestibule and standing well clear of the entry-archway of the front room until I had properly sussed out the genius momenti from boca to culo. The FR itself was now darkened, but there was enough illumination seeping in from the dining room for you to make out the basic shape of everything. Of the old 25-inch telly there was nary a trace, and parked rather pathetically at its former station on the middle shelf of the so-called entertainment centre was a little 12-inch set that I recognised as the one from my bedroom (Why this one, and not the 15-incher from Sid's room, I couldn't help wondering at this point). As the coast so far appeared to be clear, I thought I might as well move my listening station up a stage to the threshold of the dining room, en route to which I caught sight of the carcass of Aunt Agatha, sprawled prostrate, dead to the world, on the couch, and covered from chin to toe in one of my old Star Wars blankets.

Once I was positioned at my new post, the first intelligible sound that made it into my orioles was that of Mum saying to someone obviously not present, '...five foot nine, with closely-cropped dark brown hair, and wearing a navy blue jumper and dark grey trousers. Oh, you say one of your officers sighted a person matching that description? At about what time? And where?' Right about when Mum's finishing up her missing-person's profile of me, I venture to take a quick surreptitious gander into the dining room, where I see Dad sitting at the now-bare-and-declothed table, with his arms folded in front of him; and Mum herself standing off to the right and talking into the mouthpiece of our 1980s-vintage un-cordless blower. (The Birthday Boy hisself only knew where Sid was--possibly in his room; more probably out on a fresh spree of whoremongerage.) And just as Mum's starting to receive secondhand the Stewart-doppelgaenger's intelligence on my recent whereabouts, I start to think, if only for the sake of sparing her the expense of a so-sorry-to-have-bothered-you return phone call, that I really shouldn't postpone the revelation of my obviously-still-living--albeit rather haggard and hangdog--phiz to her and Dad a second longer. So, clearing my throat as loudly as I can manage, I do a sideways step into the dead centre of the frame of the dining- room threshold; and I give a couple of knuckle-raps to the right arch-post with one hand, and a flat-palmed HRH-style wave with the other. Both pairs of parental okies join in shared cuntsternation with my single filial pair; then, immediately afterwards, the paternal pair settle comfortably back into their tableward-slouching stance, whilst the maternal pair roll themselves at me in a manner that I would not hesitate to deem synonymous with the interjection, 'You cuntish cunt!'; did I not know full well that cunt is a word that figures not in my Mum's private--let alone public--lexicon.

Then, she resumes, blower-wards: 'Actually, sir, he's just now stepped in. So sorry to have bothered you. And thanks ever so much for your help. Bye.' After cradling the phone, Mum wastes no time in getting round to saying to me, 'Nigel Weatherby McGyver, where have you been for the past two hours? Your father and I have been worried to distraction--'

'--I'd settle for miffed to borderline preoccupation, dear,' Dad cuts in. 'There is, after all, only so much harm or mischief a bloke can come or get up to in two hours, in Diss town, in the Cincinnati of Norfolk...'

'There you go again Stanley! I don't know which of the three is most irritating-- your Twain-quoting, your pedestrian punning or your Gilbert and Sullivan fixation. Can't you give the whole dog and pony show a rest for just one night?'

'I'll do my best, liebchen. But the night is getting rather prematurely old, I'm afraid; and a bloke must find ways of diverting himself in his quotidian dotage.'
Mum tossess her head and delivers an interjection of Humph! as if to say, Even at my expense, you s*dding windbag!, and steps off into the kitchen. Then Dad resumes: 'I was about to say that, although, unlike your mother, I never entertained the slightest suspicion as to your well-being; I did, and still do, find your theatrics a bit--well, let's not mince words here--arse-chafing, and--'

'--Dad, if this is about the TV, I'm all set to pop up to Norwich to get you a replacement, first thing tomorrow morning.'

'It's not about the TV, and least of all about it tomorrow morning. Good heavens! I wouldn't dream of your suffocating yourself in the Boxing Day shopping rush, even if you'd Molotov-Cocktailed the entire front room. In any case, entre nous--' here he leans over to me and continues in a near-whisper, '--I'd been planning, for our thirtieth wedding anniversary next month, to surprise your mother with one of those flat-screen high-definition jobbers that you can hang on the wall like a world map--I mean one that's the size of a world map. In the meantime, the old 12-incher will do.' [Well, this little scrap of divulgence certainly nixed in the bud my filial reparations project. In the first place, I couldn't very well upstage Dad's anniversary plans; and in the second, well, round about the 150-quid mark the spirit of Filial Remorse gives up the ghost, and the spirit of Personal Fiscal Panic takes over for him.] 'No, it wasn't the demolition of the telly that piqued me--there is, after all, no more time-honoured method for a bloke to get his ire out than by lobbing a cricket ball at the source of his vexation, and he can't always count on the ball nearest to hand being up to league regulation standards. Truth to tell, towards the end, that Chavworthy fellow was beginning to get to me, too, and if you hadn't beaten me to the scone, I might have taken a bowl at him with it myself.'

'Really? You seemed to be enjoying his schtick as much as anybody else in the room.'

'Well, I was--at first, without quite understanding why, as I'm not really au courant on this chav phenomenon. But when he made that crack about UEA-versus-Luton U--well, that put a different complexion on things entirely. I couldn't help asking myself, "What planet is this bloke living on?"'

'Probably Planet Oxbridge, from whose ethereal vantage-point all English universities founded since 1300 look like piddling, pebbly little asteroids. But you were saying, the thing that miffed you wasn't the...'

'...the telly, right. No, it was your taking French leave of all of us so precipitously. What, pray tell, was the point of that bit of panto?'

'Well, there was no point to it. I just needed to get some fresh air, as they say. I just couldn't face up to the whole confrontational aspect of the situation, I--'

'Oh, come off it, Nigel. What was the worst that could have happened?--that you'd have nicked your finger on a shardlet of glass whilst helping us clean up? Certainly you had nothing to fear from any of us. Where was your backbone, man? Your slack lower lip, your...' [With slightly curled fingers he palms the air in a hefting gesture.]

'...couilles?'

'If I may pardon your French, and mine, yes: your balls. Good heavens! Did your mother and I raise a man or a m-'

Before he gets to the end of that word that I'll hazard to conjecture would have been mouse, Mum cuts in, screaming, from the kitchen: 'STANLEY! WOULD YOU GET IN HERE AND HELP ME GET THE LID OFF THIS MARMITE JAR?'

'No need to shout, dear; we don't want to wake your auntie!' Dad calls back meekly, and, in a bit of French-leave-taking of his own, exits stage right without comment. Presently from the kitchen there issues a dialogue of inarticulate grunts and groans seemingly calculated by the Almighty Scots Demiurge to put me in mind of the most grotesque parental copulatory kinetics; and, slightly less presently, I am obliged, for the sheer sake of expunging these images from my mind's porn-cinema-screen, to intervene. I step into the kitchen and silently proffer my old RH to Dad, who's half-doubled up, purple-faced, over the aforementioned obdurate MJ (Mum, for her part, isn't so much looking on as leaning off, against the fridge, fanning herself and panting as she dazedly regathers her strength and wits after her own last futile crack at unlidding). Dad all-too-obligingly hands me the jar and joins Mum at the fridge-cooling-station; and I, wrapping a couple of square inches of pullover wool round the edge of the lid, give the latter a couple of hardly-Herculean anti-clockwise twists that, between the two or three of them, suffice to render unto all six of our grateful ears the much-sought-after 'POP' assuring us that the cherry on this here centiletre-sized batch of marmite has been broken. (My heartfelt apologies, incidentally, go out to all of my readers whose lunch has been irretrievably spoilt by my invocation, in the last sentence, of the insufferable gustatory combo of cherries on marmite.) This minuscule, manifestly un-taxing, test of strength having been passed, I return the jar, cupped in my palm bottom-downwards--as if thereby to say (and, I should hope, communicate) Voila! Mes couilles!--to Dad, who, after thanking me for my efforts in well-nigh asthmatic or emphasymic tones, finishes off the unlidding of the vessel and sets to work applying its contents with a butter knife to a sextet of de-crusted bread-slices that have all along been patiently awaiting such treatment, at a cutting-board next to the sink.

Whilst he's preparing the sandwiches, Mum suddenly takes it into her head to announce--as I'm fairly positive she wouldn't bother doing in the absence of my late proofs of filial fortitude--'By the way, when you where out, your friend Tex called.'

Blimey! I'd forgotten all about Tex Winckelmann, my old mate from my UEA days. Not that I'd exactly lost touch with him--in fact, he'd emailed me a couple of weeks before the holiday to ask if I'd be in the area thenabouts--but in the midst of the familial tempest, the mental ferryboat linking me with this sole other-genred island of Norfolkiana had been more or less solidly moored ever since my arrival. But now that Mum had broached his name, the exigent thought of at last speaking to him nixed, in one swell foosh, all of my accumulated angst-cum-triumph appertaining to the TV, the abscondment, the Diss-missal and the marmite-jar.

'Did he leave a number?' I ask(ed), doing all I can to cuntain any betrayal of the life-or-death import that, just now, hangs in the balance of this question.

'Two, actually,' Mum replies, tearing off and handing to me a post-it note from the scribbling block affixed to the front of the fridge. 'The top one is his home number, and the bottom one's to his mobile.'

'Right,' I say, heading towards the dining room en route to the stairs and my room. 'If you'll excuse me for a bit...'

'Don't you fancy a sandwich, Nige?' Dad asks me with his back still turned.

'No, thanks, Dad. I'm still full from dinner.' This is a lie, as the reader of my last post will have deduced. But I'm of the opinion that it's a prerogative of every marmite-loathing adult to keep that noxious concoction well clear of his palate and gullet by whatever means prove necessary, be they fair or foul.

Back in my room, I try to reach Tex at the home number, but all I get is a voice- mail greeting bearing the vocal imprint of a blokess speaking in a drawling, reedy-as-all-get-out midwestern North American accent: 'You've reached the Weeenckelmann-Stuckenschmidt residence. Ooo gaash, I'm afrayeed we're naat hoom at the mooment, soo if you'll just leave your neeeame and number, we'll get beeaack to you as soon as paaasable.' Don't mind if I don't, you nasophone trans-pondial cuntess, I say to myself. I do, however, succeed in getting hold of Tex at the second number.

'Oh, huh-huh-hi Rugger,' he answers. 'HUH-HUH. Nice to huh-huh-hear from you. HUH-HUH.'

I can tell straight-away, from the pant-to-word ratio of these first coupla sentences, that he's doubtlessly kind of in the middle of something, as they say--coition or fellatio most likely--so I resolve to keep it short. 'When do you want to meet up--and where?'

'HUH-HUH-huh?'

'WHEN AND WHERE DO YOU WANT TO MEET UP?'

'HUH-HUHAAEEdunno. HUH-HUH-Horseshoes? Tomorrow-HUH-night? Eight-o'-HUH-HUH-clock?'

I do a quick mental check on the chronographic coordinates of tomorrow's Charlton-Arsenal match, then reply, 'Sure.'

'HUH-HUHhhhexcellent. HUH-HUH. Sorry, Rugger, I'm on the...HUH-HUH...on the road.'

'On the road? Has your power steering given out?' I was trying to be winsomely waggish, but in retrospect, this seems a right cuntishly tactless question. It's quite conceivable, nest pah, that a bloke might be driving and receiving a blow job simultaneously?

'HUH-HUHHhh, no. I'm on my...HUH-HUH-HUH...on my bike.' [Here, he's interrupted by a stream of dopplerised car noises leading up to, and following right on the heels of, an interjection of 'Out of my fucking way, you fucking berk!'] 'I've really-HUH-HUH-got to go, Rugger. See you...HUH-HUH...see you tomorrow night.'

Now, I hope you lot will forgive me for turning the dial of the miraculous Ronco-patented McGyver yarn-spinning-machine back to STANDBY position for a moment or two whilst I do a bit of biographical backfill on Tex—it is, after all, only for your own readerly good and comfort that I’m bothering to do so at all. Actually the best, the most timely, moment for suspending the narration for this selfsame purpose was probably a coupla paragraphs back, right after Mum handed me that post-it note bearing Tex’s diggits; but as I invariably find this back-ground-in-filling subroutine the most cuntishly teejious one of the whole blogging enterprise, in this case, I’ve put it off, as usual, to the last possible moment (i.e., now). Mind you, I nonetheless maintain that mastery of—or, at least, borderline berkish competence in--the background-in-filling subroutine is essential to any bloggeur who aspires to attract a readership wider than that comprised by his own shittily foreshortened circle of friends (not that I've told any of my friends about this here blog). For, averse as I am to the fecal-tea-leaf-reading school of blog-post-composition (see, if you need to, my post of 1 November of last year), not even the Honourable Alexander himself could be Downer than I am on the antipodally opposite approach, sc. that of Norse-saga-esque unqualified-name-cataloguing. Typical essay in the aforesaid: For dinner last night we went to Bob’s [is Bob’s a restaurant or some bloke’s house?], where we ran into Tom, Cindy, and Chartreusa, who introduced us to Tim, Harry, and Prunella. At the end of the meal, Prunella suggested we should adjourn to Raul’s [again I pose the question: taberna or residence?] for schlongtails and Strip-Cluedo. Christ, you could learn more about these people by combo-nergling their names in the local phone listings. Needles to say, as first-blush-inducingly incommensurable as the two approaches would seem to be, you often enough find them being employed cheek-by-jowl within a single post, for the scandalously simple (if less-than-okie-burstingly-obvious) reason that pretty much everybody is much more readily captivated by the chemical constitution of their own turds than by anything having to do with other people.

But back—or, rather, on—to Tex. Like me, he’s a native East Angelino; but unlike me, he’s not a native Norfolkian, hailing as he did originally from somewhere in the vicinity of Sudbury, well to the south of the Ouse and the Waveney. We met, as I’ve already indicated at the University, quite early on, in fact, when I was still enrolled as a part-time student. I remember the occasion as though it were only four years ago instead of eight. We--the two of us-- and a butcher's half-dozen other students were seated round a table at the Student Union under the aegis of some semi-official event, probably one of those loathsome so-called orientation sessions organised by the university administration during the opening week of the term; and in answer to the question of 'What kind of music do you listen to?' posed by the so-called student facilitator of the meeting--a blokess a year or two ahead of us--to each of the rest of us in turn, Tex replied 'Tex-Mex music.' (My own reply is lost in oblivion, but I assume it was something entirely unimaginative like 'indie-rock' or 'classic schlong rock.') Hence, you reason, the moniker of 'Tex'. Well, yes and no: for if our bare avowals of musico-subcultural allegiance had counted for anything on that score, then I presumably would have answered from that day forwards to the appalachian of 'Indie' or 'Classic Schlong'. The real reason the Texan nickname stuck chez nous--the real reason, in fact, that the jaunty little biplane of our friendship first took wing--was that when, later that same day or week, I encouraged him to initiate me into the mysteries of the Tex-Mexican musical canon, he frankly confessed to me that he owned not a single recording representative of that canon; that, indeed, he hadn't the foggiest notion of what Tex Mex music sounded like or on what make of instruments it was played; that he had inprovved his curiously parochial reply to the facilitator's question in a spirit of resentment towards what he saw as the question's cuntish intrusiveness, by supplying his interrogator with information at the furthest conceivable remove from the truth. Well, as this under-the-table two-finger salute to the Man (or, rather, Woman) jibed most harmoniously with my own modus operandi--and, indeed, in this instance exceeded it both in the M and the O--I took an immejiate shine to the bloke, from there on out, right on through to graduation, we were thick as thieves. And I guess you could say that, unlike the protagonists of the Jam song of the same name (i.e., 'TAT') we remained so well into the semi-maturity of our mid-twenties--the sheer frequency with which I've called upon him to act as my imaginary second-or-third conversational wheel in recent years attests to that SOA; only, as of last month, I hadn't seen much of him lately, on account of the fact that he'd been abroad for so much of the time. The very same month in which I'd moved to London, you see, he'd taken a job at a so-called web design firm in Canada, and it was there, in Toronto, that he'd met and eventually married the selfsame blokess whose voice I had encountered--for the first time--on my first attempt to get in touch with him on Christmas Day. Eventually, though--and, specifically, last summer--he'd moved back to EA, either out of an unquenchable yen for the shores of old Blighty or an unquellable intolerance for life in Canada, and set up shop as an independent consultant in Attleborough, basically a southern suburb of Norwich sited about halfway between N-Town and Diss.

Well that, I'm more or less confident in saying, is pretty much all ye need know for now concerning Mr Winckelmann. What do you say I get back to a spell of yarn-spinnage? Next day, Boxing Day, in keeping with tradition, was pretty much a loll -about-and-sit-on-your-arse day for YFC's truly. Mum and Dad drove Aunt Agatha back to Earsham in the morning while I held down the fort at Diss. Then, in the afternoon, there was the Arsenal-Charlton match, a bit of a downer for me on two scores--first, on that of my having to watch the game on the TV in Sid's room, surrounded by piles of malodorous unwashed laundry and stacks of empty beer tins (I felt that I at least owed it to Mum and Dad to register my contrition for the demolition of the front-room telly negatively--i.e., by not presuming to usurp their viewing privileges down there); and second, on the quite literal score of the outcome of the match itself: Arsenal 1, Charlton 0. I blame it all on Charlton's grounding of their no-holds-barred-opting goalkeeper Stephan Anderson in favour of the highly-competent but over-scrupulous Thomas Myhre. That clinical, scientific, whip-out-your-surveyor's-telescope-and-plumb-line-if-and-only-if-the-ball-crosses-the-halfway-mark-style defensive approach just doesn't work against the Gunners, at least not consistently. To keep the Thierry-Henry-spearheaded-blitzkrieg consistently at bay, you need a goalkeeper who is actuated first and foremost by a well-nigh-gormless sense of team loyalty, the type of bloke who--like Anderson--will pounce on the ball with the heedless abandon of a foxhole private clutching a live grenade to his chest, in so doing surrendering his own sorry carcass to pulverization that his cuntishly ungrateful platoon-mates might live.

After the game, I cop a couple of hours of zeds that throw me smack dab against the striking of seven, giving me just enough time to perform the four esses before taking my leave of Mum and Dad at a quarter of eight to keep my rendezvous with Tex. At precisely 7:47, I climb into the Mazda and drive a coupla miles due east along the A143--Her Majesty's official Diss-transcending name for our Park/Victoria/High Road--over the railway tracks, through the dorflet of Scole, and pull over at a largish, peak-roofed, two-storey building resembling--to my okies, at least--a mediaeval army barracks. For the benefit of the gormless or uninitated, a large green sign posted above and well to the right of the front door identifies the establishment housed therein as THE HORSESHOES. I step inside and take a quick tour of the nine-tenths empty ground floor, including the so-called Non-Smoking-Dining-Room annex indicated by a 1970s-style cuffed pointy-finger suspended from the ceiling of the main room. As, on the evidence of this tour, I'm the first to arrive, I procure myself a Stella from the bloke behind the bar and take a seat at a table set flush against the middle of the three monolithic support beams that divide the room in half. From this station, I judge, Tex and I will be remote enough from the hubub--should any materialise--to converse unmolested, and yet close enough to the bar to forestall any perverse, well-nigh-slapstick-worthy bar-ward treks through vast swathes of unoccupied tableage should business remain mercifully sluggish for the duration of the evening. Sipping my Stella and lighting up a burro, I reflect that, considered on the basis of its own merits--bland standardised cuntry pub menu, below-average beer selection, geriatric clientele--the Horseshoes really has absolutely nothing going for it, and that, all in all, I would gladly have traded the convenience of the easy commute for the novelty of hanging out somewhere nearer to Tex's vicinity, at some Attleboroughian venue as yet unknown to me. And yet, I thought, it was Tex's idea, not mine, to meet up here. And whence had this idea sprung into his gourdita? Well, presumably from the recollection that this was where we had met up the last time we were both in EA, Christmas before last. And presumably the only reason we'd done so then was that my parents had dragged us here for dinner once before, in the summer of '03. You've got to keep a well-nigh cuntishly vigilant eye on the old bugbear of inertia, I apostrophised myself, otherwise, like something out of the writings of that famous Germanaphone Czech bloke, it's liable to morph into a cuntishly fearsome tiger named Tradition.

Well, fortunately, at about this point, I'm distracted from these reflections--which in another ten mintues would surely have degenerated into a pissy bout of sedentary flaneurie not much different in character from the one of two days ago--by a flash of red, white and blue appearing at the corner of my right eye. I glance up, and see that the white is emanating from a cyclist's helmet, the red from a pair of thigh-hugging, schlong-and-sack-delineating knee breeches, the blue from a puffy ski waistcoat; whilst framed exquisite-corpse-fashion by the whole ludicrously outlandish, Union-Jack-colour-schemed ensemble, is the all-too familiar phiz of my mate Mr Winckelmann, who's now standing at the corner of the opposite end of the table.

'Sorry---I'm---late, Rugger,' he says, through slightly laboured breaths, as he unbuckles the helmet and unzipps the waistcoat, 'only I was--held up for a few minutes--just outside of Attleborough. Bit of a pile-up of cars behind me--I had to pull over and---wait for 'em all to pass before I could go on. Christ, there must have been about 50 of 'em, a veritable cavalcade.'

'You mean you biked all the way down here?' Well, of course, I could see that he had done just that, but the gentlebloke prefers stark avowals of feigned incredulity to candid imputations of barminess, at least for starters.

[Sitting down, hanging jacket on back of chair next to him, laying helmet on seat of selfsame chair, adjusting scrotal package below table level] 'Course I did. It's only fifteen miles. An hour-and-a-quarter, tops. Three-quarters of an hour in good traffic.'

'Well, then, you must be well knackered.'

'Not quite. Pleasantly exhausted are two words for the sensation. About ready for a beer are five others. Are you yourself--about ready for a second?'

'Yeah, or will be soon enough. Stella, please.'

So Tex steps off to the bar and returns presently with a pintful of clear gold in one hand; and a silver-and-white-labelled brown bottle, along with a polyhedral short bloke of a glass, in the other. He nudges my pint over to my side, fills his glass to the rim with about half the contents of his bottle, and says to me: 'Were you planning on eating?'

Well, as a matter of fact, I was; only in getting my first Stella I had neglected to take a look at the menu, which--in a cuntishly incommoding gesture apparently meant to impart an old-school-pub-style aura of off-the-shirtycuffness to their culinary preparations--The Horseshoes sees fit to post above the bar in eraseable chalk. 'Yeah. What are the highlights of the bill of fare tonight?'

'Nothing out of the ordinary. Ploughman's dupper, steak and kidney pie in Guinness gravy, fish and jalapeno poppers.'

With his divulgence of the last item in this culinary catalogue, Tex seemingly unwittingly puts a well-nigh-un-dessicatable damper on my convivial spirits. If fish and poppers are already to be had in this provincial watering hole, I say to myself just then, perhaps I really am, at arse, an unreconstructed hick--a chav even. But I dare not betray a soup's-son of the aforesaid dampening at such an early moment in this here cul-a-cul. And so, with consummate slack-lower-lippedness, I ask Tex, 'What were you thinking of having?'

'Well,' says Tex, lifting his glass to his nose and sniffing the rim with all of the cuntish anticpitory fastidiousness of a wine connoisseur, before taking therefrom the most cuntishly minuscule of first sips, 'I was leaning towards the steak and kidney pie.'

'Leaning towards it or falling into it?' I insist with a brusqueness that, for its own part, is not lacking in cuntishness.

'By now, I'd say, "falling into". And you?'

'Never mind me. I'll go and place the order.' The fact was, I hadn't made up my mind. The ploughman's dupper I could cross off the list straightaway--I had no patience tonight for sawing through a hundred schlong-lengths of cheese and sausage. But as to the steak and kidney pie and the fish 'n' poppers; well, in the choice between those two entrees there hung in the balance a veritable declaration of allegiance (and possibly, even, of independence) that I might never subsequently live down, either in my own okies or in those of my confederate. The prospect of digging into a steak and kidney pie was certainly mouth-watering enough; but I had long ago forsworn all commerce with the Guinness brewery and its imprinted potations--Harp and Smithwick's included. On the other hand, if Jeff Chavworthy's spiel was anything to go on, in tucking into a basket of fish 'n' poppers in the presence of my comrade, I should be laying myself open to a litany of imprecations that might very well exhaust the mine-shaft's-ghost of the entire evening, and leave me feeling in the end like dirt's kid sister to boot. But after a half-minute or two of mental hemming and hawing at the bar, the blokish half of myself eventually remonstrated with, and thereby succeeded in overpowering, the poncey half of myself, thus: Fuck it. You've already uncloseted yourself as a Stella-drinker anyway. How much more harm can a pair of fish cutlets and a butcher's dozen of poppers do? And, anyhow, you like fish 'n' poppers a helluva lot more than you do steak and kidney pie, right? So I resolutely says to the bartender, in a resonant basso, 'One steak and kidney pie and one fish and jalapeno poppers, please,' and return to the table.

'So how's, err...' I begin.

'Susan?'

'Yeah.'

'She's fine. Or, rather, more and less than fine: she's pregnant.'

I do my best to look enthused. 'Congratulations. When's the baby's ETA?'

'Early June.'

'Ah, splendid.' [A right berkish rejoinder, if I do say so myself. As if a May or July delivery have been a whit less splendid.] 'And how's business these days?'

'Never been better. But enough about me, Rugger. How's life in sunny old north London these days?'

As I'm no more of a fan of the catching-up midget-dialogue qua speaker than I am qua listener, in answer to this question I essay what amounts to a twenty-word paraphrase of 'same-old same old' before leading my old discursive pet wiener dog by degrees to a conversational topic I actually have some interest in, and on which I hope Tex might be able to enlighten me. From the London HQ of Ruggerworld it's an easy stroll to the East Anglia branch of the same enterprise, and once arrived at the latter destination, I can proceed fairly briskly to reporting to Tex on certain peculiarities of my brother's speech patens that I've noticed for the first time during the present visit, and to quizzing him as to whether he's noticed anything of the like kind among the youth of Norfolk since re-settling here.

'He's absolutely smitten,' I say, 'with this phrase ride all of the new jet. Are you familiar with it?'

'Passingly.'

'And you know what it means?'

'I haven't the foggiest. I've always assumed it had something to do with being up-date--but up to date on what?'

'Clothes, apparently, according to Sid.'

'You don't say!'

'I do. And here's another one for you: whereas you or I might disparage an indiwidual whose behaviour we disapproved of by means of the epithet of cunt or twat, his preferred tool in the same line of work is pit. As in, Shut your CTM hole or Stick a pair of wadded up knickers in it, you pit. Sometimes it's you shaved pit or you wax-jobbered pit.'

'Yeah, well, I actually heard that one when I was still living in Canada.'

'I must say, it sounds right throwbackish to me; like something you'd hear in a 1950s Yank movie set in a soda-jerkerie. Conjures up the image of a poodle-skirted blokess ejaculating Oh, jeepers, Bradley, this place is the pits!, if you know what I mean.'

'Yes, I do, but I'm afraid you're bound straight for Lowestoft on that particular steam-powered train of thought. The pit in question, you see, isn't some kind of rubbish tip or coal mine--it is, rather, a part of the human anatomy.'

'You don't mean--?'

'That's right, Rugger--it's the armpit. According to the meejia, our microgenerational descendants have acquired a predeliction for what in clinical terms is known as axilar coition; otherwise, in the current youth vernacular, as pit-buggery.'

Never in my worst nightmares would I have guessed that that was what it was all about. 'Christ, Tex, I think I'm going to be sick.' As I utter these words, I hear the barman calling out to us in the background, Soup's up, guys!

'Pretty piss-poor timing on your part, Rugger. Shall I fetch the grub while you quell your queasy innards?'

'No, that's all right. I could do to spread me legs a bit after what you've just told me. You about ready for another...what's it called?'

'Hoegaarden. Yes, thanks.'

So I step up to the bar and claim our plates and ask for another round--along with a tray, so's I can carry the food and the drinks back to the table unassisted. Then, as I'm popping my first popper and Tex is forking up his first dripping gobful of S&KP, he takes up the thread of the conversation from where we dropped it a couple of minutes ago.

'Yes, Rugger, the younguns of your brother's microgenerational niche have a whole way of talking and acting entirely different to the one we came up with.'

'By came up with do you mean invented or inherited?'

[With a dismissive wave of forkful number five or six] 'Same difference.' [Belching through mouthful number four or five] '(Mmm! The meat is good.) And we'll never be able to mend the gap; all we can do is mind it. 25 or 30 years ago, in our parents' day, a difference of a half-a-dozen years wouldn't have counted for much--we'd still be wearing the same clothes, talking the same lingo, listening to the same chunes, as the teenagers. Now that difference is enough to place you, in the younguns' eyes, well to the pasture side of the cattle-guard. You know what they say, 25 is the new 36.'

'Do they now? But don't they also say 36 is the new 28? Seeing which, isn't 25 actually also only the new 28?'

'Beats the carp out of me. Point is, Rugger,' [spooning up the last traces of gravy from his pie-plate (meanwhile, I've got three poppers and a whole piece of fish ahead of me)] 'I'm fully sympathetic to your communications issues with your brother. In fact, you could say I'm more than sympathetic; as I suspect that in your place, I'd find the going even rougher.'

'Whatjyer mean?'

'I mean, has it ever occurred to you that, at your insoo (as their vernacular would phrase it), and especially for one so long in the tooth, you might enjoy a fairly decent rapport with the younger microgeneration after all?'

Here, I happen to notice the BEATING OFF ABOUT BUSH (AS SHRUB-OR- CUNT-COIFF-SYNONYM, NOT AS NAME OF CURRENT U. S. PRESIDENT) indicator flashing on my mind's dashboard bullshit detector. 'And on the basis of what evidence do you draw this rather co-jonic inference?'

'On the evidence of, well, a certain phone conversation...' He trails off and his phiz assumes a solemn aspect that suggests he would at this very moment be saying You'd better sit down for this, only, unfortunately, I'm already sitting. Then he resumes: 'As you probably know, Rugger, it was your mum who answered the phone when I tried to reach you last night--'

'--Goddam her and her cuntish Machievallian maternal machinactions! What did she tell you? Did she tell you about what I'd done to the telly?'

'Yes, she did, but I'm not really concerned with the TV as such.' [I wish someone were concerned with the TV as such. It would make everything a bloody lot more simple.] 'I'm concerned, rather, with the circumstances that surrounded, led up to and actuated your assault on the TV qua Jeff Chavvworthy proxy. You see, Rugger, I'd happened to catch the Chavworthy special myself on that day, and noticed, both in the contents of Chavworthy's checklist and in the guy's general stage presence, certain familiar traits--traits that, to put it bluntly, reminded me of you.'

Christ! (and TBS), this outright cuntfrontational stratagem is much more than I've bargained for. Ordinarily, Tex is a model of tact; hence, I thought I was in the clear of his mercilessly reserved snootiness when the arrival of the poppers failed to elicit the typically Texan toffish sniff or toss of the head, but evidently not; evidently he's been stifling even these cuntishly restrained tokens of disdain all along, and with a well-nigh Arsenalian degree of cuntish forbearance. In the presence of any acquaintance of more recent standing (even, say, Ronnie Livingstone), my fingers would be plucking away at shirt button number four right about now. 'What is this, Tex, some kind of a sodding intervention? I'd have thought that you'd be the last person in the world to take Rugby Weatherby McGyver for a fucking ch-'

[Tex, raising an admonitory forefinger to his O-iform lips]: '-ch-ch-ch-shhh! Remember Item No. 154 on the Chavworthy Checklist. And, as a matter of fact, the answer to each question is No, this isn't an intervention, and No, I don't think you're a chav. I have, however, I confess, remarked over the past few years certain chavemes in your social habitus that I believe could be extirpated therefrom at a negligible psychic cost--'

'--but surely, Tex, we're just haggling over semantics here. Chavemes, chavvism, what's the difference?'

'A very substantial one, to my mind. You see, while from a loosely heuristic point of view I consider Mr Chavworthy's checklist absolutely indispensable, from a strictly philosophical point of view he and I are very much at loggerheads; for I, unlike him, do not regard chavism as a spiritual kinda fing; which is to say that I regard it at bottom as a matter of behaviour rather than of worldview.'

'You mean that, in contrast to him, you really do think that clothes make the chav?'

'Clothes, yes; but not merely clothes: what one elects to eat, drink, read, listen or otherwise pay atention to--in short, a whole range of lifestyle choices--all contribute to the social constitution of a chav. It therefore follows that by voluntarily declining these choices individually or in the aggregate, one may manage to free oneself either gradually or at one go--and ulimately once and for all--from the opprobrious imputation of chavdom.'

'So your advice to me, in short, is to lay off the fish 'n' poppers?'

'Well, yes, for starters (and, a fortiori, for the main course). But what you really should be aiming to do--and I know you're not going to want to hear this--is find yourself a new most-favoured beer brand.'

'Cor, are you barmy, Tex? Give up my old faithful RW&G? You might as well tell me to trade in my bollocks for a pair of nuticles.'

A shadow or soup's-son of a spasm of a grimace passes over his phiz, as though I've inadvertently reminded him of something cuntishly unsettling but off-topic. But it passes quickly. 'This is all up to you, Rugger. No one can make you give up Stella. Consider this, though. Your fish'n'popper addiction is a strictly private matter between you and your barman or server. I'm sitting less than a metre away from you, and yet, if I didn't know better, I'd be hard pressed to say whether those poppers on your plate were fried jalapenos or fried escargot. Whereas it's entirely possible that that septegenarian bloke sitting way over there in the corner of the room knows that the beer in your pint glass is Stella, supposing he saw the barman filling your glass from the tap. And at off-licences and parties, of course, the evidence is even harder to conceal. What with the company-logo-bearing bottle or tin being on your person at all times, you're practically a walking Stella-Artois billboard.'

'I don't buy it. I mean, I buy the Stella-billboarding bit but not the chav-indexing bit. What does this Chavworthy wanker know anyway?'

[Tex, Poker-faced]: 'I see. Well, if you're looking for a third opinion...' He unzips the nearer of the two ski-waistcoat pockets, and from it extracts a sheet of paper, which he hands to me across the table. I take a gander at the paper: it's a full-colour computer print-out of what at first glance appears to be a Monopoly board; and at first-and-a-half glance reveals itself to be some kind of Monopoly parody styling itself Chavopoly (the substitute name is spelt out in the familiar board-bisecting diagonal capitals; and at the centre of the board, in place of the harriedly good-natured moustachio'd and top-hatted figure of Mr Moneybags, there's a headshot of a stroppy Burbury-capped young bloke who could easily earn a few quid as my brother's stunt double [if there were any call for such work] And disposed at every rectangle round the edge, in place of the usual property-names and other such real-proprietarial verbiage, I see such bits of chav-sniping verbiage as HANG AROUND NEWSAGENTS. TRY TO SNOG FAT BIRD and WHITE LIGHTNING. PUNCH YOUR GIRLFRIEND).

'These Chavopoly games are selling like hotcakes this holiday season' Tex parenthesises as I study the sheet. 'I couldn't resist picking up one myself, for my nephew Kyle, just to take a bit of piss out of him. Now, if you'll just read the text on the fourth rectangle on the left on the bottom row--the light blue one--you'll see what I'm getting at.'

Aforesaid text reads, jaw-drop-inducingly enough, Down the pub for a pint or two of Stella and a fight. As I take in these words, I'm utterly demoralised. I feel like some sort of grimy, burlap-smocked peasant who's just been laughed or tomatoe'd out of a hoity-toity big-city restaurant for asking the head waiter whereabouts he could find a decent cow or sheep to shag. 'All right,' I say, handing the paper back to Tex. 'You win. Perhaps it is time for a potational upgrade. Any suggestions?'

'Well, yes, plenty of them--and one of them's ready to mouth.' He empties the remainder of his silver-and-white bottle into his glass, and hands the latter over to me. 'Try it. Drink the lot of it, if you like.'

I take a tentative first sip, and find the taste not unpleasing. 'Bracingly bitter,' I report. I take a bolder, more voluminous, second sip, this time letting the beer cascade slowly across my palate before swallowing. 'Bracingly bitter,' I say again, 'but with a smooth and slightly fruity finish.'

'Now that,' Tex triumphantly asserts, 'is what I'd call a respectable mid-priced continental import.'

'I'll say. What's it called again?'

'Hoegaarden.'

'Hoegaarden,' I repeat, ruminating aloud, 'Hoe-garden, a garden of whores, i.e., a brothel. Not sure I much care for the name. But I dare say the taste will grow on me. How much does a bottle of this here Whore-Garden set a bloke back by?'

'By roughly 75p more than a pint of Stella, and the difference is worth every penny.'

Thereupon I start mentally tabulating the balance sheet of a Stella-to-Hoegarden switchover: Let's see...75p per bottle, at 20 bottles a week--let's make that 25, so as to account for the bottle-to-pint differential--equals an extra 15 pounds plus...3 pounds 25....'

But my calculations are rudely interrupted by the ring-tone of Tex's mobile, sounding the opening bars of 'Lillabullero' with muffled monophony from the right pocket of his waistcoat.

'Excuse me, Rugger,' he says, reaching over, extracting the phone and placing it against an ear. I can tell straightaway, by the cuntishly deferential posture he immediately adopts, that the caller is none other than Mrs Winckelmann-Stuckenschmidt; and that, for some as-yet-inscrutable reason, Tex has just been booked a single room in the connubial doghouse. Decorum in such sitches is decidely dodgy: on the one, more reflexive, hand, you don't feel you have the right to eavesdrop; on the other, more reflective, one, you feel you owe it to yourself to do just that, in order to avenge yourself against the cuntish intrusion precipitated by the interruption of your own convo with the phonee. More often than not, as in this case, the Spirit of Happy Indifference lends a helpful mediating hand between the two extremes; such that, by the midpoint of your interlocutor's conversation with the interloper, you've long since retreated gratefully back into your own private thoughtworld. Such that, by the time Tex is re-secreting the phone, I've long since resumed and am in fact am drawing to a final tally my beer upgrade calculations as follows: That's 126 plus 13 pounds, equals 139 pounds per annum. I think I can swing that. And just as the full stop is hitting the right end of the t in that, Tex announces, with unwittingly perfect timing:

'Sorry-squared, Rugger. Bit of a cock-up on the home front. I'm afraid I'll have to be heading back.'

'Oh, come on now, Tex,' I retort even as the dictionary-definition-header lost cause, flanked in the margins by a snap of the two of us sittng there, pops into my mental field of vision. 'We've been here, what, maybe an hour and a half. Surely after a gap of two years you owe me more so-called face time than that. Besides,' I suddenly think to add, with cuntish archness, 'you could always plead heavy traffic if Susan gave you so much as a turdlet of shite about the delay.'

'No, I'm afraid I couldn't, Rugger,' says Tex, his phiz immejiately assuming a more Haggard aspect than those of H. Rider and Merle combined. 'I don't know how closely you were paying attention just now [If he only knew how cunt-hair-ishly close to fuck all closely the truth actually was!], but I did happen to let slip to Susan that you'd driven here. [Chief Inspector Noseycunt, thine alias is Woman!] By which I meantersay, or rather, ask...er, beg...'

'...me for a ride back to Attleborough. Yes, yes, of course, I understand, and would be more than happy to oblige.' My tones, in acquiescing to this supplication, are within a micro-hertz of the those of the Good Old Samaritan. My actual motives for so doing are, of course, hardly worthy of a bloke aspiring to canonisation. I'm quite looking forward, you see, to watching Tex sweat, shiver and squirm for another 20-odd minutes under the prospective slings and arrows of the old shawl and bane. An involuntarily celibate bloke such as myself isn't often afforded opportunities such as this--opportunities, that is, of treating his bachelorly Schadenfreudal rooster a proper strutting stroll round the barnyard. As Tex is settling the bill, I bask in the prolepctic glow of him asking me sheepishly, halfway up the road, So, what are you going to do for the rest of the night? and me replying, bullishly, I dunno. Maybe I'll try to spend some quality time with Sidney. We'll drink some pints, rustle up some whores...who knows? Maybe I'll even see about getting my axilar-sexual cherry popped. Unfortunately, my rooster is destined to remain cooped. You see, maybe two minutes into the trip, before I've even fully retraced my route back to Diss, there's another burst of mobilephonic Lillabullerage, and Tex is obliged to take another call from Suse. This time round, the convo is brief enough that I take in the whole Texside part of it before I've made up my mind whether or not I want to.

'Hello.' Tex says. '...So you've managed to work it out on your own?...Ah, splendid. I'm really proud of you...So you don't need me back there just yet?...Right, well, just give me a ring in an hour if you haven't heard from me by then. Love you. Bye.

Having signed off, he addresses me thus: 'Well, Rugger, it appears we've been given the go-ahead to prolong our little frolic an extra hour or so. Are you up for it?'

'Yeah, sure, of course.' [In fact, I gots to admit I'm at best semi-tumescent about it, without quite knowing why.]

'Wahsome. We could, of course, go back to Horseshoes, although I must say I've about had my fill of it for one night.'

'Ma Aussie. And I'm not too keen on, say, the Two Brewers either. [The 2Bs being my watering hole of first resort in Diss proper.] What do you say to our hitting your local up in Attleborough?'

'Well, Rugger, I haven't really got a local per se...'

'Christ, you must know of at least a couple of pubs in your neck of the woods.'

'Yes, but by name and reputation only, nothing firsthand.'

'Well, then, it's high time that first hand of yours got a pint-hefting workout. I've had it up to my teeth with Sufnorfolk, and I'm primed for some Sufcentralnorfolkian action.'

'Fine with me, although I doubt it'll make for much of a change of scene. Personally, I think Diss compares quite favourably with Attleborough--and with Sudbury, too, for that matter. Are you really having such a miserable time here?' From the toffish and well-nigh Joan-Greenwoodian lilt in his voice as it raises its skirts to step over the word really, I can tell that the last vestiges of connubial panic have evaporated, and that he's about to re-mount the podium and re-don his lecturer's mortarboard.

'In all candour, yes,' I answer him, knowing that he'll eventually force me to admit as much anyway. 'I can't recall three consecutive days of such concentrated shitiness in all my natural. And I can't imagine what ever possessed me to squander a whole week of my precious leave time on this place.'

'Ah, but that'll never do for an answer, Rugger. Because a guy can have a perfectly shitty time just about anywhere, if he's of a mind not to do otherwise. The question is, can you in all candour say you would necessarily have spent the same four days less shittily anywhere else--say, back in London?'

[Damn him and his cuntish Socratic shenanigans!] 'Well, er, no...not necessarily...'

'To cut to the chase, I'd be interested to know, if there's nothing that attracts you to East Anglia, what it is in London that's holding you down there.' (As cuntishly intrusive as I find this whole line of questioning to be, I gots to admit that the very fact that Tex is capable of pursuing it attests to the transparency of our friendship. Having reached the London-bound fork in the road, a bloke who knew me less well would have said to himself, 'Ah well, London. It's the capital, dontcherknow,' and headed back home for lunch. But Tex knows every bit as much as the reader does how little I care for the pomp and pageantry of capital-ism.)

'Well, er...'

'...and if the answer is within spitting distance of Fannie Adams, I'd be even more interested to know whether you've ever given any thought to moving back to EA.'

The truth is that, like Mr Sedule on the matter of 24-hour licences, I've thought about it for the duration of a single thumb-and-forefinger fillip, and on equally solid, equally incontestable grounds. The trouble is that in Tex's okies these grounds are bound to appear as boggy and foggy as those of The Norfolk Broads in midsummer. To a bloke so quixotically starry-okied as to believe it's actually possible to do what you love for a living, my purely inertia-driven argument for staying on at Proctologitex will carry no momentum; ditto for my case for the Ape vis-a-vis a bloke who's never known the charms of a well-appointed local, with its ever-dependable-yet-never-static assortment of familiar faces and arses. So I try to postpone essaying an answer to his question by ever-so-lamely turning the tables on him. I say:

'Well, what about you? You've lived in the big city--well, a biggish city, Toronto--and you gave up your metropolitan amenities to settle in Attleborough. What was it about East Anglia that you absolutely couldn't do without in Ontario?'

'I dunno, Rugger. You know, when I was over there--and by there, I mean not just Canada but the States as well--I saw six of the seven wonders of the modern world: the CN Tower, Niagara Falls, the Empire State Building, the New Jersey Turnpike...the...erm...Varsity Hamburgeria in Atlanta....er....hem...the South of the Border Fireworks and Petrol Emporium...and somehow none of them could hold a candle to the city centre of Norwich, or the medieval ruins of Dunwich, or a Lowestoft sunrise or a promenade down Great Yarmouth High Street. There's something about East Anglia that has never been surpassed on this island, or, I suspect, in any other corner of the western world. I mean, we really lucked out here; we got all the mod cons of industrial civilisation--electricity, abundant food supply, and none of the drawbacks--the smokestacks, the supermotorways, the crappy-looking suburban new towns, et cetera. In four words, this is God's country.'

He falls silent for maybe half a minute, during which interval we approach, then overtake, a road sign that reads ATTLEBOROUGH 2.

'Rugger, I know it's a bit ungentlemanly, a bit low-rent, to pry into another bloke's financial affairs, but how much per month is your London flat setting you back by?' Christ, he certainly wasted no time in bringing it all back to me. Serves me right, though, for not filling in that patch of dead air.

'Technically, Tex,' I rejoin with prideful anorakism, 'it's a maisonette--a split-story unit--not a flat.'

'Oh, for crying out loud, it's a one-bedroom dwelling space, right?'

'Well, yeah.'

'Which is a flat as far as I'm concerned. So, how much...?'

'950.' (Disclosure: next month it rises to a full grand.)

'Crikey! Round these parts you could find a two-bedroom for a hundred less. And if--as I quite understand you might be--you're put off by the thought of living with your folks while you're looking for a place of your own, Susan and I have an extra room that we'd be willing to let to you for 400 a month.' (As if the thought of living with a pregnant woman and a henpecked dad-to-be should be any less off-putting.)

'And when you say we, you mean--'

'I mean it in the non-royal sense. I've already proposed the idea to Susan and she's thinks it splendid.' [Curses!] She's quite keen to meet you, in fact. Of course, as the room will eventually go to the baby, this would be a strictly temporary arrangement.'

'Well, I'm certainly touched by the offer, Tex, but the fact is, even coming up with the 800-odd pounds for the room is going to be a rather dodgy prospect, so long as I don't have a job lined up in the area.'

'You can have it on credit if you like. Although, really, Rugger, I doubt a man with your connections will have much trouble finding work round here.'

'Connections?'

'Yes, connections--to the Greater Norwich Old Boy's Accountancy Network.' (Disclosure No. 2: Like me, my Dad is an accountant. And so was his father before him. [And his father's father before him? Circus contortionist.])

At this point, if my hands weren't occupied with the steerage, I'd be throwing them up into the air and ejaculating Ayayayay! in inarticulable exasperation. 'I still don't understand what the motivation for moving back here would be. Christ, who do I know here, apart from you and Mum and Dad and Sid? How am I supposed to fritter away my free time here--by playing Cluedo, or watching Sex and the City reruns, with you and Susan?'

'No,' he replies, with just a soup's-son of alkaline stroppiness. 'Have you ever considered, Rugger, that I might have some semblance of a social life in spite of the fact that I haven't committed to memory the Lonely Pub-Crawler's Guide to Norfolk from cover to cover? You do know what a book group is, don't you?'

'Course I do,' I say (forbearing to add, with exemplary uncuntishness, Just because I like to get out for a pint every now and then doesn't mean I've lost my command of the fucking alphabet). 'It's when you get together every so often with an assortment of blokes and blokesses for a chinwag about a certain book, and at the end of the meeting someone proposes a title for the next one.'

'Exactly. Well, Susan and I have belonged to one for about two months now(mind you bear to the left up ahead, by the way; the road forking off to the right looks like a continuation of this one, but it isn't), and through it--this book club--so far, we've easily made a dozen new friends in the area. I daresay you'd find your niche amongst some subset of the group, if you cared to tag along. And the books themselves are, of course, endlessly stimulating. Two weeks ago, we read Dude, Where's My Country?; last week, The Da Vinci Code; and next week it's on to The World Is Flat.'

Christ! Cluedo a trois with the Winckelmanns seemed like a piss-up at the Ape by comparison with that lot. 'Sounds...fascinating. Where do I go from here?'

'Well, Rugger, that's up to you. I've said my peace on the--'

'No, I mean, where do I drive to next?' (At the moment, we're stalled at a railway signal, waiting for the last cars of a passenger train to clear the intersection.)

'Oh. Keep going straight till you get to the first big intersection, then hang a left. That'll carry us to the High Street, and to within a couple of doors of the Snooker Club. Barring a couple of borderline tearooms, that's really the only pubbesque place I've even heard of in Attleborough.'

Whilst I'm affecting to be completely absorbed in following the last bits of navigationage, I set about framing a suitably pissy riposte to Tex's full litany of prospective Ruggerian lifestyle changes, a rejoinder capable of reducing to rubble his whole meticulously fortified Alamo, so to speak, in a cuntishly merciless atom-bomb drop; for, you see, I have by this point long since revoked Tex's stewardship of Mr Doubt's government benefit cheque--the exact moment of the revocation having elapsed, probably, as he was effectively outing himself as a moonlighting member at large of the East Anglia Board of Tourism a couple of miles back up the road. So after I've parked the Mazda on the High Street, within spitting distance of the sign of the Snooker Club--a drinkery [spoiler warning!] whose potations I have yet to sample--and disengaged the engine, I turn to Tex, and let fly at him a classic instance of McGyver Signature Rhetorical Ploy #47: The Calculated Non-Sequitur:

'You know, Tex, there is...Arsenal.'

Tex [B-mused as Ed Wood or Roger Corman]: 'The football club?'

'No, the second word in the title of Morrissey's third solo effort. Of course I mean the football club.'

'Well, in that case, I'm in full agreement with you. There is Arsenal. Arsenal, like shit, happens.'

'Oh, so you're one of us after all, are you? I'd never have guessed it.'

'One of you? You who?'

Me [triumphantly high-fiving my inner goat-poacher]: 'One of us Arsenal-bashers. You know, Tex, if you're even half as down on the Gunners as I am, you really ought to consider relocating to London.'

Tex [rolling his okies]: 'Oh, I see what this is all about. You're back on your anti-Arsenal kick again, aren't you?'

'Not back on it, Tex: still on it.'

'Whatever. And you mean to say that for an anti-afficianado of Arsenal, there's no place like London.'

'You got it.'

'I see. Have you heard of this amazing invention known as the wireless, patented more than a century ago by this Italian bloke name of Marconi; or of this even-yet-more amazing invention known as television, patented round 80 years ago by this Scots chap name of Baird--'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I catch you. But can you imagine what it's like, Tex, to pound the pavement in the vicinity of Highbury, confronted at every turn by 20-stone blokes in red number shirts, and think to yourself, If they only knew what I thought of them, and of that cuntish club whose colours they're sporting...well, the like kind of so-called adrenaline rush is simply not to be had in these parts.'

'Well, Rugger,' he says, clearly apostrophising his second wheel--i.e., presumably, his wife--Take a gander, darling, at this here exemplary specimen of Homo sapiens barmiosus, 'I think it's high time you channelled some of that negative fan-energy of yours into some more positive outlet. We do have a team here in Norfolk, the Canaries. Oh, I know they're not quite premier-league material these days--'

'Oh, fuck the Canaries, Tex. Fuck them in their pinprick-sized, triple-duty piss-poo-and-egg chutes. Fuck the Norf and the Suf of East Anglia. And...fuck you, Tex! If the only alternative to chavdom is being a bollocksless metrosexual like yourself, then sign me up for a lifetime supply of Burbury caps. As for EA, I'd rather spend the next four days at my London maisonette, hoovering out my navel, than suffer through another minute of your Bono-esque eulogizing of this pathetic grab-bag of provincial shitholes. Sarah Slother was right about Norfolk...'

'...Sarah Slother? Who's that?'

'Oh, never mind. Collect your bike, and go.' I electro-unlock the front and back side passenger doors.

'But, Rugger, we've easily got another half-hour ahead of us. Why not have a pint, calm your nerves--'

'No, my mind's made up. I'm heading back to Diss toot sweet, and tomorrow, back to London. Get your hoss outta my hoss, and git!'

Once he sees I mean business, he climbs out, opens the back door, and starts to pull the disassembled bike, one piece at a time, out from the back seat--only not quite fast enough for my liking.

'I said git and I meant it! Git awn outta here, you git!'

No sooner has the second bike tyre cleared the foot-guard, than I rev up the engine and pull out on to the street, without even giving him time to close the back door, let alone say 'WTFYFC'. It was a pity to lose such a first-rate third wheel--I mean Tex, not the bike--but on the whole I don't regret what I did, given the circumstances. I mean, that's a risk a bloke always takes when he meets up with one of his mates who he hasn't seen for a stretch, that his immago of the other bloke as an all-round righteous jude will be supplanted by a new one sporting the phiz of an all-round cuntish cunt.

Next morning, I'm up well before the parting of Bourgie Dawn's arse-cheeks, packing my things--throwing my dirty clothes (including the old sailor's pullover) into a plastic shopper's carrier, and my Christmas takings into my suitcase. On catching sight of a still-clean string vest lying folded in the lower jaw of the latter, I can't help saying to myself, Tut-tut: two days' worth of costumery gone to waste! Round about seven, I'm ready to go, and step into the front room with my luggage. My Escape Plan A involves leaving a note on the fridge, but as I happen to discover Mum and Dad already up and breakfasting in the dining room, , I'm obliged to fall back on Plan B, which involves the oral delivery of my pre-fabbed excuse: 'Sorry, Mum, Dad, but I'm afraid I've got to head back to London--actually, to Hertfordshire. I got a call late last night from work. They need me there today. Seems there was an explosion down at the plant. Pools of flaming latex and petroleum jelly as far as the eye could see, they told me. Horrible.'

'But you don't work at the plant,' Dad quite reasonably demurs.

'Er, well I do now, for the time being. They need, er, reinforcements, to cover for the injured blokes.'

'I hope,' Mum says, rising from the table and wrapping an arm round my shoulders, 'this hasn't got anything to do with us.'

'What do you mean? What could you two possibly have against Proctologitex?' My thickness knows no limits at times, particularly at the single-diggited AM ones. 'Oh, I see what you mean. Er, no, of course it hasn't. I'm telling you the honest to goodness truth.'

'Because if there's one thought about us you should take away with you, it's that we both love you very much, even if you are a sexually-diverse chav.'

'Come now, Martha!' Dad remonstrates, sternly though not stroppily, 'Surely this is no time to be opening those two cans of worms.'

'Oh, what do you know about timing when it comes to emotional issues, you insensitive clod!' Mum screams, disengaging her arm and turning to Dad. 'All you care about is your Gilbert and Sullivan records...and that Trippet-Jones woman!'

'Oy, vey!' Dad exclaims, rolling his okies. 'I can't believe what I'm hearing.'

'Don't you try to wriggle out of this, mister. I saw you talking to her yesterday morning.'

'Yes, for the ninth or tenth time in as many months. And for Christ's sake, we were standing five feet apart.'

'All the better for concealing your affair with her. I'm warning you--if I catch you speaking to her one more time, we're through. I'll pack my bags and move in with Aunt Agatha.'

I start thinking this is probably my last chance to make a speedy exit. Mind you, I really do want to rally to Dad's defence, but that would involve getting myself dragged right back down deeper than ever into the very mire that I have already resolved to escape from. So, grabbing hold of a bag in each hand, I step silently from the dining room, through the front room and out the front door.

Barring the New Year's party at the Ape, my navel-hoover-centric prognostications of the night of the 26th proved chillingly prescient. If I wanted to, I could devote a whole nother post to the New Year turnover itself, whose highlights included a near-shirtfest with Manish Shah, occasioned by a 12-pint-induced bout of pulling on his girl; and a 2 p.m. pigeon-peck-induced, half-naked solo reveille on a pavement in Hendon on New Year's Day. But all told, I think I've had just about enough of '05, and I think it best to put a full stop on my reminiscences of that terrible year with the final full stop of this very paragraph. To sum up belatedly the end-of-the-year SOA chez Rugger, as of this 12th of January, 2006: At home, all is well, with no further damage to the window since Halloween night. At work, I continue to plod along in a spirit of very nearly tolerable stroppiness. Arsenal have fallen to fifth place in the Premiership table; and I find that, accounting for outstanding debts, I am worth -₤3000. For all of which Stella and/or Hoegaarden be praised.

Reveries of a Solitary Rugger (HMSLX Part Three)

My, but how a bloke's fortunes and self-respect can take a tumble in the course of a single hour! At 4:30 in the p.m., he's sitting, with feet securely stirruped, astride his Unprodigal-Filial high horse, and smugly stroking his poncily-trimmed-and-waxed, bum-fluff dragoon's moustache; and come 5:00 he's AWOL and on foot, limping along the High Road with a bullet-wound in one leg and the military cuntstabulary of Filial Impiety in hot pursuit of his carcass. OK, I admit that I didn’t actually have a bullet lodged in my thigh at 23:00 sharp on Christmas Day, and that consequently I was actually moving at a pretty steady clip (and as you lot were there with me at 4:30, you already know I wasn't literally sitting on a horse, etc. in the strip-cartoon panel thus time-stamped). The fact remains that at that at at that precise moment, at 5:00, I was out of doors, on a road that was--and is--indeed named High (amongst other appalachians at various points along its bent-schlong-like cursus), and heading away from home and the tsunami of curses, imprecations and what-did-you-that-for-you-cuntish-gits, that doubtlessly would have come crashing down on to my head from all sides of the room in the wake of my demolition of the telly had I lingered there even a fraction of a second after taking conscience of the enormity of what I had just done. It must have been round about 5:07, as the Rugger runs, that, having got far enough the fuck out of there for my conscience's tolerable discomfort, I finally got round to giving the here, the now and the whither their alloted ten second's apiece on my mind's casting couch; that, my breath becoming rather laboured, my ticker positively kvetcing for overtime pay and my okies alighting on the cross-street sign bearing the legend 'MERE STREET,' I paused and, shivering like a pirate's timbers and schvitzing like a gefiltefisch, considered what I should do next.

'Is it too soon to go back?' I asked myself.

'Is it fucking ever, Jude!' myself rejoined. 'You'd be lucky to walk in on them wheeling away the telly and sweeping up the bigger hunks of glass if you headed back now. I'd wait another hour, at least.'

'And by means of what cuntishly slow-strangling karate or ninjitsu hold, pray tell, am I to dispose of that selfsame hour?'

'Well, the technique's got nothing to do with karate or ninjitsu. Nothing to do with Asia at all, in fact. It's a little soft-shoe step invented by the Frogs, and it's called...'

'Yes, yes, yes..?'

'Flanerie.'

'Flannery? As in Flannery O'Connor or O'Brien?'

'No, flanerIE. As in Flannery Adams Else. It's basically a hifalutin word for taking a walk, only with this difference: that as you're walking you pause occasionally to make snippy little remarks on the shittiness of the people, scenery, etc. immediately to hand. What with all the pausing and snipping, you can easily treble the timeage of your constitutional.'

'But if there are any people about, won't they think me a bit barmy? Or, worse yet, take these animadversions on their shittiness as a provocation to shirtiness?'

'Of course not, you fucking fleischkopf, because you won't be saying these things aloud; you'll be saying them to yourself (i.e., me).'

'I see. And presumably you've chosen this moment to moot this flanerie-ing chronocidal strategem because here we are at the foot of Mere Street, the Fifth Avenue, the Charing Cross, the Tiananmin Square of Diss...'

'Exactly. Because, in short, it's the finest quarter-mile of flaneur's fodder this side of Thetford. On Mere Street, that queer street, they do things they don't do on Broadway...'

'OK, that'll do. Matt Monro or Frank Sinatra you ain't. I'm off.'

Thus putting a full stop on the old inner dialogue, and putting one hoof in front of the other, I beat a leisurely stroll along the curve of the pavement linking the east-west left flank of Park Road to the north-south left foot of Mere Street. The local-heritage puffers tend to describe this left or westerly side as the more 'picturesque' of the two on account of the fact that it abuts on the town's greatest natural geographical treasure, the eponymous Mere; but to all the Dissian newbility (who are not to be confused with the non-existent Dissian nubility), I say: 'Don't be taken in by the LHPs. The Mere is no great shakes.' In any newer-fangled town--say, Milton Keynes--it'd be mistaken for a man-made drainage pond, and not a particularly spectacular example of the genre at that.

But anyway, I couldn't have taken more than a couple of dozen steps on my northward-bound stroll, when I became conscious all at once (as one tends to do in cold weather) of an acute and well-nigh-unpostponeable need to piss. As I was just then drawing level with the municipal public bog housed in a rather unprepossessing little bungalow set off to the side, within (so to speak) pissing-distance of the Mere, my first instinct was naturally to repair to the Gents' half of that edifice; but to no purpose: it was, unsurprisingly, locked; and so I was obliged to relieve myself under the only other cover to hand, namely the great 15-foot-high willow tree out in front. To divert myself during the first half of the relief effort, I glanced to my left over at the Mere, on whose opposite shore loomed the Rotary Club's traditional Christmas display, a massive tanenbaum-shaped edifice of particoloured lights surmounting the cuntishly oversized characters R-O-T-A-R-Y; at the sight of which I said to myself, A tourist from another planet would think 'Rotary' was the name of the fucking holiday. Then, pointing my okies downwards, and watching the piss descending from my schlong in great cataracts or inverted geysers and running down the bark of the tree-trunk in little steaming rivulets or lava flows, I recalled, for the first time in perhaps a decade, a certain anecdote or legend centring on this very tree that Mr Jenkins, a primary school teacher of mine, had related to us younguns during one of our many lunchtime outings on the Merestrasse. According to Mr Jenkins, the Norman King Stephen, had, in 11-something AD, during one of his progresses through Diss en route to London from Norwich, watered with his own piss the seedling from which eventually sprouted this mighty willow. And for the first time in, well, probably all of the 20 years that had elapsed since the relation of the anecdotage itself, it occurred to me that there could not be so much as the slightest soup's-or-cunt's-son of truth to this story. There was no way this tree was more than a hundred years old; and it was probably less than 50. Willows (it just occurred to me then) aren't fucking sequoias or even oaks--they're simply not cut out gene-wise for the long haul. Lies my fucking teacher told me indeed, and probably for the sheer cuntish thrill of telling them to a so-called captive audience of credulous tykes. Well, cuntishly disillusioning revelations like this one do have a way of creeping up on a bloke at the most cuntishly inopportune moments.

I was not, however, about to let myself be fazed or otherwise incapacitated by the falling from my eyes of this particular scale-let; I had resolved to promenade along all 500-or-so metres of Mere Street, and so, after zipping up my flies, I set off once again towards the fulmilment of this resolution. I passed the Waterfront Inn, Cannell's the Butcher's and Amity's the Florist's, and paused in front of the National West Bank, from which station, sited roughly halfway between the southern and northern terminuses of the road, I could take in virtually every salient observable detail of the opposite side in one sweeping 180-degree, left-to-right neck-pivot. Taylor Electrical; W. H. Smith's; the offices of the Diss Mercury, the local paper--all were shut up and darkened for the holiday. Even towards the middle right edge of the frame, to which the pink-and-green neon shop-window sign of Hing Lee (the remains of whose insipid Kung Pao chicken were at that moment wending their way through my large intestine en route to my colon) could have been counted on to impart a bit of light and colour to the composition on any other Sunday, there was nary a glimmer. Nor, much to my would-be flaneur's chagrin, was there a soul was in sight on the pavement, on either this side or that one. Only once, in fact, during the twenty-odd minutes of the whole Mere Street stroll were my meditations interrupted by the vaguest obtrusion of a human presence, in the form of a town copper walking his beat (or so I assume, though in truth I have no idea if these blokes even have beats to walk). Whether it was on account of the copper's gratuitously militaristic gait or on account of the suspiciously helmet-like composure of that portion of his curly black coiff visible beneath his gendarme's cap, I can't say; but as he briefly passed within a few cunt-hair's-breadths of my person, and grunted a none-too-friendly pair of syllables that passed with equal plausibility for 'Evening' and 'Fuck off,' I couldn't help taking him for this bloke Sergeant Stewart, an officer of the Norfolk Cuntstabulary who in my first-and-second form days at Diss High used to come round every month or so to deliver a so-called motivational presentation to us tykes on the legal hazards of drug use, petty theft, vandalism, littering and cursing. (These presentations, incidentally, had always terminated a quarter-hour ahead of schedule, with old SS, on the evidence of our collective apathy, collecting his presentational paraphrenalia and marching out with the valedictory ejaculation of 'You're a fucking pack of lost causes, you lot!') But a quick bit of mental arithmetic-cum-sartorial-analysis soon set me despondingly straight: there was no way that bloke had been Sergeant Stewart; as old SS when I had known him was already pushing retirement age, whereas this bloke couldn't have been a day over 60 now; and whereas SS had been a county cop, this bloke's uniform had clearly marked him as one of the local rent-a-bobbies.

Otherwise, I was at liberty to mull over the desolation, the solitariness, the prosaic otherworldliness of the whole scene, and therefrom to draw out the most mercilessly snippy conclusions ad nauseum. At first, TBF, although I did feel that there was something off, if not downright sinister about the aspect of these environs, I was hard pressed to put my finger on any particular quality that merited my disapproval. Yes, at half-past five in the afternoon of Christmas Day, Mere Street, the hoppingest thoroughfare in Diss, was dead as Dillinger's doornail, but was there anything especially objectionable in that? This was, after all, a self-styled sleepy East-Anglia market town; and it would have been completely out of character at such a time for its main pedestrian drag to be swarming with punters laughing, shrieking, puking and otherwise carrying on like the yobbility or chavvility of your average inner London borough on a Saturday night. The LHPs had gone balls deep to make the Mere Street of 2005 look as quaint as Queen Elizabeth the First's cunt, and had succeded in doing so beyond the pie-est-in-the-sky-est dreams of local-historical anorakism. Here were none of your tastelessly anachronistic wire-mesh public dustbins, let alone any of your High Street-busting Concrete-and-Perspex architectural monstrosities. No, the newest building on the strip probably dated from ca. 1600; the tallest of them stood at three storeys, and the broadest of them squatted at no more than 20 feet. So apparently keen had the LHPs been on making Mere Street pass for the real deal in the eyes of a 17th-century time traveller, that, in seeing to the public lighting, they had forsworn the usual fluted-cast-iron-lamppost-type schema one usually encounters in such so-called heritage districts. (Lampposts? I imagined one of these LHPs ejaculating through a pinched nose, Ugh! How smuttily Victorian, how modern! You might as well talk of opening up the area to flying cars.) Instead, they had gone for affixing unobstrusive reading-lamp-sized lights to the fronts of the shops themselves. And it was, in fact, only after my vision had gone slightly out of focus from having been fixed so long on the same static prospect, and thereby diverted my attention away from the fake-aides of the buildings and towards the dingy yellow sodium vapour halos emanating from these very lights, that I began to get a purchase on the peculiar and yet all-too-familiar aroma of shittiness exuded by Mere Street, and--by extension--by Diss in culo. You see, it was in taking notice of the portability, the un-placededness, of these halos, and of the uniformly garish, monchromatic tinge they imparted to every square millimetre of the streetscape, that I was vouchsafed a singular revelation vis-a-vis the boutiques of Mere Street: namely, that every bloke Jack of them was simply a scaled-down, cut-rate, inferior version of its equivalent in Norwich or London. Sure, the buildings themselves were quaint enough, but their contents and purposes were anything but. I had never seen a Diss Strip Steak on view under the front counter at Cannell's, or a Norfolk Nosegay advertised on the sandwich boards out in front of Amity's; and if (as I was sure it must do) the Waterfront Inn now happened to dispense from its taps some undrinkable goo of semi-local provenance styled Lowestoft Lager or Somerleyton Stout, it was pound coins to peascods that the first keg of the stuff had been bunged not a day earlier than Whitsuntide of 1995, in envious emulation of some Leicester-or-Cambridge-originating so-called real ale dating from no farther back than the hoary old late 80s. And this revelation induced in its turn the more general and no less devastating revelation that, pace your Billy Braggs and Paul Wellers and other dirgesmiths of the grand old industrial British crap town, it was actually Diss and the hundreds if not thousands of other ancient market towns of similar size that comprised the real set of boar titties on the belly of this here Sceptred Isle (incidentally, I'd place the sceptre itself--i.e. the boar's craggy, atrophied little schlong--somewhere in the vicinity of Portsmouth), and had done for probably the better part of two centuries. If, I reflected, a town like Manchester, or even Sheffield, had been swallowed up whole into the earth even in the period of the absolute US Green Party presidential candidate of its industrial fortunes (1970 or thereabouts), all of Britain would have wept and wailed at the catastrophe, whereas if the same fate, during the same period, had befallen a town like Diss...

Here I suddenly and positively reeled as if felled by an apopleptic seizure; and, overwhelmed by the torrent of stupid puns un-dammed by the phrase a town like Diss, I was obliged to plant a palm on the pavement in order to keep just barely upright. But debilitating and unnerving as this little episode was in the short run, in the long run I was grateful for its occurrence, as it eventuated in the clearing up of a mystery that in my mind had always surrounded a certain series of public relations initiatives undertaken by the town council during my late nipperhood and early adolescence. You see, when I finally felt well enough to disengage my hand from the ground and to set off again northwards up the street (if for no other reason than to prove to myself I was constitutionally up to it), and thereupon added the two of my lamp-lit revelation to the two of my pun-induced seizure, I all at once, and for the first time, saw these PR campaigns for what they really had been--utterly desperate attempts by the local bigwigs to capitalise on the one attribute that really did set Diss apart from the thousands of other UK bathroom communities with which it was otherwise virtually interchangeable, viz. the ludicrously, endlessly riffable character of its very name. Any traveller who has passed two hours together at a Diss pub on karaoke night will have been subjected to the perennially popular punning parody of the Specials' classic 'This Town' (Diss Town is coming like a ghost town, etc.). I myself remember learning it on the nursery school playground, and along with the so-called Mere ducks it's probably the closest thing we'll ever get to a genuine local folkway. But at least as far as I can recollect, it's never been exploited for the purposes of publicity, perhaps for the okie-burstingly obvious reason that it casts the town in such a disparaging light, perhaps for the less okie-burstingly obvious one that the costs of remaking even a single stretch of one of our commercial roads into a facsimile of an abandoned town of the American Old West, complete with robotised tumbleweed, faded Saloon marquees and the like, would almost certainly have bankrupted the town treasury.

But we're not talking about counterfactuals here; we're talking of actuals--actual instances of an official attempt to extract revenues from the town name; and the earliest such attempt in my lifetime that came to mind then, on Christmas Day, as I was passing by the shuttered windows of the Meat Inn (Cannell's rival charcuterie on the trip), had centred on Diss's exact phonetic, if less-than-exact graphic, correspondence with Dis, the name of the celebrated (or infamous) capital of the Hell of Dante's Inferno. I recalled that for a few fleeting months in the summer of 1988 or 1989, strategically placed, street-spanning banners bearing the legend 'WELCOME TO DISS: ONE HELL OF A TOWN!' had greeted visitors at all three of the town's main gateways: Roydon Road, Frenze Road and Denmark Street. Here, the TC must have reasoned, I thought, was a PR sally that would be as cheap to pull off as it was insanely catchy; and indeed it had proved so popular with the locals that plans eventually had gone afoot to extend the Dantean semio-geography to the rechristening (or, rather, re-sataning) of specific local landmarks: the river Waveney, to the immediate south of town, was to be re-named the Phlegethon, after the fluvial border of lower Hell; the mouth of the Mere the Malebolge, after the so-called evil pockets leading into Dis; and the Mere itself Cocytus, after the frozen lake at the very bottom of the Ninth Circle. But all these plans had come to naught after a certain senior octagenarian member of the town council (quite rightly, in Mum and Dad's view) warned that the wholesale Satanification of the Dissian map, innocuous enough as it seemed at first blush, could not fail of eventually attracting in droves a decidedly unpleasant element--Goths, genuine Satan-worshippers, junkies, mafiosi and the like; and that from their infiltration of the town it would be but an easy step to the conversion of our beloved Park into the site of a year-round Woodstock, Glastonbury or Burning-Man Festival. This prophecy being subsequently and universally seconded in the town council, and thereafter generally seconded in the community at large, the banners were pulled down as swiftly as they had been put up, and no more had been heard since on the subject of Diss as the UK's Next Great Hellhole.

But at least in point of sheer ambitiousness or hoot's pa, I thought, the Dante venture had been but a run-up to or foretaste of the high era of Dissploitation, the early '90s. I recalled that the entry, at some point in 199o or 1991, courtesy of the infectious transatlantic pop-musical-cum-subcultural phenomenon known as hip-hop, of the word diss meaning 'to disrespect, snub or treat in an all-around cuntish manner' into the lexicon of the UK youth vernacular had been a positive windfall for the most aggressively self-whoring faction of our so-called business community; who, on the basis of a consensus that they must strike while the iron was hot, had promptly set about placing an advertisement bearing the leader of 'DISS YOUR WORST ENEMIES, AND SHOW 'EM A GOOD TIME TO BOOT!' in all of the major UK pop music magazines (NME, Melody Maker, Smash Hits, etc.) and in a smattering of their Stateside counterparts. The idea had been that for the rather princely sum of eleven hundred quid, you could send your chosen victim a so-called Dissogram, inviting him or her anomymously to a free junket in Hawaii, Acapulco or wherever-have-you; and that, supposing they took the bait, they would thereupon and unbeknownst to themselves be transported, by whatever conveyance proved necessary, to our little corner of East Anglia. Once here (so the pitch went), they would--for all of their stroppiness at having been dropped off at a destination entirely different to the purported one--be so speedily captivated by the sheer face-cheek-pinchable charm of the place that they would no less speedily offer up their open wallet or handbag to the hose-ends of our local cash-hoovering establishments, and ultimately pass on the good word about Diss to their friends and so-called loved ones. The only taker--or takee, rather--that I had ever heard tell of in connection with this scheme was a bloke hailing from the hardly-exotic locale of Norwich, a rapper bearing the moniker of MC Sir Thomas Browne, who'd claimed to have been despatched hither courtesy of the cuntish machinations of his London rival, MC Sammy 'Let met give a shout out to all of my' Pepys. And the only reason I had ever even heard about the apparition of this bloke in our midst was that Anglia Tonight had done a short segment on it, in the summer of ’91 or ’92—I forget which. This bit of footage had opened with a long shot of the mouth-end of Mere Street centred on the diminutive person of MCSTB making all of the stock gestures of cuntsternation (pacing up and down, stamping one’s feet, shaking one’s fist at the heavens), then cut to a medium-close-up that revealed him to be a frankly clownish—nay, even guyish—figure attired from head to ankle in togs that reminded me simultaneously of the Three Musketeers and the Mayflower pilgrims (plumed three-corner hat, voluminous cloak, laced-up waistcoat, baggy pantaloons and calf-hugging postman’s socks, all in black); whilst on his feet he sported immaculately white, fat-laced, moon-boot-sized trainers. 'You done dissed my lily-white Norridgian ass plenty of times before, Pepys,' Browne stroppily addresed the camera, 'but this diss, dis Diss [at the words dis Diss there was a cut to a kiddie-TV-show-style super-close-up of the landmark cruciform town sign, and of the bloke's gloved forefinger laboriously underlining the town name posted there in four-inch high capitals] takes the [BEEP]-ing cake. At two o'clock this afternoon, a minicab pulls up at the front porch of my crib, and I get in thinking it's gonna take me to Norwich airport, where I'm poster catch a plane to Mallorca. Instead, it takes a wrong turn, and heads south and drops me off at this pissant shamlet. I dunno, though. Maybe Diss is my mother[BLEEP] fault after all. Maybe my mother[BLEEP] mind's playing tricks on my ass. Or vice-versa. Let me check my appointments for the day [reaching into the folds of his cloak and producing a small memorandum book and a ballpoint; then, licking the tip of the latter, and opening the former; and, finally peering into the latter (i.e., the former former) whilst scanning it with the former (i.e., the former latter)]. Let's see here: 8 AM: COLONICS (DR ARSCHSCHWIMMER). 10 AM: DRIVE-BY. CAP RESPECTIVE ASSES OF MESSERS BOYLE AND HOOKE. 11:30 AM: TAKE GRAN TO SEE TERMINATOR 2 (CENTREFOLK CINEPLEX). 2 PM. AIRPORT. BRITISH AIRWAYS FLIGHT 451 TO [dramatic pause] MALLORCA.' Yeppers. Just as I thought: Mallorca. Ain't no mentionin' o' nuttin' here 'bout no mother[BEEP] Diss. Mark my words, Pepys, yoh nappy, titty-gropin', closet-masturbatin', diary-keepin', naval-contract-pimpin' ass gonna pay for Diss. I'm fittin' to Bismarck or Fargo yowass, you catch? T-B-mother[BEEP]-S, this mother[BEEP] town is whack. A neighbah cayn't even get a decent blunt or a fowty in this mother[BEEP] dorf. Shiah, Nero...' The segment had closed with a cut back to the studio, where a presenter mooted the purportedly widely-current rumour that Pepys had had nothing to do with the Dissing of Browne; that Browne had engineered the whole affair as a publicity stunt timed to coincide with the release of his new LP Urne Buriall, which, I now recalled, in subsequent months had figured fairly prominently on the playlists of some of the overnight shows on Radio Norfolk. To my fairly untutored 12-year-old's ears the record had sounded like an intriguing cross between the Geto Boys and Joy Division. (I wonder [now] what ever became of old MCSTB...) In any event, the iron had cooled soon enough afterwards; by '94 or thereabouts the grizzled punditry of the political chat shows had got hold of diss with a lowercase 'd' and, by virtue of bringing it to bear on every bloke Backbencher's most cuntishly ephemeral tiffs with Whitehall, transformed it into a veritable shibboleth for out-of-date squaredom pretty much overnight. And thereafter--and every year since--for our TC it had been back to round one of the All-UK Pissant-Towns' Self-Promotional Talent Tournament, with its boilerplate soft-shoe routine of 'Great schools, blah-blah-blah; only a half-an-hour from Pseudo-Real City X, two hours from Quasi-Real-City Y, blah-blah-blah; rich cultural history, blah-blah-fucking blah'; and in whose closing ceremonies Diss might hope, at best, to receive an honourable mention every 20-odd years.

I reached the slightly misaligned three-tined fork at the end of the road. Straight ahead, Mere Street morphed into Mount Street, and to my immediate left was Market Hill; whilst at a just-barely legible distance further ahead, and to the right, the sign of Church Street beckoned. My bout of Mere-Street flaneurage was at an end. At arse, for all of the Diss-illusionment (ugh!) it had wrought in the Ruggerian psyche, I could hardly in retrospect call it Diss-appointing (ugh-squared!). It had served its purpose; it had killed what I could only suppose was the better part of an hour; moreover, in shifting the onus of angst from one of my mind's arse-cheeks (the arse-cheek of filial piety) to the other (the arse-cheek of hometown loyalty), it had made the prospective re-assumption of the burden by the first arse-cheek that much easier to bear. I could now, I realised, face my family with a cunt-hair's-heft of equanimity. It would all be a matter of ponying up to the front doorstep--on the back of my unprodigal-filial little Shetland--with an offer to replace the telly as toot enough close to sweet as possible; i.e., first thing tomorrow morning, when the shops opened. Such an offer, tendered in a spirit of real contrition, should smooth things over with Mum, Dad and my conscience alike for the duration of the evening.

Rather than follow the shortest route up Market Hill, I took the long way back up to St. Nicholas Street by pressing on up Mount Street past Church Street, so as to get a proper up-close gander at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, whose austere, understated English Gothic grandeur--my steadfastly pissy reservations about Diss a culo notwithstanding--I would trade for the overblown neoclassical proto-Washingtonian hooplah of St. Paul's in London on any day. And as I marvelled anew at the salient architectural features of the church--the triangular, castle-worthy spire, comprising nearly a full quarter of its total height; the rather miniscule, purely functional, prolate windows peering out diffidently amidst massive blocks of freestone, each individually traceable even from the distance of the pavement; the rough-hewn, stylised gargoyles that in their only half-hearted aspirations to full-fledged critterhood were more evocative of 1950s car-bonnet figurines than of their cuntinental counterparts--my okies happened to alight on the dial of its clock, which, I observed, now read almost half-past six. Yes, it was certainly well past time to be getting back. For the first time since setting out from Orchard Grove I noticed--actually noticed, not merely felt--that I was cold, and that my ancestral sailor's pullover, salvaged from the day before, did not, on its own, afford sufficient protection against the depredations of this barely-super-freezing late-December weather. I also noticed that I was already once again getting a wee bit peckish; and where there is peckishness, to misquote some ancient Roman geezer with a name like a pizza, there is hope. Impelled at this point by a heady cocktail of more appetites and passions than one could have shaken a swizzle stick at, I dug my boot spurs into the hind flanks of my humble little Unprodigal Filial steed and cantered off homewards faster, and with more alacrity, than I ever would have thought possible a scant hour before.

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To be [JMFC!] continued (and concluded)...

Had Meself a Shi(r)ty Little Xmas: Part Two

Not to let the reader down after all that angsty build-up at the end of the last post, but I must confess that my first night at the old parental abode passed agreeably enough. Not that, on the other hand, in so confessing I mean to recalibrate downwards the reading of the angstometer of two days ago insofar as it registered my general attitude towards the McGyverhaus during my first Mazda-cocooned moments in Diss, or to suggest that that attitude was without legitimate foundation. It's just that even in the most inhospitable of locales, the sensation of being unreservedly welcome on the premises tends, for a time, to forestal or overwhelm any misgivings you might have otherwise had about being there. In this case, the era of good feeling lasted almost through to bedtime. First off--I mean, as soon as I stepped in--there was the usual sentimental, lovey-dovey bullshit: the hugs, the face-cheek-pinches, the proffered verbal insistences that 'You're looking quite healthy!' ('cos what else can they say now that you've stopped growing--at least upwards?).

Next: dinner, consisting of my mum's signature Bosty-Drog-trouncing, rosemary-and-garlic-basted Cornish game hens, accompanied by liberal dollops of couscous and all-too-illiberal lashings of Beaujolais. And there was nothing too traumatic about the meal's midget-speak, which centred on such eminently unstroppifying topics as my drive over; life in the respective salt mines of Proctologitex, UEA and Palgrave Primary School (where my mum has a gig as a kiddie psychologist); and preliminary preparations for next summer's Party in the Park, Diss's one-horse answer to the Notting Hill Carnival. It was only in the last quarter of our time at table together, as my dad was clearing away the last of the dinner cooter-mints and my mum was cutting up the rhubarb crumble, that the ghost of awkwardness decided to pull up a chair and join us for dessert. It was just then, you see, that I happened to notice we were one person short for a four-handed, all-familial, post-prandial game of Cluedo; and thoughtlessly opened my gob to inquire into the whereabouts of Sidney, my still-at-home residing nineteen-year-old kid brother.

'I expect he's out on the town somewhere...carousing,' answered my mum through the merest soup's son of a grimace. 'Isn't that right, dear?' she asked my dad, as if seeking affirmation of her choice of this last word, 'carousing,' in preference to the hundreds of other available alternatives in Mr and Mrs McGyver's Private Thesaurus of Euphemisms.

'Mmm,' he answered gruffly with a nod, as he bit into his first gobful of rhubarbage--such that, until he resumed speaking a half-minute later after chewing and swallowing, I wasn't sure whether it was the word or the crumble that thus elicited his approval. 'I suppose that's about as good a word for the activity as any other, carousing. Nice Krauty-sounding word that, don't you think?--carousing. Frenchy-looking, but Krauty-sounding. Mind you, in this instance, I should have gone for something both Krauty-sounding and Krauty-looking--something along the lines of...mmm...I don't know................whoring?'

'Stanley!' my mum shouted across the table at him with outraged peremptoriness.

'Sorry, doveling. I admit I was well out of line there, in point of both civility and linguistic precision. Must be the Beaujolais talking. The nub of the whole crux of the thing, Nigel,' he continued, turning to me, 'is that Sidney's not far away tonight, and that he's promised to join us for dinner on Christmas day, so you'll be seeing him soon enough.' And then, back to mum: 'Will that do for a subject-closer?'

'To a turn, dear, to a turn.'

And that, bar the shouting (or, rather, in this case, silence), was it for dinner. Whatever Sid was up to, whether it was carousing or whoring or sheep-buggering, I didn't care to get involved, and so I held my piss, as did they, until after the last of the crumble was polished off. Then, with surprising, and, indeed, slightly hurtful promptitude, they bade me good night and hurried off to bed, leaving the washing up for next morning and me to settle down on to the front-room couch for a spot of telly. But even before switching on the set, I felt that something was missing from this particular run-through of the old familiar couch-cous-cous's passing-out routine, my appetite for that something having been whetted, and yet not half satisfied, by the two glasses of wine I'd had over dinner. And so, without quite knowing what I was about, I stumbled into the kitchen and popped open the fridge--and lo! What did I behold on the bottom tray, just above the crisper drawer, but an integral, un-torn-into four-pack of my beloved Stella! Awfully prescient of mum and dad to have seen to that provision, I said to myself en route back to the couch, scratching my pubes with one hand and cracking open my newly-filched tall bloke with the other.

My last memory of that night centres on a scene from some sort of seasonal claymation movie with talking mice (produced, perhaps by the Wallace and Gromit team?), and my first memory of the following morning centres on my dad standing in front of me, dressed in shorts and a V-necked cricketer's jumper, and flailing rather theatrically about in all directions with some sort of oversized fly-swatter.

'Have you taken up Tai-Chi since I was last here, Dad?' I ask him, shielding my eyes with one hand against the all-too-cheerily bright rays of sunlight passing from Bourgie Dawn's arse cheeks and through the unblinded front-room windows.

'Tai Chi? Good heavens, no!' he answers, stopping short and laying the fly-swatter down on the coffee table. 'Just practising my backhand. Care for a game of squash this morning, Nige?'

'Eventually, Dad, eventually,' I mutter, getting up from the couch and staggering into the bathroom to perform my morning 'blutions (i.e., the first three of the four esses). And afterwards, back in my old room, I rummage through the chest of drawers in search of some squashworthy togs. The only halfway serviceable things I manage to dig up are a pair of orange-on-yellow polka-dotted Bermudas that I haven't worn since fifth form (and that I can barely squeeze into) and a rather moth-eaten blue sailor's pullover that, as I've never set me okies on it before, presumably belonged to my grandfather or some other relative now long deceased. Back in the kitchen, I find the coffee pot full and freshly piping, and the table laid out with a fresh box of Weetabix cakes and a jar of peanut butter along with the necessary cutlery and dishery. First the Stella, now the Weetabix, I said to myself as I prepared the first of my eventual four Weetabix schmears, This is starting to get a wee bit cloying.
After breakfast, I step out front and find Dad, squash gear slung over his shoulder, chatting with one of the neighbours, a quadragenarian or quinquagenarian blokess whom he introduces to me as Jane Trippett-Jones. 'Jane's on the planning committee of the Town Council,' he explains, after we've taken leave of Ms T-J and are hoofing it up Louie's Lane in the general direction of the Squash Club, 'and she was just telling me of a proposal a certain bloke had the temerity to present to them, a proposal to turn a barn on Walcot Green into a garage for his car-repair shop. Can you imagine that--a glorified indoor scrap-heap taking up residence on such a sanctified preserve of old-style English country living? What an eyesore and earsore it would be! Why, it was worth vetoeing on grounds of proximate traffic congestion alone. The confounded cheek of the fellow!' Christ but these provincial geezers sure do seem to have an arse-load of time on their hands! I couldn't forbear ejaculating to myself, or adding: Back in London, I doubt I'd bat an eyelid if all of Hampstead Heath were converted into a giant 300-acre car park.

Aloud, I say: 'And what about Mum?' This is the question I've had in my mind's front pocket all along--I mean pretty much since waking up.

'What about her?'

'I mean, where's she got to?'

'Oh, she went up to Earsham to fetch Aunt Agatha.' (Agatha, my mum's widowed aunt, being the only living relative of the older generation still resident in the area.) 'The two of them will be back round lunchtime, I expect.'

Up at the Club, it would be fair to say that Dad wiped the court with my carcass. We played three games, and in one of them, I managed to score a measly two points; in the other two, he nixed me nine-love. The shogun-marriage-diet of Ms Stella Artois and the Duke of Marlboro hadn't exactly done wonders for my athletic prowess, especially at a sport I hadn't played regularly since fifth form. At least Dad, gorblessim, had the good grace not to gloat over the whole thing, as geezers of his generation are wont to do over the most cuntishly slight proofs of their enduring june-ness.

Then, that afternoon, all four of us (Mum, Dad, Aunt Aggie and YT) drove down to the cinema at Bugger St. Edmunds to take in a matinee showing of the new Disney adaptation of C. Staples Lewis, Sr.'s Lion, Witch & Wardrobe. In childhood, I'd taken to the Narnia books like a so-called duck to water, after the fashion of all nippers who are force-fed that sort of pre-juvenalial tripe. Later, though, at some point in my early teens I was tipped off to the whole Christological subtext of the books, and the magic was gone, as they say. And Disney's efforts to heathanise the whole thing retroactively--a la Peter Jackson on Tolkein--did not impress me. The whole thing fairly oozed the unsavoury odour of re-hydrated beef jerky, if you know what I mean. Still, I couldn't exactly blame Mum and Dad for thinking this was the sort of thing I'd cotton to; for what else did they have to go on, as far as my so-called current interests went? After all, I'd never breathed a word to either of them about my Stellaphilia or Arsenalophobia, as though I'd always assumed that in their eyes these passions would have figured as veritable by-words for Paedophilia and Hydrophobia.

Well, back at the ranch, I was still so knackered from my squash-workout that I conked out right after dinner (Chinese takeaway from Hing Lee on Mere Street) without first even availing myself of a second Stella tall bloke. Luckily it was an off-night for the Gunners, so in being absent from the telly I didn't miss out on my weekly dose of Arsnelsschadenfreude. Next morning, from the aforementioned BD arse-crack onwards, the whole house was abuzz with preparations for Christmas dinner. Mum was inermittently at the oven, first turning the scones then prodding the turkey; Dad almost constantly at the cooker, stirring his secret-recipe Christmas posset; while Aunt Agatha manned the micro-onda, feeding into its torpedo-bay a succession of side-dishes from the fridge (including, regrettably if inevitably, her perennially inedible plum pudding). I helped out mainly by staying out of the way. Too many Indian chefs spoil the kheer, as the saying goes, especially in a kitchen the size of a third-class compartment of a Calcutta to Delhi express train.

At 2 p.m., the appointed dinner hour, the table is set, everything that's meant to be piping hot is there, piping away; whilst everything that's meant to be cold is also there, chilling out; and the only thing that's holding us up from tucking in is the arrival of my brother. Come a quarter past, there's still no sign of Sid; nor come half-past. Dad starts beating a tattoo on the table to the accompaniment of a whistled rendition of 'Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,'--and not in a poncey Bertie-Woosterish kind of way, as if to say, 'Tut-tut. Unpunctuality is such a frightfully underrated vice'; more of in a blokey Cecil-J.-Rhodesish kind of way, as if to say, 'I'm fittin' to teach this fucking savage Boer a lesson in punctuality!'; whilst Mum and Aunt A start, as they say, exchanging nervous looks.

Then, as the grandfather clock in the front room is just striking a quarter of three, I hear the front door being flung open so violently that the inside knob makes an audible crack against the opposite wall of the vestibule; and my brother barges in, visibly pissed and reeking like a lorry-load of well-fermented nappies.

'About bloody time, Sidney,' Dad reproaches him without raising his voice or twitching a nostril; which co-jonic self-mastery on his end of course makes the reproach all the more ominous. For a second or two I start to think a cross-generational shirtfest between the two of them is in the offing, and I glance over my mental notes on Ronnie’s comportment during my recent near-scuffle with Herbie Hancock at the Ape, preparing myself to step in with a letter-perfect copy of that performance. But Sid obligingly tweaks the tension just enough to postpone, if not preempt, an outright confrontation in answering, 'Yeah, well, sorry, Pops. But this ain’t exactly the first stop on the holiday slop-crawl for me, if you know what I mean. What are you lot drinking today, anyways?' He then scoops up our still-unopened fresh bottle of Beaujolais from the table and takes a gander at the label, painfully sounding out the words as he reads: ‘Jacks de Bof Boojolays Nowvoo. Two-thousand-ought five. Funny, innit, that "2005" is the same in French and in English? [Here Dad presses a thumb and forefinger into his okies in apparently unspeakable consternation.] Anyways, I’ll stick to beer, if youse don’t mind.’ Whereupon, having re-placed the bottle, he traipses off to the kitchen, whence, a moment later I hear issuing the stentorian ejaculation, lifted straight out of the Goldilocks story, 'WHO’S BEEN DRINKING MY STELLA!’ As I’m pretty sure that at this point a dining-room-to-kitchen shouting match between the two of us would serve as a veritable Archduke-Fritz-Ferdie-assassination-type catalyst to an all-out McGyverworld War involving everyone present, I diplomatically excuse myself from the table and join Sid in front of the fridge.

‘Well, of course it was me,’ I fess up to him with, as they say, disarming simplicity. ‘I’m sorry—I didn’t know you had dibs on the Stellas.’

‘And who the fuck else would have done, you shaved pit? Dad? You know he’s no beer-drinker.’

In hindsight it all made sense. As to his cuntish meanness on the score of the single-can-filching itself, well, there was no need of hindsight to explain that—it was totally characteristic of him. He’d always been a proprietary anorak, ever since he was a knee-high to a sausage dog. I remember particularly vividly one occasion, dating from his fourth year and my tenth, on which, having been presented by our grandma with a roll of Smarties to share with me, he’d meticulously counted out exactly half the contents into my hand and then proceeded to swallow the lot of the other half right there on the spot, ‘to make sure,’ as he'd said, ‘you don’t get your teef into any of my stash.’ So, then, knowing as I do that there’s no way of pacifying him but to repay him in kind and toot sweet, I pull out my wallet and hand him a tenner. ‘There,’ I say. ‘Knock yourself up. Buy yourself a whole 'nother four-pack, and keep the cambio.’

'Ooh,' he taunts me, pocketing the note and screwing up his face into a sneer startlingly reminiscent of the phiz of his could-have-been namesake, the Sex Pistols' second bassist, 'His Grace the Duke of Moneybags stoops to throw a farthing to the grubby li'ol guttersnipe! I'm sure it's a great sacrifice for you, you cunting wax-jobbered pit.' For just an instant my right hand jerks reflexively towards my top shirt button, but luckily just in time my left hand intervenes Dr-Strangelove-style to check it before it quite reaches its destination. 'No, my dear FC,' the voice of my left hand says to me, 'You shall not suffer yourself to become shirty over this piffling pseudo-contretemps. You shall not even suffer yourself to make the Unprodigal Son's set speech, which, you will remember, commences thus: You think I have it easy on my 30 grand a year? Well I, unlike you, have rent to pay; I, unlike you, YFC, have to cover the costs of my own car insurance, etc. Admittedly, the Unprodigal Son is the role of a lifetime, and equally admittedly you are fast approaching the age beyond which it is quite impossible play the part gracefully. Nonetheless, I must strenuously insist that you keep your gob zippered, lest from your liberated tongue should fly the verbal spark that blows to pieces the very 1914-vintage powder keg in the interest of whose perduring wholeness you have repaired hither.' He talks a bit too posh for my taste, does my old El Haitch; and his metaphors are a bit screwy, but he generally offers pretty good advice. So I hold my piss, and simply say, 'We'd better be getting back to the table, Sid. The turkey's getting cold,' and leave the kitchen, waiting for him to catch up in his own good time (i.e., a full minute later, after he's pounded his first tall bloke and cracked into a second one).

The convo gets off to a pretty sluggish start, as it seems Auntie and Sid are much more up-to-date on (or indifferent to) the goings-on in Mum and Dad's life than I've been lately, and I'm not, as I've already hinted, particularly game on volunteering any info on my life back in London. I eventually think to take a rather lame crack with the ice pick myself and ask Sid how things are going over at Just Beds, this furniture shop on the south end of town where, according to Mum and Dad, he's been working part-time since last summer.

'Well, druths, the pay is shite, but, on the other hand, lolling about all day in a showroom filled wall to wall with mattresses does have its perks. It has its ups and downs, you could say. Its ins and outs, too: you know what I mean? Eh? Eh? Ups and downs and ins and outs; ins and outs and ups and downs--'

'Yes, Sidney,' my Dad wearily cuts in. 'I'm sure he knows exactly what you mean. And so, I'm sure, do the rest of us.' I can tell that by now the wind, as they say, has been taken out of his sails, and he's simply biding his time till the whole sodding holiday blows over. Aunt Aggie's segue is hardly calculated to lighten the mood, especially for your-fucking-cunt's truly: 'Speaking of, ahem, seksyooal congress, have you got yourself a young lady friend back in London, Nigel?'

Just the kind of question her gossip-hungry, wool-gathering widow's arse would ask. 'Not at the moment, Auntie, but I have been working on it. To be honest, I've been going through a bit of a rough patch lately--'

'What he means,' my brother says, 'is that he's queer but that he just ain't got the balls to admit it.'

'Now, Sidney, you know that word has been scientifically discredited,' says Mum. 'We don't call them queers anymore: we call them persons of diverse sexual orientation.' (Note well that her first impulse is to rush to the defence of her shrink's anorak rather than to the defence of her older son's masculinity.)

'No,' I jump in, doing what I must say is a pretty creditable impression of Dad two minutes earlier, 'You nailed it, Siddie old boy. That's me in a nutshell. Queer as a three-pound note. As the pitch of the High Street of the Castro District in gay old Frisco. As Schlong's hatband. Oops, did I say schlong? So sorry to drag the level of conversation upwards from the toilet to the lower waistline.'

Whereupon I start balling up my napkin in my lap in preparation for my Unprodigal Son's righteous exit (which, properly executed, will culminate in my slamming my bedroom door behind me and blasting classic schlong rock at Level 11 on the hi-fi), as Aunt Aggie, totally oblivious of the ambient knife-sliceable tension, (Gorbless her gormlessness), asks no one in particular, 'I'm afraid I don't understand. What is the meaning of this word schlong?--I've never heard it before.'

'Schlong,' says my dad, with what I guess you'd call an impish smile that suggests he's been waiting for a chance to explain this for years, 'is a slang word, of Yiddish provenance, for the membrum virile.'

(AA): 'The membroo whateelay?'

'The membrum virile: the male member, the rod or yard, better known in these pedantic times as the penis.'

Thus commences a most captivating open university lecture on the etymology of the word schlong [from the German Schlange = queue, tail, snake or serpent] delivered by Dad, veering occasionally into the adjacent territories of psychoanalysis and theology, and followed up by a no less captivating Q&A session. Whodathunkit?--that the broaching of such an off-colour topic would serve to nix Mum's prudishness, Aunt Aggie's gormlessness, my own stroppiness and Sid's all-around cuntishness all at one go? But that's exactly what it does do, such that, come 4:00, as the whole discussion rounds itself out in a satisfying conclusion, just as we're polishing off the last of the grub along with a second bottle of wine (of which even Sid deigns to partake), the old mine-shaft's ghost is of exactly the right temperature and texture for us to proceed without interval into the front room and to settle round the tree for the exchanging of presents.

There are few surprises on my end of the Santa delivery lorry: from Aunt Aggie, I receive her perennial bequest of a five-quid book of McDonald's vouchers. Back in the late 80s, I could stuff my tykish self to the verge of puking three times over with one of these voucher-books of hers; now, the whole sheaf, with an extra quid thrown in, barely covers the cost of curing a single case of the tummy-rumbles. It's hardly worth making the trip anymore. From Mum and Dad I get the usual assortment of ill-fitting fashionless togs that'll go straight from the boot of the Mazda to the return register at Mark's and Spencer's, along with, from Mum alone, a sodding self-help book penned by that walking fart Dr Phil, the ninth one she's given me so far. But I've pre-empted this perennial interventionist sally of hers in having chosen as my gift to her a satire on self-help books entitled Release the Imbecile Within that I came across at the a couple of weeks ago at the Hampstead Waterstone's. Hopefully, she hasn't had every humorous atom in her body chemo'd out of her by her professional life, and will take some pleasure in reading the book. To judge by the expression on her phiz as she tore off the wrapping she was not amused by the title. Anyway, fuck her (in a strictly non-Oedipal sense, natch) if she can't take a joke. As for Dad--I mean the gift, I'd chosen for him, it was a 10-CD boxed set of the complete D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's Gilbert and Sullivan recordings, the ones I remember him playing to death in their LP format in days gone by. I'd worried he'd already bought the reissue years ago; but, no, he says, he's still only got the LPs, and he seems to be genuinely touched by the pains I've taken towards the care and feeding of his G&S-ian hobby horse. Then, vis-a-vis Sidney, as I'd no idea what to get him, I'd gone the Aunt Aggie route--albeit on a grander scale--via a 30-quid HMV voucher.

'Thanks, druths,' he says, clutching me in a nose-stopping, piss&shit-permeated hug. 'With this, I can get the new Arctic Monkeys CD, and the next one too, probably. But ain't you going to open my present? It's the last one of the heap, innit?'

And fuck me with a knobbily-barked, 50-growth-ring-thick Yule Log if the solely unopened package, a circular, shoebox-sized thing wrapped in overlapping lengths of loo paper didn't have my name (and his) on it! And in this box is contained the only real surprise of the whole parcel-shucking session (I'm afraid a fudged a bit when I said there were few surprises on my end): namely, a tan-and-gray chav's cap, just like the one sported by those blokes who roughed me up on Halloween night. My gag reflex, as they say, is to vomit; and yet, for all of Sid's cuntishness, I can tell on account of all this beaming he's doing that he's put no small amount of forethought into this choice. So, for the time being, I'm speechless.

'Don't you like it, Nige? You want to ride all o' the new jet, dontcha?'

'Ride all of the new jet?'

'You know, sport the trendiest clothes. All the lads in Diss and Thetford and Norwich are wearing them there hats. I got 20 of 'em meself.'

'Well, of course I like it. I'll wear it with pride.' (omitting to add, of course, but only indoors and when you [and no on else] are around.)

After clearing away the confetti, all four of us adjourn to the front room and take our places round the coffee table; Dad brings out great mugfuls of the posset--which has been simmering on the stove at a scalding 99-degrees-centigrade all through dinner--Mum brings in a plateful of scones; and, munching and dunking, we launch into the final module of the traditional McGyver Christmas, the all-family, least-common-denominator, soporific telly-viewing session. Aunt Aggie isn't shy about commandeering the remote--probably in the hope of ultimately subjecting the rest of us to some pre-historic holiday cine-screed featuring Bing Crosby or Perry Como--and no more than five channels into her ten-seconds-per station bout of channel-browsing, she happens to alight on the isolated image of a bloke sporting yet another one of those Sherlock-Holmesian chav hats.

'Do you see, bro?' Sid ejaculates, pointing at the screen. 'He's wearing one of 'em.'

'Yes, I see.'

But back to the bloke himself. He's pacing up and down some kind of stage with a microphone in his hand, like he's in the middle of a rant or sermon. A stationary electro-banner at the bottom of the screen reads: 'YOU'RE WATCHING THE JEFF CHAVWORTHY HOLIDAY SPECIAL.' It obviously doesn't take the powers of deduction of SH himself to see that this fellow is a stand-up comedian, and one of some fame or notoriety (although none of us seems to have heard of him).

Mum, doubtlessly anticipating nothing but wall-to-wall pottymouthism in this quarter says, 'Go on, Auntie. Skip ahead to the next channel.'

But Sid will have none of that. 'No. Stay here, Double-A. I want Nige to see what riding all o' the new jet is all about.'

For my part, I gots to admit, my sociological interest vis-a-vis the greater phenomenon of chavvism has been piqued. So, in the absence of further vetoes from Dad or Auntie, we hear out Mr Chavworthy.

'Us chavs,' he's just then saying, when we show up, 'get no respect. No ffffffffffucking respect! And the fing that really gets on me tetons about all this is, you lot out there--yeah, you lot: you pits down there in the pit and you pits lounging on your fat arses at home and munching on your Christmas scones--are a fuckofalot more like us than you'd ever care to admit.' On the whole the act is pretty convincing. Every now and then, though, he lets slip a hard 't' or a round 'o' that betrays his origins in the poshility, that proves he's just another one of those wanking Oxbridge posers like S. B. Cohen.

'I mean,' he continues, 'a lot of people seem to fink that being a chav is purely a matter of style, that clothes make the chav. Take my hat, for instance. No, take it please!'

So saying, he doffs his cap and flings it into the crowd like a frisbee. The camera cuts to a teary-eyed blokess, a tarted up harlot in a pink terry-cloth track suit, who without taking her eyes off the stage, scoops up the hat from the floor and clutches it to her tits in a manner reminiscent of a man-knicker-collecting Tom Jones fan. When the camera's back on him he's crowning himself with another, identical cap, which he's presumably just extracted from the pocket of his hoodie or somewhere thereabouts.

'No worries. Them fings only cost a quid-and-a-half at Tesco's. But like I was saying, a lot of people fink being a chav is all about dressing a certain way, that if you don't wear one of these here Burberry hats, or gold-pound coins on your diggits, that somehow lets you off the hook of chavdom. But the way I sees it, it ain't like that at all. Being a chav is more of a kind of a spiritual fing. It's a whole way of looking at the world, innit? Meaning, irregardless [sic] of the way you dress, if you fink a certain way, like it or not, you are a chav, and you'll just have to live wivvit, for the rest of your cunting natural. It therefore follows, if you're one of these pits who've fought all along that you wasn't a chav, you really ought to take a good gander at yourself, and into yourself, and ask yourself, "Mightn't I hav been a chav all along wivvout knowing it, at my insoo?" And that's where I come in, you see. I've devised an, ahem, chav's checklist [reaching into his his hoodie hold, and producing and unfolding a sheet of paper], a one-hundred-and-fifty-four-point catalogue of chavworthy qualities itemised in a handy dandy if...then format. If you do or are any one of these 154 fings...you might be a chav. Get it? Oh, and one more fing: the list is arranged in order of ascending chav-clinchingness, meaning the higher the number, the more chavvish the quality associated wivvit. Here's just a little sample. [Pretending to read off the paper, whilst resuming his pacing routine.]

'Number 5: If you've fucked your sister in the last 24 hours, you might be a chav.'

'Number 24: If you've ever taken a chip kebab to a job interview, you might be a chav.

'Number 35: If a copper, or some other such quote-unquote authority figure asks you for identification, and you show him some article of jullery hanging round your neck, you might be a chav.'

'Number 87: If your richest relative changes flats, and he don't bovver to call you to help him wivvah move, on account awvvah fact that he's forefeited all of his furniture to the local council........you might be a chav.

[I can't repress a chuckle here. I say to myself, This bloke ain't half bad.]

'Number 95: If you fink marmite is the other dark meat.................you might be a chav.'

'Number 117: If you fink a five-course meal is a bucket of KFC and a four-pack............................you might be a chav.'

But now, after this last one-liner, for just a second or two, the camera cuts to a close-up centred on Chavworthy's phiz, and during that briefest of instants, his virtual okies make contact with my actual ones; and, absurd as it seems, I get the distinctly schphincter-dilating, un-Heimlich-like feeling that he's looking straight at me, and addressing me alone. And he resumes:

'Number 127: If you're under the age of 70 and regularly wear a string vest..................you might be a chav.'

('O come off it!' I can't resist interjecting aloud. 'I thought you said it wasn't clothes that made the chav,' and Mum motions 'Hush!' to me in sign language.)

'Number 134: If you fink Stella Artois is a perfectly respectable mid-priced continental import beer..............................you might be a chav.

'Number 146: If you fink fish and halapenyo poppers are the dernier cri in English cuisine....................................................you might be a chav.'

'Number 150: If you went to college at some Johnny-come-lately university like, I dunno, the University of East Anglia [?], and look down your nose at alumnuses of such venerable ex-polytechnics as, say, the University of Luton [?!]...............................................................................you might be a chav.'

By now, Sid, Dad, Aunt A, Mum--everybody but me--is positively in stitches over this well-nigh-otherworldy cunt's shenanigans, whilst I'm holding on for dear unshirtiness with both hands to the front cushion of the sofa, practically impaling my palms with my fingernails through the fabric.

'Number 151: If you've ever walked out on a dinner date with a girl 'cos you fought the restaurant was too quote-unquote trendy or ersatz, then guess what?'

'YOU MIGHT BE A CHAV?' the crowd call back in unison.

'Spot-cunting-on, you pits!'

This is all too much for me. I leapfrog right over the hurdle of SHIRTINESS on the rage-o-thon track, and alight smack dab athwart my co-jones on the hurdle that reads PALEOLITHIC MURDEROUSNESS. Crying out in a voice choked with rage, as they say, 'FUCK YOU CHAVWORTHY, I AIN'T NO FUCKING CHAV!' I seize on the nearest object to hand--in this case, the last remaining scone--and hurl it with all the fury I can muster straight at the power button of the telly; only I miss by about a half a foot and the scone goes crashing into, and through, the screen. (They're none of your namby-pamby, borderline spongecakes, those scones of my Mum's.) Its tube smashed to bits, the darkened telly starts smoking and sending off sparks like an overheated toaster. But as if to spite me, with a cuntish, zombie-like tenancity worthy of the Terminator, JC gets one last dig in before the sound cuts out:

'Last, and certainly not least, Number 154: If you've ever had occasion to protest that you weren't a chav........well, I rest my case.'

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TBC yet again, I'm afraid (YFC).