Poft Baggage

Time, DGR, for a trip in Ye Olde Wayback Machine to re-visit a simpler micro-micro-epoch: a micro-micro-epoch when You Tube was but the well-nigh exclusive haunt of Weird-Al-Yankovic-video-swappers; when the hegemony of the three-buttoned men's sportcoat was, if hardly still solidly assured, then at least not yet the laughing stock of water-coolerly men's-fashion anoraks; an MME when, indeed, it was not unheard of for the Angry Londoner to launch into a post by avowing that it was 'time to take another dip into the old post bag'--all the way back, in other words, to a modus postandi not seen in these here pages since March of '06 at the latest. In a comment appended to my last post, Mr Caleb Stanhope of Carbondale, Illinois, USA writes, 'Way to go, Rugger! I’m just positively loving your blog—especially the whole soccer-fanny part of it. I can’t wait till the World Cup starts: I’m sure you’ll have a field day with it. Go England! [Just kidding: of course I meant Go USA! (Jeez! Like we even have a chance against you guys!)]'.

Jeez! to Mr Stanhope retorts your run-of-the-mill bone-headedly jingoistic English football yobbo: Like you guys even had a fighting chance of having a fighting chance against us guys in the hemisemifinals; and Jeez! retorts your run-of-the-mill cartiledge-headedly cuntish English football anorak (not that the two ethical types are by any means mutually exclusive): Like you guys even had a logical chance of having a fighting chance against us guys in the finals, seeing as how our respective national teams were consigned to the same super-group; but I, being a representative of neither type, retort instead: Jesus motherfucking Christ! Whence the fuck did you ever derive the besotted notion that I'd ever given a minute of rat's-schphicterly arc about the worldcupperly fortunes of the English National Football Team eo ipso?

'Well,' you, Mr Stanhope, might perhaps retort in turn, 'I've only read the last two posts. And there was certainly nothing in either of them that might have dissuaded me from making such an assumption.'

A fair enough objection on the part of Caleb Stanhope qua conjectural Angry-Londonindian newbie. But what of such demurral as might be raised by CS qua AL-ian semi-old-timer, viz:

'I know all about your showdown with the so-called Insular Arsenalaphobes back in March. But I always assumed that your spats with them and their like were confined to settings in which Arsenal FC figured as a competitive entity. Vis-a-vis such a setting as the World Cup, a setting in which they figured not, I assumed you would root for the home team--in this case the English team--by default.'

An equally fair-enougherly objection on the part of Mr Stanhope qua conjectual Angy-Londinian semi-old-timer. But what of such demurral as might be raised by Mr S qua genuine AL-ian long-in-the-toother, viz:

'I remember vividly a remark you made in your post of March 12, a remark I am obliged, in view of its damning evidence of your hypocrisy, to quote in full as follows: How, I ask you, if there were any justice in this world, would this tatty pack of cuntinental swashbucklers [i.e., Arsenal FC] have been suffered to slip through the elimination rounds [of the UEFA Championship] like an armadillo-sized rat through a cunt-hair-wide gap in the floorboards, to emerge at the other end transmogrified into England's last best hope in ought-six, a veritable batallion of Winston Churchills decked out in the armour of St George--and this at the very moment when they were only just beginning to get their long-overdue comeuppance at home? If, as I submit, on the evidence of this passage, the focal point of your animus against the Gunners is centred on the prevailingly continental provinence of the squad's personnel, how can you help but cheer on the English National Team to victory in any competition in which they figure, e.g. if not i.e., the World Cup of the present calendar year?'

A cuntishly Jesuitical or berkishly imperceptive retort indeed, my conjectural, dentally-over-endowed Carbondalean friend, for all the Angry-Londinian erudition evinced therein! I shall concede that as a general, perduring condition the prevailingly continental composition of the Gunners' roster contributes a faggot or two, if only just, to the fuel supply of my Arsenalophobia. I shall concede, moreover, that during the micro-micro-epoch in which the above-cited passage was composed, the micro-micro-epoch of Arsenal's ill-fated UEFA Championship run, the fact that we English were being shamelessly, tirelessly adjured, by innumerable TV and radio chat program presenters (all of them, no doubt, on M. Wenger's payroll) to jump on the Satanic bandwagon of Arsenalophilia on the nipple-disclosingly flimsy argument that the Gunners were an England-based club--for the sole duration of this micro-micro-epoch, I say, the Continentalophobic sector of my Arsenalophobic bonfire burned with proportionately greater ardour than it had done in micro-epochs or has done since. These concessions having been granted, I must take you to task, Mr Stanhope, for having neglected (deliberately, I daresay) to procure from your local chemist's--or drugstore, as you would call it--a refill for your Ockham Mach 3 razor; as anyone in possession of such a finely-honed shaver could not help but observe that as--notwithstanding the prevailingly continental composition of the Gunners' roster--the flyers of the cross of St George amongst its ranks are outnumbered only by the flyers of the accursed RW&B tricolour, in any match between my home nation and any other country save France, a dyed-in-the-poly-wool Arsenalophobe such as myself would automatically favour the side that was pitting itself against the English squad.

[Conjectural long-in-tooth-cum-unstroppy Mr Stanhope]: 'Case in point: Portugal against England in the late quarter-finals?'

'Case in perfect point, inasmuch as Portugal's roster is a hundred per cent Gunner-free. And case in super-perfect point: Portugal against France in the later semi-finals.'

'I see. But what about, say, a case in which one Gunner-rich squad is pitted against another Gunner-rich squad, as in the even later final ass-off between Italy and France? Do you Arsenal-Bashers then find yourselves in a situation analogous to that of a state delegation to our presidential electoral college--i.e., obliged to root wholeheartedly for the Gunner-poorer of the two?'

'Not at all. In such a case, the actual outcome of the match is, at arse, irrelevant; in such a case, we root for (in your Yank parlance) whichever non-Gunner happens to be thwarting the progress of a Gunner at any given moment.'

'Jeez. That sounds awfully complicated.'

'Sounds and indeed is. But that's not the half of it. For just as in chess the taking of a rook is de jure incommensurable with the taking of a knight or bishop, let alone of a pawn; so in the international Arsenalophobic calculus the failure or penalisation is a given Gunner is de jure incommensurable with the F/P of any of his other clubmates.'

'And precisely what set of factors determines this calculus, the calculus that eventuates in the labelling of one Gunner a rook-equivalent, the next Gunner a bishop-equivalent, and so on?'

'The set of factors comprising, inclusively, and in that order of magnitude...skewed me whilst I consult the rubric...ahem: Team Title, Year of Birth (the later the more cuntish), Proportion of Career Spent as Club Member, Field Position, Total Number of Seasons as Member of First Squad, Total Number of League Goals Scored or Stopped, Total Number of First-Squad Appearances. Thus, according to this calculus, and all other things being equal, a setback for Thierry Henry (the Unholy Grail of Arsenalophobia) is perforce the equivalent of four setbacks for Lauren Etame Mayer (b. 1977, right-back, six seasons on the first squad/in the club, six league goals), three setbacks for Jay Simpson (b. 1988, Gunner since birth, winger, zero first-squad goals/appearances), and ten for Mart Proom (b. 1972, goalkeeper, Gunner since fall of '05, zero first-squad stops/appearances).'

'And all other things not being equal...?'

'...As they of course aren't 99 per cent of the time. Well, in such sitches--as in parallel sitches in chess--the rank of the player/piece takes second place to his/its strategic importance vis-a-vis the game as a whole.'

'I see. So Thierry Henry's flubbing a kick in the opening minutes of a game would be outranked in point of Arsenalophobic significance by Mart Proom's allowing a touchdown--excuse me, goal--during the last ten seconds...'

'...No, no, no. You're not getting the big picture here. Note that I wrote "the game as a whole" and not "the match as a whole". Let me remind you that the two words are not synonymous on this side of the pond. By the game I mean the World Cup tournament in the aggregate, qua running tally of Gunnerly abjection.'

'So, then, in Arsenalophobic terms, TH's being sent off in the first round might very well be outranked by Jay Simpson's being yellow-flagged in the quarter finals, which might very well be outranked in turn by what-his-name's...'

'...Mart Proom's...?'

'Right...Mart Proom's allowing a goal in the final or semi-final match?'

'You got it.'

'Jeez-to-the-googleth power! This system makes one of our fantasy football seasons sound like a game of tic-tac-toe. How do you manage to keep it all straight in your head?'

'By hours and hours of intra-match swotting, that's how. But no matter how thoroughly he's swotted up beforehand, in the thick of a match--or even in its aftermath--a Basher is all too apt to find himself utterly flummoxed, scarcely able to tell friend from foe, after the manner of a lowly infantryman in one of those so-called grittily realistic war movies. Indeed, come the dawn of Day 2 of the Cup, what with no fewer than four Gunner-loaded teams having participated in the preceding day's melee-age--and I having managed to catch only a smattering of two matches (one smatter-half in replay, at that)--I instantly perceived that the whole to-do of gauging, let alone recording, where we Bashers stood from day to day would prove so cuntishly impracticable an enterprise, that I had best postpone committing jot or titter numero uno relating to the Cup till the whole fracas was over and done with, till the dust had settled on the pitches of Krautland's stadia from Hamburg to Bamberg, and the confetti, condoms, bloody bandages and beer cups had been swept clean of the stands thereof. Hence the notable, if hardly exceptional, gap between my last post and the present one; and hence, epiphenomenally, Mr Stanhope, the tardiness of my reply to your comment, for which I extend the most guilt-oozingly heartfelt of apologies.'

'No worries, Rugger.'

'Well, in that case, Mr Stanhope (by the way, that's an Aussie-ism, not a Yank-ism, you know: no worries. Just thought I'd mention that for the benefit of any eavesdropping left-pondial dialect-ical purists), what do you say to my closing out this post and girding myself for the opening of the next one, provisionally entitled The Angry Londoner's World Cup Special?'

'Knock yourself up, is what I say.'

'Right, then. G'dye t'yer, Mr Stanho..'

(DGR, butting in, both querulously and stroppily): '...Pardon me, Mr Stanhope, but I have a word to address to Mr McGyver in private.'

'Look, MDFC. The opening sop to you notwithstanding, the dialogic meat of this this here post is for the gobs of Mr Stanhope and me only. I see exactly why you're butting in here, though. You're jealous, aren't you? Can't bear to see me chatting up a genuine flesh-and-blood reader, can you?'

'It's got nothing to do with jealousy, I assure you.'

'Well then what has it got to do with?'

'It's got to do yet again with--confound it!--your traducing of the hallowed principle of psychological verisimilitude. Good heavens! As of close of the last post you had avowedly just suffered the full panoply of country-and-western-tune-mythified tragedies. And yet you launched into this post without making mention of a single item in the catalogue--the girl, the dog, the best mate or the car. Are we to assume that you've retrieved them all and that everything is once again simply hunky-dory in your lifeworld? Or that, having failed of retrieving one or more of them, you're weathering his/her/its/their absence with classic British slack-lower-lipped stoicism? Because on the evidence of your comportment so far today, a much more plausible assumption than either of these would be that this so-called trip in Ye Olde Wayback Machine has carried you clear off the chronographic scale altogether and set you down in some alternate world in which, in addition to all blokes' sporting black eyepatches and green members, a certain eyepatched-and-green-membered bloke who need not be named is as yet unacquainted with Ronnie, Esmeralda, the Mazda or even (here I cannot repress an audible sniffle) little Lucy.'

'OK, DGR, you've said your piss, now let me say mine. First off, let me remind you that, as of the close of the last post, I had already got me car back. So that's one item struck off the tragic checklist. As for the other three, well, strictly EN on the DL (cover your orioles Mr Stanhope): the real reason I put off writing another post till after the end of the Cup...well, how shall I put this...it was for the sake of a certain effect of aesthetic symmetry. I mean, you know how a couple of posts back I opted to approach the UEFA Championship match obliquely, by way of an account of the progress of my liaison with Esmeralda...?'

'...Yes.'

'Well, no sooner had the next footerly landmark--i.e., the World Cup--come into view on the horizon, than I thought, Wouldn't it be simply brill if I could pull off the same sort of performance in reverse...if I managed to make my way round to the continuing saga of my LW by way of an account of the WC?'

'Hence, not only the notable, if hardly exceptional, gap between my last post and the present one, but also, epiphenominally, the anaesthetization of Your Bloke-esty's loyal readership with twenty-pages' worth of footerly ephemera.'

'That's harsh. And disingenuously so, I'll wager: don't say you haven't been enjoying it.'

'ZZZZZZ....'

'All right, we'll have it your way. Lads! Change of plan! Take up your big, non-flesh-and-blood pole with the magnet on the end, strike THE ANGRY LONDONERS WORLD CUP off the marquee for the next post and queue up the letters for UN AMOUR DE RUGGER PART FOUR. And sorry again, Mr Stanhope...'

Post Baggage

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

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

'Yes?'

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

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

'Even so, counsel. Please proceed.'

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

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

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

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Wassauf, Hünden?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Angry Londoner replies:

Dear Mr Mörike-Jones:

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

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

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

Post Baggage

First things first: purely for the record, I should mention that last weekend—the very next weekend after our abortive motor-pub-crawl—Ronnie and I did indeed discover a proximate, quasi-local late-night drinking venue, a joint up in Chipping Barnet sited a mere 3-quid-minicab ride’s distance from each of our abodes. As I’ve only been there twice, though, and have yet to get much of a feel for its genius loci potandi; and as nothing worth writing home about, as they say, took place during either of these visits, I won’t bother essaying the even the most schematic description of the place for now. Truth be told, at arse I’m keeping mum for now lest, by extolling this new pub’s virtues too fulsomely, I should jinx my still-nascent late-night drinking routine and have to start all over again at square one. Who knows? Maybe this place will turn out to be the Sedulous Ape Squared North. Then again, it might just turn out to be the Barnet franchise of Mr Dunderbeck’s All-Night Sausage Emporium.

Next, it’s time to take another dip into the old post bag. The following letter was sent to my personal email account, although, as the reader will see, it was obviously intended for publication here in the AL. As etiquette demands in such sitches, I’ll let the author herself get the first word in and save my own piss for the postscript:

AN OPEN LETTER TO MR RUGBY MCGYVER, EDITOR OF THE ANGRY LONDONER

Dear Mr McGyver:

I was led to the most recent post of your weblog by a google query centring on a topic of exigent interest to me in an official capacity whose precise parameters will be delineated for the benefit of you, and of your readers, shortly. Before I address the concerns relating to this topic, though, I should like to express myself in my sheer capacity as a resident of Hertfordshire; and to apologise for the admittedly rough treatment you received last Friday week at the hands of Officer Roscoe Q. Coltrane of the Hertfordshire County Constabulary. You may rest assured that in my 35 years as a Hertfordshire resident, Officer Coltrane is the first rotten apple in the constabulary bunch whose existence I have yet got wind of; that during each and every one of my many transactions with the local police force over the course of those 35 years, they have comported themselves to a man and a woman with exemplary courtesy, discretion and forbearance; and that I have never had the slightest occasion to lodge a complaint against them on behalf of myself or of anyone associated with me. In particular, my husband and I have always heeded the stoat crossing signs that you have made mention of, never stinting in our aurigational efforts to avoid collisions with members of the ermine tribe; and have yet to be molested by the local gendarmerie for our punctiliousness on that score.

Now, at last to divest myself of my humble burgher's tunic and don the purple robes of high office: I am addressing myself to you, Mr McGyver, in my capacity the President and Co-Founder of the Hertfordshire Chapter of Childless Housewives Against Binge Drinking (CHABiD). It was in the days and weeks antecedent and posterior to the effectualisation of the new liquor licensing laws that, in the aforementioned capacity, I entrusted to myself the unenviable but urgent task of trolling, as the subcultural vernacular holds, the so-called interweb in search of evidence of fresh irruptions, in the UK generally and in Hertfordshire especially, of the pathology to whose eradication my association have devoted themselves selflessly, wholeheartedly and unanimously. To be sure, none of our sorority were in favour of the introduction of these laws, which we did everything in our power to forestal. Some of us even went so far as to offer our services as concubines to the members who, as they say, might have swung in either direction; but ultimately to no avail. There are, after all--alas!--only so many satyrs and sapphists in the Lower House to go round.

But as brevity is the soul not only of wit but also of solicitude, let me advert forthwith to the specific passages in the latest post of your weblog that elicited my concern. There are two of them; and whilst either one, encountered on its own, might have slipped, as they say, below our radar screen as an index of a repellent but ultimately benign strain of yobbishness, in tandem they betoken your complicity in a conspiracy whose all-too-feasible achievement would spell the annihilation of every man, woman, child and sentient non-human creature on the planet.

The first passage is coextensive with your account of the initial minutes of your northward flight from your local public house, the Sedulous Ape. Therein, in reply to a timely query as to your fitness to drive, posed to you by a member of your cohort, you averred that you had consumed only four pints of beer in the span of five hours, and that hence your personal blood-alcohol content could not have but been below the legal threshold of intoxication. If, sir, these pages constituted a court of law and your post a form of sworn testimony, I should not scruple at this point to adduce the medical evidence culled from the annals of our neurologists, who assure us that the first centres of the brain the daemon alcohol attacks are those of judgement, whose bailiwick comprises inter alia, the power of enumeration. But as these pages do not constitute such a forum, I must and shall abjure all recourse to the argument ad hominem, and treat every circumstance alluded to by you as a matter of fact rather than of conjecture.

This concession to your veracity having been granted, let us now turn to the second passage in--or, rather, out--of question, the passage treating of your hours spent on the premises of The Green Guy Pub in Great Offley. In this passage you admit to having ordered a round of Kronenbourg draught beers for yourself and your confederates, and with the consumption of your self-allotted third of this round (at the very latest), you crossed the porous European-Union-esque border separating the salubrious desmenses of genially yobbish merrymaking from the pathological lepers' duchy of Binge Drinking, from whose borne no traveller ever returns. For the Chief Medical Officer of this our United Kingdom has fixed the border separating the occasional and tippler from the unregenerate and diseased binge drinker at--for an adult male--the consumption of five units of alcohol in one-twenty four hour period, 20 in one week, 500 in one year, 800 in one decade or a thousand in a lifetime. And let us not mince words here: binge drinking is a disease, like cancer or depression, like gout or athlete's foot. The fact that it was not recognised as such as recently as ten years ago should not serve as a kind of scrim occluding our discernment of its fundamentally and virulently pathological essence; for we inhabit a far more enlightened age than did our forbears in the twilight years of the last decade of the second millennium; and the strides made in medical science over the course of the past five years are such as to have trebled the store of knowledge accummulated in the preceding 500. Thus, to those who would argue for a more measured or lenient response to the crisis to the public health of the Kingdom presented by binge drinking, CHABid retorts: 'Let us set the chronometer of our time machine for ca. 1500 AD'. We believe, indeed, that the government and its affiliated public health quangos, in emphasising only the more spectacular, the more grand-guignolesque case studies in the pathology, have heretofore prosecuted their case against binge-drinking in a merely semi-gludial fashion; and that as long as they continue to do so they will never succeed in bringing home to the average pub-goer and off-licence patron the dangers inherent in the pursuit of a career in binge-drinking. We have been vouchsafed oodles of televisual footage from our CMO on instances of alcohol poisoning at all-night parties at universities, but not a millimetre of digifilm devoted, for example, to the economising-yet-would-be-charitable housewife who, on encountering a starving homeless gentleman on the High Street, reaches into her change-purse for the five-pound note that would procure for him a life-saving takeaway curry, only to discover her fingertips alighting on bare vinyl, and exclaims to herself, with immeasurable vexation and remorse, If only I hadn't had that fifth pint down at the pub three years ago next Friday!; scads of radio hours from our so-called Yob Czar on gangs of inebriated hooligans smashing in shop-front windows, but nary a wireless whisper concerning the octagenarian pensioner who, titubating under the weight of the two imperfectly counterpoised four-packs of Boddington's that he has just purchased at the local off-licence (and determined to extinguish the first and crack into the second by nightfall), falls flat on his face and bleeds to death at his own front doorstep. All told, CHABiD put the conservative estimate of the number of British deaths caused directly or indirectly by binge drinking at three million souls per annum. That is an Hiroshima every fortnight, an Auschwitz every month, offered up at the altar of the Tomcat Moloch Potio Immodica. And yet ninety-nine point ninety-nine per cent of these casualites go unreported as binge-drinking casualites. The sources of this hush campaign are not far to seek; for it should go without saying that the publicans, brewers, distillers, swizzle-stick manufacturers, etc. have all got their hands deep in the pockets--and, by extension, on the naughty bits--of our polity, as well as of our print and broadcast media, and that in face (or, rather, crotch) of such brazen and munificently bankrolled importunities as these, any disinterested call for the pursuit and public execution of the true culprit will inevitably fall on deaf ears (or, rather, numb genitals).

But we at CHABiD refuse to be complicit in this Vichyist quietism. We shall not lie back and think of England, not this time. We shall stand patiently massed outside the county jail, flaming acoustic torches in hand, until the sheriff delivers the caitiff recreant into our hands for mortal impalement on the stiletto'd tips of our parasols. Even as I type, thousands of CHABiD members are liaising with representatives of their respective local YMCAS (and their Judaic, Islamic and feminine counterparts), community centres and continuing education schools of our colleges and universities; urging them on pain of boycott to treble their curricular offerings in such wholesome, rejuvenationary subjects as knitting, scuba-diving, hang-gliding, and shark-baiting--activities that afford their practitioners a natural high in juxtaposition with which the artificial stupor induced by binge-drinking makes a very sorry showing indeed. Additionally, and at great personal expense to our membership, we have had printed, in a first run of 100,000 copies, a Personal Binge-Drinking Scorecard, sized for convenient insertion in the photo-snap sleeve of the average billfold wallet and subscribed, in attractive mauve uncial capitals, by our organisation's official slogan of 'A BINGE DRINKER FOR ONE NIGHT IS A BINGE DRINKER FOR LIFE'. (Regrettably the formula does not quite rhyme, but we are hoping to remedy this prosodic defect by petitioning the OED to annex all senses currently appertaining to the word life to the definition of the word light.) By means of reference to this checklist, the would-be tippler can determine for himself how soon--be it next hour, next week, next Christmas, or next Halley's Comet visitation--he may suffer himself to down another tall-guy or highball.

Of course, Mr McGyver, as far as your own personal salvation is concerned, this is all by the by. Whether it would not have already been so a month, a year, five years ago, I cannot say; as I know nothing of your personal history beyond that portion of it disclosed in your last post. All I know is that, even supposing the first pint of ten nights ago contained the first grain of alcohol that had ever passed through your lips, by six o'clock the following morning the hymen of your binge-drinking virginity was rent asunder, and that now no amount of the most up-to-date laser-scoptic suturing will ever restore to it its original pristine, mebranal integrity. Why, then, you may well ask, am I bothering to write to you at all? Why, upon conclusion of my perusal of your post, did I not simply chuck it on to the top of the already three-foot high sheaf of documentary evidence that I am compiling against Herts-CHABiD's end-of-the-year report to the County Council? The answer is elegantly simple to the point of criminality: to judge both by the bare demographics of your so-called user profile and by the inordinately strong admixture of unfamiliar words in the periods and paragraphs of your weblog proper--words whose sense I am able to divine neither on my own nor with the help of my trusty 1990 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary--I cannot but surmise that you have your finger on the pulse, so to speak, of the Sprachsgeist of the youth of today's Britain as none of us at CHABiD can have, in virtue of our relative seniority and our diurnal abstraction in the chores of our self-appointed vocation of ménageuse. You will, of course, have done us an inestimable service merely in publishing this letter; but if, supernumerarily, you could be prevailed upon to accept a carton of our scorecards, and to cry up their utility to your friends and acquaintances in the rude patois of your common subculture, the salutariness of the initial gesture will have ultimately been magnified a thousandfold. And in so doing--in spreading the good word of CHABiD in the incarnation of a recovering, albeit incurable, binge-drinker--you should enjoy an ineffably spiritual satisfaction such as as has perhaps not been vouchsafed any subject of this Kingdom since the glorious first heyday of the Salvation Army, when fallen women plied the pavements of the most disreputable districts of our cities in search of others of their sex who, but for their own timely intervention, might have otherwise shared their own decidedly unenviable fate. I patiently await the notification of your home address at the inbox of the account whence this letter was posted.

But never fear, Mr McGyver! With or without your assistance, we at CHABiD shall continue to fight the good fight against binge-drinking, up to and including, if necessary, the moment at which the bibulous mob are obliged to prise our parasols from our cold, dead fingers. And even if at any time it should fall, I (speaking once again in a personal capacity) shall raise and carry the banner of anti-binge-drinking and alone lead its charge. I would fain die in theatre for that which itself is infallible and undying.

Sincerely,
Mrs Abigail Ashby-Jones
Royston, Hertfordshire

P. S. I apologise for the extremity of certain of the rhetorical figures in the preceding paragraphs, but I am hard pressed to discover words in the English lexicon that express with sufficient vehemence the extent of my devotion to my cause. I am, moreover, I confess, a little out of sorts on account of having missed by an hour my matutinal cup of Twining's darjeeling, in my zeal to have this letter posted and on its way to your inbox by noon of this instant. And so, avanti ed adesso, to the kettle!

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Well, what can I say, Mrs A-J? Your letter leaves me likewise at a loss for words. How shall I ever circumvent this here attack of aphasia? [Interpolate two-minute long stretch of ellipses.] Got it. I'll express myself charadically. Ready? OK, here goes:

Three words. First word: One syllable. Sounds like: [I jerk my torso forwards and pass my hand briskly backwards over the top of my head.]

'Bow?' you say?

No. Mind especially the second half of the performance.

'Duck?'

Got it. Sounds like duck.

'Good heavens! Not f--'

'--No.' [I point to the ground.]

'Luck? Muck?'

[I keep pointing downwards.]

'Suck?'

I nod Yepissimo emphatically .

'Hardly an improvement over effims. Next word?'

One syllable. [I gesture broadly towards my own carcass.]

'Me.'

No.

'My.'

Yes.

'Third word?'

Two syllables. Sounds like: Movie title. [I do the stationary wall-climbing dance.]

'Spider-Man?'

No, and, in any case, that's three syllables. [I stroppily swat at the air as if at a swarm of gnats, every now and then leaving off to leer squintily as if at a microscopic pair of bazoombas.]

'King Kong?'

Got it. Sounds like King Kong.

'King Wrong? Song?'

[I jerk my thumb upwards.]

'Long? Dong?'

Got it: Dong. So spell it all out for me, woudya?

'Suck...my...King Dong?'

Good work, Mrs A-J!