Basher's Delight: Part Three

'I'll tell you what it is that marks it as uniquely Kennish,' a chirpily stroppy feminine voice twitters in from my immedjiate right. 'It's that it doesn't make any bloody sense.'

I swivel my head in the direction of the twittering, and my okies alight on the person of a blokess who, on the testimony of Mr Firstblush can only have been hoisted thither through a trap-door-panel of the fibreboard drop ceiling, as the main points of her coocher alone--a V-necked kelly green long-sleeved jumper, pointy-collared white blouse and blue jeans--attest to her manifest affiliation with some other tribelet of femininity than the Ashan one. Fortunately, to the greater good of the gazelle shaft's ghost, Mr Secondblush steps up just in time to urge the more plausible conjecture that as the spot of chairage now occupied by this blokess was only lately eclipsed by the formidably endowed figure of my neighbour the mammilar nape-groper, she's actually been sitting there all along.

Manish seems, or affects to seem, as pleasantly taken an-arse as I am by this interjection. 'Come again?' he and I shoot back in eagerly beflummoxed unison.

'Well, the Reuben brothers have never had anything to do with Iran. They were born in India, and their parents were Jewish Iraqis. If he'd told them to go back to India or Iraq or Israel--well, that would have been bloody rude, to be sure--but at least it would have been intelligibly rude. But to tell them to go back to Iran--well, you'd think he came up with that one by just blindfolding himself and chucking a dart at a world map.'

I like what she's saying, all the more so as she's a girl who's not too hard on the eyes; but in the disinterested service of refining the science of Kenophobology, I feel obliged to play Devil's advocate (bearing in mind all the while that the very logic of the idiom is compromised by the fact that Ken is the Devil), thus: 'So you're saying it's merely a scrawny little linguistic tongue bone us Kenophobes have been picking at in his company all these years?'

'Of course not. The main reason we hate Ken' [Ah! What music to my ears inhered in that single syllable we!] 'is that he's a bloody tyrant. But it's certainly a cellarful of salt in the wound--a bone-deep wound, if you will--that he can't even throw his weight around gracefully, with a bit of elan. Take that jab at the American ambassador that you two were just discussing [So she'd been paying more attention to our Kenophobic convo than to the hen session. Encore, maestro encore!]: you chiselling little crook. Well, crooks don't chisel; they filch. It's misers and skinflints that chisel. You filching little crook, or You chiselling little skinflint--that would have been one for the next edition of Bartlett's. But You chiselling little crook--it's pure tat, obviously cobbled together not so much on the spot as on the breath, as if he'd launched into the sentence without having the foggiest notion of how he was going to end it. Similarly vis-a-vis that undeservedly notorioius quip to the journalist from the Evening Standard, last autumn: Were you a Nazi concentration camp guard in a former life? Oh, that's inventive. Haven't heard that one once in the past sixty years. Even Winston Churchill, back in the 50s, would have found it a bit old hat. I think, by the way, that Ken could learn a thing or two in the political face-thwacking department from old Winsty. You remember what he said about his rival Mr Atlee--A sheep in sheep's clothing? Now that's a certifiably witty and certifiably devastating bit of piss-taking, one that's well beyond the reach of Mr Livingstone's present chops. Coming up with it obviously involved a bit more brainwork than just thumbing through Roget's to the entry for evil bastard.'

Speaking of brainwork, I've certainly been putting my old continuously-looped noodle through the mangle over the course of the minute or two comprised by the preceding diatribe. For, as pleasurable as it undoubtedly would have been to allow myself to be passively swept up into the hoover entrails of this girl's Kenophobic dynamism; to sit there all the while with jaw hanging loose Jacob-Marley style and drool spilling over my none-too-slack lower lip and on to to the tabletop like water out of an unattended bathtub, from round about the 20- second mark of the diatribe onwards I was clear on one thing about this little spitfire, namely (NSS, nest pah?) that I was in love with her; and that, hence, I was not afforded the luxury of simply basking in her Kenophobic aura; that if I wanted to advance to the hemi-semi-finals of the UEFA Championship season of my prospective liaison with her, a mere corner or two against her already-netted three or four goals would never do, that, as the match clock of the evening very probably read something like 1:20 [Cor, it actually probably was round about 1:20 a.m. that our inaugural chinwag took place], I had to score at least a goal or two of my own and toot sweet. I cast the metaphor of my plight in footerly terms because those are the ones that spring immejiately to mind, although in all in all candour I gots to say that a three-dimensional chess metaphor would probably be more apt. I hesitate to make use of such a metaphor, though, on account of the fact that 1) I don't know the rules of three-dimensional chess, and b) assuming it's got this much in common with two-dimensional chess, the checkmate analogy is probably as piss-poor an analogue for the outcome I've got in mind as is the match-result analogy imported from footie. The point is, I know I've got to append to my Kenophobic inamorata's diatribe something that nearly--but not quite--matches the diatribe in point of cleverness, but that yet hails from an entirely different register. So, as hard-going as I'm finding it to take stock of the various particular upshots of her Kenophobic squibs, the one thing that I manage to suss out that they have in common is that they all hail from a register of, as it were, theoretical or analytic Kenophobia; that they generalise about the common shortcomings of things that Ken has already said or done. I thereupon conclude that my rejoinder had best hail from the register of practical or synthetic Kenophobia, that it had best consist in a practical prognosis of things Ken might plausibly one day say or do, on the basis of the principles adumbrated in this here theory of hers.

But, of course, it’s absolutely out of the question to preface the exposition of my practical programme by presenting its difference from her theoretical one in starkly actual terms, to say, ‘I admire the sublime philosophical detachment that enables you, as though from stratospheric heights, to take in all of the salient shortcomings of the Livingstonian worldview at a single glance; but as for me, I prefer to get down there at ground level and submerge my bare arms up to the elbows in the nitty-shitty of the Livingstonian manure heap, you know, put my Kenophobia into practice’: that would come off sounding too much like a lecture. Rather, I have to work my way round to the programme obliquely, by initially appearing not even to lay a diggit on the longest head-hair of her argument; that is, namely, by availing myself of McGyver Signature Ploy #78, The calculated pseudo non-sequitur, also known as the logician's trump- the-okie, as follows:

‘Do you reckon Ken’s got a team of professional speechwriters, or that he comes up with this stuff all on his lonesome?’

‘That’s a good question. I’ve never given it much thought. I should hope he wasn’t actually paying anybody to produce rot like that, but you never know…But why do you ask, anyway?’ she asks, a trifle mistrustfully.

Why indeed? Such is the question I must set about answering with all speed; for the greatest danger inherent in the deployment of the calculated pseudo-non-sequitur is that, sitting out there in the boggy rhetorical open like a turd, it is apt all too readily and incontrovertibly to be taken by one's interlocutor (or interlocutress) for an instance of the real fake deal, and thereupon to effect all too effectually the diametrically cross-purposive rhetorical outcome of the same (you’ll recall, DGR, that the last time I let fly a calculated genuine non-sequitur it was as a proper-dudic to kicking a bloke out of my car)--unless, that is, the deployer benefits from a split-secondly simultaneous access of the co-jones, acuity, dexterity and stamina requisite to scooping that seeming turd up into his hands, sussing out the three or four spots of intervening dry ground, hopscotch-skipping across these (the spots) and flattening it (the turd) out into a paving stone abutting directly on the terminus of the high road of his chinwag-buddy's argument. I leave it you, DGR, my bog-trot-competition jury, to judge whether or not my subsequent performance, recorded below, amounted to a score of a perfect ten on all four counts:

'Er, well, because it seems to me that if the hallmark of the Livingstonian rhetorical metier is, as you claim, one of irrationality, that the surest means of putting this claim to the test must be to to take a stab at composing a Livingstonian speech through the consistent application of that hallmark or principle.'

'Can you be a bit more specific, a bit more concrete?' She looks intrigued but a mite sceptical.

'Er, well, yes, I think so. Say you divided the typical Kennian tongue-lashing into a certain number of salient categorical segments--Mayoral Policy to Be Steamrolled In, Identity of Would-Be Opponent of Said Policy, Slur to Be Applied to of Said Opponent, Country of Prospective Exile of Said Opponent, etc.--and sort of plopped down randomly-selected instances of such categories into a template sentence, consisting certain dead connectors--if, then, why don't you, you might find it easier, etc.--'

'--You mean so as to make a kind of Livingstonian Mad Lib?' she jubilantly interjects, whilst laying a hand on my arm.

I couldn't have concretised my project more efficiently myself. (Nor could she have concretised a certain other thing of mine more efficiently than by laying that hand of hers on me as she had just done, but that's a whole 'nother trowel of cement.)

'Yeah, that's right. Spot on. And if you were to get together a whole slew of the things, slip 'em in an envelope addressed to City Hall, along with a cover letter of application to the position of his Mayorship's free-lance speechwriter--'

'--Let's do it. Right here, right now.'

In toking obeisance to the most obvious out-of-context acceptation of this last sentence, I suffer my phiz to dilate itself into an aghast-clown's-faced expression signifying 'Well, mademoiselle, if that's the sort of thing you're in the market for, I suppose I could oblige you,' and orientated towards a patch of wall appropriately adorned with a snap of a munificently-pubed, doe-naked blokess sitting high astride the seat of an ancient penny-farthing bicycle--but only for the most cunt-hairishly-splitted of milliseconds. Then, scrunching it--my phiz--up into an altogether more businesslike expression orientated towards the starry-okied phiz of my newly-discovered partner in Kenocide, I says to her:

'OK. Have you got any paper on you?'

'No,' she replies, reaching over to her right not for a handbag, but for a kind of oversized feminine wallet known, I believe, in Yank parlance, as a pocketbook, 'but I have got a pair of biros, and a pair of scissors. This'll do for paper.' And by this, she means our table-compound's assigned customer-service plank, which she's just now scooping up and flipping over to reveal a 150-square-inch-strong backside of blank scribbling surface. So, after un-snapping her pocket-book, and producing therefrom all three needful implements, she sets about cutting the card in two, then hands me over my half-plank-'n'-biro.

I shall spare the reader whose wardrobe lacks a navy-blue Kenophobic anorak an exhaustive account of our enumeration of the categories, our crafting of the model sentence, our clumping together of the various segments of verbiage into a butcher's dozen little heaps of paper-shavings disposed more or less uniformly all round the circumfrence of the pivot-table, and leap ahead to the moment when we were ready to compose our first Mad Ken Lib; not, however, without first remarking Manish's silence throughout the whole of the proceedings, barring the occasional suggestion of Steamrollable Policy X or Country of Exile Y--a silence that might, on the one hand, have very well been premeditated, in view of his foreknowledge of this blokess's presence on the scene; but that might likewise have been accounted for by his interminable efforts to keep Manisha awake--through numerous bouts of cajoling, face-cheek-slapping, higball-glass-off-fending--in face of the dual phenomena of the constant haemmoraging of her contingent out of our vicinity and the galloping progession of her blotto'd-ness.

'So Ken says,' the girl says, reaching from pile to pile, and composing as she goes along, "If you...proctologists are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of....instituting a 10 per cent rise of the council tax...to pay for civic improvements against our hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games, why don't you move back to...Mauritania--I'm sure you'd get a better deal from the... Mormons."'

'Solid gold Kenologia. He'd kill for a speech with a line like that in it. Shall I hazard my own inaugural contribution to the portfolio?'

'By all means.'

'So Ken says, "If you Swabo-Liberians are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of...assessing a 25-quid charge on all wide-axial vehicles entering the city centre--'

'Oh, come on,' Mansih leaves off Manisha-face-slapping to interject, 'This defies imagination. He'd never go that far.'

'Never put any reg or leg past Ken, however draconian it might be. So, anyway, Ken says, "If you Swabo-Liberians are not a hundred per cent on board my policy of assessing a 25-quid charge on all wide-axial vehicles entering the city centre...to offset London's .00000005 per cent annual contribution to global warming, why don't you move back to... Lapland--I'm sure you'd get a much better deal from the...Rosacrucians."'

Just then, the PP is pounding out a succession of chords that is all too familiar to me, albeit in a rather unfamiliar timbre--something like Dah-Dahhhhh-dah-nah-nah-nah-nah--Dah-Dahh-Dah-Dahh-nah-nah-nah-nah--oh, fuck the onomatopoeic-transcriptive hoss-shite; why don't I just go ahead and say what'll cut a zillion times more mustard or salad cream with the average sub-sexagenarian reader anyway, namely that in this sequence of chordage I immejiately recognised the opening synth-riff of Van Halen's 'Jump'.

I feel a tug at my shirtycuff as Manny pipes up thus:

'Lucky hit, this song turning up in the rotation, and late enough that the mike's free to boot. If you'll excuse me for a minute or two, and keep an eye on her [meaning Manisha, who has by now passed out with arms folded and head down on the table], I've got a spot of business to attend to. And, oh, Rugger, if you don't mind--'

'Yes?'

[Motioning towards my earward-abutting grammaphone horn:] 'Take a sock out of it.'

Without quite knowing what I'm in for, I brace one hand against the base of the horn, and whip out the napkin with the other hand. Manish mounts the stage, puts the microphone to his gob, and through the newly-unmuted horn issues the following dedication:

'This one goes out to my mates, Rugby and Esmeralda.'

'Esmerrugba?'perpexedly queries the two-larynxed-critter the girl and I have untowardly just metamorphosed into. Then: 'Rugberaldy? Who (s)he?'

'That's me.' the TLC rejoins in its first intelligibly-transcribable issue of verbiage.

Blimey! Evidently we've both been so caught up in the heat of the Kenophobic moment that it hasn't occurred to either of us to ask the other's name--which, perversely enough, it seems to me, bodes beautifully for our prospective future together. What doesn't bode so well for the same object is the name, her name, itself, which, IDMTY(MDFC), has never been a favourite of mine; indeed I've always thought Esmerelda made a much better name for a household disinfectant than for a girl. Well, anyway, in the meantime we've both directed our attention towards the stage, where Manish is just starting to croon, chunefully enough--albeit in vocal stylings that to my orioles seem to owe more to Eddie Vedder than to David Lee Roth--thus:

I get up, and nothin' gets me down.
You got it tough, I've seen the toughest around.
And I know, baby, just how you feel.
You got to roll with the punches and get to what's real.
Ah, can't ya see me standin' here I got my arse against the Protex machine.
I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Ah, can't ya see what I mean?
Ah, ya might as well skip. SKIP!
Might as well skip!
Go ahead and skip. SKIP!
Go ahead and skip.
Skip the fuck on outta Dunedin, baby... (etc.)

Prevailingly, his attitude is that of your average karaoke-ing punter bereft of grander foot-lighterly aspirations; in other words, he's content by and large to stand in place, arse against the playing-machine, with the microphone held throughout in one hand athwart his intermittently-breached gob. Occasionally, though, he sees fit to step clear of the piano and launch into a brief, right-foot-favouring jig that I at first take for some kind of choreographic analogue of the song's eponymous refrain, until, midway through the second verse, I happen to notice that there is, in fact, absolutely no correspondence between the recurrence of these terpsichorean episodes and that of the word skip. Anyway, at the song's conclusion, Manish bows to an all-too-brief smattering of applause, thanks his pathetic remnant of an audience, relinquishes the mike and returns to our table.

'So that,' I ask him, after Esmeralda and I have given him an obligatory thump on the back and a handshake, 'I take it, was...?'

'...Yeah, that Testicular Atrophy song I was telling you about back at the Ape.'

'Funny, it sounded an awful lot like...'

'"Jump"? Well, I'm sure it was, as far as the piano-roll manufacturer was concerned. You see, two years after the release of the "Skip" EP, Van Halen nicked the lyrics off TA and changed the tune. And the boys down under never saw a dime of royalties. A crying shame, really, when you think about it.'

'My heart goes out to them.' My brain, on the other hand, goes out to Manish thus: 'But "Jump" isn't even a 70s song--not by a long stretch.'

'Ah, well, you see, Rugger, this is 80s night: they slip in a song from that exogenous decade every half hour or so.'

80s night at an 1890s-themed 70s bar? I quiz myself rhetorically. The chronological bleedover is enough to make you vomit, innit? Still, I suppose the coarse art of wallet-hoovering knows no aesthetic limits.

'Anyway, Rugger,' Manish resumes, administering a rousing quintet of jostlings to each shoulder of his so-called romantic partner, 'it's high time Manisha and I were heading home. Will either of you be wanting a lift?'
For my part, I'm all for staying put at table with Esmeralda and exhausting all the remaining Ken-Lib-ic permutations over a butcher's dozen more phosphates, and pulling a sickie the next morning (interrupting whatever amorous adventures might ensue just long enough to hand over to Lou my trusty schedules for the 84 and 383, together with sufficient bus-fare to cover the trip up to Potters Bar); so I 'er' and 'well' a bit whilst waiting to follow Esmeralda's lead. But Esmerelda, for her part, at the moment, seems to have orioles only for Manish; for, fixing upon him the sunniest of grins, she says, 'Yes, thanks, I'd appreciate it ever so much.'
'And as for our...em...game,' I lamely interject, doing my best to keep my upper lip from outdoing the lower one in point of slackness.
'Oh, we can continue it some other time,' she says, turning her still- heliomorphic phiz towards mine whilst raking the shavings from all corners of our table-quadrant into the gaping maw of her pocketbook.
'Well, then,' says Manish, playing an arseward-orientated airbourne pair of air-castinets by way of catching the attention of our waiter, 'we'll just settle up and be off.'
The waiter presently returns to present us with our bill and--once the papoose thereof has been duly stuffed with the requisite volume of Isabelas--to divest us of our anklets. We're all four of us--Manish, Manisha, Esmeralda and YFCT--on the point of setting off towards the front entrance, when Manish suddenly winces all over and, relinquishing his shoulder-support of Manisha (Esmeralda immejiately thereupon stepping in to supply the absence thereof with admirable timing), stoops over to massage his right ankle.
'The bastards,' he gasps, his phiz contracted into, as they say, a mask of pain. 'They shocked me. Over and over and over and over again, they shocked me.'
'So the piano was outside the limit of the anklet?' I quiz him as I wrap his free hand round my own shoulders.
'Evidently so.'
'And that's why you were hopping about so much during your performance?'

‘That’s right. It’s OK, Rugger, I can walk on my own, if you’ll take over escort duties for Manisha, Esmeralda. I’ll tell you one thing, though: first thing tomorrow morning I’m writing a letter to the management of this place, and sending a copy to the CMO.’

The crowd has thinned out quite a bit over the past hour or so of our time in the dining room. Half the tables are either empty or occupied solely by members of the staff, gossiping in couples or trios or lolling solitarily with their clip-ons unclipped on one side and savouring post-shift fags. One block of tableage, though, at the very front of the room, is conspicuously full. At first, as we're just setting out, the party there assembled give the vague impression of being a mini convention of court jesters; then, as we're skirting round the bell of the player piano, they're clearly distinguishable as a troop of football fans of various clubberly affiliations; and finally, just as we're drawing level with them, my okies fix on the 18-stone backside of the most conspicuous of their number, and, adding those 18 stone to the 2 of the Gary Neville shirt swathing their better part, I immejiately suss out the identity of the ManU fan in question as that of my erstwhile fellow Arsenal-basher Cyril, and a quick spot-scoping of the his neighbouring faces and arses injuices the subsequent deduction that this here assembly cannot but be the Third Plenary Meeting of the North London Insularist Arsenal-Bashers' Association. I know we're going to be within gobbing distance of the lot of them for all of, at most, ten seconds; but that's certainly more than long enough for me to think it worth my while to shade the left side of my phiz with my hand until we're back out front in the anteroom. (As I'm in mufti, my phiz alone is the only part of my profile likely to tip them off.) That would have been a real poser, what-what?, the choice between; on the one hand, dishonouring myself as an Arsenal-Basher by openly feigning not to recognise Cyril and his crew; and, on the other, alienating my Kenophobic chums with a ban-worthy display of righteous Arsenalophobic shirtiness?

Back out front in the car park, I follow Manish over to the driver’s side of the Bug and climb in to take my place in the cut-throats’s corner, whilst Esmeralda, after helping the nearly-comatose Manisha into the shogun seat, presently sidles up alongside me into the back-seat driver’s perch. And by and by we're off on a southbound course along the High Road, one tending ultimately (NS) towards my digs. Whether Esmeralda's digs will mark a penultimate stop or a post-ultimate one it is beyond my present (and naturally non-Livingstonian) ken to ascertain; and somehow, I feel that it would cuntstitute a breach of etiquette to try to hone my gormlessness on this score by prying into the whereabouts of her chaise Louie less than an hour after having learned her first name, desperately though I am hankering after some sort of convo-re-ignition agent, and as readily-to-hand in this very capacity such prying presents itself. As for such perhaps-no-less-into-prying subjects as the nature of her job, her place of birth, the number and species of her pets, &c.; their potential intrusiveness is pretty much soundly trumped by their practical unbroachability, in view of the 10-minutes-maximum conversational breathing-room afforded by the commute from Redford's to the maisonette. Thus, I piss away roughly the first two of those minutes alternately staring out the window in seeming cuntemplation of the fugitive commercial and residential street-frontage, and nodding towards my bench-mate with a vacuous 'So-there-you-are-then'-ish grin; in each case to the monotonous soundtrack of the engine, punctuated every now and then by Manisha, somnolently wailing, She was carrying a Fistoulari handbag. Esmeralda, for her part, is game enough to meet the first butcher's half-dozen of these grins with a kind of ironically comprehending mirror-grin of her own signifying (so, at least, I flatter myself), So here I am, then (Do you want to make something of it?). But as for the eighth or ninth of them, she flash-freezes it by observing, poker-phizzed as, er, the world poker champion (whose name, regrettably escapes me at the moment):

‘I see you go for the continental look.’

‘Eh?’

She makes a vague, sweeping forefinger-gesture in the vicinity of her throat, as though presenting goitre symptoms to an invisible physician.

‘Oh, that,' I say, taking stock for the first time in hours of my gaping shirtyfront, and, to judge by the scorching sensation I'm getting in my temples at the point where they're touched by my ear-tops, blushing to the very roots of all half-million of my head-hairs. 'Lost a button back at the restaurant as I was, er, combing my hair in the gents [Sorry to disappoint you, DGR, but you haven't caught me asleep at the yarn-spinningwheel: I never visited the men's room during our sojourn at Redford's. I'm simply banking on the likelihood that she wasn't enough acchuned enough to my whereabouts throughout the earlier part of that sojourn to call bullshit on me now.] They don’t sew ’em on like they used to do, that’s for sure.’

‘Actually,’ she says, with an inscrutable little smile, ‘I rather like it.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. I find it quite fetching.’

Now, DGR, I wasn’t born yesterday. Admittedly, in some of my gloomier, more beflummoxed moments, I’m prone to wondering whether I wasn’t born the day before yesterday, but this isn’t one of those moments. I know that she doesn’t actually find my string-vest-scrimmed upper torso in the least bit fetching; I know that in claiming she does she is, not to mince words, taking the piss out of me. The question is, which of the two piss-stand takeaway orders has she ticked off the menu at the moment: No. 1, ‘I know full well you’re holding your breath against the moment when you get to see the verso of my knickers, so let me spare your pulmonary-cardiac system a bit of trauma by giving you permission to let go of those two lungfuls of air,’ or No. 2, ‘I don’t quite know as yet whether you’re holding your breath to see the verso of my knickers, so let me give your co-jones a little through-the-flies skeeter bite to remember me by’; which, of course, may be in turn sub-off-ticked as House Speciality No. 2a., ‘because I’m an unregenerate cuntess who gets off on giving random blokes scrotal skeeter bites,’ or House Speciality 2b, ‘because for my part I’m holding my breath against the moment when I get to see the verso of your knickers, and I see you’re wanting a bit of injuicement to pull them off’? And if I may be permitted to do a bit of piss-taking of my own out of the episstemology of flirtation, I would defy a Barry White or a James Brown or any one of our other widely-fellated latter-day Don Joouhnns, placed in a parallel sitch, vis-à-vis a blokess he’s known for as short a span of time as I’ve known Esmeralda, to arrive at a greater degree of certitude vis-à-vis this blokess’s amorous intentions or lack thereof.
Had Esmeralda been of a more die-latery temperament, I might to this very moment still be in the dark as to which of the three possibilities was manifested by her pseudo-admiration of my continental coocher. But to her credit on more scores than one, she seems to have foreseen the necessity of steering me towards a less ambiguous epistemological SOA before we part company tonight; for, just as we're rounding the corner of Woodside Park Road--from which it's but an ant's trek to the very doorstep of my digs--her lips swap the inscrutable smile for a slightly-more-scrutable frown as she snaps open her pocketbook and lowers her okies towards its innards with enough eyebrow-ballast to suggest she's searching intently in there for some specific item or object. At last--and I mean the very last, as we're idling kerbside at my RM coordinates--she lowers a tweezerly-gingerly thumb-and-forefinger into the pouch and extracts therefrom a cookie-fortune-thin sliver of paper, which she then immejiately, without even giving me enough time to mouth a courtesy mute WTF, reaches over and deposits in my tit-pocket.
Wellsir, there was evidently nothing for it but for me to suss out what this contraband-handover was all about afterwards on my lonesome; if the de facto generic constraints imposed by the third-party drop-off set piece hadn't sufficed to check my impulse to linger, then Esmeralda's own seconding of those constraints by means of a mechanically repetitive, retarded-hand-puppet-style goobye wave, accompanied by the return of the inscrutable smile (highlighted this time round, if my okies don't deceive me, with discernable traces of sheepishness), would have done so on their own. I stepped out of the car, hemmed my way through the 'Thanks for the ride/don't be a stranger' valedictory routine with Manish as blasely as though I'd been his only passenger all along; shouted out a jaunty 'Night Manisha; Night Esmeralda' in the general direction of no one in particular and waved the lot of them off on their U-turning way back towards the High Road.
No sooner is the air clear of the sound of the Manishmobile's engine, than, without even searching out a decent patch of light beforehand, I stick a coupla right-handed fingers into my TP, and, after an irksome encounter or two apiece with Jimmy's flyer and my shirt-button, manage to seize and tweeze out Esmeralda's sliver and nudge it over to the flats of my palm. Inscribed on the paper appears to be the single word 'dervishes.' Hoping against hope that the darkness is to blame for this apparent misreading, I walk on over, with palm still cradled upwards, to the git-proof illumination of my front-doorstep-light, and take a second gander downwards. Dervishes, the li'l cutting stubbornly snaps back at me; this time, though, in my own spidery handwriting, thus snapping on a so-called inner lightbulb identifying itself as remnant of the Ken-Lib game (i.e., as a component of a sentence that would read, e.g., '...move back to Utah--I'm sure you'd get a much better deal from the dervishes.').
'So that cinches it,' I says fumingly to myself. 'It's basically a sub-sub tick-off of 2a, i.e., "Let me give you something else, something material to remember me by, to no apparent fucking purpose."' Fortunately, my hand--perhaps in virtue of its greater degree of commerce with my schlong--is a good deal more open-minded on the subject to, er, hand than my mind itself, for it takes it upon itself to scrunch itself up in such a fashion that, once I've caught on to its shenanigans and have ordered it to uncurl itself, I see that the paper has been flipped over on to its backside, where there is to be descried not the word 'dervishes,' nor indeed any other composite of Roman characters, but a string of numerals, which, on account of its 020 prefix, I immejiately identify as a London telephone number.
'So it was 2b after all,' I can't help saying aloud through a belly-laugh. Then, louder: 'She loves me!' Then, louder still, 'SHE LOVES ME!' Then, loudest, of all, 'SHE LO-O-O-O-O-O-VES ME!'
At the termination of this last (and admittedly asbo-worthy) outburst of amorous triumph, I hear a window being flung open up above and a stroppy masculine voice calling down, 'Hey, you, down there--pipe down and fuck off! Some of us have got work tomorrow, you know.'
I glance up and am at once relieved and cuntsternated beyond belief to identify the plaintiff as none other than Lou.
'Hey, you, up there," I call back to him, thrusting upwards my conveniently- already-partially-unshirted chest. 'What the fuck are you doing in my bedroom?'
He wastes a good quarter-minute of my time on his finger-gnawing schtick before slamming the window shut. Then, after leaving me on my hyper-stropped lonesome for the remaining three-quarters of that minute, he re-appears downstairs in the front doorway, clad only in a string vest and pair of shorts, and bowing and scraping apologetically in all directions, towards every corner of the aperture, as if to block my view-cum-way into the house for a strategically-mandated span of time; not so efficaciously, though, that I don't manage to espy the terry-clothed dressing-gowned figure of a blokess high-tailing it down the stairs and through the kitchen towards the rear exit. Well, suffice it to say, DGR, that that's the last time I trust him with my house keys.
Suffice it also to say that, as I'm typing this here post a full five days after the events recounted herein, there have in the meantime been developments, as they say, chez Esmeralda and myself. But as I'm a bit preoccupied at the moment by the outcome of tonight's Villareal-Arsenal match, I think it'd be best to postpone an account of those developments to a later post. And how soon might we expect this later post? you ask. Well, let's check the fixtures: in the event of an Arsenal defeat tonight, perhaps as soon as tomorrow; In the event of the Outcome That Shall Not Be Named, perhaps as late as Doomsday.

Basher's Delight: Part Two

‘No, no, no,' says Manish. 'Let me explain: We’re not asking for a new table, an unoccupied table. We’re asking to be shown to a pair of unoccupied seats at an occupied table. We’re expected, you see. The name on the reservation should be be Manisharrr…rrorrr…Asha, party of seven.’

‘Correction,' rejoins our shapeless, 23-stone dull-bike of a hosting wench, with the contrived patience of a sainted cunt, 'Asha, party of five, lately party of seven. Effective the first instant of the present month, we have instituted a ten-minute straggling limit for each party comprising fewer than 50 persons, with all empty chairs to be confiscated and reallocated, and the table reconfigured accordingly, at ten minutes, one second after the time of the reservation. And you two appear to be about…oh...let’s say 92 minutes the farther side of the limit, give or take 30 seconds.’

‘So I guess perching on a barstool at the corner of the table is…’

‘…Absolutely out of the question. There is literally not a vacant seat in the house. You are, however,’ she adds, her phiz suddenly coming over all cuntishly sunny, ‘welcome to stand yourself at the bar—two lovely patches of wall-space have just opened up there.’

'Err...,' he says, repaying my dubious glance in kind and then some, 'we'll think about it.'

'Think about it, schmink about it. Do you want them or not? Going...going...'

'Err...well...'

'...Gone! to the couple just behind you in the queue. Stand aside, please, gentlemen, to make way for them.'

‘Cor,' I say to Manish, as we edge our way over to the side of the room and plant an arsecheek apiece on a red-velvet-upholstered setee just broad enough to compass the combined girth of a pair of anorexic pygmies, 'is it ye olde friendly neighbourhood ice cream parlour or Studio 54 they’re trying to do up here?’

‘Studio 54? More like Soylent Green, I’d say. Anyway, Rugger, are you up for waiting round for another patch or two of free wall space?’

'Up's not really the word for it...'

'...inasmuch as your second wind is by now--?'

'--giving up the fart's ghost, and my sails are deflating faster than a pre-
Viagra-era octagenarian pensioner's schlong.'

'Same with mine. Unfortunately, I've got to hang round at least long enough to get a word in to Manisha, preferably in person rather than by phone, so's to obviate racking my brains over the first question of the Chipping Catechism: "How do I know you're actually here and not a hundred miles away in the arms of a 10-quid hooker?"'

'I catch you. Well, I suppose I could always cab it back down-district, and we could push our Ken-bashing chinwag back another night or two. It does seem a bit like keeping indoors during a thrice-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse, though, the idea of passing up the opportunity to bash in the company of this blokess you mentioned. What would you say the chances were of the four of us meeting for a quasi-or-pseudo half-blind double date at, say, Emchai?'

'Half-fair to decent,' says Manish, a trifle absently, his phiz orientated away from mine and towards the hostess's station. 'But maybe it won't have to come to that. Look.'

I hop on board the train of his gaze just in time to catch the arse-end of a whispered chinwag betwixt the bike and one of her draughts-board-uniformed confederates of the male suasion, accompanied on her part by a series of jerky Sicilian-farewell-style hand-twitches evidently intended for our okies solamente. Perhaps I've been wrong all along about this blokess's sexual orientatedness and she fancies one of us; or, per-equally-haps, the Byzantine regulations of this place, quite in spite of their cuntish selves, have left a once-in-a-blue-moon-exploitable loophole open to such indiwiduals as find themselves in our particular plight; or, perhaps then again, a little bit of both of these phenomena is at work here--perhaps it's all overdetermined. At any event, after we've heeded her summons and moseyed our way back to within shouting distance of her lectern, she happens to deliver up to our orioles the following dispatchlette of good news:

'Gentlemen, you're in luck: we've had a death at Table 5.123657, and an apoplectic seizure at Table 4.23852; such that, posterior to the obligatory five-minute window of table-reconfiguration-and-seat-appropriation, you may join your party.'

Naturally, it did cross my mind's belly that it might be a bit crass, and indeed, a bit well-nigh cuntish, to take advantage of the misfortunes of two of our fellow punters in such a fashion as we would be doing in claiming this prerogative. On the other hand, I was more than a bit loath to lose arse with Manish by backing out at this stage of the evening, after all of my aforesaid quasi-astrological vaunting. Mind you, if Manish himself had voiced the merest soup's-son of a scruple on the score of our claim, I'd have fallen right in line behind him. But since, in his capacity as my cicerone, he evinced all too much eagerness to do in Chipping as the Chippingians did--since he in fact pounced on the hostess's proposal (not, let me be perfectly clear, on the hostess herself) like a proverbial lion on a Christian, by drooling back unctuously, 'Thank you ever so much; we're ready whenever you are' without so much as a consultive glance back in my direction--I was willing, if not actually content, to do the same.

'Splendid,' says the hostess. 'Whilst your places are being prepared, you may--and, indeed, must--proceed to our VIP lounge,'--she gestures vigorously over her right shoulder with her Biro as though doing a panto-ist's impression of a geezer scratching his back--'for the affixing of your homing-anklets. Have a wonderful evening, and thank you for choosing to spend it with us at Redford's.'
'Homing-anklets?' I says to Manish, as we're hoofing it to the lounge. 'I don't like the sound of that.'

'Me either.'

'So you haven't been initiated into this ritual already?'

'Nope. Must be another policy implemented on April 1.'

*

'On April 12, actually,' says the affably mesopmorphic 17-stone youth assigned to homing-beacon-affixing detail, as, having already graced one of Manish's trouser-cuffs with the same dubious adornment, he's crouching at my feet and velcro-fastening a hefty plastic shackle to my ankle. 'It was a bit before my time, so I can't vouch for the truth of the legend; but the old salts say the reason management decided to do this was that they were having a lot of trouble with the dine-and-dashers, with people taking advantage of the press of the crowd to slip out before settling up their bills. They say the serving staff and the CCTV cameras weren't really up to the job; that between the two of 'em they were only managing to catch 90 per cent of the offenders. Only 90 per cent? Cor, I'd say the Met could've learned a thing or two from that lot.' Then, rising to his feet, and switching into boilerplate queen-bee-channelling mode, he says, 'You will wear the anklet at all times. Should you stray beyond a 20-foot circumfrence of your table, you will be administered a mild electric shock, certified to within a microvolt of the legally permissible standards established by the Chief Medical Officer's Interdepartmental Quango on Health, Trade and Industry. At the third infraction of the straying-limit, you will automatically forfeit your place in the dining room and be assessed the full total for all outstanding orders placed or comsumed. Any attempt to remove the anklet will likewise eventuate in the forfeiture of your table and the assessment of the full total of the bill, together with a 50 pound anklet-replacement fee. Do you have any questions?'

'Er, no, I guess not.'

'Splendid. Have a wonderful evening, and thank you for choosing to spend it with us at Redford's.'

'A question's just occurred to me,' I say to Manish, as we're limping out of the lounge, 'namely, how will they know how to nick us if we do stray beyond the perimeter, etc? I mean, apart from resorting to the old-timey low-tech methods they've apparently abandoned?'

'That's a good point. Er, no, hang on a bit. Have you ever filled out one of their customer service quality control cards?'

(Let it be said that these so-called cards were actually 8-by-12-inch cardboard planks that took longer to complete than your average O-level exam, and were more chockful of cuntishly intrusive questions than an application for employment to the MI5.)

'Yeah--but only once or twice, when my server happened to be a comely lass, and I thought I might get some extra pulling points in by flattering her in the Miscellaneous Comments section.'

'Well, there you have it. Once is enough: you gave them your address, and they know where you live.'

That about does it, Mr Redford, I said to meself: Just you see if I'm ever again seduced into offering up even the most trivial declassified national secrets of the Ruggerswelt--say, my preference for poppers over chips--to one of your polyester-trousered Mata Haris.

Wellsir, as I was in the midst of saying, we were limping from the lounge, through the bar and into the dining room, past a wall-ful of punters groaning--so it seemed to me--in wretched envy of our prospective sedentariness, past a quartet of paramedics bearing a pair of covered stretchers towards the front entrance, and up and into to an alcove of Tetris-tesselated chunk of tableage, to which, just as we're arriving, a male member (sic) of the staff is fastening another square module so as to transmogrify the ensemble from a '7' figure into a kind of heavy-metallic 'S'. The bloke thereupon departs, and for a half-minute or so, we're left standing--and fanning our respective pairs of arse-cheeks in default of any more productive use of our time--until he returns with a pair of chairs. Being nearer to the wall than Manish, by default I take my seat at the left side of the upper prong of the S, to my immejiate and infinite cuntsternation and regret; for my chair has been apparently and cuntishly strategically placed within blower-receiver-earpiece's distance of one of the speakers of the house stereo, housed in a casing mimicking the flared horn of a fantasy-eccle acoustic grammaphone yet mounted to the wall, in appropriately anachronisic fashion, by means of a bracket-cum-plastic-coil mechanism suggesting that it's meant to be detached after the manner of the speakers of one of those trans-pondial so-called drive-in cinemas.

At the moment, the piped-in player-piano soundtrack consists of a rendition of that hoary old ragtime standby 'The Entertainer' (a.k.a. the theme to the motion picture The Sting) with accompanying tuneless vocals screechingly supplied by one of the female punters. For the benefit of those of you who bothered to read my last post, I must apologise for neglecting to mention therein a salient (and supplementarily off-putting) feature of Redford's house schtick: namely its round-the-clock karaoke policy. With respect to the tunes of 1970s vintage, which are to the last bloke of them at least proper songs, the conception of this policy would appear to be eminently rational--at least vis-a-vis the inherently flea-brained ethos and aesthetic of karaoke enthusiasts. But as far as these chunes from the last-century-but-one go, one must assume that their de facto integration into the karaoke block at Redford's constitutes something of a so-called brain-fart on the part of the management, inasmuch as the better part of them were written, published and performed in their day as instrumentals, bereft of vocal obbligatoes; such that any punter gormless or co-jonic enough to proffer his or her pipes in the service of filling out one of these compositions is obliged to improv lyrics for them on the spot and off the shirtycuff. Mind you, for a certain sort of person, a torchsong-enthusiast-cum-old-timey-pop-music-anorak--a budding Tiny Tim if you will-- this sort of forum is probably just the ticket. But what do you suppose the odds of such a bloke or blokess turning up at a Chipping theme bar on a preekend night are? Exactly: about a trillion to one against. Such that, as I settled my arsecheeks into the aforesaid chair, I was treated to a pungently tinny earful of the following:

Yeah, the name of this song is 'The Sting,'
And I don't thing it means anything.
Yeah the name of this song is, the name of this song is, the name of this song is The 'Sting'! [x 8 or 9]
Ahh...thayouvermuch!

Meanwhile, during the obligatory scoping out of the immejiate scene, I take in nothing particularly surprising. Arseward and to the left of Manish sits Manisha, holding court, as it were, and flanked on all remaining sides by her butcher's-half-dozen-strong junta of blokesses, cackling over Christ knows what; and accoutered, like her, in chube-tops of various equally off-putting pastel shades, hooped earrings the size of schlongtail coasters, and--between the lot of them--a hectare or two of eyeshadow.

Then, just as the piano is striking up the opening bars of Elton John's "Saturday Night" [preceding which the song's poncier-than-Noel-Coward karaokist announced, 'I've taken the liberty of amending the title to "Thursday Night"], a bloke finally comes round to take our drink orders. Manish asks for a busman's holiday (i.e., a dirty vodka martini, hold the olives but not their juice [ugh!]), and I my Redford's usual, a sidecar phosphate (brandy, triple-sec, lime juice and soda).

And hereupon we--Manish and I--are catapulted into that social-tippler's-no-man's-land comprising those butcher's-quarter-dozen-or-so minutes wherein you've been vouchsafed the promise of drink but are as yet still bereft of that vital conversational prop that is the brimful pint or highball glass itself. Not that, physiologically speaking, even so much as a nanolitre of tongue lubricant can be accounted for by the imbibement of those first microlitres of alcohol; it's just that, psychologically--or rather, perhaps, aesthetically--speaking, should your chinwag be interrupted by the entrance of, say, a troop of ski-masked Uzi-wielding bandidoes or terrorists, you always want to be able to say after the fact, to the TV reporters or your mum and dad, 'Soandso and I were in the midst of a so-called heated discussion on Topic X, over drinks, when in traipsed these Uzi-wielding blokes in ski masks,' rather than, 'Soandso and I were in the midst of a so-called heated discussion on Topic X, over a great heaping stack o' thin-air pancakes, when,' etc. You catch?

Therefore, it was thus, ever so tentatively, whilst we were waiting for, respectively, our busman's holiday and sidecar phosphate, that I re-broached the official subject of our convo, as though launching into the opening of a joke:
'So Ken says to the American ambassador, You chiselling little crook...'

'Yeah, what was that all about?' shouts back Manish. His spirit is game for the convo, but his flesh thereto is weak, as I can tell by the leftward orientation of his head--and the occasionally corresponding orientation of his okies--as he utters these words. And for all of my own verbalised enthusiasm for getting down to Kenophobic bidness, I find myself catching a touch of the henophilic bug from him, as I twitch my right oriole likewise in the direction of the girls and, my attention momentarily captivated by the following scrap of dialogue, voiced by Manisha herself:

'So Sarah shows up at the reception clutching--get this--a Fistoulari handbag--'
Tittering cackles from all round.

'Why is that such a faux pas?' I shout towards Manish in what I take to be an altogether vain effort to re-unite his bifurcated attention, 'Last I heard from Manisha this Fistoulari bloke's wares were the dernier cri in women's accessories.'

I'm more successful than I ever could have hoped. 'Schtumm, Rugger, schtumm...' he says, furrowing his forrid vexedly and dribbling in fast-motion an invisible miniature basketball from a half a foot above the table. 'That was then, this is now.'

'Oh, don't sweat it, Manny. There's no way any of 'em heard me. TBT, I can barely hear myself over the din emanating from this contraption' (i.e., the grammaphone horn). 'Say, that reminds me...you're familiar with that idiom put a sock in it, the great-grandaddy of our beloved shut your CTM hole, right?'
'Of course.'

'Well, in case you've ever wondered what manner of object the it in question originally referred to...' [Here I reach for an un-disposable napkin rolled ready to hand on the tabletop, unfurl it and shake it clear of its cargo of cutlery; then, detaching the horn from its bracket and laying it on my lap like a newly-poached stoat cub, plunge the napkin as far up into its flared arsehole as I can reach. '...Get a little action in,' the horn at first protests with feisty stroppiness, during the first microsecond or two of the operation. Then, more feebly: 'Thursday night's a night for swiving.' And finally, with whimpering acquiescence: Thursday night's mmm-pmmpff, mmm-pmmpff!] '...Ah, that's better. [Re-mounting the newly tampon-sock'd horn] Stone-age recording engineer's slang. "PASII," that is.'

'One learns something new every day doesn't one?'

'Yepper. Pity one also always forgets two in the same interval. So, anyway,' I happen to feel safe in up-thread-re-taking as I espy the us-ward-tacking person of our waiter about fifty feet off, 'Ken says to the American ambassador, You chiselling little crook...'

'Yeah, what was that all about?' Manish says again, seasoning this spot of dialogue with a rather different flavour of distraction than during our first dry-run through the scriptlet--i.e., with the flavour of cuntsternated impatience, as though he's trying to make the utterance do duty for its virtual carbon-copy of 'What is this all about?,' i.e. 'Where's my fathermucking drink?'; an interpretation bourne out by his snapping to as follows when the long-craved holiday almost immejiately materialises at his elbow: 'Oh. Yeah, where does Ken--a glorified pocket-borough councilman--get off thinking he's within his rights to go toe-to-toe with the executive branch of the most powerful nation on earth? And to talk like he's the one with the bigger toe, no less! As though any proper head of state--of state, mind you, not city--has ever dared to dress down Uncle Sam in such a fashion. As though Jack Chirac or Vladdy Putin, in the stroppiest throes of Ameriphobic PMS, would ever dream of taking such a tone with Bush. Crikey! As though Leonid-freaking-Brezhnev, with an average monthly balance of 20,000 nuclear warheads in his arse's personal checking account, ever dared to call Richard Nixon an anydoing little anything?'

'Dittissimo, dittissimo,' I nod as I quaff the head off my phosphate. 'And above all, for him to claim the moral high ground in this matter, is un-fucking-conscionable. As though resistance to paying the sodding congestion charge is something anyone ought to feel guilty about. Oh, I do apologise ever so humbly Mr Highwayman, for the fact that I can only pay you in single-pound coins. I promise my wallet'll be flush with ten-pound notes the next time my equipage is arrested at this checkpoint. Thank you ever so much for not shivving me in the belly this time round, dear, dear Mr Highwayman, sir! Oh, thank you, Sir--thank you, thank you! That's the only attitude that'll cut ice with Ken.

'Mind you, though,' I cuntinue, twisting my top shirt button fretfully all the while, 'he's a wily cunt, is that Ken; like all politicians he knows which side of the bread his butter is...er...buttered on. Supposing the congestion-charge protestor is some nonagenarian old biddy of a chat-show-phoner--some menace to drivers and pedestrians alike who shouldn't even be allowed within sight of a car--well, then he hums a different chune altogether; he treats the plaintiff with kid gloves: I'm terribly sorry madam; rest assured that my staff and I are working on establishing an exemption for persons in your situation, etc. Fuck Ken Livingstone! Fuck that fucking cunt!' I take another phosphate sip, and amidst all the fizz, my tongue catches on something solid about the size of a watermelon pip. I spit the little foreigner into my hand as discreetly as I can manage. It's my shirt button, which must have snapped loose and fallen into my glass. Easy does it, Rugger, easy does it, I say to myself, and count to one; and, slipping the button into my tit pocket (just behind Jimmy's flyer) with one hand, hasten demurely to cinch together the two halves of my newly-gaping upper-upper shirtyfront with the other.

Manish registers his stock-taking of this embarrssing little cuntretemps on my end with the lowest-key of fisty-coughs, then says, 'Well, I suppose we should move on to, er, Irangate, before we run out of time.'

'Yeah, I suppose we should,' I concede, out of regard more for my shirt's well-being than for the clock's. 'I'll let you draw first blood on that one.'

'Thanks, Rugger. I'll do my best. So Ken says to those two building contractors, the, er, whatstheirnames...'

'The Reuben brothers.'

'Right. He says to them, if you're not happy with the way I'm handling this Olympic Sports complex thingy, you can go back to Iran and see if you can do better under the Ayatollahs.'

'Yeah, how characteristically, cuntishly Kennish, that line of rhetoric.' (Meanwhile Manisha's entourage has started to thin out. A couple of minutes ago, a girl on Manish's side skewed herself, perhaps merely to step out to the ladies, but more probably for good; whilst the blokess to my right has, by secreting her fags in her handbag, just given a surer sign that she's out for the count, and is just now scooting behind me close enough to bring the tips of her ginormous 'zoombers into contact with the upper nape of my neck; and at the instance of this contact I can sense my schlong stirring, yawning, stretching its arms [use your imagination, DGR, if you dare] and saying 'What's all this, then?' 'Down, won ton, down! I order him. Can't you see I'm trying to have a conversation here?) Mean-squared-while, Manish is rejoining:

'Indeed. But the thing is, Rugger, I'm just now realising that I can't quite put my finger on what about it is so specifically Kennishly c****ish [sic (don't ask)]; on what sets it apart from the myriad other c****ish rhetorical metiers we're confronted with day in and day out in the media. I mean, as punchily pleased as I am from a pragmatic Kenophobe's point of view that the Standards Board are going after him on this, I can't really see what anti-semitism has to do with any of it.'

'I'll tell you what it is that marks it as uniquely Kennish,' a chirpily stroppy feminine voice twitters in from my immedjiate right. 'It's that it doesn't make any bloody sense.'

Yarnfacker's Bank Holiday

It is with no small degree of Shah-grin and cuntsternation, DGR, that I initiate the typeage of this here post by reporting to you on the unprecedented viscosities of ins-pissation attained by my thickness roughly ten minutes ago. It was right about then, you see, that, having brought you practically within pissing distance of the threshold of the venue of the second module of last Thursday's out-hangage in the closer of my last post, I was sitting with all ten diggits poised curled above my keyboard like those of a pianist primed to strike up the opening bars of 'Furry Lisa,' primed, i.e., and for my own part, to launch into a fresh spell of yarn-spinnage commencing in medias Redford's, when the following thought belatedly got round to staggering its stroppy 'govered way across the synapses of my gourdita: Hang on a bit. I may know Redford's better than I do the puckered ridges of my own schphincter (er, rather, 'considerably better than the PRMOS'), but who's to say my reader enjoys a more intimate acquaintance with Redford's than with the schphincter (or fanny) of Fannie Adams? What fact concerning Redford's is he or she capable of de-juicing from the meagre data I have hitherto supplied to him or her, apart from the bare predicate of its mere existence, i.e., the fact that, as my ex-third wheel Mr Winckelmann might put it, 'Redford's, like shit, happens'? In other words, I realised that the time was not so much ripe as rotting for me to do a spot of back-in-filling on the subject of me old local-away-from-local. That said (or, rather, thought), I also realised that, as this back-in-filling would very probably consume a considerable amount of pixellage, I might as well take advantage of the opportune inter-postal moment of its irruption by devoting a separate post to it. For ever mindful and respectful of the non-paying bloggerly puntility's addiction to a well-spun yarn as I am, I cannot but assume that the numerous back-in-filling episodes that I have hitherto been obliged to interpolate into the threadeage of this here blog must obtrude upon the okies of some goodly portion of this selfsame puntility as so many unsightly sheep-turdlets. So, DGR, if your body mass happens to cuntribute to that goodly portion, if to your mind the only good narrative is an uninterrupted one, I heartily, and without the merest soup's son of cuntdescension, implore you to shut this here window and seek out bloggerly pastures new, and to pop back in a day or two to catch Part Two of Basher's Delight; the present post will, after all, still be available ready to mouse should you encounter any clouds that require elucidation during your reading of that semi-narrative.









(YFCT, in a whisper): Are you sure they've gone?

(MFCT, likewise): I think so.

(YFCT, switching lights back on, settling into armchair, lighting meerschaum pipe and taking a few ruminative puffs therefrom): Splendid. Well, you may recall that the sole raison d'apparition of Redford's in these here pages, way back last December, consisted in its being a 24-hour tippling establishment within minicabbable distance of the maisonette. You may also recall that in the same typist's breath with which I made my inaugural mention of it, I pledged myself to suspend judgement on it until such time as I had properly sussed out what I then termed its genius loci potandi. Well, as you may have gathered from the sparsity of allusions to Redford's in subsequent posts, the aforesaid judgement, when it all-too-speedily cleared the docket of the courtroom of my private Old Bailey, was far from favourable. To summarise the main nub of the ultimately-triumphant case for the prosecution: Redford's suffers from a certain inherent and ineluctable generic limitation that renders it fundamentally ill-suited to the sustenance of the Ruggerswelt; for, you see, in contradistinction to a venerable old watering-hole-cum-larderia like the Ape, it is an accursed so-called theme-bar, specifically one of those so-called surrogate-retro bars that have become so fashionable here in London over the course of the past year. Just in case you've been living in a cave--or East Anglia--during the preceding twelvemonth, I should tell you that the general aim or principle of these places is to capture the mood or zeitgeist of a particular stretch of calendar-hooverage vis-a-vis an earlier stretch of calendar-hooverage. Still stumped, my troglodyte or East Angelinan friend? To spell it out more fully, then: you know how every decade of the past half-century or so, be it the 1950s or the 1990s, has had as its counterpart an ancestral decade with whose fashions, folkways and miscellaneous other unmentionables it was unaccountably obsessed? (Maybe you don't know. I can't say as I blame you, inasmuch as I didn't either this time last se'enmonth. But for what it's worth, since becoming acquainted with Redford's, I've heard tell of two other joints in the less immejiate vicinity exploiting the same premise mutatis mutandis, and in my okies, three of any sort of establishment of a given make or model doing bidness simultaneously within the confines of the 33 boroughs constitutes a bonerfied trend in London nightlife.) Well, in Redford's case, the two decades in question are the 1970s and the 1890s, as the casual punter may ascertain by taking the most toking gander at the front cover at its menu, emblazoned in a kitschy old-timier-than-dirt-typeface with the motto The Gay 90s as You Knew Them in the Swinging 70s; or at the home page of its website, on which it bills itself slightly more elaborately as 'an authentic full-scale replica of a classic Gay-Nineties-style ice cream parlour-cum-pizzeria of the 1970s'. As my carcass was scarcely in the early stages of preemie-birthable foetushood as of the concluding microseconds of the more recent decade of reference, I'm hardly in a position to vouch for the letter-perfection of Redford's mimicry of its model. I can, at most, offer a negative testimonial or two in affirmation of the joint's claims to authenticity, by pointing to certain of its traits that have struck me as being congruous neither in the setting of the present nor in that of the remote past. First off, there's the attire of the staff, consisting uniformly of red waistcoats and black trousers woven out of a version of polyester whose coarseness of woof-'n'-warp you wouldn't find disgracing the tits or shanks of the lowliest cashier or stockman at Tesco's nowadays; together with ready-made black bowties and elasto-strap-on'd mock-boater hats of moulded white plastic. Secondly, there's the decor, the better portion of which consists of these black-and-white-or rather brown-and-white--family portraits in which the blokes are togged out in frock coats and ascots, the blokesses in close-fitting dark dresses stretching from their necks to the floor, the boy-nippers in short jackets and knee-breeches, and the girl nippers in looser-fitting, lighter-hued versions of their mothers' dresses. At first glance, you might take these portraits for the genuine fantasy eccle article; but at second glance you start to notice certain sartorial peculiarties that tip you off to the fact that they were all snapped well into the latter end of the last or 20th century: a bloke here will be wearing trousers with flared bottoms, or even jeans; a blokess there will be sporting a boxy wristwatch or a plastic handbag; a nipper here or there will be spectacled in lenses that are large enough between the two of them to blot out the upper half of his or her phiz, or cradling a C-3PO or Barbie doll in his or her wee arm. Finally, there's the entertainment centrepiece of the joint: an automatic or so-called player-piano, which, in loo of a jukebox, offers up an assortment of unaccompanied chunes that mostly, in their cheerfully monotonous syncopation, seem indeed to hail from a more-byer-than-bygone era, but that occasionally mimic the familiar rhythms and cadences of a composition penned by Randy Newman, Elton John, James Taylor or some other singer-songwriterly pantheist of a generation-and-a-half ago. As for the rest of the place-specific paraphrenalia--the slatted faux-mahogany wainscoting, the brass fittings on the taps and doorknobs of the loos, the stained-glass-ensconced table-lamps; and, indeed, the Anglospheric purity of the menu (on which nary a curried or kebab'd or satay'd starter or entree is to be seen)--the lot of it might have been inherited from a TGIF's, as, for all I know, in my Chipperly ignoramushood, it actually was.

Well, I think that about covers it as far as Redford's-in-back-filling goes, unless, DGR, you've been living not so much in a cave or East Anglia as in a self-drilled pit extending a hundred metres into the peatage of the Norfolk Broads; for, if there's one fact of modern life that any indiwidual living in a corner of the globe touched by capitalist enterprise knows, it's that, regardless of their particular check or stripe, such godawful theme bars as are instanced by Redford's are consistently, and okie-burstingly out of all proportion to their intrinsic merit, packed to the point of suffocation. It was to this packed-to-the-gills SOA that I was alluding in shorthand when I averred a coupla hundred words back that Redford's was fundamentally ill-suited to the sustenance of the Ruggerswelt, and that, indeed, Manish had already alluded even more concisely when he spoke in the last post of the difficulty of getting a table there on a preekend night; and, TBS, the scene at Redford's hardly constituted an exception to or betrayal of this SOA when the two of us pitched up there last Thursday night at 22:58 GST.

Basher's Delight

Corrigendum to the closer of my last post: for lives to bash another day read lives to wish he’d died that very day. I know it doesn’t scan properly, but fuck it; at least it accurately renders the spiritual SOA in the lifeworld of YFCT over the course of the past three round weeks. In these 27 days, in racking up win after win despite their total absence of footerly finesse, squeaking through by the skin of their depilated cunts each time, Arsenal have furnished proof after proof of the perduring partiality of the almighty Scots demiurge to their cuntish cause, both at home and abroad. I mean, it would be one thing if they'd actually topped out the Premiership table--in other words, if their success vis-a-vis their material standing in the football world had actually been commensurate with their insular performance, and superior to that of Chelsea, ManU et al. In that case, TBS, I'd still be angsted to the gills, but my angst would have missed that superaddition of that cosmological mickey that has ratcheted the pain up to all-day-hangover levels. '"Let the best side win," they say,' I would have said, in that case, 'If the best side happens to be populated by the most depraved cunts in professional sport--well, that's just the way the old Weetabix cake crumbles, innit?' But no--the Gunners had to go and 'roid up their performance just barely enough to get them from number five to number four position on the table; just barely enough to ensure themselves a berth in next year's Champions roster; and--most cuntishly of all--just barely enough to ensure a tie with Juventus on the 5th instant. The whole strategy reeks so gamily of n***ardliness that it's no wonder the ASD took them under his wing--er, kilt; he must have seen in them a pack of kindred spirits. Of course, as long as I'm haemmoraging counterfactlets here, I might as well add that even if all other things were equal on the Gunners' (i.e., arse) end, I'd still find the present period of bereavement easier to endure if the Bashers still existed in their pre-March-24-configuration. With all due fellationary suction having been rendered once again unto Reg's ex-presidential schlong, although blokish fellowship has indeed never been the fundamental telos of the Bashers, I'm sure that Reg himself would have been the first to concede that having a roomful of fellow bashers' shoulders to cry one once in a fortnight made the Arsenalophobic cross a much easier burden to bear; that it was, in other words/to say the least, a salutary epiphenomenon of the club's core mission. And with all due fellationary suction having been rendered unto Ronnie's legal-scholastic schlong, although the Bashers, TBS, have perdured since 24/3 as a legal entity, I'm sure Ronnie would be the first to admit (and, indeed, he was Toadmit Numero Primo) that these past few weeks haven't exactly amounted to an occasion for our iterating Davie Byrne's most celebrated catch phrase to each other. Just do the maths (specifically, the first-form set theory): as all three of us surviving North London Bashers are honorary or fully-accredited Barnetians, the club is Judy-bound, for the time being, to hold its meetings at a Barnetian local. But as the Bashers are banned from the only such local known to our chapter, we are essentially--and, again, for the time being, venue-less. TBS, by dint of conducting all of our official club bidness on the pavement, en route either to or from the Ape, and of swapping our livery-shirts for non-football-semiological T-shirts and button-ups, Ronnie, Lou and I have managed to conduct our past two mandatory meetings in Mr Sedule's property without a hitch, and under cover of plausible deniability. Still, as I reflected to Ronnie at some point after the first of these sessions--from an Ape's-eye point of view, there really was nothing about an April '06 North London Arsenal Bashers' meeting that could set it apart from a generic Ronnie-'n'-Rugger chinwag of October '05--apart, that is, from the presence of Lou, which, in any case, could have been accounted for by our pre-Bashers-era chumship. But, alas! There we Bashers were--stuck in our anonymously Simian holding patten. There we were then. There we were then. There we were--'

'Skewed me,' the reader propitiously interrupts. 'What about that fellow...whatshisname...'

'You'll have to give me more to go on than that, MDFC.'

'...Of course, of course...[twirling left-nostril hair meditatively]...Fellow with the first-generation Krautish mum: Cox...No...Box...No...'

'Ochs?'

'That's the fathermucker.'

'What about him?'

'Must I explain everything to you?'

'No, you mustn't--or, rather, needn't--do. Still, I think you yourself would find this here expo inestimably more readable if you did.'

'VFW. As of March 24, Ochs was still a member of your surviving non-insularist, non-Spursophilic chapter of the Bashers, right?'

'Right.'

'And Ochs is also a resident of Barnet; hence, a legitimate North Londoner, right?'

'TBS.'

'But at the same time, I must assume, unless you've been playing the cunt with us for six months running, that he is not an habitue of the Ape.'

'No, I've been on the vertical-cum-vertical with you on that point: to my narledge, Ochs had never set foot in the Ape before March 23.'

'Well, then, according to my first-form set-theory calculations, you should have had an alternative venue ready to hand in Mr Ochs's presumptive local. Whence, then, the necessity of recourse to these clandestine meetings at the Ape?'

'Whence, MDFC? Hence: [leaning leftwards as if to facilitate the insertion of right hand between arse cheeks]. No, but seriously, Madeira Football Club: my thoughts did indeed advert to the super-hypothetical watering hole of the Ochs when I began planning our meeting of April 6, and they materialised in my ringing him up on the weekend of the first. My call began and terminated with an audition of the following voice mail message:'

Hallaw, this is Anna von Ochs. Neither myself nor my son David is able to come to the telephone. Und do not trouble yourself to call tomorrow: we will not be able then either to come. Und if you are one of those verwuenschte Arsenal-bashers, I have got a message for you: Ficken Sie sich!

So, there we Ochsless Bashers were--stuck in our anonymously Simian holding patten. And whilst throughout the duration of the first of these holding-patented meetings the Ape's-eye point of view described above obtruded itself in a strictly theoretical and aesthetic plane; during the second of these meetings--i.e., the most recent one to date--it assumed a much more practical and detrimental aspect vis-a-vis our activity as Bashers. During the first of these post-24/3 Ape meetings, I may have been irked from time to time by the reflection that Van or Suzie or DW or Dwayne could not but have represented the spectacle comprised by the three of us under the prosaic appalachian of 'Rugger and his mates having a chinwag' rather than that of the infinitely more poetic 'Seventh Bimonthly Convention of North London Arsenal Bashers'; still, for all of my irkage, I might in good conscience have affirmed at evening's end that not a single minute at our table had elapsed unescorted by an Arsenalophobic gesture of some make or other. During the second meeting, though, I discovered just how much of a double-edged beard or sword plausible deniability could be; for I had to contend not merely with the theoretical notion of being seen as a mere undifferentiated chin-wagger, but rather with the practical reality of actually being treated or addressed as one, and of being helpless to disavow the imputation.

What I meantersay is that, whilst this new dispensation possessed the singular advantage of rendering us invisible to Jimmy’s and Mr Sedule’s Basherdar, it also possessed the singular demerit/liability of rendering us vulnerable to the off-topic chinwaggerly incursions of the puntility, among which figured no small number of our friends, to whom it was rather out of the question to give the old-British raj-style blow-off glance signifying, ‘Fuck off—we don’t want to talk to you and it’s none of your fucking business why we don’t,’ for, needles to say, such a riposte would have eventuated in the tragically gratuitous sullying of tens of square yards of genial shirt fabric.

Wellsir, it was by just such an incursion that the three of us were confronted last Thursday night when, in the midst of a particularly so-called heated exchange on the subject of that cunt Fabregas's prospectively imminent defection to his hometown side of Barcelona, Manish Shah, whom I hadn't run into in Donkey's weeks, took the liberty of pulling a chair up to our table and saying, ‘Supsters, Rugger, Ronnie? Long time no see. And, er, sorry,’ he continues, extending a hand to Lou, ‘I’m afraid we haven’t met. My name’s Manish.’ Lou gives the hand a hearty pump, nods, smiles ingratiatingly, points to his own person, oratorically stretches forth his right arm, and, with chin jutting upwards, tortures his phiz into one of those orgasmic faces characteristic of an opera singer holding a high note.

‘Song title?’ Manish gormlessly queries me rather than at Lou.

‘I think so,’ I answer.

Whereupon Lou nods, gives another ingratiating smile, and literally skips off in the direction of the gents like a little girl playing hopscotch.

'Skip?'

Lou leaves off hopscotching just long enough to give a negative shake of the head.

'Anyway,' I say, 'there's no song simply entitled 'Skip' is there?'

'Yeah,' says Manish, 'Testicular Atrophy, 1982.'

'Must be a rare B-side. I've never heard of it.'

But Manish doesn't stick around to confirm or refute my discographic conjecture. Instead, he steps off in pursuit of Lou's foot-ball steps and follows them straight through to their destination at the threshold of the bog, only to have the door unceremoniously slammed in his face. ‘SKIP TO MY…LOU?’ he shouts his second guess through the barrier.

‘That’s right,’ I say, and beckon him back to the table.

‘But if I got it right,' he says upon arrival, 'why isn’t he coming out?’

‘Probably because he's actually got to go.’

‘Makes sense. Anyway, Rugger,’ he says, thread-up-pickingly, and making as if to settle down in that there newly up-pulled chair of his, ‘I trust you've been keeping abreast of the latest pair of Ken-related scandals? Irangate? And Embassygate?’

Oh, TBS, I'd been running left-nipple-to-right-nipple alongside both of these scandals from their respective Day Ones, and forcing myself to keep mum on them in the presence of a fellow diehard Kenophobe like Manish was almost enough to impel me to leap to my feet and do the old pee-pee jig; but mum on them I indeed had to keep so long as I remained within the charmed circle of Arsenal-Basherdom: ‘Well, I dunno, Manish…,’ I lamely temporised.

‘What d’you mean, you don’t know? Either you have been or you haven't.’

‘I catch you Manish. It’s just that...Well, what do you think, Ronnie? Would it be possible to insinuate a treatment of Mannie’s topics into the minutes of the present session?’

‘That depends, Rugger. Does either of these Ken scandals by any chance appertain at least tangentially to the Scottish football team?’

‘The Scottish Football Team?’ Manish cuts in incredulously. ‘Since when were either of you a supporter of that organisation? Come to think of it, since when was anybody south of the Tweed a supporter of them? For fudge's sake, they haven't even been in the World Cup since '98.’

Now, from a balls-to-the-wall Arsenalophobe's point of view, what I really should do right now is milk this here misinterpretation of the SFT epithet for all it[']s worth; that is to say, by assuming an embarrassed yet offended air and rejoining something to the effect of All right, you've outed us, Manish. Ronnie and Lou and I are fans of the Scottish national team. Is that so wrong? Are we not thereby participating in a noble pan-insular British tradition of cheering on the underdog? Instead, my gormless vanity gets the better of me, and I finish up candidly explaining--

‘Point of clarification, Manish: we’re not talking about that Scottish football team, or, indeed, about any other team actually hailing from Scotland (except, perhaps, in a loosely metaphysical or ethical sense [but that’s neither here nor there]). You see, we’re using the phrase “Scottish football team” as a kind of euphemism pattened on the old thespian substitution of “The Scottish play” for Macbeth.’

--which explanation effectively delivers the detonation button of a Bashers'-cover-blowing fart-bomb straight into Manish's mitts. For, as remote from the outer circumfrence of the loop of our official affiliation with the Bashers as I suppose him to be (to say nothing of his probable degree of remoteness from the OC of the loop of Mr Sedule's interdiction of our club), Manish is well enough acquainted with Ronnie and myself to suss out that the lexical schlong-and-jones concealed by the euphemistic fig-leaf in question cannot but be Arsenal. He is, moreover, just borderline cuntish enough to take the unmentionability of the A-word as a cue to mention it, well in advance, most probably, of having formed the foggiest notion as to why we’d rather he didn’t do:

‘Oh, I get it. You’re talking about Ar-’

(Fortunately, for all of my gormlessness, I’m wise enough, if only just barely, to this Tweed-straddling cuntishness of his to clip its wings before they take flight:)

‘-rrrright, Manish, that’ll do. You get the picture, and I’d appreciate your not ringing up the appraisers at Southeby’s just yet. For now, let’s just stick to your original ice-breaker of these most recent Ken piss-takes. I think it’d be safe to say, Ronnie, that no amount of calisthenic exertion on the part of Fannie-Adams’s flabby-arsed imagination is going to bring these here Ken-related news items within auto-fellationary reach of the SFC. What time have you got, anyway?’ (In actuality, I could probably guess the current time to within a microsecond of the reading at the Greenwich Observatory, but rhetorical logic calls for me to feign casual gormlessness on this point.)

Ronnie checks his watch. 'It's about a quarter past ten.'

'A quarter past ten, eh?' I say, rubbing my chin faux-deliberatively. 'Only fifteen minutes till last orders. Well, we've put in the best part of our two and a half hours tonight. I say we step outside and conclude our, er, transaction now, and then return to wag our chins unreservedly in tandem with Manish's.'

‘But Rugger,' Ronnie recalitrantly remonstrates, 'we had just started off on a fresh Cecs Fabregas-bashing tear. We were really just starting to break new ground there.’

‘I agree. But new ground is all the more fertile for having been given time to breathe.’

‘Whatevsissimo. Rather than waste half of our precious quarter-hour tilling that metaphor with a ten-foot-handled hoe, I think I’ll simply ask our third active member if he’d fancy a spell of tie-breaking.’

Lou—oldly enough returned from the gents to get the gist of our dispute—simply spreads his hands, shrugs and composes his phiz into a sheepish (and cuntishly disingenuous) Don’t look at me: I’m just along for the ride kind of look. (Cf., natch, the look Mr Sedule cuts the copper in my post of November 7 of last year.)

‘Righto,’ sighs Ronnie, literally throwing his napkin in towards the centre of the table and rising to his feet. ‘It takes three to thuringo, after all. Lead the way out back, Rugger.’

So I rise in my turn and make for the rear exit; at which, while holding the door open for Ronnie and Lou, I call back to Manish, as an afterthought, ‘BYOBB!’

‘What’s that?’ shouts Manish, flummoxed. ‘Don’t you mean BRB?’

‘No, I mean Bring Your Own Beer Back. Just in case we don't have time for another trip to the bar before last orders.’

Out in the courtyard—at which site we have collectively agreed to conclude our meetings, for the surer evasion of Mike O’Schorr and his hypothetical confederates—we do the old count-off, and sing the familiar strains of ‘Arsenal, O Arsenal,’ etc. Then it’s back indoors and to our old tea-n-seas, where Lou and I settle our respective pairs of arse-cheeks kitty-cornered to and opposite Manish, respectively.

‘So then,’ I say, addressing Manish, and rubbing my hands together briskly and eagerly, as though the convo to hand were a piping hot plate of fish'n'poppers, ‘Where shall we begin? With his tiff with the contractors or his tiff with the American embassy?’

‘I'd prefer that we work our way backwards, chronologically’ says Manish, quaffing the head off a fresh pint, 'from the embassy tiff to the building-conrtacting one. As much of a cock-up on the Ken front as Embassygate is, it's really just chum to the corpse of Irangate.' Then, half-stroppily taking cognizance of the North London Arsenal Bashers' Sergeant-at-Pints' still-erectile person hovering within kneeing distance of his right elbow, he glances up and asks, ‘Aren’t you going to join us, Ronnie?’

Ronnie, stifling a probably-artificial yawn, replies: ‘No, thanks. I’m right knackered. I think I’ll be heading home. Night, all.’ And so saying, with stooped shoulders and a heavy gait, he plods on out of the pub through the front door.

'Funny,' Manish says in the wake of Ronnie's arse-cheeks, 'how the bloke always seems to suffer from an attack of narcolepsy the moment anyone's about to lay into Ken.'

'What are you getting at, Manny?' I say, giving my shirtyfront an ever-so-discreet pair of sub-nipple-level tugs.

‘Er, nothing,’ says Manish, with a sidelong aversion of the okies, ‘nothing—just that he seems to be awfully bored by local politics.’

'Well,' I say, 'each cunt to his gout, as the Frogs say. 'And you and I, unlike Ronnie, appear to have been genetically predisposed to contract a version of that ailment merely in virtue of our residence in a burgh presided over by the Right Dishonourable Mr Livingstone.'

'It's a mark of aristocratic distinction, you might say,' Manish gamely rejoins.

'One can only hope. Well, anyway, on to what you've termed Embassygate--'

But just then, later than I feared but early enough, I'm cut off by the appointed apparition of Jimmy, who, laying a left and right hand on each of our complementary respective shoulders, leans across the table to say to us, in what comes across as a whisper in these noisy environs:

'It's about that time, gentlemen. Drink 'em up.'

'You're awfully low-key tonight, Jimmy.' I say. 'What gives?'

'This does,' says Jimmy, stepping back, producing from one of his trouser pockets a small sheaf of papers--wrapped together, like a wad of Isabellas, in an elastic band--and deftly shucking a trio of leaves therefrom on to the tabletop.

I screw up my okies to take a gander at the nearest leaflet, which in design would appear to be a take-off on that one Devo album cover with the little tyke in profile shouting EEG waves through a hand trumpet, the only detectable divergence from the original being the presence of the words 'GREATER LONDON BARMEN'S LAST ORDERS COMPETITION/REGENT'S PARK/11:00 AM/20 May 2006' in place of the EEG curve.

May 20, eh? I says to myself. That's the Saturday after the UEFA Final. Bit like making plans for after the Rapture, what what, fixing an agenda for that day? But before giving Jimmy the old thumbs-down, let's see whether the presence of OFCT at this event will even be exigent, namely by posing the following question to him:

'So you're leaving these with us why?--because you're an organiser of the competition?'

'Not an organiser--a contestant. And I'd be ever so grateful to you if you could make it out there to support me. The vote, you see, is by volume of applause, so the more Apeketeers who show up, the better the odds for this local boy trying to make good.'

As of now I'm being assailed on the one benumbed mind's arse cheek by a distinct incapacity to pitcher to myself exactly what a last-orders' competition might actually entail, for either the participant or the spectator; and on the other by a distinct incuriosity to make that picture any clearer, on account of the more pressing impulse to take a crack at the old Keñata. So, secreting the flyer in my tit pocket, I say:

'All right, I'll pensu it into my calendar.'

'Meaning,' says Jimmy, a smidge stroppily, 'you reserve the right to back out at the last minute.'

Cor, I exclaim to myself, the bloke must really be desperate to win this thing if he's tallying his support punter by punter. And why single out YFCT, rather than Manish or Lou, for upbraiding as a prospective no-show? Is this a talent show claque he's putting together, or a World Cup football team? Which string of reflections impels me to rephrase myself thus: 'Fair enough, Jimmy. I'll sharpie it in. You can count on me to be there.' That is, if Arsenal haven't won the Championship--and if they have, well, I'm pretty sure Miss Manners counts being dead or institutionalised as a legitimate excuse for cancelling an engagement.

'Thanks, Rugger. And, er, will you be wanting another 'Gaarden? There'll be absolutely no pressure tonight to finish up by 11, I promise.'

'Sure,' I answer reflexively, just as I notice Manish sucking down his pint with an unwonted degree of alacrity, through a straw no less. 'That is, provided both of my comrades are planning to make up a full round with me.'

'Sorry, Rugger,' says Manish, withdrawing the straw ever so briefly from his gob. 'I've got to run.'

'WT-fucking-F, Manish!' I ejaculate in immeasurable cuntsternation whilst moving Jimmy along to the next table parenthetically with a You-can't-get-decent-help-nowadays-ish roll of the okies. 'What was the point of adjourning the Bashers' meeting [Sic/Doh!] a quarter of an hour early and scaring off Ronnie, if you were just going to footer the dissection table before we'd even made incision number one in the Livingstonian cadaver?'

'Yeah, I take your point, Rugger, and I apologise. Fact is, when I rolled up here I was banking on a good half-hour of chin-time with you, and meanwhile I've neglected to adjust my personal chronometer to the interruptions. Still, if you were up for it, we could continue, er, initiate, our discussion elsewhere...'

In virtue of the respective flavours of Manish's antsiness and cuntrition I can suss out the exact coordinates of this elsewhere, convo-genre-wise if not GPS-wise, and TBT I'm none too eager to repair thence: 'I take it you've scheduled a rendezvous with Manisha.'

'Yeah, up at Redford's. She's having a bit of a girls' night out there, and I promised I'd stop by to pick her up round 11.'

'Well, that hardly sounds like a Buckingham-Palace-sized bay window for a Kenophobic chinwag, the interval between our showing up and your reaching for the car keys.'

'You might think so; but nightlife-wise Manisha tends to be a true-blue Tory in principle and a redder-than-Ken Old Labourite in practice. Meaning that when I show up at 11 at one of these 24-hour joints she's typically just catching her second wind.'

'A second wind, at 11 on a Thursday? I was lucky to catch mine at half-past nine. Doesn't she have to work tomorrow?'

'Yeah, but that doesn't slow her down much. You forget, Rugger, that by comparison with us she's a mere babe in the woods. Don't you remember what it was like to be 22?'

Indeed I did, albeit rather vaguely. Much more concretely, at the moment, I recalled what it was like to be 26.1622695 and looking forward to a leisurely Ape-centred Ken-bashing chinwag, and to be 26.1622790 and realising how Manish's cuntish negligence had put paid to this forward-spectating ambition. And now, here I was, aetatis 26.1622885, weighing the pros and cunts of taking up his invitation to adjourn to Redford's. TBS, the sheer moral inertia of the human psyche--and perhaps more particularly, the blokean psyche--is a cuntishly staggering force to cuntemplate. On the one hand, at that moment, I was miffed beyond belief at Manish on account of his not having been up front from the beginning about how pressed for time he was, and his having consequently, gratuitously and undoubtedly expunged my name from Chapter One of Volume One of Ronnie's good books; and in view of the centrality of Ronnie to my lifeworld relative to Manish, I should have long since footered the premises. On the other hand, so finely had my Kenophobic appetite been whetted by Manish's initial mooting of those two scandals, that not even the most potent moral emetic imaginable--say, the news that Arsène Wenger would be presiding as guest barman--might have sufficed to put me off the board of the feast then on offer up at Redford's. So, with affected reluctance masking my barely-batable enthusiasm, I says to Manish:

'All right, I'll come with,' not, however, without adding as a conscience-sopping saving throw, 'provided you can assure me we'll have a proper spot of tableage to ourselves, well clear of the tractor beam of the hen session. I'm in no mood tonight to have my co-jones pulverised on the score of my oblivion of the latest trends in handbag engineering.'

'I can assure you of no such thing, Rugger. You know as well as I do how hard it is to get a table in that place for Sunday dupper, let alone at prime time on a preekend night. Still,' he says, standing up and twirling his keys smugly round his forefinger, 'that's no reason for bowing out. Quite the contrary, I should imagine, because from what Manisha tells me I gather that at least one of her friends has pronounced Kenophobic tendencies.'

What make of mythical creature was this sylph, this Blokessa Kenophobiosa, of whom he spake? I could scarcely produce enough mental wool to muffle the rintintinabulation of wedding bells going off in my head just then, let alone enough thoughts of cricket to continue my masterly-enthusiasm-bation; such that my final, determinant voicing of assent came out as a kind of ejaculation of constipated stroppiness:

'OK--then--let's be--off.'

'Glad I managed to bring you round. And what about you, Lou?' [Lucky for me that Manish had remembered our tablemate. For all of my two years, 7 months, three weeks and eight days' margin of seniority of acquaintance with Lou, I'd have probably been out the door and well on my way to Chipping before I'd given thought number one to him.] 'Do you fancy popping up to Redford's with us?'

Lou shakes his head, puts his hands together in a prayerly configuration, lays his head ear-downwards on the pair of them and closes his okies.

'You want to go beddy-bye?' I ask him.

He nods Aye in his feigned slumber.

'Well, I wish you'd let me know earlier, specifically before Ronnie headed out. That would have saved us both a lot of trouble. (Lou's crashing at my place tonight),' I add, as an explanatory aside to Manish.

'Oh, really?' says Manish, his phiz betraying about a billion times more beflummoxedment than the SOA lately divulged would seem to warrant. 'Well, in that case, I suppose I needn't have mentioned Manisha's Kenophobic pal.'

'I don't mean in my bed, for fuck's sake,' I spit back as soon as I get a gust of Manish's imputation. 'We're co-workers. Lou lives up in Hertfordshire, and every other Thursday he comes down to London for the...'

'Yes?' quizzes Manish from the free end of a rope lasso'd round that there the...'

Fuck it. At least for the next Ape-bound minute or so I'm just going to have to live with the knowledge that Manish takes Lou for my semi-long-distance boyfriend. 'I'll explain later. You promise,' I say to Lou, 'to sleep with the telly and the stereo off, so's you'll hear the doorbell when I get in?'

Aye, Lou signifies again, by the same means and in the same posture.

'All right, then,' I say, fishing out the maisonette keys and hooking the ring thereof round his outward-jutting thumbs. 'Sweet dreams.'

'You don't reckon by any chance he's actually asleep already?' Manish asks me out front, as we're pounding the butchers' half-dozen squares of pavement en route to his hoss (a yellow ought-two VW Bug, for the benefit of all period-cum-local-detail anoraks).

'No I don't, by fuck any chance. Christ, even a hand-made pillow needs some kind of under-support, and his elbows were half a foot clear of the tabletop.'

'Because in your place,' shouts Manish across the top of the car as he's opening the driver's-side door, 'I'd have been wary of leaving my keys with him.'

'Yeah, I know it must seem a bit strange,' I say, settling my arse cheeks into the front passenger-side seat of the Manishmobile, 'but the thing about Lou is, he really prides himself on the integrity of his mime schtick. Such that he'd have held that pose till sunrise, if need've been, so long as we were lingering in sight of him. But I guarantee that the instant he felt the cold steel of my key-ring round his thumb-knuckles he started counting down the seconds to the moment of our probable exit, and that by now he's hoofing it up Woodside Avenue, if not scraping his shoes off on the mat of my front doorstep. Bit of a queer fish, that Lou, I'll admit--but a real upstanding bloke, nonetheless. I trust him implicitly.'

'Well, yes, I imagine you must do,' says Manish. 'Trust is, after all, the cornerstone of every meaningful long-term relationship.'

Note, DGR, the utter bereavement of italics or double-inverted commas in the preceding spot of dialogue, an episode of typographical puritanism attributable solely to the corresponding apparent absence of the merest soup's son of a twinkle of ironic cuntishness in Manish's single visible okie as he cuntributed that very string of characterage to the pixellage of this here post.

'Look here, Manish,' I say, stuffing a hand under each arse cheek in a burst of emergency shirt-shielding prophylaxis, 'Lou is not--I repeat, not--my bloke. It's just that we have this club, the Arsenal-Bashers--'

'Yeah, I know. You mentioned them a while back.'

'I did?'

'Yeah, back at the Ape, right after I told you I had to skedaddle.'

'Blimey! I hope no one in the know overheard.'

'You mean, say, Jimmy? I wouldn't worry about that. Not that I can be sure he didn't overhear, but that it's no cause for sounding the village alarm bell if he did do. You see, he filled me in on the checquered history of the Bashers, and of your involvement therein, as I was ordering my second pint tonight, while you lot were palavering out back. "I know what that lot are up to," he said to me, "and trust me, all it'd take would be a single word from me to Mr Sedule and KHHHHHH!" He drew a finger across his bollocks (I'd mimic the gesture if I weren't driving).'

This spell of retrospective exposition was enough to make my head reel, as in the attempt even tentatively to suss out its implications I found myself staring into the vertiginous depths of an apparently infinite regress of cuntishness, of Shahvian cuntishness framing Phippsian cuntishness framing Shahvian cuntishness and so on, like a bloody moral-cum-epistemological well of mirrors. I don't mind telling you, DGR, that if it hadn't been for the more exigent cause of forestalling the full onset of an incipient case of carsickness (leta alone the fact that my hands were still pinioned under my ACs), I would have been more than content to put a fist into the Shahvian end of the old Gordian mirror-pit right then and there, the attendant risk of our smashing into a late-night-trolling bendy bus at 40 mph notwithstanding.

'So...if Jimmy already knew the Bashers were meeting under Mr Sedule's roof...?'

'...Then why didn't he have you lot kicked out? Who knows? Some sort of personal don't-ask-don't-tell policy vis-a-vis the Arsenal Bashers? In any case, surely the question is of merely academic interest now that you've got insurance.'

'Insurance?'

'Yeah, in the form of your pledge to show up at his sodding last orders competition. No need to worry about being pitched out of your local for the better part of the next month--or possibly even beyond that, if he wins.'

Fuck me with a rolled-up sheaf of actuarial tables if every trace of Manish qua standard-bearer of the spirit of unregenerate cuntishness wasn't once again being effaced in my good books by Manish qua non-standard bearer of good news. Rather gormlessly goaded on by this ongoing effacement, I then took it upon myself to ask him:

'So, then, if you already know about the Bashers, then all this talk about my supposed committed long-term involvement with Lou was...'

'...Mere acting, in the service of good-natured piss-taking. I know how paranoid you single guys are about being caught out on a man-date by the neighbourhood paparazzi.'

Right, that does it, I says to myself as both hands bolt out from their sub-gludial lair and, with the sureness and swiftness of a pair of laser-guided missiles, bear down on the bull's-spchphincter of my top shirt button. Trouble is, what with having been pressed down like a pair of panini for the past butcher's half-dozen minutes, for the time being they--my hands--are no better suited to shirt-shucking than a pair of dolphin's flippers would be. So, like a blokess drying her nails, I start flapping them feebly about in an effort to wake them up.

'Right, here we are--beautiful downtown Chipping,' says Manish, disengaging the engine. Then, glancing over at me, and subsequently evincing a good deal more schphincter tension than I should do were I in his Birkenstocks, he says, 'Chin up, Rugger. It'll be all the same in a hundred beers' time.'

'Er,' I stammer back gruffly, 'Would you mind letting me out from outside? I seem to be somewhat, er, incapacitated at the moment.'

(TBC, TBS, TBC, TBS, TBC, TBS, TBC, TBS...)