Had Meself a Shi(r)ty Little Xmas

Well, if you lot thought my aspirations to truth in advertising had been undermined by last month's account of my little overnight junket in Hertfordshire, you ain't seen nuffink yet: just wait till you've sunk your okies a few layers of paragraphage into this here post. I meantersay, for the benefit of the thicker amongst you, that of late in these pages there has irrupted a kind of fissure between their purported provenance--as indicated by the name of the blog, The Angry Londoner--and the actual setting of the events recounted therein; and that this selfsame fissure is only going to widen into a veritable gulf with the publication of my next deluge of typeage. But I can't say as I'm entirely to blame for this admittedly regrettable SOA; for, if it were up to me, my movements (of the non-bowel variety, natch) over the course of an entire year would trace a kind of irregular trapezoid whose four vertices would comprise, respectively, the maisonette, the Ape, Sainsbury's and Stora Market (my de-facto local off-licence)--barring, of course, the single tangential spike marking my more recent semi-weekly peregrinations up to Redford's (the all-night joint I mentioned in my last post). Christ, if I'd had my druthers, by now I'd have worn a fucking trapezoidal trench clear on through to the mantle of the earth with my pavement-pounding between and amongst those four points. Naturally, had my stomping grounds been so mercifully circumscribed on the day I first logged into Blogspot, the present weblog would never have been entitled The Angry Londoner at all; it would have borne, rather, the handle The Placid Barnetian, or some other such sober-K expressive of my complacent suburban parochiality. Regrettably, from the outset, I have been obliged to make the occasional 4-A into the redbrick-and-dog-turd jungle that is inner London; and, perhaps even more regrettably, in order to shift my arse-cheeks for myself--in order to compete, let alone go for the bronze, in the great rat's-arse-Olympiad of global capitalism--I have been obliged, five days in every seven, to cross the county line into Hertfordshire, and thence on to Potters Bar and the offices of my employer, Proctologitex, Ltd. Most regrettably of all, perhaps, I retain ties of consanguinity and grudging affection that oblige me to venture no less occasionally even further afield of McGyverworld HQ, sc. to that quadrant of the English sub-kingdom semi-officially known since pre-Norman times as East Anglia. And it is to an account of my latest sojourn in that region that the best part of this very post--and probably the next one as well--shall be devoted. For, as I have already once sworn to all and sundry who might happen upon the urldom of the Angry Londoner, I shall record herein no more--and, I would now add, no less--than I would like to remember; and this latest and by no means shortest of my stints in EA was nothing if not memorable.

And so, to strike a pithy and pissy compromise between connecting the dots for the benefit of my thick-though-loyal readers and lithograping the entire fucking picture in the minutest detail for the benefit of the thick-and-thin newcomers: the reason I submitted to this my most recent bout of trippage to East Anglia--as to all preceding thitherward bouts--was that it was there that I was born, and that it is there, in the ancient market town of Diss, that my parents still reside, in the very same semi-stuccoed bungalow, in fact, in which I resided in tandem with them (together with, eventually, my little brother) from the day of my deliverance from the neo-natal ward of NNUH, in the regional capital of Norwich, 40 kilometeres to the north, to the day, 20 years later, on which I flew from the familial coop--so far for good--and alighted at my university-dormer's nest back up in my birth-city. Now, during the first three-quarters of my two-year stint as a full-time student and resident of UEA, at my parents' behest, I tended to pop back down to Diss quite frequently; roughly at every other weekend. And what with campus life at East Anglia being, on the whole, of a temperature and tempo sufficiently tepid and sluggish to make dishwater fear for the renewal of its royal charter of Official Metaphorical Vehicle of Dullness, I bore the burden of these semi-monthly visits to the genitors rather lightly; they were like a gentle zephyr blowing through the defoliated treetops of my virtually non-existent personal life. Even during my last term, when I was trying desperately to make up for lost time, and to cram four years' worth of bird-pulling and pint-guzzling into four months (with, I might add, staggeringly pathetic results); and when I made a grand total of, I think, three trips home, I'm pretty sure I still managed to acquit myself of the merest soup's son of filial impiety courtesy of my weekly lunches with my dad--who worked and still works at the University--at the student union. But then, a scant two months after graduation, came my big move to London. [Cut a la Alexander Payne to a cheekily anachronistic montage of grainy 1960s newsreel footage depicting caravans of Routemaster buses rounding Nelson's Column at Trafalgar Square, platoons of perky-titted dolly birds in jumpers, minis, and knee-high boots promenading alongside the shop-fronts of Carnaby Street, etc.] Ah, London! Home of a myriad-cubed distractions fit to blind the fenokies and sanitise the wallet of a guileless young buck fresh from the provinces. The London Eye! The Tate! The strip clubs of Piccadilly! The Dim $$$$UM-erias of Chinatown! The fucking congestion charge of the whole fucking city centre! And last, but certifuckingfiably not least, FUCKING KEN LIVINGSTONE!!!!!!!!! ['Skewed me while I recompose my shirtyfront.] Truth be told, for all-my meritorious inner-London-bashing, I did rather enjoy myself during that first year of my residence in the Capital, much to the detriment of my Norfolk-nostalgia, and of any impetus to return to my home burglet; especially as in those days I lived much closer to the centre than I do now. And yet, London-besotted as I was, I still managed to make something like five trips to Norfolk during the course of that first year. Not a bad showing, that, all things considered, Mum and Dad must have thought come New Year’s Eve. It was only afterwards, upon my relocation from Whitechapel to the decidedly less hubbubious precincts of Woodside Park, that the first symptoms of Filial Snubbage Syndrome became manifest in the Ruggerian organism. Indeed, I put off going back to Diss a full six months after my move to Woodside; and I don't mind telling you the fart’s-ghost of that first post-Woodside return trip was none too friendly; for, in addition to being cuntishly fatiguing, like those of all the preceding trips, it was additionally and no less cuntishly unsettling or disturbing. A mite paradoxical, innit, this alienation from home setting in only after I'd mounted a horse (i.e., Woodside/Barnet) that has been known occasionally to overtake Dishwater and UEA Student Life in the Kentucky Derby of Dullness? Well, don’t you worry, Mr Pair O’ Dox, you’re in capable hands; I’ll see your first name changed to Orth by the end of the next sentence but one. I have this theory, you see--it's less of a theory, really, than a speculative premise--that the n**gardly Scots demiurge who rules this tube-station-bog of a cosmos of ours, to no apparent end other than the flexing of his tartan-swathed cunt-muscles, has decreed that a bloke mustn't be allowed to feel at home in two places at once. He may have spent 149,999 of the preceding 150,000 hours of his life in one place, but all that counts for naught in point of homeiness once he's passed the 500-hour mark as a resident of some other place; no sooner has he arranged the furnishings of his bachelor's maisonette in the second locale--no sooner has he stocked his fridge with Stella, shelved and alphabetised his porn video collection and set up his Thierry Henry punching doll in a corner of the front room, than he starts to feel himself ill at ease anywher other than within a 30-mile radius of his by-then-no-longer-new domicile. During that first year in London, you see, when I was living in Whitechapel, swotting for my accountancy certification and working part-time at the Beeb, I knew for a dead cert that the life I was leading was an altogether transient one; consequently, the McGyver ranch at Diss remained my de facto home base, and it was always still with a palpable sense of relief, of homecoming, that I scraped off the soles of my galoshes on to its front steps. But once I was truly and wholly settled in Woodside Park; once I’d ferreted (or stoated?) out the Ape as a weekend and occasional weekend hangout, and attained virtual fluency in my Ayhern button-pushing typewriter exercise up in Potters Bar, I began to conceive of the life I was now leading there as a permanent one; and it was towards that corner of London, specifically to the front steps of the maisonette on Woodside Avenue, that the mud on my galoshes-soles began gravitating. All I really meantersay, in short, is that, in contradiction of received opinion on the subject (which, I have no doubt, is being tirelessly iterated at this very moment, in every corner of the Anglo-blogo-sphere), it’s not the positive elements of these holiday-season trips—the reversion to parent-child role-playing, the sleeping in your old room with your 15-year-old model aeroplane collection to hand on the chest of drawers next to the bed, etc.—but rather the negative elements thereof—the not being able to choose between CTM and vindaloo at dinnertime, the not being able to nip down to the pub for a pint at eight o’clock—that really do you in. Are you paying attention, BTFW?

'Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z...eh, what? [snort, yelch] Yes, of course. Go on with this... fascinating disquisition...'

Don't mind if I do. Actually, I'm pretty much through with the Diss-quizzatory bit (and ready to launch into a fresh yarn-spinning bit); apart from the little bridge passage comprised by the second part of this sentence: the upshot of the creeping un-Heimlich-kite of Diss that set in after my move to North London was that my return trips became ever-more-widely spaced, such that, indeed, the first 11-and-a-half months of last calendar year, 2005, elapsed without my paying my parents a single visit; and that thus, when the so-called holiday season rolled round, I felt I ought to try to mend the gap by making an unprecedented weeklong do of my annual Christmas sojourn. And the only way of pulling off this scheme in tandem with my other pet scheme of ringing in the New Year at the Ape (New Year's Eve being the one night of the year when Mr Sedule dares to keep the joint open after 11 for the benefit of the general puntility) was to haul my luggage into PB in the boot of the Mazda on the morning of Friday 23rd and leave for Norfolk directly after work, and, coincidentally, the office Christmas party. This whole pre-trip prepping routine was a cuntishly fatiguing decathalon, I don't mind telling you. There's nothing like fishing in the wash basket at 2 a.m. like some sodding sartorial Noah--i.e., in search of exactly seven of every kind of garment [seven overshirts, seven pairs of socks, seven string vests, etc.]--to give a bloke a right chronic case of the strops; especially knowing as he does that he's got to be up a mere four hours later, at the arse-crack of bourgie dawn. E-fucking-squared-specially knowing moreover as he does that he'll be spending the better part of the day ahead rubbing besotted arse-cheeks with the devil's cunt-brigade comprised by his assembled coworkers.

To change my forename to that of the late Mr Sinatra, though, the party wasn't half as awful as it might have been. In the first place, little Brianna Ayhern was mercifully absent, owing, her father said, to her attendance at a kick-boxing lesson [!], and so I escaped the scene with my co-jones unbruised. (With cuntishly forced magnanimity, he condescended to accept in her stead that canister of Toxic Waste Balls I'd salvaged from my front-window shards on Halloween night.)

On the debit side of the balance sheet, though, as I was driving, I couldn't really partake of the bracingly potent house punch beyond the first two glasses, and you really do need to be pissed to stomach and humour the lower-primatial attempts at wit of the Poctologitex rank and file. More materially, I did not manage to escape the scene with my gob or phiz unsullied by the lipstick of Winnie Wilkins, who, at a particularly inebriate late moment in the proceedings, dragged me under the mistletoe and subjected me, from the top of my forehead to the tip of my chinny-chin-chin to a succession of wet, stale, Charley-perfume-permeated smooches. I'll wager that it was only by dint of reaching behind her shoulders and flinging off her scarlet-and-white-pom-pommed Santa's helper's variant of her plum tam-o'-shanter (which she thereupon scampered away to retrieve), that I eluded a fate worse than death at her hands--or, rather, cunt. Naturally, if I'd tried forcing anything of the kind on, say, Sarah Slother, I'd have been given my walking papers right then and there.

Oh yeah, speaking of old SS, it was to her account that the other entry on the credit side of the party's balance sheet should be charged. You see, about an hour before the WW incident, I managed to get in a dig at her that, I flatter myself, should count at least as a corner against the goal I gave up in not getting a dig in at her old man a month earlier. She had just passed within a cunt-hair's breadth of my shoulder en route to the Swedish meatball tray, apparently utterly oblivious of my presence (and by that apparent-ness dutifully proffering Serve No. 225 of our three-month-old tennis match of mutual snubbage), when I suddenly thought to call out to her, 'Hey, Sarah, that's a nice snap of you on your dad's desk.'

She turns round and asks me, 'What's that?' The ball has just hit the net and the score is now Rugger 1, Sarah Love. I can tell from the sheer uninventiveness of her disyllabic riposte that I've caught her certifiably off-guard. And, heartened by a not-quite-cuntish sense of exaltation, I continue:

'When was it taken? In 99? No, scratch that--I'd say in '96 at the latest, to judge by those oversized specs you're wearing in it.'

For an instant or two longer, in virtue of her wide-eyed muteness, she betrays her ongoing enthrallment to the Tomcat Moloch Paranoia (as Mrs A-J of CHABid might put it). But then the mental gears of rationalisation start engaging themselves; she starts saying to herself (so I conjecture), 'What could a gormless rube like Rugby McGyver know of my father's metier, let alone of the furnishings of his bureau?' and she says to me, 'You're a swiving barmy lot, you Norweegians.' Then she jumps back on to her bee-queue to the buffet, planning no doubt on her arrival to engage in round 355 of Rugger-bashing with one of her colleagues in PR.

Finally, as a kind of splits addendum to the debit sheet of the party proper, on my way out, I find myself heading for, and eventually inside, the lift alongside Mr Ayhern and no one else but. Turning to me with the stroppiest of phizzes, as the doors gather themselves shut in front of us, he asks, 'You'll want all day off tomorrow, I suppose?'

What kind of overtime shanghai is this cunt trying to pull over on me? I wonder to myself. But not to be nonplussed by his cuntishness, I answer, with a faint smile, 'I should say so, sir. It's a Saturday. And then,' I go on, fishing my leave slip out of one of my front trouser pockets, 'I'll want and expect to get the whole of the following week off as well,' punctuating this remark with a few well-timed flicks of my forefinger against the slip, so as to produce the ineffable Sound of Smugness that can be elicited only from the ballistic impact of human fingernail-matter on a schlong-stiff paper surface.

'Let me see that,' he growls, snatching the slip from my mitts, and frowning and grunting and 'Mmm'-ing over it like there's a fucking proposition from Wittgenstein inscribed on it. At last, just as we've exited the lift and are standing in front of the guard's desk, in the vestibule of the ground floor, he indicates the spot where his John Handschlong is sited, and says, with grapefruit-sized co-jones, 'That's not my signature.' Here he goes again, acting on the advice of his business-cunt's self-help manual. But fear not, Cher Amy reader: the Rugger is ever-resourceful and forsees every contingency. So I says to him, 'Well, sir, perhaps you've forgotten you signed it. If you're in need of a memory refresher, look no further than the other side of the sheet.' So he flips the paperlet over; and on the verso, to his cuntishly infinite cuntsternation, he discovers, spanning the full length of the slip, the un-forgeable, palsy-stricken JH of Chester H. Wickwire, chief of the accounting division. (That's right, CAR, acting on the precedent of his exhibition of the selfsame cuntish conduct the last time I'd tried to call in one of my leave debts, I had ventured to go over Ayhern's head for a co-signature for this one--and succeeded in getting it.) Glancing up at me with lips pursed, nose scrunched, and okies fit to burst out of their sockets, Mike hands me back the paper. In plain English, what he wants to say to me just now is something like, 'Sir, I would demand satisfaction from you in no uncertain terms at this very instant, were it not for the fact that, aware as I am of how cuntishly in the wrong all and sundry would judge me to be in that event, I know that I could not count on my own mum to act as my second.' In even plainer English, what he actually says to me is, ' Well, I suppose you must have the whole week. Be here all the earlier on the following Monday!' Then, without tendering me so much as the most cuntishly perfunctory of good-byes (let alone such borderline cuntishly perfunctory seasonable valedictions as 'Merry Xmas to You and Urine'), he turns on his heel and strides briskly towards the door and out of the building.

Well, I'm not the sort to stand about brooding over the disapprobation of such a moronic cunt as Mike Ayhern. All the same, I'm certainly not keen on crossing his path again in '05--as I'm in slight danger of doing, on the pavement, if I follow his egress too closely--so I fritter away a minute or two trading pleasantries with the guard, a fellow Arsenal-hater. We toast each other over the Gunners' recent dip in the Premiership standings, and then I proceed on my own merry way out the building and next door to the company car park, where the Mazda is berthed.

Now, I know that in the post before last I rather tore a new schlong hole in outer Hertfordshire, in making it seem--as it in fact did at the time--like Britain's answer to Hazzard County (Christ, though, it wasn't my fault that cop's name was Roscoe Coltrane!); but there's nothing like a drive from inner Hertfordshire to outer Norfolk to put in perspective a Barnetian's metropolitan snobbery vis-a-vis even the most hickish purr-loos of the London commuter belt, especially if he hasn't made the trip in a year. You know what the biggest town along the whole 100-mile itinerary is (unless you count the tangential brush against the very outer arc of the nipple halo of Cambridge at mile 60, which I don't)? It's Thetford, the Manchester or Chicago of Norfolk. In so dubbing Thetford, I of course don't mean that it has anything of the character or appearance of either Madchester or the Windy City; I mean, rather, that it happens to be the second or third largest city in Norfolk. And when you consider that Norwich itself numbers barely a hundred thousand souls, and do the math to scale, you'll see that in point of populousness Thetford makes even Potters Bar look like, well, Norwich by comparison. Now you'd think that the one saving grace of 100-plus miles of Gobi-deserted highway would be that they made for speedy, limit-breaking, cruise-control-guided driving, and so the London-to-Diss stretch of road does at most times of the year--but not at this one, not at Christmastime. At the acme of the so-called holiday season, East Anglia seems to be the place on which all of England converges to lapse into a turkey-induced coma, and thus you're lucky if you clock in an average of 30-miles-per-hour from door to door. Things get especially strop-inducing during the last third of the trip, when you leave behind the motorway and hit the two-lanes-per-carriageway A11.

Anyway, the upshot of all this gazetteer-mongering that I've been doing for the past coupla hundred words is that, although on account of the party I got off work an hour early, at four, I don't pull into Diss till half-past seven, hungry and stroppy as a grizzly bear in mid-spring. Mechanically, without having to remind myself of the route, I hang a louie off Roydon Road on to the aptly-named Louie's Lane, then another on to Orchard Grove, following the southward bend of the road almost all the way to the end and parking in front of the third house on the left back from the so-called cul-de-sac. The familiar tokens of identification are all still there: the lime tree in the front garden, the beige 1975 Mini parked in the drive, even the old red watering can on the front porch, just barely visible in the fluorescent glare of the front-door light (itself a permafixture of the place). Minus the extra foot of growth on the tree everything looks exactly as I remember it looking in 1995 (or, for that matter, 1985).

As I take in the scene, the timeless melancholy lyrics of the Moz blare through the speakers of my mind's tannoy and reverberate hollowly against the walls of my mind's deserted high school gymnasium: I don't want to go home, because I haven't got one...anymore. And so with a heavy heart, and an even heavier schlong, I get out of the car, walk through the front garden and up the front steps and, with grossly affected jauntiness, give a few raps to the front door.

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TBC, you ask? 'Course, YFC!

Just Another Mazdaless Monday

I don't mind telling you lot that I'm a bit of a novice at this here activity known as blogging. And now that I've done a bit of browsing through some the other sites here at blogspot, it occurs to me that unbeknownst to myself, I've essentially and flagrantly been flouting the conventions of the genre since day one. First off, to judge by common practice, it's pretty much derry gurr to publish a post every day, or at the outside, every two days; and secondly, it appears to be equally mandatory to fill every post from miso soup to wasabi peas with a comprehensive catalogue of the minutiae of one's daily routine, be any of these minutiae ever so ponderously unreadable. The typical blog post, from what I gather, begins as follows: 'I got up this morning and scratched my pubes and repaired to the loo with last week's Sunday Times crossword in hand. I'd solved three clues and voided every last bit of matter from my bowels when I found myself snagged on number 12 across (Talleyrand's
wiedergänger twice removed, quoth Lord Acton). The stool was of a generally firm consistency, in ten pieces, cretaceous rather than globular in composition, and of a caramel buff colour streaked with highlights of umber...' and concludes 'I sat at the foot of my bed, with the vertical axis each buttock intersecting with the surface of the mattress precisely 15 centimetres inland from the edge of the latter, and trimmed my toenails. I calculated that my big toenail had grown 3 millimetres since I'd last trimmed it, two months and four days ago, whilst my pinkie toe had grown only by a single millimetre during the same period.' It's like reading a fucking transcription of the Radio 4 shipping forecast, minus the romantic aura of life at sea. (In hindsight, BTFW, Sarah Slother strikes me as a born blogger.) Obviously these wankers have taken their cue from that Boswell bloke, the one that wrote the bio of the wig-coiffured geezer I mentioned in my last post but one, who said 'I will live no more than I can record' and, true to his word, finished up with a diary about ten times as long as the London telephone directory. But from what I dimly remember seven years on from poor old Max Sebald's autobiographical lit course at UEA, the Boz actually had a life that was worth recording; he'd spend his days chinwagging with likes of PM Billy Pitt, Sr., Frankie 'Voltaire' Arroway and JJ 'Dyn-o-mite' Rousseau, and his nights whoring in Hyde Park and St. James's; and therein lies the difference between him and our contemporary Joe Blogses. The best part of all lives lived today--yours truly's not excepted-- are tracts of irredeemable shittiness unworthy of being recorded even for the benefit of one's future self, let alone for the benefit of sodding so-called posterity. And so my motto vis-a-vis this here blog has been 'I will record no more than I will want to remember,' which so far, I'm disappointed to say, hasn't amounted to a hill of baked beans on toast. All the same, for a while now, I have felt as though it would be worthwhile to try my hand at writing a post that conforms more closely to the conventions of the genre--i.e., that records my progress through a whole calendar day, and that incorporates as much of the trivially unmemorable bullshit as I can force myself to remember from the-next-day's distance. Maybe the habit grows on you. I doubt it, but anyway, without further ado:

Yesterday, Monday, the 31st of October, I rose at 6:30 (or as late as :40, if due allowance is made for snooze-buttoning). Next, the four esses followed by Weetabix and peanut butter to a soundtrack of JoAnne and Jono. At 7:30 sharp I'm out the door and hoofing it to Barnet High Street to catch the northbound 7:45 Number 383 bus, which sets me down at Union Street just in time for me to hop on the 84. Nothing recallable--as distinct from memorable--about either leg of the trip, apart, of course, from its interminability. I swear the next time I find myself Mazdaless I'm getting a bike. That or a helicopter. I alight from the bus at Southgate Road/Mutton Lane, just a two-minute stroll down the street from corporate HQ on Baker Street. As I'm stepping through the front door of the building and walking to the lift, I check the time on my mobile. It's 8:58. I'm supposed to be there at 8:45, but luckily I make my way to my cubicle without crossing paths with anyone who might give a rat's arse about my punctuality.

Ordinarily, after getting in, I take a stroll down to the kitchen to nab an extra-large cuppa fee, which I then drink at my desk over a leisurely browsing of the Nergle News. But straightaway this morning I see that there's likely going to be a slash administered to the tyre of my routine, as the voicemail indicator light on my phone is flashing, and that can mean only one thing: a message from Mike Ayhern, my immediate superior. And sure enough, the first thing I hear after electing to listen to my first (and only) message is Mike's voice, squawking peremptorily at me in his burrrrish Edinburgh accent, 'McGyver, I want to see you in my office, ten minutes ago! You hear that? Ten minutes ago!' The message is stamped 8:55; which means that, by his reckoning, I'm already 15 mintues late.

A parenthetical word or two about Mike is in order here. He seems to fancy himself something of a Perry White or Lou Grant figure, the editor of a 1970s upmarket American newspaper as depicted, for instance, in the first Superman movie or in that Redford-Hoffman snoozefest about the blokes who got Schlong Nixon busted, They Couldn't Put President Humpty Together Again, I think it's called. (I, on the other hand, tend to fancy myself something of a George Taylor figure in a version of Planet of the Apes [not, alas, the Ape] where the apes can't speak and do nothing but fling poo at each other, but that's a different story.) Exhibit A in support of my thesis as to the Whitean-Grantian provenance of his delusion: his insistence on being addressed as 'Mr Ayhern' rather than 'Mike.' (If only his surname were 'Hunt'!) Exhibit B: his (already witnessed) insistence on addressing his subordinates by their last names denuded of the prefatory 'Mr' or 'Ms'. Exhibit C: his predeliction for leaning back in his desk chair with his hands folded behind his head so as to expose to best advantage the sweat puddles on the pits of of his shirtsleeves. A couple of weeks ago I actually walked in on him applying water to his armpits with a squirt bottle, at a lavatory mirror in the gents.

So, anyway, having listened to the message, I sprint down to Mike's office and find him disporting himself in his characteristic pose. 'Ah, McGyver. Late as usual!' he says to me in the same squawking tone he used on the blower. 'Well,' he continues, gesturing towards me with his left elbow, 'Have a seat.' Then, pointing with that same left elbow to a dish full of gumball-sized sweets of various colours, he asks, 'Care for a toxic waste ball?'

I say, 'No, thanks.' For well I remember the night at the Ape, last April, that Dave Sims, that sadistic old tadger, slipped one of those toxic waste balls into the beer nuts; along with the look on the face of his gormless victim, Duane 'Lord' Dennyson. Cor, it was enough to make you cry yourself blind in sympathy.
'Well, I'll have one myself, if you don't mind,' he says, grabbing a green one and inserting it into his gob, afterwards re-placing his hand at its accustomed perch. 'My little Brianna's got me hooked on these things. [Brianna's his cuntess of a five-year-old daughter. He actually had the hoot's-pa to bring her to the last company Christmas party, where she gave me a surprisingly painful sock in the co-jones. She's got a bright future ahead of her in women's boxing] 'But enough of this...persiflage. Let's talk turkey. Where's that report I asked you for on Friday?--the one on revenues for coffee suppositories in the last quarter?'

As sure as I am that the current pope is a kraut who shits in the Black Forest, I'm sure he's made no mention of such a report. Clearly he's acting on the advice promulgated in one of those businessman's self-help books like The Seven Habits of Deeply Offensive Cunts, following some rule that reads, Never flinch, in the face of your underlings, from making shit up as you go along. But I, acting on the advice of my own private piss-boy's manual The Seven Habits of Shallowly Inoffensive Schmucks, dare not betray the merest soupcon of my awareness of the fact that he's conjuring his allusion to this report ex nihilo. Instead I say, 'Oh, sorry, Mr Ayhern. I'll have it to you in a jiffy.'

'Mark my words, McGyver. If I don't have that report on my desk by three this afternoon, your ass [not arse] is grass.'

'And I guess you're the lawnmower?'

'You catch on fast.'

So I rise from the chair and make for the door. But as I'm about to cross the threshold, he says to me, 'You'd better watch your back, McGyver. I don't care for your type.'

'I know, Mr Ayhern. You've told me so several times already.'

'Right, well, I'm telling you again because it bears repeating; repeating and elaborating. And so let me elaborate: you strike me as the type who's too...ductile, too easily led.'

I cut him a blank No shite, Sherlock-type look, and answer, 'Are you saying this is a bad thing, Mr Ayhern? You are, after all, my team leader, are you not?

'Well, of course,' he hems and haws, for a bit, then resumes: 'I don't mean easily led by me or other paragons of leadership. I mean, easily led by unsavoury types. Bad elements. Riffraff and such-like.'

'Of course. I stand corrected.'

'And it's not just me. Other people have remarked it as well.'

'Other people such as?'

'Other people senior to myself. I trust I needn't name any names.'

'No, certainly not. Well, anyway, I really should be off to work on this report...'

As I'm saying these words, his face suddenly puckers into a mask of agony, and his hands spring out from behind his head, and he starts pounding his desk with his right fist like Nikita fucking Krushchev with his shoe at the UN.

'Is it the toxically sour centre?' I ask him. He gives a mute, helpless nod.

My parting words to him are, 'Hey, Mr Ayhern--calm down a bit. That's the only way that centre's ever going to get better.' I don't know what else to say to him. He knew what he was getting into with the Toxic Waste, right? It's his superfund, you could say. As I pull open the door to its full compass, he flashes me a thumbs-up sign with his free hand, whilst continuing to pound the desk with the other one with undiminished fury.

On the way out, I'm practically run over by Winnie Wilkins, an 18-stone fifty-something secretary in our division, walking in with a large three-ring binder and wearing, as usual, her signature plum-coloured tam-o'-shanter, the type of headgear you find at a car-boot sale. (In the summer months, she doesn't wear much other than this plum tam o' shanter, to the infinite revulsion of myself and most of her other coworkers.) 'I've put stamps on those letters, Mr Ayhern,' she's saying as I barely manage to squeeze past her behemothic form, 'and recorded them all in the ledger, like you asked me to.' Winnie Wilkins and her fucking plum-coloured tam-o'-shanter. Christ, how I hate the old bag!

Then en route to my desk I come across a couple of office boys, lads from the post room, literally jumping for joy and hi-fiving each other. I ask them what the hooplah is all about. One of them tells me they're congratulating each other on Barnet's defeat of Rushden and Diamonds on Saturday night. These League Two fans are so fucking pathetic. Why do they insist on doing things by halves? Why don't they just attend junior football games if they're so thrilled by the spectacle of shitty, ninth-rate playing? At least with the juniors, there's a chance that someone out there on the field might someday amount to something, that five or ten years hence you'll be able to boast to your mates, I saw so-and-so when he was just a wee bairn in the junior league.

Anyway, back at my desk I run Ayhern's sodding report. The whole operation takes a grand total of 20 minutes, and I piss away the next four-and-a-half hours browsing the North London Arsenal Bashers' website, along with my favourite porn site, Randy Nannies of the Northern Line. Ordinarily at about one I'd pop down for lunch at the teria, but as I'm keen on avoiding Sarah Slother for at least a good week, I content myself with lunching at my desk on a packet of crisps and Coke from the vending machines on the mezzanine level. Then, at 2:30 sharp, I return to Mike's office and present to him the report, encased in a manila folder.

'Mmm,' he says, stroking his chin and frowning a Mussolini-esque frown of grudging approval, as he pretends to read the text. I write pretend in full confidence because I took care to hand the report to him facing upside-down, and he hasn't seen fit to turn it the right way up. After about a minute or two of this pointless panto, he closes the folder, places it squarely in front of him on the desk, and says to me:

'Impressive work. Not so impressive as to be almost too impressive to be true, but impressive enough, to be sure. Run me another report, would you, on the same fiscal quarter; this time on anisette tampons. I need it by noon tomorrow.'
'Righto, Mr Ayhern,' I say, and head for the door.

'Oh, and McGyver!' he calls out to my back. 'About those guys in the top brass who said you were easily led?'

'Yes?'

'Well, they were only half right.' I look back and see he's sporting one of those frozen grins that these newspaper editor types always sport in the final shot of those 70s movies and TV programmes, as though he's expecting a title card reading Executive Producer: Bob Newhart to descend from the ceiling.

And doing my best to cop a choked-up Jimmy Stewart attitude, I say: 'Thanks...uh, thanks, Mr Ayhern,' (thinking even as I'm saying this, 'Cunt's too nice a word for you, you supercunt) and turn back round and walk out. Well, as I've got another two-and-a-half hours to punch-out time, I figure I might as well run this second report, which I do. Afterwards, another two hours of electrified porn & scorn, then I'm headed for the door and towards Baker Street to catch the 84. About ten minutes into the second leg of the trip, on the 383, I hop on my mobile and give a ring to Quadruples, my local takeaway sandwich shop, and place an order for an Italian cold cut sub. Over the course of twenty or so of these Mazdaless commutes I've got this sandwich-ordering routine down to a science, as they say. I know that ten minutes into the 383 leg is exactly the moment when I should call in if I want to be sure my sandwich is just about ready when I get to 'Druples, if I want to be able (as I am today) to walk in there, greet Suma or Jagdeesh at the register, hand over my tenner, and be proffered my usual all inside of a minute. (Let me as an aside just put in a good word for the 'Druples's Italian cold cut sub, a noble edifice stuffed with every kind of meat and cheese imaginable. And to any Yank who might be reading this now and saying to himself, This limey asshole thinks he's had a real Italian cold cut sub. Has he ever been to D'Amici's in New York? or to Di Cazzo's in Philly? I say: just try me. I'd be more than happy--once I've got a few hundred quid to spare--to jump on a direct flight out of Heathrow to your home metropole, and take you on, culo a culo, in all of my shirty choler, in defence of the Quadruples Italian cold cut.)

Back at the maisonette, I put the takeaway bag on the kitchen counter and check the voice mail on my immobile phone. There's one message, from this bloke who calls himself Ralph. I can't say as I can recall having met anyone named Ralph since moving to the capital. At UEA, I did know a bloke name of Ralph Shillibeer, but it's been almost five years since I lost touch with him, when he dropped out at the end of his second year. What would he be doing calling me? And how would he have got hold of my number? It's unlisted. Anyway, the message went more or less like this: Hi, this is, uh, Ralph. [The tone of the voice is muzzy, absent-minded, indistinct.] How's it hanging? Uhhhhhhh.... [a belch] Sorry about that. I got way too pissed last night. Having trouble putting two thoughts together. You know how it is. So, I was just calling to remind you...uhhhhhh...excuse me a moment. [There's a few seconds of silence followed by what sounds like someone puking his guts up from a fair distance away, followed in turn by the equidistant sound of a flushing toilet. Then a few more seconds of silence, and he's back on the blower.] Sorrier about that. Anyway, uh, as I was saying, I was just calling to remind you about what I was telling you the other night down at the pub. [Indeed?] You know, about that special package trip you've been selected for, the all-expenses-paid trip to Mallorca...

I hang up. Well, there just went two minutes of my life I'll never get back, I say to myself. Two minutes squandered on hearing out the sales pitch of a fucking computerised telemarketer. Christ, will they stop at nothing?

Wellsir, this little digressive hurdle having been cleared, I go to the fridge and crack open a Stella, unwrap the sub and carry them both to the coffee table in front of my futon, where I settle down to eat and catch a spot of telly. It's 500 channels and fuck-all on, as the so-called Boss sings: sodding cooking shows and Hitler documentaries the full length of the dial. Much against my better judgement, for want of any better viewing fare, I allow myself to be sucked into watching a full episode of EastEnders. As I haven't followed the show since I was about ten and was practically forced to for a whole summer by my Grandma (at the time it was her favourite story), I can't recognize any of the characters or make head or tail of the plot. For some reason or other, the climactic moment involves this one bloke catching this girl--who he's shown no sign of being shacked up with or trying to pull--talking to another bloke on a closed-circuit TV monitor. I guess it'd all be clear to me if I'd tuned in 27 weeks ago.

Just as the credits are rolling on EastEnders, and I'm balling up the remains of my sandwich for the dustbin, at half-past eight, the doorbell rings. I assume it's Ronnie Livingstone, come round to propose an impromptu piss-fest down at the Ape, although it's not really his style to pop by unannounced like this. At all events, I hardly expect that when I open the door I'll be greeted--as I in fact subsequently am--by not one, not two, but ten children, dressed in a motley assortment of costumes, and screaming 'TRICK OR TREAT!' at me in discordant unison. It takes me a moment or two to register what's going on. Is this an unseasonably early charity collection for a local school's Christmas pantomine? Or a party of revellers on their way to or from a fancy dress ball for dwarfs? Then I reflect on what they've just said, remember what day of the year is, put one and one together, and realise: it's Halloween, and this is a pack of so-called trick-or-treaters.

Now, I don't know what part of the world you're from, gentle reader, but depending on the degree of popularity this here holiday of Halloween enjoys in your home town or country, and on your degree of familiarity with the history of regional folkways in the UK, you might be inclined to crown me the King of Thickness for not having anticipated this type of visitation, or for not at least having recognised it for what it was right off the foot. But I'm from a pretty remote corner of Norfolk, you see, and it occurs to me as I set about rationalising my stupefaction in the face of these trick-or-treaters, that there might actually have been a grain of insight in Sarah Slother's pigeonholing of me as a provincial the other night. My dad likes to joke, riffing on Mark Twain's famous quip about Cincinnati, Ohio, that if Norwich is the Cincinnati of the UK--meaning that if the world were about to end, you'd pack up and move there straightaway, seeing as how nothing seemed to catch on there till ten years after it had caught on everywhere else--then Diss is the Cincinnati of Norfolk. I haven't been back there at this time of the year in a good four years, so I don't what it's like now, but back in my day, we didn't celebrate Halloween in Diss. It was a Guy-Fawkes-day-only kind of town, and so, for that matter, was Norwich, as near as I could tell as a part-time resident. It was only after moving to London that I started getting used to seeing Halloween sweets and costumes on sale at Tesco's; but what with my being a single adult bloke with no kids, it never really sunk in with me how quickly mandatory celebration of this festival had caught on here. And as for flesh-and-blood trick-or-treaters, I'd never seen nary a one till last night. Next year, I'll see that I'm better prepared for the onslaught, if only for peace-of-mind's sake.

Anyway, back to the front door and the first dawning of my Halloweenic epiphany. I really want to say to these kids, 'Fuck off, you cuntlets; go bother Mrs Preston next door,' but I get a visceral kind of feeling, perhaps set off by associations between the present scene and my run-in last winter with little Brianna Ayhern, that that would be unwise. I know there's nothing in the kitchen suitable for consumption by minors, but I guess you could say for form's sake, I ought to make a cursory rummage round back there. I check the fridge: nothing but a half-empty jug of milk and my still ten-strong Stella twelve pack. I check the cupboards, whose sole contents consist of a half-full box of Weetabix, and exactly ten packets of Korean ramen noodles that I've ostensibly been saving for a rainy day (i.e., a day when I'm so much on my uppers that it comes down to doing without Stella or doing without takeaway). If only I'd grabbed a fistful of those fucking toxic waste balls when I had the chance! Well, I say to myself for the 50th time in the past week, adopt, adapt, and improve. The noodle packets are brightly-coloured and shiny, and labelled inscrutably enough in Korean: hopefully I can get the door bolted behind me before any of them opens one of them and catches on to the imposture. So, grabbing five of them in each fist, I head out back front and start passing them round. As I'm doing this, I note each of the costumes. To a little man and a little woman, they're transparent impersonations of characters from the just-past or just-approaching movie season: Spider Man, Lemony Snicket, Mr Tumnus, Johnny and Joan Carter Cash, etc. The last blokette has me stumped, though: he's got on a great black curly Harpo Marx wig, a black Charlie-Marx-sized fake beard, and an ankle-length smock or apron covered in what to my eyes look like bits of crusty fecal matter. 'And who might you be, young sir?' I ask him. 'I'm a Hairy Potter!' he rejoins 'Clever lad!' (Or not-so-clever lad with clever and sadistic mum or dad).

And with that, I shoo them all away, and slam the door behind me, taking care both to lock the deadbolt and pull the chain to. I go back to the futon, sit down, close my eyes, let out a deep sigh and count to one. Silence outside. I count to one again. Still not a sound. But just as I'm about to count to one a third time, I hear an irregular knocking sound coming from towards the bottom of the front door, followed by these muffled words, delivered in a voice that I'd say sounded like David Beckham on helium, if David Beckham's natural voice could get any higher than it naturally is: 'You fucking sod, trying to pass off fucking Chow Mein [sic] noodles for sweets! My mum's a lawyer, she'll get you, she'll have you put in Wormwood Scrubs, you cunting fuck!' Then the knocking gradually grows weaker, slows down, and finally stops, and before I get to my second count of round two of one-counting, there's a crashing sound of (no shit) breaking glass at the front window. I walk over to the site of the impact, and peer out at Woodside Avenue just in time to identify the perpetrator as he disappears into a shadow cast by a willow tree on the opposite pavement: it's the nipper in the Johnny Cash costume. I see that the little sod has managed to take out a whole pane of the window. With the expense of this repair tacked on to replacing the windows of the Mazda, I'm already close to a thousand quid out of pocket to the glaziers in the space of two days. At this rate, come the end of the month, I'll be lucky to be living on ramen and water.

At the moment, there's no remedy to hand but to crack open another Stella and light up a fag, and when I'm finished with the fag and half-way through the Stella, I'm finally calm enough to break out the old whisk broom and dust devil and sweep up the bigger pieces of glass and hoover up the smaller ones. In the midst of the breakage, I happen across the missile that was its cause--that missile being an unopened grenade-sized canister of Toxic Waste Balls. Well, I must thank Stella for small mercies. Here's a means of making nice with Miss Ayhern (and her dad) at the next Christmas party. Maybe I can even parley the presentation of it into a rise...? Not bloody likely.

By nine, I've got the glass cleaned up and a piece of cardboard from an old Stella twelve-pack taped over the empty pane, and I'm just settling down, over a third Stella and a second fag, to another pointless bout of cable roulette, when the doorbell rings again, and this time, my better judgement tells me I really should let it go. I tell myself, Look (YFC), you've cleared out the pantry, there's nothing else in the house to fob off on to the kids, maybe if, and only if, you mute the volume on the TV and keep absolutely stumm, maybe they'll think no one's home, and they'll go away without putting another hole in your front window.

But in my cuntish stupidity, I decide, as if in revenge for the abuse I've so far suffered tonight at the hands of the munchkin mobility, that, although I'm easily forty years too young for the part, I'm going to play at being the sinisterly stroppy bogeyman of a neighbour, that I'm going to fling open that door, let out a mighty guttural roar like a rabid wombat, and send them all scattering like terrified desert mice (or whatever sort of prey wombats prefer). Bad decision. Christ, I should at least have taken a look through the fucking peephole!

So, as I was saying, in my cuntish stupidity, I set my phiz in the most grotesquely stroppy attitude the muscles will bear, stomp up to the door, fling it open and see...a fully grown man. And Ronnie Livingstone it ain't, although he appears to be about Ronnie's (and my) age. He's wearing a flight jacket, a bloody Arsenal T-shirt, a plaid deerstalker-ish cap, khaki slacks and trainers. And behind him are standing four or five other blokes, similarly attired.

'Trick or treat,' he says to me, without a trace of a smile.

'I'm sorry,' I say to him, 'but your, em, predecessors have cleared me out. No more sweets on the premises, I'm afraid.' (In the space of a nanosecond I find I've morphed from a stroppy ogre into a wobbly-kneed latter-day Jeeves. My but how suddenly finding yourself face-to-face with a pack of unreconstructed yobbos does wonders for a case of the strops!)

'That's all right. We're not really in the market for sweets anyway. We prefer vittles more suited to grown-ups. Isn't that right, lads?' he adds, with a nod back to his mates, who all murmur back, each in his own good time, 'Yeah.'

'So, what are you blokes--er, lads--dressed as this evening?' I say, desperately keeping the charade going for want of any better stratagem.

'We're dressed as members of the East Finchley chav posse.'

And with his dropping of that monosyllable chav, I immediately find all of my strength returning to me. In a rush of adrenaline, my knees lock up, my fingers set to work on the top button of my shirt--but all for naught, for at that very moment, my interlocutor administers a mighty wallop to the pit of my stomach, and I crumple up on to the floor. There, as I lie weeping like a freshly-neutered puppy, I can hear the sound of many pairs of feet stomping past me towards the kitchen, the hermetic pop of the fridge door opening. I manage to get back up on one elbow just in time to catch the posse emerging from the kitchen, with one of the chavs, a different yob from the one who punched me, carrying an object I recognise all too well under one arm, a boxy something about the same size (if not shape) as a newborn infant. Reflexively, as the red-white-and-gold crest passes, I reach out towards it with a choked cry of 'Stella!'

'Aaaah, shaaaaddup, yah schlongsucker!' the kidnapper grunts at me, following up with a kick at the corner of my mouth that sends me collapsing once again back on to the floor.

Then everything goes black. Well, not really, or not, at any rate, immediately: what actually happens is that after they leave, I'm simply too overcome by the abject shittiness of my situation to get up off the floor; and that I prefer to lie there and fall asleep in a puddle of my own bloody drool. Well, naturally, next day--today--I pull a sickie. Good thing I got that anisette tampon report done a day early, what what?