And facking redder!!

I'm really starting to think that Ken has it in for me personally. You say I'm fucking paranoid? Explain this coincidence, then. The Northern Line shuts down for 'safety reasons' on the very day that 1) I happen to have a doctor's appointment in Kentish Town and b) my Mazda happens to be in the shop. What do you think the statistical likelihood is that all three of these cock-ups (or two cock-ups and one cock-chafe) happening on the same day is? I put it at about 1:1,760,999.021. So, no tube service means buses in place of trains along the lines, right? Yeah, we all know the drill. Trouble is, I don't know the drill, at least not on the Northern, because the last time I had to take a tube on a down line must have been back in '02, when I lived in Whitechapel, on the Hammersmith & City and District Lines. The upshot is that it was a long time ago, so this morning as I was listening to GLR--sorry, BBC London--over my usual breakfast peanut-butter-on-Weetabix-spread (don't knock it till you've tried it), and I heard the Northern Line would be down and that service would be 'supplemented' by buses I naively thought that that meant the bus would just sort of follow the tube route, you know? Stop at every station on the line. That's what a sensible bloke would assume by default, right? So I leave about an hour earlier than I'd planned to, figuring that this bus-leg of the trip is going to add, at most, an hour's worth of stubble to the trip. I get to the station ('Woodside Park?' you ask. 'Course, YFC!' I reply) and just sort of instinctively make my way for a corner of pavement near the entrance where maybe 50 people are all sort of half-standing, half milling-about, most of them all obviously on the verge of a strop attack. I ask around a bit to see if anybody can tell me when the fucking bus is supposed to show up, but nobody is any the wiser than I am in my total ignorance. So I take a stroll round the perimeter of the station a few times, smoke a fag or two, and when I'm coming round to the front for the fourth or fifth time, I see that a red bendy bus is parked out front and that a queue has just started to form at the front door of it. I step to the end of the queue and climb in with the rest of the hoi polloi, and straightaway I can tell that the bus is already half full and I have absolutely no chance of getting a seat. The driver calls out, 'Everyone move on back, please, lots of lovely room!' and I go as far back as I can, which as my beshattened luck would have it, was right at the join between the two halves of the bus--right at the accordionated bit, in other words. I mean, literally, my right foot was in the back half of the bus and my left foot was in the front. So for the whole trip I felt like I was stuck on that Great Frisco Temblor of '06 ride at Blackpool, the one where the floorboards rub against each other under your feet, that I always used to get sick on when I was a kid. So we pull out of the station turnaround, and straight away I notice something's wrong. My sense of direction is none of the keenest, but it's keen enough to tip me off that, although, assuming we were following the Northern Line we'd be heading south, the street we were on (Woodside Park Road, I presume) was carrying us eastward. I ask the bloke standing to my right--an old-school geezer in oatmeal tweeds and a Lenin cap--to smooth out this little discrepancy for me. 'Well, of course we're headed east, youngblood,' he says, as resentfully as though I'd asked him to explain, say, what he was doing wearing oatmeal tweeds and a Lenin cap in Barnet in 2005, 'That's where Arnos Grove station is.' 'Arnos Grove?' I says. 'Isn't that on the...' 'That's right. It's on the Piccadilly Line.' 'Cor, what good'll that do me? I'm trying to get to Kentish Town.' 'And I'm trying to get to Goodge Street. So I'll detube at Holborn and catch a bus there, or, failing that, walk. You'll have to do the same, get off at the nearest stop on the Piccadilly Line to Kentish Town. It's SOP, dontcherknow, during these suspensions of service, to transport passengers to the nearest stop on an adjacent line.' 'SOP?' 'Standard Operating Procedure.' 'Oh, of course.' Right about then, as I was wrapping up my convo with this geezer, I started noticing this really horrible smell, a smell exactly like the smell of an overcooked grilled marmite sandwich. And right after that, I start to notice a plume of smoke hovering in the vicinity of the accordion join right in front of me. And I look round and see that everyone else is starting to notice it too. But contrary to the way you might expect people to behave in the presence of an outbreak of fire, no one is particularly alarmed. All I see in the faces of my fellow riders is a mixture of irritation and resignation, and all I hear coming from their mouths are words like 'Fuck,' 'Shit,' 'Gorblimey,' and 'Dagnabbit' uttered in tones not deserving of an exclamation point. And on second thought, I wasn't in the least bit surprised that they weren't more panicked. I'd already heard on the news of several of these bendy buses' catching fire, and from what I'd gathered from these reports, a fire on a bendy bus was about as unusual an occurence as a riot as a ManCity-Arsenal game. So we lumber on for maybe another quarter of a mile, then pull over at this special bus stop, with an old brick shelter and a mini turnaround of its own, and everybody files out. The bus is smoking out its sides, but, again, nobody seems to feel they're in harm's way, that there's any danger that it'll blow up or anything like that. I turn to my mate the geezer and ask him what happens next. 'What happens next, youngling, is that we wait here for another bus to carry us to Arnos Grove station.' Great. So this here scenario was pretty much a replay of the one at Woodside, except that this time I went through twice as many fags and I had nothing to stroll around unless I felt like braving the traffic to get to the Wimpy's across the street (which I didn't). Eventually the second bus showed up, and fortunately it got us all the way to Arnos Grove without catching fire, and fortunately I got to the platform just in time to jump on a southbound train that was just pulling up. In the meantime I'd lost track of Squire Tweedledum, so I had to figure out on my own exactly how far down I should ride this train. As near as I could tell from screwing up my eyes at a tube map on the wall opposite me, Caledonian Road was my best bet. On the way, of course, we passed through the Arsenal stop; and naturally being a high priest of the church of all haters of the football club bearing the A-name, I crossed myself upside-down there. On resurfacing at CR, I tried to get my bearings vis-a-vis Cuntish Town and my doctor's office. But before I'd so much as taken stock of the name of the cross-street, I felt a faint and by no means unpleasant vibration on my co-jones. It was my mobile. 'Mr McGyver,' the politely stroppy female voice on the other end addressed me, 'Your appointment with Dr Singh was for 2:00 and it is now 3:30. I regret to inform you on his behalf that, in view of your flagrant unpunctuality, he will have to reschedule.' I take a deep breath, count to one, and remind myself that, whilst it's not my fault I'm late, it's not their fault either. Then I say, 'OK. When's the nearest available time?' 'Let's see...March the 25th, 9:15 am?' 'March the fucking 25th? Get Dr Singh himself on the blower, prontissimo.' 'At this moment, Dr Singh is very busy...' 'I don't care if at this moment he's performing a colonoscopy on the Queen herself. I want to talk to him.' 'Very well.' So, Dr Singh comes on and I say to him, 'What's all this about not being able to see me before March the 25th? Christ, I could be dead by then, for all you know.' 'Could be dead, you say?' he says to me, and already I don't quite like his tone. 'Could be dead by then, you say, of an....mmm [I guess he's riffling through, or pretending to riffle through, my chart here]....scrotal rash? I doubt that very much, sir.' And he starts outright giggling, like a little girl. And so I start to scream into the blower, 'Look here, Dr Singh, I lay out muchas isabelas for health care through my taxes, and I think the least that I'm entitled to expect from you lot is...' Here he breaks in and says, 'I'm sorry, Mr McGyver, but I must go. Duty calls. I'm at this moment performing a colonoscopic examination on a person of some eminence.' Then the phone went dead, and I walked over to the first pub I set my eyes on--some shite joint called the Flounder and Firkin, where I got stroppily tanked on a dozen pints of Kronenbourg (my fallback beer [they were out of Stella, and there could of course have been no question of my drinking this pub's speciality, that sickbed piss known as real ale]). I got out of there just barely in time to catch the last outbound Piccadilly train, and to Arnos Grove no less barely in time to catch the last bus to Woodside Park. How long did the trip take? Well, I'm afraid I didn't check the time at any point along the way. I do know, though, that I was sober as an imam by the time I got home. Anyway, the moral of this story is: Fuck Ken and Fuck the National Health Service. Fuck them both through the same Texas-porn-shop-appointed glory hole.

Stropfest '05: Part 247

It's midnight. Just got back from the pub. I'm pissed on six pints of Stella and right stroppy! Had a run-in there (at the Ape) with one of my old girl mates (or whatever the proper word is for a richard you haven't managed to pull [yet!]), name of Maggie, Maggie Elms. I met her about three years ago, when we were both working at the caff at at the BBC--Bush House, not the Television Centre. Blonde, bit on the heavyset side, seems to take her fashion cues from Desperate Housewives. Still, not a bad looker--not to mention the fact that she's got a rack you could shelve a complete set of the OED--the real, pre-digitised one--on. Back then at the Beeb I tried chatting her up a few times , but with no luck; I didn't even get to the half-way line with her. Then I was fired from that job (probably because I was spending so much time chatting her up and so little time minding the chip vat), and I lost touch with her. Anyway, I'd been sitting there at a table by the fruit machine for about two hours talking to my mate Ronnie Livingstone (no relation to Ken, he swears [and I swear I'll smash his fucking steak-and-kidney-piehole in if I ever find out they are related!]) and watching, not very closely, a replay of the Wolverhampton-Burnley match on the telly, when she walked in. I signal to her to join us, which she does, and we do a bit of catching up. Turns out she's just moved to the neighbourhood (not that I consider Golders Green part of the neighbourhood as such) and now works at a bank. So Ronnie offers to buy her a beer, and she says she'll take a Guinness, and right about then I start feeling like I'm within my rights to get shirty with Ronnie on account of the fact that he seems be putting the ball in play so he can get a direct free kick out of this girl's being there, but I let it slide because obviously I have to let it slide if I want to have any hope of scoring point one, let alone a hat trick, tonight. So he goes away to the bar, and I do my best in the interval to lay on the charm, but all I manage is to get an earful from her about this bank job of hers before Ronnie's back with three beers--two Guinnesses for him and her and a Stella for me. I buy the next round, and he buys the one after that, and so on; Maggie doesn't buy any, doesn't even lift her finger to offer to buy one (I took that as a sign that she assumed we were both pulling on her, and wanted us to know that she assumed it). And the whole night I'm thinking I look like a total cheapskate because I'm drinking Stella, which at the Ape costs a full quid less than Guinness. But I'm not about to switch to Guinness, even for a single night, just to impress some dopey girl. I'd sooner drink my own piss than drink that swill. Actually, I'd much sooner drink my own piss than drink Guinness, because my own piss at least looks a bit like beer, whilst Guinness not only tastes like piss but on top of that looks like liquid shit. Well, anyway Ronnie and I had already put away about three pints before Maggie showed up, so naturally we were already pretty well on our way to being tanked by then, and we were definitely three sheets to the old double-yew when they called last orders. And as usually happens in these situations where two blokes are pulling on the same girl, the conversation pretty much just kept rolling along as it would have done if the girl hadn't shown up. It has to do that, because the only alternative is for one of the blokes to pay more attention to the girl than to his mate, who then inevitably starts feeling like a bollocksless wonder and either picks a fight, or, more typically, storms out of the place in a seething rage of repressed randiness and stroppiness, which just encourages the girl to throw in the old J-Cloth on the evening too. It's a lose-lose-lose situation, you see. So we just kept debating the original point of the evening, which was 'Who is a more monstrous cunt--Arsène Wenger or Thierry Henry?,' and as you can tell by my phraseology, our lingo generally leant more than a few degrees towards the off-colour side of the perpendicular. Mind you, I was watching Maggie out of the corner of my eye the whole time, and I could tell she was getting more and more offended by all the profanity. Until finally, just after Jimmy Phipps, the head barman, had come round the first time to tell us to finish up, she stands up, puts her hands on her hips and says in this hoity-toity tone of voice, 'My, but aren't you two guys giving yourselves some side?--carrying on like a couple of chavs with your cees and effs, and completely ignoring me. What do you take me for, some kind of a spandex jumper and cutoff jeans-sporting blokess who actually follows football?'

Well, that about settled it. At that point, she was all Ronnie's, as far as I was concerned. He could have her and the fucking package tour of Cornwall in the bargain if he wanted to do. But there was a point I thought I owed it to myself to make to her first. So I said to her, 'My, Princess Margaret the Second, but aren't you giving yourself some side?--calling us guys, comparing us to chavs and taking umbrage at the idea of being regarded as a blokess. I myself am proud to call myself a bloke, and would hardly scruple to consort with, or even to marry, a blokess. Of course, I would never dream of addressing a fellow bloke as bloke, any more than, were I a member of the poshility, I would dream of addressing an individual fellow toff as gentleman. We blokes have a different honorific for that purpose, that honorific being lad (ladess--not 'ladette'--being its feminine equivalent). But being a bloke or a blokess, per se, is nothing to be ashamed of. And as president and charter member of the East Finchley chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Blokishness against the Incursions of Guydom and Chavishness (SPBAIGC), I am duty-bound to remonstrate with any person or set of persons who would besmirch the good name of bloke by imputing to it the remotest degree of consanguinity, by the spear or by the distaff, with that most churlish of all anthroponyms, chav. Hie thee hence, woman; get thee to a chavvery, for 'tis plain to all that have eyes that thour't naught but a chavess in blokess's clothing.'

She was looking poisoned micks at me throughout this speech, and just as I was getting to that bit about the Society for the Preservation of Blokishness, etc., I saw her eyes narrow into horizontalised vertical smiles, as they say, and I could tell that she already had a comeback waiting for me. So as soon as I finished, without missing a beat, as they say, she says to me, 'I apologise for the chav comparison. That was paying you too high a compliment. I see now that, even worse than that, you're nothing but a common, run-of-the-mill anorak.' And with that, she picks up her three-quarters-full glass of beer, drains it at one go, puts the glass back on the table, summons forth a mighty belch worthy of a 20-stone bloke, turns on her pointy three-inch heel and marches out, leaving Ronnie and me alone with our two schlongs and our two half-glasses of Guinness and Stella. I tallied the total cost of her beers in my head--Cor, she'd just bilked us to the chune of 10 quid! Then Ronnie says to me, 'For fuck's sake, why did you have to go and bollocks everything up like that?' And I says to him, 'Like what? It must have been obvious to you that she wouldn't have had anything to do with either of us for all the kheer in Oldham.' And he says to me, 'Well, you didn't help matters any with your Society for the Preservation of Cuntishness Against the Incursions of Dudedom or whatever the fuck you called your fictitious club. Christ, you don't even live in East Finchley!' 'Course I don't,' I says to him, affecting to examine my nails with a detachment worthy of a Cotswalds bungalow. 'But what self-respecting regular bloke is going to admit he's from Woodside Park, a mere throne's stow from the fucking Hertfordshire County Golf Club? At least East Finchley's got a couple of snooker parlours.' 'Whatthefuckevs, you fucking anorak,' I then heard (or thought I heard) him mutter into his last mouthful of Guinness. Then Jimmy came round a second time to kick us out (No lock-ins on weeknights is an inviolable rule of Mr Sedule, the owner), and I walked home and started writing this here post.