Tales from the Dun Cow 1 (2024)

Tales from the Dun Cow 1

1. Fuchsia

2. Spoilers

You know the film The Usual Suspects?
​Toby looks up from his sudoku again ‘Good film.’
‘Well, what if someone told you how it ends?’
‘I know how it ends.’
‘Before you’d seen it, told you about Verbal.’
‘Verbal?’
‘Kevin Spacey.’
Toby does a Gallic shrug. ’Okay, so what’s this got to do with the Guardian?’
I’ve been telling Toby about the Guardian’s quick crossword, how there’s an online version with comments posted by a community of solvers that includes people who give the answers to clues in their posts.
’So?’
‘Well, a lot of people don’t like it.’
‘A lot of people?’
‘Some people, a number of, a proportion…’
‘But…don’t they know the answer anyway?’
’Not necessarily. Some people read the comments before they do the crossword.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just the way they prefer to do it.’
’So when they come across an answer to something…’
‘Some reply to the poster with…a reproof’
‘A reproof?’
‘You know, a finger-wag, a smacked wrist.’
‘Well at least it’s not a kicking.’
‘Gets close sometimes.’
‘Don’t be daft! It’s a bloody crossword’. Toby swigs off a quarter pint and returns to his sudoku, shaking his head.
’Six! Nine!’
‘What?’
’Spoilers. Sudoku spoilers. Just wanted to see your reaction.’
Toby wags his finger at me.
I drain my glass, ’You do know Bambi’s mum gets killed?’
‘Bastard!’
Andy arrives, ‘What are you talking about?’
’Spoilers.’
‘You do know what a spoiler is?’ says Toby, a bit supercilious.
‘Mais oui’ Andy matches his tone, ‘I had one on the back of my Capri.’

3. Dope

‘Have you been to that new vaporiser shop, next to the butchers?’
Andy and me shake our heads.
‘You know where I mean though.’
Andy and me nod. With a delicate pinch of index finger and thumb, Toby pulls a vaporiser from his breast pocket and lays it on the table. It rolls away from him and chinks against my empty glass.
‘I didn’t know you smoked, Toby.’
‘I don’t, I vape.’ Plosive P.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Packed up years ago. But these are different, none of the nasties.’
‘There’ll be something.’
‘You’re always a glass half empty kind of bloke, Andy..’
‘Only when it’s your round and I have to nurse it.’
‘…unfair…anyway have you tried it? Either of you?’
Andy shakes his head, I nod mine.
‘Tell him, it’s different isn’t it?’
‘I’m sure it is, but my one is designed for the herb of your choice.’
Andy smiles.
‘Dope?’, Toby tried saying it sotto voce but it came out hard and high, ’Do you still smoke that?’
‘Yes but I’ve tried vaporising it too.’
Andy stands and grabs our empty glasses, pinching them together with the fingers and thumb of one big hand, ’Set vaporisers to stun.’
We instantly have a good laugh. Pleased with his hit, Andy heads for the bar.
‘Why d’you want to smoke that stuff?’
For all that Toby likes to think of himself as sharp, it’s clear this question came from an irony-free zone. ‘For one thing, it’ll give me a few more go rounds with Andy’s quip.’ I start chuckling again.
’So is that what it’s about? Laughing all the time?’
’No.’ I feel myself becoming defensive, ‘Not all the time. But as often as I can.’
‘What sort of example is that? Life’s a serious business.’
‘If you say so, Toby.’ There’s sarcasm in my voice and I’ve disappointed myself. Andy returns with three brimming pints clamped together by both hands. Setting them on the table, not a drop spilled, he glanced at both us in turn, sensing tension.
Toby tried to ground it, ’How’s the fuchsia empire doing Andy - now you’ve handed it on to your son?’
‘It’s hard to let go but you have to. I can’t keep watching over his shoulder. Interfering.’
‘Interfering? All that experience? All that skill?’ Be a shame for it to go to waste.’ Toby looked to me, tension gone, for endorsem*nt. I could tell that he hadn’t seen what he was looking for.
‘I’ve never known anyone as good with plants as you are Andy’, I said. Thankfully Andy didn’t do false modesty. ‘Do you think you could show me how to grow a tricky plant?’
‘Tricky?’
’He means trippy,’ Toby flashes a glare at me, ’Sometimes, you are Mr bloody Mischief.’
But I was being Mr Serious.

4. Kundalini

I was late. Rain had held me in the house, humming and hawing about whether to go to the Dun Cow when I heard Paul McCartney singing in my head, ‘You've never felt the rain my friend,till you've felt it running down your back’. Worse, I couldn’t remember the name of the song; I got indignant with myself for being both faint-hearted and forgetful. I set out, and if it’s possible to be ostentatious when no-one can see you, I ostentatiously left my umbrella. Andy and Toby were already there. ‘You look like a drowned rat!’
‘I can’t stand the rain…’ Toby half-sang half-chanted.
‘It’s only weather.’
‘Pint?’
‘Thanks - Tipsy Toad’, I did my Get Carter impression, snapping my fingers, ’In a thin glass.’
A small puddle gathered on the floor at my feet.
‘Why didn’t you bring an umbrella?’
‘Because sometimes Andy, I get twattish.’
He gave me an understanding look. ’Here, you’ve done yoga and that haven’t you?’
‘A bit.’
‘What’s a kundalini?’
I’d read something about it once but never having got far into any discipline without being threatened, I could only say that it was something to do with a life force, likened to a snake coiled at the base of the spine ‘…waiting to be awakened. Supposed to be good for libido, org*sms and all that. Why?’
‘org*sms?’ Andy’s gaze drifts, shaping an intimate tableau.
‘You alright Andy?’ says Toby, handing me my drink.
‘She’s having an affair.’
‘Who?’
‘Olga.’
Toby and me exchange a did I hear that right look.
‘Olga?!’
‘All these years and she’s going to leave me for a poxy yoga teacher.’
We were about to laugh at this notion, at Andy’s foolishness, but quiet had settled on him, diminished him. Our friend seemed suddenly fragile.
Toby leaned forward, his voice stilted, ’It might not be what you think Andy…who…how long has Olga been going to yoga?’
Andy joined us from a long way away. ’She starts next week. Holy Trinity.’
Toby rolled his eyes. I grimaced, ’Sometimes Andy, you get twattish.’

5. Brexit

‘What is it with you men? Why do you have to argue? It’s the drink.’
‘We’d only had two pints. It’s nothing to do with the beer.’
‘So now you’re not speaking to one another!’
‘No, I said we had a falling out.’
‘Over what?’
‘Because…we couldn’t agree to disagree.’
She laughed. ‘So…what? You disagreed to disagree? What did you “fall out” about?’
‘Brexit. We…’
She held up her hands, palms towards me before leaving the room shaking her head ‘I don’t want to know.’
For the second time that evening I knew myself as a source of irritation, first to Toby and Andy, now to my wife.
‘f*ck it’ I said quietly to no-one, poured myself a whiskey and water and sat on the sofa to continue reading The Blind Assassin. But my mind was reheating the conversation in The Dun Cow and I had to put the book down.
It had been an OK, as per, post book club evening. We had been discussing Margaret Atwood’s book, until Toby came back from the bar with his round, and with a little backwards nod over his left shoulder said, ’Another one who can’t accept he’s on the wrong side of history.’
Andy and me waited for the clarification.
‘Another embittered remainder’ Toby twinkled to Andy then meaningfully, to me.
Toby had dubbed us pre-referendum The Three Brexiteers. He was surprised to hear I was a remainer or ‘remainder’ as he now chose to call me. I was alarmed to think I had given him any cause to assume I was a leaver.
‘You don’t have to get all stabby with it, Toby.’
‘What? What did I do? Andy? What did I do?’
Andy clockwised his pint on its beermat, ‘It’s done. We’re out. Let’s all just…get on with things shall we?’
‘That’s what I’ve been saying. It was a clear-cut decision…’
‘Mathematically.’
‘… it was a clear-cut decision and guess what? We’re not all fascists and racists like we’ve been portrayed by the remainders.’
These moments repeatedly present themselves throughout your life. Combustible moments that you could let pass in silence or walk away from, allowing them to die. Or seize and grow into rampant minutes, hours of heated disagreement. I repeatedly fail to be silent, fail to walk away.
‘There’s been a lot of misrepresentation Toby, and by including me in that statement, you’re a part of it.’
‘Well, alright, I’m not saying you thought that way…’
‘But you are, you’ve pigeon-holed me in the very same way you are objecting to being pigeon-holed yourself. At least I’m aware of what you are doing, of what’s been done - you’ve just swallowed it all haven’t you? Believed all the lies, all that crap about having our cake and eating it.’
Toby’s momentum deserted him and in a more considered but intense way turned to Andy, ’You know what I mean don’t you? We’re not racists or fascists because we voted out.’
‘I didn’t vote.’
‘Didn’t vote?’ Toby seemed genuinely nonplussed.
‘Yeah. Did. Not. Vote.’
‘I thought you were going to vote out.’
‘Thought about it.’
’So why didn’t you vote?’
‘Because I was fed up with all the sh*te everyone talks…still am.’
Andy downed the rest of his pint quickly, and standing to leave waved his copy of The Blind Assassin, ‘Think we can do this next week…gents?’ He didn’t wait for an answer.

I sipped my whiskey. One in, one out, one no show. I took a small book from the shelf and after a brief search slipped a bookmark into the page I was looking for:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
  Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
  Came out of the same Door as in I went.

Next week’s peace offering.

6. Blue

7. Boycott TMS

8. Literature

9. Olympics

‘Well, I don’t care what you think, it makes me proud to be British.’ Toby emphasises ‘you’, ‘me’ and ‘British’, and noisily scraping back his chair, goes to the bar for his round. I’ve upset him by being insufficiently patriotic.
‘Why do you wind him up?’ Andy asks.
‘Well, my take on just about anything seems at odds with his in some way, it’s difficult not to wind him up.’
Toby had been eulogising GB's sporting endeavour, adding to The Dun Cow’s olympic natter of seconds and metres, gold and silver, dedication and wonder. When he said that events like BMX and synchronised swimming were ‘…not proper sports…’ and ‘comical’, I said that given a little reflection, all sport took on a surreal quality that was not only comical but bizarre and that attaching so much significance to it, with rules and refs, medals and medal tables, flag-waving, chest-beating and interviews with leaping or weeping relatives seemed to me even less grounded.
‘It’s pride. Pride in achievement. Pride in your family. Pride in your country. The problem with people like you is that you don’t believe in your country.’
‘Toby, I don’t even know what you mean by that.’
‘You don’t believe in it, don’t get behind it, support it.’
‘I'm not a flag-waver but I pay my taxes, I vote. I live by its laws…’
’So do most people, but would you fight for it?’
‘Wait a minute! How did we get onto fighting for your country?’
‘Would you? If there was a war…would you sign up, fight?’
‘Depends.’
‘See!’ Toby turns to Andy, ‘This is what I mean. Depends! When the country is being invaded, there he is wondering whether to fight for it! Depends! On what?’
‘Whether the country was being invaded, for example.’
‘Have you heard the expression My country, right or wrong?’
‘Yes Toby and it’s as ridiculous as it sounds.’
‘Ridiculous!?’
‘It absolves…’
‘That dressage’ Andy interrupts, ‘I wonder if the gold medal horsesh*t is better than silver or bronze. I wonder if you could charge more for plants grown using gold medal dressage horsesh*t. I bet someone is already.’
I’m grateful for Andy’s interruption but as I watch Toby go to the bar I wonder where that ‘people like you’ came from so suddenly, so vehemently. There was animus.
‘What was that all about anyway?’ I ask Andy, ‘One minute we’re talking olympics, the next it’s war.’
‘He’s competitive is our Toby. I think that’s how he sees and understands the world - like a continuum of conflict.’
Maybe Andy is right. When Toby returns with the drinks I challenge him.
‘Right, I don’t have to put up with your ‘people like you’ crap, I’m going to give you a damn good thrashing.’
Toby looks irritated but puzzled.
‘What’s it to be Toby, rock, paper, scissors or darts?’

10. Merry Christmas

The hum of conversation briefly thinned when Andy came into The Dun Cow on his crutches. When it buzzed into life again, the edge of laughter made it sound brighter than before. Andy’s face went red, his tightened lips white. They knew. A few had read about it on the local rag’s website but most had heard it through the grapevine. They all had a version of ‘Man goes nuts in garden centre’, and nutso man was Andy.
‘So are they going to charge you?’ Toby asks.
Andy shrugs.
‘What’s with the foot?’
‘Broke my big toe.’
I’m the first to crack but when Toby comes in with his laugh it makes me laugh louder, harder. We have to get the laughing out of the way because we want to hear Andy’s explanation of what happened. We knew it was Andy who went bonkers in the garden centre and destroyed their christmas merchandise display. We also knew that in the process of dragging a christmas tree down and booting decorations in all directions he managed to kick the still being curated nativity scene up in the air, breaking his big toe. Agony. Immobility. Ignominy. Police. Ambulance. All this plucked from the grapevine. But not the answer to why?
‘I don’t know, I was all of a sudden…enraged by all that christmas stuff. For christ’s sake, we’re nowhere near christmas!’
‘Yeah, for his sake!’
‘You know what I mean Toby, it’s just October! It’s a poxy garden centre, they should be selling bulbs and plants - garden stuff, not christmas crap.’
‘I admire your activism Andy,’ I say ‘but I think it’s going to cost you.’
‘I’m thinking of saying I had some sort of blackout or fit. Only came to my senses when I hurt myself.’
Having family who have had fits or blackouts, I was irritated by this idea, ‘I’m sure it’s been tried lots of times Andy but even if it ‘works’, don’t you think pretending that - well, you know - it wouldn’t be good for your - karmic balance.’
‘f*ck karma! I need a plan and that’s a possible.’
Then I remembered the relative who had fits and relied upon that to mount a successful defence of a shoplifting charge. He told me later he’d been drunk and properly caught and that getting off that charge was the only time having epilepsy had done anything positive for him. I decided to shut up about karma.
‘Another possible is you say sorry and pay for the damage…’ Andy shifts and I can instantly tell he’s already thought of this. ‘…then maybe you won’t get prosecuted.’
‘Yeah. Repent yobbo!’ Toby jokes.
‘Or I could take what’s coming…’ Andy says, thinking as he goes, ‘…and turn it into a statement against…rampant christmas greed.’
‘Right on!’ Toby jokes on.
‘Maybe you can get some crowd funding for fines, costs…’, I’m on a roll, ‘…get an ‘up with this we will not put’ website going. Never mind The Leader, you’ll get a spot on Look North.’
Toby looks at me aghast when he dings I’m not joking. Andy fires up a slow smile.

When I get home, I roll myself one and play some Radiohead - Karma Police and No Surprises. Georgie asks ‘What made you put that on?’
‘Feeling reflective.’
‘I like it but it’s a bit…’
Georgie’s right. I play some Skatalites and we skan* the kitchen whilst I update her on Andy’s alter ego, Destructo. And for the second time that night, I hurt my ribs laughing.

11. Merry Christmas - slight return

‘No charges. All sorted.’
‘Don’t come the mystery man Andy, what happened?’ Toby is revved and ready to go.
‘I found out who the head honcho was, phoned them and made a proposal - that was accepted.’
‘What proposal?’
‘One that it didn’t really make sense not to accept.’
‘What’s that?’ I ask, ‘You smash up their christmas display, get carted off with a broken toe and come back at them with Carry on Mafioso?’
Andy dismisses me with a wave. ‘I offered to pay for the damage and do a few plant growing presentation things, gratis. All square.’
‘I bet that’s a weight off your mind’ Toby says. Me, I’m disappointed that Andy isn’t going to make something of it, do his protest thing. Once the fire fades, in comes pragmatism and it’s all linear stuff.
‘If it was me, I would have made you be Father Christmas in a kiddies’ grotto.’
‘It’s bad enough as it is Toby, Olga’s saying things like “Dinner’s ready, Scrooge; have you fed the dog, Scrooge?” ‘
A memory looms up and I tell them about the time when I was young and unemployed and waiting my place on a government training scheme. Whilst I was waiting, I got a job in well known department store as a porter, having to enthusiastically lie that I saw my future with them and wanted to work my way up. They had their doubts but offered me a job anyway, in either the carpet or toy department. I’d seen how big and heavy the rolls of carpet were and took the toy department.
One day I got asked to help set up Santa’s Grotto. I quite fancied the window dresser lass who’d be in charge and briefly fantasised some serious flirting in the grotto. But I get taken to the stock room to fill Santa’s sacks with wrapped toys and shown where all those filler toys are. Come lunchtime, Santa’s Grotto is progressing and I ask how much entry will cost. When I’m told, I think what sh*t value for money it is. That afternoon, back in the stockroom, every fourth or fifth toy I wrap is a zinger. Nothing conspicuously bigger or heavier, just from more expensive shelves, some much more expensive. I have fun thinking of the kids unwrapping them and their parents’ gratified ‘Someone’s dropped a bollock’ chuckles.
‘That’s got to be gross misconduct.’ says Toby.
‘It felt right at the time.’
Toby’s doing mild outrage, ’If every employee did stuff like that, companies would soon go out of business.’
‘No, that takes someone like a Philip Green doing altogether different stuff. Anyway, you couldn’t get away with it now…all that tagging and scanning.’
Toby is about to battle me on that one when Andy says, ‘It’s a bit late, but that deserves a whiskey.’ and hobbles off to the bar.
‘Cheers Andy, Irish please.’ I call after him.
‘I’m drinking with a couple of subversives!’ says Toby, ‘I know about you but here's Andy growing marijuana plants and smashing up the garden centre.’
‘He’s retired, it’s good to keep busy.’
Andy puts a double on the table for me. ’To Santa’s Grotto’, I toast. Andy drinks, Toby doesn’t.
’So did you get off with that lass?’ Andy asks.
’No. “Remember you’re just a porter!” is what she said. Oh the hurt!’
‘Yeah, it cuts you at that age doesn’t it?’
‘Don’t be daft! I couldn’t stop laughing. She tried to get me disciplined for ‘inappropriate laughter’.’
‘You must have been a nightmare employee.’
‘Not really Toby, I was just a square peg. I couldn’t get with the game.’
‘I’m going to do all that compensation stuff for the garden centre,’ says Andy, ‘I mean, I don’t want a record or ASBO or anything. But I’m thinking I might still do the website thingy.’
‘What?’
‘I told number two son about what happened and he knows how to do all that stuff. Thinks it could be a goer.’
‘That,’ I say, ‘would deserve a bottle of this.’ I savour my whisky and get a glow.

12. Soirée

‘Don’t go mad with the drink, no smoking anything, no talking about politics or religion…and no swearing.’
‘I might as well stay at home - you could go on your own.’
Georgie gives me her Snow Queen stare, ‘And it wouldn’t kill you to wear a tie for once.’
A smartly worded riposte gets strangled by smarter, unspoken words, like discretion and valour.
‘You know my tie days are done, Georgie. What about a cravat?’
‘Why can’t you just do normal?’
‘I’m averse to it. My middle name is ponce.’
‘You said it.’
This banter is just pre-event tension. I’ve been ready for ages but Georgie has been suffering outfit doubt. Between a couple of spliffs and her changes of mind over her look, I’ve managed to become confused and inattentive when tested with ‘This one or the other one?’ challenges and I’ve got no chance of being right until she is. We’re getting ready to go to Toby and Carol’s soirée.

Andy and me have been intrigued from the moment Toby handed us our RSVPs but he’s kept schtum despite our fishing, probing then point blank asking what it was all about. Andy is convinced that Toby has an agenda, ‘You know I don’t do funny handshakes Toby.’
Toby sighs.
‘And I don’t want to become Rotarian.’
‘Not everyone has ulterior motives, Andy. Why can’t Carol and me simply invite our friends round for the evening because we like their company?’
I’ve always liked cribbage and had a remote interest in the idea of bridge; poker however, with its overtones of machismo and its chip-piled posturing, holds no interest for me. If it did, and I had been playing Toby, the anxiety that unpokered his face would have signalled ‘quarry’. He got up to buy a round before I followed up my intuition, Andy and me exchanged a look.
‘Well, why can’t it just be a good time invite for friends?’ I ask.
‘Cos it’s Toby.’
‘Maybe it’s Carol.’
And there, we tacitly agreed to leave it. We’ve got so used to Toby regaling us with anecdotes of his domestic ascendancy that we had almost begun to take them literally, despite them running so counter to our own experience. It had to be Carol.

We finally make it out of the house, avoidably detained. We don’t do fashionably late as we both think that’s a bit rude and not really fashionable at all. Anyway, I like to get there in reasonable time and get stuck in. Carol opens the door when we din the dolphin knocker and greets us with a big smile and a kiss.
’You look lovely, Georgie.’
‘You too!’ and they’re off, arm in arm. Toby hoves into view and I can tell he’s already been caning it. As if choreographed, the thing on his co*cktail stick falls off and he treads it into the carpet as he walks towards me.
‘sh*t!’
‘I was hoping for something tastier.’
‘What’s that ‘round your neck?’
‘Come on Mr Sophisticato, you know it’s a cravat.’
‘It looks a bit…poncey.’
‘When you’re right, you’re right’ I laugh, taking my freshly charged zippo from my pocket and giving its lid a few clink-clunks, ’Is there a designated smoking area?’
We head off to the garden, arm in arm.

13. Car wars

Toby is getting hacked off now. He’s bought a round and been twice to the gents and each time he comes back, Andy and me start up with the Star Wars theme - Daaa-da-dadadada-daaa-da. Carol has rung round to ask where she could get Toby what he wanted for his upcoming birthday, a personalised number plate - TOBY 1. So tonight we’re ripping into Toby-Wan Kenobi in the relentless way that only friends can get away with. It’s childish but we can’t stop ourselves.
Andy waves his mobile. ‘Here you go - eBay.’
Toby and me read:Private registration plate L70 BYY perfect for anyone called TOBY, £399.
‘Perfect!?’ Toby exclaims, ‘How stupidly imperfect is that? Must be a moron.’
‘Perfect for a mug like you. What do you want a personalised number plate for? If it’s four-hundred quid for that, what’s it going to be for one that actually does spell your name?’
‘It would be an investment, Andy.’
‘If it exists and you could afford it and there’s another mug Toby out there to buy it from you.’
‘What’s the attraction?’ I ask, ‘Why not have any old number plate and spend the money on a better car?’
Toby looks at me as if his movember effort has turned into a turd. ’Better car!? Are you a complete automotive ignoramus? What could be better than a British Racing Green 1966 Jaguar Mark II with tan leather interior and split-rim wire wheels?’
I had forgotten about Toby’s restoration Jag, wheeled out of his garage during dry, bright weather for ongoing work, fondling and cherishing. He had made a wonderful job of it and although I am not a car enthusiast, not even a driver, I recognised it as a thing of beauty and admired Toby’s skill and passion in getting it to emerge from its rusty chrysalis.
‘Well, I rather like the look of that old Citroën, the slopey one that goes up and down on its suspension.’
‘The Citroën DS, with hydropneumatic suspension.’
‘I’ll take your word for it Toby. I trust you on all things car. Except I have to say that if you were thinking of TOBY 1 for your Jag - well, it would be demeaning somehow. And OTT. How standout do you want to be?’
‘He might know sweet FA about cars Toby, but he’s right about the number plate, if that’s what you wanted it for.’
Now he’s been rumbled, Toby puts on a sulky look, made sulkier by his moustache. ‘It was just an idea.’
‘Cheer up Toby.’ I say, ‘With all the money you’ll save, you could get yourself a Picasso or Matisse for the kitchen.’
‘At least I go for classic British engineering and design - what’s with the French car?’
‘Classic French, Toby.’
‘Touché!’ Andy exclaims, making an elaborate fencing gesture before bringing a pointed finger to rest in Toby’s chest.
Toby finds he has to smile, ‘Whose round is it?’
‘Your round, Toby-Wan, it is.’ Andy nails the impression.
‘Give it a rest guys. Pint?’
’Noilly Prat, ice and lemon please.’
Andy chuckles. Toby makes an elaborate, classic, two-fingered British gesture before going to the bar and returning with three pints.

14. Demises and Surprises

Andy and Toby are trying to cheer me up. But I’m blue black brown - pick your mood heart study colour.
‘Bowie’s gone, Cohen’s gone. Prince, Ali - gone. Britain’s out, Trump’s in. I’ve spent over four weeks ill in bed, I’ve had two teeth out to abscesses, food poisoning, eye infection, painkiller addiction, I’m limping like a bastard and my mojo’s turned to glass. And the year’s not over yet.’ I curse 2016.
Shadows of mortality have been tugging at my sleeve, getting under my feet, whispering in my ear. I’m struggling to suppress the rage and frustration of feeling vigour leach and resilience wither. In every encounter - organic, technological, spiritual, political - I’ve backed the vanquished and the triumphant have horrified me.
’Never seen you down like this before’. Toby’s hand is on my shoulder, a light squeeze, a comfort. I smile thanks but want to cry.
These are the times I want to beat myself senseful, sleep deep until spring, become someone in a novel, write life differently, find I can sing, stop. Instead I have to not drown in the remorseless tides of time and events, not come apart in the grip and stony abandon of their million-shingling waves.
’Sorry guys…I shouldn’t have come out tonight.’
Andy offers his pick me up, ‘Hey, I’ve got hold of some Jack Herer seeds…’
I know, I feel my silence must seem incomprehensible, ignorant, ingrate, but anything I say tonight is soured and contaminant. Sullen November fogs have mantled the ghosts of the fighting and fought over dead, whose waste and rot still stain history, memory, land.History never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. I feel unsteady on the global groundswell of hostility, intolerance, rejection and discriminate hate.
Leonard Cohen pushed me into this icy plunge. His leaving left an echo of someone else in another time - though she wasn’t the one after all, nor I her man. The Cohen song, the one that was me to her, she found ‘A bit cheesy’ and found it so on the same day, the very afternoon that she refused to believe frisson was a real word, the frisson I got thinking of her, anticipating the sight, the meet, the smell, the touch. A hairline crack chinks open in a day, the chords of grand passion diminish to the tiny belling of cooling embers, poetry unwinds into words. She’s going, she’s gone. The strike of that memory unravelled me and now everything overwhelms, joy, cruelty, kindness, living. I’m possessed of such a dumb darkness, I can’t understand how or why I came here to sit with my friends - I am not a me I want to share. I need but am afraid to be alone. I excuse myself and leaving my drink take a long, slow walk home. I’ve been in the dark before the sun will rise again.

15. Film Night

​
​The drink of choice at The Dun Cow

16. Fit for purpose

Toby shows me the fitness band on his wrist. It looks like clever, costly technology but he has an issue with the colour.
’Teal. I ordered teal. What colour would you call this?’
‘Turquoise’ I say Frenchily and instantly regret it when I see Toby’s eyes go all feral.
‘Toorkwaaz?’ he says mockingly. ‘Do you say poorpwaaz? The fishy thing?’
‘Not on purpose.’
‘Do you say toortwaaz? The shelly thing?’
‘So how do you say turquoise?’ I ask.
After a pause, ’Terkoyze.’
‘Do you say perpoyze? The marine mammally thing?’
‘You know, you can be world-class annoying sometimes.’
Andy interrupts with a fistful of clinking bottles that he brings to the table. ‘Promotion - English Pale Ale.’
‘Andy, what colour would you call that?’
’Greeny-blue.’
Toby runs out of gas and rolls down his sleeve to cover the gizmo on his wrist. Andy leans close into him, ‘Just like your eyes.’
Toby does a startled tortoise move and mumbles a phrase ending with ‘off’.
‘What is it, anyway?’, Andy asks.
Toby has gone not-playing quiet with added exasperation-face, so I chip in. ’It’s a device that confirms you are no longer young.’
Toby directs another phrase ending with ‘off’ at me.
’There’s something called aDeath Clockonline, apparently.’
We give Andy a quizzical look.
‘True. Number two son told me about it. He’s a morbid little f*cker.’
‘Death clock?’
Andy elaborates. ‘You enter date of birth and some personal details and it gives you a countdown clock to when you are going to peg out.’
‘Is it accurate?’ Toby asks, with no hint of sarcasm.
‘Who would be a dissatisfied user?’ Andy answers.
‘There could be.’, I say. ‘What if number two son does it on your behalf, makes plans, then turns up to find you still alive and says “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead”.’
‘I’m checking the will and testicl*s when I get home.’
‘I would.’ I say, ‘You may need to add a zombie codicil.’
A techie bleeping noise starts up. It’s coming from Toby’s direction.
‘What’s that about?’
‘It’s his buy a round alert.’
‘Very funny. It’s telling me that…’ Toby rolls up his sleeve then unconvincingly pretends he can’t make out what he’s seeing. Andy grabs Toby’s wrist, squints, then starts to chuckle. ‘It’s telling you that you’ve been inactive too long.’
‘Does it know you’re sitting on your arse AND drinking beer?’
’So…you’ve paid good money to be nagged.’
Toby gives up his attempt to find silent mode and flushed with candour says ’I would feel less disappointed if it was proper teal.’

17. Quote, unquote.

Praise be! We’ve nailed down the coffin lid on Dickens’A Christmas Carolbut I don’t think I’ll be able to rest easy until I’ve taken my copy to a crossroads and hammered a stake through it. For the final book club meeting of the year, someone had suggested this seasonal work by an author whose style curdles my brain and makes reading a feat of endurance for me. A further festive sign-off is to come from readings of our favourite literary quotes. I had prepared to reveal my hidden shallows with Wilde’s ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing’ but I had already been festooned with pity and cast out for my dislike of bomb-proof Charlie.
With Dickens done, Erica became animated, providing mince pies from the oven and a range of spirits to lace dark, rich coffee. She was a generous and gracious host and the room soon filled with the comforts of spice and java. Quoting time. We heard a selection of the good, noble, surprising, worthy and bonkers; from a stupefyingUlyssespassage to translations of Zeno, Camus and Marquez with two of them casually murdered in their own language. We had poetry, pathos, anger, profundity, cynicism, hope, violence, love, laughter and idiocy. It’s why we joined the book club.
Surprisingly, the hot-faced tumbleweed moment was provided by Aaron, who has clearly been coveting more than the intellectual charms of the luscious Sam. Probably deciding this was his sh*t or bust moment, he lasered her with a smouldering gaze, then with some light gurning and bad emoting, eviscerated all elegance from a bit of Marvellian knicker-springing cheese. No-one could mistake Sam’s embarrassed horror for coyness.
Mine was a standby that impressed me at an impressionable age as the best opening line of any book I had read, and being memorably short, I didn’t need to write it down; Hartley’s ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’
Andy had said he would be quoting some Chandler and I expected something hard-boiled. Instead it was wistful, ‘To say goodbye is to die a little.’ The shortest quotes came from Andy, me and Toby, but it was Toby who came from left field. I felt the crush of reproof when he opened his copy ofA Christmas Carol, then crashed the silence with some coughed mince pie after we heard ‘I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.’ Andy delightedly thumped me on the back and when Toby caught my look he gave me back enigmatic.
Later, in the Dun Cow, an elusive niggle in the back of my mind prompts me to pointedly ask Toby how come his chosen quote is a favourite?
‘To be honest, stuff like that doesn’t really stick in my mind. It’s the whole book that makes an impression on me, not just a bit of it.’
’So...’
Toby silences me with enigmatic again but less assuredly this time, tapping the side of his nose.
Andy informs us his quote is fromThe Long Goodbye. I say how I like the novel and, though different, Robert Altman’s film version too, and we get to discussing films of books and whether they can ever be as good.
‘You can’t beat the originals.’ Toby says, getting up to buy a round. As he gets up, he knocks his copy ofA Christmas Caroloff the table. It splays open on the floor and a card falls out. The graphic on it instantly resolves my niggle. It’s the card I sent him when he’d had a minor op some while back. His Hunter S Thompson quote was one I wrote in it as a get well message, chosen because it was so not Toby, to give him a laugh and test his stitches. Or was it so not Toby after all? Either way, I had been gifted an opportunity to rag him. I quickly tuck the card back in and return the book to the table. As quick as I was, Toby has taken it in. I smile at him and tap the side of my nose. Even when you’re all Dickensed out, there’s still room for sentiment.

18. Happy Anniversary

I’ve set myself up to relaxau Lebowskiand have just stretched out on the sofa to dip intoPrivate Eyewhen the home phone rings. I’m for leaving it but Georgie answers. ‘It’s for you - Andy.’
He never rings me at home. I can hear strain in his voice.
‘It’s all gone wrong, it’s an emergency! I need some help - my mind’s gone blank!’
‘OK Andy, take it slowly. What’s the problem?’
‘Number one son’s the bloody problem! You do the cooking at yours don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I confirm, guardedly.
‘Well, I need some help, it’s all gone wrong. That little twerp!’
Andy tells me what’s all gone wrong and how I can put it right. I call Toby to find out if he can give me a lift, then grab venison casserole from the freezer, half a celeriac, potatoes, garlic, some seen better days French beans, a couple of pears, Stilton and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône that I hope he won’t need.
On the way over I relay all I know to Toby. It’s Andy and Olga’s wedding anniversary, she’s out enjoying some sort of überpampering treatment that Andy arranged. She’d said what a lovely thought this was and that she would take them out for a meal that evening. Andy then boasts he could cook something every bit as good and Olga calls his bluff. As Olga has the car, Andy rings number one son and asks him to buy what he needs. Number one son prangs his car in the supermarket car park he wouldn’t be in if it weren’t for Andy, drops off what he’s bought and they have a row over it. I’d said it sounds like this isn’t meant to be, change plans and go for the meal out. But Andy is angrily stubborn, ‘I’m going to cook a special bloody romantic meal. End of!’
Andy has calmed down by the time we arrive and thanks us for coming. ‘I said to him “get gastropub”. I could’ve just bunged that in the oven. I wanted something like that big, bald bloke on the telly cooks. But what does he come back with?’
‘What?’
Andy takes us to the kitchen and points at a gnarly-looking, shrink-wrapped mound on the worktop.
’Snails?’
‘Snails!’
‘Gastropods! He’s got a one track mind.’
‘Doesn’t she like snails then?’ Toby asks, failing to not laugh.
I felt some sympathy for number one son, it was Andy who had encouraged such horticulturality. And it was his anniversary that he should’ve sorted and not have to get save-the-day rescued. But now was not the time to point this out. Wiping away my tears, I ask Andy a few questions about his cooking skills. He’s borderline useless but after I’ve searched about for kitchen paraphernalia, I get it all prepped and write down a how-to. He’s got a fancy microwave that, he assures me, will take the casserole from frozen to cooked to table in gentle steps.
‘I’ve brought you some romantic gear.’ says Toby. He rummages in a carrier bag and flourishes out a single red rose followed by two mismatched white candles.
‘Cheers lads!’ says Andy rubbing his hands together, ‘It’s all going to be OK. I won’t forget this.’
The fog is so thick that it trails around the ankles of everyone entering the Dun Cow. We’ve taken a table away from the door and near the log fire. Andy brings the beers, then returns to the bar for some fancy whiskies.
’Cheers. So how’d it go?’ asks Toby.
Andy shakes his head, kind of ruefully, and smiles at me, ‘Olga comes home and says “Ooh! That smells wonderful! What is it?” So I tell her what you told me, venison casserole with red wine, juniper, bit of rosemary. She polishes it off, making all the proper mmm! noises, but I know what’s coming because it’s chicken.’
‘Chicken! Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure unless it was an egg-laying deer with three-inch thighs.’
I reflect that I must get my act together with the labelling thing, ‘Sorry about that, it was all frosty from the freezer and it was a rush.’
‘Yeah. So I’m rumbled and ‘fess up it was “you what did it” and about gastropub and the snails ballsup.’
‘How’d that go down?’
‘She says that’s OK. She knew I was a crap cook and had stopped off to buy some stuff as a standby; knew it was chicken and not what I said from the cooking aroma; that the rose was a nice touch but shame I had cut so much off the stem and did I know we had a bud vase?’
Toby laughs, ‘You are so sussed!’
The way Andy tells it, Olga was a bit hard on him. I remember her humour as sharp but dry, so maybe Andy is spinning it. As we leave the Dun Cow and part, Andy, walking away, says with mock I almost forgotfulness, ‘Oh, Olga says “compliments to the chef”. You’re invited with your better halves for a meal in the new year.’ Then with a hint of dig, ‘Would you like game?’
’Pigeon breasts.’ I shout into the fog.
Andy’s disembodied voice foghorns back, ’Chicken thighs!’

19. Mr Spring

January and its fireside charms eluded me and I find myself pitched into February by an already swift-marching year. Soon I’ll emerge from my wintry soul cave, shrug off SADness and wear the greening mantle of Mr Spring. Dark brews and fiery spirits are beginning to feel too heavy, comfort food cloying. The prospect of equinox is already conjuring pagan from me and I can almost feel that first, warm, southerly breeze of the year, the one that carries scents of living and growing, renewed hope and promise.
I was getting ready for a trip to the Dun Cow, heavy coat, hat, gloves, wallet, keys - when Maddy Prior singingThe Lark in the Morningplayed on the radio. Her voice has always beguiled me and now, when instead of the years burying layered memories, the fault lines of living yield vivid recall, I am no longer wrapped against the cold but lying in a summer meadow, grass scratching my bare back. The girl whose head rests on my chest is not just the centre of a perfect world, she is my world, high above us in the startling blue, a lark cascades a sun-gilded love song.
So I can’t leave the house just yet because my eyes have gone a bit blurry and I need to get a grip. I’ve become what my dad would sometimes refer to as ‘a soft bastard’. I am undone all too easily and feel like the lad inAmerican Beautywhen he says ‘Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in’.
Georgie is surprised to see me still indoors, ‘I thought you’d gone, have you changed your mind?’
‘No, I forgot something.’ I lie, patting my pockets for effect. I give Georgie a hug and a kiss and the way I hug and kiss her makes her give me a ‘What’s up?’ look. I smile and hug her tighter. Georgie isn’t the girl in the meadow from sparkling days, Georgie is all of nature and all its seasons, my enduring love, riches beyond deserving.
‘Are you alright?’
‘Of course I am. I was just thinking of how time flies…how we change…how I want spring.’ Now Georgie gets misty and strokes my cheek. The years have hardened her hand and weathered my face but her touch still feels electric.
‘See you later.’
‘See you later. Love to the boys.’ As she usually doesn’t, Georgie stands backlit in the doorway and waves me off.
Andy and Toby are already in the pub when I arrive. As I unwrap myself from the cold weather gear Toby says ‘You look a bit far away, you know, dreamy. Are you feeling OK?’
‘I’m feeling vernal.’
‘Well, there’s a cure for that and luckily for you, they sell it here. What’s your fancy?’
‘Weissbier. Cold as it comes.’
Toby looks at Andy. Andy says ‘Away with the fairies.’
We may still be wintered but my beer is spring. ’Cheers. Georgie sends her love.’
‘Cheers Georgie.’ Andy and Toby say together, and sup.
After the girl in the meadow and before all of nature, a woman who taught me much used to say ‘What is a man but a little boy in long trousers.’
‘To spring and short trousers!’ I toast.
Toby looks at Andy and says ‘Yeah, away with the fairies.’
And they drink.

20. The Penance of Bad Mood Bear

‘If I had the energy, I’d start my own book club.’
‘Energy!’ Andy splutters, ‘What energy do you need to run a book club?’
‘More than I’m prepared to give.’
‘Well, perhaps you’d better stick to reading…or is that not reading?’
Andy’s in the right, I’m in the wrong. Also petulant, churlish and an all-round show-off arsehole. I know that I’ll be owning up to these unedifying behaviours and apologising for them.
‘I’d hate to see how you’d react to something serious, it’s only a book!’
Toby’s right, I’m wrong. Biorhythms, the stars, wrong side of bed, I certainly have no reasonable explanation other than my blood was up. Even now, in The Dun Cow, I’m annoyed with myself for being annoyed earlier, at the book club. Realising that a chain reaction of getting on my own nerves might take possession of my immediate future, I laugh at myself. I rememberBad Mood Bear, one of the bedtime stories I used to read to our girls, and it’s as if a squall has passed; I become utterly calm. This seems to bother Andy and Toby more than my puerile silliness and they exchange wary, questioning looks.
‘I apologise for my behaviour.’ I say, getting up, ‘And I’ll apologise for it at the next meeting too. For my behaviour and my language but not my point…which I hold to. My round. What’s my punishment?’
I take my time at the bar, inviting someone to be served out of turn before me whilst I reflect on intemperance. Andy and Toby want their usual beers. I get three beers and three particularly unusual malt whiskies. When Andy takes a sip of his whiskey, he winces. Tentatively, Toby takes a sip and tries not to wince but does. I take a swig of mine and smile savouringly, even though it nearly kills me. I don’t know if it shows but I can feel my eyes start to water and eyebrow hairs twist.
‘Whatthehellisthat!’ Toby coughs.
‘Finish it off first.’
Toby has another sip, ‘No thanks. Sorry. It’s not for me.’
‘Andy?’
Andy shakes his head and grimaces.
‘How can you tell if you haven’t finished it?’ I ask, and return to the bar to fetch whiskies I know they like. Those wincey whiskies were a hammer-handed attempt to prove my point. I had been put in the stocks and pelted with virtue at the book club for saying I didn’t need to read all of Garrison Keillor’sLove Meto know it was one of the worst books I had ever opened, so I wouldn’t finish it because life’s too short for bad books. I defended my view…robustly…in the face of united and noisy disagreement. How could I tell without reading it to the end? Andy and Toby had thrown a bit of that rotten stuff too, so I only felt a little cheap responding in kind. I put the fresh whiskies on the table.
‘There you go, stuff-u-like. I don’t see what the obsession is with “I’ve started so I’ll finish”. I got that as a kid, about how important it was to see something through, regardless, like I would be suffused with some kind of character-building moral fibre. I never found the reward commensurate with the disenjoyment. I reckon creativity merits respect, I just don’t think it deserves reverence.’
A bubble of silence inflates around us before Andy pops it, ’Have you finished?’
I give Andy my ‘I’m listening’ look.
‘Giving us drain cleaner to drink and not persevering with a book are not the same thing.’
‘Some people, connoisseurs, rave about that whiskey…’
’Well, more fool them!’ Toby chips in.
‘Whiskey, book…you can tell…’
‘OK smartarse, even if I agree with your point…’
‘Do you?’
‘Even if I agree…’
‘Do you at least see it?’
‘Yeah I see it…’ Andy turns to Toby and invites him to join the joke, ‘…but it’s cost you to make it.’
Toby lifts his unfinished whiskey and hold his nose. We all find this funny.
‘I had to do some sort of penance for my behaviour.’
Toby smirks at me, ‘Are you a Catholic then?’
‘Not even christened’ I reply, fish for the chain inside my shirt and flourish my silver St Jude.

21. Life in a glass

When ‘next book?’ time at the book club produced a swell of apathy, some bright spark suggested that we all needed more time to think of suggestions but how about we each also write a little something for the next meeting, just to keep our literary muscles in training. This got a burbling murmur that was taken for assent. So instead of it being three would be pseuds in tweed and briar mind-sets heading for The Dun Cow to discuss proper literature whilst supping real ale, we’ll be making psycho stabs at creating a distant, shrunken quasi-relative, like Piltdown Man or something fromThe Island of Doctor Moreau. We are each silent in our thoughts as we approach The Dun Cow.
But once through the door we are struck by a denser soundscape than usual. The babble of many conversations and flares of laughter from a dark-clad crowd of strangers meshes the air. The yeasty aroma of beer has been joined by the rounder and sharper scents of sherries and spirits. Glasses chink and glitter, black patent leather shines, tables are strewn with paperware and the hardening remains of a pastry-based buffet. Loosened black ties and undone top shirt buttons indicate the session has been sessioning a while. We have walked in on the hard core mourners getting seriously merry at the wake for Tommy Cavendish.
Our favoured table is taken, as they all are and such are the numbers that Andy, Toby and me rotate to a space at the bar to be served. It isn’t long before a highly spirited chap by the name of Bernie asks us how we knew Tommy Cavendish. Our explanation that we didn’t means little to him as he insists he buys our beers. When I drink to the memory of a man I didn’t knowingly know I am surprised to think myself diminished by his passing. As tipsy and watery-eyed mourners start making noisy exits, we find ourselves a table and are soon joined by Bernie and we stand him a drink. He is joined by a friend of his then Andy tells them of our writing task whereupon Bernie, pointing at his friend, tells us he is just the man as he worked in the papers. His friend affects some modesty and before I know it, as the one who carries a pen and notebook, I am tasked with writing down rip-roaring story ideas, including those of Bernie’s friend who ran the small and personal ads section of a local rag in a far off place. As the rounds quickened my notes began to squiggle then flatline and the following day I attempted to piece together the bones of a story of international criminality and the redemptive powers of love.
A New York Mafioso, whose life is not worth a plugged nickel after singing like a canary, is hiding out in Cleethorpes. The only thing threatening to blow his cover is his bel canto Noo Yorrikan banter. Taking in the bracing North Sea breezes one day he spies and loses his heart to Nadia Stefanescu, chip frier nonpareil at Salty Sal’s, an enterprise boldly contemptuous of NHS and most other dietary guidelines. Day after day, Grasso Bastardini foregoes balsamic for malt vinegar and cracks cross-cultural jokes about portions that require miming to be understood. After weeks of deep fried doubt, Grasso decides he will declare his feelings for Nadia. On a day of unseasonal and unusually angular sleet showers, having prepared his declaration, he takes a deep breath and accidentally inhales a pickled onion. Grasso is moments from pop-eyed asphyxiation when a passing member of the EDL gives him what he cheerfully calls the ‘Himmler manoeuvre’ and Grasso is de-onionised at the cost of a couple of armfuls of cracked ribs. As he slowly and painfully makes his way back along the front, a dim and dangerous delinquent from Grimsby, known as Codhead Kev, who has a sharp eye for likely victims of petty crime, squares Grasso up and proceeds to try and kick his balls into a paste. Rendered thus unconscious, Grasso is relieved of his wallet, watch and haddock. Nadia runs to him and cradles his head in her batter-flecked hands. Grasso mouths ‘I love you’. The sky clears and the warm sun raises suggestive steam around them from the wet promenade. They kiss. Nadia tears off her Salty Sal work wear and laughing throws it to the ground. Grasso and Nadia decide they will make a life in Romania but Grasso vows that before they do he will find and have revenge on his attacker. Codhead Kev permanently sports a black bobble hat from beneath which springs a two inch halo of tight, dirty yellow curls, which together with the dark blue dashes and ‘cut here’ tattooed round his neck make him easy to track down. Repaired, recovered and revenged Grasso wonders if he can ever truly be free of the violent mafia ways that haunt his past but believes that if anything can free him, it is Nadia’s love. Codhead Kev sleeps with the donkeys.
We had some laughs and dedicated most of our drinks and all of our nonsense to the memory of Tommy Cavendish. From what we heard about him, he would have liked that.

22. Sweet and sour

I’m in so much trouble!
Carol decided she would like a hit of lemon haze, and another. Etc. Before I know it she’s throwing a whitey and off to the ground floor toilet where she repurposes a fair bit of dinner in two heaves separated by her glasses falling off into the pan. If I’d been there, I could have prevented that or at least held her hair back for her. Toby has his strong arm around her, giving me clutchy death looks and it’s working, I’m getting Darth Vader cramps beneath his stare. I want to be small and sliding out of the room unnoticed but the lemon haze has leveraged my sense of humour and utterly trashed my better judgement, so I’m laughing like Dr Demento at the situation. I have also yet to confess to trampling on some special plant doing its hello spring stuff when I was in the garden, ‘bustin’ moves’ with no heed for age or grace toYou Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). I thought Carol was about to join me when she made a bolt for it.
And it started so well! The promised meal from Olga and Andy, ‘thanks’ for our help with their anniversary panto cook-off. I had cleared it was OK to bring my smokes and in a fit of gratitude took bottles of red, white and drybubble fun. I even shaved real close, wore my tartan tie and mustard waistcoat, which raised some eyebrows and greased the joke cogs. The meal was fabulous, drink plentiful, the company great. We’re on the cusp of mellow when Olga, at the music controls, changes 4 dial jazz to 9 dial ABBA. Andy protests! But Toby backs her up, grooves in his chair, and asks me if they are my kind of music?
‘Yeah, they’re OK. Depends on the time and place. Great writing team.’
‘OK!?’ he laughs - loudly. ‘Now? Here?’
I smile, nod and thumbs-up but Toby maybe senses some diplomacy he fancies testing.
’So what’s your kind of music, don’t you like the seventies?’
‘Certainly do, great decade, hippy, disco, punk. Love them, disco for dancing…but punk…hippy…ish.’
Toby has grown a smile, ’So…you were a Pippy!’ This gets a hearty laugh. I laugh too but damn me if I don’t touché him with ‘No man, I was a hunk!’
Mirth notched up! Toby joins in, a split after everyone else and his grooving’s slowed.
‘Still are!’ says Carol, following up with a pout.
For the longest second, brittle silence grapples ABBA then the joke cogs start whirring again. But I’m feeling wildfire racing all over my face and it’s not the jokes. It’s because I’m thinking ‘f*ck! I’m at Abigail’s Party!’. I excuse myself for a smoke, straighten up through the patio doors and I’m in the garden, alone with my detailed thoughts. I light up and stop thinking, so I can hear the near but far conversation crank up again before it gets buried in upturned disco. Shortly, I catch aromas, Toby’s vanilla vape then cigar smoke. I’m loving the cigar smoke when suddenly, there’s Carol’s voice, really close to my ear, so close it’s breath-hot - and done sexy - not like she usually speaks, ‘Give us a toke’. Fortunately, I was relaxed enough to not jump very far. Context or not I make it a rule never to ask a grown woman ‘Are you sure?’ but I thought it would be the right kind of caring to ask ‘How long is it since you had some of this?’
’Too long!’
And BAM! I’m already hanging on to the innuendo before last. So in a way, maybe it was for the best that Carol’s whitey came down before the dancing because I was in her slipstream and finding it exhilarating.

So, the awkward end. Music zero dial dead, the party breaks up and we’re ushered past the scent of pine disinfected sicky room, through the big door and into the night. Andy waits to wave us off, Olga, waving, turns back inside. Our voices are loud and sharp in the mist-cool air. “See you soon. See you at the book club. Dun Cow. Nice evening. Sorry about…Forget about it!”. Carol’s pissed, stoned and dishevelled and is trying to climb into their car as if all her hinges are busted. Toby has gone serial-killer calm. Georgie is furiously sober and I’m doing disexistentialism. Then we all get stiffened by Olga’s voice arcing like a jet of cold water over the featheredge - even Carol takes a whack of sober.
‘ANDY!…come and see what your bloody dog’s done to my plant!’
Time passes - too much for me, not enough for Georgie. I’ve been back, pause and forth over that night and in recounting it, I detect vague injustice. Over lunch, Georgie is getting some free digs in whilst I’m still puzzling over her complicated explanation of split verdict guilty for something or other I’m not sure I’ve done. But anyway, I’m on the cusp of being forgiven for it. We know it won’t be forgotten. Then as Georgie canters away in triumph, she lets fly a Parthian shot at my salad-dressing. FFS & silly yellow symbol for man biting tongue! Now, Georgie sometimes gets her words simultaneously muddled and mispronounced and when she said ‘Bazomic vinegar’, I went boneless laughing. That’s funny to everybody! Right?
I’m in so much trouble.

23. Sometimes, always, never.

Georgie never cooks, that’s my job. And on top of that, she’s woken me up with croissants, pitch black coffee, and flopped the Observer on the bed. Dressed like that! I’m pleasantly confused, flipping the ledger to check my balance for this treat. I’m to take it easy, read the paper, chill out, she’s doing lunch and everything…I mustn’t lift a finger…all day…it’s my special day.
‘It’s not poxy father’s day again is it?’ I say ungraciously ‘You know I don’t believe in all that crap.’
‘No, silly!’ Georgie says in a baby, set-you-up-way, ‘I know how you feel about “all that crap” - you meanie! No! This is your proper, special day, it’s…TADAA!…STONER DAY!’
She dips out then back, with a comedy spliff made of well-stuffed pillow and felt tips.
That penny dropped a long way and it hurt, the coffee got bitter, I said something that stung. It’s a week since that night. We’ve become childish. Looks like it’s that other proper special day, SERIOUS TALK DAY.
On the plus side it wasn’t a day. Barely thirty seconds in fact - and though it was a bit one-way at least it was clear and simple. I’ve got to apologise properly to everyone for everything and promise to never do any of it again. Sharpish. Until I do, we’re all out of kilter. I suddenly wish I was a lawyer. But I think about it, search through Georgie’s arty crafty drawers, for card - to make cards. I forego the picture from the web of a really sad, teardrops, big-eyed, fluffy kitten holding up a paw for the front. Flippant. Instead a big, bold, serious, outline SORRY! In Arial. Inside verso goes:
Well, I really, truly am sorry for everything, everyone. Unfortunately I can’t remember everything and don’t know what it includes. The blank bit is for your personal list of what I should never do again and so not have to apologise for later. Please qualify each one with a. sometimes, b. always or c. never. Use CAPITALS! Don’t put your name! I don’t want to know. Anonymity guaranteed. Get them back to me in the envelope and I’ll be guided. No peeking!
And I sign it fountain pen style and stick them in blank, unsealed envelopes, divide them between two bigger envelopes and post them off to the Andy, Olga, Toby, Carol jury. I hand Georgie hers.
At The Dun Cow, a couple of rounds in, Andy and Toby hand me their envelopes, I take Georgie’s from my pocket and shuffle them up. I’m nervous!
‘Get on with it then!’
I start opening the envelopes, Andy and Toby try copping a look so I open them under the table, ‘Anonymity guaranteed!’
‘How do we know you’ll play it straight?’
I give Toby a look, he raises his hand and says ‘Sorry.’
Well, they’ve entered into the spirit, lots of neat, anonymous capitals. And generous spirit, there’s some stuff in there I didn’t know I’d even started. And forgiving; an easy to do analysis shows I’ve done my bit for into kilter again, I can pretty much do everything, sometimes. Only two bits of bucking the system, one of the cards has instances of d. occasionally. That had to be Georgie’s ‘It’s fine, occasionally’, and I thought, wasn’t it an occasion that got me into the trouble? One has a zap-red lip print with a X. My imagination freezes before an eager thought that it might be Andy or Toby having a laugh gets me staring at their mouths. No! Whose lips? Georgie! What if it isn’t? I can’t remember lipstick colours! I’m feeling wildfire racing all over my face at the thought that it’s not Georgie. Now’s not the time to be asking Toby about his black eye. I hope I’m not witnessing a derailment.
But for Andy that night is already deader than the disco he turned off. ‘Good! That’s that then. Toby! How long do you think we’re going to wait for you to tell us about the eye?’
I feel my relief selfishly grow as Toby tells us how he got a Carol elbow in the eye, helping her out of the car that night and then they had a bit of a row afterwards. ‘But it’s OK now…’ Toby chuckles and goes on, ‘…we’ve said sorry and made up. Nice, really - we went for a stroll together, into town, and we end up on a little shopping spree. We haven’t done that for ages. I bought some new togs, Carol got a load of “I fancy a bolder look” makeup - whatever that is!’
We all laugh.
Makeup! I’m feeling a bit weird and trying to puncture my ego for making me think it’s Carol’s lips. Toby is sat right there...he’s my mate. They’re OK now. It’s Carol! Jeezuss! Please let it be Georgie.
It transpired that karma came with kilter, in an unexpected way. As I can’t find out if it’s Georgie’s lips without acting suspiciously, I’m sat with a smoke wondering ‘What would Sherlock Holmes do?’ when the phone rings next to me. It’s Olga.
‘Hi Olga, I’ll just get Georgie…’
‘Thanks’, then all low and sexy, ‘Did you get my card?’
Profound silence.
Me, ‘You…?’
Olga, laughing a we can laugh about that night now laugh, ‘I can do poutery.’
Smilingishly, I call for Georgie.

24. A Husk of Knowledge

Toby has been extolling the virtues of various power tools and in a land far, far away - I’ve been finding it interesting.
‘Where would your business be - without power tools?’
Andy has to agree, with a proviso ‘…there’s only so much you can do with them…then it has to be a hand job.’
‘All I get is a cup of tea!’ is how I change the theme, raise the tempo, and lower the tone. After an enfeebled round of lead-in-pencil mannish boy humour, Toby takes a deep breath, gazes to the infinity beyond his pint and declares ‘Vitality!’
We wait, though I think I heard that gear clunk.
‘Vitality! That’s what we lose. Essence! Where do we go?’
Andy points at me, ‘He’s been there and come back - and we still don’t know!’
‘That’s why technology and vitality - go together’ Toby says, ignoring him.
‘Being vital and vitality go together’, I say, Andy nodding agreement.
‘Cryogenics, mental databasing, uploading consciousness, preserving the essence, the bit that’s you, the bit you go nuts with. Vitality!’ Toby taps his head, hard and surprisingly loud.
‘But Toby…’ I reply after a draught, ‘…what’s the point of any of that if the bit that’s you wakes up and goes nuts anyway?’ Andy nods agreement.
‘Because you don’t get ‘woken up’ until they know how to prevent you from going nuts.’ Toby mockpatronises me..
‘Stick it! I want to feel vital all over. And what if they’re the ones who’ve gone nuts and shouldn’t be waking us up yet? Or only waking us up as food or just sawing us up straight from the freezer?’
I can tell Toby has been following through on this, and finding my views ill-informed and childish, he sets out to correct them. Andy attends with some nods whilst I wonder what it is about notions of mortality that draw Toby’s thoughts to technology and mine to music and poetry. Why this way, or that?
‘It’ll be too late for us, of course’ Toby wraps up, ‘We’ll be going old style.’
‘Old style gives us poetry, music, elegy.’
Toby mockscorns me, ‘Ology not elegy - technology, that’s where we’re heading. Still you, just done digitally.’
‘I’m so analogue, Toby.’
I’m worried about Toby. I hope hisFrom Power Tool to Technology-EssenceTEDTalk doesn’t hint at a deeply creepy contemplation of DIY cryogenics.
'Anyway…’ I’m inspired to say, ‘…against any of your technovisions of essence, I play stuff like this…’ From my notebook I read a snatch of poetry that spilled unexpected wonder on me, scribbled in fat pencil before the words from the radio went away.
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
’That’s something!’ says Andy, easing back in his chair.
Toby is beaming, ’And an example of why whoever wrote that should keep living and writing.’
‘Dylan…’
‘Bob?’
‘...Thomas’
‘There you go! - Dead! - and not writing great poetry.’
‘It wouldn’t be the same without the longing.’
‘No longing needed, you can live…and write…for as long as you want to.’
‘I’m talking about the longing in knowing you can’t.’
Andy nods and gets a round in.
We enjoy weaving a little husk of knowledge when we sit and talk. And though we never leave for home any the wiser about the big stuff, there’s Toby striding off, happy in a halo of his imaginings. As Andy and me part, I ask him ‘Do you think Toby’s…OK?’
‘Who is? He’s probably been watchingThe Matrixagain.’
The street lights are still out and I walk a starry way home, thinking after a film I would like to share with Toby.
​

25. Gathering

‘OK! OK! Cheers to the gathering!’
‘To the gathering’
‘I still think it’s all a bit…childish.’
‘Toby, I fail to see what’s so great about being grown-up.’
‘Yeah, well, you’re one of them, aren’t you.’
‘And happy to be, if I could have got there, I would have gone, and sussed out Portobello where a great-grandfather hailed from.’
‘So you’re a little bit Jock?’
‘And English and Irish and Welsh.’
‘What a mix!’
‘Child of these islands, Toby.
Toby shakes his head, working into the thin end of a laugh, ‘Spanishscot, Deelfi and what was that other one Matisse, Juiche…’
‘Zhoosh’
‘It’s all very silly…I suppose you’ve got a silly name too. Go on, what is it?’
‘Muncastermonkey.’
‘How bloody silly is THAT! Toby turns to Andy, biglaughing with a thinly veiled air of superiority, ‘Silliest of the lot, I bet.’
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘Er, no!’
Andy is keeping out of it and I’m feeling defensive now. ’OK Toby, if I had asked you to drink to, say, friendship, generosity, being simpático…’
‘No problem, who wouldn’t.’
‘Well, the gathering, the splother, it’s about that, and whatever you think of the ‘silly names’, the world needs more of it.’
Andy eyes Toby, raises his glass and querying eyebrows. Toby hates ceding anything and struggle shows on his face every time he does. But all it needs now is a little push.
‘Once more with feeling?’
Toby nods.
I raise my glass, ’To the gathering.’
‘To the gathering.’ Andy and Toby say, with feeling.
‘But I’m not drinking bloody co*cktails, so don’t ask again.’
‘OK Toby, and thank you.’
From ‘Handy’ Andy, ‘Jugs’ Toby and me, a Dun Cow toast to the gathering and any birthdays.

26. Ungrammatical use of words - breach of good manners (8)

It’s been difficult not to speak about the June general election as we had agreed, but what with the resignation of a chancer’s hope and fearing a horrible beating, I’ve been diligent in steering clear of politics. Today though, Toby got to the pub first and whilst waiting for Andy and me, has been reading a copy ofThe Daily Mailthat someone has left behind. I’ve barely sat down with my pint before he flaps the paper in front of my face, pointing at Labour horror headlines, ’Still a socialist?’
I’m about to reply when Andy grabs my arm, putting a finger to his lips with a warning look. Toby chuckles, but so smugly that I snatch the paper away from him, theatrically mime wiping my arse with it, throw it on the floor, then kick it into the corner. Unsurprisingly, this attracts attention and murmurs start. Toby stands up, and with a supplicating gesture says ’Please forgive my friend, he’s got Corbynitis.’
‘Will you two behave!’ Andy says angrily through clenched teeth, ‘You’re like a pair of kids!’
And that’s true. As we sit down again, Toby eyes me and makes little circles with his forefinger at his temple. I eye him back and give him the wanker sign.
‘I can’t be having this!’ Andy takes his pint to another table, ‘Let me know when you’ve sorted it out and remembered how to act like grown-ups.’
The landlord makes his way to our table, ‘What’s up chaps? It’s not like you to fall out.’
I heard the words - ‘He started it!’ form in my head and felt very silly. But a peacemaking laugh didn’t quite make it out of me before Toby actually said ‘He started it!’
The laugh just made it, but fell short and brittle. ‘I’m left, he’s right, I’m red, he’s blue, he’s strong and stable, I’m many not the few. We’re warring clichés’.
‘I thought you were just mates.’
When I reply ‘In all but this’, it hits me anew how domestic and mundane variations on the theme of division must be playing out all around the country, how events of the past year have entrenched confrontation, argument, cast winners and losers, unpicked friendships.
‘Sorry about the behaviour. We are mates. Look!’ I hold out my hand for Toby to shake, which he does. The landlord leaves us, Andy rejoins us but a weighty silence settles at our table. I don’t want another drink, the one I still have is the wrong brown, too flat, too bitter, too much - or is it not enough? All I know, all I feel is the prickling torment of wrong, wrong, wrong and I cannot grasp any sense or meaning of the wellness and betterment that Toby feels so assured of. The time is indeed, out of joint.

27. Add beer for idiot

​The first hint that it wasn’t to be a brewery tour as we had expected, was seeing the chock-full car park. From there we were guided by singing and din into a cacophonous low-roofed hall to discover that the evening was in fact the brewer’s thank you to its landlords and ladies and their handful of guests. A bowler-hatted band of Acker Bilk lookalikes thrashed out bawdy ballads whilst pumps were pulled non-stop, dispensing free beer. There may not be a law that demonstrates free beer is drunk faster and more copiously than bought beer but observation suggests there should be. Part of any proof would involve over a hundred blokes, free beer, a two-stall urinal and one w.c. No surprise then, at the clamour for a roadside stop, miles from home, some would say miles from anywhere as we are heading back across the marshlands into the purpling night west.
The Dun Cowcontingent set off in the dwindling of a warm, cloudless, sunny day, the battered minibus rattling down east into the flatlands. On the way out we rode a character vehicle, on the way back we rode a bladder-jarring write-off with England’s hardest suspension. So there are a dozen men swaying in the traditional roadside choreography of relief. It’s countryside cool, dark and scented. The moon, a day off full, is high and bright, like a rice-paper lightshade. Andy is stood next to me and I am remarking on the beauty of the night, the heady scents of the hedgerows, the sharpness of the stars, when suddenly, with a small scuffly sound and a tiny ‘Oh!’, he topples like a felled tree, todgerfirst into the nettle-filled ditch. I tried to grab him back but missed him by a week. Uttering not a word he made a havoc like a wild boar thrashing its way through the undergrowth as he returned to the roadside and staggered upright, his kit ghastly white in the moonlight. Then he starts cursing and blaming the crumbly verge. Sympathy? Too busy laughing. ‘Call that swollen?’, ‘Rub it with a co*ck leaf!’ Stuff like that. Furiously indignant, Andy then roughly catches his dick in his zip. It was eerie to hear such a high-pitched sound come from a big man and when his spooky shriek died away, the night felt watchfully still, and some us were a little sobered. But not Toby. He’s been getting snaps on his phone. And not me. I’ve been texting Olga, ‘Andy wants you to massage his nob with cold cream when he gets home’.
Disembarked back in neon territory and its heatsink smells of tarmac and bricks, Andy says ‘Don’t make a big thing of this, OK?’ I try not to laugh. Toby either tries and fails or fails to try and laughing says, ‘Of course, I’ll only share the pictures with our closest friends.’
Andy’s eyes narrow, his mobile dingdings. Scrabbling the phone from his pocket he reads the text and looking at Toby and me, his eyes narrow narrower. Turning gingerly on his heel, he throws ‘Bastards!’ over his shoulder and heads home, walking like John Wayne.
‘Shouldn’t laugh really’ says Toby ‘There but for the grace of God and all that.’
‘That’s schadenfreude for you!’ I reply, giggling.
’Whatever. Weird that it’s only when something like that happens to someone else that it’s funny.’
Time to meander home.

28. Sardines and flowers

It’s hot. We’re having a laugh about the peculiarly British phew-what-a-scorcher bonkersness that hot weather brings out. The fahrenheit-centigrade confusion, the I like the heat butness, the radiant glow of lobster-armed rednecks, wardrobe malfunctions, sweaty selfies, barbecue smog. When our golden-yellow-white-topped beers arrive, the condensation on the glasses is starting to gather and trickle and in an unconsciously co-ordinated moment, we each stand, stare and anticipate the savour before reaching out and guzzling.
‘Same again?’ asks Toby. Of course same again, it’s hot. ‘That was like that film where they came out of the desert and they’re lined up at the bar…’
‘Where John Mills says “Worth waiting for.”?’
‘That’s it!’
‘Ice Cold in Alex.’ Andy gets the title.
‘That’s it!’, Toby continues, ’John Mills, Anthony Quinn…’
‘Quayle, it was Anthony Quayle.’
‘Yeah, him, the spy. And who was the other one, the woman?’
I can see the scene in front of me now, ’There were four of them.’
‘Four? I think you’ll find it was three.’
‘Four for sure. Sylvia Syms and…’ I’m struggling for the other name.
Toby is confident, ’Three! Put your money where your mouth is. Here you go, a fiver says it’s three.’
I’m confident too, go to my wallet and slap my fiver on the bar.
‘What’s this supposed to be?’ Toby picks it up and turns it over in his hand.
‘Oh sorry, that’s a shopping list.’
‘Two items - you just made it. Are you forgetting things now?’
’Sometimes I make a list and forget to take it with me.’
‘It’s your age. You’d better get Georgie to sew your name and address in your clothes!’
’I can do my own sewing but I’ll…ears! Big lugs…Harry Andrews!’
‘That’s him!’ says Andy.
‘Thanks for the fiver Toby.’ I whisk it off the bar.
‘Wait a minute! Are you sure?’ Toby is miffed. ‘Where’s yours then?’
‘Don’t need it, I’ve got yours.’
Toby chunters a bit but he knows he’s lost fair and square. Andy nudges him in the ribs, ’Never mind Toby, you must have forgotten’.
‘Yeah. But I wouldn’t have forgotten a shopping list of just sardines and flowers.’
Andy looks at me. ‘I got them for Georgie.’
Toby is rarely down for long, ’Sardines and flowers! You know how to treat a girl don’t you!’.
I explain how we often get flowers because we like them around the house but on this occasion I got them because Georgie had been feeling a bit low and that I was going to cook something different and interesting with the sardines to help cheer her up.
‘With sardines?’
‘Yes Toby, sardines. For a version of stargazey pie that I came across.’
‘Stargazey pie!?’
‘What are you, a parrot now?’
’So what’s stargazey pie?’
I’m describing how I was seduced by the lovely name and how it all comes together with the heads of the fish poking out of the dish when Andy interrupts me, ‘Did she like it?’
‘Not really. She said it looked threatening. I cooked us some threatening food.’ Andy and Toby are laughing. ‘And on top of that, I forgot an ingredient.’ They laugh a little harder.
‘Should have put it on your list!’ Toby glees.
‘Oh, I had it, I just forgot to put it in.’
Having invited them to ratchet up, Andy says, laughing, ’Please tell me the flowers were okay.’
‘Hayfever’ I shrug, ‘Some days…you know.’ I put my and Toby’s fivers on the bar, ‘Same again?’

29. The Sad-o-meteR

The weather outside is overcast and heavy and Toby is tuned to it. He has been telling us about some kind of mental sad-o-meter he checks before deciding whether he would feel OK enjoying himself that day. I tell him I don’t get what the sad-o-meter’s job is in the first place, what does it let you know? I’m cynical about the sad-o-meter. Too much crap happening? Enjoy yourself as long as you can feel a bit guilty about it.
‘But I do! How can I truly enjoy myself?’
I say this reminds me of a bit of Woody Allen, that I mangle, so Andy insists on taking an age to demonstrate why smartphones aren’t before finding the quote, ‘I can't enjoy anything unless everybody is. If one guy is starving someplace, that puts a crimp in my evening.’
‘That’s just it! How can we stand here drinking beer and joking when there’s so much crap happening to people around the world?’
‘Luck of the draw.’ Andy shrugs.
I think aloud by way of reply, ‘This is one of the ways I cope with knowing there’s so much crap happening to people around the world.’ But it feels weak, and I still feel pinned by Toby’s question. Deep down, I feel old enough to have justifiably given up trying to make sense of ‘it all’.
Toby does internal dialogue with volume set to share. ’Sometimes I feel myself want to melt into it all, the human experience. Even things out!’
I nod because I think I get where he’s going, ‘Sounds a bit Jungian, he was big on the collective unconscious.’
Toby gets suddenly angry at me ‘Yeah! Trying to catch me out with your poncey bits of knowledge! Carlos Young, I know him! And Freud and all that lot. Ponces! What use are they all when you’re a refugee?’
I wasn’t trying to catch him, he just caught light. I didn’t want to fan the flames by trying to refine my point, even Carlos didn't make me laugh because, anyway, Toby had me pinned again.
Andy starts, ‘Look, when I was breeding fuchsias, thousands of ‘em…’ but tails off at the look Toby gives him as he says ‘f*ck fuchsias! I’m talking about People!’
I can see something’s put a firecracker under Toby’s arse and I sense I need to put an arm round his shoulder and a few gentle words in his ear. This Toby is one I’m uncertain of, but even so, I put an arm round his shoulder and say kind of privately into his ear ‘I can see something’s put a firecracker under your arse, Toby. What’s up?’
‘What the world has come to!’ is what’s up for Toby. ConsideringThe Newsthe kind of daytime viewing that proved you weren’t senile, Toby has OD’d to the point of almost chronic despondency.
‘You know,’ I say, to Toby, ‘I could imagine Orwell saying that how all the misery is reported to us, is a way of encouraging private content, satisfied customers in a look-how-lucky-we-are way’.
‘You’re just twisted. And read twisted books!’
Toby says this bitterly. So I lean in a bit closer and say kind of privately in his ear, ‘So I’m twisted. But you Toby, are coming across a bit wired. Whatever it is, we’re your mates. Ease up.’
Toby excuses himself for the toilet and when he comes back, he’s flipped a switch. Wiped the tape. Conversation, a different conversation, heads deep into the banal to ensure it steers clear. I’m not putting much into it because I keep sneaking a look at Toby, and seeing his sad-o-meter clicking, wondering exactly what it’s registering.

30. Vive la.....

‘Georgie gets in a muddle when she has a pop at me over too broad a front. Forgets what she was saying.’
‘That’s good isn’t it?’
‘Yes and no. It’s a sort of peace by amnesia, but you can forget that...’
Nothing.
So I continue, ‘…it’s no because I’m supposed to have been listening. So when she asks ‘What was I saying?’ and I remind her, the front’s back. If I don’t or can’t, I’m rumbled.’
‘Rumbled?’
‘Were you listening to me?’
‘Yeah, of course!’
‘No, that’s what Georgie would say, “Were you listening to me?” ’
Toby and me had somehow found ourselves discussing a discrete but boundless aspect of domesticity. Difference. I have been describing the dynamic of living with it as like a constant dance, changing tempo, step, lead and follow. Toby hears me out then calls it ‘Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus’. Then he gets exasperated when I ask ‘Why isn’t it Women Are from Venus, Men Are from Mars?’ and I get to rip-roar laugh when he puts heavy dismissal into ’Who cares? It’s all bollocks anyway!’
So then he composes himself into offended and I mean it when I say ’Toby, I love you to bits.’ But he’s armoured himself. Andy returns to the table with fresh beers. Toby says, ‘He’s been telling me about how him and Georgie don’t get on.’
Andy looks surprised and I say ‘Don’t get me wrong Toby. We don’t not get on. Far from it. We disagree on some things, mostly about what should stay and what should go. We have a lot ofstuff. Georgie can’t let it go because she wants or needs the…I dunno, the way it hooks her back to when we were younger, when our children were children. I want to thin all our stuff right out, don’t want to be constantly prompted to keep using up now time replaying gone time. What’s wrong with now time, and the bit that’s coming next?’
‘Have we been smoking the old jazz cigarrrettess?’. Toby enunciates this the way Santa Claus and Queen Victoria might have duetted it. It makes me laugh too. When I reply that I might have indulged before I came out but what’s that got to do with it? Toby says ‘Thought so. It makes you talk gibberish.’
‘Now now!’ Andy polices. He holds his pint up to the light and we’re about to chink cheers when he takes in a big breath and says:
'Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn
My lip the secret Well of Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur’d - ‘While you live
Drink! - for once dead you never shall return.’
After a brief pooling of silence, we drink. Andy smacks his lips and dipping into an inside pocket, produces a leather-bound Fitzgerald edition ofThe Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyámthe size of a credit card. ‘I swear by this.’ he says waving it between finger and thumb ‘It’s all I ever consult in moments of…any kind of…turbulence.’
‘Good as anything!’ I say.
Toby has a sally, ‘Good as the Bible?...The Koran?’
‘Good as anything.’
Talmud? I-Ching?… Whassname…Bagofevita?’
‘Better than all of them.’
‘Better!?’
‘It’s smaller.’
Toby laughs despite himself as I turn to Andy. ‘All I was telling Toby, was that Georgie and me are solid where it counts but we just don’t attach the same significance tothings. And that…’
Andy shrugs sympathetically. I point at the little book, ’Suggest a quatrain, Squire.’

31. Last known address

Toby’s recent existential angst has been shredded like sea fret to reveal a Martello Tower of outraged vigilante.
’They told me I’ve had my address stolen!’
‘Your email?’
‘No! My address!…where I live!…park my car!’
Andy is nonplussed, ’What the hell are you talking about?’
‘If I could just get my hands on them!’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Toby!’ I say urgently.
‘What!?’
’How are you going to get home?’
Toby looks at me in a vacant, pained way as I get my notebook out and opening it to the back, point. ‘What’s that?’
He looks and sighs.
’They may have stolen your address but I’ve got a perfect copy.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Toby had been noticing an increase in the number of (double double fingers in the air) ’financial’ mail shots and letters he was getting. Then they started coming for other people at his address. Opening one, he sees it wants money. Having zero faith in the postal preference route on offer and now having a suspicious bee in his bonnet, he gets in touch with Trading Standards where someone suspeculates he may have had his address ‘stolen’ in a postcode scam and that, ‘It’s especially troubling for a lot of older people’. Knowing Toby, it was being called ‘older people’ more than having his address stolen that’s morphed him into Testosterone Man. He makes hard claws of his hands and grimaces, ‘I’d tear their nuts off with my bare hands!’
Andy and me are having horrible imaginings before Andy, ungendering his, asks, ‘What if they haven’t got any?’
‘Women!?…Women wouldn’t do a…Women!?’
‘Come on Toby’ I say, ‘surely equal ops is mainstream now. Anyway, you’ve read Chandler, watchedThe Maltese Falcon.’
‘Not real life. Not like any women I know - not like Carol.’
‘So you didn’t know she had you double indemnified?’
‘Very funny.’
‘Just don’t go near any trains.’

Toby’s rage and frustration, he says, comes from not being able to get revenge.
‘That would do it?’, I wonder.
‘You bet!
‘Tearing nuts off with your bare hands…’
Toby is quiet, looking at his hands as he eases claw out of them with open, close, open, close. ‘No, that’s second choice. Revenge would be getting my money back and some of theirs.’
‘I didn’t know you’d lost any.’
‘I haven’t but I could have been one of those…older people.’
‘But surely,theirmoney isn’ttheirs.’
‘And them going to prison.’
’Toby, unless you’ve sent money off, you’ve escaped being scammed. Good. What’s with the revenge?’
‘I’m just so angry at the thought someone can invade your life like that. If it’s not that, it’s call after call trying to get money out of you or con you about a bank transaction or a log-in or click on this link or something. Used to be, phone rang and you’re set for a chinwag with someone you know.’ Then after a pause, ’They could do something about it, something serious, the government - if they wanted.’
’So why don’t they?’ Andy asks.
I dive in. ‘It’s like what Lenin said…you look for the person who will benefit, and…’
Toby suppresses his impatience by folding into calm, ‘Lenin? Exactly why are you talking Lenin?’
‘I’m not…well…I am,The Big Lebowski.’
‘Whatever. Why?’
‘You must have seen it!’
’Nope.’
’It’s about…confused addresses.’

On the way home, a calmer but still unstoic Toby drops by mine to pick up the DVD. As he heads off I call after him ‘That says just what I was trying to say earlier but much better.’
‘Which bit?’ he calls back.
‘All of it.’

32. Music, Food, Love

Waiting for Andy and Toby in The Dun Cow, I’m trying to finishThe Axeman’s Jazzbefore they arrive. I have about ten pages'worth of reading left when they join me after collecting the drinks I’ve put behind the bar.
‘Jazz eh?’ Andy’s liking for jazz prompts him to ask if the book ‘is about jazz jazz or, you know, stuff jazz?’
‘Mostly stuff jazz but Louis Armstrong gets a look in.’
The conversation pinballs, with rapid dings and flips and I reveal my fondness for Louis Armstrong’s version ofI Only Have Eyes For You, Toby says he and Carol get schmoozy to Art Garfunkel’s version, Andy says ‘If music be the food of love…’ and before I know it, I’ve agreed to Toby’s suggestion to host a kind of show and tell love song themed evening at mine, ‘With the laydeeze, of course!’
’Spoilsport!’ Andy says, giving Toby a lunging kiss on the cheek that gets wiped away with the alarmed ’Yeeugh!’ of a four-year old.
Georgie thinks this should be fun but we’re not long into making and listening to our selections when I realise that come the evening, we might just end up emotional wrecks. I say to Georgie, ’It’s crazy, I know what’s coming but it gets me every time. Pavlov would have loved me.’ Georgie gives me a hug and we get to doing those intimate, shuffly, stick close to me moves and I get lightbulbed, ‘How about we clear the front room for dancing?’
’Showtime!’
Come the evening, Toby has brainwaved some ideas that he wants to introduce - guess who picked it anonymity, love love, sex love, broken heart love, first love - Carol asks him if he’s brought his spreadsheet? I tell him that as the music provider, I can’t handle all that because I’ve been on the laughing gear. I didn’t tell him about Pavlov and that I had persuaded myself this would be a good way to help avoid making a teary fool of myself. So after the welcome hugs, kisses, drinks? nibbles? lovely! and all that, it was with with an edge of ‘Do a hundred lines’ that Toby insisted I get things going in the love song dance space.
So I did a suitably wild, not to say bonkers job of it to Iggy Pop’s singingI Wanna Be Your Dogthat included a near miss with one of Georgie’s prized ice candles.
’That’s a love song?!’
‘It’s a many-splendoured thing Toby!’
‘It’s the sweetest thing!’ says Andy, up on his feet and singing to Olga Al Bowlly-Peter Skellern style. This prompts Toby to drop onto one knee, serenading Carol tunefully with more Skellern. ‘You’re a lady, I’m a man…’ to which, chuckling knowingly, Carol says that she has ‘…always thought that song was a nice way of asking for a bit of the other’ as he segues into an unbelievably cheesy rendition ofI Just Called To Say I Love You. Though my fragile plan to get everyone’s songs and playlist them is broken, I’m comfortable knowing the evening is now on random. The odd diversity of misery and joy included Andy and Olga duettingAnnie’s Songbefore getting all sinuous toBody Talk, me karaoking Etta James’At LastandShould I Stay Or Should I Goby the Clash before doing the make a fool of myself thing along with Georgie to This Mortal Coil’sSong To The Siren, Carol outbelting Whitney Huston inI Will Always Love Youand then with Toby, doing a scary, unsynced version of that song from Titanic by Celine Dion that had me hiding. Georgie brought me back with a heart-catchingFast Carto Tracey Chapman.
The evening flies by but we none of us have the dance stamina or enchanting abandon of our youth, though the spirit is willing. As we flag, Olga says fanning herself, ‘Can you feel the heat? We’re glowing!’
I throw the window open to let in the night and dot joss sticks and candles about. Danced and sung out, cooling in the garden we all join John Lenon in singingNorwegian Woodtogether. We get to no common understanding of why music does what it does to you but agree we don’t mind not knowing as long as it carries on doing it.Quand Vous Mourrez De Nos Amoursby Rufus Wainwright filters out and floats about us with the moths, candlelight and curls of incense smoke. We all quietly listen and understand it is the last song; the affection of our goodnights is strong.