Lowlife 24 - The Turks are Revolting

Lowlife 24

The Turks are Revolting

I see that the French are on strike, the Turks are revolting (or rebelling, as "revolting" could be taken the wrong way) and that the Royal Bank of Scotland Chief Executive Stephen Hester is abandoning ship, now he feels that he has done his bit for the bank, with an immensely generous golden handshake of £1.6m of taxpayers’ money and a potential £4m in shares to feather his nest with.

I feel sorry for the tramps in Istanbul as not only are the authorities planning to build on the locally revered Geki Park in the city but a law has now also been passed banning the sale of alcohol in shops after 2200 hours, so they cannot even drown their sorrows to lament the sad news of the Park’s development if they fail to get to the off licence on time. 

I can picture Turkish tramps waking up on park benches after impromptu snoozes and legging it to the offy to buy their medicinal nightcap just before 2200 hrs in a blind panic, with the booze devils chasing them up the street.  The image is akin to me leaving the Flagon & Gorses at one minute before midnight in the desperate hope to make the Rhareli Peking Chinese take away before the turn of the hour, when it shuts; the sight of the light to the shop being on when I turn the corner of the road is a highly welcome one, like a thirsty man sighting an oasis in the desert.  I understand that J.J. Cale penned his classic track, After Midnight, after the crushing disappointment of not making it to the Rhareli Peking before closing time.

On the BBC, RBS's Hester immodestly sang his own praises and then he then declared, "I've been in the trenches with my people."  To begin with I doubt he's been in the trenches, more like in battle HQ far behind the enemy lines, sipping Bordeaux and biting into quails eggs telling the other officers how he and Bunny once laid on a seventh wicket stand of 117 for Oxford University 2nd XII against the oiks from Birmingham.  "My people"?! Does Mr Hester think he owns the poor employees at RBS? Is he going to take them with him when he leaves and pack them into a card board box with the contents of his desk and the £1.6m in banknotes he's blagged? 

We've all heard the expression "laughing all the way to the bank"; well in this case the fortuitous Mr Hester will be laughing all the way from the bank.   I can just imagine him returning home in the evening and explaining to the wife, "the bad news dear is that I have resigned and no longer have a job.  The good news is that I have got 1.6 million spondoolies in my sky rocket, so forget those fishfingers you are cooking we are going down the pub to get ratted followed by a ruby at the Star of Bengal.  Jeeves, rev the Merc up my old son, I'm choking for a pint."

Hester and his like live in a completely different stratosphere to us mere mortals.  Apparently he owns a 350 acre estate in Oxfordshire and the garden, which includes an arboretum, was designed by Chelsea Gold Medal winning landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith and includes pleached limes and five of the first batch of Australian Wollemi pines ever brought to Britain.   Why anyone would want to own Australian Wollemi pines is beyond me with them being a singularly unattractive tree; they resemble my scraggy, cheap, plastic Christmas tree that I drag out of the cupboard under the stairs once a year which is so uninspiring it actually dampens the festive spirit as opposed to enlivening it.   Contrarily, a row of elegant pleached limes would go down a treat amongst the cat sh*t, stingers and weeds of my Codger Mansions garden.   Hester has expensive pleached limes but all I get is a pickled lemon, which Chilli Willy offered me in the Flagon the other night and I have to say it was truly disgusting.  The place for a lemon is in a gin and tonic, sliced, in my book, or distilled into limoncello, not soaked in vinegar in a pickle jar, which is more the domain of onions, eggs, gherkins and the like.  One thing is for sure, with £1.6m nestling in Hester’s wallet he is unlikely to be in a pickle.

I even have to weed the wall in the back garden of Codger Mansions as like charity street sellers in Birmingham City Centre, the damn weeds get everywhere.  The owners of the new tram line at Snow Hill in Birmingham have turned the whole thing on its head by actually inserting weeds into the freshly developed wall by the proposed tram line and it looks dreadful.  Every time I walk past the wall of weeds it reminds me that the Codger Mansions garden needs attending to so the whole thing has less to do with a tram trip and is more like a guilt trip.

I rarely keep up with current affairs, usually only hearing snippets of news in the Flagon & Gorses, which are mostly a version of the story distorted or misrepresented by the punter in question and heavily laden with the relater’s opinions on the matter.  However, I learnt of the France, Turkey and RBS developments after catching a few minutes of the news on BBC television.
 

People at work often ask me if I saw this or that on television last night but despite me replying repeatedly “no, I don’t often watch television” they continue to ask away and then tediously explain the contents of the goggle box programmes they watched the previous evening.  Some of them must dedicate their entire association time to glaring at insipid television programmes and what’s worse they totally ignore the odd programme of quality and interest that can be found, if one tries hard enough, such as the documentaries on PBS America.  There was such a broadcast on the channel last night, a two hour film about the two fabled bouts between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in the 1930’s but alas I had to give it a miss as I had to dedicate time to writing this nonsense. 

Some people even switch the television on but do not watch it, which is a puzzling thing to do to my simple mind.  It would seem odd if a person put the oven on but cooked nothing, but switching on the television only to undertake a different activity, or even to adjourn to another room, is apparently a normal thing to do. 

My viewing is largely confined to football during the season, the odd bit of test match cricket and the Cartoon Channel when my son Kenteke is in the house.  As a money saving measure I have had Sky Sports switched off for summertime, after having had to wrestle with the difficult but cosmopolitan staff at Virgin TV to accept my simple instruction of disconnecting the channels.  I spoke variously to a gentleman from the sub-continent, a Scotsman and a lady of indistinguishable accent or origin before eventually losing faith in humanity and putting the telephone handset back on the receiver. 

A letter of complaint to the Virgin company secretary subsequently did the trick and the polite complaints manager that telephone me, who sounded like he is from the Home Counties, could not have been more helpful.  The smug faced Richard Branson might want to spend less time appearing in his irritating television advertisements and more time reminding his telephony staff they that are there to assist and not obstruct valued customers, who help to pay their wages after all (whether it be in sterling, rupees or Scotch whisky.)

Thankfully the television is rarely switched on in the Flagon & Gorses and when it is on it is confined to the back room, so it is not a nuisance if you are drinking merrily in the peaceful bar.   There is a rumour though that a new model is to be installed to replace the current antiquated set, which should be confined to the vaults of the British Museum.   All this modernisation at the Flagon is a little concerning though, as we do not want to lose the antiquated charm of the place and I cannot see the Pirate wearing the latest pair of Adidas training shoes with his trouser belt hanging half way down his arse revealing Calvin Klein pants.

Postscript

The other week in Lowlife 22 I failed to mention another culinary lowlight from my Fairfield Drive days. Prior to payday all I had left to eat was the residue of a stew from the night before but there was not an ample amount left to constitute a meal so I managed to form a soup out if it, which thereafter was known as the resi-stew.

© Dominic Horton, 14^th June, 2013.