Lol-ed into a False
Sense of Security
By Dominic Horton
It is odd what curious thoughts and images flow through our heads in idle
and vacuous moments. In the Flagon &
Gorses the other Sunday, with my recent viewing of the superlative television
series Rome fresh in the memory, I
fleetingly but involuntarily pictured Gary Sitting Bull, Pat Debilder and
Arthur Chedeurvalie as Roman governors sitting in the Senate encasing their wisdoms
in flowing togas. The thought fled as quickly as it had arrived and was but one
of hundreds of such flighty images that sped through my psyche during the
day. For the most part people do not
articulate such adventitious and momentary thoughts through fear of feeling
foolish or silly but given the on-going whimsical nature of this column I might
as well fire away as no doubt my fellow Flagoners perceive me as a peculiar
sort of chap anyway. And I am certainly
in no position to disagree with them.
Or maybe it is just me that has strange irregular thoughts like this
during the day (and most of the night come to think of it). It could be accounted for by me drinking too
much, which is a distinct possibility.
But how does one break the enduring cycle of boozing and ignore the
bewitching calling of drink that softly and seductively whispers, “submit
yourself into my soft and warming arms and all will be well and all of your
worriment and quandaries will be forgotten”?
When I played football it bought discipline to the proceedings and kept
me more or less on the straight and narrow.
Association Football is a young man’s game though and it is beyond me
now as for me to play again would take a more miraculous comeback than Christ’s
on the day after Easter Egg Day or Elvis Presley’s in Las Vegas in 1968. Legendary characters both but I think that in
Blackheath Elvis’s comeback just shades it over Jez’s resurrection in the
popularity stakes. But if you compare
Jesus coming out of a tomb looking a bit peaky and asking if anyone has got a
spare fag to Elvis tearing into a rip roaring rendition of Arthur Big Boy
Crudup’s That’s Alright Mama there is
clearly no competition.
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| Adam Brown as Ori, in the Hobbit |
Anyway, football doesn’t seem to be a goer for booze diversion tactics so
maybe procuring a girlfriend would be the answer but with me on the prowl I can
see the concerned women of Halesowen quickly forming a resistance group. I did date a nurse recently but it ended up
being another romantic calamity. She had
a habit of ending all her text messages with the increasingly popular but
irritating abbreviation “lol” regardless of the content of the message. She gave the impression that all was going
swimmingly well but she eventually contacted me and said she just wants to be
friends. You could say that she lol-ed
me into a false sense of security.
Maybe if I cooked a meal for a prospective suitor it
might impress her sufficiently to offer me a second date; then again given my
industrial one pot cookery skills (where lean, tender meat and fresh, vibrant
vegetables are transformed into stodgy gruel in a reverse butterfly manoeuvre)
it is more likely to lead to a Crimewatch
reconstruction. Carla Von Trow-Hell at
the Flagon & Gorses will no doubt campaign for the actor Adam Brown to play
my part in the reconstruction as she cruelly suggested that I look like the
character that Brown plays in The Hobbit,
being the dwarf Ori. I can’t see the
likeness myself; Ori is far
better looking than me. I will have to
leave my Codger Mansions dwelling and move into one of the Hobbit homes on Long
Lane in Blackheath.
On the subject of matters culinary, things such as
cooking an entire brisket without tenting or making a soufflé are often bandied
about as being the hardest things for a chef to do but to my mind the task in
cookery that requires the most skill is to is to defrost bacon in the
microwave. The thin ends of the rashers
end up cooked while the fat ends remain frozen and stuck together. They should challenge the contestants of MasterChef to defrost bacon in a
microwave the morning after having drunk their weight in beer in the Flagon
& Gorses. I can just see Greg
Wallace assessing the end result and proclaiming, “you have had a nightmare
there kidda, if I dare eat that sandwich I’ll have to take War & Peace to the karsi with me
as it will give me a severe dose of trichinosis.”
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| Hobbit homes in Blackheath |
Whilst on the theme of food, I’m having preliminary thoughts about trying
to grow a few vegetables in a little patch in the Codger Mansions garden, like
Tom Good. Mind you they will have to be
hardy, as the only things that seem to survive there are weeds. The garden seems to have the ecosystem of
Chernobyl. Willy Mantitt suggested that
if I do become green fingered that by the end of May I might be able to enter
the Chelsea Flower Show but I would imagine that one of the fundamental requirements of the competition
is that your garden boasts flowers. There
isn’t a single flower in mine, so that rules me out. If there was a competition called the Chelsea
Weed Show I would be a gold medal winner as there are varieties of weeds in the
garden that are unique to the Codger Mansions environment; I found three new
types yesterday that have developed over the winter. Anyway the chances of any success of the
cultivation of vegetables is minimal given that the back garden at the Mansions
is darker and damper than Windy McDisco’s aris the morning after he has had a
skin full and a Vindaloo with the Pirate.
But whether I grow vegetables, capture a girlfriend or
enter into some other improbable occupation the weekly routine of drinking then
drying out needs to be unequivocally broken and replaced with something a bit
less acute at both extremities; this is especially the case as growing into my
40’s I am conscious that from a health perspective that I am marching into
stroke/ heart attack/ mental breakdown/ midlife crisis territory; the latter
two I have experience of but the former two have hitherto not called to say
hello and if they did they would be unwanted guests. Hangovers, the filthy post-booze terrors and
lost weekends are bad enough but a major health incident would be more
unwelcome than the Pirate at the Queen’s Garden Party.
 |
| Arthur Big Boy Crudup |
But why all the drinking in the first place? Is it just
habit, so enduring and persistent that it is just second nature, a way of life
which I submit to unthinkingly? Does it fulfil a meaningful purpose? Is it just
a side product of being single and spending my association time in the Flagon
& Gorses? I was going to deliberate over these questions at the Great
Western beer festival on Saturday but being in the eye of the storm is probably
not the best time to ponder on these matters.
So in the dead of the night last evening, during my weekly
first-sober-night-of-the-week-sleepless-terror-ride (which is like being on a
ghost train at a 70’s fairground where the structure has been hastily and
unsafely assembled with Peter Sutcliffe as the station master) it dawned on me
that a prevailing sadness drives me to the pub.
The following day the drink compounds the sadness which propels me back
to the pub once more, like a sick, pervasive boomerang, until enough becomes
enough and I sharply apply the breaks for an emergency stop and effect a three
point turn back to sobriety. After the
passing of a few dry days the sadness is steadfastly insistent in its
occupation of my existence so it is a case of, what the hell, I might as well
go and have a drink and make merry and the whole sorry rollercoaster starts its
journey again.
And I don’t like rollercoasters, ever since I was on one
as a kid with my Brother the Albino in Blackpool when we went round a sharp
bend and I hit my head on a wooden white post at the side of the track. It was only the fact that I was wearing a
‘Kiss me quick’ hat that saved my young life.
Another painful memory from that holiday was when on a roasting hot day
my Grandad Charlie gave my brother and I bottle of Corona orangeade and told us
not to guzzle it as when we had drunk it there would not be another. Disastrously either my brother or I dropped
and smashed the bottle (I forget who) and we were reduced to drinking warm
water from a water tower. So maybe I now
guzzle beer regularly through fear of it disappearing or running out. Well, that’s my excuse anyway and I am most definitely
sticking to it.
©
Dominic Horton, April 2014.
* EMAIL: lordhofr@gmail.com.
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