A Great Sporting Moment
By Dominic Horton
Being a writer I like to get involved in literary matters
and to that end on Tuesday I attended an entertaining and informative talk by
local writer Tom Bryson. The first thing
I noticed about Tom was that he was wearing a sports jacket over a white shirt,
smart trousers and brown brogues which happened to be the very same outfit in
which I was clad; it was almost as if we were both issued with an Acme writer’s
uniform as part of our commitments to the written word. As the event was not as well attended as it
deserved to be I had the chance to chat to Tom, who was very helpful, and as he
gave me his business card to publicise his work I reciprocated with my Lowlife equivalent. If Tom did not despatch my card straight
into the bin and he actually subsequently read an online edition of this column
he was most probably completely perplexed within two minutes flat, leaving him
in need of a reassuring drink.
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| My dear son Kenteke |
Tom seemed very
interested in the whereabouts of the Flagon & Gorses so I reckon he likes a
pint and he was probably choking for one after the talk and if I had suggested
going for a drink he might have jumped at the chance. But I was desperate for an alcohol free night
after effectively having had two boozy Sundays on consecutive days (i.e. the
normal Sabbath followed by Bank holiday Monday).
On Sunday No 2 our
vivacious landlord at the Flagon & Gorses, being the Pirate, meandered back
into the pub, after his weekend junket to Lyme Regis, sporting a dazzling pair
of salmon pink trousers and carrying an Indian takeaway big enough to feed a
small hamlet in Worcestershire. I
thought I had been transported to a fancy dress food night. The Pirate explained that the zip had broken
on his other trousers and the flamboyant salmon pink britches were his only
alternative: on the incredulous sight of the Pirate’s luminous and ludicrous
strides I decided that I must be drinking too much was so it was time to
tentatively retreat to the uninviting lands of sobriety on Tuesday.
The result of Tuesday being the first dry day of the week
was that sleep was hard to come by, as is usually the case on the first
booze-less day after the weekend. The
sometimes elusive mistress of sleep flirted with me and we even had a little
foreplay but she didn’t want to engage in full intercourse. At least this meant that I did not have my
regular weekly nightmare. So the
phantasm that usually visits and terrorises me was kept waiting all night for
me to go to sleep, which he was less than pleased about, reading Scream (the UK’s No 1 horror magazine)
to pass the time. It would have been
ironic if through boredom he had nodded off whilst waiting at the top of the
stairs and I had snuck up on him and menaced him for a change to get my own
back, which would have been sweet revenge after all these years.
If I had not been so depleted of energy I would have got
out of bed and popped my head around the bedroom door to the stairwell and
invited the phantasm to help himself to light refreshments and to bung the tele
on to while the night away; there was bound to be a decent documentary on PBS
America though he would most probably have preferred to watch the Horror
channel to give him a few ideas for next week’s visit, which will probably be
more vindictive than usual in retribution for this week’s lack of opportunity
for him to petrify me.
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| Scream Magazine |
The phantasm might well catch me off guard and come to
Codger Mansions tonight when I least expect him but that said he must have
other people to terrify as I can’t be the only person on Furnace Hill that has
a regular, reoccurring nightmare. Come
to think of it, as he has been visiting me regularly now for over a quarter of
a century he must be knocking on a bit so he could well be semi-retired, which
may mean that he no longer works every night, so he could be free later to
scare the living daylights out of me after all.
I guess that the phantasm must be older than me as when
he first started to appear in my nightmares in my teenage years he must have spent a certain amount of time
in training and as he has frightened me witless from day one he must have been
an experienced ghoul even back then. I
sincerely hope that before he retires that he has the courtesy to let me know
as I would at least like the opportunity to wish him well and maybe even buy
him a pint up the Flagon & Gorses, where he would be in good company as
there are plenty of characters there who could easily be mistaken for
zombies. I would also like to think that
the phantasm will introduce me to his successor, so that there will be a
seamless transition.
I wonder if the phantasm will suggest to his successor
that he goes easy on me to give me a break as I have been a long term sufferer
of his menaces or whether he’ll say to him, “I’ve been visiting this bloke for
years so he is desensitised to it. You
are going to have to pull out all of the stops to make him scream, so make sure
you are firing on all cylinders when you turn up and scare the living sh*t out
of him.” If I know the phantasm it will
be the latter.
At
least I didn’t have a nightmare at Villa Park on Saturday after my beloved
Aston Villa finally secured safety in the Premier League in what has been
another difficult season. With it being the final home game the players were due to give the the
usual lap of disgrace after the match and I wasn’t very keen on it given that
we have been generally rubbish at Villa Park this term and I was eager to get
back to Codger Mansions. After the game
I asked my dear son Kenteke if he wanted to stay to see the players come back
out but he said, “to be honest dad can we go as I need a poo.” Which just about sums up the season.
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| The Author Tom Bryson, by request of Toby In-Tents |
But it was earlier in the day on Saturday that I
witnessed what for me was a great sporting moment. It was Kenteke’s final football game of the season for
his team and as is usual all the players were focussed on scoring a goal to
round the season off. Kenteke had a few
good efforts saved and I could see that he was getting desperate to score but
as the clock ran down it was looking increasingly unlikely. Then in the very last seconds of the contest
he went clean through on goal and from an angle he shot in textbook striker’s
style low and hard across the keeper and the ball went in the bottom corner of
the goal, after which the referee immediately blew the whistle for full time.
Thank you and good night. At that moment I knew
that later that day Villa was going to win.
Late on Saturday for the remains of the day I watched the
film The Remains of the Day, starring
Sir Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. I borrowed the DVD of the film from my
Mom many months ago but I kept putting off watching it as I feared that it
might be a little bit depressing as I erroneously believed that it was a slow
film about a blind man (played by Hopkins); such belief was borne out of me remembering
seeing a clip of the film in the early nineties (when it was released) with
Hopkins dancing with Thompson with his eyes shut and me subsequently casually
glancing at the dust jacket years later and reading the word “blind”.
The main character Stevens (a butler, expertly played by
Hopkins) seemed to enjoy the full benefit of sight at the start of the movie so
I thought that a horrendous accident would happen during the course of the
film, shaking the axis of the story; I waited with baited breath for such an
incident to occur. As the film
progressed I began to get so anxious and tense at the thought of the impending
accident which robs Stevens of his vision that I thought about switching the
film off. But I bravely ploughed on but
with only minutes of the film remaining Stevens could see perfectly well so I
thought to myself “any minute now the calamity will surely be upon the poor
chap” but to no avail. At the conclusion
of the picture Stevens’s mince pies were still in fine fettle. Perplexed I read the blurb on the DVD’s box
which read, “……an extraordinary and moving story of blind
devotion and repressed love.” I, of
course, felt like a fool. As they say,
there are none so blind as those that cannot see.
© Dominic Horton, May 2014.
* EMAIL:
lordhofr@gmail.com.
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