All
Played Out
By
Dominic Horton
Curries
from an Indian takeaway are evil as they are so full of fat that they
bloat you up and provide you with your recommended weekly calorie
intake in one hit. It's the ghee that does it. An ex-colleague at
work used to eat loads of curries and he developed a sizeable belly;
we used to call him the Ghee Lord. You might as well eat a pound of
melted lard as eat a takeaway curry. And beer is pretty bad for
putting on weight too. Especially as it makes you eat curry.
 |
| Hatchet Harry Stottle, by request of Toby In-Tents |
And
don't get me started on Chinese takeaways. But to my credit for many
weeks now I have managed to avoid my nemesis, the Baby
Faced Assassin at the Rhareli Peking Chinese takeaway, and I feel
better for it. I find it helps leaving the Flagon & Gorses as
late as possible in the evening to make sure that the Rhareli Peking
is shut. I've always said that leaving the boozer before last
knockings can be fraught with hazards; if you leave at kicking out
time you'll not end up with an unpalatable and emblubbering
beef fried rice and curry sauce from the Rhareli Peking and you
have less chance of being robbed on the Stourbridge Road by Mexican
bandits.
I
tend to cook my own low fat curries to eat after the pub as I have
only got to look at a samosa these days and I seem to put weight on,
which is what appears to happen when you get older. When I was a
teenager I could drink a skin full of beer and eat a curry, rice, a
big naan bread and chips as well and the calories would burn off
quicker than an egg frying on a car bonnet in the Mojave Desert. But
not anymore. So now I eat soup, lots of it. I cook the soups myself,
they are so easy to make that I bet even the undomesticated Willy
Mantitt could make one. But then again maybe not.
So
no longer being a big eater I was surprised with myself on Monday
because I made an Herculean effort and ate all of
my humongous Christmas dinner at the Flagon & Gorses
(actually, I did leave two roast chestnuts on the plate. I am lead to
believe that the Cambodians think it is rude to not leave a little
bit of food on your plate at the end of a meal. I was not being
polite, I was simply fuller than Mr Creosote in Monty Python's The
Meaning of Life. I could not even manage a wafer thin mint.
Apparently Elvis Presley was a keen Monty Python fan, which seems a
bit odd. Maybe when he died on the karsi he was laughing so much
at The Dead Parrot Sketch that it gave him a
Connery. It's a credible theory.)
 |
| Al Whispering Death Stottle |
Chef
Chilli Willy had put enough food on the plate to feed a small
gathering of Japanese Elvis impersonators but the food was so good,
and I was that famished, that I polished it off. And I put the
Christmas pudding and custard away too, which was washed down with a
fine Hungarian Dessert wine from the Pirate's personal collection. I
was joined for dinner by the Pirate, the Pianist and Leigh D'Stray as
my regular dining partners of Tomacheski, Pat Debilder and Mother
Teresa were absent without leave. Not being a cultured type I had
never had dessert wine before but I would imagine that the Pianist
and Leigh have, as they are more refined. And I am sure that the
Pirate has as he is a p*sshead.
I
spent the course of the meal with serious concerns that the Barbara
Cartland Suite, where we were seated, was going to explode as the
Pirate was sitting next to the fire and he is infamous for the amount
of flatulence he permeates. With the Pirate having a Christmas
meal, which included sprouts and stuffing, his wind was off the
Sphincter Scale. I took the precaution of putting Red Adair's number
in my mobile telephone but fortunately in the end I didn't have to
call him.
Al
'Whispering Death' Stottle (aka the Coarse Whisperer) had arranged
the Stottle Gang's Christmas junket for Wednesday and I knew that I
dare not back out as our leader Hatchet Harry Stottle would not have
been best pleased. But by then I was all played out as I had already
attended two boozy Christmas functions on the weekend in addition to
the Flagon meal on Monday, so I ducked out early of the Stottle do,
after only six hours of drinking, and headed back to Codger Mansions
for an aforementioned homemade curry.
 |
Pete the Heat Stottle, The Stottle With No Name & Wild Bobby Stottle (aka
The Pirate) looking like the three unwise men at the Flagon & Gorses Christmas
dinner.
|
Because
I was tucked up in bed early on Wednesday evening with Alfie the
teddy, by 0500 hours on Thursday morning I was up and about and as
fresh as a daisy that has been trampled on by a dog in the park but
survived the experience. So I decided to make a batch of soup in the
slow cooker, a simple vegetable. The soup that is, not the cook. The
only problem I had was that I thought I had better not use my hand
held liquidiser as it makes a terrible din and it might wake up the
neighbours. But I had the bright idea of taking the saucepan of
carrots, onions and celery (for the soup's base) and the liquidiser
to the bathroom as the neighbours would not hear the noise from there
– the bathroom is at the bottom of the extension on the ground
floor and for the record (with regards to hygiene) it does not
house the toilet, which is in a separate room. Which is a shame
as I could have sat on the karsi while I enacted the liquidising
operation and killed two birds with one stone.
My
neighbour told me a while ago that a previous owner of Codger
Mansions killed himself in the bathroom by slashing his wrists. But
it occurred to me that it might have been accidental death when he
cut his wrists after his hand held liquidiser slipped during a
routine souping procedure at five in the morning. Mindful of this
possibility I proceeded with great care and due diligence.
 |
| Hugh Queensbury |
I
took less care and due diligence on Saturday night when I
recited poetry at the Queensbury's Christmas dinner party, the
reason being that by the time the other diners allowed me to
read the poems I was three sheets to the wind. I thought a few
festive poems might be a pleasant idea so I did some research earlier
in the day and finally settled on three pieces of verse: A
Christmas Carol by GK Chesterton, Minstrels by
Wordsworth and Mistletoe by Walter de la Mare. But
when I suggested at the dinner table, early in the evening, that I
recite some poetry it was met with such a mixture of hilarity and
derision that anyone would have thought that I had proposed to run
naked around the streets with a piece of mistletoe sticking out of my
a*se. Queensbury was laughing so much that I thought he
was going to have a seizure, which he would have been able to deal
with as he is a paramedic. By the time I recited the poetry later in
the evening he was more like a paralytic than a paramedic and I
wasn't far off either.
So
my recital was not as good as it ought to have been and to compound
matters the whole sorry performance ended up on social media. But
when I watched the video clip the one thing that struck me was not
how tipsy I was but how pronounced my accent is, which sounded like
an odd mix of Black Country and Brummie – this comes in the week
that a poll conducted by market research firm YouGov found that the
Brummie accent is the most unattractive of all accents in the British
Isles.
 |
| A gathering of Japanese Elvis impersonators |
Whoever
devised the YouGov poll should be hung out to dry because to describe
it as being fundamentally flawed is an understatement. As far as
YouGov are concerned all of the residents of the West Midlands speak
with a Brummie accent, which is patently not the case: clearly
accents from around the Black Country, where I live, are different
from accents from Birmingham or accents from other parts of the
county, such as Coventry. Additionally many inhabitants of the West
Midlands speak with a non-English or non-Midlands accent and some
speak no English at all. Other regions are treated the same: for
example, ludicrously all Welsh accents are lumped into one generic
group.
I
am not sure what point the YouGov poll is trying to prove or what its
purpose is. The introduction to the poll on the YouGov website states
that there are as many dialects in the British Isles as there are in
the whole of the vastly more populous North America (including
Canada, Bermuda and Native American dialects). That being the case
surely it would be better to celebrate the richness of Britain's
linguistic diversity (including languages other than English) than to
be divisive about the matter.
The
accent (forgive the pun) should be on inclusivity and diversity, not
on belittling or marginalising people because of their accent or
dialect – if we did that in the Flagon & Gorses The Pirate,
with his soft Hampshire drawl, would be ostracised, drinking and
f*rting on his own by the fire in the Barbara Cartland Suite. And
the only possible person to benefit from that inflammatory situation
would be the legendary fire fighter Red Adair.
©
Dominic Horton, December 2014
Lowlife
is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall
Email:
lordhofr@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment