MAILMAN, BRING ME NO MORE BLUES.
There came an e-mail.
Hi, Ishmael!!! Remember me???!!! From when you were nineteen??!! Well, I have terminal cancer and and I understand that what you do in these circumstances is try to reconnect with old friends!!! I found you through the wonders of the Internet!!!
What - as the young people say - the fuck? This relationship had lasted, what, maybe two years and effectively finished around nineteen-seventy. Funny thing was that although I hadn't thought about Colin for forty years I had, just a few days previously, dug out an old photo of him, of us; an early, tiny, black-and-white Polaroid, taken in his first, proud, matrimonial home - chunky Cotswold stone fireplace with no chimney and an oak-framed, leather three-piece, old codgers here will remember the style. Why on Earth would he be reaching out to me, of all people, advising me of and involving me in his death?
Cheeky bastard, is what I thought, at first. Fuck off out of it, you could have contacted me years ago, why now, when you have outlived your three-year prognosis? Is it that you think I have no troubles of my own, that I sit here in my stony fastness just waiting for a forty years dead friendship to revive itself, now that it has at least one foot in the grave; what is the point of that? Go and suffer your own burden of mortality, as the rest of us do, or else don't, go and some quietus make, with a bare bodkin or, in your case, one of a matching set of cooking knives, from Habitat, or some other, prats' designer confessional, Bless-me,-Father-Conran,-for-I-know-not-what-I-like-unless-you-tell-me outlet.
I became quite angry but only for a moment or two. When we were kids he was a good-natured boy, industrious, reliable, a clean cut kid. Unlike me, he had parents and they, too, were kindly; he was generous and had a quirky sensayuma. He was decent, as straight as a die and I guess a proto-Thatcherite materialist; a ghastly, little Barret house on an arid, make-believe estate and a company Ford Escort Mk 1, these were the spurs in Colin's flanks. Not me, fuck no, anything but; William Blake's road of Excess had me marching unsteadily, the soles of my feet smoking on its molten cobbles. And the last time I saw Colin I glimpsed him, from within a disintegrating marriage at which he had been my best man - Gosh, the things we did, then, before before, the worthless, paltry rituals to which we slavishly subscribed - as he carried the coffin of his infant son, stolen away in the night, freighted off to darkness and memory and disappointment, courtesy of cot death syndrome.
We see it all the time, now, in Arabia and Asia, fathers carrying dead infants, but somehow these bereaved men have about them the dark dignity of rage, generally against Uncle Sam and the UK; there's no help for these heroes, no collections, no gabshite actors bleating their phony lines on behalf of hundreds of thousands sentenced to cruel bereavement. Only wogs after all, and niggers. No, no, don't get me wrong, I'm not racist or nothing, I value the right sort of foreigners, but lessfaceit, lessbeclear, these nignogs, I mean, they're all terrist scum, int they? ( from Paul Staines' Guido's Big Book Of Political Science For KnobHeads.) But where you can see, in Abdul's eyes, his almost comforting hatred of our warmachine; in Colin's, on that day so long ago, all I could see was weary, resigned bewilderment; his beloved, pre-ordained consumerist lifestyle had short-changed him, in the worst possible way.
And after a lifetime abidng with all that, all that suppressed guilty regret, now he was dying, not suddenly, on a day to surprise he and his, but measuredly, on what they call a journey, his course set by - whaddayacallem? - oncologists; his hands held by MacMillan nurses and other ghouls, as these things are now ordered; maybe a hospice of horror, an unashamedly public dying. A Cotswold stone fireplace of a death. Bogus and non-functional. There for all to see. Including me.
I mellowed quite quickly, though, a matter of seconds. He had never done me any harm, only kindness and fellowship, never caused me an instant's hurt, what did it matter that his ancient choices were crass and vulgar, they were certainly not as bad, as damaging as my own, and they were probably more his parents' - and her's - than his own. If he wanted to make contact with me then he was entitled, I felt. I know that in many hospitals they are denied even a sip of water but amongst the rest of us the dying must have some entitlements, mustn't they?
I have nothing in the way of kin and my parents died an eternity ago; death, therefore - somebody dying - , well, its rarity is a suckerpunch to me. In my forties, through Mrs Ishmael, I met a woman, Celia, who had been first the mistress and then the wife of one of my teachers at grammar school. He was, like most of them, a contemptible bastard, your foot would break before you tired of kicking him in the balls and I was cheered to learn from Celia that he had died young. Her then current husband, John, was in the middle of a longdrawnout dying and everytime we met he, like the Ancient Mariner, fixed me with his glittering, cancerous eye and rehearsed all the sins and duplicities and shortcomings and betrayals of his previous wife. I just listened to him; he wasn't interested in listening to me. He barely paused for breath, hour after hour, in merciless detail. He had been going to kill her and some or all of her lovers but he had thrown his revolver in the River Fleet to stop himself so doing. But Christ, was she a bitch, did I tell you about the time she went off with this solicitor and I got the Law Society involved, didn't stop her, she was just a slag and then there was the time she flew to Israel with one of the tribe, a Jewboy, but that didn't last. Must've amounted to days, the hours he ranted at me, about someone I had never met. Celia would, whilst John was frothing at the mouth, just talk to Mrs Ishmael, as though nothing untoward was happening. I didn't realise until after John had died that Celia was just waiting - gasping - for it to happen so that she, in her blowsy sixties, could take up with an utter arsehole of a humanist minister; quite how there can be such a thing as a sermonising humanist minister seems as bizarrely and improperly illogical as, say, the existence of Nigel Farrage, but never mind, Celia had the oldy hots, bless her, for this unspeakable cunt and actually couldn't wait for whining old, dying old John to pass over, taking with him his ragingly unresolved first marriage. I thought John was entitled, you see, thought it was the least I could do, listen to a dying man's woes. She later dragooned me into helping her scatter his ashes over an old hill fort in Presteigne; I never knew why, still don't, there were many other closer, more appropriate people. It wasn't until some years afterwards that I felt a little soiled, a little used, by both Celia, in her time of lusting and by John, in his time of dying.
I have suffered no such beleaguering from Colin's correspondence, no such bilious filibustering. I did write back to him as best I could, as warmly and thoughtfully as I could, as amusingly as I could, as profoundly and elegantly and as rhythmically as I could. A list of sales-repping career achievements is all I have read in return, nothing of him or his life or his dying but then not everybody can write these things down, not everybody knows themselves. Maybe, I more or less resolved, his contact was just a form of naughty, pre-mortem, public announcement; maybe that's all he wanted to do, a dark showing-off, a little boy, waving his tinkle at the world, while he still can.
WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU.
I haven't died or yet been pronounced dying but I have been terribly fatigued. There is a disc in my neck which has popped out and is pressing, like a tiny, malevolent guillotine blade through the spinal fluid and into the spinal cord. Fatigue is a symptom, fatigue and pain, or pain and then fatigue and no wonder, I nearly fell over when I saw the MRI scan.
I have cupboards full of narcotics but unless you're taking them for fun they're no fun at all and so I don't; with the opiates and opioids I work to Phil Spector's gun maxim - Better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them. It's good advice for anyone in serious chronic pain - just knowing that you possess something that will almost instantly engender a warm sense of painfree wellbeing is better than actually using it, because once you use it you will want more and more and it will work less and less; quite medieval, I am, about suffering pain; I must deserve its horror, its transcendence.
My consultation with the neuro surgeon was difficult. I guess that in the strict sense of the word he could speak English but he knew nothing of nuance or idiom and on top of that, in any language, he was slipshod, pompous and self-regarding. Oh, he said, there'll be plenty of notice of it becoming an urgent condition; seemed a contradiction to me, a non sequiteur. Odd and frustrating, because in the same hospital, over the same period just recently, I have been treated, for another matter, by a world-famous plastic surgeon, Aegean, I guess, South Mediterranean, North African, maybe, who is a precise, fluent and gracious communicator. There oughta be a law, hadn't there, this is life and death stuff, you need to understand what's being said to you. I asked, anyway, for a second opinion. Maybe I'll get one I can understand.
Sorry, anyway, not to have been in touch.
TALES FROM THE RIVERBANK.
General Eisenhower, storming across war-torn Europe in his staff car mused to his driver,
Honeybabe, these Godamned Autofuckinbahns are some hot shit; they're as smooth as yo sweet ass, flat as a Godamned pancake and they run from here to fuckin' eternity. How come these Kraut sonsafuckinbitches got highways like these while back home we just got motherfuckin' dirt tracks, dusty fuckin' lanes like the kind that Bonnie an' fucking Clyde got shot to fucking pieces on. Now, pull the fuck over here an' gimme somea that sweet peaches an' cream y'all been keepin' warm for me all the way from fuckin' Normandy.
And so it was. When Ike became president his very first project was the design and construction of Uncle Sam's Interstate Highway System;
This was and remains - it is still being built - a massive, massive civil engineering project. Wherever it has gone it has attracted economic growth. Aside from the thousands employed in its construction and in the design and manufacture of its machinery, the Interstate Highway network spawned hotels everywhere - Hiltons and Holiday Inns - diners and fast food outlets, filling stations; towns sprung up, airports, car hire firms, Highway Patrol law enforcement agencies, huge transport fleets of Mack trucks, criss-crossing the country.
The project continues to this day, government initiated, the Interstate Highway has created trillions of dollars worth of good. If only, instead of a cabal of up-each-others-arses public schoolboy, trustfund spivs, ponces, slags, extortionists and child molesters we had someone with Ike's courageous vision.
The floods have presented a perfect opportunity for a sensible government to commit to a civil engineering project that would both safeguard parts of the country and put it back to constructive work. Instead, punitive and mean spirited, we have retarded mutants like Ian Duncan Smith throwing aged and vulnerable people out of their homes, the shameless, criminal poltroon Cameron, promising access to, Oh, ten million pounds, for flood victims; that must be all of two, maybe three bankers' annual bonuses.
The Deluge of river, sea and sewer water has, I'm afraid, made me laugh. I live perilously close to the ocean and only a few metres in sea-level terms above it and that's why the house and contents insurance is so costly. We have never flooded but a big, freaky sea would wash the place down with us in it and the four-figure insurance premiums wouldn't matter a fuck. When the winds blow, therefore, I set myself in the watchtower and take catastrophe precautions. This much is obvious - if you live close to the sea or a river or on a flood plain then Peril is your chosen next-door neighbour, Peril is your problem, not mine.
There is, of course, no question but that govament has failed miserably, shamefully, ignominiously and disreputably to maintain let alone improve flood defences but what else would accrue from people like these, Underpants Major, ButcherBlair, Gordon Snot and this wretched Coalition of Cruelty and Criminality. What do people expect from Chris Huhne, David Laws, Nick Clegg, Eric Pickles and the rest, these people are all dangerous criminal incompetents. David Cameron believes that the USA won the Battle of Britain; Nick Clegg averred that the state pension was Oh, about thirty quid a week. These people shouldn't be in charge of wiping their own arses, never mind the safety of the nation in a time of erratic climatology; they should be in a secure care home for the criminally insane, instead, their rancid cocks sucked dry by les invigilateurs faux et mechant, JockyNeil, Young Parent John Humphrys, Jerry Million Pounds A Year Paxman, Adam Lard and the rest, MediaMinster's best continue shitting in our faces, unchallenged.
But even so, it is a measure of the stupidity of the nation that we tolerate all this deluvian bleating and skriking from fuckwits, chancers and opportunists. There was a publican, demanding that I compensate him for his loss of business, cheeky fucking bastard; he should insure himself adequately or give his pub away to some other dummy. Oh, but Mr Ishmael, you dunno how hard the pub trade is; d'yaknow there's four thousand pubs shutting every hour and now this, people being too, well, too flooded to come and prop up the bar, like in the good old days, playing darts and munching on hearty ploughpersons' lunches; heart of the community, it was, the 'pub, dunno what the world's coming to, me. Global warming? Nah, dunbelieve in it. Lefty nonsense, innit. But I do need compensating.
No, no, no, in my considered and costly opinion it's all these food banks that're causing the problem, simply throw the scrounging bastards into the Thames, that'll sort it. Cocaine? Never heard of it. Nigella Coke? No, never heard of her, either; she that fat, greasy cook, the one with her tits hanging out, was married to that barrowboy, Saatchi?
Funniest thing of all, though, was Prince Billy Gormless and his oik brother, Prince Harry Moron, the pair of them posing with one or maybe as many as two sandbags that they had filled photo-opportunistically, taking a half-hour break from their lives of permanent holiday and eighty-quid-a-throw cocktails, worthless, pampered cunts;
Christ on a fucking rope, if people will swallow that sort of shit then they deserve anything they get. Drowning's too good for them.
JUST TWO POUNDS A MONTH CAN HELP US SAVE A FAMILY OF RATS THREATENED BY NASTY PEOPLE.
The rat family.
Just two pounds a month.
That's all it takes.
No, don't worry, love, I'll get the taxpayer to fund my advice to you.
And then you'll shred the receipts, right? Brilliant.
Tony and Rebekah Rat have worked tirelessly to promote, well, murder, filth, pornography; don't let them go under just for the sake of two pounds a month.
No degrees of separation.
David, Andy and Rebekah Rat have toiled tirelessly to suborn what Tony Rat left of democracy in this country; don't let them down, now when they might, even David Rat, eventually be looking at an unfair prison sentence. Andy mated with Rebekah and quite possibly with David, too. Don't let these closely-knit rodents be separated. Two pounds a month's all it takes.
Rebekah Rat and the RatFamily driver, Jeremy FatRat; they need your help so badly; Jeremy as his car show descends even further into schoolboy farce and Rebekah as the RatExterminators gather outside her homes.
And are one's prisons really like holiday camps?
One hopes you don't find out for yourself.
In a quiet moment Queen Rat and Rebekah Rat discuss their anti poisons strategy. You scratch one's back and one will scratch yours.
A greasy, slab-faced spiv and a pasty-looking, nasty slapper.
Dave Rat and Rebekah Rat,
Boogie-ing the truth away.
I mean the night.
No, I don't, I mean the truth.
Funny, isn't it, how many of the unelected prime minister's chums are, well, crooks. Like him, the Wisteria bandit.
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