PARAGRAPH OF A NOBODY

Neither of her grandmothers was at Clare College with the present heir to the Viscountcy. Nor has she ever been to a ball in May, or any other month of the year for that matter.  She is somewhere above oik and below poodle-faker. She is no relation at all to Nettie Honeyball, Captain of the British Ladies Football team in 1895. She has never met anyone called Hugo, who wasn't dead or Spanish. She was never sent down from Cambridge for cheating at cards, for keeping a bear, or for flogging a valet while wearing the incorrect attire. She has flogged coat hangers, bingo pens and illicit contraband. She was sent to Coventry from Norwich (knickers off ready when I conceal heroin) by means of mutual exchange with an alcoholic whose wife had died of crack.  She is nobody of consequence.  

YES/NO PRiME MiNiSTER

As she sits down to weigh up likelihoods and alternatives - bacon (cured/ uncured) in classic tandem with eggs (scrambled /unscrambled) toast (wholemeal/ white trash) not to mention coffee and tea options in attendance - the PM partly regrets a decision brazenly taken early in the morning chez Number 10: to kick start the day with a brace of coddled eggs and a pair of rough, yet sturdy and dependable oat cakes on which to place them, before snapping a jpeg of the arrangement in order to compare and contrast them with those in the illustration on the back of the box - or is it the side?


- How is breakfast PM?

The PM has expended a goodly few minutes out of her precious mind in an attempt to resemble as far as feasible the studio photograph on the packet. She rues her choice of lexis. Surely goodly is incorrect in this context. Neither is she convinced that a coriander leaf does a passable impression of a sprig of parsley. Ho hum.

- How is breakfast PM? 

The question fails to jolt the head of government out of her reverie vis-a-vis the insignificance or otherwise of her quirky urge to do more or less whatever the serving suggestion suggests. It comforts her greatly. She feeds compulsive order/ disorder to relieve the oppressive sense of failure that, despite evident success in life, continues to dog. The crisis of choice overwhelms. Should I remain? Or perhaps better to exit? Soft or hard-boiled, how does the narrative move forward? To go? To stay? To act now? Or two acts too late? The continuous drip drip of binary opposition. The endless tap tap tap tap of politically mediated remedies...

At the breakfast buffet of entitlement, she has finally arrived at the egg station, only to be quietly informed chef's nipped out back for a smoke. Is this where the grammar schoolgirl trail ends? Even as PM, shall I never enter the upper echelons of the rarified Etonian rifles? 

A corrupted Cartesian dualism has begun to unnerve and unravel her clockwork of control. The spring has unsprung. I choose, therefore I am undone. Pepsi Cola v. Coca Cola? The apparent binary that is actually a duality. Like the commitment of the pig and the cod, compared to the involvement of the chicken and the chips, these two Great British institutions are under threat from pan-European alternatives and the menace of the almond croissant, at this critical juncture, moving forward. She has become habituated to biting off chunks of PR. She longs for detail, she overgeneralizes, she skips whole chapters and she loses plots.

- How is breakfast PM?

- Well, Kenneth. Breakfast is breakfast.

Bugger. There I go again. Ingrained a sociopathology as shoe-buying, kleptocracy, and torture has become to Imelda Marcos, this obsession, this extreme compulsion, this militant tendency to duplicate the binomial, to re-formulate this reciprocal philosophical reflection on every aspect of existence is not only inane and anodyne, but must stop now, before I implode, she fails to tell herself firmly enough.

Enough is enough! Aaarrgh!!!...

- I'm afraid the PM is unable to attend this morning's conference, announces a predecessor to stalking horses past, ladies and gentlemen of the press, due to an unfortunate and curious case of the sound bite in the night, followed by the now all too self-evident indelicate second breakfast debacle.

- The PM, continues the CPHQ spokeshorse, her chief physician informs us, has what appears to be a kipper bone lodged in her sternum which causes iteration, re-iteration and repetition of key parallelized expressions that double back on themselves with alarming frequency.  Are there any questions?... Just one. Yes. Lord Buckethead?

- Was the Kipper smoked?
  

MARIA SKLODOWSKA'S EGREGIOUS DISREGARD FOR HEALTH & SAFETY

As the door of the Floating University's science laboratory opened and the future Madame Curie shuffled in, the officer slammed shut the book that he had been studying since the beginning of Police Academy. 

- Can I help you?

- I was just checking your health &  safety records Panienka Sklodowska.

- My what?

- Your health & safety records, Panienka.

- I heard perfectly what you said. This is Poland 1889. My safety is highly contingent.

- Please excuse my intrusion. The name's Korzeniowki. Detective Jozef Korzeniowski. 

- Why should you be so preoccupied with my health & safety?

-All our citizens' safety preoccupies the minds of officers of the Service, Panienka.

- At the service of our Russian oppressors no doubt.

- Do you have isotopes on the premises?

- Radioactivity isn't a criminal offence. It is the great marvel of the age.

- The Service wishes to register an interest in your work. In the interests of protection you understand. It's about our national patrimony. We don't want you running off to France.

- France? Now there's an idea.

- And as for your flights of fantasy...

- Detective, if I were you, I'd be more interested in the two litres of fluid currently making its way towards your head from your ankles. This is the Floating University. As in Zero Gravity.

- I thought it was the Flying University of Warsaw.

- Flying? Don't be ridiculous. 

- Flying, floating, what's the difference?

- I thought it was my health that concerned you detective, not our infrastructure.

-  I imagined floating to be merely stationary flight. Though I am but an ignorant realist, Panienka Skolowodska.

- Pah! Flying would require so great a release of karmic force as to make the entire project unviable. Only 2% of the energy created actually goes into propulsion.  Rocket technology is so over-rated.

- So, how on earth do we float?

- The future is biofuels, Korzeniowski. We have constructed a platform out of valuable chicken stock.

- Chicken?

- Certainly. When the temperature of the broth is greater than absolute zero, inter-atomic collisions cause the thyme and parsley molecules to change... It's a classic recipe. Would you like to sample a bowl?

- I'm vegetarian. I don't eat mammals.

- Pah! the luxury of the bourgeois. I eat meat whenever I can get it. Mainly I survive on buttered bread and polonium.

- And the gamma rays?

- Small exposures shouldn't do much harm. One day, it could even save your life.

- I doubt that very much, Panienka.

- Are you sure you wouldn't like a taste of longevity Detective Korzeniowski? 

The policeman's eyes bulged, his cringing lips shied away from a response, but his body screamed gigabytes. Panienka Skolowodska's irradiated chicken stock was most definitely off the menu.

 

 

 

THE ANGEL OF THE NORD

Her face looks sad. Peter Shufflebottom sits and stares at it. He stirs his grande creme, though it has no sugar, and licks the froth from his teaspoon. She has an exhaust trail down her left cheek. She doesn't look back at Peter. His gaze gets more intense as he scans her body for more detail. She is unaware of the attention. Without looking down, he picks at the detritus of his croissant; the slithers and crumbs have formed a scrapyard on his serviette.

He'd feel sick if he smoked in the mornings now. It's been a long time. Jean-Paul Sartre made him nauseous. At the Sorbonne. During the miner's strike in Emile Zola's socially real novel Germinale. Sipping Monaco's. Smoking Pall Mall rolling tobacco. Albert Camus' rats made him phobic, paranoid. These days fashionable young women of the Group d'Intervention Gendarmerie National, the Anti-Terrorist Para-Military Police, wear blue berets, urban camouflage and postpone the use of their Uzi 9mms until the very last moment.

Back home at this time he'd be sitting in a greasy spoon: egg, two sausage, bacon, beans, mushrooms, tinned tomatoes, tea and two toast. And those girls from the council offices. He'd look right at them, the full metal jacket, till they went back to their fags and tabloids.

He focuses on her legs now. Her toes are rounded and neat. He watches as a pigeon sheds its load over Calais. Calais is one of the statues in the arches over the Gare Du Nord. She needs a clean. Parisian carburation, guava and Gallic neglect have all taken its toll on Calais. His architectural survey over, Peter goes back to spying through the mirror at the full-lipped brunette and her friend who are far too chic for the brazen eye-contact he pours on Calais every morning over his four Euro fifty petit dejeuner on the Rue de Dunkerque.




published - http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/90s/issue96angelofnord.html

FRANKLY GENERAL FRANCO

It was a work of utter imagination.

Nevertheless, it was the closest thing that my father could get to a British workers' newspaper in fascist Spain in Torremolinos on a Wednesday morning in 1971 in between two miners' strikes and a change of occupation that would see him move from butcher to bingo caller to bus driver to bricklayer and builder of stone fireplaces in half of the council houses in Walton, Fazakerley, Kirkby and beyond, yet nowhere near third millennium Blade Runner post-Brexit Britain, where the pedestrianized malls of the South East are splayed with Hong Kongese-speaking third-generation Catalan Republicans who can't believe how cheap Primark is, or how the locals can eat that crap that makes them so fat, or why their parents insist that they come to Cambridge to acquire a globalized language that they must embrace as if their livelihoods depended on it, now that the civil war no longer rages on the streets of Barcelona where the newly blonded Messi avoids tackles and taxes, and now that the near-midget Generalissimo's humongous cojones have shrunk to the size of chick peas, pulses that the tourist guiris wouldn't touch with a barge pole, even if deprived of Watney's Red Barrel, bacon & eggs, fish & chips and their page three stunner from Pinner, when Middlesex was just a place outside London and not a gender. 

I was eight. And at eight you can't imagine nearly 40 years of dictated repression because at eight you can't imagine nearly 40 years of anything. Period. So I ordered a 7-Up and a strange banana-shaped sweet bread known as a croissante. Later that afternoon I would binge on American champagne (Coca Cola) and cop hold of the mother of all sun strokes that would restrict me to the recently Poly-fillered quarters of the hotel for days. 

In the bar by the pool, my father opened the popular tabloid that, verbally and pictorially, was to spend the following 40-odd years assaulting his class, his city and his life partner's sex. Ordinarily, he'd have opted for a Daily Mirror or a Liverpool Daily Post, but sun seekers on the Costa del Sol can't be choosers. This wasn't Liverpool 4. This was Torremolinos Fase II.

Though the news was that there was a hotel guest who'd driven all the way to Malaga in his tiny hired SEAT 600 just to get yesterday's Daily Express, in those days a respectable broadsheet where the broads and the nipples were kept under wraps. 

Yet, whether we like it or not, the words and the pictures come out and they do stuff. Then, as now. Sometimes the weapons are words. Sometimes it's just the pictures, the poisonous influence of pictures, even if The British Sun came out two days late in these parts. 

The past was covered, but the future is a dangerous business. It's difficult to look into the future when you're eight and the present is already 48-hours old. These days, 45 years on, I try to face forward, look into the present and inhabit the moment. But lapses into historical record are the living link to the now. And my current past is a 1936 Catalonian anarchy fantasy that escapes the total control fetish that defines the present age where a directionless, uncontrollable brutality bubbles beneath and above the surface of anti-socially mediated realism. 

In Aleppo, this is just so much Western blah blah blah blah, as yet another child is wheeled into an underground hospital with her left foot on her chest and her intestines hanging out for all to see. 

But this kind of talk is censured from within. 

Meanwhile, a 19-year-old from Cumbria with the correct curvaceous corpora, who hoped smiling at the camera while showing off her God-givens to the boys would progress her future, caught the eye of the 28-year-old brickie from North Liverpool, as was its designed intent. She was no booby. The boobies are the boys that ogle and leer and jeer and learn to objectify before they can talk or work or think.

Yet something was amiss with the cheery miss. 

As I swigged at my 7-Up, it became as clear as my continental lemonade that something was up. Had Lieutenant General Jaime Milans del Bosch mobilized his tank divisions on the empty streets of Valencia a dozen years too early? Had tri-cornered-hat-wearing Civil Guard officer, Coronel Antonio Tejero's abortive military putsch been brought forward a decade? Had Arthur Scargill led the British workers to a glorious syndicalist revolution on the promise of a four-day weekend with full terms and conditions, time and a half Saturdays, double time Sundays and half-day closing on a Wednesday for re-education and Yorkshire tea? But what did I know. Nada. I was eight and I knew 7-Up was foreign for pop. That's all I knew.

Though I also knew that if I hunched my right shoulder forward, dragged my left foot behind me and drawled like Charles Laughton in a desperate quandary with Maureen O'Hara the same year that Franco captured Barcelona, I could pass for Quasimodo and earn the validation of my parents. That's all I knew. Page three was a foreign land back then.

Page three, however, had grabbed my father's attention more than usually. What was wrong with cheerful Cheryl from Carlisle, her clear skin and perfectly formed breasts that had caused my father so much fascination and forced the Fascist Catholic hierarchy to act and redact?

The pesetas. The Americanos. The palm trees. The straw donkeys. The sangreeya. The Drifters. The Barcardi and cokes. The cicadas. The flamenco. The senyoritas. The guitaristas. The garlic. The olive oil. Miguel at the bar. The por favors. The mix intoxicated and incapacitated. But this was beyond the palo.

- Pat. Pat. Look at this!

What was going on? He was sharing Page Three with his missus, my mother, the woman who four years later, on the very day that the anti-sexual discrimination legislation came into force to make it legitimate, would waltz into the local Working Men's Conservative Association bar and with almost Hispanic brazenness would order two gin & tonics for her and a friend and down a toast to the end of male bastions of shiny-buttoned, blazered stuffiness under Winston Churchill's portrait 33 years after he committed heinous war crimes on fascist-controlled civilians in another darkly censored reality.

- Wha'? 

- The paper. Look.

- What are you showing me that for?

- Look at her tits!

- You wha'?

- The tits. They're blacked out.

Sure enough. The heavily inked bar across the breasts of the glamorous young miss from Cumberland obliterated nipples in the name of an imposed appropriacy that the clerical military junta dictated as normative, until the day the bastard son of a free-thinking philanderer from Galicia perished and the free Spanish press went topless loco in the name of social democracy and freedom.

- Ooh! said my mother. 'I like this Franco.'

Good quality counter-narrative content comes in many forms. As they say in the Foreign Office. 

The SLOW And PAINFUL DEATH Of JEREMY HUNT

The painfully slow and torturous death of the Secretary of State for Health occurred on a Saturday. Much less certain, however, was the manner of his agonising demise. 

In this best of all possible worlds, it was of course merely a matter of time before the Angels of the Nation sought fit to mete out justice. And naturally, it was equally fitting that he should perish at the hands of all those he had wronged in his miserably inadequate and wretched life. It was indeed only fair that the ex-president of Oxford University Conservative Association, the former Head Boy of Charterhouse, the elder son of Lady and Admiral Sir Nick Hunt, the great grandson of Walter Baldwyn Yates, the fourth great grandson of John Scott, first Earl of Eldon, the 29th great grandson of King Henry I, the fourth cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II, and the fifth cousin once removed of Britain’s most celebrated fascist should be brutally battered into oblivion by a lynch mob of avenging Angels baying its fury on this pathetic apology of a man.

What remained unclear to the great and the good was the motivation behind this grievous event, whose egregiousness was the subject of several thousand column inches in the better class of newspapers in this most liberal of Western democracies where it is widely believed that the interests of the many outweigh the vicissitudes of the few, should one happen to have spent one's entire life with one's unthinking conk firmly ensconced up one's alimentary canal. 

Beyond any scintilla of doubt, however, was the true character of the Health Minister's extensive and staggeringly prodigious injuries, bearing in mind that, at the time of his vicious but righteous slaughter, he was visiting the cardiology department at the world famous Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge.

Indeed, the Coroner’s inquest concluded that the major trauma and multiple lesions were the consequence of a sustained assault by an unrestrained but co-operative group of people who had inflicted the injuries extremely slowly and methodically - much in the manner of the aggrieved assailants in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Each and every single one of The Angels of Mercy at Addenbrooke's were complicit in the morally motivated assassination of the Health Minister, seeking the justice that the son of Nick Hunt had thus far averted in his sickeningly pampered existence. Needless to say, Countess Andrenyi of Finchley did not form part of the self-appointed jury and execution squad.

As an instance of industrial union solidarity, it was without parallel in recent British Labour Relations. As an act of mindful violence, it was even more aesthetically blissful than the summary execution, on 29th April 1945, of Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, Claretta Petacci and their entourage of proud Italian nationalists. As a feat of human bio-engineering, it even surpassed the astounding achievements of proto-feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Dr Heinrich von Frankenstein's monstrous re-arrangement of the physical form. 

According to several scurrilous reports in the more salacious tabloids, there were pieces of plasma and fragments of protoplasm plastered all over the walls of Cambridge's dedicated cardiology centre, which is proud to provide high quality care to the privately rich, many of whom were traumatised by this collective deed of astonishing brutality from the nation's most-loved and least-remunerated Angels. 

Apparently, all norms of professional conduct were thrown out of the window, as pinned-down private patients had matchsticks inserted between their opened eyelids, forcing them to bear witness to the rabid slaying of the Health Minister, as kind-hearted Angels ran amok, chanting: "The Hunt is Dead! The Hunt is Dead! All hail the Hunt is Dead!"

A 23-year-old Ecuadorean staff nurse took great relish in ripping off Hunt's left ear with her bare teeth while inserting into his rima oris her treasured copy of Granny Made Me An Anarchist: General Franco, The Angry Brigade and Me.

Such reports, however, subsequently, proved false. 

At no point did the assailants run amok, rather the febrile Angels of Mercy queued politely, waited patiently and took turns to inflict monstrous acts of inhumane pain upon the esteemed Right Honourable personage who had seen fit to patronise them that very afternoon. This is, after all, England. Keep Calm & Carry On, as HM Government instructs. There is no earthly reason to jump the queue, lose one's temper or to be rude in the execution of one's duty. 

As the privately-educated Minister's twitching bag of bones lay on the recently fogged floor, becoming a festering cadaver of frothy puss, sticky sputum, throbbing gristle, blood-streaked semen and purulent discharge, the dedicated Angels of the NHS stepped over it and went about their day.

Relieved. Content. At peace.

50p DOWN THE CHARITY

Maybe I should start my story here, lying beside an H-shaped swimming pool in Beverly Hills on my 27^th birthday, taking in the spectacular sunset through the LA smog. Maybe I should shoot from the hip and start where the fancy takes me. Maybe, even though I’ve already done my laps for the day, I should go for another swim. Maybe I shouldn’t get the story started at all. Maybe I should just tell her to go back to London. Maybe I should smoke the second of my cigarette ration. Maybe I should get in the car and drive and drive and drive until the Hollywood bubble is bearable again. Maybe I should ring my mum. Maybe I should write the bloody thing myself, I mean to say, how hard can it be?

Maybe you shouldn't've binned that first one, that bitter hack of a scribbler, bald pate and podgy chin like an un-photoshopped Nick Hornby. Maybe you should take a leaf out of Elton’s voluminous tome and wipe your over-ample arse with it! Maybe you should just get your agent to cover my expenses and politely tell me to kindly fuck off.

Maybe we shouldn’t overstate the straightforwardness of the project. Maybe we should only do fifteen hundred words this morning’s session and break for decaf and Zumba. Maybe we should... Maybe I should lighten the load for you. Maybe we should start at the beginning for a change: after all, the poolside scenario in celebrity-infested Beverly Hills is a well-trodden treadmill. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve got famous in the first place. Maybe I should ingest another spoonful of psychotropic chemicals. Maybe we should focus on the human experience; the smog motif makes a powerful statement of emotionality. Maybe I shouldn’t listen to the seven and half billion voices in my heart. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the Tupelov went down and the Red Army Choir perished. Maybe we should ignore the faulty flaps and cut straight to the singing career.

Maybe I should show them my sad face; the one I can see from inside here, the one I glimpsed in the mirror this morning, the one that knows how it feels with clarity and certainty. Maybe I should emote about Uncle Arthur.



Maybe we should kick off with that sentiment writ large through the LA smog, the oppressive nature of celebrity over which you triumph with lower-middle class, girl-next-door grit and state-capitalist four-quadrant appeal . Maybe we should start with my Nan, she was always moaning about the London smog, she reckons it took her old man, that and the drink, and the fags, and the heroin.



Maybe we should separate out the family strands before we delve into the allegations. Maybe we should run with the Beverly Hills kudos, you’re a bit of a hottie in your prime, etc., etc., and yet despite – or dear readers, hint, hint, maybe because of – the A-list celeb LA lifestyle, the squillions of dollars, and You Tube hits, basically you’re a gawky teenager from the Home Counties struggling with the male gaze, big boobs, early periods and being a ginger. Maybe I should just give you a slap, ghost girl.


Maybe we should go with the thing dad used to say about reaching for the Moon on a stick, or whatever. Maybe we should save that till the end. Maybe I should hold onto the preface about the allegations until we get the legal jazz back from the lawyers. Maybe you should interpret the hollow feeling at your core as fragmentation of psyche. Maybe you should take it as a moot ontological point not to be glossed over with shiny pics and lipstick and short tight dresses shaped out of nationalism and fear. Maybe you should have done a jokier sort of thing like Sporty did, darling.



Maybe we should go avant-garde and forge it into a constructivist statement on technological Armageddon. Maybe the ghost writer should keep her big conk out of it. Maybe I shouldn’t edit out the implicit racism and have you bang to rights, you anti-Semitic cow. Maybe I should tell them about dad and his affiliations.



Maybe we should take that break now. Maybe I should take another tablet. Maybe you should end the story here by the pool, lying.  

ALF

The chewing gum is so thin there, you can see some of the floor. Where it says Built by Metro Camel. The passengers mumble it to themselves. Endlessly. On their way to work. Glad I don't have to go. Doesn't look like they enjoy it.

The flavours keep me busy in here. I suck the fruit sauces off the red hangers in the ceiling. All change please. This is the last stop. All change.  You see the tourists sitting there, wondering what is going to happen.  All change what? Trains dummkopf, even I know that.

The flavours change every zone. Central zone's strawberry. Zone two's apple. Zone three's banana. The outer zones're all coffee. Someone should tell control, coffee's not fruit.  It's really moreish. It's only a flavouring. I know the real reason I eat it isn't the taste.

Coffee's the world's most popular drug, I heard them say.  Water's my drink. That and the purple syrup they give me if I make enough hits. 

MIND THE GAP. STAND CLEAR OF THE DOORS.

The words scrolling along the electronic sign are nice to watch. I'm glad I can't read very well. They'd drive me nuts. Mind you, the station stop announcements do that I can tell you.

The commuters don't seem to mind the voices, but they have an endemic fear of eyes. It is as if  they know. Like someone  has put them in the picture, and they refuse to notice. Mind you, you see some sights on the Tube. They rarely look at each other, let alone strap-hanging monkeys strung out on coffee and captivity. 

Zzzz. Zzzz. Zzzz. Here comes another. Up to the ceiling and suck. Wait for fuzzy charge to kick in and Zzzz. Zzzz. Zzzz...  This could be the last one. The last before they do it for real. With you.

 MIND THE GAP. STAND CLEAR OF THE DOORS.

INAPPROPRIATE MATERIALS

 A TALL TALE OF TOWER BLOCS

Eyes, red from last night’s exertions, are nevertheless focused on the scrawled mess on the back of a ripped open white A4 window envelope – an arrears letter from the council’s arms-length management QUANGO demanding she start to reduce the £2,ooo plus debt if she is to avoid further action.  Action? That meant what exactly? Another new Acting Manager, who she’s never heard of, and who’ll be out the door again before six months is over, like the last, and the one before, that has charged a £50.00 management feefor the privilege of informing her by letter of an increase in her arrears of, oh! I don’t know, £50.00.  The blank space on the back has been well recycled. Her internal Dot Cotton kicks in. It cushions her against life's little travails, not to mention long waits for council lifts: 

I told him I did. I said, You can stick your £50 quid where the sun don’t shine sunshine, not now, not now that they’ve been and gone and put all that bloody scaffolding up. Cosmetic cladding on the outside… half the block hasn’t even got gas… in 2017 I ask you, 5^th largest economy in the world, what?, the 6^th largest economy… ok 7^th largest ecosystem in the milky way, and they’re a  lot smaller than they used to be an all…

The envelope contains a sketch of how it would all go. Straight from the School of Scottish Socialist Surrealism (Liverpool, Militant Branch). She’s even drawn herself in, pointing at a $ sign on the whiteboard: a deformed matchstick figure; her head an @ with a misshapen K minus its leg. Mind you, I've done better than the crooked line with the tiny 666s for that Twat of an Outside Observer sat in the corner on  a ∑–  as per the lesson plan. That now lies on the kitchen floor of her 17^th storey high-rise. She stamps on it, leaving an imprint from her trainer sole. She looks at it again, then picks it up and walks through the door. Capitalism doesn’t pay for itself. Childfree and doing something for her while earning. Week 2. Vamoose. Tracey McClee odd. Mac Clee Odd! It had been funny the first week. So, in the box marked Anticipated Problems, she has written: Students may have difficulty when pronouncing my name.  Students may have difficulty understanding my accent on occasion. Only at first, mind. Aye. And the Aye instead of Yes, etc. It was just Summer School, why did they need a bloody intricate plan, apart from the observers, the twocks who only stay 20 minutes anyway, half-planned she always performs better, all the detailed plan does is to make you do the plan. As the lift arrived at the ground floor, it took an age to open… 

 
They have to tick their little boxes I suppose. They have their boxes to tick.  Tracey McCleod (clued like the Scots, or cloud, like the English, if you prefer) noticed something strange in week 1. The rigidity of the superstructure compared to the looseness of the format. The attempt at planning, but then it was like paying lip service to a plan, before deciding to go and do what you were going to do anyway. She also put it down to the novelty of the situation. I mean, the point of view is all over the place, is it first-person or 3rd? and where is this dialogue? that the plan said would spontaneously break out between students as soon as presented with the irresistible hand out on two sheets of A4 with black and white drawings, photocopied down the public library, the day their computers were down, typical, a plastic a wallet from a Woolworths that no longer exists, until she realises the lesson has started and the TOC is twitching his right leg like a crane fly listening to break beat in total silence, and she remembers now that the low-grade lemon-fragrance placebo was actually the cheesy skunk she’d got Ali to pick from Carlos’s, oops… She notices the twock has ticked the box marked inappropriate, and the word material is prominently underscored in the bright red pencil they give them when they qualify in bloodsucking. Aye. Well, get tae fuck… I’m doing it anyway, pal. 

Right, Student A sit opposite your partner, but with your back turned. Likewise, Student B. Remember Ali, like on the whiteboard. Look… back-to-back. Mauricio! What is it you have in your hand?

A plano.
A what?
Is plan.
OK. It’s a plan of what?... Rosario?

Is plan of apartment blocks, same but different.

That’s right. Your drawings? Are they the same?

Yes.

Yes and No. They are similar. SI-MI-LAR. Three syllables. You repeat. Stress the first. SIMilar.

SIMilar. Good.

Some of the people are doing the same things, but other people….

Other people?... Monkbayar?

There is 8 different peoples doing the different things…

OK good. Don’t show the plan to your partner…

Rosario… the other way. That’s right.

Remember, what does James Bond say?
TOP SECRET!

Ok… go! You have 20 minutes to find 8 differences.

What’s the man doing in flat 20? The man in flat 20 is watch, no is wash hair. He have the black hair, like me. What’s the man in flat 20?  What is doing the man in apartment 20? Same? Same as my picture? In my apartment 20 there is man homosexual, he is look like Freddie Mercury, he watch the dishes, he have mustache like Freddie Mercury, sing? No no sing? He watch, wash plate, like woman, he wear glove and, how do you do? App.. app.. teacher, teacher, how to say? EI… EI.. apron.. Ah Freddie Mercury wear apron….. That’s not Freddie Mercury, Ahmed. That is a drawing of a man with a moustache who is doing the washing-up, that's all. What’s he doing with the brush Carlos? The WA-SH-ING-up…That’s right. Look Ahmed, you switch partner. Sit with Keiko, please. Keiko? You sit with Ahmed, and Rosario can do it with me…ok what is the dog doing in flat 9, Rosa? The dog is sleeping on the cheap, inflammable sofa.. Good Rosa. The man in flat 8 is watching dogging, No Rosa, the man in flat 8 is washing his dog, no teacher, is no true, in my picture the man is watching dogging, you know, sex in car park, porno, al Tesco, like me and Carlos, sabes? Ali? where's Ali... have you been drawing on Rosario's  hand out again? Ok, the dirty old man is watching pornography, porNOGraphy...

Typical, I knew it, the second the twocks in the room, the bloody thing falls apart... Sister, this is as sturdy a lesson plan as I have ever put together. It used to work well back in the day. Aye, back in the day when she could stay up all night, doing papier mâché models of Prime Ministers repeating soundbites of doom  like an auTOMaton, AUTomaton. We used pull the cord out of the back and have a right laugh, like Toy Story's Woody on mogodon.... Days of avant garde tales of postmodern criticism and rebellious action. Action that involved actual doing, pasting, cutting, literally, physically, collaboratively, meaningfully, mindfully…..

Ms McCleod, are you sure this material is that appropriate given the recent turn of events? We wouldn’t want to alarm any of our residents unnecessarily. At the time it was given, it was perfectly formed advice, grammatically correct, and intellectually coherent, any mistakes were minor and fundamentally non-impeding as I think you were made aware at the time, going forward, forward, forward…

Carlos, give the outside observer another clout with The Guardian. The functionality’s stuck in italics again. It’s 2017, and I’m still having to use these old cassettes…. No, Hiroshi, it says Flat 13, that bit’s just Tippex, Tippex?, you know liquid ink? Never mind, what is tenant in frat 13 doing? Good Hiro… Don’t show him, Rosario, speak. The couple in flat 13 is watching TV. The man is fat and bald, he look like Freddy Mercury, but old and no hair, teacher, how you say? No hair like Monkbayar…Bold, bald, man bald, bald, fat man who have mustache and wife with blond hairs and both stare, staring at TV like robot, in my country we have TV robot, watch TV while you work. Teacher, teacher, Hiro say me in his country TV robot watch TV when he go to walk, work, when he go to work, I think Hiro is pulling your leg, Ali, how many hairs does she have, Monkbayar?

The outside observer has had his usual fill. Seventeen and half minutes in and she can sense him preparing his flight for freedom, thanking fuck he doesn’t have to endure another hour and 45 minutes of this Tower of Babel, in heat that used to be illegal back in the 90s when he first started in this God forsaken profession, his internal monologue is starting to cognitively affect the students. It’s time to abandon the plan. It is high time we introduced a splash of Tracey magic…. OK switch partners, only this time let’s include the Outside Observer…

In Flat 12 there is one couple who dance, they dance the dance of happy people, even if we cannot see the face. She is wearing an open-backed number, she look like Tracey, the man, the man is dressed in a classic black tux, white shirt and black bow tie, his half face reminds casual observers of Cary Grant, but on closer inspection looks more like inspector.

Ms McCludd, the lesson was all over the place, potentially it was an interesting spin on a well-worn idea I must admit, but just not that thought through, and I mean, the plastic cladding reference alone…. Far too soon to say, far too soon to say, public enquiry, public enquiry… Teacher talking time needs massively reducing, remember to slow down, talk directly to camera, or else get the BBC bastard off-guard and pretend you’re an earnest academic from the London School of Economics and not some scallywag EFL teacher from Dumfries winging it with a couple of dodgy photocopies and a tired old agenda. Magic just doesn’t work anymore. Empathy was the thing, but the Brand DNA? Ecstasy, euphoria, effervescence… such things can be bought at music festivals, £10 a gram of thin white watery powder, dries like Tippex, you remember Tippex? You used to be able to get it at Woolworths, a perfectly serviceable and recyclable brand, I think you'll find capitalism is  malleable, and perfectly capable of breathing new life into old DNA, the working class thrift monetized, entrepreneurship is not a four letter word, Ms McCastro! Though in this class nothing would surprise ...Carlos, give Keiko her pencil case and her dignity back, please.... Look, Ms McClot. It says, least ways, in the plan I am following, it stipulates that you are second-generation Scottish, and have only ever been to Dumfrieshire when passing through on the way to see that subversive family of yours in Free Derry, which I see you claim is not part of the UK, Ms McCleudo, said the Outside Observer mechanically.

And this rampant disregard for form, Ms McClueless. The rubric clearly states the intention of the cognitive affective activity you and your tenants have been engaged in amounts to a suspicious conversation with extremist content. The exponent that was supposed to be practised thoroughly, had you only thought to first present the target language, the purpose of the present continuous aspect is to focus minds on the extreme present, to be mindful of cause and effect at this present moment in time is highly inappropriate….  

• Would you like to be molested on a Saturday morning TV show that all your classmates were watching? Retorted Hermione mechanically. 

- There it is again, that persistent irrelevant irreverent line of questioning, said Harry Potter adverbially… and the utter contempt for the normal rules of engagement McCluskey, this isn’t Grange Hill. This is a paper-based activity about an apartment that exists only in the present to fulfil one function and on function only: to teach these boxes English, to fill up their empty heads with meaning. Rolf Harris has nothing to do with starting fires in tower blocks for Chrissakes.

It finally reaches the moment in the class plan when the T-shirt lift has once again become essential. Cause and effect. Lipstick and tits. Bit continental. Not very Brexit.
- But see that, see those, aye, you’re looking now pal, aren’t ye? 
- What do boobies say, teacher? says Ahmed, opportunely. 

- It’s nae aboot tower blocks; it’s class war.

Hell breaks loose. Plan goes out of the window. The outside observer's marginalized. Trump Towers becomes Twin Towers, Cleveland, near Middlesborough, thousands of miles from Cleveland, Ohio, 12th largest city in the U.S. home to 142 completed high-rises, 33 of which stand taller than 250 feet (76 m). None of which has anything to do with the day she saw the second plane hit, as she sat on the dodgy sofa eight months pregnant, reading English Grammar in Use religiously, crossing legs and fingers, praying today’s investment would pay dividends in a wicked world of work that she had hoped would never come to this, memories, a fragmented collection of ideas, in shreds, like a lesson plan from a pdf download that didn’t somehow seem the same. The bloke with the tash who lived across from her dad’s mother’s flat in Everton Valley did actually ring a bell, Freddywise, Mr. Lambert wasn't it? The Militant council asked Everton’s inhabitants what should be done with their towers, the reply was pull them down and give us back the streets. It was done. Just like that.Now, such things only exist in Guardian sound bites as pie in the high sky dreams, Ms McCommunist.

The recent upsurge in the class struggle should in no wise impinge upon the fee-paying student’s learning experience, Ms McTrotsky, I don’t suppose you believe in the sanctity of the polling booth, the sanctuary of democracy, your sort never do. No overall coherence to the plan. Very little cohesion in its execution. The tenants must remain in their individual, atomised, living space units until such time as they are informed otherwise, wet towels are an integrated part of any fire safety feature in the new millennium, moving forward in the 21^st central, century even, Ms McChomsky. So there. Put that in your lesson plan, and smoke it, just like that wacky backy that you and your bohemian behemoths toke on incessantly as you’re planning your plots to overthrow the massive spread of bloody manspreading on the Tube, I ask you. 

Can I ask you a personal question?

If you must, Ms McCorbyn…

Do you have a Freddy Mercury washing-up apron?

As it happens, I do.

Are you withdrawn, controlling, obnoxious and neurotic?

Yes, I am.

Would you prefer to be frenetic, flamboyant, edgy and famous?

…………………..

Would you wanna be Freddy Mercury, Adam?

Yes, I very much would….

Then, come over here. See that wall, the one with the sign on.

Yes.

What does it say?

The Fourth Wall.

And the clock on the opposite wall… what does it read?

10 minutes and counting... no, nine minutes and counting…

If you break down that wall, just once… then who knows?

But that’s ridiculous... you can’t end it here. I haven’t ticked all the boxes yet! 

Show me.

Well, for example, who’s Carlos? And what about the rent arrears?

None of your business. And squat.

Squat? With Carlos?

No. In the Tower Block, 17^th floor. Where I live.

My concrete haven in the sky.

But you, but your chest said…

I know what my tits say… What do you say?

In my picture, I can see one woman. She is showing to man chest with writing. In my picture, the woman have no writing, she have nice half-dress like woman in Harry Potter film. In Flat 13, the man who wear apron have lipstick. Your man have lipstick, Ahmed. Yes, I am the man who like to wear the lipstick and sister shoes.

Good, Ahmed. Let’s all step into the sisters’ shoes.
And that’s the end of today’s lesson. Well done, class.

THE CHILLINGTON HOE

Oily handle. Linseed. Long smooth shaft. Calf muscle shape. It feels the part. It looks right. All eyes are on the crease. The opposition have cowered. But this is not cricket.

The blunt edge is poised to tear away at flesh, to till the bowels of the invader, to hoe the hardest of hearts and to plough a furrow of pain; a gardening implement of destruction held aloft by one half of The Amazing Bergs; a wrestling tag team from the sticks and horticulture’s answer to the Mongolian hordes.

The Mongols From Hell, a motorcycle gang from the dark side, has descended on Bungay.

The small Suffolk market town hasn’t seen the like since the USAF attempted to take out a local traffic cop after he had absent-mindedly wafted his speed gun towards the heavens. But this attack is no single strike; it's multilateral damage.

Award-winning lawns have been terrorised by Norton, noise pollution laws breached by Triumph, pristine flowerbeds turfed onto the road by Pirelli, and the local population intimidated by design. The bad boy bikers, however, haven’t counted on a Berg being in town. Cy has gone up to London on a bit of business, but Tony Berg is a force to be reckoned with, or for that matter, without his machete-wielding twin.

Tony mutters something about there being too much linseed on the handle. He delves his palms into the gravel. Better. The dirt gives him a firmer grip. In fact, he has the firmest grip of us all. Jocky Paltrow, the promoter, his minder and I hang back. This is a job for the Chillington Hoe. Tony's World War II weapon: a land girl relic that was used to till the soil round these parts long before the Mongols were born.

The greasy Herberts facing us have blades drawn, bike chains poised and knuckle dusters at the ready. Shiny brass, shiny metal, shiny studs. No match for the dull, matt, round-edged, workman-like tool Tony Berg has been brandishing like a banshee, a whirling-dervish and an all-in wrestler all in one. In suspended animation. Everyone stands still. The threat hangs over the bikers like cancer. Nobody dares move.

It has, however, already happened. Two Mongols were floored. Tony put them down without even breaking sweat or eye contact with the dozen or so amassed greasers outside the George & Dragon’s car park. Their necks cracked like brittle toffee. The two Mongols were body-slammed to the tarmac like a couple of trunks of sodden oak.

- I won’t tell thee again.

He doesn't need to.

Back at Paltrow’s bungalow, we hear engines revving up as they turn tail petulantly towards the A road; the two near-corpses slumped on the back of their bikes, off to torment Diss no doubt.

Stored away till next time, the Chillington hoe is placed alongside the machete, the only two tools of the trade Cy and Tony Berg ever need.