Two Chaps Talking

Mon Ami,

There are times that try men's souls. Even the stoutest of Englishmen need certain things to keep their chins up, their upper lips stiff and their resolves firm. Centuries ago when first spreading the word, along with a touch of Unpleasantness, we needed nought but our shields, our swords and our stout hearts. Later when we pitched out tents and unpacked our campaign chests we needed boot boys and batmen. At the beginning of the last century when chugging across on the great ocean liners we needed only someone who could make an Old Fashioned and a valet, sometimes one and the same chap.

All right so drag yourself forward to the present, unpleasant I know but bear with me. What does a Young Turk and son of the Empire need now when let loose on the New World? A steamer trunk full of well cut suits and a rainbow selection from T&A? Certainly yes. Graham Greene and Ian Fleming? Yes again, there are no finer examples of how an Englishman should behave abroad. A picture of his Mum and an internet link to the Guardian? Well, yes to those too.

But, I hear you cry, if he's in the Far East surely he can go to one of the ex-tailors to HM's armed forces and get himself properly kitted out. The reach of the world's finest authors is unlimited so he's rarely too far from a purveyor of literary classics. An Englishman keeps is Mum's picture firmly imprinted on his mind. And even the darkest corner of this great earth has an internet cafŽ.

Had you cried so you would not have erred. And so I come to the point, hastily you might think but you'll allow me the occasional foray into brevity. What is it that a chap simply has to have, and has to have from Mother England? Something that can't be faked, mimicked, copied or re-created? I'll tell you shall I? (Yes do.)

Heinz Baked Beans.

Oh pish and piffle I hear some say. baked beans are made all over the world. Even in America. One can find them in any Bodago, Foodmart, Convenience Store or Seven-Eleven. What pray, is the big deal? Aha, well this is where we part ways with those outside our Commonwealth.

There are Heinz Baked Beans, and then there is everything else. Nothing, nothing at all is in the same class. They stand alone in the pantheon of fine foods. As you know I yield to no man in my worship of Le Gavroche, but what good is posh French nosh when you're hungover on the Upper West Side of Manhattan? It's true that Diners here in New York provide copious amounts of hearty fare at great speed and for minimal cost, but what's the point, really? If you can't taste the unrivalled glory of thickly-buttered white toast piled high with Heinz Baked Beans then you might as well throw in the towel.

After a mere six months here in the New World, having suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without basic necessities I vowed to find my holy grail. Bear in mind this was during the last century and the locals were a good deal less enlightened. Anyway I set out to find sustenance and would accept no substitutes. I trawled the bars, pubs and caffs that claimed some link to the Seat, but all to no avail. As the day passed I became weak, light(er) in the head. I saw Bobbies on the beat on every corner. There were red telephone boxes complete with tart's cards and dubious puddles. Cars were driving on the correct side of the road. In short I was delirious.

And then it happened.

From my prostrate position, bent and weary, I spied the Union flag. It couldn't be, I told myself. After all I was in the heart of Greenwich Village. Another hallucination surely. But it didn't fade. It grew larger, the image stronger. My back straightened, my eyes grew clear, my upper lip stiffened and my chin rose up. For, and this really is the point, I had found what I needed, nay, what I craved, and it had a name. And that name was Tea and Sympathy.

Sing out heavenly angels! Tea and Sympathy - a small and perfectly formed English cafŽ providing everything a chap could want from home. 'What's the matter darlin'? You missin' your mum's cookin'?' was the cry. And yes, truly I was. I tucked into Heinz Cream of Tomato soup, Cornish pasties, mashed potatoes and yes, Heinz Baked Beans on thick and heavily buttered white toast, with a liberal coating of HP Sauce. Washing the lot down with PG Tips tea and following it with Treacle Sponge and Custard I was at last a happy man.

Not long afterwards the kind souls who ran the place opened a shop next door called Carry On Tea and Sympathy, thus allowing a chap to cook Baked Beans in the comfort of his own home. And it didn't stop there. Next they opened a chip shop called of course A Salt and Battery. And if that wasn't enough they bought a Black Cab to park outside. Sitting in T&S on a rainy Sunday, tucking into roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding, drinking tea from flowery china and staring out at the Cab you could almost be at home.

It brings a tear to my eye even now to think of that poor wretched boy, fresh off the boat and utterly Bean-less. How he suffered. So now it is my duty to inform my fellow expatriates of the life giving sustenance that this oasis provides. Christmas Crackers, Alan Partridge videos and Union flag tea towels are at my fingertips. What else could a chap want?

Yours contentedly,

S

Posted by S at 08:29 PM | Permalink

Dear Boy,

What a ghastly quandrary. To take up gainful employment or to take Hollywood's vile shilling - I have no idea which way I'd turn in such circumstances.

Having said that, I've a couple of short commissions with US companies on the CV and can honestly say they were experiences I'd rather forget. One place made me sit through a day-long workshop on what constituted actionably inappropriate behaviour with my PA. (There's nothing like teaching your granny to suck eggs).

There was a fifty-five minute long video that went into such toe-curling detail about exactly when and where a backrub could be engaged in that I genuinely considered self-immolation. That was until I remembered the two-day workshop on smoking in the workplace that I'd suffered the previous week.

I think I mainly took issue with the famous American work ethic. I ended up with a staff of thirty-five brain-numb wage slaves who left their jackets on the backs of their chairs when they went home at night, worked loudly through lunch, proudly announced at tediously regular intervals that they hadn't seen their families in weeks, were taking home their own weight in work and had grotesquely distended bladders from being far too conscientious to take a pee on company time.

I got sod-all real work out of any of them in the six months before I bailed.

I have a suspicion where this culture of 'Busyness' comes from. I'm convinced people (and sadly it's not just the Americans any more) are so driven by the competitive ethic that they can only validate themselves by how full they can make their diary look. Having said that, any decision that is actually made carries an inherent possibility of failure that is too terrifying to contemplate. The ideal situation, therefore, is to have a diary entirely full of back-to-back meetings in which nothing is ever moved forward.

This explains, for me, the bizarrely Kafkaish face of modern business where everyone works like a galley slave and lies awake at night in a muck sweat of self-loathing at their own worthlessness.

On the one rare occasion I remained a member of a gymnasium for more than a week I used to attend one in Covent Garden. It was full of dancers and thesps and smelt, naturally, of sweat - Not, in an odd way, that unpleasant. On one occasion I attended another branch of the same gym in the City. The changing rooms, chock to the rafters with traders and lawyers had the rank, feral smell of terror. I swear to God the place smelt like a warm evening in Scutari Hospital.

Which thought brings me to the recollection of my time in San Francisco where I worked, for a while, in the Financial District. There, the local papers reported, workers suffered from epidemic YETSS - Young Executive Tight Sphincter Syndrome - Yuppies with high stress lifestyles, grabbing junkfood meals at their desks would develop chronic constipation, producing abnormally large, hard and intractable stools. Once a week, fuelled by the morning gasper and a doppio espresso they would deliver the package with resultant - and here I quote - "anal fissuring".

Each day, I dutifully attend to my morning offices, as gentleman should, in the medically approved, leisurely manner, with the added stimulus of the newspaper. This would take, on average, the recommended fifteen minutes.

During this agreable reverie, half a dozen or so of my American colleagues would enter adjacent cubicles like Bramah Bulls going through a gate. They would apply their hideous behinds to the appliance like someone trying to force a lard filled duvet into a small bucket and grunt and scream as if in the throes of childbirth. There would be a splash worthy of Barnes Wallis then a concentrated miasma that smelt for all the world as if they'd just passed a decomposing badger they'd been storing in their colon for three months.

Without pausing for self congratulation they'd be up and back at their desks within the minute.

It was rumoured that the company kept a fellow who's job was to break up the stubborn detritus with a pickaxe handle but I never actuually met him.

Judging from their strangled cries, some of the stall occupants needed strong men and heavy-duty tools to snap off the stalactite.

Christ alive. Surely they can't pay people enough for that sort of thing. It's not even as if we're doing anything important most of the time. Most people I work around waste years of their lives, destroy their relationships and their health and prop themselves up with stimulants in order to increase market share of own-brand dog biscuits or to leverage absorbency technology to enhance the bathroom cleanliness experience and thus exceed customer expectations in the personal paper products sector.

Come to think of it, if I were you, Old Mate, I'd follow my muse and bugger the consequences.

Remember the old joke " I hate hospitals, they're full of sick people"...

...Well I hate jobs - they're full of idiots working.

Hang in there.

T

PS. By the way, your reference to duelling sent me scuttling to my library whence I unearthed the following... the old Irish Code Duello. Darcy would have wanted us to have it.

T

Posted by T at 10:49 PM | Permalink

Mon ami,

It is the kind of knife-edge that a chap looks for to settle an affair of honour that began with the over-hearing of a lady's name taken in vain. The kid gloves were thrown and when no suitable remorse was shown seconds were despatched and weapons chosen. A doctor was on hand in the shaded copse on the outskirts of town where the parties were to meet at dawn. And then as so often before the miscreant backed out at the last moment, choosing to be branded forever a coward rather than feel one's cold steel.

Take the blade of that foil, sharpened to cut thick leather and leave a nasty scratch on the blackguards wrist with no TCP in sight, and balance yourself on it's very edge. That is where you find me as I write. I shall pause here to allow you to refresh your glass.

It's like this. Cast your mind back to my inglorious past, no not that bit, I mean the time when for some long indecipherable reason I proceeded to show my face at a place of wo** for a great many days in rapid succession. Now picture the nature of that endeavour. Yes that's right, I allude to the fickle mistress of fashion, curse her. Well she has once more intruded into my life of leisure and I find myself dangling over her web, within a inch of being sucked in and devoured.

I know what you're thinking - surely my record of being highly over-paid for doing little or nothing of any worth speaks for itself. Not only that but my habit of occasionally thinking about leaving the bar to telephone the office and damn well ask how it was all going surely speaks volumes about my effectiveness as a leader of men. And if that weren't enough then what could prevent me from buggering up the interview and putting an end to it all. Aye well you'd be reckoning without the OB&C. It has been made known that a spell of gainful would not be entirely unwelcome for yours truly.

So that's on one side of the aforementioned k-e. On the other is a funny old situation and no mistake.

'Dib dib dib,' went the cry. 'Arkela. We'll do our best,' was another. At least that's what I dimly recall from the 25th Rosebery Park Troop. Is that not what springs to mind when the word scout is mentioned? Who had even the faintest idea that another kind existed? Well they do.

You may recall my mentioning the befuddled ramblings I have recorded on paper over the years. Well lately I bumped into a splendid literary chap who claims these can be turned into a racy best-seller, with the names changed to protect the innocent. Furthermore he suggested that a bunch of scouts have shown interest.

What would a bunch of short trousered bob-a-jobbers want with my salacious reminisces you might ask. Well apparently these particular scouts work for film studios and are charged with looking out for books just like mine. The thought of khaki clad do-gooders with neckerchiefs and woggles dashing around Hollywood clutching the history of what an arse I was when I arrived here in the New World is quite bizarre. But then stranger things do happen at sea.

As unlikely as it all sounds I am told it's proceeding apace.

Should anyone care to salute the flag as it's currently being run up then the Trouble has let it be known that I'm off the hook as far as the Fickle Mistress is concerned. The alternative doesn't bear thinking about.

So there, you see, is my dilemma. On the one hand getting drunk and writing about shirking wo**. And on the other getting drunk and shirking wo**. It's keeping me awake in the afternoons I can tell you.

Only time will tell. I know your thoughts are with me.

Yours on the steps of the scaffold,

S

Posted by S at 01:10 AM | Permalink