Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

The Germans, as always, have a word for it. Ohrwurm is best translated as ‘ear worm’ and describes a tune or ditty that you can’t get out of your head. I, of course, have little interest in popular music so should not be thus afflicted, however, I have been infected for some years by an ohrwurm of my own. It was a name, lyrical in its way, that stuck in my mind and, no matter how hard I pummelled my brain to locate its origin I couldn’t place where I’d heard it. Who, I asked over and again, was Retti Solovets?

I tried all the usual routes. The web was no help, reader’s and quotation dictionaries offered no solution. The National Dictionary of Biography and LexisNexis, failed me. Was he a Finnish cinematographer; nothing in the Biographical Dictionary of Film or imdb.com. A dissident Russian author? An émigré Hungarian photographer in pre-war Paris. An abstract expressionist, writer and critic sponsored by the CIA to discredit socialist realism? Emeric Pressberger’s focus puller? The puppet dictator of the Belgian Congo between April and June 1955? To my growing frustration, all drew blanks - until this weekend.

I was at the old homestead, putting away the red with the Pater when my eyes fell upon the Encyclopaedia Britannica; a nine foot phalanx of brown Rexine on the shelf behind the old chap’s noble bonce. There, at the base of the spine of volume ten of the Micropaedia was the name that had haunted me ‘Reti Solovets’. My unbridled joy was followed immediately by a sense of disappointment. I had imagined such great things for Reti that it was a bitter blow to discover he was merely the sum of human knowledge bracketed by Istvan Reti [Hungarian Painter, 1872-1945] and a group of islands in the Ukraine. Even more exciting names flanked him. If Reti Solovets was suddenly lost to human history, what of Otter Rethimnon and Delusion Frenssen?

Emboldened by drink, Pater and I resolved that Reti and his cohorts would not go unremembered and so I present the cast list for my masterwork, Micropaedia - The Movie.

A-ak Bayes. Design guru of Armenian extraction. Bayes lurks in the galleries and boites of NoHo, Shoreditch and SoMa clad from top to toe in immaculate black. He is rumoured to wear a new suit every day of identical cut and hand assembled by Japanese fabric technologists to a pattern extracted from stills of La Dolce Vita by NASA rendering programmes. His adopted first name is the nearest approximation to the word ‘Nothingness’ in the click language of the Xan. He is usually accompanied by a beautiful Japanese design student of indeterminate sex - of immaculate cut but different every day
Bayeu Ceanothus. Illegitimate son of a Charleston banker and his gorgeous, mad and ultimately doomed maid, Ceanothus saw action with the 2nd Airborne at Na Truc before joining the New Orleans Police Department. Falsely named by his brother officers as a key member of a grits smuggling gang, he was suspended and turned to the bottle. He now sits on the porch every night, playing mournful catches of Coltrane on his saxophone and running a successful business consulting to writers of Southern Gothic detective fiction who’ve never left their gated communities in Charlotte.
Delusion Frenssen. Product of a brief liaison between a Belgian industrialist and a Swedish performance artist, Frenssen was effectively orphaned at five when his mother was crushed by a collapsing sculpture made of fat and felt. His father left instructions for the boy to be brought up by an Existentialist cult just inside the Arctic Circle before taking his own life with Absinthe and a Dremel. At 18, Frenssen, his hair turned prematurely white by years of Nausea, Gitanes and lithium, changed his name from Olaf to Delusion, took a job as a Government assassin and came off the anti-depressants.
Freon Holderlin. Frenssen’s lover. Ice blonde Prussian psychopath who’s simultaneous loathing of men, raging nymphomania and deep rooted masochism can only be satiated in a loveless relationship with an emotionless deviant. Also drawn to orphans as she has understandable issues around meeting the in-laws.
Krasna Menadra. Alcoholic opera singer and exotic dancer associated with Aleister Crowley and a necrophiliac subsection of Golden Dawn. Menadra (real name Ethel Mintz) claimed to have been a lover of Adolph Hitler, Bela Bartok, James Joyce, Princess Grace and Jim Morrison. Died in L.A. in 1968 of spontaneous combustion.
Otter Rethimnon. Miraculously well preserved for sixty, George Rethimnon rose from humble beginnings to create the most successful women’s separates manufacturing business in the Mid West. At forty-nine he met an Italian exchange student with a pierced navel and New Age pretensions, left his wife and three children and followed her to join a ‘personal effectiveness course’ in Phoenix. Two weeks later, newly qualified as, a hypnotist, aromatherapist, grief councillor, Rolfer, NLP grand master, sex surrogate, a black hat feng shui practitioner and entirely penniless, he wandered into the desert to undertake a shamanic ritual and discover his inner animal. When, after three weeks of chanting, starvation, drumming and hallucinogens, it remained, stubbornly, a gerbil, Rethimnon walked out of the desert in disgust, took the name ‘Otter’ which he mistakenly recalled from a Discovery Channel programme on jungle predators, hitchhiked to Los Angeles and into history. Rethimnon’s ‘Life Coaching’ programme now claims over seven million paying members worldwide and is worth more than France. According to the latest communique from his fortified HQ in Montana, Rethimnon will ascend to Godhead with 375 carefully selected ‘Handmaidens’ just before the end of this financial year.
Reti Solovets. Our hero. Working under an assumed name in a London PR agency, Solovets is, in reality, a secret agent, phenomenal sexual athlete, martini connoisseur, gentleman flaneur and one of the most promising writers of his generation.
Trudeau Zywiec. Zyweic was born in San Francisco’s North Beach in the early fifties and thus claims an intimate connection with the Beat Poets. Though he has, in intervening years, written fourteen books and built an enviable academic career on this fact, his experience is limited to having been babysat by an ex-girlfriend of Kerouac’s while his mother popped out for a few more Ephedrine inhalers, csome clove cigarettes and a jug of wine. Gregory Corso may once have commented ‘Christ, what an ugly kid’, Lawrence Ferlenghetti may have passed his pram and Burroughs claims to have been entirely oblivious to his presence. Zywiec now runs the English department at a community college in the northwest and is currently under investigation for questionable behaviour with a female student.

Next month, I resolve to get out more…

T

Posted by T at 02:19 PM | Permalink

Mon Vieux,

Though somewhat out of character, except where absolutely necessary, it had been my intention to begin this missive with an apology. It has come to my notice that in recent letters I might have given the impression that The Fickle Mistress of Fashion was in some way disreputable. I might have gone on to suggest that She, her followers, and indeed the places where they congregate were somehow not quite top drawer. Furthermore I might have inadvertently suggested that the industry that has grown up around her skirts is staffed by shall we say those who are not entirely clubbable.

Note the tense of my opening statement. It had been my intention. Well, recent events have clarified my thinking as never before. It is now crystal clear, and I can state unequivocally and without fear of contradiction that the Fickle Mistress is in fact a bloated syphilitic slattern who should be scorned by right (ie left) thinking persons at every turn. Furthermore her followers are lowly types who should be fed outdoors and poked with sticks daily. And as for the places they congregate; let us just say that SH and its ilk are a terrible waste of a perfectly good opportunities for poorly maintained public toilets and rubbish dumps.

And believe it or not those feelings are echoed, or should I say sanctioned, by the OB&C. Crazy I know, but there you go.

Moving on, after a healthy slug of Calvados to wash away the taste, on an entirely unrelated issue let me state for the record that She Who Must Be Obeyed has parted brass rags with her erstwhile provider of weekly stipends and a yah-boo-sucks to them and all who sail in 'em. A pox on their house and may all their shoes be ill-fitting and their hats tight.

And so with new found time on our hands it became obvious that we should decamp to warmer climes; in particular the home of the worm-in-a-bottle.

Having been there before we were assured of a warm reception and with the possible exception of a house band that persisted in trying to play Viva L'Espagna (I kid you not - think Black Lace in Bognor Regis circa '78) all was well.

Thus we come to a singular moment in my life. Have you ever, my dear, wallowed around in the ocean with land a mere spec on the horizon and your only means of transport sailing into the clear blue distance without you on it?

No, nor had I.

You may dimly recall my last sailing exploits in the land of cricket and rum. Fifteen feet I believe I was thrown when the wind turned and the force ten swept in. With my inherent British seamanship I righted that sloop and lived to tell the tale. Accordingly this time I felt, as any Englishman would, that a bigger craft and some proper off-shore racing were in order. So it was that I found myself skipper of a one man J Class (ish) yacht with a top speed of about fifty knots (probably).

Well it was bigger than the last one anyway.

Some miles off-shore as one might have confidently predicted the squalls set in and Fisher-Bight-Dogger became stormy. This time I don't think I touched the water until I was a good twenty-five feet from the upturned hull. So the first order of business was to rescue the cap. With that in place at the correct jaunty angle it occurred to me that my frenzied thrashing had occasioned me to be some distance from my chosen form of conveyance. In fact, as previously stated, it was disappearing at speed into the distance sans yours truly.

Not actually what I was after if I'm completely honest and I won't pretend that I was entirely sanguine. With no help in sight I remembered the motto of the Old Bournemouthians; Pulchuritudus et Salubritus, though how that helped I don't know, and set off in the wake of my craft hoping to catch it before I went the way of thousands of sailors before me, that is down to Davy Jones' locker.

You'll be relieved to know that I didn't in fact drown. When I finally caught my yacht, righted it (singled handedly I might add), and returned to the beach I was greeted by the OB&C with;

'Oh it's you. Fetch me a Pina Colada will you? And do get out of my sun.'

Trying, no?

Day three was a bit of a interesting one too. It began, you see, to rain. And rain it did as though for forty days and forty nights. There may additionally have been a plague of locusts but frankly who'd've known? After three solid days of this tempest the Mem was starting to tire of the whole enterprise (ie Mexico) and trouble was definitely on the horizon. Imagine then, if you will, the level of her displeasure when we awoke on the fourth day to a lagoon surrounding our apartment. A lagoon the like of which hasn't been seen since the Mekong Delta. I was quite sure green faced Green Berets were lurking in their search for Col. Kurtz and we'd be smoking illicit leaves through gun barrels before the day was out.

That was when the Trouble decided to put everyone straight. She may or may not have had a word with him upstairs but within the hour we were ensconced in a super luxury spa resort the like of which mere royalty has no chance of entering. Needless to say she also arranged for the rain to stop and the sun to shine so we passed an idyllic week in an earthly paradise.

Back in Sodom, tanned and rested I had of course to don appropriate apparel and saunter along to a local boite to watch our chaps do battle. Bloody Hell. By the time you get this we shall know if our gallant lads have soared to even greater heights. But in the meantime who'd've thought Ginger and Jug Ears could've been the nation's heroes? Takes you back to times when returning from a successful sortie over the Rhine was what sorted the wheat from the chaff what?

Very nervous. Must plan outfit for the morrow.

Yours in fervent hope. And England's Dreaming,

S

Addendum

Friday 25th June 2004

You may recall, old thing, that some time ago I waxed lyrical about Quantum Physics; it all had to do with driving Land Rovers over hills and the wearing of Italian jackets. Anyway the thrust of it was that super-accurate measurement determines the level, or amount of units, that a group or party has; and the more units that a G or P has then, well, the more it has. Or so I thought.

Recent events have demonstrated that this is in fact a laughable and grotesque error. I now realise that the less units that are measured then the more that a group or party has. Thus if, for instance, Party A has one unit and Party B has one unit initially but then goes on to acquire a further (perfectly legitimate) unit thus giving them two units, then it is Party A that has the most units, even if they actually have only half as many as Party B.

Shocking I know, but when it's made abundantly clear by a citizen of the country that is famous for counting money, particularly Nazi gold, then who amongst us can argue?

So let's hear it for cheese, chocolate and clock making neuters the world over.

Turns out it's not coming home, we are.

Posted by S at 03:11 PM | Permalink

Dear Boy,

The first truly seething day in the Metropolis and it’s like nothing has changed. The tarmac smells like a roasted ashtray, I’m sweating like a therapist and people are already talking about the idiot Henman as if there’s the slightest hope he’ll ever do anything more than fail quietly - not spectacularly, not even ignominiously, just quietly, pointlessly unable to be good enough.

I’ve been a bit slack, of late, with the correspondence. For as long as man has tried to turn ideas into written words there has been the nagging incubus of displacement activity. I’m fairly sure Philip Marlowe didn’t have an iBook and he wasn’t knifed in a Southwark coffeeshop with broadbandWiFi. It’s certain though, that, before dipping quill, he’d do almost anything to avoid the moment; rearrange the desk, paint the bathroom, take a leisurely dump, put the kettle on, go on holiday, make tea, get married, scratch, rearrange his CDs, buy a new dictionary, have a quick one off the wrist, anything to avoid making the first mark on paper. I’m told that Hitler only annexed the Sudetenland to avoid having to start work on an outline and first chapter for “Mein Kampf II - The Difficult Years”. It seems a legitimate argument that the Brontes were only as productive as they were because there was sod all to do in a rural parsonage.

(In the space between this full stop and the next sentence I have decided that I’d rather write this tonight, on the other computer with a glass of wine, gone home, played with the baby, put her to bed, spent two hours restoring an old camera, drunk the wine anyway, watched a rerun of a bad episode of Sex in the City and 15 minutes of a film involving not just Jean Claude van Damme but also Dolph Lundgren, found some smoked haddock in the freezer while looking for ice for a drink, decided to produce half a gallon of pureed fish and potato baby food, listened to a rerun of Round the Horne on the radio while cooking, reeled into a shower, slept, woken, taken the baby to school, gone to work, done my expenses… at which point I lose track and the will to live).

However, I’m now convinced that I’ve found the ultimate displacement activity as the Mem and I are trying to buy a new house.

I work in a business that attempts to make news out of pointless statistics so few of them really appeal to me but last year I read that moving house was the third most stressful thing that can happen to a person after divorce and the death of a loved one. I don’t really hold with the idea of ‘stress’ as it seems to have replaced the ‘bad back as the shirker’s excuse de jour. The experience is, however, the most monumental pain in the arse. Most of it, I can just about handle. Lawyers who seem unable to do anything without daily telephone pursuit and vendors who set prices using a ouija board and a crack pipe are merely enough to make me psychotically furious. It is the estate agents who reduce me to inarticulate apoplexy.

There are no academic qualifications required. The sort of financial talent you’d see in an illiterate goat trader or a small time loan shark are perfectly sufficient to the task of adding and subtracting large round-figure sums (they are allowed a calculator to check a ludicrous fee percentage). An essential ability to ingratiate themselves with both buyer and seller, while shafting both, and a hide like a rhino are the only other requirements. The hideous secret of the trade is, of course, that an estate agent needs no qualifications because he doesn’t actually do anything. He doesn’t value the property, he just checks what other people are charging in the same neighbourhood and calls it ‘market value’. Once he’s paid someone else to measure, photograph and advertise the property, he walks you round it, lying involuntarily then waits 'til you bite before handing the whole process back to your own solicitor and collecting a large fee.

It takes a special kind of person to turn to his careers master and say, in a loud, clear voice “I believe I should like to be an estate agent”. He must have already ruled out the more morally and socially acceptable options, child molester, for example, and have learned, to his chagrin that he’ll never show the requisite moral fibre to become a peep-show jism-mopper.

(Go to get coffee, discover machine has been switched off, switch on, go back to desk, tidy desk, find bill, pay bill, make coffee, discover there’s no milk, walk to garage for milk, remake coffee, retreat from Moscow, go to bed)

Sometimes, it seems like, the best way to get going is to find something that really pisses me off.

(Put on new CD, decide it’s time to digitise entire CD collection, begin feeding them into computer, satisfied that project should take around six months, go out for sandwich…)

I’m not one of those Europeans who hate America. As we’re constantly reminded, we would be a German administrative district were it not for their entry into the last war. It could be argued, of course that we have since repayed that debt. I definitely agree that we should have supported the US in this war, though I think we should probably have hung back for a couple of years and waited til the Iraqis bombed our fleet. No, on balance, I’m all for US imports. I like the odd hamburger, Sigourney Weaver, Dashiell Hammett, Charles and Ray Eames, the Cat in the Hat, Earth Wind and Fire and the Douglas DC3. What, I don’t like is this…

I’m standing in the sandwich shop and the oaf in front of says “Can I get a cheese and pickle sandwich?”

I don’t know, Fuckwit? Can you? Can you get one? Do you have what it takes in terms of motor skills and rudimentary cerebral function to go to wherever the bloody sandwich is, get it and bring it back? Personally, I doubt it.

It’s everywhere at the moment. The many headed have seen one too many US import sitcoms and suddenly ‘May I have’ or ‘Do you have any’ or ‘Please can I’ have disappeared. It’s all very well if you're talking to a girl on roller skates at the Sunset In and Out Burger but it sounds bloody rude in an Italian sandwich shop in King’s Cross.

Bring back bloody National Service, I say.

PS. I've been invited to Trooping the Colour this weekend. I shall, of course, report in full

Hey Ho

T

Posted by T at 10:55 PM | Permalink

Mon Vieux,

Ah the life of a poor sap in the tropics old man; 'tis never easy. When old Mr. Kelsall et al cast us out into the world I wonder if it was here in the colonies they had in mind for yours truly. Methinks perhaps not.

When the mulligatawny that is summer weather descended some time last week I happened to be in something called the meat-packing district. Not, as one might readily imagine, a euphemism for the stomping ground for friends of Mandelson and Spacey, but rather a place where lorries turn up of a morn and unload well, meat, there to be packed into boxes or something and forwarded to the ever-expanding consumer (Gawd how it's expanding!). Anyway there I was with the OB&C and some dear pals strolling from boite to bar to hostelry, when all of a sudden I felt a certain sponginess about the soles. Ye gods. A tidal wave brought on by this country's Dear Leader's belief in the bible rather than science? Was I about to see animals trotting two-by-two into a big wooden boat? Some no doubt would like to think yes.

Checking that the Desert Boots were still impeccably sand imagine my surprise, if you will, when I beheld an area of sogginess, emerging so it seemed from a rather tackily adorned doorway nearby.

Some horrendous effluent from the meat-packing doings of the daytime perhaps? Or a lorry of ice fallen on hard times and letting its cargo seep through the cracks? Maybe a poor wee kitten being freed from up a tree by burly local firemen to the accompaniment of copious weeping?

If only it were old thing, if only. Now you know me to be an open- and fair-minded sort of chap. Each to his own and all that. Hmm, well that's all very well up to a point. But when poncey Ruperts and their gakked-up coterie infest a place with their so-called exclusivity and sadly deluded waiting-list-to-join, well a chap can only take so much. That their soggy carpets made themselves felt even unto the very road upon which I trod, well that's just taking it a bit too far dontchathink?

Curling an eyebrow and glancing to the side I caught sight of a sadly out of touch entrance hall straight out of the interior magazine du jour staffed by a comedy, though not comely, frippet with a copy of Polo Monthly in one hand and the keys to Daddy's Aston in the other. Ghastly, to use their own parlance.

Moving away with all speed my soles dried out instanter and all was well with the world. Alas the same cannot be said for the meat packing district which must now be stricken from one's maps. Think the Notting Hill invasion of the trustafarians circa 1990. And if the Soggy House weren't bad enough there is now a growing mass of what are called 'boutique' hotels sprouting up like the hairs on a Euro trash arriviste's un-waxed chest. Euch!

Moving on I have a question with regard to social etiquette upon which I'd like your point of view. Very recently the Trouble and I attended something called a film premiere during which one is required to sit through a cinematic entertainment before being filled to the gills with free plonk and canapés. Simple enough you'd think. But, and here's the prob. At the to-the-gills-filling stage one was put before a chap who happens to be a titan of Wall Street. A titan of such magnitude that a sky-scraper in Times Square bears his name. Now my question is this: where this titan has more money than the Almighty is it done, en passant, to slip in a quick request for a Bentley? I mean, he's probably got more than he can even remember buying and he certainly wouldn't miss one.

Same thing happened at another gathering of late when I found myself across the table from a chap whose Ma and Pa account for a sizeable percentage of a certain nation's GDP. Tearing a piece of bread for reasons that will soon become apparent the words; 'Pass the salt, oh, and could I have a small house please?' were on the tip of my tongue. But frankly I doubt it would've got me one. Play their cards' damnably close to their chests these titans.

Moving on (sans Bentley and small house alas) we're about to celebrate the 60th anniversary of one of our dear country's and others' finest hours. That of Operation Overlord and the immortal D-Day. Without wanting to harp on in general terms, though you and I would welcome any who did, let me share with you a memory of someone who was there.

Some eight years ago one was invited out on a yacht skippered by pal's father-in-law; a fine upstanding gentleman called Ted. We roughed it on the boat for three days, sailing in and out of, and drinking, various ports, and braving the tempestuous North Sea. Along the way we ate, drank and were merry; we swapped sea-faring stories; cooked nosh in the galley and, at Ted's instruction, always mopped our plates with a piece of bread to ease washing-up and avoid waste.

Big deal? Who hasn't used a freshly baked chunk of ciabatta to mope up the last of one's arrabiatta in the hills of Tuscany? But this was Mother's Pride white sliced and we were eating beans and sausage and egg. Not quite so tempting some might say.

Thing is; Ted picked up this habit during the Second Little Unpleasantness while in the Paratroop Regiment.

And, along with many thousands of other Paras, Ted jumped out of a plane over France on D-Day.

And not only that.

In 1994 on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, while in his seventies, Ted jumped out of another plane over France to commemorate his fallen comrades. He and other veterans were encouraged not jump due to terrible conditions, but you don't tell men like Ted what to do.

So when a man like Ted encourages a chap to wipe his plate then he need seek no further opinion. I mop my plate with pride and will continue to do so no matter where I am or who I'm with. And bugger the consequences.

Posted by S at 10:52 PM | Permalink