Clean myself: 0
Monkey see, monkey do: 0
Tics: 0
Believe in God? N
YTLH: 0
It’s Christmas, and I am only the Sound of Music short of having watched the canon of epic Musicals of 1960-70. As my father finally gets us out of the door and off to the rugby club, I feel a pang at the loss which I know my mother shares, (The Sound of Music – surely the apotheosis of that period of unsurpassed output?) and find myself wishing for it to be playing in the background on the high-up TV screens that are dotted about the bar at the club. We enter the air lock between the outside door and the one which gives access to the main bar, and that familiar smell of grass, mud and Linament, mixed with beer fumes hits me for the first time in ages, bringing back all sorts of odd memories. Suddenly I realise, that if there is to be a TV programme running in the background, the children and kidults will have banded together to make sure that it’s Doctor Who.
We go in and my father dispenses his final piece of advice, ‘Stand up straight for once.’ It’ll help my cause, he adds, as my mother brushes the mince pie crumbs from my new three-quarter length job-seekers Crombie. I am just home having finished a stint as an intern at Ogilvie, Windsor & Clive, the crack advertising agency, and I am being presented back to the local market as a young buck going places, who, leaders of the community may wish to help on his way. Here, for the moment at least, I am still considered a gifted child with a golden future. Any number of local businessmen – and they all hang out here, it being a bit of a rugby club, Rotary and Masons all mixed into one, would bite my hand off to take me on, I’m told. I am to use their networks to gain a leg up into the world of high-commerce. High-Commerce? This is one of father’s phrases. He has used it for so long now, that it has become an accepted term of art with us. Even I no longer hear it as the preposterous expression that I once did. ‘The world of business is a very interconnected place,’ he adds, sensing that I perhaps demand slightly more from him now, having completed my top-class (again, one of his) internship.
I allow him his moment, but I draw the line at ‘Circulate and chatting up.’ Mainly because I don’t understand what that means. Instead, I act like I’m thinking about how I might best do that, and I slink away to the far side of the room behind a pillar, with one eye on him, and the other on the tele.
When did the TV companies give up on Christmas? ITV seems to have entirely abdicated the responsibility to put on a festive treat, and the BBC just raid the archive. These children, tearing about the place, with their super-hero costumes and futuristic toys which beep and flash no better than ours used to, will never know the joy of looking forward to the TV premiere of a blockbuster film. If we can have anything whenever we want it, why don’t we be done with the whole lot of it, and call off Christmas? Why not recognise that Christmas comes every day of the week now and that the joy of this season should be about having a day without it; where downloading is banned, and you’re only allowed to eat what you can carry back from the shops? That way we might have something to look forward to every now and again.
As if to make the point the children who have been rushing around the open spaces of the bar as one cartoonish rabble of noise and arms and legs, stop next to me to look up at the largest screen. Their self-appointed leader, a boy possessing all the accoutrements of a child but with some adolescent, young adult themes emerging, bids them sit down while he asks a question of the steward. As soon as he is told that they don’t have the Disney Channel, he raises his charges, and with an authoritative ‘Quick, to the kitchen!’ Leads them away to continue their adventure.
As they leave, a small, neat, man dressed as a golfer, arrives. He’s got this at-home feeling about him which makes me think he’s one of those club-men types. He’s not that much older than me, but I’d have recognised him from my playing days if he was of my cohort. I immediately frame him as someone who’s triumphed over a lack of natural charm and empathy to have molded himself into a tolerated outsider.
‘He loves Christmas, my lad,’ he says nodding to the troupe that have just disappeared, exhaling as he does, as if he’s been part of their high-octane revelry too. There’s a little pride in it too, betraying, I guess, some sort of connection with the abnormally grown leader of the gang, which, if true, probably does put him a few years ahead of me. I don’t say anything, in case there’s something wrong with the boy, and I’m being set up in a woke-pc sting, by a professional victim.
Mini-clubman settles on the bar stool next to mine and threatens a conversation. At least it corroborates the cover story with my father.
‘First timer?’ he says, and it sounds practiced, like he’s heard other members talk to new faces in the same way. I tell him that it’s quite the opposite actually, and then of my playing days here as a boy when I was still at school. Immediately, the school reference makes Mini-clubman realise that I was one of them, not one of whatever it is that he is.
He swivels to order a glass of coke, no ice, and a packet of cheese and onion, then turns back, once the transaction is complete, and the goodies, not for Orville as it turns out, are safely settled side by side on the bar. ‘You’ll be Johnny Carver’s generation then,’ he says, and as he does, he nods in the direction of the bank of fruit machines, where most people have gathered.
Johnny-county lock now, actually-Carver. The talentless but massive, good-speaking, hero of the club who scraped into Oxford on the back of a rugby CV, and once there, scraped into the second XV once in a three year career devoted to nothing but rugby. He probably says, ‘Half-blue now, actually.’ Johnny Carver, whose brilliant mind and fabulous wit came up with Dick-Shit for me as a nickname, it being a diminutive of Dickie Shite – the single most, in fact only, creative moment of his entire school life. There he was, sat on a bar stool, alone amongst a sea of admiring faces, yawing and yahing, looking like a boiled egg balanced on a cocktail stick.
I think about renewing my list of targets to be serially killed, should life head back in that direction. Then I think better of it, and decide to get out and home to the Sound of Music before I draw any attention to myself, and talk turns to job-seeking.
Dickie White's Diary 