Oct 6th – Replace a replacable replacement with this.

It’s an unpleasant subject but we can’t put it off any longer. Male underpants. With the death of our esteemed landlord, we have inherited a stock. But not those of the modern fashion – with a bit of stretchy leg in them; nor those of time-honoured style – with a keyhole access point; no, the preferred Chew-Chew variant reflects a far unhappier period of the masculine wardrobe, and is one which more closely resembles the ladies’ tanga brief than they do their traditional male counterparts. With patterns drawn on them. After a long spell with nothing but threadbare trousers to protect us from our embarrassment, despite their obvious designation as discothèque knickers, they, at first, made for a welcome change. Now we dread being caught in them.

We strode out for the night last Friday, full of confidence in our new togs, which fell away to nothing as we approached the doors of the nightclub. I will tell you more about it another time, but let’s just say this for now – we felt blessed that we encountered not a single lady who was interested in looking at what lay beyond our velvet bell-bottoms.

He has also unknowingly bequeathed us his short-wave radio with which we have reconnected with the rest of the world, and me, the old country. Within an hour of listening to it, a horrible shroud of dread fell upon me, as if suddenly becoming aware that I had somehow lived for the last two years in a state of bliss, oblivious to the slog and grind of a real existence.

It was once said of the UK that a squirrel could commence a journey in, say, Brighton, and travel all the way to the northern tip of Scotland without ever having to touch the ground. You could make the same journey by CCTV camera now. I was wearing a pair of Chew-Chew zebra-stripes as this thought flashed across my mind, and as it did, I was struck by the realisation that we have filled this site of unexplained death with evidence, and flung our DNA everywhere.

And look at them, the monsters, they were even wearing the deceased’s underpants
– the special ones he used for nightclubbing.

I mean, can we ever really achieve a state of true unconnectedness? The knife you buy to commit the crime; the material with which you clean it; the sanitising of the crime scene; the chainsaw you have to acquire to cut the body into small disposable pieces; the sheet on which you butcher it; the fire pit in which you burn the bones; the river into which you throw away the tools. We always leave a trail. And this must be the most surveilled territory on earth.

But, would they be bothered to look twice at a diseased body lying under a hedge? Surely the only thing that matters is to be elsewhere when he’s found? Yes! My future lies but a short trip up the road.

Yet that journey feels about as enticing as the offer to join a bible studies group.

Too little time, too many thoughts.

Pause. Stop thinking. Think only of the air. In through the nose, pause, out through the mouth.
Keep it up. Don’t allow your mind to wander. Breathe. Hear the air. Stop. Hear it again on the way out.

I dare to contemplate the vanishing point of the future and now I see it staring back, all settled in like winter, steadfast, unmoving, attending me, knowing that I will walk straight into its traps because I am not smart enough to do anything but.

I procrastinaiou
Together, we procrastinaem
I was procrastinal
I did proprocrastinal
I am going to procrastinatь

It is the night before the exam, yet still, somehow, I can’t bring myself to open my textbooks. I’ve locked myself in, unprepared to make the tiny effort to break the slender bonds that tie me in to inertia – physics must have come up with a better word for that phenomenon by now – when inertia and momentum describe the same event? Spinning? Is that it?

Steady away. Go to barn. Lie on straw. Think of only one thing at a time.

Napoleon often felt unwell before he began a campaign. Then again, look how it turned out for him. He missed his date with destiny. Will it wait for me? Of course it will. I am it. And, like Dick Whittington, whatismore, – did Dick say that? Or the Marquis of Carabas? I forget. But it did have a cat in it, I know that. I digress… whatismore, I will learn a transferable trade.

And besides everyone says that with hard work, comes a head of self-esteem.

Yes! This is all dropping into place beautifully by the simple technique of employing logic. How well I have been raised. Thank you, daddy.

But what to do? There must be loads of trades to learn in the gig economy – all based on riding bikes, answering phones, watching and making TV programmes, being an MP and frying eggs. That’s the UK economy, right? Isn’t it? Oh, and getting everything wrong the first time, then doing it again. I’d be great at that.

Suddenly, I notice that Friend John is waving at me from a distance. He wants to talk, and it brings my energy back down, switching from high octane nonsense, into despondent idling mode while I attend his arrival.

I am a spin doctor.
Friend is my spin patient.

If I am to gain any traction on this slipway it behoves me to think like a leader and take little Friend John with me. Dick Whittington, Robert the Bruce, Napoleon and Churchill, those types. They’d had their dark moments, and usually it was a small animal that got them through it. If not Friend John, I could perhaps trap a squirrel? Or, better still, send him to get one for us? Though I’m not sure about Napoleon, he was too much like me: good at everything for years then went missing when the only thing for which he’d be remembered came along – condemned by English historians for his failure to write the story himself. Come to think about it, he probably wasn’t stroking anything under his vest. As for Churchill, the opposite.

Friend walks inexorably towards me, bringing the moment of an ill-considered, ad-hoc, decision closer.

              Hold on a minute.

Is that not revealing? The very reason Churchill was motivated to write his story was because he knew that he was at heart, a bum and a bullshitter, whose actions could not stand up to the analysis of the free market. He learnt the art, as many sois disant successful types do, of glossing over his failures; making a virtue of them, in fact. When he went to bed at night, he was as haunted as me; his bravado no more than a gossamer carapace of cigar smoke and alcohol fumes.

I cling to the silky spider’s dragline line, spinning on my axis, between poles. I belong at neither. I am both. I am a new-revisionist. I am my own doppelganger. I will bake my cake and share it. I am neither Dickie, nor Winston. Well, I’m feeling slightly dickie, obviously, and I have not yet turned myself into a winnie.

You are nothing but a whining, Moaning-Minnie.
I thought you said I was a ninny? Or did mother call me that to impress you?
Who cares? У меня есть планы.

I will go home the slow way, keeping a war diary as I go. I will become a two-sided revisionist. Yes, that is my calling. That is my definition. Logic once more fires its Exocet missile into the dead centre of a crowd of innocent civilians. I’ll be literally like one of the flexible, skilled, and adaptable success stories that are keeping the UK economy robust, versatile and world leading.

Literally forge a role for myself, by embracing my own greatest asset, failure. I will get every decision wrong, every time, and by pressing on regardless, pausing only to revise my message, and say that the outcome was exactly as planned, and expected, I will eventually come to be regarded as genius, who knows something that no one else does. Quite literally.

Tomorrow, before we load our wagons, and begin the great depart, I will reflect once more on these ideas, until I am sure that they have been formed of copper-bottomed logic, and are not the loose ramblings of an unlucky loser prone to dreaming, wearing too-tight underpants.

I make my way back, one last time, from barn to house, and as I reach the fence, I take a moment to reflect on the timeless appeal of the two-centre vacation – if you accidentally kill someone in one location, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the holiday’s a write off.