Nov 16th – So, if you’re down on your luck, I know you’ll all sympathise…

Do you remember when Friend John and I returned to the UK in the spring of last year? I can talk about this now that he has passed to the other side. I’d prefer to say, ‘Now that he is dead,’ but we do keep receiving emails from him in purgatory, so I guess, until he gets his own cloud, and settles into Dear Leader’s realm of eternal happiness, and the messages slowly dry up, we’ll stick with passed.

We had returned full of hope. There was a General Election coming, and though no one dared predict a Tory meltdown, we knew they were not merely doomed by their fin‑de‑siècle shitshow, but destined to be despised for a generation, thanks to that steaming muck‑heap of straw and manure who lay stinking just off scene. Like a turd left to fester under the dessert trolley of a Knightsbridge restaurant in the wake of a Bullingdon Club outing, it was only a matter of time before the putrescence of our former PM (sic) was recalled by the voting public.

I say certain, in the way that only a recidivist gambler can. I know, I know. Afterwards, once it’s happened, our strong hunch that something might happen, suddenly turns into ‘I knew it was going to happen.’ We didn’t. We were just pretty confident.

And we were invested. As a thank you for all our research and dirty work (Friend John), and articles to which he added his byline (me), Press Daddy, through an influential contact, set us up with the Labour Party candidacy for the hopeless seat in my home town.

Anyway, on this particular evening, we were on our way to the rugby club —the social centre, and emblem of that mediocre town, which drew in the best of the area’s worst —ready to give them our first proper stab at campaigning. There was an enlivening Haribo Tangfastic zing in taking our social democracy message to that crowd, who a little while earlier, writ large amongst the country, had been so thick, so uninformed, so clueless, so desperate to grasp at any huckster’s schtick that echoed their primitive perceptions of a golden age, to have elected the fuckwit’s-fuckwit, dim-MAGA, cerebrally-clouded, Liz Truss, to lead them.

We were never going to persuade the audience, but we figured that we could make a mess of it in front of them, and it would count for nothing. Most of them had already acquired a pretty low opinion of me, anyway, about which, more below.

We were also to meet Eggo, because time had come for me to collect the money I’d left with him. Remember when I’d won all that money on The Chase, and then my media career that followed it? I had a hundred thousand or so with him, and with that we were planning to put a deposit down on our constituency house. Friend John was to be my parliamentary secretary. We’d pool our wages and share them, as we would the flat, close to work in Westminster that we’d rent on our MPs expenses.

Bob was quite literally our Aunty’s trans-mans companion living with her under a prenup NDA-style arrangement.

Then my phone rang. It was some apparatchik from the party to inform us that a late replacement, professional politician was to be parachuted into the constituency to replace me.

‘I’m sorry, but we think it’s going to be a close count, and need someone with the right sort of  experience to know what it takes to get these tight counts over the line.’

What he meant, was that their poling figures showed that this lost cause had suddenly turned winnable, and we were to be dropped for the daughter of someone better connected than us, who had no experience whatsoever in getting anything over the line – except perhaps her nose and a rolled up fifty-pound note during her internship at the bank/advertising agency/AI start-up, into which she’d also been parachuted, shortly after being airlifted from Oxbridge.

Disappointed, and not to say a little furious, we continued on to the rugby club to meet Eggo, to give him notice on the redemption of my money. And to strategize. If this were to be taken away from us at the last minute, Press Daddy owed us a pretty good alternative.

We’d been in the bar about an hour or so, when Iain Collings turned up.

We’d met on our first day at school, aged five, then went to our next two schools together, until he left, aged sixteen, to become a welder. He had recently, by the acquisition of a suit and an on-line diploma, become a financial adviser in the employ now, of Johnny ‘Big Eggo’ Carver. Not so much cronyism, as the lazy recruitment of a biddable wannabe of no discernible intelligence.

He had always been a creep. Not thick as such, but not quite possessing the insouciantly acquired attributes to get on that he envied so much in others. We were assigned Houses when we first arrived at senior school, three of which were OK. One, was for people who came from all the far-flung places surrounding the town, who could boast neither established social groups, nor a cohesive thread, to bind them. He was put into that loose collection of misfits, and so, came to be ignored by the remaining three-quarters of his year group. To them, he came to be known as Bon-Bon, for a reason nobody ever bothered to ask.

One day, he came to school with a badge in his lapel that none of us had seen before. It proudly proclaimed a love of a band called Supertramp. ‘Who are they Bon?’ somebody asked one wet playtime.

‘They’re an American metal band. You won’t have heard of them,’ said Collings, soaking up a longed-for moment of bellwether notoriety, incapable of understanding that within a few weeks we’d all know that they were a squeaky-voiced falsetto soft-rock combo, who put out whining, cheesy Wurlitzer piano-based commercial pop, that made you wince for the participants as soon as the twat who’d drawn the short straw, started singing.

In his desperate pursuit of cool, and his desire to be recognised as the equal of those he considered to be unworthy of their lightly-worn attributes, he morphed into a fantasist. Nothing happened without him being distantly related to the new hero in the news; no new cultural phenomenon occurred without him having first heard of it through undisclosed contacts. Never did he not pipe up with an ‘I’ve heard…,’ or not give you a knowing side-eye, when some poor sap found himself courting trouble.

I’d finished university, and short of anything better to do, returned home in late November, and with that, started to turn out for the local rugby club. Say what you will about rugby, it has always found room for unathletic inadequates with a bad attitude. And Collings, once so sneering about participation in House matches, and the relish of competition, had quietly, by virtue of a gym membership, quietly insinuated himself into playing member and stalwart, of the club.

It was Christmas. And tradition had it that we’d split into groups for lunch at various different venues, before slowly drift back to the club during the afternoon, until, at about six or seven in the evening, the place became alive with drunks sharing a not usually seen measure of goodwill with each other.

Since I’d arrived, a month or so earlier, we’d barely exchanged a word. But that night, he sought me out with an odd question.

He’d been insanely jealous of mine and Neil’s membership of Furness Jazz Society, and Furness Film club, which, as I’ve explained on other pages here, took us into the land of adult fun ahead of our peers. We, of course, gave short shrift to his overtures. And when his entreaties failed, his desperate attempts to hint that what we got up to was widely known, and that we were close to being rumbled by those who had the power to make us pay for our misdemeanours, they solicited no sort of response from us.

He suspected that we had skinned the odd spliff in our time, though, unlike him, and this is what killed him, had we, we kept the fact that we’d accessed the underground to ourselves, never to share our secrets, and especially not with a petty and vengeful enmerdeur like him. And when he asked what he supposed, by his limited intellect, to be veiled questions about what it was we’d been up to when we rolled into school just in time for the register, he’d be shrugged off with an indifference that must have been intolerable for a perennial aspirant like him.

He told me that some friends of his were in. They weren’t members, but here’s the thing —they had some dope. Would I be good enough to show them how to roll it into a joint?

No, I wouldn’t. He asked again an hour later, then twice more, about half an hour apart after that. The last time he asked, he told me that they had gone to the kitchen.

‘It’s that door, on the right, when you come through the lobby,’ I told Friend John, as I related the story to him. It was only used on match days.

I was ready for home, so I told him I’d do it as a favour on the way out, as long as he left me alone, from then on.

He led me to the kitchen to make the introductions, then left, and within about thirty seconds of going, the door was banged open by our neanderthal club captain, Tommy something. Tommy Trotter, one of those sort of names. He was as angry as I’d ever seen him, which was something of an achievement for him. Pointing towards the exit, shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Get Out!’ Then, as I walked past him, into the lobby, shouting again, after me, ‘You’ll be dealt with next week.’

For the next two months, or so, I became the pariah of the club. I had brought shame on it. I had brought shame upon it. The club that my father had joined as a young boy; the place which helped form the values he took into adult life. It had been the citadel for people like him. My leper status faded slightly over time, but from then on, whenever references to drugs came up, my name was linked to it, or all faces would be turned to me, as the punchline was delivered.

I sort of melted away as that season came to an end, and didn’t renew my membership for the next. But, here’s the thing: I never thought to object. I never thought to say that I had been caught up in someone else’s trouble. Nor to insist, as had been assumed, that it had not been me who’d brought the drugs onto the premises —the most heinous of my said offences. I just went along with the generally held opinion, that it had been my doing. Even when, towards the end of the season, people like Tommy Trotter would say to me, in the post-match session, ‘Why did you do it? You’re such a decent, good lad, otherwise,’ I’d never think to say, ‘I didn’t actually do anything.’ Never once did it occur to me to correct their misapprehension of the event.

In fact, it took a year or more before the penny dropped for me, and I realised that the uber-creep Iain Collings, had set me up. How else had Tommy Trotter known what was going on before he bashed open the door? How else had he been inspired to go to the kitchen within a few seconds of Collings leaving? I mean —he was essentially retarded.

As I finished telling the story to Friend, Collings arrived in front of us.

‘You here to meet Johnny?’

I’d forgotten that about him. When he asked questions he did this thing with his head, sort of nodding it backwards, as if there’s something sinister he’s tuned into about your intentions.

Friend John turned to me, and asked, ‘What did he do, when you told him you’d worked it out?’
I told him that this was the first time I’d seen Collings, since.
‘Who the fuck are you? His secretary?’ Friend asked.
Collings turned away from him to speak directly to me, and said, ‘Johnny’s in his place in France for a while. I’m looking after the London office. What are you after?’
Sensing that Friend hadn’t quite grasped what a snake he was, I stayed silent, unwilling to share any personal information with him, hoping that Friend might notice without having to be told. But, into the silence, Friend said, ‘We want our money back.’
Collings gave us one of his trademark laugh-shrugs, as if to say, ‘What money?’ implying:

the likes of you have money with us? I doubt it.

Then he said, ‘If you want to discuss anything, you’ll have to come and see us at the office.’ He took a business card from his breast pocket and put it on the table. ‘Mind you, you’ll have to pay consultancy rates,’ he said, as if he knew that the cost of a meeting alone was beyond us. He looked me up and down, and said, ‘Six-fifty an hour.’

I expected Friend to do as I’d see him do many times before, and to next engage with Collings by his err bon-bons, tightening his grip until he’d wrung some respect and compliance from his prey. But instead, he picked up the business card, examined it for a while, then asked, ‘When are you next in the office?’

Collings told him that he was driving down the next day, and would be there all week, and perhaps the next. He expected a request for an appointment to follow, but Friend John just snared him a dead-eyed stare, until he realised that neither of us intended to say anything further.

Unable quite to cope with the idea that it had pushed the success of our short exchange back in our direction, he turned to go, then stopped, and said, ‘Don’t forget to ring the office first. The six-fifty needs to be paid before we’ll take the appointment.’

*ВТШ, this is the new journo-fiction that is coming your way. Other than being based on deep disdain for those who dish out spite without wit, it has nothing else to recommend it.