The Morris Flavoured Halo Drink and the Big Girls

The big girl gods are feeding on my liver again

I’m a vegetarian

You’ve been I sigh with big girls before?

The Sights

The sleeping semi-ripe bald man - on the train – a pile of nulls in an anorak who wouldn’t wake up even after being prodded by three different people including me, the cleaning lady and another male passenger.  He was on the local train into Paddington which had terminated – and he just stayed put.  “Do you think he’s ….”  I ask the cleaning lady too superstitious to finish the sentence.  “Let him go back to where he came from.” she joked.

Charities

Morris announces our reward in the New Year as if it were a private audience with the Pope or a prize draw at the synagogue raffle – a vegetarian meal with the father in law from Lvov aka Lemberg.  Fadjan might be an Armenian name – there is an Armenian Church in Lvov – and historically a small Armenian population.  Morris fills us in on his travel plans to the US for a couple of big American weddings.  Eleanor his wife is worried the American trip might interfere with their ancestral pilgrimage to Lvov – organized by their dynamic evangelist rabbi – whom we are also supposed to meet.  Morris is worried about what to wear when visiting his rich American distant relations.  “Maybe I could just rent a tux there.”  The person he refers to as ‘our parliamentary lady’ (probably the charity’s lobbyist at Westminster – her name is Claire and she has soft sweaty hands and a receding chin but a kind of ingratiating lilt) reassures him “Whatever you wear will be fine – they’re always behind us over there.” Eleanor is an aficionado of Americana such as the sights on the Hudson River – she wants to travel up the River, look at residences of FDR (the sister dwellings to Hampton Court, Blenheim etc for the English tourist-loyalist), see the paintings of Frederic Church.  Me: Who? He: Frederic Church an American painter. Me: I only know “American Gothic”, miming standing with the pitchfork. American art just started to be interesting with Edward Hopper. 
Church, says he somewhat reproachful, is from the Hudson River School of Painting – an important landscape painter in the traditional vein (not in my book on American painting).  Morris: Eleanor has quite a lot of artistic interests.  I encourage her in that.  

All the people at the ‘work drink’ table in the pub including the ‘birthday’ host Morris work for the same medical charity.  Morris is a part time volunteer. Their office is within spitting distance of the pub – it’s their local.

At least half of London’s clerk demimonde, office worker fashion plates and sub-celebs work ‘in their proper jobs’ for charities. Dementia is very popular around London and the Home Counties. The English charities are very Victorian being ultra utilitarian – in other words they’re fundraising racketeers.  They quantify and monetize the needs of the ill, feeble minded, underdeveloped or victims of natural and military disasters to acquire huge global fortunes and enterprises. Along the way they diversify into simple secondary monetization like selling motor insurance etc or full-blown financialization by investing in futures and shorts.

The humanitarian charity is a typical follow-on project for an ex-empire service economy. 

But what else to do with all those old boys and old girls, who, had the empire turned out differently, would have filled the ranks of mid level colonial administrators?

The public schools (which are themselves charities) alias ‘sausage factories’ still churn out the same amount or more of sausages – but without an empire they would just rot dockside.  So let a 1000 charities bloom…  The commodities produced by incestuous charities are incestuous charity workers.

Even the land-mine clearing enterprise which employs the neighbor’s ex-soldier nephew as a ‘consultant’ in places like the Syrian Turkish border or in Ceylon is called a ‘charity’ – with the pastoral sounding name of Halo Trust.  In a recent twitter Halo Trust thanks the “foreign office” for all its support in the charity’s latest remit on the West Bank.  The presumably authentic BBC-John Le Carré television series The Night Manager shows what the latter-day T. E. Lawrences and their gangs of merry mercenaries do in their charitable/humanitarian camps called havens on the Turkish Syrian border.  Behind the humanitarian scenes they sell napalm, sarin and ‘standard’ weapons to assorted Middle Eastern suits, who come to their obscure desert hideouts to watch the goods in spectacular action.  The transactions are disguised as trade with biblical sacks of grain and agricultural machinery.  An interesting coincidence – the appropriately named Dromgoole, M16’s (‘River House’) deep state/black ops contact to the ‘rogue’ weapons dealer Roper is code named ‘Halo’ like the land-mine charity.  Dromgoole sounds like a cross between a dromedary and a ghoul – reminiscent of Poe’s “homo-cameleopard” or four beasts in one.  A ‘gul’ (Arabic) is a desert demon who robs graves and devours corpses – so a ‘Dromgoole’ is a ghoul who roams the desert in the shape of a homo-dromedary.  No one could possibly wish to contradict him when he tells the petty international enforcement agency lady to stop meddling: “we need Roper to be what we are, to punch above our weight in the world.” One of Roper’s entourage sees it otherwise: We have our own country, gesturing towards the Turkish sand – which doesn’t seem like much nowadays. United Fruits had their own continent. Roper says he is an ancient Roman who has his own ‘kingdom’ as he slithers down a sand bank in his fenced off desert camp.  This brings to mind a line in one of Cicero’s letters when he jokes about how he, who is not a king, has handed out many kingships to foreign satraps as the Consul of the Roman Republic.

The Dromgoole actor looks like he had a few extra jaw bones implanted for the role – so that he could keep at least one jaw clenched at all times.  He is the much forbearing unsung hero of the piece. 

Pub Grub (Birthday Party)

The Royal Oak on Nebraska Street to which we were lured by the promise of a ‘birthday party’ is one of numerous way stations belonging to a famous brewery – its beer flowing out of taps in taprooms all over London maybe even further –thousands of iron breasts at which the city, the nation suckles – like Remus and Romulus suckling at the wolf’s tits.  We staked out the place briefly before entering – looking inside over the flimsy cheesy half curtains on their golden rods to see if we recognized the host, we’d only seen him once before. That’s when we met him – in the queue at the proms.  Afterwards we stood with him under a Shostakovich waterfall at the back of the Arena. Anyone can look good under those conditions. In the pub he sat with 6 to 8 others on a long narrow church pew like bench pushed against the wall, on the plain deal table nothing but a mess of glasses, not even a crisp or a pack of peanuts in sight.  The whole braying grunting scene was bathed in dirty yellow light of a Salvation Army (Sally Army) brass band orgy. (At close range – the assembly resembled more the AGM of a pigeon fancier’s club, which has wanted to disestablish itself for years.)  After much hesitation we braced ourselves to meet the faces, the beer barnacles – the entrance was indirect as if one were to break into a church through the sacristy – the tabernacle of metabeer for metaholics.  

When Morris saw us, he rose from his seat in a strange cataclysmic fashion, almost exploding into the upright position, his crooked forearms thrust before him like a pugilist - battering rams ending in mallets. He is nearly bald except for Fu Manchu shaped tufts of hair in the back.  His aquarium face swims before me.  Every look a fleet of scales.  A maniacal stray vatic gleam in his sidelong glances grazes my shoulder.  As soon as I sit down I realize our huge mistake in coming.  I curse our criminal naiveté in following a call, which in fairy tales can lead you straight to the bottom of the river (the Thames swishes at you in so many places in the city). Why did we believe in this birthday party and even bring gifts (two precious vinyls from our collection) for this lewd stranger?   There is a book on the table in front of him East West Street.  “Here here” he says with a stutter still locked in his throat, pointing to this book which is supposed to be why we’ve come, why we’re there.    

I learn the names of whiskeys – the life drink.  Claire tells me she drinks Blue Nun from Aldi – whiskey of a lesser quality, to drink when nothing else is around.  If this were a quiz question she would have lost the point.  Aldi’s £18 whiskey has been ranked one of the best in the world and it’s not called Blue Nun.  But Blue Nun is everywhere else – Blue Nun is not just wine and “Germany’s greatest export”, someone on Instagram holds up a massive “blue nun pineapple”.  How is it possible to have lived and never to have heard of Blue Nun although the whole world bathes in its pineapple notes?

Morris is fond of Talisker – high quality beloved whiskey from Skye.

He basks in idyllic memories of a whole pre-dinner bottle on the house in the hotel bar on Skye – watching the sunset die in the sea.

Thinking of the ‘sleeping Man’ on the train I ask Morris as a drinker – “Do you think it would be possible to be so drunk, that you would fall asleep and not wake up even if someone were to shake you?

He: I’d wake up.

I:  I don’t mean you. I mean anyone.  Do you think anyone could?

He: I’d wake up.”

Could we have still turned back while we were looking through the half curtained window to see if we recognized him and his ‘birthday party’ or when we entered the ‘foyer’ of the bar which divides the two pub rooms, or when he clenched both fists and made a kind of victory sign – as if his team had just scored a goal or he had backed a winning horse at Newbury.  The gulls had entered the trap.  Dickens’ territory – Little Dorrit and Chaucer.  The pub could have been one of those where in earlier times an unsuspecting traveller falls into a vat of boiling water through a trap door.  Not a peanut or crisp in sight – like drowning on dry land.  Just chew on the table.   But we didn’t leave.  Not just because as soon as we sat down our coats and rucksacks were buried under the massive scrum of dozens of other coats and bags – not because we were caged in on all sides on that very narrow bench.  It was the superior power of an action in the prime of its unfolding over the instinct aroused by a moment of danger.  What sort of anti-evolutionary tic is that?  Or is it the shadow of the death drive?

Once we arrived the only mystery was how we came to be there at all.

Scene: Tearing apart (limb by limb – as in the blood smeared jaws of Goya’s Saturn devouring his son) - Sparagmos on the real presents for the fake birthday party – tearing apart of the living birthday god – we were witnesses of his tearing apart – the others too – but probably didn’t notice.  Morris fist fucks the wrapping. Our ‘bells and whistles’ never stand a chance.  He pounds and rips his way through the wrapping and baroque swirls of ribbon and crepe paper, flaying the packages with eager claws.  I expect him to gently prise open the tape – but he bulldozes down the front – tears out the ‘face’, which a few hours earlier we had repaired and re-taped – especially the fragile paper relief floating on top – and carried on the train and tube in separate bags to prevent them from being crushed …

After the act, the epidermis is brutally crumpled, crushed in the paws of the giftee – shoved under the bench.  I rescue out of this human shredder blade – the ‘birthday’ note with its arcane symbols and letters and charms against il malocchio. He lays this inverse spell on top of the vintage records – our musical sacrifice.   (Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” and a historical recording of “The Mikado” - the soloist Alfred Brendel can easily be missed, and if I’m honest I would never listen to any Gilbert and Sullivan tripe.  The record sleeves are the best part.  Morris seems to be pleased though.)

Dodging his volleys of spit on the narrow bench, worn in places or hollowed out; generations of pub bums over Chaucerian eons have carved out seats my buttocks contradict.   

Tales of doomed Victorian mariners, the ill-fated polar expeditions of Scott and Franklin and an Iron Vampire (a new kind of superhero), which sucks iron neat out of you and doesn’t mess around with blood, creep into the conversation.  

Nigel the office wit and master of the Christmas quiz asks everyone to consider what they would choose as their ‘Mastermind’ specialist subject – “nothing major – like the Works of Gilbert and Sullivan,” (winking in our direction) “or the history of Lancashire County Cricket Club, just something minor but rare enough for you to ‘own’ it – mine would be the first ten series of “The Simpsons””. I: You should visit Didcot Parkway, everyone says it looks like Springfield.

Morris is impressed by new findings that show evidence of cannibalism amongst the crew of the lost ships Erebus and Terror. 

I: Wasn’t it tempting the devil, a risky act of Victorian hubris, to call a ship HMS Erebus, the first port of call for the newly dead in Hades or HMS Terror? And I thought mariners were such a superstitious lot. No wonder the Franklin story turned out the way it did. 

The demon waiter cop haunts our corner – he rubber limbs it over the bar and confiscates every glass the moment it is set down on the table.  He takes away my glass with its spurious liquid contents without asking me.  He is like Ganesh the quadruple armed elephant headed god – god of beginnings and remover of obstacles.  The new beginning is each drink; obstacles are the half empty glasses, which stand in the way of the next beginning.

Morris Flavoured Halo Drink

Hours spent looking up the drinks menu of the Royal Oak on Nebraska Street  just to see how much our ‘host’ cheated us when he ‘paid’ for our lime cordials which weren’t like any lime cordial I’d known.  (Just read the standard lime cordial is Roses’ patented in 1867 to ward off scurvy in the Royal Navy – this was standard medical practice – all those culturally engrained products have to do with English seafaring and then colonies to supply the seafarers with lime and sugar and the rest. That’s why the British are still known as Limeys till this day.  Rose preserved his limejuice in sugar not in rum as before.)  What Morris brought us from the bar was probably not a drink at all.  Certainly not on the menu.  Which I couldn’t find – as if it had been destroyed as incriminating evidence.  Only something about ‘pub grub’ – some Ploughmans – not even the vegetable and stilton pie I’d seen once but never again – more likely he’d asked the bartenders for 2 small glasses of London tap water – and when they weren’t looking gave each glass a squirt or two of piss – just so a cough lozenge would melt in them or a dash of lemsip, maybe he dissolved an old dextrose tablet into the glasses – or some lint flavoured saccharine packet – he found in the bottom of his trousers pocket – right next to his testicles.  And then when L. tentatively offered him a fiver for this delicious brew – he looked at the bill, his face flickered once and he made it disappear somewhere in the same pocket to the same place of no return where it performed pre-lycanthropic pub sex on some poorly endowed bald castrato coin. 

The Big Girls

From the body snatcher hoods of Southwark we fall into the arms of ‘the exterminating angel’:  We can’t leave Paddington – no trains to nowhere, all the trains are cancelled indefinitely. “It can take a very long time – best look for other means of transportation,” the very patient Great Western rep (the man in the green coat) tells a mob of stupefied passengers and us.

The Big Girl phalanx – arrived on the same very slow Southwestern train we had to take from Waterloo station because of the Paddington signal meltdown. They walked/swayed down the platform in Reading arms interlocked, the outer girls waving half empty open wine bottles offering other passengers a sip.  They wore off the shoulder dresses, had broad shoulders, no coats, big heads, hindquarters like shire horses and heavy legs in very high stiletto heels. They look like a mass of galleon figureheads on the run.  Maybe the big girls are trans.

They provoked a near altercation in our coach with a group of drunken Landsknecht sorts, randy lads from Reading back empty-handed from a big night out in Wokingham – it was over the possession of a bottle.  One of the mates demonstrates a crude style of ‘traffic cop’ seduction – much admired by his fellows.  He plays the warden and keeper of public order.  He lights up a cigarette for one of the bar dames, snatches it out of her mouth, and throws it on the tracks then reviles her for littering. (this was told in the coach by one of his male admirers so we could keep up with the plot and previous episodes.) In the midst of the raging bottle fight – the ‘girls’ bolted – one of the blokes followed them into the next carriages – but they had vanished.  The rest of the ride was filled with elaborate revenge lust – “let’s push them onto the tracks – take them out.” Some specs were bandied such as their ‘price’ “18 pounds an hour”, “you could eat 18 pounds an hour.”  “Your mother is biodegradable.”  Someone groans, that was below the belt. The ‘warden’ was on a one man ‘crusade’ – and the loudest of the wags couldn’t stop talking about St George and knights mounted on horseback waving their swords and taking out whole harems (pronounced ha-reem).