Monday 29 October 2007

Fingers & Forecasts

Feelin’ Wear-y, Fulham friends?

Has the Stadium of Light left you a little darker in the soul?

Early this morning, I was helping Miss Wetherby (next door-but-one) de-gunge her griddle. She says that naïve fingers are more sensitive to small grooves. She was certainly all smiles afterwards.

Her antiquated Bakelite was rattling and droning in the corner, puffing out the weather forecast. I copped an ear:

“A deep depression over Craven Cottage, remaining steady, with a new low expected tea-time Saturday.

Warnings of gales in Brompton Road proceeding menacingly towards SW6.

Team failing, moving slowly south, 18 to 20. Squally showers expected, occasional brightness. Managerial position emptying by December, future outlook changeable.”

Galled by this prognosis, I sloped off up to the market, which was fussily arranging it’s skirts for the coming day’s trading.

I collared arch-grump and market sage Mr Jewry, and relayed these ominous projections to him. Ever tetchy, he waved a dismissive currant pasty, and said: “supporting Fulham is like being trapped in a slowly-deflating dinghy, circling clockwise in the North Sea: Forties-Fisher-German Bight-Dogger, and repeat until sunk.”

Well, that’s talking in tongues down my street, and it sent my noggin into a bit of a tailspin, and that’s no fib.

So, finding all this flimsy humbugging too heavy for a pair of hopeful shoulders like mine, I slipped away, and went briskly on down to the Cottage to unburden myself.

As ever, upon arriving, the prospects improved. Newly gladdened, I set about projecting some positive tidings towards that delightful Johnny Stevenage stand, before depositing a few protective karmic charms by each of the turnstiles.

You could say that I’ve swathed that old place in a kind of psychic bubble-wrap that’s rendered it impervious to all the downbeats and wiseacres.

With these dependable measures in place, we’re all set and fair to deliver a right Royals beating on Saturday, and squarely debag those gloomy harbingers what’s pooping on our parade!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Friday 26 October 2007

Courting & Cavorting

Brotherly love to you all, my adorable cottaging kindreds.

In those tiny transitional spaces where the hectic yields to the humdrum in the continuum of your convoluted daily lives, I fancy I can hear you wondering to yourselves, as the hubbub recedes, where I have been.

Where have I been?

Exchanging playful glances with Munster Road’s elusive peek-a-boo dandy?

Cavorting in a spinney with a shrewdness of apes?

‘fraid not, mateys: I’ve been contracting a stoop from spending most of mid-morning with my beak squashed against the grime-ingrained panes of The Divide And Conker, Pa’s local, trying to alert the redundant old cove through the lunchtime turmoil.

I was keen to secure his attention before he became completely liquoriced, and relocated to the Former Sober Republic of Drunkmanistan.

I could vaguely identify his spectral, attenuated form, like a fifth-generation photocopy of a person, shimmering through the twenty-watt, yellow-bulbed gloom.

He was slumped in a musty snug, like an under-stuffed, unwanted Guy on November 6th, slackjawing about this and that, and ritually cursing misfortune’s neglected half-brother. He persisted in holding court despite his audience comprising solely of shove ha’penny champion-elect Rancid Joe (comatose), and the landlord’s clingy, wheezing, Bichon Frise, freshly sick from being force-fed pistachios by you-know-who.

He’d just polished off a platter of the sub-gastropub puree that they try to pass off for food. The usual rag and famish fare, it slid down his gullet, no doubt, without even touching the sides.

My loitering was on account of me being on the ear’ole for a sub with which to purchase a mid-morning Banana Inbetween from the highly-esteemed Well Bread pastry parlour.

A gratis Underage Alcopop fizzer to sloosh it down with would have been most welcome too.

It’s all right for Pa, idling his life away, content and not the least bit ashamed to be forever dipping his rookers in the National Handbag. But when one is toiling away under a malign maternal dictatorship like I am, some level of sustenance is required. It would be entirely fruitless to pester Ma - she’s the living embodiment of the cashless society. Any coins that slip into her apron disappear never to be seen again.

A bit like a first-half Fulham lead.

Despite my frenzied dumb-show, he failed to notice me and, as the ingested indulgences steadily paralysed his system, he seemed to slowly fade away and become one with the grubby upholstery.

I was barking up the wrong family tree.

I decided to drift over and attempt to catch the eye, if not the ardour, of the flower-seller’s enchanting daughter. Now there’s a lass with the latch-keys to my heart.

Stationed opposite, I commenced my renowned and much-plagiarised, courting ritual. I employed all my most erotic techniques:

strutting back and forth like a cockerel, with a baby parsnip peeking out of my button-fly;

vigorously thrusting my pelvis towards her whilst squawking like a distressed crow;

kneading tallow into my bumfluff, and tousling my barnet with shredded vegetables;

flamboyantly juggling four under-ripe limes, whilst whistling “You and Me and Fulham.”

Nothing worked.

It was a peerless display of uninformed carnal expression but, despite my fervent approaches, she remained impervious; engrossed in her world and quite serene, she continued delicately twisting wire around the stems of her orange Barberton Daisies.

I had as much chance of beguiling her as I did of being kidnapped by a badger in a gravy waistcoat.

So, with a distended belly, and a fallen crest to boot, I can only beseech our boys to, by any means necessary, out-manoeuvre the Mackems at the weekend, and give a little hope to us all.

But whatever happens chums; remember that each of us is black and white, and that when it rains we all get wet.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Monday 22 October 2007

Lawrie & Lactation

Subdued salutations, my most exasperated mates.

You don’t need me to impart the fact that a lot of yammer’s been spewed about a certain Sanchez, L., Mister. With this is mind, I fancied I might wield some of my newly found words to fashion my four farthings worth.

Thing is, when I spluttered up to Mr Jewry’s stall, all proud and beaming, to show off my little discoveries, he gave me a right terse ticking off. In fact, afterwards I felt a little shrivelled. He said I should handle superior words with caution, and be careful not to obfuscate, whatever that means. He said that some folks could interpret my immature doggerel as a touch patronising. That it could appear snooty, even from a gutter-dwelling chit like me.

Well, I’ve still got the flea in my ear now. Just shows how even the most innocent of intentions can get misconstrued, eh fellas? And that brings us roundly back to Mr Lawrie.

He may be a stern, bespectacled martinet, but in management terms he’s a tyro, and his future remains a guessing story to the best of us.

Granted, as a relative greenhorn he remains a going concern rather than a racing certainty, but needs must when the devil drives. And if it appears I’m alluding to Mr Harrods Al Fayed as a devil, then it’s in strictly the most endearing and chubby-cheeked sense.

Some insinuate that the little giblets he’s purchased to date aren’t the butcher’s best, and that he’s therefore something of a lickpenny. They wonder will he be able to perform the same acts of alchemy that he’s done previously, and make straight fires from crooked logs.

Some sorts even insist on crucifying him for his playing past. Be honest gentlemen, would you be content for a mature boudoir performance to be judged on an adolescent alleyway fumbling? It seems that old sins cast long shadows.

I can understand the frustrations and the need to vent. We all need a little release from time to time: our passions are liable to get pent-up when the object of our affections goes a little limp.

It reminds of me of that rather rum story by Mr. Maupassant - An Idyll - the one about a heavily-lactating woman on a train who only gains relief from the pain of her milk-swollen breasts when a fellow passenger offers to imbibe some of the offending liquid, direct from source you might say. He hadn’t eaten in three days, so it suited both parties!

No! I’m not asking you start suckling your neighbours at the game, St. Ivel preserve us! Although when those replica shirts come off, there’s some chaps that certainly look capable of providing a little half-time refreshment.

What I’m saying, is that we can hector and chide ‘til our temples pulsate – in fact, I bust yet another pair of braces meself this last Saturday - but where’s the percentage in aspiring to champagne tastes on a ginger beer budget?

Our travails might seem like water off a lame duck’s back sometimes, but I’d wager a gusset-full of plums that beneath that reasoned veneer, he’s as troubled as we are. He does, so far at least, appear to possess a splash more acumen than most. He certainly presents a more austere mien: I can’t see him sharing a lager bath with his players and scrubbing their backs with organic leeks, post-defeat. I reckon he just sits in a corner, leering menacingly over the top of the latest copy of Business Today, punching digits into a calculator. Maybe even drawing a sinister finger across his neck, slowly, from ear to ear.

We all agree that it’s time for success to get it’s collar felt ‘round our way, and I ain’t just talking about winning the Intertoto one time. But sometimes, as we all know, football can amount to little more than a squalid raffle. Goals that are not goals, leads that are no longer leads.

In those instances, we just have to accept that we are mere ears of corn, in thrall to fate’s force nine. It’s sometimes better to yield a little, than risk suffering widespread structural damage.

In conclusion, based on the evidence thus far, Your Honour, I’d probably give Mr. S. the name of my tailor.

And if he’s still with us in the New Year, I’ll give him the phone number too!

Until then, as Mr. Jewry often remarks, “don’t count your headless chickens before they hatch.”

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Friday 19 October 2007

Nouns & Naysayers

Fulham friends fair and lean, assume a metaphorical huddle formation, fondly clasping the shoulder blades of those adjacent, and ask me, as one, where I have been.

Where have I been, you ask?

Investigating the subtle differences between a gimlet, an awl, an augur and a wimble?

Playing Knock Down Ginger in Jackanapes Row?

No, my little cummerbunds, I have been executing, Rolex-regular, my pre-market ambulations, dreamily traversing south west six’s sublime lanes and passageways.

Routine, I find, like a long-limbed soak in a sudsy pewter tub, never fails to soothe the stings and bangs what life typically dishes out to low-hanging miscreants like us. In particular, and most specifically, the harsh, raking ache caused by football-shaped travesties such as what we are forced to endure all too frequently down by the Mighty Thames.

Yes, repetitious and non-thinking pursuits somehow manage to apply a pacifying salve to smarting emotional ailments, such as this great stinking post-Pompey hangover we’ve all been a-suffering from recently.

Despite the first steps of my morning trawl being reliably undertaken through a fog-brained murk, I nevertheless aspire to keep at least one lazy eye out for any discarded reckonings as I wander. Copper coils, lead piping, discarded titanium hip-joints: anything that I might be able to exchange for some low-denomination pocket smash, or that Ma could potentially employ in the creation of more celebrity-aping homunculi to flog from her stall.

My knock-kneed exertions were carrying me along handily when, turning the corner into an alley behind Clem Attlee Court, my apprentice totter’s radar demurely blipped.

Something, singled out by the sun, was glinting at me from beneath a mound of off-cuts, waxy shavings, lino curls and coffee grounds. Cagily, I approached this inviting little beacon. Nudging the draff aside with the toe of a nimbly-buffed brogue, I uncovered a small, cognac-coloured, leather field-case. Lifting it from the ground, I shook off the spoilings.

I liberated the clasp and lifted the flap.

There, bunched within, shimmering in the thin morning sunlight, was a plethora of pristine, unused English nouns. Suffused with a rather pitiful glee, I quivered as I eased them out.

There was balustrade and guillemot, and even haberdasher, safe within their waxed-paper wrappers.

Continuing to rummage within the damp satchel, like a pig snouting for truffles, I uncovered a covert pocket containing a small, tightly-bound bundle. It turned out to be some collective nouns, all wrapped up in a ragged dimitty petticoat.

Placed under pressure from a broad-beamed peeler with a fistful of me scruff, I’d have to concede that the collective nouns are my most lovingly-tongued favourites, officer.

And what a medley it was:

There was murmuration. That’s a collection of starlings.

There was skulk. That’s a collection of foxes.

There was also dopping, sedge, and sounder, but please good chums, don’t chide me for squirreling them away for another occasion.

Despite heretofore possessing synapses pickled in syrup, this find got the matter in my noggin pulsating like billy-o. A microscopic firework display of reasoning, exploding right there between me cauliflowers: roman candles and catherine wheels of “I wonder”s and “what if”s.

What these cerebral pyrotechnics lead me to speculate, was if there might be a collective noun for our beloved black and white boys.

We know that some inveterate piss-the-beds might suggest that the term should be “a failure of Fulham players.”

Well, perish the thought and all it’s children! Let any oily-arsed naysayers chew on this well-spun one-liner:

“A brilliance of black and whiters.”

“Touché!” I hear you ejaculate in sympathy. But, deep-down we know, our brows beaten through seasons of experience, that the more suitable syntax would probably be:

“A frustration of Fulhamers.”

Or, perhaps, “an inconsistency of Cottagers.”

It’s a difficult thing to precisely pin because, as Mr Jewry often opines, supporting Fulham is like “falling between two stool pigeons”. And I think we all know what he means by that, don’t we fellas.

Leaving them considerations hanging enticingly in the limpid, brittle air, I tripped off with my giddy windfall, happy as a kipper in a kibbutz.

So chums, look out for me this coming Saturday, where I shall be openly displaying my freshly-swollen glossary, and ramming a few choicely selected idioms up the Derby.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!