Butterflies & Buttocks

Sun-kissed associates, loosen your neck-ties, top-up your iced tipples, and tilt your wicker trilbys to a more forgiving angle.

Then, collectively quiz me as to my recent whereabouts.

Like, where have I been?

Boiling up the bones of regret in a fog-bound bothy?

Sprinkling pepper on a salt marsh?

Negative: no boiling, no sprinkling.

The fact is, I’ve been out liberating a few rustic impulses on Putney Common. Now, that notion alone should be enough to undermine your pre-existing knowledge of human nature, your investment in a non-random universe, and your faith in phenomenological reality. To willfully mis-quote that esteemed philosopher Mr. Tom Jones: it is unusual.

For not only am I as urban as a pigeon roosting in the wheel arch of the Lord Mayor’s carriage, I’m also currently bedevilled with what I’ve christened ‘close-seasonal affective disorder’. Consequently, I’ve been presenting a rather saturnine aspect to the North End Road environs and it’s populace.

Starved of football-infused nourishment, the Maurice metabolism starts to drag at this time of year. The humours thicken and slow. I begin to droop like parched wisteria, and slump like an under-stuffed guy on bonfire night. Morosely I loaf about under my own personal cloud, frowning at acts of human kindness.

To aggravate my malaise, Ma has evicted me from her stall. She claims she’s been forced to “reduce headcount” due to “fiscal hiccups” or somesuch, even though my labours remain uniformly unrewarded and, in truth, represent little more than a benign form of slavery. I think it was just a random act of heartlessness contrived to imply business acuity. With similar intent, she often boasts to fellow traders of how the meagre profits she extracts are “selflessly reinvested in the local community.” In practice this amounts to Pa pocketing them, and spending the day getting progressively guttered in The Goose. Unfortunately, his submersion renders me little more than a nebulous shadow skulking outside the pub door. To him, ‘bonding’ is something involving highly-flammable adhesives and a g-clamp.

Even my pals have evaporated, ferried away to caravan in Canvey, chalet in Clacton, and winkle-pick in Whitby. Meanwhile, the closest the Maurice family gets to a holiday is arguing over a strawberry Mivvi outside the travel agents.

But, so as not to appear ungrateful to be drawing breath whilst others fester and decay beneath the ground, I may occasionally, in the pre-market quiet, rescue a few flaccid kale and cauliflower leaves, curling mournfully by the kerb, and fashion something football-shaped from them with a length of waxy twine. Glumly, I then proceed to nudge this cruciferous cluster around the streets of SW6. With eyes cast downwards to keep it close to my good leg, navigation becomes arbitrary. Somehow though, I always seem to end up on Stevenage Road. Then, with the charmless bravado of youth, I inevitably go on to challenge Mr. Haynes to a keepy-up contest. He beats me every time.

Anyway, sensing the sun behind my ears, serotonin slowly dispersing the melancholic fog, I experienced a compelling desire to escape the arid streets and frolic in a leafy arbour for a few golden hours. Oddly inspired, I even made myself a ramshackle butterfly net from a discarded bamboo and pair of Miss Wetherby’s laddered nylons – she made me peel them from her actual legs, and that liberated a few impulses by itself. I prepared a bottle of redcurrant cordial and a beetroot and chive pasty for sustenance and, as an aide, wrapped up my rations in one of Ma’s old tea towels - the one depicting ‘Endangered Butterflies Of Britain’.

I resolved to bag myself a brace of Glanville Fritillarys, or at least a Lulworth Skipper. Once ensnared, I would decant them into the emptied pop bottle for safe-keeping. I then planned to deliver them to a fanatical conservationist in exchange for a generous settlement, the ensuing acclaim leading irresistibly to a life of coruscating fame and glamour.

Leaving Fulham behind, I sloped over Mr. Bazalgette’s stately bridge, and hurried past the spot where homicidal maniac and pubic-hair connoisseur John Christie was buttonholed by the law’s long arm. The thought induced a shiver as I pushed on along the lower of the Richmond Roads.

Upon arriving at the common, I surveyed that unkempt meadow there, glittering lazily in the haze, and instantly noticed something glinting as it fibrillated just above the tips of the tall grass. A dot-dot-dash of morse flashes seducing me like a siren’s sultry refrain.

With the immediacy of the hypnotist’s finger-click I am in a trance and at the mercy of urges I cannot control.

I cleave eagerly though the long grass like a besotted spaniel just reprieved from castration, intent on one last shot at extending it’s bloodline. My momentum is such that even my unwieldy gait assumes an elegance. I am consumed with the exertion, and hopelessly in thrall to the bounteous rewards I have envisioned. In my imagination the sunlight splintering through the trees is a volley of paparazzi flashbulbs. They merge into a continuous curtain of light and I see a future where I glide from moment to moment bathed in the effulgent glow of unending adulation.

As I approach, the vista narrows, whilst the flickering nucleus of my intentions expands until it seems to fill my vision. At the final instant, it is wafted upwards by a balmy breeze fresh from the river. I leave the ground, my trajectory destined to intercept it at it’s apex. As I climb, time recedes. My feet are en pointe, my net arm extended. I am Neil Armstrong, pioneering, ascendant. I am Rudolf Nureyev majestically mocking gravity. I have subjugated nature. I exclaim in triumph as the prey yields to my prowess and nestles sweetly in Miss Wetherby’s redundant gusset.

Mission accomplished, I begin my return to earth. However, with toes still pointing, my landing is prematurely curtailed. Glancing down, I see the gleaming tip of a freshly-buffed brogue daggered deep between the buff buttocks of a gentleman who is, in every sense, naked. A similarly-attired female, glistening with arousal, inspects me from over his shoulder.

From deep within my core I ignite with embarrassment. I fear I may combust. With my free foot dangling, I veer around on the other like an arthritic ballerina. Only suction is keeping me upright. It wasn’t just nature abhorring this vacuum, believe me: I attempted a few fractured pirouettes and eventually managed to extricate myself from the startled lothario’s rear-end embrace. The resulting sonic event scattered a knot of crows grazing nearby, intuitively alert to the farmer’s shotgun.

Fearing he may re-enact the posterior intrusion with my bamboo, I made off towards the river without delay.

Once I had reached the cover of the trees I remembered the pursuit that had spawned my disturbing encounter. Expectantly, I teased my fingers into the soft gauzy folds of the net. Alas, what I extracted was no priceless entomological specimen, safely delivered from extinction. No, it was nothing more than a crudely torn square of lurid coloured foil. Reassembling it, I managed to identify the words ‘lubrication’ and ‘sensitivity’, but I was by then too crestfallen to comprehend. Limp and deflated, I tossed it to a passing Pomeranian, prancing blindly through the grass after it’s master.

I toiled on for the best part of the morning, but only managed to apprehend a Grizzled Skipper (no, not Mr. Murphy), some green leaf weevils, and a solitary cockchafer. Bone-tired and with braces slackening, I made my way on down to the river, unwrapping my tucker on the slipway opposite the Cottage. As I sat there, gazing at the empty ground, standing silent and inscrutable like a sentinel watching protectively over the Thames, I tried to calculate how many tides it would witness before it was teeming and in full-cry again.

Well that was a sum too far for the nascent Maurice noggin but, nevertheless, I knew that soon this painful gestation period would end, and we would be witnessing the birth of a bright new season emerging, blinking and bonny, from within that historic shell opposite.

And right there and then I decided that, in future, that was the only species I was gonna be pursuing!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!