Little Fripperies

Intrigue & Intoxication

2011-03-08T13:18:00.003Z

Crotch-kissers and gusset-suckers of a SW6 allegiance, discard your dribble bibs, down the clouded dregs of your final, lovingly-supped pints, retrieve your ring fingers from your dilberry makers, and drape your attention across the ensuing ham-handed doggerel.

I shall pre-empt your most pressing enquiry, tout de suite: “Where have you been?” I hear you wail from deep within the reverberating nothingness of your existential dungeons.

Confabulating marshmallow alibis in a craftily uplit alcove?
Fondling a trombonist from Bow?

Poppycock in a knocking shop!

The harrowing, hand-wringing, actuality is that I’ve once again been cruelly deployed as an unwitting buffer in prevailing intra-parental hostilities. An impotent little sapper conscripted by opposing sides in a shabby campaign of matrimonial warfare, without even a tin helmet in which to ensconce my imperilled noggin.

It was late afternoon last Friday, and that incorrigible old North End Road was a crucible in which all kinds of canny, underhand commerce had been a-simmering since first light. Fruiterer and fishmonger alike had barked their hearts out and were now keenly shoe-horning themselves into any ale-dispensing aperture going.

As usual, my father, gin-pickled grumbletonian and feckless scourge of this exalted manor, had installed himself as captain of the HMS Oblivion. It was a ship that had left dry dock many hours earlier. He was denting the leather in The Goose, where he had been steadily coaxing himself into a profoundly kippered condition.

I had been skulking around outside for most of this time, getting bumped and buffeted by the crowds like a hapless little pinball. My only comfort came from a still-warm turnip and chive pasty from the Well Bread bakery smouldering away in the pocket of my charcoal, pin-stripe overcoat. A few baby carrots nestled in the breast pocket, cunningly camouflaged against an orange paisley pocket square.

But hasn’t a muddle-minded understrapper like me got fresher fish to fry? You know, brogues to buff, hats to steam, and tufnells to darn? Not to mention refraining from ogling the flower-seller’s daughter five times a day to kneel and pray in the direction of our black and white mecca?

In one, chums. Unfortunately, Ma had ordered me there on a sub-rosa scouting mission. Apparently, hovering over Pa recently as he plummeted the scuzzy depths of one his impenetrable post-booze slumbers, she had heard him mumble some kind of spittle-coated serenade: “Lovely lady G”, he had dribbled, “My beautiful, beautiful Ginny”. Her suspicion, as a consequence, had become inflamed.

To be brutal, the thought of him doing the blanket hornpipe with anything other than his imagination set my braces quivering. It was almost enough to send me scuttling away to the nearest seminary to take a life-long vow of non-penetrative canoodling.

Her interpretation of this seedy sleep-talk had no doubt been influenced by a previous incident shamefully engraved in family legend. Several years ago, Ma had discovered him in an unlit utility cupboard concealed beneath a dim and rancid stairwell in Clem Attlee Court. Squinting through a thicket of mops and brooms, she caught him touching giblets with ‘Easy’ Elsie Blow, notorious suet-fleshed slattern and bane of the North Fulham Purity League.

Later, pinned to his favourite armchair with a toasting fork poised to puncture his chest and skewer his heart, he claimed that Elsie was on a First Aid course and that he had merely been showing her his war wound, which was still prone to weeping. Well, Ma gave him a wound of her own that day that ensured his beard-splitting days were over. The meat tenderiser hasn’t been seen since.

Nevertheless, here I was in full-on, underage espionage mode, trying to catch sight of his festering spectre through intermittent chinks in the bustling clientele.

It was a tall task, as the pub was packed and poorly-lit. Thirsty men monopolised every seat and stool, coveted every livid inch of Pollock-patterned carpet: moth-eaten, wife-beaten, and all committed to liberation through alcohol. A porridge-coloured fog hung menacingly above a mottled array of trilbies, caps, depilated domes and disappointed hair-pieces. It was so dense that the watery yellow light leaking from the occasional light-bulb merely seeped onto and around it, fringing it with a sickly, jaundiced aura. Its constitution was not, as in days past, cigarette smoke, but a mouldering miasma of dust, dandruff, fugitive food particles and navel lint, coagulating within a bulbous cloud of steam and evaporating perspiration. Some punters have claimed, at the end of a complicated evening, to have seen it circumnavigate the ceiling of its own accord, like an airship that has slipped its moorings.

My initial sightings confirmed that he was alone, although quite clearly incubating a grudge of some design: he had a face like a flat tire. Even for one so constitutionally sour, he looked nettled. Eavesdropping on a few departing patrons, I learned that that he had become engaged in a particularly vindictive skirmish with the barman concerning Mr. Sparky Hughes. They were bitterly disputing which was the greater: his shirt-collar size, or the coefficient of friction between his upper thighs.

Apparently, the thick-tongued sophistry he had managed to exhume from the cognitive mulch of his crepuscular mind was so belligerent and off-beam that he had been threatened with immediate cessation of credit. They might as well have condemned him to the gallows. Dragging his feet like a scolded child, he returned to his seat where, bristling with insult, he had proceeded to inflict revenge by force-feeding pistachios to the landlord’s dog - a bellicose pug named Dowie that was last seen sliding on it’s belly towards the beer-cellar hatch.

It could have only been a cursory sulk, as the next time I caught sight of him he looked in thrall to some gormless euphoria. He was cradling a bottle of gin in the crook of one elbow whilst sliding a single, shaky fingertip through the condensation that embraced its subtle curves. Radiating an unconditional love to rival that of a mother for her newborn, he slurred the undertones of some long-forgotten lullaby, whilst simultaneously muttering an enigmatic paean to the cradled beverage. Elementary lip-reading suggested “My lovely lady G”...

The bent penny dropped.

What a mutton-headed, piss-the-bed he is! I was smarting all over: he had just wasted an afternoon that I could have wasted perfectly well myself. I immediately declared my career in reconnaissance over, and set about my pasty with grim intent.

Turning away, I dissolved into the decaying movements of the market, gathering up a few squares of navy tissue and a coil of twine as I went. Limping instinctively towards the Thames, I began to absent-mindedly mould my pickings into a makeshift football. I popped it under the faithful stovepipe and continued on to seek out the solace of a dusky kickabout with Mr. Haynes.

See, me and the Maestro, we have a relationship based on loyalty and respect, and that’s the only sort worth considering in the context of this tawdry tale, eh, chums?

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Ice Cream & Irises

2010-09-17T13:06:00.003+01:00

Lazily gazing at the flower-seller’s daughter, I flicked my tongue across a Piccadilly Whip.

I was not of a mind to contemplate kipper salads, long-limbed spinsters, or the unknowable depths of another’s despair. No, not when I was languidly suspended in a bi-sensory heaven.

The heat of the day was a blanket that suffocated sound and inhibited movement. Floating motes of dust, encased in sunlight, looked like tiny bubbles of air trapped in glass. The streets flickered like a faded home-movie unfurling in slow-motion, a surreal dream-sequence swimming in muted hues.

I was sitting on the kerb opposite the flower stall, one elbow resting on the scorching fender of Miss Wetherby’s (next-door-but-one) plum-coloured Karmann Ghia, savouring my frozen treat. As its icy sweetness assailed my synapses the girl’s smooth, elegant movements appeared to emit slowly-dissolving trails of light, hypnotic patterns that shimmered and overlapped as though contained within a kaleidoscope.

In the aftermath of this clammy hallucination, the cogs of the Maurice noggin began a-turnin’. I concluded that just as the mind may become enlivened by psychotropic substances, so the eyes could become intoxicated too if the sights they absorbed were potent enough.

With such a bewitching vision before me, I had to blink to stay sober.

It was captivating to see her so wholly immersed in her work, tenderly plucking leaves from erect stems, and lovingly fondling swollen blooms. She raised a crisp and vivid carnation to her nose and inhaled its perfume, before nuzzling it like a post-partum beagle with an unlicked pup. You could see her senses devouring her.

I surveyed her alluring wares: endlessly seductive, eternally out of reach. With frustration I wondered why it was that some flowers spread their petals and allowed themselves to be penetrated by an eager proboscis, whilst others remained tightly-closed.

How does nature’s dating game operate, I pondered? What are the elusive rules of attraction and when will I learn ‘em? Are we mere, besotted stooges in some metaphysical Blind Date? Lovelorn puppets of a scheming celestial Cilla?

Realising that I was stretching my bijou thesis way beyond its capacity to endure scrutiny, I allowed the dilemma to disperse into the woozy Fulham air, like cottonwood fluff being teased from a branch by a tentative breeze.

Sucking lustily on my honeyed fingertips, I felt a small resolve begin to stiffen. I stood up and, palming away the dust of crumbled wafer from the weft of my pin-striped tufnells, determined to act on this slowly solidifying notion.

See, I had read about these pheromone characters in one of Mr. Rutter’s (antiquated bookseller) enigmatic tomes. I’d purloined it from the racy stash he keeps under his stall. But I didn’t need a book to know that if a theory cannot sustain itself in practice then it is worthless.

So, hands in pockets, plaid cravat askew, I strove to attenuate my limp as I aspired to a nonchalant swagger in her direction. I sincerely believed that I was reviving, right there on North End Road, the effortless dash of a Grant or an Astaire. Once up to speed, I strained to achieve the erotic chemical excretion that I had read about.

The ensuing sniggers and guffaws suggested that I was channeling Hugh rather than Cary. Those unwitting market-goers must have believed they’d stumbled upon the West Fulham heats of the Disabled Pimp Olympics. How hormones warp one’s self-awareness is one of evolution’s enduring cruelties.

A confluence of lush floral scents rippled from the stall and mingled with the dry, musty heaviness oozing from the market’s pores. It begat a somewhat curdled confection, suggestive of a drenched Afghan Hound on the rampage through the Selfridges perfume hall. Together with the heat and embarrassment, and a debilitating post-sugar dip, I was becoming somewhat light-headed.

However, approaching her sumptuous display I rallied. I feigned a casual fingering of the cuff-links, and began to whistle the opening bars of “If I Was A Chocolate Flake Would You Be My Ice Cream Cornet?” I felt that I was being consumed by fire, and struggled to maintain the melody through my sticky, sugared lips. I glanced directly at her, pleading silently for some connection but she was in thrall to her inner world.

Despite failing to penetrate her intimate circle, I was praying that the sentiment behind the song might nestle subliminally within her bosom. Buried there, perhaps it might find her rising one morning possessed of an irresistible urge to hunt me down, transport me to a secluded arbour in Bishop’s Park, and proceed to delicately weave fresh irises through my barnet.

With the tune dying on my lips and my hopeless strut unraveling, the entire conceit crumbled like a punctured meringue.

I was beginning to wonder if I should abandon what was increasingly looking like a unilateral romantic quest. As Mr. Rutter is wont to say: “When your horse dies, get off”.

Who knows, maybe it’s nature protecting me and I’m simply not ready for a paradiddle on Cupid’s kettle drums. Or even a little fiddle in the string section.

Yes, it was another one of life’s lead-filled gloves to the solar plexus.

I suppose, my black-and-white acquaintances, that by now we should be used to the unrequited love of a capricious mistress but, like soppy, forsaken spaniels, we keep coming back season after season, don’t we.

But can there be a purer love than that?

Scallions. Flamin’. Fulham. Up The.

Decorations & Detritus

2010-01-14T16:16:00.002Z

My little frost-flecked Fulham-flavoured sprites.

Where have I been?

Deadheading busy lizzies in neglected suburban graveyards?
Playing head tennis with Les Dennis?

Amidst the profane chaos of your unravelling psyches, perhaps.

In actuality, I’ve been mooning around this manor like some forsaken phantom with no-one to haunt.

Ringmer, Hestercombe and Gowan, and all their blessed allies, lie engloomed within the fug of a Christmas passed.

Seasonal detritus dots them, discarded, forlorn.

And how pathetic my leaking brogues, only sustained these days by Parade Gloss and prayer, as they listlessly toe transparent sacks of Christmas wrapping stacked against the bases of lamp-posts. Bright red ribbon veins the pavements, as the crimson ink on a discarded gift tag slowly bleeds it’s greeting towards the kerb.

It’s over. The goose has been cooked, the copper cleaned. The angel has descended to earth and the gaudy baubles have all been boxed.

As I float about, living-rooms are subdued and lounges no longer resonate with festivity. Windows are dark now, their lacy tableaus of blinking lights dimmed for another year.

Scrawny firs and pineless pines lie abandoned on corners, curls of tinsel, like silvered catkins petrified by frost, trapped within their branches.

It’s queer, chums, but this recurring new year limbo always tends to attenuate my sparkle. In fact, the other day Mr. Rutter (antiquarian bookseller) cuffed me for skulking. The predictable sermon followed: “If you can’t be chipper, Maurice, at least be downright miserable. Suicidal, even. Mediocrity is man’s biggest enemy. Don’t mess with Mr. Inbetween.”

It only addled me further.

This pagan gaiety is fine, but a low pecuniary ebb always limits us. Christmas day, then, is like most days: a stand-up wash followed by a sit-down meal. Drink is drunk, the uneasy peace ultimately ruptures, and soon a swarm of cooking utensils is clouding the kitchen like chaff. It’s like an improv session at a knife-throwers’ convention.

Indulgences are few. Grilled kippers might melt beneath an extra scrape of butter. A few lobes of some grey mechanically-recovered game might be crowned by a solitary cranberry, menacingly crushed beneath the heel of Pa’s shoe. A cube of Raspberry Chivers with a marble poked inside can double as a pudding and a present.

Similarly the Maurice refuge remains undecorated, as Pa refuses to purchase anything that is not at least 40% ABV. He tried to convince me that there would be a market for paper chains backed with Whisky-infused glue.

Thus, as usual, Ma and me improvised. She purloined a candle from her part-time cleaning job at the church (the vicar insists upon fresh rushes up the aisle at this time of year). Inspired, and lacking any bona fide phizogs of Ol’ Santa, I cut a picture of Mr. Hodgson from the Hammersmith and Fulham News, fixed it around an empty pickled egg jar with a few spots of wax, and placed the candle inside.

It proudly illuminated our mantlepiece, radiating benevolence, right through to Twelfth Night.

Apparently, some erudite scholar once posited a world in which he wished it could be “Christmas every day”, which sounds like some kind of gluttonous dystopia if you ask me. Christ, imagine the walnuts!

Well, I know he’s lauded aplenty ‘round these parts as it is, and I’m not one for prostrating before false idols, but with St. Roy steering the sleigh around SW6 it’s pretty much Christmas every week anyway!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Butterflies & Buttocks

2009-07-08T12:57:00.003+01:00

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!

Myths & Melancholy

2009-02-20T12:38:00.004Z

There are people and proceedings apparently assembled entirely from hearsay.

Biographies that persist through whispered myth, spun from wide-eyed playground hyperbole, promoted via bar-room boasting.

Infamous exploits that thrive within a loosely-tangled hairball of fact and fable.

Around North End Road, history pits the brickwork; it impregnates yellowing ceilings. There, through common conversation alone, people may be rendered real enough to rub shoulders with. And although no-one you know has seen them, everyone claims to know someone that has.

Is, for example, the existence of Munster Road’s elusive peek-a-boo dandy mere conjecture, or does he occupy a realm in the here and now? Many say they have seen him swing a gay parasol in the dusky twilight. Several attest to spying him saunter past Olive’s on the corner of Wardo Avenue, pausing momentarily to finger the leaves of the box ball tree that stands there.

Consider Mr. Dave, notorious brick-built barman of The Goose. Has he only ever pulled pints in the unrequited dreams of dry-mouthed drunkards, or did he really force-feed a 20 x 22 gram card of Mr. Porky pork scratchings (packaging ‘n’ all) to a hapless punter for “looking at him funny”, as market folklore decrees?

And what of ‘Easy’ Elsie Blow? Have you ever accelerated her sputtering pulse, or smudged her clumsy rouge with the heel of your hand? Perhaps her history solely resides in lines written on walls: grotesque slogans proclaiming her to be dirtiest puzzle in SW6; alleged invites to underage lads scratched in the bubbling cream emulsion of unheated, busted-seated, public conveniences.

She could be nothing more than an ongoing narrative of Chinese whispers, dictated via the urgent imaginings of deprived youth, but through the years she has been depicted in a litany so vivid that anyone would know her the moment she appeared.

Mooning around the kitchen once, I pressed Ma on the veracity of Elsie’s existence, but she didn’t answer. Instead she fixed me with her flinty eyes, and with grim vigour continued chopping the courgette she held pinned to the kitchen table. She clearly felt such topics to be forbidden fig for a freshly-weaned whelp like me so, sadly, my blinkers remained.

And yet, like a mercurial striker penetrating a well-drilled back four, the truth will ultimately wheedle its way though the most densely-woven deception. Like dogged chickweed winding through hairline concrete cracks to sprout into the light.

Last week, I was loping along towards the river to take in the tides. Hard sunshine kicked off corroding fenders and the market roar gradually decayed as I drifted further away. Generally looking like I couldn’t help it, I was struggling within my brain to evaluate the difference between a chamfer and a bevel when a tiny bulb of light burst in the corner of my vision.

I looked down the alleyway I was passing by, and there, through the opened doors of someone’s garage was, unmistakably, Elsie. Elsie. Unmistakably. At once, that multitude of after-hours murmurs found itself reconstituted into an irrefutable, copper-bottomed fact.

Frozen in mid-pucker, she was modelling hourglass corsetry for the readers of some rank magazine. She had spilled herself over the bonnet of a burnt-out Hillman Imp, like a marshmallow congealing on a hot stove.

I was dimly hypnotised. There she actually was, like some queasy conflation of a blowsy brothel madam and a dinner lady on Viagra.

The director of this squalid scene, weaselly in his soiled gabardine, flashgun primed, was evidently aspiring to some kind of Ballardian tableau. Framed as it was by the garage doorway, it looked more to me like a road safety poster targeting mature nymphomaniacs.

Where is the allure, I wondered, of exposing one’s chassis and gaskets to the world? Why divulge one’s vitals in the centre spreads of catchpenny publications that are doomed to curl and bleach in wire carousels standing off-kilter on suburban station forecourts? What fate for one’s flesh to be fondled only in facsimile by the grubby thumbs of bored salesmen with gout?

Collecting copper’s a diminishing trade right now, but are a few photographer’s farthings slipped into the willing gusset going to put sufficient steam on the table to justify such bruising indignity?

As I slipped away I sensed a rare melancholy consuming me. That uncomplicated optimism that springs, some say, from a robust dim-wittedness, felt punctured.

It got me thinking about the dead-ends and disappointments that might be awaiting me one day. It was like a future memory of a life unlived.

But how could I feel things I hadn’t encountered yet?

Had I acquired this awareness via the eye peeping through the door crack, the ear straining at the keyhole? Had half-remembered conversations and splinters of market chatter been absorbed subliminally, just like the tall stories spawned in these here streets?

Or perhaps it had been learned through actual experiences elsewhere, from recurrent episodes where the chafe of failure is felt first-hand. Speaking of which – I’ll see you at the school of hard knocks on Sunday!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Horns & Hand-Washing

2009-02-13T12:41:00.001Z

I was in the scullery rinsing linen for a shilling.

She was in the study playing scales on her flugelhorn.

Miss Wetherby (next-door-but-one) is a valued family friend, and often supplies vital subsidy when the pockets of the Maurice breeches become barren.

She’s also a liberal source of solace when the Mighty Whites are stymied. On the many occasions that they’ve reneged on the ‘mighty’ part of the deal, she’s entered her parlour to find me prostrate over the decaying Bakelite on which she allows me to listen to away games. Without hesitation she gathers me up and absorbs me into her bosom. Whilst not necessarily assuaging the pain of defeat, it does readily spawn other feelings that strive to compete with it.

As well as paying me to knead her smalls, she had promised that later on she would be serving me her ‘Cherry Delight’. I would be the first to savour her special recipe. It was already cooking she had confirmed with a wink.

There was a tidy pile of underwear resting on the draining board. Sunlight shimmered through the cobwebs criss-crossing the skylight and dappled the terracotta tiles underfoot. A sour smell leeched from the small iron drain cover in the centre of the floor.

With my hands plunged deep within her pants, it occurred to me that the benefit of conducting simple repetitive manual tasks is that the unrelenting rhythm often lulls one into a kind of meditative state. Untaxed, the mind is clear to pursue whims and fancies at will. And so it was that I, sluicing merrily away, allowed myself to indulge in a pleasant reverie involving the flower-seller’s daughter, and an alluring Banana Inbetween - a speciality of the renowned Well Bread bakery.

The stack was slowly diminishing, and the daydream’s denouement growing closer, when a small knot of suds liberated itself from the sink and floated up to settle on my nose. Unfortunately, being up to my elbows in borax, I was unable to attend to the irritation. I began twitching and puffing, trying to dislodge the offending bubbles when, unannounced, a pair of hands appeared before my face and gently wiped them away. I had been so embroiled in my imaginary escapade that I hadn’t noticed that the music drifting in from the study had stopped. The arms lingered there, encircling me from behind.

Suddenly my collar felt a little tight, my braces rather constricting. A prickly heat flickered up and down my legs. The aroma of Miss Wetherby’s signature dish baking slowly nearby became overwhelming.

She invited me into the study. She said she wanted to reveal her special piece. It was time for me to enjoy her “Così fan tutte”. The Maurice noggin began pulsating and reverberating like a boneshaker rattling along a cobbled street. What was she talking about? For a cork-brained upstart like me it was like to trying to crack a cryptic clue written in a foreign language. Confounded, I padded after her like a soppy-eyed spaniel.

Tripping dimly through to the study, I struggled to rescue a few shards of sense, tossed asunder in the mental turbulence. I lashed them together into a cogent thought and reassured myself that, as the woman before me was honorary treasurer of the highly-respected North Fulham Purity League, I was in safe hands.

And after that I remember nothing.

When I came to I was slumped in a voluptuous leather Chesterfield. The lady of the house was sitting opposite me, pert on a straight-backed chair, pressing a freshly-plucked stem between the pages of Flugelhorn For Beginners. Her face was fixed with a queer, beatific smile.

I managed to haul myself up from the depths of the armchair. I stood there wavering like a drunken captain on the prow of a storm-tossed ship, blearily scanning the horizon. It felt like all the strength had sapped from my little legs. She glided towards me serenely and, pressing a coin into my palm, leaned over and whispered a fragile “thank you” in my ear.

I turned to leave and, glancing at my reflection in the hallway mirror, noticed that my braces were twisted, and my hair was parted on the opposite side from usual.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around the market trying to resolve my confusion, struggling to give things a name. Eventually I conceded that perhaps some of life’s little mysteries are just a little too far out of
reach for a young ‘un.

For the time being, anyway.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Peas & Philosophies

2009-02-06T13:00:00.003Z

Flimsy conceits rarely endure, do they.

I was concentrating keenly, for concentration is required to perfect the art of wearing a hat in a built-up area.

As I moodled along Racton Road, the sharp winter sunshine sprung the colours from my schmutter, the air was cold and precise, and the wind rattled ‘round my ears.

I felt pristine, like a pea freshly-popped from its pod, and my braces were vibrating at some kind of mystically harmonious frequency that created an aura of serene wellbeing.

I imagined I was a demobbed squaddie recently recognised for acts of uncommon bravery on the front line, strutting past a line of court-marshalled malingerers loitering at lamp posts.

Increasingly spry, I felt my momentum smoothing out my congenital limp, and the fleeting grace it afforded allowed me to swivel crisply on my newly-cobbled heels into Tamworth Street.

Soon, however, my lofty reveries were fractured by the raucous approach of a gaggle of local girls. A giddy riot of jelly rolls, rouge, and rudeness, they were bawling in each others’ ears and collapsing against each other with laughter. Indeed, they seemed to find their very existence hysterical.

They were brash enough, blurting schwas all over the place, but I was so taken with the vision I’d spun of myself that I prepared to indulge in a slither of dangleation with them.

As they approached, I fancied I was filling out me tufnells nicely.

Alas, it was the bait that hides the hook. Drawing level, and about to give them the trusty wink and hat-tip combination, my fragile imaginings shattered:

“Does your grandad know you’ve nicked his trousers?” one of them shrieked, sending my eardrum into spasm.

“What a shockin’ bad hat,” yelled another.

“Are you minding those legs for someone else?”

It had become clear that there was fat chance of a tupenny fumble today, let alone taking one of ‘em up the Trocadero.

Now, I align with the axiom that apparel maketh the man, but just look at the trouble a silk handkerchief, a whistle of herringbone, and a wayward gait can get you in. In fact it tempts one to disappear into the drab parade, to make every day a ‘dress-down Friday’, just for a quiet life.

Still, there’s a salve for every sore.

See, Ma’s forever instructing me to disregard goading and leg-pulling. She advises employing philosophy as my ally. The insight of the wise will defend me ably, whatever the situation, she insists.

She’s always arming me with gnomic and knowing epithets from the Greek and Latin eggheads; regularly serving me a snippet of Socrates or a Sun Tzu strategy to suck on, and then recall whenever I find myself the object of opprobrium.

So, while these frenzied harpies were spinning me around, fingering my lapels, and tossing my hat like a Harris tweed frisbee onto a nearby rose bush, I recalled the maxim that she whispers in my little ear‘ole most often. I don't know if it issued forth from the noggin of Mr. Aristotle, or if it was coined by his mentor Mr. Plato, but she always dispenses it immediately before turfing me out into the world:

"Ridicule is nothing to be scared of," she says, and “don’t you ever…” - but I’m out the door before she can finish, enlightened and emboldened.

And so, as these mouthy frippets skitted off into the distance, still intoxicated with their own cleverness, I managed to still my quivering bottom lip by reciting that line. It’s true my delusions took a bruising, but it demonstrated that when the outlook is Lanesborough-grey, and life’s put the kibosh on your adolescent esteem, it’s not events what’s important, but how you look at ‘em.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Afros & Apostrophes

2009-01-26T13:28:00.003Z

That was an interlude, weren’t it.

So, a new year has begun. Apparently it’s traditional at this time. Still, more days are always welcome, ain’t they.

Of late I’ve been silenced. Some skinny-trousered squirt spilt luke-warm Super Malt over Mr. Tjinder’s fat-fibre web connection and spooked it. I’ve tried hollering through a rolled-up programme on matchdays but my words disappear amid the chat and blether of the black and white masses.

To be honest, I’ve forgotten most of what’s happened, and remembered a lot of what hasn’t.

But life, as ever, continues to veer from the prosaic to the poetic and back again. And although I haven’t read the book, I know it remains a queerly-waddled world. For starters, there’s a tennis player called Mardy Fish.

Still, so long as your braces remain taut and your shirt-collar’s kept scrubbed, life will deliver larks ‘til the coffin shop calls.

Admittedly, I’ve been frustrated at being unable to discharge my bulging lexicon into your yearning maws, so here’s a few aide-mémoire from the Maurice Moleskine:

One day, I found a box of greengrocer’s apostrophes and went ‘round randomly adorning the stall-holder’s signs. There’s nothing like a bit of grammatical terrorism to keep the cold at bay, and it’s always good to see plum’s, fire-lighter’s, and duster’s selling well!

On another occasion, I caught some nippers giggling over a postcard of a fat man on a motorcycle. Then one went past. It was a riot.

I’ve noticed that the voluminous afro hair arrangement is in vogue amongst the young ‘uns ‘round here, but it’s too late to lionise Kareem Abdul Jabaar, I say. Trumps corn-rows though, sartorially-speaking.

Mainly, I’ve been spending a lot of time teetering on a stack of milk-crates on Stevenage Road trying to meet Mr. Haynes’ stare in the hope that there might be some transference of greatness. Alas, sublime balance is not something we share. Thank heavens for Holloway’s Ointment – “it cleanses before it heals!”

Must go, some coves have brogues to polish: the Kettering mosh-pit has left them scuffed beyond acceptability!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Celebrations & Circumlocutions

2008-06-16T14:43:00.001+01:00

Fellow great escapees of a black and white hue, concur without embarrassment or delay that being aligned to The Fulham Football Club is, at times, a pleasure akin to squatting on the very doorstep of Number 1, Heaven Place, dressed in one’s craftiest schmutter, whilst chomping nonchalantly on a freshly-baked Banana Inbetween from the Well Bread bakery.

Even I, playing fast and loose with Mr. Einstein’s enshrined decrees as I am wont to do, could not have conjured an ‘up’ from a ‘down’; but that is what our esteemed Mr. Hodgson somehow managed to achieve. And we are all, are we not, still feeling ourselves borne aloft on the balmy zephyr of exultation that emanated from that logic-defying feat.

So, my post-celebratory, premier-league-dwelling chums, where in the name of Mr. Murphy’s numinous noodle have I been?

Developing a steam-powered pencil-sharpener?

Playing Yahtzee! with the Glitter Band’s drum technician?

Wrong times two my chipper little sticklebacks.

But fret not, and quell your collective curiosity forthwith. Replace your foaming pints of wallop upon the nearest table, and allow your befuddled craniums to become becalmed.

For I continue to dwell, as I always will, within the Fulham demimonde. I cannot leave, and it cannot leave me.

The simple, copper-plated fact of it all, is that I’ve been nowhere of note, doing nothing noteworthy, not knowing nor caring what is not mine to negotiate. But that’s fine and I’m a little dandy: for it’s the more prosaic pursuits what throw the highlights of our little lives into such sharp relief, is it not?

Whilst your still bathing in the fragrant cloud of existential clarity that I’ve just expelled, I shall pencil in a little detail for the more bewildered amongst you.

Specifically, I‘ve been populating this typically barren between-season hinterland with my usual concerns: limping gamely along the glorious thoroughfares of this parish (Racton, Ringmer, Hestercombe – why, the very names chime) whilst seeking variegated detritus to sell in an illegal under-age fashion at Ma’s stall; throwing sprouting tubers and bruised Delbard Estivales at unwelcome market interlopers; and pining like an unlicked pup for the flower-seller’s daughter.

When not engaging in any or all of the above, I gad about in a dim and unguarded manner, aspiring to mirth and mischief with my like-witted pals. Polishing door-knockers for cash, admiring Miss Wetherby’s (next door-but-one) furbelow, and sabotaging understrappers from rival manors with cunning ruses.

But without doubt, the most fruitful excursion of recent weeks was on that singularly effulgent Sunday in May. The one that’s branded itself upon our memories forevermore. Me and my chuckle-headed pal, Lil’ Larkins, well, we jigged ourselves into a deranged, hyperventilating delirium in the garden of the Golden Lion that day. Fuelled by a bevy of bracing cordials, we fizzed like a brace of 5 year-olds dosed-up on ‘E’ numbers.

Afterwards we repaired, pleasantly spent, to Bishop’s Park. By now, my braces were sagging, and the Larkins’ whipple hat was flaccid from the absorption of a continuous rain of airborne ale, sent into orbit by the carousing throng.

But we didn’t care: we were in raptures.

Woozy in the afterglow, we spent a few shining hours constructing a life-sized effigy of the aforementioned Mr. H. from discarded cardboard clappers, right there in the shadow of the ground. It was a famous creation, fashioned in gratitude and respect, and if it survives the attentions of the local mutts, it could well become a pre-match shrine for the Cottage-bound faithful.

I know where I’ll be worshipping next season.

See you soon if not before!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Meringues & Malingerers

2008-04-11T14:59:00.003+01:00

Fellow Fulham-leaning down-in-the-mouths.

We remain, do we not, collectively hunkered down ‘neath the swirling clouds of foreboding what’s spiralling up from the Stevenage Road environs; the fallout of this wretched season settling on our psyches like toxic dust on lush foliage.

I reckon soon they’ll need to create a dedicated FFC ward at the Royal Hospital & Home for Incurables, Putney. Padded in black and white it’ll be, with restraints on the beds, and Andy Williams crooning on a never-ending loop.

For solace, I’ve been petting the flower-seller’s daughter’s Maine Coon. It’s a mutually-beneficial pursuit: the cat likes it, and I get to loiter around the lass with the latch-keys to my heart. One day she’ll notice me.

Those of you that have no recourse to feline fondling, consider this lively tonic:

Strip to your skin. Then, patiently re-adorn yourself in your dandiest schmutter. Flick a freshly-laundered silk fogle over your forehead, assume a forthright aspect, and inhale defiantly.

Now re-established, cast a panoramic eye over all the associated joys of your lives in order to swathe these prevailing football-flavoured agonies in a contextualising blanket. This dilemma won’t seem so bad then.

Newly invigorated, reward yourselves with a cunning shufti at my humble lexicon before life swindles you irretrievably.

But first, I sense you wondering where I have been.

Playing gin rummy with a tripe dresser in the back of a maroon Morris Oxford?

Skinny-dipping in a teacup outside Lotte Berk’s?

No, I’ve been needling away at life, with only my innately retarded glee to chivvy me along, spending most of my time, yes, looking like I’ve just found a badger’s nest and can’t stop laughing at the eggs.

But even the slow workings of my dense noggin have revealed to me that, as a club, we most assuredly have our eyebrows on the Queen’s iron. Yes, we are incarcerated in relegation chokey, gazing ‘tween the unforgiving bars as the Premiership escapees gambol in the exercise yard.

Now, I’m not about to drown myself in a half-empty glass of misery water – life has too many greater tragedies to warrant dangling oneself like a human pendulum from Bishop’s Park’s sturdiest bough - but recalling pleasurable instances from this season is like trying to extract winkles with a claw-hammer.

I think it’s true to say that by now the whites are well and truly beaten. Perhaps this is what you get from trying to make a meringue with addled eggs? And who is the man wielding the whisk of blame: Commis Chef Sanchez, or Head Chef Hodgson?

It’s a queer old kitchen whichever serving hatch you look through.

And yet, the sterile parish of Reading calls me thither.

Are we to witness once more a gaggle of flimsy malingerers defiling the sacred black and white? Or will they rally, like the condemned man granted a last repast at the foot of the scaffold?

Whatever the conclusion to this miserable procession of performances, we remain shackled to the source of our misery, for better or worse. All spouses lose their looks eventually, but love, if unconditional, will prevail.

As for making a weekend in Burnley or Barnsley romantic: now there’s a challenge to consider.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Mutton & Materialism

2008-02-27T14:51:00.003Z

Debauched friends, grant me a pause in your wallop-soaked badinage, and allow me to decant these musings into your gaping maws.

Yesterday morning, as I idled along Fabian Road toeing a bundle of rags I’d snitched from the recycling bank, I visualised myself as an elegant arabesque of poise and balance. In actuality, I lumbered forwards lop-sided as a paper kite.

I was on my way to Maisie Cloves’s flat in the Samuel Lewis Trust Dwellings. Ma had sent me there to collect an upside-down shallot tart that Maisie had baked for her in return for disinfecting her chute.

I was anxious. Although antiquated and barely six stone seven-pence, Maisie is a redoubtable article, especially to a diffident, short-harrissed chit like me. Keen as a Loch Fyne kipper and wiry as a whippet’s whisker, she looks like she’s had an onion and chive pasty inserted under the skin of each upper arm, so proud are her biceps.

Even today, she could strangle a goose with one hand, whilst churning her cast iron mangle with the other. It’s little wonder she was the North End Road carpet-beating champion of 1947. The dust devils she conjured from that finely-woven Oriental throw were still swirling through the neighbouring streets the following day. Residents along Lillie Road thought that hostilities had resumed, and that a radiation-tinged miasma was descending upon the Fulham borders.

Her physique is the product of long days toiling as a stove blacker on Strutton Ground, longer evenings ironing pound notes on Cold Blow Lane. Back then, it was blunt maternal devotion that enabled her to put steam and prayers on the table for the four hungry children whose scruffs she was single-handedly responsible for.

Her selflessness and fortitude got me thinking about professional footballers, and how flimsy and acquisitive most of ‘em are. Instead of seeing solemn endeavour as a reward in itself, they crave ostentatious baubles of every voguish brand: mock-croc washbags; vulgar, plate-sized timepieces; and a Bentley on a stick, "to go."

These days, there’s pressure on us to acquire every jot and tittle what’s dangled it front of our little lamps. We all know the devil’s in the retail, and these fellers have got more coinage than their tufnells can contain.

Yet, how flaky they present when confronted with adversity. They buckle and fold like cheap umbrellas in a squall.

It’s a shame that Mr. Vuitton doesn’t sell own-brand “hard work”, or the House of Gucci knock out Limited Edition “gumption”. Maybe then these players might be tempted to spend some of their easy-earned cutter on something less frivolous, and of a tad more merit to us long-suffering supporters.

I know it’s not like I’ve got any choice, but I don’t particularly hanker for this consumerist society’s over-egged desiderata. A well-turned trouser: yes. A sturdy-soled brogue: naturally.

Most days however, a fresh mutton fritter and a swig of Heathen’s Disdain and I’m as chuffed as a butler in the buff. Yet even those paltry delights cost copper. If we’re talking bona fide buckshee, there’s always a firm-handed ruffle of the hair from a kindly market aproneer; that, and a benign wink from their autumny eyes, and I’m set steady for the rest of the day.

Despite my parsimonious leanings, if Mr. Jimmy manages to whistle in another one of those speculative benders on Saturday, I’ll gladly shower him with all my worldies. A meagre pledge, I know, considering there are days when I struggle to muster tuppence, but if he delivers, watch out for fifteen pair of threadbare braces raining down on the Bullard bonce.

Anyway, mustn’t dwell, Ma’ll have my giblets for mincemeat if she notices I've sloped away.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Comrades & Corsairs

2008-01-21T14:06:00.000Z

Rainy days and Mondays getting you down, fellow Fulhamers?

Where have I been, I hear you speculate as you toss back another thimbleful of whisky to deaden the black and white ache that afflicts us all.

Indeed, my anguished allies, where have I been?

Deflowering pious spinsters in a secluded rotunda?

Practising the lindy hop on Holcroft Pavement?

No, not in any way or by any manner, my little piccalillis. When not flinging chipped oxbloods at Lil’ Larkins, I’ve been wiggling a butter knife in the slot of the old honesty box to extract a few opinions for you.

And it’s my sincere view that football down Fulham way is something of a hard-fought field at the moment. Our boys were certainly given the runaround this last Saturday - and I ain’t talking about gruff cockney Mike Reid’s deranged televisual shenanigans – ‘though that’s what our band of midfield munchkins recalled at times. Mr. Murphy and his mates may as well have been milking pigeons.

And now it feels like our whole season is disappearing backwards down a muddy track strapped to the roof rack of a rusting Ford Corsair. And we all know who the stern-rimmed chauffeur is that reversed us into that quagmire, don’t we.

By the players demeanour you’d think they were sitting in the back of a cart trundling up Holborn Hill, on a one-way trip to Tyburn. The prevailing fear is that they’ll be collectively up for the final drop come season-end. It might have provided entertainment for our Victorian ancestors, but that’s one grisly spectacle I don’t want to witness.

It appears that rank disenchantment ain’t just the preserve of grumpy-eyed fussbuckets anymore: it’s afflicted all of us. Even perennially philosophical ganders like me.

Well, I know it’s true that I spend most of my time looking like I can’t help it - I’m just a cork-brained hemp whose marrowbones knock like they’re grinding mustard when I walk - but I think I like Mr. Hodge.

I’m particularly tickled by the way he articulates that little roll on his ‘r’s. It makes him sound like a particularly well-to-do Dickensian philanthropist. Whereas The Sanch bristled, all Kray-flavoured authoritarian menace, RH resembles an esteemed professor, imparting good and bad tidings with clinical equanimity.

You’ve just got to hope that a manager that uses words like “mendacity” and “Churchillian” without flinching, is similarly erudite with regard to footballing matters.

Anyway chums, I’m off to bathe in the limpid refrains of migrating curlews, whilst having my feet lathered by voluptuous concubines.

Ha! Ha! Not really mates! More like rummaging around in the decaying organic detritus what lines the floor of North End Road for the rest of the day or, at least, until the streetlights flicker on, refracting through the drizzle, and Ma comes a-calling for me.

In the meantime, cultivate comradeliness and keep ‘em keen: the revival’s on it’s way!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Sermons & Shellacs

2007-12-14T08:30:00.000Z

Come closer, my rib-shivering colleagues, and let your cockles be warmed by this wintry tale.

There I was, this last Thursday, lingering at the intersection of North End and Racton roads, with my pal, the Pelican Whippersnapper (a puckish sort, with a crafty aspect, and a fellow alumnus of the ragged school), and indulging, quite snugly, in a spot of adolescent chin music.

He’d just returned from helping his father de-louse some bedding in Rickman's Rents (Narrow Street, Limehouse, thanks for asking). He still had a few traces of permethrin powder on his clothing. I leant over to brush some off his shoulder.

We were jawing over the state of the local polonies, and how the curve of some of their ankles reproduced the delicate sweep of the pediments that sit atop that handsome façade in Stevenage Road.

We were also reflecting upon how our beloved boys, them what ply their trade in the black and white, might prosper this coming Saturday evening when confronted with those lesser black-and-whiters from Tyneside.

Presently, our most high-minded wittering was disturbed by some muffled thunderings, underway further down the market. Someone had been on the loud-mouth soup.

We dandied on down to the site of the ructions.

A crowd had gathered, no doubt expecting either a glorious epiphany to part the clouds of their existential gloom or, at the very least, a gratis set of kitchen knives. Alas, today they would be going home blade-less, and with their moral compasses still spinning like billy-o.

Some low-rent twicer had constructed a makeshift hustings upon which to deliver a scalding sermon to the unassuming market-dwellers, harmlessly trying to assemble a few victuals.

An obstreperous knocker from the gospel shop, he was giving all of those within earshot a right verbal handbagging. Haranguing quite liberally he was, accusing his audience of being slack and back-handed. He was the distillate of all that is vexatious and pernickety.

Nudging through the throng, we could see that he was in fact balancing upon on an unwieldy pile of scratched and cracked shellacs. As he rattled out his bilious volleys of pelting-speech, punctuating his accusations with prods and pokes, he rocked like a storm-tossed sailor, yielding helplessly to the stack’s unsteadiness.

The tone of his tirade was apparent: we were all crumbs ‘neath the Devil’s fingernails (and quite possibly, the scurf on his tail, and the tarnish on his trident too, for all I could surmise).

He was bellyaching about the state of the neighbourhood: how we were sinners, spinners, infidels and n’er-do-wells, and how we were all overdue a one-to-one with old Mr. Grim.

The stuff about being lowly and forsaken I could weather: after all, we’re all of us only ever one step from the gutter. But his dockside manner chafed my sensibilities no end. It was like someone adjusting me braces without introducing themselves first.

What a sixpenny schlemiel he was!

His oratory technique grated too: there were glottal stops and non-sequiturs tumbling out of his gob like some kind of anti-grammatical ectoplasm.

At any minute I was expecting him to spout some hackneyed trader’s spiel: “Four linen shifts, two pair of muslin ruffles, and a set of copper-bottomed saucepans…sold! to the shrinking lady in the violet affair. I’d get some ointment on that, love!”

Well, he got some hackles up and no shamming.

But oh! how he fled when the turnips and beets began raining down upon his evangelical bonce, courtesy of yours truly and the Pelican. He thought that Old Scratch himself had singled him out for some kind of divine tuber-related retribution. All of his past transgressions went rattling along behind his eyes like some kind of debauched ticker-tape.

As he tried to dodge this plague of produce, he tottered and fell, spawning a swirling confetti of pious pamphlets amid the shrapnel of splintering 78s.

He then skidded off down Tournay Road like copper off a collection plate. That’ll teach him not to be so sudden and upfront on our territory.

If he wants a lesson in expounding in a succinct and direct manner, he wants to come down the Cottage when a game’s pulsating and everyone’s dander’s up, and hear the practised eloquence on offer there.

So thick is the air with cusses and expletives that, at times, you could reach up, and fair pluck them out of the ether with your pinkies.

Then, if you were so inclined, you could thread them onto a piece of waxy twine and fix ‘em up so that they stretched from one side of the Johnny Stevenage Stand to the other like a string of sparkly X-rated Christmas lights.

Even the cherub-faced understrappers join in sometimes. I’ve even seen a few little ‘uns hoisted on to their parents shoulders so as to reach up and seize some filthy idiom in their chubby little mittens.

Anyway, having stood lapel to lapel as unelected guardians of our beloved parish, we opted to let modesty form the better part of valour and slipped away.

Knowing that the tide would be low, we wandered off down to the river for a swift session of ducks and drakes on the foreshore.

So, friends, until the next time, steer clear of trumpery and take care to avoid the morning drop.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Reserve & Resolve

2007-12-05T09:52:00.000Z

In the most recent of days, where have I been? Where indeed, my warm-minded Fulham contemporaries, have I been?

Out on manoeuvres with The Parsons Green Fundamentalist Militia?

Eating skylarks in a freezing garret?

No, fellas: neither. Last evening I limped on down to the Cottage, floodlights blazin’ by the river, to view the latest gaggle of Black and White understrappers attempting to catch teacher’s eye. We all like a tryer don’t we, chums, and enthusiasm’s the father-in-law of achievement, or so Ma says.

Well, these boys were plenty keen, and you would hope so considering how callow most were: some had less bum fluff than me. So, on the seesaw of virtues, resolve might be on the “up” end, and panache on the “low”, but I’m sure that by the time they’re sporting shadows at five o’ clock, they’ll be shaving with the first team.

It was particularly cheering to see that cheeky renaissance man Mr. Volz striding out. I had donned a pair of suedette bib-shorts, and waved around an antique stein of Ma Knows Best, to hearten him following his sideline spell. I think he appreciated it. I hope he did, for by the end of the game my shanks were a-shivering like nobody knows. I had to race home for a vigorous rub down with some Dante’s mustard liniment.

Last night I did see the future, mateys, so ready yourself. For when it comes today will be yesterday.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Manchester & Mannequins

2007-12-03T11:27:00.001Z

It’s the morning of a Manchester evening, my Cottaging cheerios.
And despite the innate glories of a south west six existence, I feel a miasma of foreboding looming o’er us all.

Even a beetle-headed ninnyhammer like me recognises that pickings tonight are likely to be decidedly slim. No, I won’t be expecting a flurry of pocket-sized epiphanies to be igniting within my noggin during the course of the game; even with Mr. Sanchez’s assertion that our heroes are to “have-a-go.”

Now, I might proceed on knock-knees, but I don’t have gambler’s elbows. Nevertheless, if our boys conspire to overcome those mercenary-headed reds, I will personally accept a forfeit.

At first twinklings tomorrow morning, I will construct a life-sized effigy of The Sanch from the seventeen yards of soufflé gauze and two pair of worsted stockings that I recently purloined from a doorway on Racton Road.

I will then slice open the back of my hand-crafted mannequin with a keen–bladed Stanley and climb inside. I then pledge to spend the rest of the day terrorising the market like a kind of inverse Santa, an anti-Christmas if you will, roaring at the little ‘uns, and lobbing Battersea Bundles at all the bleary-eyed backchatters who doubted Lawrie’s logic.

Anyway, I’m off for a steaming hot slice of Hare Pie Scramble and a Conny Wabble chaser to calm the nerves.

I’ll then set about adjusting my braces extra tight in readiness for tonight’s game.

See you on the other side, mateys!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Lemons & Leads

2007-11-30T12:17:00.000Z

Famously Fulham colleagues, I’m not wrong am I?

Collectively - that’s all of us together, like - our humours are a little sluggish, aren't they? Our faces are somewhat long, and our peckers require upping.

In addition to the on-pitch misdemeanours that we suffer all too regularly, we each have our own little grievances that irk and confound us, and cause merry hell with our moods, don’t we chums.

Well, this time last week, I’d just paid a visit to the esteemed Mr. Saxby, on that there Fulham High Street, to avail myself of an exquisite pair of mustard-yellow moleskin breeches to wear to Sunday’s match against the Blackburners. The concept, as it germinated within my murky loaf, was to use the extra space provided by their inherent design to smuggle in a highly potent, citrus-style arsenal. Specifically, a slew of unwaxed Sicilian lemons packed around the thighs.

My squint-eyed plan being to bombard, mid-game, the lustrous noodle of that bellicose bully huff, Mr. Robinson Savage. Any queries from the security blowhards at the turnstiles were to be fended off with a convoluted alibi involving cellulite and water retention. Evidently, I was fully prepared.

Imagine my dismay then, when that flailing chancer didn’t even take to our sacred turf. I was so keen to give that cunning shaver his comeuppance, that the match result seemed even more depressing than it should’ve. The only thing that wasn’t deflated was my bloomin’ stupid fruity bloomers. I had to waddle all the way home before I could offload the contents into the coal scuttle.

I did think of presenting them to Mr. Lawrie as a kind of post-game consolation. You know, one lemon for each time we’ve surrendered a lead, that kind of biscuit. Thing is, he seems to be turning into something of a misery chops as it is, without sucking on a glut of de-trousered bitter fruits. He’s morphing into a right prickly grumble gizzard ain’t he. When he’s not having elbow digs at the whiskers and blazers, he’s penning peevish epistles to Mr. Hackett.

He’s certainly not one to let his sour grapes wither on the vine.

He wants to go easy. All that shaking your fist at the moon’s not good for the constitution, not to mention the risk of contracting glue-tongue from all the stamps he must be licking.

Anyway, I’m off to cheer myself up by throwing flaming celery sticks at the Jesus freaks leafleting on Lillie Road.

As for perking up our Sanch, I fear that only the presentation of Sir Fergie’s tallywags on a Harrods-branded salver next Monday evening could crack that grim visage at the moment.

Let’s all raise a glass to that potential canapé, eh fellas!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Sylvain & Salvation

2007-11-06T12:53:00.000Z

On an unsullied Tuesday such as this, your team having recently exposed some Royals without resorting to blackmail, you may ask yourselves, in a distracted fashion, where I have been?

Where have I been, you query?

Boning up on genealogy in the hope of finding a distant Welsh relation so as to boast an affinity with the mercurial Mr. Simon Davies?

Collecting up spent squibs ‘round Bishop’s Park in a fit of civic-minded hunter-gathering?

No, my little sparklers, I have been spending most of my time since last Saturday evening stroking Mr. Sylvain Legwinski’s radiant mane, finger-tipping Poacher’s Relish into his beard, and gazing indulgently into his luminous, staring eyes.

So, did Ma finally flip, and despatch me to Ipswich like a doleful little evacuee in 1939 or thereabouts, short-trousered and with nought to my name but a plimsoll bag and a slab of Palm toffee?

Have I, since then, been floating around the changing rooms at Portman Road, attending to a reclining Frenchman while he earwigs the half-time team talk from Mr. Magilton, drip-feeding him Crimson Seedless grapes in a bacchanalian orgy of simmering homoeroticism?

Don’t be five past daft, Fulham mates, I’m a red-blooded chit like all of you, and the truth is, of course, far more mundane.

You may recall, that last Friday I was presented with a plaster saint that Ma had rescued from the local vicar’s lecherous clutches. You may also recall that I carried out a masterful, Fulham-themed makeover upon the sacred figure, and that by the end of it he was the spit of our Leggy.

I then resolved to take him to Saturday’s game with me as a kind of karmic talisman what might tinker with the laws of physics as they’ve been generally adopted, and cause great things to happen in a Fulham-leaning direction. Great things that our boys have been unable to conjure thus far by virtue of their boots and brains and stuff.

Well, you can’t dispute the evidence can you, my post-celebratory chums, you just can’t. In fact, you can round up Mr. Einstein, Mr. Newton, and even the eternally foxy Judith Haan, pop them in a hessian sack and drop ‘em in the mighty Thames, ‘cause we out-manoeuvred them and all their tricky thinking too.

Yes, Mr. Sylvain’s supernatural persuasions undeniably secured us that elusive conquest, and that is a hobnailed truth. What is more: he made an elephant fly; he made a Welshman take wing; and he de-spooked a goalkeeper suffering from Soldier’s Heart, and returned him to the keen-reflexed stalwart he once was.

So, to show my thanks on your behalf, I’ve been tending to the fella’s needs and necessities to ensure that his powers don’t diminish through neglect, because you never know when we might need him again.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Saints & Speedos

2007-11-02T14:07:00.000Z

Beatific Friday blessings to you all, my most devout Fulham flock.

As you all know, on a select few days each week, prior to opening up her stall, Ma avails herself of some extra apron-cash by undertaking a sprig of cleaning at our local church.

There she was yesterday morning, toiling in silence amidst the grainy, pre-dawn dimness: conscientiously sponging down the pews; industriously buffing up the cherubs.

How sensitively she de-curled the stiffened little wicks that had wilted on the votive candles, like a junior doctor on their first day checking for the descent of a pair of adolescent testicles.

Diligently up the aisle went the fresh rushes - laid with a practised hand - when her reflective maternal reveries were disturbed by a strange, attenuated moaning. It resounded around the triforium and down along the organ pipes.

Not being one to give sofa-space to superstition, and feeling somewhat responsible for the premises, she resolved to track down the source of this ungodly, oscillating drone.

Being of a keen ear, she soon located the sound as emanating from behind an ornate screen, perched in the corner of the gloomy apse. As she approached, she glimpsed frantic movements through the squints. Involuntarily, her mind added the missing information to formulate a picture in her head of what lay beyond.

The bad penny dropped.

Rounding the screen, there was the sight she had by then constructed within her noggin: the vicar prostrate, thrashing away, getting gratuitously hot under the dog-collar with a two-foot tall plaster saint. A pair of turquoise Speedos were shoved into his mouth, muffling his fervent ejaculations.

She instinctively moved as if to flay the prone clergyman with a fistful of taut rushes, but held back for fear it may deliver a prurient thrill, and propel him over the cusp of arousal (she still had the cleaning responsibilities, remember, chums). Instead, she hoicked the font across the flagstones, tipping it’s contents over him and finally extinguishing his perverted ardour. The divine drenching caused him to start as though woken suddenly from a deep, intense slumber.

Upon comprehending his detection he oozed ignominy from every pore. Shame ain’t the word: he had a finger in every humble pie.

It didn’t fool Ma though. She cut her milk teeth on the many previous indiscretions of his that she’d witnessed; the least reprehensible of which was interfering with a wicker reindeer the Christmas before last.

And it wouldn’t be his last performance, Ma knew that for certain. In fact, if we weren’t only a few short shillings from Carey Street, she might have performed a rough and ready rectal exam upon him with the unfortunate object of his lust, before telling him what do with his menial, sub-minimum wage arrangement.

Instead, she satisfied herself with leaving him snivelling in a pool of his own humiliation, confiscating the abused icon to spare it from further indignities in the future.

Upon returning to the family digs, she presented it to me as though it was top of my Christmas list. Not being of a particularly pious stripe meself, I chose to render a profane but sensitive reassignment to the exploited statuette.

Scrabbling around under the sink, I found one of Pa’s long discarded tablets of tailor’s chalk, and a rusting tin of black Kiwi Parade Gloss.

After a brief artistic interlude, I’d re-painted the fellow in a true-to-life replica of that most exalted and famous black and white Fulham kit!

And by Cribbins how noble he looked then. In fact, his pre-existing ‘tache ‘n’ beard malarkey gave him a rather bohemian bearing, and brought to mind none other than Mr “Leggy” Legwinski.

So fellas, look out for me tomorrow when I shall be swinging the born again totem around my bonce like a demented hammer-throwing highlander, whilst imploring our boys towards a blessed victory.

Salvation’s at hand, fellow parishioners: St. Sylvain’s gonna save us!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Fingers & Forecasts

2007-10-29T13:48:00.000Z

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!

Courting & Cavorting

2007-10-26T14:00:00.000+01:00

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!

Lawrie & Lactation

2007-10-22T14:39:00.000+01:00

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!

Nouns & Naysayers

2007-10-19T13:54:00.001+01:00

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!

Wembley & Wapping

2007-09-28T12:48:00.000+01:00

Come, come, my glum chums. I’m in the dumps too.

In fact, I feel like I’ve been debagged on Lady Parson’s Stairs, them slimy risers at Wapping.

You see, following Mr Sanchez’s explicit tub-thumping regarding our imminent cup-hugging glory, I’d already commenced, in intimate cahoots with my tailor, sourcing cloth for a new pair of tufnells in which to promenade up Wembley Way next May two thousand ‘n’ eight. They were going to be in the camp colours, an exquisite herringbone affair, spun from the finest Super 100s. Strap ‘n’ buckle side adjusters and all.

Then we go and play some giddy-eyed formation against a team of pub-lumbering no-necks, and a significant spoke gets put in our Wembley wheel of fortune.

With such an approach, we had about as much chance of winning as
we did of cycling to Canvey in a custard hat.

Lacking wherewithal and insight as I do, I decided to elicit the opinion of market-notorious, cryptic-quipping grouch and stall-holder Mr Jewry.

How, from his lofty-minded realm, did he survey the Coleman-Sanchez continuum?

After a moment of synchronised introspection and crotch-scratching, he replied, shipping forecast-like, “moderate or poor, becoming mainly good.”

Well, by faint praise be damned, Mr Lawrie!

Surely, I suggested, you’ve been moved by his measured articulacy, his reasoned eloquence, and by his uniformly effulgent loquaciousness?

“Fine words butter no parsnips,” he batted back.

And I think he may have had the beginnings of a point. Whether he has the endings of one too, only the unfurling of the season will reveal.

For now though, we need to collectively cease bellyaching, hand-wringing, finger-wagging, and eye-rolling. Because we all know that this coming Saturday weekend we share pasture with our bluetongued, bovine neighbours. Them what’s currently squatting on our land.

If you’re attending be sure to take your umbrella, for if their shoddy, faux-mourning continues, the crocodile tears are gonna be raining down from every corner ‘pon our proud little black and white bonces.

So, are we gonna clean their clocks, or are we about to undergo an unholy doughnutting?

If we trade in another lettuce-limp display, it might only be praying to the god of produce that delivers us buttered parsnips.

With such conjecture hanging morosely in the air, I for one will be spending from now until then kneeling on a pretend-grass prayer mat in front of the first fruit and vegetable stall I come to.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Maps & Meditations

2007-09-20T15:07:00.001+01:00

Yesterday evening I sloped off on one of my typically bow-legged wanderings around the manor, primed to meditate upon, and ultimately turn to mental mulch, the day’s dealings.

And, as decisively, to develop my proficiency for wearing a hat in a built-up area.

My mooch was as arbitrary as ever, only using that Craven Cottage as a reference point to prevent me from straying too far; a comforting beacon, blinking away at the back of my awareness.

As I drifted, I gazed up at the ethereal vapour trails in the sky and tried to locate one that matched the sublime arc undertaken by Mr Kamara’s outlandish upside-down bicycle-kick, whilst wondering wistfully if he could repeat his acrobatics against the Svengalis this coming Saturday tea-time.

It was a satisfyingly wayward saunter, and it left me resolved and revamped.

Upon returning from these crooked amblings, I often take out an old map of these here streets and mark out the route, the one what I’ve just undertaken in my own shoes, by virtue of my own rickety limbs.

Well, last night, having traced my path onto the paper with a stubby Faber Castell HB, I found, to my glad-eyed wonder, that the route that I’d just undertaken described a near-perfect heart shape!

What is more, there sat our beloved ground, succinctly bullseyed bang-slap in the middle of it!

It was accidentally heart-shaped some of the flint-faced rationalists amongst you might protest, but to my enquiring bean it represented a subconscious revelation of my ardour.

Now dismiss that thinking, if you must, as a whole sorry sack of yackety-yak, and ridicule me for playing keepy-up with tuppeny-ha’penny notions, but not even the most cold-blooded curmudgeon would question that my little strawberry’s in the right place.

And I know that, with every little black and white beat, so is yours!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Pies & Postcodes

2007-09-12T15:31:00.001+01:00

No football for a fortnight, fellow Fulham followers! How you may collectively kvetch and bristle at such starvations.

But like Miss Khan, I feel for you, and like two Chuck Woods, fourteen days is too long.

It’s been a football fast and like flip am I famished.

So, where have I been during this fallow, mid-game slump?

Investigating the subtle differences between a gilet, a jerkin, a bib and a tabard?

Ankle-paddling in the Quaggy?

No, my friends; when not ricocheting around like a flippered pinball amongst the hectoring hustle and bartering bustle of the market-day melee, I’ve been moping away amid the Fulhamish demimonde.

Late last evening, I found a crust of Bombardier pie on the corner of Crabtree Lane and Rainville Road. In fact, it was right on the very threshold where our celebrated realm of SW6 goes to-to-toe with that of our neighbour, W6.

Was this an epicurean revision of the beating of the bounds? Have the locals taken postcode pride to a gang-like level, and started marking out their territory with the plate-scrapings of old repasts?

Perhaps they’ve also been dipping their pinkies into some arcane psychogeographic chowder before flicking all manner of protective karmic spells around their manor, in an intra-community xenophobic hoedown?

Or did some late-night, loud-mouthed dipso, whiskied to the gills, simply discard it whilst reeling sideways across the street into an unyielding lamppost, sublimely unaware of the administrative ley-line he was trampling upon, and the connivings his behaviour might trigger within this eternally nonplussed noggin?

These rum conundrums befuddled and bewitched me as I loped off towards Stevenage Road for a last lingering nighty night.

Fortunately it’s a finely-tailored fact, that when such convolutions create havoc ‘neath me little stovepipe, one simple glimpse of Mr. Leitch’s listed brickwork soothes the psyche, and readies me for a gentle reclining into the arms of Mr. Morpheus.

Ma said there would be days like these. And like cribbins there was!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Frying Pans & Felons

2007-08-28T19:36:00.000+01:00

Two-one.

One-two.

Two-in-one. Two for the price of one. Two become one.

Curse that squalid combination in all it’s manifestations, eh, Black and Whiters? Together, it’s been no less than a hex on our season thus far.

But, negative mathematical karma aside, last Saturday came and it went, and that’s a fully-upholstered fact.

Despite the sadness of stepping outside the boundaries of my beautiful SW6 for a day, me and my brogues limped into Aston with a cheerful aspect.

With time in hand, I sat down in the park by the ground to savour a pre-match spread; a tart blackberry sherbet, and a chive and parsnip pasty done my palate proud. It was mildly idyllic save for the M6 droning away over my shoulder.

Mid-tucker, an elderly fellow wandered past (be-suited, and smart as shoeshine he was), and nodded a greeting. He had the beginnings of a dowager’s hump, it’s true, but for eighty years old he was sprightly and bright enough to be the envy of all of us thruppeny squirts.

He stepped off the path and wandered over for a spot of chin music.

On learning of my London leaning, he recounted how he once lived in Stoke Newington and was married to one of the Christies.

My noggin creaked and groaned as it tried to place the name. No! Surely not! Your wife wasn’t related to that murderous wrong ‘un from Rillington Place, I asked him?

No, he said, Christie’s that world famous auction house dynasty. Oh well, you must be quids in then mister, I thought, hastily scribbling a begging letter behind my back.

The damn and blast of it is, that he didn’t find out his wife had the keys to the vault ‘til after they’d separated. Going once, going twice…a lifetime of regret sold to the dapper gentleman with the stoop!

He also related how he had once worked in The Castle on City Road and, following a bit of a hoo-ha involving the Kray twins, turfed the monozygotic maulers out and sent them packing all the way back to Valance Road, despite frantic mimes from the landlord to the contrary. What a terror!

Talking of villains, that stadium of theirs was like nothing more than one big frying pan, weren’t it, my overcooked chums. I kept expecting a giant-sized Ainsley Harriot to suddenly loom up over the Holte End, and toss in a touch of Tabaso.

And what was cooking in that pan (apart from us Cottagers lined up around the edge like sizzling little shallots), but one enormous footballing curate’s egg.

How can our mighty boys be so fluent, so imposing, and so tenacious for a spell, and then a single segment of orange later, become so gossamer-thin, so ephemeral, and so infuriatingly will-o’-the-wisp?

That’s a quandary to ponder, if ever I met one.

And ponder it I did as I stood there, post-defeat, ‘neath that incessant Birmingham sun, getting slowly casseroled whilst waiting for one of the two omnibuses provided to escort a near stadium-full of souls back to the city centre.

And tho’ the scene indeed resembled something Biblical, the feeding of the five thousand it weren’t.

With that in mind, and if not before then after, I’ll see you for the joust with Jolly’s boys at the weekend.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Dislocations & Daydreams

2007-08-23T09:55:00.000+01:00

Subdued Autumnal-type tidings, cottaging crew-mates.

I’ve been taking time out from pie-eyeing all the glad-ragged polonies mewling and gassing along North End Road, to ponder the strange and raggedy start to our season.

I spent much of yesterday idling by the parapet at the mid-point of Mr Bazalgette’s beautiful bridge, gazing most of the day long into that eternal tide.

It’s a unique set-up, and that’s no lie, what with having a church poised at either end. Yet, despite this reassuring symmetry, I was feeling a tad dislocated, as is the way with some of our players’ limbs at the moment.

Stripping fibrous strands from a stick of celery and letting the wind lift them from my fingers, I watched them see-saw down into the ebbing flow beneath. As I did so, I wondered within my adolescent bean if our fortunes were going to be the same: unpredictable and inconsistent, prey to sly-eyed forces beyond our control.

Have the Fates formed an anti-Fulham federation? Are they, clad in luminous shirts (you know the ones), whispering viciously even now as they plot to undo Mr. Lawrie’s grand plan?

Or, will that very plan be shown to be little more than “sound and fury, signifying nothing”?

The screech of a number 14 arrested my reverie, and prevented (hallelujah!) the formation of yet another tawdry metaphor for you to negotiate.

Enough! I challenged myself. There’s been too much dwelling in penny-farthing hells, too much belly-aching, and too much hangdogging around here.

So, grasp the nettle and follow me to far-off Aston. And when we win, I’ll be standing you all a slice of cob and a celebratory quaff of tar water.

As sure as shallots, I’ll see you there!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Sparklers & Squibs

2007-08-10T10:41:00.000+01:00

Quit cabbaging, dozing associates of mine, I’m pregnant!

Pregnant with anticipation that is!

Did you really think I’d casually scuppered eons of evolution with a mere semantic bauble!

The blue touch-paper of the forthcoming season is about to be lit and I, for one, am not about to retire to a safe distance. Fertilised or not, I’m gonna be cheering for two, and that’s not even close to a lie.

I’m keen as kippers to get my sticky mittens on Mr Sanchez’s newly-purchased little sparklers. Will they be exciting sixpenny fizzers, or the same old damp squibs?

Can I now limp game-wards with some freshly-laundered hope in my ticket pocket? Arrive with renewed promise reflecting in the gleaming, elbow-greased, toes of my brogans?

Whatever the prospect, my favourite half-lined trousers will be there this Sunday coming, and I’ll make pig-sure I’m inside ‘em, dressed and ready for the set-to with Wenger’s Originals.

Once inside, I’ll be carousing around the aisles in my steam-fresh, cadet-grey whipple hat. I’ll be freely distributing punnets of hand-picked, locally-grown, nouns and verbs from within my trusty tan leather valise, for you all to construct your own, personalised, pro-Fulhamer chants with.

If things start to turn a little queer late in the game, I’ll have an emergency supply of potent expletives ready to pass around for you to curse the footballin’ gods with. Handle them with care though - you might wake the gooners!

So prepare yourself, chums; it’s time to pull the ring finger of fate.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Slingshots & Steptoes

2007-07-31T10:46:00.000+01:00

My fairest Cottaging cousins, I trust you’ll be dragging your exquisite corpses out of your local brandy shops and joining me this coming Friday, as we set about shooting a few hoops?

See, following a well-meaning, but rather bewildering ear-bending about shepherds’ bushes, public conveniences, and back alleys, Ma’s granted me the keys to the city (well, the White one, anyways).

It’s a must-see, ain’t it, what with Mr Sanchez recently enjoying one of Chairman Mo’s glorious golden showers. Such largesse, deployed as it has been with keen managerial acumen, and bullish business dealing, has provided us with a spanking set of new players to ogle. They might even be good!

The leading question at this particular time is, will we be parading cheeky, simian-featured Mr Cook in front of his only recently ex-employers? Won’t that be peculiar for the fellow. It’ll be a bit like toddling off to Mr Tjinder’s corner shop to buy a stale tuppeny starver, only to meet yourself on your doorstep upon your return.

So, yes, I’ll be attending, and it’s a bet safe as houses that my Crombie pockets are gonna be packed with kiwis and bruised plums, ripe for lobbing. I’ll even be using my newest silk fogle as a slingshot, if the locals get uppity.

And once my intimate fruitery has been exhausted, I’ll be pelting all those grimy-collared steptoes with turns of phrase, figures of speech and all manner of pithy rejoinders.

It’s gonna be a massacre of thesaurus-type proportions!

In fact, if you keep your glazzes open, post-victory, you might witness me fizzing past the old Palais (R.I.P.), hanging grim and death-like to the bumper of a speeding saloon, with a set of sofa casters lashed to my brogues.

I need to race home and retire early, see, as I’ve a promise to keep to Miss Wetherby (next-door-but-one) on Saturday morning; she’s asked me to rake over her smallholding. I don’t know what cribbins that entails, but she said that me tufnells could come undone, and me hair could end up parted on the opposite side to when I got up.

With such queerness to consider, I’ll see you all on Friday.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Tiling & Tartlets

2007-07-09T11:50:00.000+01:00

Well, well, and well, black and white brothers and sisters!

Although our transfer window is open, it seems as though almost no one and his uncle wants to defenestrate themselves in our direction!

So, while Mr Sanchez continues to schlep across the football desert in search of some footballing nomads what, like, might actually want to play for us, I’ve been on my knees at Miss Wetherby’s (next door but one), up to my cuff links in grout.

As a favour for letting me finger the knobs on her old Bakelite whenever our boys’ away matches are being broadcast on The National Wireless, I’ve been half-tiling her scullery.

In black and white, of course.

Thing is, pals, whenever the aroma of her freshly-baked lemon-zest tartlets mingles with the pungent tang of tile-paste, I can feel myself going giddy sideways. I start to think I’m in the changing rooms at the Cottage, and before I know it I’m smearing adhesive all over me little limbs like linament, and executing star jumps, banging me bonce on the bare light bulb! It’s like playing truant from common sense school.

It’s hard work, and sure to leave me on the far side of fagged, but it beats flogging hand-made knick-knacks on Ma’s stall, and that’s not even the brother-in-law of a lie.

Anyways, I’m sure that soon enough, some of Mr Harrods Al Fayed’s hard-earned tourist cash will be flowing out from one of his offshores, in exchange for another willing new recruit.

Until then, turn the corner for SW6, and do-si-do your partners.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Hunger & Hallucinations

2007-07-03T12:35:00.001+01:00

Comely greetings, my charming cottaging kindreds, despatched roundly from yours truly as he foot-drags his sorry way across the off-season hinterland.

Are you, like me, a little hungry?

No, I don’t mean I’m aching for some belly timber. Around this market, there’s always a kumquat to suck on, if you give the right trader the wink. And, at the day’s death, there’s always a warm stubby of Super Malt from Mr Tjinder in the corner shop.

No, good friends, I am hungry for football.

So, what have I been doing then, during this gloomy hiatus? Engaging in the hugger-mugger of international finance? Consumer-testing gas umbrellas? No, I’ve been flexing my leather uppers, skulking endlessly around the avenues of this glorious parish: the Gowans, the Ringmers, the Hestercombes, but always, always ending up back at the gates of our beloved ground.

Have you, like me, found yourself going five fathoms past doolally with it all?

Yes, I can press my face against those gates, half-close my eyes, and kid myself within my noggin that I can see a fully-restored Mr Bullard, scrawny and liquid-waisted, executing exquisite fouettés before block DL, bedazzling his lumpen, dreary-eyed opponents.

But I want more than a penny peep on the palace pier. I want the whole shebang, the entire oeuvre, the complete sha-la-la. I want some full-on horizontal refreshments with a football flavour.

Face it, fellow Fulhamers, without football, life is little more than a loosely-tangled hairball of fripperies and bagatelles. A farrago of distractions and empty asides.

But, like Ms Ross, I’m still waiting: waiting in vain, waiting for the man, waiting in the waiting room.

Like some Beckett decrepit, waiting, waiting, waiting…

Once underway, a season gives us structure, don’t it? It gives our meagre existences a shape, a framework on which to hang our mundane mitherings, and our duty-bound, day-to-day dealings. Imminent fixtures on the calendar can punctuate our emptiness, can’t they, like little ships of hope bobbing on the horizon of our subconscious. Thirty-eight reasons to carry on living.

Now I’ve handed over my craftily-earned cutter, I can’t wait to get my adolescent luppers on that freshly-minted Season Ticket. I’ll be there at Mr Wenger’s Marvellous Soccer Theme Park for the season bully-off in my best three and nines and, believe me chums, when that inaugural whistle toots I’ll be as pleased as a punch-drunk pug on butter puffs.

Yes, I’m an eager beaver, and like fanny am I looking forward to sampling Mr Sanchez’s fresh fish; with the right purchases, the upcoming season becomes a shush bag of expectations. I dare say I can feel a pan-handle forming in the basket of me tufnells!

Anyway, we’ve all got time to pass, and some more than others, so I’m off to polish me new brogans.

Until then, go easy on the bark juice, consider foot-binding, and shake your angry fists at killjoys and cheap jacks.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Pomegranates & Polonies

2007-05-31T10:56:00.000+01:00

Mind your beeswax, Fulham-striped friends, the football/fashion dichotomy has just taken a fist to the solar plexus!

You’ve noticed – surely, you have – that our boys have just received a brand-new outfit to peddle their footballing wares in – it’s the butcher’s best ain’t it, and that’s not even close to being a fib.

I like the new kit. It’s simple, like me. And, as we all know, simplicity is the hand-maiden of style’s younger brother.

Well, now that the team are all correctly kitted-out, there’s no excuse for not mounting a realistic challenge on 15th place next season. And if they ultimately under-achieve – like fanny they will! - at least they’ll do so in a dapper fashion.

Anyway, I’m off to spit pomegranate pips at all the teenage polonies scowling down Munster Road – somebody needs to.

And in the meantime my good chums, remember: it’s easier to break the egg of style than to lay it.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Buddhists & Bully-Boys

2007-05-16T15:19:00.001+01:00

Fairest Fulham disciples, who are you and where have I been?

You are a sentient sack of bone and spittle what’s using your noggin to pontificate on these words, right now.

Me, I’ve been polishing doorknockers on and around North End Road, and building a life-size curlew out of curled-up cabbage leaves merely in order to earn a bit of spare trouser-cash.

Well, spiritually-leaning chums, in a facsimile of the great Buddhist cycle of Death and Rebirth, football is dead, only to be born again in a few short summer months’ time.

In the meantime, mid-knocker polishing, I‘ve been squatting on the Stevenage kerbside gazin’ up at that beautiful stand, idly shaking hands with my most sombre and deep-lying thoughts.

I’ve been tickling myself into believing that I can hear the matchday hubbub: the fluttering of Fluts, and the monotone boom of the programme sellers.

I fancy I can see the ghosts of former players, taking flight and manufacturing magic from the mastery of their lithe limbs, and limitless imaginations.

I sense I’m somehow seeing the spectres of spectators, drifting through the turnstiles, repeating a similar cycle: that of returning again and again to support their team. And yet another one, that of renewing one’s enthusiasm, weekly, in the midst of relentless, recurring disappointments.

Hope dying, hope being reborn.

Eventually, the reverie gives way, and I realise it’s just the low-level thrum of my grandfather’s pocket watch, ticking away constantly within my best vest pocket, impervious to life’s ups, oblivious to it’s downs.

Then, amazingly for a low-educated (but honest) cripple like me, a small thought hatches itself from within the incubating warmth of me stovepipe. I realise, that that’s how we all need to be in these ever-changing times. Constant like a clock, anchored on a stormy sea, whilst renewing ourselves each and every day.

Well, whilst your testing those telling truths I’m limping from the scene. All that thinking has given me a right backwards headache, and what’s more, I’ve got to pick up some faggots for throwing at the market inspector later on. Fascist bully-boy!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Plums & Pom-Poms

2007-05-03T11:04:00.000+01:00

My most esteemed cottage-flavoured companions: are you ready?

Internet-ready, battle-ready, oven-ready, HD-ready, ready steady go, Ready Steady Cook, ready for action, Ready Brek, ready or not here I come. I don’t care which stripe you aspire to. Just be ready.

These last weeks I‘ve tried to rally my best black and white chums using, like, verbs and nouns and things. Now, I don’t by any stretch see myself as a cheerleader and, to be brutal, walking ‘round the market bearing a brace of pompoms would have got me a swift toe-cap up the harris many moons ago. Polish on the seat of me tufnells for the sake of a bit of cross-dressing? No thank you, Mr La Rue!

But I’m beseeching you once again to holler to the heavens.

Over a stale lardy bun just yesterday, I was pondering thoughts from within my noggin: we’ve raised ourselves up for the Reading game; we braced ourselves for the Blackburn; we got aroused for the Arse. With the refractory periods becoming ever-more exhausting can we possibly enliven ourselves for the Liverpool?

Mr Jewry (at the next stall), he says that supporting this club is like “eating plums off a barbed-wire plate”. Well, if you love this club right down to your bones and sockets, as I do, then you know all too well that the sweetness of plums in the mouth often carries a bitter aftertaste, however much you masticate.

So this next coming Saturday, mouth full or not, let’s collectively spit pips for our boys.

Indulge in whatever foreplay gets you fruity, get entangled on the terraces, and let’s come together as one. Let’s fill the Fulham air with unrestrained ejaculations, with no worrying about what stains we may leave behind.

Until then, make like monks!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Kennedy & Knock-Knees

2007-04-27T10:29:00.000+01:00

“The future’s made of virtual insanity.” That’s what he said.

This morning, all of a sudden like, whilst deep in a relegation-centred reverie, an unseen force lifted me up on to me tippy-toes. Violently. This sudden growth spurt was not by virtue of eating a fistful of baby spinach for breakfast, but as a result of Mr Jewry (at the next stall) a-twisting my ear‘ole between his thumb and forefinger whilst simultaneously grinding a whelk into the North End Road tarmac with the heel of his superannuated Loakes. Obstreperous bumpkin!

“The future’s made of virtual insanity”, he ejaculated whilst performing this grievous act.

Now, I may be little more than an honest cripple with a crafty aspect, but whatever the future is, in fact, made of, my immediate one will see me knock-kneeing it up the Holloway Road this coming Sunday afternoon. Not even Mr. Jay Kay is gonna stop me from doing that!

Of necessity, I shall be decidedly post-prandial, having had an apron full of belly timber, pre bully-off. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to cheer in the face of overwhelming odds on an empty stomach. P’raps I should eat the form book for lunch! That’ll be a superior remedy chums, killing, as it were, two sparrows with one stone.

Now, my most admirable black-and-white comrades, once inside that unholy corporate dustbowl, we may well be little more than the equivalent of a few sprats in a Sperm Whale’s gullet, but that’s no excuse for being shrinking scaredy-cats, or sickly, weak-limbed lightweights. We need gallons of spunk, spine, spirit, and steel. We must merge together, into a kind of seething amorphous mass, and will ourselves to become more than the sum of our parts. To make a sound that science can’t contain.

Whatever the flavour of the on-pitch shenanigans, however grisly in nature the goings-on in front of us, we must continue to rage regardless. Like oaks in a gale, like clocks in a thunderstorm.

We must inspire our fragile heroes to step out from under the shadow of underachievement, to liberate themselves, and to shake hands with greatness.

Because as we all know, friends: the mediocre are many but the prime number few.

So prepare yourself, one and all. As Mr. Kennedy may have once said: “ask not what your club can do for you; ask what you can do for your club.”

Now is the time to do it: let’s set the day on fire!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Churchill & Consummation

2007-04-23T08:25:00.001+01:00

Holy unconsummated desire, Fulham-minded mates of mine!

What was last Saturday just gone all about then? Hatfuls of sunshine, but precious little plunder.

It was what Mr Churchill might have called: “a fatal neutrality”.

To labour my metaphor from last week just a touch longer, Saturday was like romancing the woman of your dreams into bed, only to find out that it was your sister, and that the law of the land prevented you from progressing. Your pistol’s cocked, but the target’s moved.

I don’t know what we do with ourselves for the next week now. I can’t take much more of this 11-a-side hole-and-corner intrigue. I reckon Mr Dante could conjure up a more welcoming retreat than that which we have to occupy over the next few days.

I‘ve already spent a whole day moping around the church, whilst Ma freshened up the font with some tallow and beeswax. I was supposed to be helping her, placing some fresh rushes up the old rector’s passage, but my noggin just wasn’t working proper.

I kept drifting off into these spacious, left-handed reveries, where Mr Sanchez was forcing the players to undergo a kind of penitence, thrashing each other with fresh leeks, and poking each other in the eyes with sticks of celery. I know what your thinking: I’d been tea-leafing magic mushrooms from the hippy fella in the market. The ones he reckons are capable of making you see people what, like, aren’t really there. Well no, my suspicious ones, I hadn’t, but I reckon some of our players might have indulged a touch, what with their strange habit of passing the ball into places where the sober amongst us can’t see a dicky bird.

Anyway, you know I’d swap a skip full of shin plasters and the seat of my smartest puppy-tooth tufnells for us to survive this current episode. And I know you know.

“Wars are not won by evacuations”, the great man said. And I’m of a mind to agree with him.

In the meantime chums, lets keep our collective peckers up, and our upper lips resolutely stiffened.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Tragedies & Trollopes

2007-04-19T14:56:00.000+01:00

Thursday-shaped greetings, Fulham friends.

It may, indeed, be Thursday, but I say: enough of this dilly-dandering! The hour is, is it not, at hand. Or at least it will be come 3.00 this next Saturday coming.

A tall, thin gentleman from Ireland once mused: “The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes over life and death and other tuppeny aches”

Meanwhile, some shorter, less thin, and marginally less austere fellows once expounded: “Tragedy – when the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on.”

Whatever the great poets might have said about it, the question currently buzzin’ ‘round my noggin, Cottaging associates, is this one: are we about to enter into a slow-time waltz with Lady Tragedy? Are we about to slip ‘tween the bedclothes with Dame Disaster? Come Saturday tea-time will be collectively fingering the gusset of Madame Misfortune?

Or, and this is the twenty-bob poser, will we be gang-banging the Trollope of Triumph?

And if we are, will we, post-coitus, be gorging ourselves on the victuals of victory: to be specific, will we be eating SW6 out of turnip crudités and hare-pie scramble come Saturday evening?

I don’t know what you lot drape your languid frames in of a Sunday, but I, for one, don’t want to be spending this coming next one, mooching around the North End Road in my mourning jewellery, considering the pros and cons of watching our crestfallen, emasculated, black and whiters playing 22-man kickaround against Burnley next season.

Therefore, and to be perfectly blunt, now is not the time for indulging in fruitless chin music, or pondering how you narrowly missed a career as Yannick Noah’s foot masseuse. We need to have our eyes lined up on the prize, strutting shoulder to shoulder down the Stevenage, buttocks taut, and chins a-juttin’.

As Mr Dickens might say “Give it mouth!”

For one brief interlude, let’s put the inexpressible, unavoidable, malaise of human existence from our minds, and make it a glorious day, filled with sunshine and plunder.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Delilah & Delight

2007-01-28T10:53:00.001Z

What a giddy to-do, cottaging colleagues of mine!

There I was yesterday, loitering around the North End Road in the pre-match hinterland, gazing idly at the assorted denizens drifting in and out of The Goose, just feeling the eagerness and excitedness start to muster in me puppytooth tufnells. When, out of the market-based hubbub, up loped a clot of clumsy-eyed Stoke City miscreants oinking and guffawing in some strange guttural tongue.

Now, The Goose might not be the most voguish of booze boutiques: modern? family-friendly? customer-facing? You jest, Fulham friends! I mean, they don’t even have latrines for lady-flavoured folk. Those that can’t contain themselves have to squat over an empty pickled herring jar under a lean-to in the windswept back yard, nylons bunched around their ankles.

Anyway, despite this rough and readiness, even these poxed and palsied potters were considered beyond the Pale Ale, and within seconds they were royally turfed out by Mr Dave the brick-built barman from Battersea: 16 stone, hands like shovels, and reigning South London Ginsters pasty-eating champion.

As they sloped off, crestfallen and sheepish-like, I added to their indignity by pelting them with a paw-full of rock hard sprouts I’d been keeping in the pocket of my midnight blue covert (velvet collar, thanks for asking) for just such an occurrence.

Later on, in a kind of symmetrical and poetic fashion, it squared up in my mind that their performance on the pitch once they’d come up against the mighty black and whiters was equally paltry. What a busted flush they turned out to be all ‘round, from the fans through to the players. “Delilah” be damned! They couldn’t throw a wig on a weathercock from half a shrinking yard, even with a head start!

Kudos and credit to Mr Cookie of course, who now seems to be assembling a group of foot-soldiers that seems right intimate with each other and who would no doubt scrub each others backs in the shower for less than half a farthing. That’s what you call loyalty in this day an age I reckon. Talking of soldierly, strictly-heterosexual, brotherliness, such qualities will no doubt be needed this coming Tuesday evening for the War on Warnock. Pistols cocked, boys!

Until next time, if not before.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Steed & Stokey

2007-01-22T08:21:00.000Z

No lingering, Fulham messmates. The day’s on fire!

Enough with humbugging and all associated slapdashery, enough with being a fly in the jug, a snit, and a foot-dragging flibbertigibbet.

Well, Mr and Mrs Tottenham’s children, they showed themselves to be nothing more than a bunch of sickly, weak-limbed, lightweights, didn't they. A gaggle of nanny-suckling parlour-soldiers, lead by Miserable Moan-a-Minute Mr Jolly, a modern-day Mr Pugwash if ever I saw one.

Meanwhile, our boys, lead by Corporeal Brown (that pallor!), cast vexations and grumblings aside, and demonstrated what a limp chimera of a top team his ex-employers really are. Furthermore, they made it more than crystal to Mr Steed that his career choice might not be the sublime path to glory that he might have previously imagined. Poor lamb.

And whilst we were unable to partake of a waltz with lady victory, we did at least get to ask her for a dance. So, before we potter off towards our clash with Old Stokey, a final, heartfelt “hurrah!” for Mr Montella, and a suitably baritone “booo” for Mr Jan’s butter fingers.

Anyways, that’s enough for charm school my Fulham friends. If you don’t see me this next Saturday coming, I’ll sure as sugar see you! Now I’m off to meet Ma from her cleaning job at the local church, and to shake my fist at Old Scratch whilst I’m there.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Wiggas & Wonderings

2007-01-12T09:20:00.000Z

Word up, Fulham thugs of mine!

As Mr GZA once said: “Why is the sky blue, why is water wet” and, presumably, “Why do lovers break each other’s hearts”.

There I was yesterday, slouching on the bonnet of Miss Wetherby’s (next door but one) plum-coloured Karmann Ghia, slurping on a can of flip. I’d had a bit of a backwards headache following a staring competition with the Johhny Haynes stand that morning. Fortunately for little me, the flip did the business - what a bracing cordial that was! Perhaps it was the turpentine chaser, but my little brain was off doing arabesques with Rudey Nureyev!

Anyways, there I loitered, gazing longingly at the flower-seller’s daughter, and wondering why if it’s a big enough umbrella, it’s always me that ends up getting wet, when suddenly the news entered my little noggin, courtesy of Mr Tjinder bellowing in my lug-holes (and interrupting my lecherous little reverie), that Mr Cookie had just ensnared a bright shiny new footballing player by the name of Mr Clint Dempsey.

Well. Clint. I don’t believe that there’s anyone currently residing in SW6 by the name of Clint. Not in this neighbourhood.

Apparently, he indulges in tip-top or bling-rap or some such confusion, whatever carry-on that might allude to?

I hope he doesn’t go in for all this glorification of guns following a goal-scoring incident: imitating AK47s, Kalashnikovs and spud-guns. There really is no need for violence in this day and eon.

Anyway, on that little moral morsel, I’m off for a quick scoot up and down North End Road to throw some sprouting tubers and broken cockleshells at the Jesus freaks out leafleting the locals.

What a hoop’la and how-de-do that promises to be.

Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Figgy Pudding & Fatness

2007-01-01T08:55:00.000Z

Well chums, with 12 crisp and shiny new months all stacked up neatly for us to enjoy over the coming year, I’d like to wish all you Fulham-flavoured best mates of mine out there a prosperous one!

Last night, with the memory of Mr Carlos Boca’s glorious equaliser still fresh in the thinking part of my noggin, I fear I had one too many sups of Jenkins Ol’ Wallop, and I was up a-jiving and a-jigging all night long ‘till auld acquaintances had been forgotten and all that malarkins! Also, through the now-foggy miasma of my noodle, I vaguely remember chargin’ up and down the North End Road at some point with a pillow up me shirt and a cupped hand to me ear, making like Mr Flab Lampard in a most derogatory fashion.

Now I’m a-achin’ all over as Mr Johnny Kidd would say!

Anyways, me New Year’s Resolution is in tribute to me still-suffering Ma: “Don’t drink a tin-bath full of Dick’s Advocaat or you’ll end up with a muzzy izzet”.

Keep those wise words with you at all times, fellow black and whiters, and it’ll be a good year!

Now let’s stuff some stale figgy puddin’ in those Hornet-shaped cake-holes today! They're nothin' but a bunch of yellow & black pantywaists!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Walham Green & Gumption

2006-12-30T08:08:00.000Z

Smite my giddy sides, Cottaging colleagues, it’s derby day!

Well, I don’t know about you lot, but I’ve spent most of this festive shebang using an antique monocle that I found in father’s sock drawer to torment the neighbour’s bloodhound. It’s driven the poor thing to distraction it has, what with his lazy eye and all. He’s been thinking he’s on doggy acid or summat. Perfectly ripe entertainment though, despite the unremitting cruelty to one of man’s best friends.

Talking of amusement, today is, not that you need tellin’, the day of our visit to that soulless temple of avarice, that vacuous shrine to retail, bulging with shaven-headed consumer-monkeys. Yes, our mighty black and whiters shall be visiting the old Walham Green Novotel Mega Village.

And now, more than ever, my good chums, is our chance to beat them, what with their catastrophic injury dilemma leaving their squad more threadbare than my 5 year old tufnells. In fact, one wouldn’t be surprised to see the old collection plate being passed around prior to bully-off this afternoon, so on their uppers are they over there.

However, despite the shining superiority of our squad, today is the day when nothing less than gumption is required. Yes, that’s right: gumption.

Mr Cookie will no doubt be ensuring that the sleeves will be rolled up on the shirts that are being played for, that the fellows inside them are men, and that as men they are standing up and being counted. Shifts will be put in all over the pitch.

I’ll be positively chuffed if that turns out to be the case in evidence, but so long as I get to witness some gumption I’ll be as happy as a sparrow in privet, and that’s no fib.

Ole, ole, ole and you know the rest, my gaysexual-friendly chums!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Richard Jobson & Rejoicing

2006-12-29T14:31:00.000Z

Merry Queuedrue-mas, Fulhamer pal-chums!

Oh what joy it was to have been welcomed “Into The Valley” by Mr Jobson and his Skidders, only to witness Mr Pards and his lame-duck 'Red Army' apologists get denied at the very death.

It was a right superior tonic for one with a selection box of issues to be going on with at this present time and all.

See, here I am, fellow black and whiters, loitering in the festive hinterland betwixt Crimbletide and the forthcoming nouvelle annus, and up to my eyebrows I am in bandages, ointments, poultices, and tinctures. Why you ask? Why am I doing a ‘Stars In Their Eyes’ aping of Florence The Nightingale?

Well, Cottaging chums, the Maurice household is a trifle poorly at present. Father Maurice had one too many ‘knock-‘em-downs’ in his local booze boutique, ‘The Divide And Conker’, and got knocked down by the cast-iron pillar he walked into noggin-first. As a result he’s laid up in his crib with a ‘strangulated narnia’, or somesuch fancy-dan ailment. Ma, meanwhile, supped a tin-bath full of Dick's Advocaat on Christmas Day, and now has a ‘muzzy izzet’, whatever doolally that may be!

Anyway, back to the sick, ill, and terminally-bemused, as Mr Cookie might be saying at this time!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Shame & Stale Pastry

2006-12-25T20:10:00.000Z

Holy Last Temptations of JC, Fulham mates!

I’ve just returned from church. Everyone was feeling right Christian charitable, and the copper was hitting the pewter, and that’s no lie. On top of that, the doo-doo’s was a-hittin’ the fan big-time stylee, as the modern children say.

See, on arriving for her part-time, menial, sub-minimum wage cleaning job yesterday morning, Ma’s caught the vicar doing the Abotts Bromley Horn Dance with his superannuated candle supplier, wearing only his ceremonial anointing robes and a pair of turquoise Speedo’s! Shocking ain’t the word!

As a direct, retributional consequence, he’s spent the day in the stocks, being pelted with stale lardy buns by me and my local chums. What a hoot!

Anyway, look out for me on this next Wednesday coming, as I shall be parading up and down outside the Valley, with his cossie a-tucked into the top pocket of my junior-sized Crombie. To folks passing-by it’s going to look like a right expensive silk ‘kerchief – only me and you are going to know different. So keep schtum!

Yes, indeed, it was little me that caught the disgraced churchman as he tried to flee over the fence. The local bobby giving me the soiled swimmers as a kind of reward for “performing a public service act”.

Well, come Wednesday we gonna bum Mr Pardew and his slack Addicks right out of SE7. So, winkles out, boys!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!