Nouns & Naysayers

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

Where have I been, you ask?

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

Playing Knock Down Ginger in Jackanapes Row?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I liberated the clasp and lifted the flap.

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

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

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

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

And what a medley it was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A brilliance of black and whiters.”

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

“A frustration of Fulhamers.”

Or, perhaps, “an inconsistency of Cottagers.”

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

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

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

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!