Ice Cream & Irises

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

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!