‘I try to steer clear of politics and yours is bad enough, but I found this on the internet yesterday and had to relay it. These headlines. Someone went to the trouble of searching for these headlines, and copy pasting them to his feed.’ I then spoke of several bullet points and an editorial comment.
“British companies GIVE UP on cross
channel trade because of red tape
Car giants slam brakes on output – factories
judder as Brexit shuts supply chains
Fashion retailer’s plans come apart at the seams – relief is turning to despair as tariffs and red tape snag supply chains
BloJoh the betrayer has swindled us over Brexit, England’s fishermen say – you sold us out, don’t lie to us
This is the biggest disaster for the fishing industry in 50 Years.
Some companies, notably in the chemical industry, are finding that business has become more complex rather than easier
The cost to chemical businesses of recreating the European regulations, which requires extensive documentation, could reach as much as £1 billion
Rotting fish, lost business and piles of red tape. The reality of Brexit hits Britain.”
“Fish cakes and eat it, yeah? Seems like it’s the fish who are -taking back control-”
‘What’s a Cockney Wanker?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I know, difficult to explain,’ I said. ‘Hold on,’ I said, after scrolling up and down on my monitor. ‘The phrase Cockney Wanker does not appear. I didn’t read it back to you, I didn’t read it out to you.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You referred to the phrase a few weeks ago, and I forgot to ask.’
‘Aha,’ I acknowledged. ‘Two reunions ago Spider, remember him? He went up to me at a reunion and flat out called me a Bloody Wanker. Who did he think he was? Ian Bloody McShane? I asked him how he knew of the phrase and he said he’d been posted over here in the military and his pals grew accustomed to English slang and calling each other slag, shag and Bloody Wankers. The irony is that he’s a Bloody Wanker, if anyone is.’
‘Which branch of the military?’ she asked.
‘You know,’ I began, ‘I was so impressed with his ability to spray insults like so much manure from a fertilizer spreader that I forgot-’
‘Probably the latrine,’ she guessed.
‘You’ve been watching too many reruns of Mash,’ I interrupted. ‘I think you mean canteen. Probably a waiter in the canteen. If he had manned the cheese counter in the canteen, it would certainly be uncontaminated by cheese.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Wonder why it’s called canteen rather than cafeteria. But what does it mean in any case?’ she asked.
‘Which?’ I asked back. ‘Latrine, Bloody Wanker, shag or slag? Bloody Wanker.’
‘Either, all, you decide.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘They’re analogous to American phrases, words, such as, I can’t think of them now fortunately. Oh, you said Cockney Wanker and Spider said Bloody Wanker. Ahm, Cockney is another name for an Englishman and Bloody is derived from a continental word meaning completely or totally. A complete wanker. And wanker just means wanker. Well there are American terms that drive chills up my spine, because they find their way into every college age sentence, especially college students who won’t take responsibility for their vocab, vocabulary, even when you try to beat it into them. The youth should quit this jargon, it’s not even jargon, they should quit this lexicon, by their mid-20s. They should grow out of this, of talking like 22 year old snowboarders from Colorado.’ Parents and guardians would be advised to invest in aquatic boot camp, in which after six weeks their kidults would gain immersion in Sailorese, and lose fluency with Social Media Speak, the unique tongue invented by the folks who brought us Outbrain.
‘Not a red state any more,’ she pranked. ‘Colorado,’ she repeated, but if I closed my eyes and listened, it would have sounded more like “color reddo.”
‘I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,’ I added.
‘Just a few words,’ she pranked again. ‘My Pig Latin remains far better.’
‘Etterbay by far. I wonder if young Spaniards discovered a pig Spanish,’ I conjectured. ‘I kinda, I’m kinda stoked to know.’
‘Wouldn’t it be …? Wouldn’t there be a different name to it than Pig Spanish, to them, if we called it Pig Latin?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ I agreed. ‘Porco Español? Hold on, that’s partly Portuguese.’
‘Anyway,’ she began. ‘I hope you didn’t mean beat it into their heads literally.’
‘No,’ I lamented. ‘Too far away. I was too far away at the time. However, I did threaten to get “the law” involved. And when I break things, it’s usually accidental.’ Nowadays anyway. I didn’t like how that came across. I hope she didn’t notice anything unusual in my speech pattern.
‘Hmmm, “the law,”’ she commented. ‘It sounds like a long story. You were going to explain “and why I should care” about supply chains,’ she said. Noncommittal. Better than nothing.
‘Awesome memory, why does it matter?’ I asked, for the sake of moving on as swiftly as possible. This question, though, was not sarcasm. Rather, the phrases “and why you should care” and “and why it matters” are synonymous.
‘Cuz I’m “stoked” to know, too,’ she explained. ‘Were they, are they bloody wankers, too?’
‘When you, if you put it like that,’ I conceded, before commencing with as precise an explanation as I could manage. ‘It happens every time, time and again. Lemmings are told, no, the populace is told, no lemmings, follow me, vote for me, I have your interests at heart, I know what’s best for the country. Those with common sense explain to the lemmings … the lemmings, that the promises they are being fed are lies, they are being fed porkies, I mean lies. They say you’re feeding us project fear, don’t tell us how to vote, and so they are free to make up their own minds. Cut to the chase and they do, and the outcome turns out worse than project fear. They either deny reality, insist that these are teething problems and the best is yet to come, or they say if we had known this is how things would have turned out, we would have voted differently. But, they were told in advance how things would turn out, and they chose not to open their ears and eyes when it mattered.’
‘Hmmm,’ she indicated. ‘I said supply chains before because I couldn’t think of the phrase, but you knew what I meant. Ummm, I still can’t think of the precise …’
‘Hmmm,’ I repeated. ‘I don’t either. Daisy chains? Picking daisies? Daisy cutters? Dairy cutters? It will come to me, or you. Umm, I met one of them once, one of their intellectual baselines. The meeting was off the record and you would not recognize the name anyway, but still. He was inexperienced, narrow minded, lacking in full sets of information and above all, stupid. He was, as the saying goes, the hole rather than the donut. The undying human condition is stupidity,’ I rationalized with one of my conclusions of the month.
‘I thought you said it was selfishness,’ she suggested.
‘Which trumps which?’ I asked.
She changed the subject. ‘You still haven’t explained …’
‘Haven’t I?’ I pondered. ‘The general public says it doesn’t want to be told what to do, but they do want to be told what to do, while being led to believe they’re making up their own minds. Also, they want to be bailed out of bad decisions when they were told ahead of time their decisions were going to be bad for them. If you vote for this lazy, selfish person, he won’t do for you what he promised, he’ll completely ignore you and rob you blind. He won’t simply lie once, he’ll pile the lies high every time. When they find out, they’ll say: he lied to us. Somebody better bail us out now. Feel sorry for us that we lost our sales channels because this is what we were asking for. Somebody give us money. Who? The government. They’re gonna hand out money to the people they knowingly forked over, rather than their cronies? The hardest working beggars in … As for me, I’d simply like to be able to take back decisions that were self-evidently bad as soon as I’d made them. One absolution for buyer’s remorse.’
“And who exactly is going to give you back this one bad decision?’ she asked.
“I dunno,’ I admitted. ‘The J man? Hawkeye? Hawkeye seems to have more power than the J-man these days.’
“Now you’re getting into psychology, which is my realm, not politics,’ she remarked.
‘Realm, like the Other Realm?’ I asked.
‘Sorry, I don’t follow?’ she asked back.
‘Other realm. Other realm?’ I repeated, waiting for an imaginary laugh track. ‘Oh yeah, you never had children. What happened to Heidi?’ I asked, changing the subject. ‘Do you know?’ Heidi was a mutual friend in high school, her age not mine.
‘Where she is now I could not tell you, but she was “dangerous,” that’s what friends of her older boyfriend Billy said, or “allies of,” as people would say over where you are. He was smitten, though.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘Which part?’ she asked back again.
‘What the phrase “allies of” refers to, over here?’ I clarified.
‘I lived in England for two or three years,’ she explained. ‘I was engaged to a painter and sculptor … it didn’t work out …’
‘It drips out,’ I observed. ‘How do artists earn a living?’ I marvelled out loud. ‘I was next door to, well not quite lived, but … rather, I owned a property and the house down the hill was owned by a sculptor, a sculptor of metal objects, he displayed some outside his house, but as there was no money in it he worked as a security guard at a college half an hour’s drive, half an hour’s drive away. I suppose he was supported by his partner, who commuted up three hours every weekend and brought the dog. A friendly dog. He liked me. It liked me. The dog.’
‘You’re rambling,’ she intervened.
‘What I meant to say. What I started to say, was that you knew what a Cockney Wanker was,’ I implied.
‘Guilty,’ she acknowledged, but my mind was otherwise temporarily engaged and I thought she said “gnarly.”
‘What brought you here?’ I asked. ‘Sorry, you told me that, not the life story of … but you told me that. I’m also curious about how you got here, how you met this English (?) painter and lived here for a few years, but that can wait. Why was Heidi dangerous?’ Gossip: straightforward; life stories: complicated.
‘She wasn’t,’ was the reply. ‘His “allies” thought she wasn’t right for him, too young, and that there was a danger they might get married.’
‘Oh,’ I commented, ‘is that all? Most of those marriages worked, at least from my experience. Once you’re fully grown, an age difference of five years doesn’t matter, or was it six? Not experience, not my experience, but what I’ve witnessed. Marriages that lasted, or didn’t. Parents only got divorced if their parents did, like that Falcone kid. I looked up Heidi and a few more in a yearbook, by the way, BTW, out of curiosity. Thinking back, I thought she was cute, but in these photos, the B&W photos, she wasn’t. Though it was black and white …’
‘From the original? You kept your original yearbooks, with the signings and all that jazz?’ she asked.
All that Jazeera, I said to myself. ‘No, that yearbook was the victim of a basement flood, the product of spring rains and a high water table,’ I explained. ‘But you can find them all now on the internet. The picture quality, the pixel quality, it’s just as good, but black and white, or just as bad, as the case may be. Maybe the sharpened versions would be better.’
‘Did you look me up, to see what I looked like as a teenager, to jog your memory?’
‘Oops, sorry, I didn’t. I’ll do that tomorrow, I promise. But I don’t have to, come to think of it, because your face is indelibly inked in my head.’
‘Oh look at the time,’ she said, pretending she didn’t hear the compliment.
‘I’m glad you said that, cuz I’ve got stuff to do,’ I cautioned.
I didn’t, but didn’t wish to be perceived as idle.
‘Bye for now.’