Lourdes, the Spanish manager of a restaurant up west and the hardest-working person I know, comes round on a rare day off with her intended, my cousin George. I ask Lourdes if she gets a lot of Russian customers. Yes, she says, and they are great. They know what they like and what they don’t like, and if they don’t like something they say so and then she can put it right.
I thought Lourdes’s experience at the sharp end a useful antidote to the nasty little surge of anti-Russian racism around at the moment, in London, and elsewhere in Europe where Moscow’s millions are spent. Bloody Russians, they flash their money around, they treat the staff badly, they don’t know how to behave, blah blah blah. Much the same stuff used to be said about all Americans, or all Germans, or all Arabs.
And the worst customers? “The English,” says Lourdes. “They eat and drink everything and then post vicious complaints on websites.” Another generalisation, for sure, but apart from the bit about the internet, it describes me entirely. I’d rather chew my toes off than send anything back to a kitchen. My policy is: sit there in a steaming stew of hatred and resentment, get whatever it is down your neck, pay up, go home to plan how to burn the place to the ground.
I used to go to an osteopath to get my back treated. A year ago, I missed one appointment without notifying her in advance. The next time I went, she said she’d have to charge me for the missed appointment, as per “company policy”. Stuff company policy, I thought, lying there seething, I’ve been coming here for years. But did I say that? No. I smiled tightly and paid for the two sessions, the one I’d just had and the one I’d missed, and as I walked out of the door resolved never to pass back through it. And I haven’t. Even though my back hurts like hell.
The reason for that is the day that started with me talking to Lourdes about her job ended with me being thrown around by her fiancé, my cousin George. We’d had a bit to drink, and a game of darts, and then my son suggested it was time we had a fight. I looked at George, George looked at me. “Might as well,” we shrugged.
It wasn’t a proper fight, with kicking and gouging and broken bottles, but it wasn’t a comedy fight either, it was somewhere in between the two, a wrestle, I suppose. Naked to the waist, with lots of lunging, tripping and rubbing heads together. Homoerotic? You betcha. Especially when for some reason my son started shaking clouds of talcum powder over both of us. My wife and daughter and Lourdes, chatting amiably in the next room, popped in to see what all the noise was about, rolled their eyes and popped right back out again.
In one corner of my office, where the fight was taking place, is the cats’ lavatory, and soon enough, locked in a heaving embrace, George and I landed right in it. Standing up, chests heaving, trails of sweat trickling through the talcum, special clumping cat litter stuck to our skin, we shook hands on the draw.
My earliest memory of George is on a punt in Cambridge, one summer in the early Seventies. I’d be about nine, which would make him about seven. His dad, my uncle, was poling us along; my mum and dad and Auntie Grace, God rest her, were also there, as was my brother, and George’s brother and his two sisters. It must have been an extra long punt, but anyhow, that’s how I remember it. George and I sat in the bow, dappled sunlight, weeping willows, trailing fingers in the Cam, as charming then as it no doubt is now, and then I picked up George and chucked him in the river. So not much has changed in our relationship. Except now he can chuck me about as well.
Yeah, life goes along. I bought my son Death or Glory for Christmas. Here, in one volume, reprinted from the Seventies originals, are 12 Second World War comic books of the sort I devoured at his age, all trenchant Tommies in the Libyan desert, giving Jerry what for. Naturally I pinched the book straight back and have been reading it avidly.
Talking of homoeroticism, I failed to notice first time around (understandably, I was only ten) that the stories aren’t really about the war as such, but rather revolve around the idea that male friendship and mutual admiration are best forged, and expressed, in the crucible of violence. No doubt it was my early immersion in this myth that led, 30 years later, to a drunken grapple with cousin George in the cat litter.
The other interesting point about those comics is that, whenever the hero belts a Nazi, he takes time to deliver a soliloquy: “And that’s for Nobby Clarke, the Sarge and Bob ‘Jock’ McTaggart, you sausage-eating squarehead,” and so forth. Whereas modern man Jason Bourne, for instance, whenever he has a punch-up, never says a damned thing. Yes, as another year picks up steam, the pace of life gets ever quicker, so it does.
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