By RICHARD LITTLETHOUGHT ‘The Voice of Truth, if by “Truth” you mean “Profoundly Right-Wing Assertions”.’
Readers, I do confess this self-isolation business is getting to me at the very roots! The other day, I was having a harmless browse of some of that P.G. Wodehouse – ‘fun for all the fam’, as the rappers would say. But several chapters in, my heart ached and a drowsy numbness pained my sense, as though of Benylin® I had drunk.
In my delirious state, I saw myself attired in a starched collar and claw-hammer coat to boot. My man-cave was gone. Looking around at this new opulent interior, I surmised that I’d entered into the employment of a top-drawer citizen: Mister Bertram Wooster! Distantly, I heard the tinkling of a bell. I pursued the sound up a long and winding staircase. I opened an oak panelled door and stepped into my master’s bedroom. He was lounging beneath candy-striped bedclothes, a little bell in his hand.
‘Now look here, Littlethought’, Wooster intoned, ‘My squeeze, Emily Maitlis, is coming round for supper later and I want to make a bit of an impression – if you catch my meaning?’
‘I’ve got a grocery list here for her favourite dish: Greek moussaka with a special side salad – Yukon potatoes, artichoke hearts and a caramelised fig – that sort of caper.’ He waved this scroll of decadence beneath my salt-of-the-earth nose. ‘Now be a sport and toddle down to Whole Foods, would you?’
‘Indeed, sir’, I intoned. I took the list and shimmered out.
Coming down Kensington High Street, the pavements billowed with a thousand coxcombs in primrose scarfs and crushable bushman’s hats. Through the window of a Wasabi, the Monopoly Man was licking ramen off a glass table top while a prostitute clapped. I turned and saw a parade processing up the road, at the centre of which was a massive Chinese dragon with the face of a polystyrene James O’Brien. Fire-eaters and acrobats pranced around it performing tricks, whilst Sandi Toksvig saluted the crowd from an amphibious rocket launcher. Jess Phillips played ‘I Will Survive’ on the ocarina. A marmoset was on Skype!!! I’m a stranger in my own country! I thought.
Behind me, I heard a fragile voice singing from the doorway of an Alms House.
‘Jesus blood - never failed me yet - never failed m’yet - never failed me...’
‘Mister Farage!’ I said. ‘Whatever became of our Man of the Hour?’
‘I’ve been stripped of m’assets, boy. Stripped of m’assets.’
‘M’Youtube videos have been de-monitised, I tells ye! All m’lovely Youtube videos!’
‘They’ll never get away with this, Nige! God’s honour, they won’t!’
‘Thruppence for a vodka jelly, will ye?’
I was about to knee him in the groin and make a speech about the undeserving poor, when an affectless young man approached and forced a limp handshake. The young man then turned and gestured to a bunch of phlegmatic-faced tweens in furs doing coke off a padlock key.
‘Hey, guys, come on over!’ he said. ‘It’s a load of pre-gentrification First Peoples!’
They introduced themselves as characters who’d escaped from an Andrew Doyle satire. They were now surviving hand-to-mouth as a band of marauding postmodernists. They tried to impress me by showing me colourful objects from their ‘superior culture’, including Nespresso pods, scalp wax and a pencil sharpener from the Barbican Centre. A young woman in turquoise brogues read a poem about having adulterous sex in a library. When I told her I thought poetry was a form of character weakness, she cried onto her shoes (AND HER LACES TO BOOT!!hooho!). One tired-looking bloke – who claimed that sleep patterns were ‘just a construct’ and favoured instead a politicised version of rest known as ‘free-sleep’ – asked if I’d considered taking ‘powerful antidepressants’ to cure my conservatism. I told him that I was in love with my own sadness. I said I wanted to live my life ‘like a powder keg: short but sweet’ – I winked at the shoe-lady. The bloke explained that he wanted to live his life like an otter: ‘a very long and chilled one’, on his own, lying on a beanbag, eating stems of barley, with infrequent but carefully scheduled sessions of masturbation. I looked him squarely in the eyes and asked if he’d ever had a wet shave. The woman interjected and said I should join a Union, as ‘a working-class person!’
‘Who’re you calling working-class?!’ says I. ‘I’m a small business owner, don’t y’know!’
I was referring to a small business I tried to establish in the late 90s, selling knock-off Toby jugs from the boot of my Mazda, just off the A13 trunk road. We got busted by a gang of hired bravoes sent by the Wedgwood company. I was left lying on the verge with a pair of broken legs surrounded by shards of homemade ceramics. The police managed to trace the bravoes as far as Stoke-on-Trent where the trail ran cold, thanks to a conspiracy of silence among the city’s terrified residents. I had a meltdown not long after that. In my despair, I overdosed on Vick’s VapoRub and tried walking into the sea one night down in Billericay. I was saved, after I mistook the inchoate outline of a miniature schnauzer for the spiritual form of a Toby Jug. It hovered above the sand, glowing.
Don’t give up, Dick. Don’t give up the ju-ugs!
But I can’t, Tobias, mate. The porcelain industry is eating me alive!
No one else can potter like you, Dick! That’s the truth.
But the jugs have become a burden, mate!
It is your destiny, Dick. The jugs are your destiny! Swear. Swear.
What are you? Angel or Devil?
Once I had absquatulated from the students, I entered the vast baize complex of Whole Foods. I’d never seen so many vegetables in my life [INSERT GIBE ABOUT THE SCOTTISH]. The building was at least 100 storeys high, buzzing with flying cars and hydraulic escalators. It was like the Tower of Babel itself! Fritz Lang’s Metropolis crossed with a farmer’s market.
The affluence of the place sickened me to my very claw! I walked past some Houynhnhnms, cantering along the ‘Oats’ aisle. They gave me sideways glances and whispered to one another.
‘Darling, is that a Leaver?’
‘Darling, do you know, I think it might well be!’
‘In Whole Foods? I say, do you think he’s here to get his methadone injection? Someone should tell him, it’s not that kind of supermarket.’ *Goya-esque braying*
I’m a creep, I thought. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.
Near an aisle of artichokes, my bum was perused by the ghost of W.H. Auden.
‘Sir! If I may say’, he whispered, ‘Your arse is so muscular, I should wish to immortalise it in verse!’ I bristled at the scent of cherry brandy on his lips.
‘I concur, Wystan!’ crooned the fay shade of Lytton Strachey. ‘A truly delectable specimen.’
I swung at them. ‘Naff orf, you bloody wagtails!’
‘Oh, I say!’ preened Wystan Hugh.
At which point the ghost of Jean Cocteau approached, his eyes gleaming like a deviant, his fingers wriggling, ‘Ohohoho! Il a un cul chaud!’
‘Now look ere, Frenchy! One step over this ere threshold and I’ll knock yer flippin block off, comprehend-e?’
‘Je recommanderais le chou-fleur.’
‘Watch it! I’m warning you!’
‘Oui. Je suis un cinéaste.’
‘I can’t make head nor tail of this! I bluddy hate these romance languages’ I said to myself, sotto voce. I felt a stranger in my native land.
Once I had absquatulated the scene, I returned to the penthouse to prepare supper while Wooster billed and cooed with Ms Maitlis. (It was like the courting ritual of kestrels!!) Around midnight, I brought in the third course of banana shallots. The room was billowing with the scent of orange blossom and legal highs; I nearly fainted. Maitlis wore large, exotic torques from the Barbican Centre gift shop. She was hunkered over a big, indulgent glug of “Chateau de Liz Kendall”. Her eyes were as brown as spear handles!! Her face was firm yet glam, like the prow of a Russian oil tanker steered by Bianca Jagger. Her throaty voice, with its alluring masculine depths, was both thick and sweet, like oil on a scone (in an M&S advert sponsored by Shell).
‘Your butler’, she intoned. ‘A bit wet behind the ears, don’t you think?’
‘Oh gawd,’ my master said, his saliva moonlit, ‘don’t I know it, Ms Emma! Hum-hum-hum-hum.’
Now easy, Dick, says I to mine-self. Easy does it now.
Her voice sank deeper: ‘If you want to move in with me, Wooster, we’re going to have to find you a new man!’
‘If you like, I could fire this bounder on the spot! Just for you. I would do that, Emily. For you I would! If you’d like!’
She grinned and they stared into each other’s eyes for a good minute. Then she glanced up at me, a touch dismayed. Wooster turned around - he had a scheming look.
‘Oh, fetch us dessert, would you, Littlethought?’
I shimmered out. I returned a few moments later with an inappropriately large jelly designed by Norman Foster.
‘Dismissed. Arrivederci, Littlethought. We’re replacing you. Don’t come back tomorrow. You can leave your key card on the salver.’
I TOOK OUT A BOMB. I SCREAMED LIKE A CELT!
‘I say, steady on there, Littlethought!’
‘YIPPEE-KI-YAY, MOTHERFUCKERS!’ I intoned.
‘I didn’t know you spoke French, Littlethought!’
I pulled the cord! ‘FOR ENGLAND!’
Unfortunately, I was the only casualty. I wish I had died to avoid legal culpability. But it was a British explosive, so I incurred only minor tissue scarring. My master and Ms Maitlis immediately pressed charges. Because of my two-year-long media campaign against legal aid, I could only afford to be represented by a sparrow. The sparrow had yet to graduate to the bar, having only recently built his nest outside the chambers at Gray’s Inn where I hoped he’d at least absorbed something of the finer points of tort law. I appeared in court the following week in a plaster cast, where I was sentenced to life by Justice Lady Hale.
‘Well, well, well, Mithta Littlethought’, lisped Lady Hale. ‘A Leaver in the dock, I thee! It mutht be my lucky day! Yum yum yum!’ (She rubbed her stomach and mimed eating me - which I thought excessive.) A roll call of witnesses for the prosecution sealed my fate: Kojack, David Blunkett, and Charlotte Church in a bonnet who jumped up on the plaintiff’s bench and called me ‘a witch’ and then fainted. Lady Hale said I was ‘weak and scum’ - or ‘thcum’, to be precise (which is Welsh for ‘seamen’, FYI).
‘I thenenth you to 55 yearth, Mr Littlethought!’ she crooned. ‘55 backbwaking yearth!’
She banged her gavel. A loud cheer broke out across the gallery. I looked at my sparrow in his tiny little fucking wig, cursing him with my very blood.
‘May God have merthy upon your thoul, Mithta Littlethought!’ Hale said.
The sparrow immediately took wing – with my car keys in its beak – and escaped from a clearstory window. I’d lost everything. As I was bundled out of the courtroom, my faithful but still vividly puce-legged wife, Vanessa, surreptitiously passed me a cyanide capsule and an After Eight mint. She kissed me.
‘I’ll never forget you, Monsieur Robespierre,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget you – you – you – YOU…’
I woke up. My body was covered in sweat. It had all been a dream. I sighed with relief. I drew back the coverlet. But then, in the palm of my right hand: was a melted After Eight! Had it really been a dream? Yes. I had fallen asleep on top of a box of After Eights. I showered the mint chocolate off my cords and wept.
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Grams: ‘Underneath the Arches’ (Flanagan/ Allen - ft. Dua Lipa)
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