by John Hughes
The chef looked disgusted as well as fierce. He raised the baseball in the air.
“Please!” begged Jez. “You can’t do this – not to Toff.”
Mr Ping gave him a quizzical look and held a hand up for the chef to stop. “Okay, who we do it to instead? You decide.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life not fair, get use to it.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Teach you lesson in respect. That why.”
“Okay, okay,” said Jez. “We get the message. We disrespected you – it was a mistake and we’re very sorry. We’ve learnt our lesson, we really have. Now please let us go!”
“Sure we let you go, but first we blake bones. Make sure lesson not get forgotten. If not Toff, how about other one. What his name?”
“Chris.”
“Okay we blake Chris arm first, if that what you want.”
“No!” pleaded Jez. “I don’t want.”
Chris now followed Toff’s example and wet himself, profusely, the splatting sound like water pouring out of a leaky drainpipe. He staggered as if about to fall over. He was still crying.
“Please!” repeated Jez. “Just let us go.” His voice was loaded with emotions; panic, fear, terror even. “Please!”
Then a strange thing happened.
Mr Ping seemed to freeze for a few moments. He stood and stared at them, as if in a trance. When he spoke, his voice had changed; metamorphosed from stereotypical, parody Chinaman to pure Oxford English. The tone and quality were so different that it could have been emanating from another person.
“Now listen to me. I have no intention of wasting any more time on you. Frankly, you’re not worth it. I have a restaurant to run and we have neglected our duties, and our customers.” He put a hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out a long thin piece of paper. He held it in front of Jez’s face. “Do you recognize this?”
Jez nodded.
“What is it?”
“Our bill.”
“That is correct – your bill. Total amount, ninety-eight pounds and forty pence. Now we are not in fact going to harm you, nor was it ever our intention. To scare you, certainly, and by the looks of it, and the amount of urine being discharged, I believe we have succeeded very well. I am first and foremost a businessman and if there’s one thing I hate more than anything else it’s a bad debt. I hate bilkers, or runners, or whatever you choose to call yourselves.”
Mr Ping patted Jez’s jacket and felt a bulge that indicated an inside pocket. He slid his hand in and pulled out a wad of banknotes. He peeled off six twenty pound notes and returned the rest from whence it came. “I’ve taken a hundred for your meal, plus twenty as a tip and to cover the inconvenience you have caused. I’m sure you won’t have any objection under the circumstances?”
Jez, Chris and Toff shook their heads in agreement.
“Splendid. I’m glad to hear it.” He nodded towards the fierce-looking chef and the driver to back off. They did so, one smacking the baseball bat into his palm and the other rattling the nunchaku. They looked disappointed. “Now, you can be on your way… assuming that is that we fully understand each other. Am I right in believing so?”
All three nodded in unison.
“I play a part, you see. I am not at all like the Mr Ping who greeted and served you earlier. Believe it or not I was educated at public school – Charterhouse to be precise. Subsequently I have taken over the family business, so to speak. You Caucasians seem to want a caricature Chinaman to serve and entertain you in my restaurants. No doubt because you and your parents and their parents before them were brought up on a diet of Carry Ons and Benny Hill… even Chu Chin Chow depending on how far back they go. So that’s what I give you.”
“Restaurants?” said Jez.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said restaurants, plural.”
“I own twelve. I flit between them.” He scrunched up the bill and shoved it into Jez’s pocket. “And you are welcome to dine in any of them, anytime. However, if you do I would be obliged if your two friends here would change their pants first. They smell decidedly pissy.”
The fierce looking chef and the driver got into their car. Mr Ping opened the passenger door. “I would also be obliged if you would pay your bill in future, like decent, reasonable human beings – the superior British that you imagine yourselves to be. Come into The Mandarin Palace and I’ll give you the names of my other restaurants. They’re all fairly local.”
As the car pulled away, the passenger window lowered and Mr Ping called out in his restaurant voice: “You come soon so I no forget you. You all looky alike to me.”
My Canterbury Tale
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger are to be thanked for my love of Canterbury. They were responsible for some of the finest British movies ever made, under the title of The Archers, long before it was filched by the BBC for their long running radio series, and it was seeing their 1944 film A Canterbury Tale fifteen years or so ago that had me driving down into Kent to seek out locations. My eyes were opened to what is now one of my favourite places on Earth. It’s no coincidence that I feel the same depth of affection towards their film. For me it’s impossible to separate one from the other and they are permanently intertwined in my emotional psyche.
I cannot walk along the High Street and turn into Mercery Lane without seeing and hearing a military band marching along as it approaches the cathedral and enters The Old Buttermarket. I cannot walk along Rose Lane without hearing the clipped tones of a local woman standing in a bomb site saying: “It is an awful mess, I don’t blame you for not knowing where you are. You get a very good view of the cathedral now.” I cannot walk past the Westgate without hearing three wartime pilgrims – an America G.I., a British soldier and a Land Girl – in conversation with Mr Colpeper, the local magistrate. Colpeper is also… ah but I’ll say no more in case you haven’t seen it.
Nor can I sit in the tea room by the cathedral entrance without hearing two ebullient G.I.s talking about tea and marijuana and blessings. The latter is why pilgrims make their way to Canterbury, to visit the cathedral where the St Thomas à Becket was savagely murdered. They come to receive blessings, or to do penance.
Like the three fictional pilgrims, I too am fortunate enough to have received a blessing in Canterbury.
I went there for a weekend with my girlfriend at the time – Nicola. She was from Swindon, had two kids, was divorced but still did her ex-husband’s laundry, worked in an office and had once been a knitting pattern designer. Her brother-in-law was a well-known artist. Her kids had gone to stay with their domestically challenged father for a few days, so we stole down to Kent and checked into what was then the County Hotel in High Street, opposite The Beaney Institute.
I had a bad cough, or what I thought was a bad cough. It turned out to be viral bronchitis, though I didn’t know that at the time. Needless to say, I was coughing a lot, and at times out of control. I must have been a nightmare to sleep with.
We pottered around the city, walked along the walls, had lunch in The Weavers, and went in the cathedral of course. On the Saturday evening, we had dinner in a charming Italian bistro in Best Lane and for some inexplicable reason – probably to impress – I blew an inordinate amount of money on a bottle of wine that proved to be very ordinary. (I’ve never repeated the exercise, having learned since that quality wine does not necessarily come at a price.) Slightly intoxicated, we made our way back to the hotel, all of two minutes’ walk from the bistro, and proceeded to – as G.I. Bob Johnson in the film might have put it – fool around, which did my cough no good whatsoever.
On Sunday morning we had breakfast, checked out, and decided to stroll around the city some more until it was time to head home. This time we ventured into lanes and alleys a little further afield, pretty much at random. We made our way down Palace Stree
t, past the King’s School to the rear of the cathedral where Michael Powell himself had studied as a boy, and then got lost. Somewhere – Lord knows where – we came across a second-hand bookshop, something I can never resist. It was on four levels, packed from floor to ceiling with shelves of books on every imaginable subject. An absolute treasure trove for a bookworm like me. We went inside.
My cough had abated somewhat by then, at least for the time being. I was well in control in Film and Cinema, Music and Musicians, Military History and various types of Fiction. I could have spent a small fortune in each but managed to resist and enjoyed a pleasurable half an hour or more browsing. Nicola and I went our separate ways, occasionally bumping into each other.
It was when I wandered into Poetry that the proverbial brown stuff hit the wind machine.
I am keen on the work of Roger McGough and sought out a couple of his collections; Blazing Fruit was one. Not to purchase. I already had a copy as I had set one of the poems in that collection to music some years earlier: Last Lullaby. I have no idea what else I looked at, T. S. Eliot perhaps, or one of the poets I had been forced to study at school and subsequently come to enjoy without pressure; Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, Tom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Robert Frost. And I would certainly have been on the lookout for any Spike Milligan.
On a far shelf, a large book with a bright green cover caught my eye. My daughter will tell you that animals come to you when searching for a pet; an inexplicable bond that exists as soon as you make contact. I can assure her that the same happens with me and books. I gradually honed in on the green cover as I meandered around the room, which was deserted apart from myself. The writing on the spine was indistinct, so I pulled out the tome and took a look at the front cover.
THE LIMERICK
The famous Paris edition, complete & unexpurged.
1700 examples.
I adore limericks. It’s a standing joke with my nearest and dearest that I can write prose but am clueless when it comes to verse, and whenever I make an attempt it always turns out as a limerick. They are, by and large, synonymous with vulgarity which I assume is part of the attraction. I opened the book.
There were indeed 1700 limericks within, each one numbered, as if to justify the cover title. They were listed in order of subject matter, ranging from Little Romances to Chamber of Horrors by way of (to name just a few) Sexual Intercourse, Buggery, Abuses of the Clergy and Weak Sisters. I started to flick through at random. Some were amusing, some funny, the occasional one hilarious. Some of the rhymes were neat, some clever, others inspired. I had decided after reading a dozen or so that I simply had to own this book. Scribbled in pencil inside the front cover was the price – £8. A bargain!
Amusing and delightful though the limericks were, even the best had eked out of me no more than a chuckle… until I came across number 788. It was tucked away innocuously under a section entitled Gourmands. Here it is:
There once was a baker of Nottingham
Who in making éclairs would put snot in ‘em.
When he ran out of snot,
As likely as not,
He’d pull down his pants and jack off in ‘em.
I laughed out loud. And once I started laughing I couldn’t stop. Then I began to cough, and once I started I couldn’t stop coughing either. Soon I was having difficulty breathing.
I was making a lot of noise. Nicola came in to see what was going on. I thrust the book at her and managed to blurt out “Buy this for me please” before rushing out of the room, down the stairs and into the street, where I sank onto the pavement with my back against the shop wall… and coughed and coughed.
By the time Nicola came out carrying the book in a brown paper bag, I had managed to regain some control over my respiratory system. I was told I looked purple in the face and that my eyes were bloodshot. When the coughing had abated, I stood up and we wandered around the streets, back towards the centre, until we found somewhere to regain our composure – Tiny Tim’s Tearoom in Saint Margaret’s Street. Even though it was still only late morning, we ordered scones with jam and cream and a pot of tea.
Nicola was curious to know what had set me off in the bookshop and started to take the book out of its bag. I begged her not to; not while we were eating.
By the time the scones had been devoured and we were sipping a second cup of tea, I had explained about number 788. Nicola opened the book, found the limerick in question and read it. She tried at first to feign disapproval, but failed miserably and let out a giggle. She started browsing through, chuckling sporadically. Then she stopped at a page and read a set, one after the other. As she progressed, she burst out laughing several times. Heads turned in the tearoom.
She stopped and slammed the book shut. “740!” she gasped. I took the book and began reading what turned out to be a whole series of limericks recording the scatological adventures of the extraordinarily talented Farter from Sparta. Nicola, I should have mentioned sooner, was asthmatic. She had started to wheeze and took an inhaler out of her handbag and drew deeply from it. I struggled on with the saga until the final limerick when our eponymous hero tries to fart the storm section of the William Tell Overture and ends up shitting himself. Ironically it was an ill-timed cough that had been his downfall.
Nicola was still struggling; chuckling and choking and gasping for breath. I started coughing again. I plopped a ten pound note onto the table, hoping it would cover the bill and, much to the relief of the patrons of Tiny Tim’s Tearoom, rushed out with Nicola close behind.
Hunched up on the pavement again, I was having real problems, coughing and spluttering. I could exhale but I couldn’t breathe in. For a few moments, I was genuinely frightened and thought I was going to die.
Nicola leaned over me and pushed her inhaler into my mouth. “Try this,” she said. “Breathe in.”
This was not as simple as it sounds. Breathing in was the problem… I couldn’t do it. But with a prodigious effort I managed it and as I did Nicola squeezed down the top of the inhaler. I felt some of the spray enter my lungs. Almost instantly I could breathe more easily.
“Again,” said Nicola. I did as I was told. Soon I was breathing normally. It was a huge relief. I had no idea what was in the inhaler but I didn’t care. The relief was all that mattered. “You should go and see your doctor,” she said. “That’s more than just an ordinary cough you’ve got.”
And that was my blessing. To have discovered courtesy of a book of limericks that I had viral bronchitis. On my return home I booked an appointment with my G.P. who made the diagnosis and I soon had my own inhaler.
My relationship with Nicola was not destined to last, but I still have the limerick book. It has given me enormous pleasure over the years. Tucked away within the 1700 limericks are some absolute gems. My all-time favourite is not in fact the one about a baker of Nottingham. It begins There was a young man of Calcutta, but it’s far too vulgar to repeat in full, and by comparison makes the baker of Nottingham seem a martyr… which, curiously, rhymes with farter.
Far more recently I received a second blessing in Canterbury, of sorts. But that’s another story.
Unlucky for Some
Paula belched. “Lainey, it’s a numbers game… dating.” She made her statement as emphatically and precisely as she was able under the circumstances – the circumstances being that between them she and Elaine had drunk a bucketful of wine. Unusual to be doing this on a Sunday evening, but Monday was a bank holiday so what the hell. Besides, it was a beautifully warm evening, exceptionally so for early May, and they were sitting on the terrace of a pub on the edge of the Oracle overlooking the River Kennet, having eaten well, and setting the world to rights on a diverse range of topics from the ageing process to, inevitably, men and relationships, Elaine being unhappily single and Paula even more unhappily married. Both in their mid-thirties, they used to work in the same school – Paula teachin
g, Elaine doing admin – until Elaine moved on. It was their six-monthly catch up.
In terms of looks, they were like chalk and cheese. Elaine was the striking one; slim, petite with a shock of red hair, a pretty face and a natural elegance that brought her more than her fair share of male attention. Paula was short and dumpy with dark hair; attractive features but not outstanding. There was irony in Paula pontificating on the subject of dating when she had no recent personal experience, not since she met her husband in her late teens. Elaine was in fact the veteran.
“How many has it been this time?” asked Paula.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. How many dates have you had since you split up with Tim and went back on Plenty of Fish?”
“His name was Tom.”
Paula giggled. “Whatever. There’ve been so many.”
“You liked Tom.”
“Until he dumped you for no reason, I liked him until then. Just as well you never moved in together.”
Elaine considered Paula’s question carefully, then started counting on her hands. She paused: “Including second dates?”
“Have there been any?”
“Cheeky mare, you know very well there have!” Elaine continued totting up and declared: “Excluding second dates… twenty-six.”
“In how long?”
“Three months and a bit.”
“That’s an average of two a week!”
“Whatever back to you.”
Paula belched again, as if making room for more wine, then filled the gap with a large slurp of sauvignon blanc. “And how many have you, you know…”
“Bonked?”
“That’s what I was referring to.”