Thing about Boys, says Bloggiana, her nasal tones cutting through the cloud of cigarette smoke in our parlour like a stealth bomber contour-hugging its way through the Yorkshire Dales, is that you can never be sure what’s going on in their minds.
Bloggiana is fresh back from a new adventure with her godson Adolesco. She is sitting in the rocking chair with a cat on her lap and a budgie on her shoulder, benignly oblivious to the palls of chutney vapour swirling around her. She is armed with a small vat full of Viognier and apparently smoking her way through an entire Boeing 747 passenger list’s transcontinental tobacco allowance.
I mean, take Adolesco for example. Before Bloggiana can go on, the lid on the chutney casserole blows off creating a brown sticky arc as it goes and a terrible noise when it lands. Simultaneously the telephone rings and the cat takes a swipe at the budgie, missing by a whisker but catching Bloggiana’s glass and tipping a little Viognier onto her lap.
So anyway, Bloggiana goes on, ignoring the telephone, wiping her lap, tipping a small amount of ash onto the budgie's head, there I was with Adolesco, sitting on the edge of the school fountain, reminiscing about the days when we used to get a lift to school in a bubble car. And there was the boy, waving madly as one of his friends pulled up in a freshly minted Maserati complete with coloured brake calipers, aluminium pedal covers and made-to-measure Maserati leather luggage set. And I said to Adolesco, Adolesco I said, tell me about your last journey back to school.
At this, Bloggiana says, the boy went eerily quiet. For a moment, she says, I thought I might have touched on something he would later rely upon in therapy. For all at once the boy’s face assumed a drole, down at heel look. His shoulders shrivelled. His eyebrows furled and even the mid-pubescent fur on his lips appeared to go softer. Adolesco! Bloggiana exclaimed, what on earth is it? And out it all came.
It seems that the last time Adolesco went back to school, there was no chauffeur and no novelty car – simply a train. And the train was, as the boy put it, chokker. And of all rotten luck, Adolesco found himself wedged at a table between a chain-munching chocolate finger-eater called Marge (it said so on her supermarket checkout badge), an elderly deaf man wearing an i-pod and Measly Twat-Sniveller, Adolesco's recent adversary and sworn enemy.
Poor you! exclaimed godmother. I know! exclaimed godson in response.
And do you know what, godmother? said Adolesco, his face now resembling a Sacré Coeur caricature of Tristesse.
No, what? said godmother, her heart skipping a beat at the sight of such pathos.
Well, thing is, mumbled Adolesco, the old man across from us was wearing a hoodie.
No, said Bloggiana.
Yes, he was, went on Adolesco. And do you know what it said on it?
Go on, urged godmother.
It said: I Poke Badgers with Spoons.
No, said godmother, genuinely taken aback.
And do you know, godmother, the boy continued, his face crumpling into something close to a Sacré Coeur caricature of Douleur, the awful thing is, I really think he did.
No, said godmother, even more taken aback.
And even more awful than that, godmother, Measly agreed with me.
Bloggiana found herself, she tells me, looking long and deep into the school fountain. The Maserati flashed past, its coloured brake calipers reflecting in the water, blinding her, she confessed, with a short sharp pain behind her eyes.
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