BANGING ON

So we sit on top of the Expensive Cooker and drink. The PG slips down a treat and it is some time before I Piccalilli realise that a) my buttocks are emitting a slight melting smell; b) we have been silent for at least half an hour and c) that someone seems to have placed a woolly gauze between me and anything in the outside world that might be connected with reality.

Thus I forget entirely what it is that I have most recently asked Bloggiana; or where it is that she has just been and just returned from; or indeed anything at all. When at last I do hear Bloggiana speak, she appears to be saying something about someone being tighter than a gnat’s arse and meaner than a box of traffic wardens – and I realise she must be referring to Great Uncle Cymbeline, because who else is there among our acquaintance who could possibly fit such a description.

Now I should tell you – before I continue with the GUC narrative – that Great Uncle Cymbeline has been batting around the margins of the cricket-pitch of our existence for many years now. His foibles, apart from his extreme Scottishness, range from his insistence on carrying a black umbrella on all occasions to his friendship with the otherwise entirely friendless Lady Ravelston Dyke – a woman who has never smiled, who drives her mini-metro as though it were a hearse and she the grim reaper, who styles herself the Coffee Morning Queen of the Newtown and who is capable of reducing even the most resolute of Scottish traffic wardens to tears.

Far in the past is buried the exact nature of our relationship with Great Uncle C. He was somehow related to someone long since dead. My mother used to take us to see him once a year – and in the back of the car, on the journey from Our House to his large and almost entirely empty flat, we would inevitably be sick at least once. It seemed to take forever to get there and when we did, Bloggiana and I would be offered a glass of bitter lemon that had gone brown through old age; and if we were lucky a stale rich tea biscuit or a piece of shortbread with most of the sugar shaken off. If we dared to complain, our mother would quite simply burst out crying so that the trip was dreaded by us on almost every level imaginable.

Improbably Great Uncle C did not die. He was tall and thin and beaky and stooped. Largely he did not notice us as children but every now and again he would and then his attention would take the form of a terrifying question like Well? which he managed to imbue with so much intonation and so many syllables as to make the brown bitter lemon seem almost desirable. If we could, we would slip from the front sitting room where there were no chairs and wander through the house. All the woodwork seemed to be painted a bright duck-egg blue and the lino in the kitchen had colonised itself into a series of mild, mustard coloured molehills. In the downstairs loo, there was brown paper which was so old and so brown, we preferred to cross our legs all the way home. On one occasion, in order to avoid questions, peeing, bitter lemon or any kind of encounter with a biscuit, Bloggiana shut herself into the lift until it was time to go.

Combing through these memories, now, on top of the Expensive Cooker, across the woolly gauze of Pinot Grigio, I find myself still utterly perplexed. What on earth could have changed to make Bloggiana enjoy her trip to Scotland and her stay with Great Uncle C?

Thing ish, the old girl says, sounding quite extraordinarily muzzy, thing ish, I never quite made it to GUC’z flat. You shee, on my way north, the old shit rang to tell me it was not convenient. Something about Lady Ravelston Dyke having gone on a final journey. Sho then I thought I would shend a message to my friend from the internet, you know the IluvBigKnockers chappy.

And with a conspiratorial wink, Bloggiana raises her glass and chinks mine. So you shee, I’ve just shpent the most shplendid week. Not in the Naplesh of the North. But in Gretna. In a bedsit. With Randolph…