The Cocky Companion (6)
By:
July 1, 2010
Every other week, Patrick Cates (HiLobrow’s Magister Ludi) produces The Sniffer, a PDF newsletter mailed to those who’ve pledged at least $10 to support our serialization of James Parker’s novel, The Ballad of Cocky the Fox. (Subscriptions are still available; check in with Cates for details.)
Each edition of The Sniffer features an extract from “The Cocky Companion,” a Rosetta Stone for decoding Cocky’s London vernacular. This week’s Sniffer (#6) includes the following glosses on vernacular from Parker’s Fit the Sixth.
TAKE THE PISS: “Same old Arsenal, taking the piss.” So would these words, sung to the tune of the Big Ben half-hourly chime, echo around Highbury back in the late ’90s when Bergkamp, Henry, and Vieira routinely ran rings around whichever workaday defenders they were up against. When used quasi-intransitively like this, the identity of the piss-takees can be inferred from that of the piss-takers and from the context. In this case, the piss-takees would probably have been Leeds. Often, the verbal phrase “take the piss” is accompanied by the prepositional construction “out of” and an explicit object. In such instances, it is assumed that the piss-take is the main purpose of the piss-taker rather than, as above, a pleasurable but coincidental side effect. For example, let’s say that my friend Josh confesses that he listens to Kenny G. If, at that point, I begin dancing around him, playing an air soprano sax like an idiotic snake charmer and, between high-pitched warbles, emitting cackles of vindictive laughter, I can be said to be “taking the piss out of” Josh.
TWAT: Every American aficionado of the swear knows what a twat is. But when Cocky acquaints us with Twat’s Bridge and the foolhardy bugger who, in crossing it, has twathood bestowed upon him, he speaks of a slightly different twat. This twat, while still referring to the female pudenda, is flatter and harsher than its Transatlantic cousin. Where the American twat is pronounced to rhyme with “hot,” the British twat rhymes with “hat.” And this phonemic nuance is important. The American version is innocuous; it brings to mind swatting flies, babies’ cots, and polka dots. The British version, on the other hand, wields more power; it is redolent of rats, fat prats, and cats that may have shat.
PORK SCRATCHINGS:The antithesis to that modern British middle-class phenomenon, the gastropub, is the shitty old boozer with a nicotine-stained ceiling, threadbare carpets, a permanent stench of stale lager and an old codger in a flat cap drinking Whitbread Pale Ale at the bar. If you’ve stumbled into one of these pre-gentrification gems and feel a little peckish, banish all thought of lamb shanks, redcurrant jus and balsamic reductions. Aside from crisps, those ubiquitous friends of the hungry pub punter, the only other thing available to eat will be pork scratchings. Inside the packet, whose unconsciously retro ugliness will suggest that the product is ten years past its sell-by date and on which you will invariably see depicted a grinning cartoon pig (“They killed me for a shitty pub snack! Ha!”), you will find twenty or so trotters that have been chopped up into toenail-sized pieces. And, like toenail clippings, they are thoroughly unpleasant to look at, smell, or taste.
MALTESERS: These are nothing to do with Malta, the idyllic Mediterranean island that mothered so many Soho porn barons of the 60s. Maltesers are honeycomb spheres encased in shells of milk chocolate. They are designed to remain solid for around 60 seconds at room temperature, after which they turn into sickly globby messes that smear pseudo-poop over fingers and faces. You may well be eating Maltesers in a cinema and this will probably mean that you drop one or two in the darkness. If you are unlucky enough to sit on one for the duration of a film, you will end up looking like you’ve had a backside accident when you leave the cinema. It is no coincidence that an anagram of “Maltesers” is “arse melts.”
TROLLEY: What Britons know as trolleys, Americans call trams. Which is confusing because Americans sometimes call buses trams. And what the Dickens is a trolleybus? Luckily we can ignore the treacherous quagmire of mass transit. The shining trolley serpent of which Cocky speaks in Fit the Sixth contains shopping trolleys. Americans will know these as shopping carts. In its American incarnation, the shopping trolley is often used by the indigent as a mobile closet or recyclable receptacle. The focus of the contraption is always on consumption, even after the trolley has been removed from its retail home. In Britain, however, shopping trolleys are more often used by suburban hooligans. Ever versatile, these sturdy vehicles play the role of chariot, battering ram and multipurpose thing-for-fucking-about-with.
BARMY: If you ever manage to stay awake longer than five minutes when your English host puts a game of cricket on the telly, and if one of the teams involved is England, you might see a cluster of supporters who look especially pasty, sunburned, ample-bellied, and drunk. These supporters will be wrapped in the red and white regalia of St. George and at least three of them will have trumpets. In between the brass blasts you will hear a monotonous refrain being boozily bellowed out: “Barmy Army! Barmy Army! Barmy Army!” It will go on for hours. Days, even. For this is the Barmy Army, a troupe of befuddled Neanderthals who cling to the English cricket team wherever it goes. The Army are like a clumsy oafish puppy that smells of lager and vomit and that suffers extreme separation anxiety. The England team is the owner who now wishes he had chosen a cat instead.
Each installment of THE BALLAD OF COCKY THE FOX was complemented by an issue of THE SNIFFER, a COCKY THE FOX newsletter written and edited by Patrick Cates. Originally sent only to subscribers, they are now all freely available here.