Five

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from: richardvhirst@acemail.com
to: martintrhiggins@acemail.com
sent: 01.02.10 at 22:11 pm
subject: RE: Hello!

Hey Martin,

Good lord, all that business with Mr Crumbgold sounds terrible. It also explains the text message I got from him late that very night. It read:

‘IM GON 2 TAKE U LIEK A PIL LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1’

Actually, no. It doesn’t explain it at all. That’s part of the reason I’m here, Marty - out of the old town and living the high life: the other night I went to a bar that sold African beer. African beer! Can you imagine such a thing? It’s beer, but from Africa. Amazing! I mean, it tasted rank, really rank - like drinking the fermented sick of a tramp who’d spent his final days licking a battery, snorting some onion flavoured pigeon-droppings and eating some particularly garlicky fish semen - but I didn’t say that at the time, obviously. I don’t want my new city-friends thinking I’m racist or anything. So I smilingly drank my way through six pints of the stuff until it felt like my body was going to make me unwillingly swallow my tongue, lips, teeth and most of the skin on my face in protest.

Anyway, my point is: there’s not really a whole lot you can do. This sort of thing with Mr Crumbgold happens all the time - not the ‘bottlefingers’ incident specifically - but when I was working at Betterbins, he’d go through these insane, depressive phases which always seemed to characterised by a manic ‘workplace idea’: there was ‘Sing-Song Snip-Snip Saturday’, where he lumbered round all the workers with a bottle of Farmer Dampcrotch Cider and a pair of kitchen scissors, cutting strips from their shirts whilst noisily blubbing the lyrics to ‘Who Wears Short Shorts’, replacing the word ‘shorts’ with ‘shirts’; there was ‘Funny Foothand Ha-Ha February’ where he made all the temps wear Gola football boots on their hands and stood watching them whilst they attempted to type, drinking screaming passages from Peter Sutcliffe’s trial transcripts through an electronic megaphone; and then there the outright fiasco that was ‘Bring Your Own Pet Into Work Fortnight’. Poor Maureen. And poor Professor Waffles. God rest her poor his little doggy soul. And God rest poor his little staple-addled, rubber-bands-threaded doggy body. ‘Puppetry Of The Puppy’, that homemade video Crumbgold insisted on sending into You’ve Been Framed, haunts my dreams to this day. I can only conclude some ghastly internal programming error has led ITV to repeatedly broadcast it as part of the show’s opening credit sequence.

The reason, I found out, for these drunken bursts of monstrosity is actually pretty simple: it’s Mrs Crumbgold. His wife, Horny Wendy, sporadically packs her things and leaves him, only to return within a couple of weeks. After this, you’ll find Crumbgold will calm down quite a bit. It might help to talk to Horny Wendy though - both to speed things up and to make sure she isn’t leaving him for good this time. Don’t be put off by her name though: she’s not, as far as I’ve ever been able to ascertain, particularly sexually adulterous. No, her nickname derives from the fact that she actually has a twin set of horns growing out of her head, like a goat or the devil. Don’t be alarmed though! She won’t mind if you stare at them or anything - she’s very un-coy about her horns, proud even. A lot of the time she paints them with nail-varnish. She’ll let you touch them if you ask her, maybe even hang your hat or a tea-towel off them. I remember one Christmas she came into the office with some baubles and a little plastic cherub hanging from them. Very festive. All that said, however, you will have to sleep with her to get her back with Crumbgold. That’s just the way things are.

So, yeah. That’s the sum total of my advice, I’m afraid.

Nothing much is different here. I’ve managed to chat to Agatha, that girl in the office I quite like, a couple of times, but I still have that old problem: I see her making a coffee in the staff-room and decide, after anxiously phrasing what to say in my mind to make it sound as casual as possible, to talk to her. But, instead of saying ‘So, doing anything this weekend?’, when I open my mouth out comes: ‘The Mongol empire owed its successes both to its theo-aristocratic roots and to Temujin who, despite the not initially commanding a heavily populated army, succeeded in uniting the clans of the Onon, Kerulen and Arugun valleys under his leadership and whose military victories gave him an unprecedented authority. The first of these victories took place in 1211 when he launched a successful campaign against the Chin Empire, taking Peking three years later…’ I go on like this until she’s finished drinking her cup of coffee, cleaned up her mug and the spoon she used to make the cup of coffee, and then left the room. I even continue speaking for a while after she’s left, just to comfort myself. So I’m not seeing it as a hugely accomplished wooing campaign at the moment. Where does it come from, this awkward inability to chat to women normally, without lapsing into a narrative regarding early thirteenth century Asian warfare? It’s a nightmare. Still, I’ve rambled as far as friar Planocarpini’s meeting with emperor Kublai in 1245 so, hopefully, after I’ve got past the point where the Mongul Empire finally collapses in 1368, my mind will be able to move on to jabbering mindlessly away about a slightly more romantic period of medieval military history.

Work is still pretty boring. I find myself daydreaming whilst sat in my cubicle copying out the red ink numbers and the black ink numbers. Throughout Friday I was lost in a vivid reverie in which I’d been taken prisoner by a company from the Korean military who were dressed like Amish hodd-carriers, wore matching dressing gowns made out of smoke and Plexiglas, and were aggressively pressing me into staging a production of Evita on a slowly deflating bouncy castle with a cast made up entirely of deceased and decaying giraffes. This can’t be healthy. I keep extending the length of time I’ve allowed Virgil, the tramp, to stay in my flat, just so I’ve got someone to have a conversation with when I get home. And even he might be leaving soon. Apparently he’s been doing some sterling work for the Cunt Fuckers, the criminal gang he’s joined. They started him out on boring, low-level thuggery: answering the phones, filing invoices from fellow gangs, photocopying beating-victims’ faces, etc. He’s shown so much promise there’s a good chance he’ll get a pay rise, company car and an office of his own, the sort that have a little shower in the adjoining bathroom and loads of those weird, slightly boring metal toys on the desk. I can’t imagine a guy with that sort of life hanging round on my sofa, watching Touch The Truck repeats and playing the ‘guess how many fingers I’m about to hold up’ game for too much longer. Ah well.

Anyway, let me know how you get on with Mr Crumbgold. And with Horny Wendy. If you want a tiny bit more of advice regarding her, I’ll only say only two further words: hornymorphously perverse. I’d better get going. I want to nip to the Spar before it shuts: they’re selling some past-its-sell-by-date chicken tikka flavoured wafer-thin ham dead cheap at the moment and the pack of woefully underdomesticated tracksuit-children who are normally to be found lurking around by the entrance hurling paving slabs at the passing traffic tend to leave at around 11pm to go beat up the first wave of pensioners on their way home from the Pug And Shovel. Bless ‘em!

Speak soon and good luck.

Richard