The Sniffer - Issue No. Twenty

8/7/2019 The Sniffer - Issue No. Twenty

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Status Quo. Somehow, the interviewer kept astraight face. Even while addressing him asStatus. After today’s listening experience, inwhich I learned that Status Quo have alwaysbeen and will always be exactly the same

execrable flavor of excrement, I am alsogoing to change my name. Not to “StatusQuo” but to “Status Cur?”

THE COCKY COMPANION

Each edition of The Sniffer features anextract from The Cocky Companion , aRosetta Stone for decoding the less obviouselements of Cocky's London vernacular. Thisextract culminates in a consideration of Michael Gambon.

MY ARS E I’m not sure who first decided toexpress his disbelief in a proposition by verbally introducing his backside to theproposer. But whoever it was should beridiculed for what must have been a lost-for-words last resort. “West Ham to winthe FA Cup? West Ham? West Ham…[speaker plumbs shallow depths of intellect for appropriate Wildeanwitticism; comes up empty-handed]…

West Ham my arse!!” This isn’t to say that“my arse” can never feature in theweaponry of a conversational jouster. Butit should do more than just sit there. For example, if you have a cigarette in your mouth but nothing to light it with, youmight ask this of a fellow carcinogenophile: “Excuse me, mate.

Have you got a match?” If he is anannoying prick, he might respond: “Yes.Your face, my arse.”

L OCK If you are strolling along one of

London’s picturesque waterways, you may find yourself yearning for an empty Cokecan, an old piece of newspaper, a plasticbag or a used condom. Rather than wastetime scouring the surface of the canal for your desired object as you walk, just waituntil you reach the next lock. You may have been told that locks are designed toallow barges to pass between two canalsections of different elevation. This is,however, an urban myth. The true

purpose of a lock is to gather and hold inplace all the floating shit that Londonersthrow into canals. This is so thatconnoisseurs can browse through it easily and find what they’re looking for.

W IDE B OY You know that bloke in theGucci suit with the big gold chain aroundhis neck and the sovereign rings on every



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finger? Of course you do. He lives inBexley and drives a Porsche 911. He leftschool at 14 and began selling fruit andvegetables at the market. And thensomehow he landed a job in the City as a

trader, back in the Nick Leeson dayswhen all you needed to get on the tradingfloor was a gaudy jacket and a Master’s inArsehology. He spends every night buyingstrippers champagne and doing charlie inthe bogs at some suburban subterraneannighthole. He doesn’t talk; he shouts. Andwhen he shouts, all you hear is anEstuary babble of syllables that rhymewith “aaaah”. If you ever get to the pointwhere you can understand what he’s

shouting, it will probably turn out to be amade-up story about how his uncle was agood friend of the Krays or theRichardsons. He tells this story often sothat people will think some of themythical gangster hardness has rubbedoff on him. In actuality, he’d probably cry if you spilled Bollinger on his Pradashirt. This reprehensible character, whowould make fine grist for the mill of amodern Hogarth, is known

unaffectionately as a “wide boy”.

DOS S One of the only times I have ever walked out of a cinema was 30 minutesinto “The Innocent Sleep”. This stream of

stinking effluent from the Dark Ages of London crime cinema (a period whichpreceded the Still Rather Dark Ages of London crime cinema, when Guy Ritchietook to the throne) was written by a piece

of software that had been programmedwith a handful of incorrect facts aboutLondon and Londoners. Thankfully, they uninstalled this software straightafterwards and it wasn’t allowed to writeanything else. In the half an hour thatmy unfortunate celluloid encounter lasted, every line of dialog, even thoseuttered by the otherwise watchableMichael Gambon, sent my autonomicnervous system into a spazzed-out frenzy.

I clenched my sphincter, bit my lip,covered my eyes, covered my ears, shook my head and curled up into a ball. Butnone of it prevented the stilted,inauthentic bilge from invading my brain. And so I ran out into a rainy Leicester Square looking for the nearestboozer, where I drowned MichaelGambon’s sorrows in London Pride. Now,16 years later, only one fragment of thescript has stayed with me. I’ve no idea

why. A tramp is standing under a bridgeholding a bottle and an angry Gambonaddresses him: “Is that a dosser’s bottle, isit? Full of piss, is it?”

GET F OXED

Back in the 17 th Fit, Get Foxed bade youconsider all the different species that Parker had paraded in front of you up to that point.You were then asked to take the household(not Latin) name of one of these species,remove a letter and rearrange the remainingletters to give the name of a country. Theanswer was:

WALES (WEASEL without an E)

This may be the last Sniffer , but that doesn’tprevent me from setting a new Get Foxed



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challenge. This time round, you are invitedto ponder the following question:

Who is Patrick Cates?

There is no right answer and there is no

deadline.OVE R A CLOUDY P INT

Some time ago, I stopped transcribing thedetails of my chats with Parker. We hadbecome inextricably immersed in a boozy,semi-telepathic exchange and there seemedlittle point in presenting an apparently random sequence of grunts, burps, laughsand coughs to the outside eye. But I’m excited to have reason to author a special

farewell installment of Over A Pint . AndI’m thankful to Joshua Glenn, Chief Prestidigitator, for providing me with thenecessary source material.

While penning The Ballad , Parker waslocked in a bi-monthly cycle of horse-trading, bartering and push-me-pull-youwith Glenn and his co-prestidigitator,Matthew Battles. Every two weeks, he wasrequired to submit a draft of the next Cocky Fit by the specified deadline. And every twoweeks, as the deadline approached, heducked and dived. He pointed and shouted“Look over there!” He led Glenn and Battlesup the garden path and back. In the early days, he would offer the authorialequivalent of that homework-eaten-by-doggambit so beloved of lazy schoolboys. But thetwo moody guv’nors were having none of it.So he had to raise his game. And yet they soon adjusted. So raise it again he did. This

cat-and-mouse tit-for-tat carried on until acouple of weeks ago.

Glenn, being the anally retentive hoarder and list-maker that he is, did us a wonderfulservice by filing away all of Parker’spropitiatory pandering. Even better, he ranthe whole lot through a magic internetmachine. The result is a “word cloud”, in

which the larger a word appears, the moreoften Parker used it in hisexcuse-mongering.

Take some time to analyze the cloud on thenext page. You will divine therein somefascinating linear pointers to the non-linear plumes of smoke that Parker would so oftenblow in the Glenn-Battles face (for there isonly one face, as far as it concerns us here).



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Allow me to choose a few nuggets at random:•

COLUMN – Parker perpetuated a longand complex con for months. He hadeverybody fooled that he was employedby The Atlantic as a columnist. A columnist! As you can see from the am-ply phallic appearance of the word, heflogs this columnar dead horse until itcomes back to life as a zombie. “Pesky Atlantic column. Sorry, chaps. I’m goingto be late with this week’s Fit…” Blahblah blah.

•

FUCKING – He just cannot stopswearing. As if angry displays of faux sincerity are going to lend any credence

to his excuses. (That said, I’m not surehe can help himself. I once invitedParker over to my grandmother’s housefor afternoon tea and every sentence heuttered was punctuated with at least one“fuck”. It was disgusting.)

•

APOLOGISE/APOLOGIZE – Most of the time he resorts to the Englishspelling, as if he thinks he caningratiate himself with the fearsomeBattles-Glen beast simply by alerting itto his Britishness.

•

BROTHERS – And then that conceit sofavoured by politicians andrabble-rousers. “We are brothers! Let’sforget our differences! Let’s have a beer and a hug!”

•

MRS – Blaming his wife? What adastard!

•

ACTION, EDIT-READY, WORK,

TODAY – There’s a reason that thesewords are so tiny as to be barely legible.

There ends my perfunctory analysis. May yours now begin.

***If there are questions you would like to ask or remarks you would like to make, you cando so by emailing the editor of The Sniffer ([email protected]). And if you are

interested in displaying your allegiance toCocky, you may care to use the same emailaddress to enquire about the availability andprice of one of the t-shirts shown below.

THE SNIFFER

EDITOR & WRITER Patrick Cates

P UBLISHERS Matthew Battles & Joshua Glenn

of HiLobrow.com

I LLUSTRATION Kristin Parker

W ITH THANKS TO Generous backers of Cocky the Fox

& Kickstarter.com

please direct all enquiries [email protected]

The Sniffer - Issue No. Twenty

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Transcript of The Sniffer - Issue No. Twenty