The club is quiet these days, which is understandable considering the bacchanalia of Christmas, followed by its older brother, New Year. There are more than a few mems who are unable to answer the bell on these squeamish days of January and several will not be seen again, not in this life at least. The home of homes gradually becomes a receiving centre for broken resolutions and good deeds gone horribly wrong. In short, to use a yachting term, the club is in irons without even the faintest promise of a zephyr. We are recumbent and inert.
However as one of the aged leaders here I remain the same no matter what. And I take some pride in that statement. I am a man of several parts, all making up the very essence of a clubman. For years I have heroically stuck to my hard and fast rule of only five martinis a day, no matter what javelin life throws my way. I remain a rock of fortitude and a lighthouse unto the shoals of life.
I do not like change of any kind, in case you are wondering.
The only problem with this time of the year is that there are few mems to talk to who are not certifiable. Sometimes one wants to shout for the net. There is one named Bob something (I never speak to him normally as he is something of an idiot savant). The chap seems stuck on the sole subject of the rebellion of Jack Cade. Not a well-known moment in time, to say the least.
This Bob fellow waits all year for the irons situation to come up and then attacks me in my green wing-back, bending my ears about that frightful man Cade.
Bob insists that the insurrection was terribly popular in 1450, and was perhaps, Bob thinks, a precursor to the War of the Roses. As a Yorkist, Jack did not approve of our friend Henry VI. He fomented a revolt in Kent and then roared around London with his followers and even beheaded the lord treasurer (Saye).
Bob became so excited by his history outburst that he was almost in my lap as I fought to save my martini from oblivion. I didn’t even know the bloody man and he was threatening my drink! He straddled my knee as I struggled to get up to tell me that Cade was expelled from London and eventually killed in battle. Jack, although dead, was brought to trial, beheaded and quartered, with chunks of him distributed about the countryside.
“There goes my appetite for lunch,” I thought. But you see what I mean, a one-subject mem.
Another man who frequents the home of homes around this time of year is Ronald Rash. An appalling man of the first order and even worse, if you can believe it, than Bob something. This blighter actually assaults our tables at lunch. I mean to say. Lunch! The man is an absolute shower.
Ronald made a beeline for me while I was innocently looking forward to the Tuesday club pork chops. “Oh Lord, not during the pork chops,” I prayed fervently. But most of us at lunch during these days of post New Year, with few friends nearby, sit by ourselves reading newspaper articles we had only skimmed at breakfast, so we are open to assault.
I had just finished my soup while enjoying my propped-up newspaper story about the pending downfall of socialism when Rash plopped his behind on the empty chair across from me and said, “Not many people realize that Tacitus was the greatest historian if not of the world, then certainly his period 55-120 AD, which included Imperial Rome.”
He then helped himself to the two sticks of celery I had been cuddling till the salad dressing returned with the waiter. Blasted hell, would this man not leave me alone and take Tacitus with him?
I was but minutes away from my pork chops and applesauce and he was just warming up.
“He wrote Germania, you know, which is an ethnological account of the German tribes of the time, and contains one of the earliest references to the term ‘ noble savage,’ which is terribly interesting, don’t you think?”
The room swam before me as the pork chop brigade of waiters began to fill the dining room with plates of the longed-for lunch. It is a little known fact that your Major can occasionally become violent when pushed beyond reason.
“Oh, I say!” I said, and I put some mustard on it. Believe it or not, this outburst had no effect on the Rash fellow. It would appear chaps like this never take the temperature of their audiences, nor do they care, as they have the sensitivity of a rhino.
Needless to say these are tough days to be a club member. Under duress, we have taken to circling the wagons, and now we form tables that have no extra seating to ward off these assassins of our time. However they now trip us up in the WC. Horrible and not fair. No chap deserves that.
Soon, thankfully, Kitty and I will be winging our way to Puerto Vallarta to let the club heal itself as we relax in the sun and forget the irons of the New Year.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2016
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