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Every word of the following is true. Perhaps the strangest Hogmanay escapade of my life.
I am not misanthropic but for some people I will make an exception.
If you are a stranger and knock on my door at 9pm on New Year’s Eve, requiring the favour of a loan of a bicycle pump and you do not conduct yourself in as business like a fashion as possible then you have become the exception.
By all means open the conversation with the delightful bit of patter, “If I had a pound coin for every time I’ve asked someone for a bike pump this evening I’d still not have the bike pump I really need. On the other hand, if I had a bike pump for every time I’ve asked someone for a bike pump this evening I’d have a bike pump already and I wouldn’t need to trouble you. Hot Dog. Of course, if you had a bike pump for every time you’d been asked for a bike pump this evening, then I ‘d be very happy.”
However, I give you fair warning that if you have rendered yourself incomprehensible through some combination of drink, drugs, lunacy, hypothermia or self-administered novocaine injections to your own tongue and therefore oblige me to ask you to repeat said patter it will go hard with you.
Do not compound this error by capering like Sylvester McCoy wearing Ace’s underwear whilst I stand in my stocking feet in my open door on the coldest night of the winter so far. Bear in mind that I have a well-deserved reputation for being a bit of dick about board game etiquette and that for every minute you keep me here, in my doorway, against my will whilst it is my turn to play in the epic game of Carcasonne raging indoors and that I was, until distracted by your simian pump-begging charade, winning, for every minute lost I lose the vital ability to pause slightly and then ask rhetorically, “Is it my go?” whilst looking over the table at the family member who knows damn well that it’s their go, that it has been their go for the last five minutes, that everyone else is waiting for them to play their go and that they’ve not being paying sufficient attention and are now guilt tripped in to making a sub-optimal move. Those are precious golden moments and you rob me of them at your peril.
Do not, for the love of God, bow as if you were Anthony Bloody Sheer in a Jacobean comedy at the Swan Theatre.
When your previously charming, now irksome patter is met, not with a hearty chuckle and a knowing smile but with a stern eye and curt, “You want a what? A bicycle pump? Hold on a minute” do not call me back from my errand down the hall, out the back door of my flat, into the common passage to the under stair coal bunker in which any right thinking person keeps their industrial sized bicycle pump in order to tell me that they fear, dear sir, that I may have misunderstood, they do not crave a donation of cash, nay, none so sordid, merely the loan, short term pro tem as t’were, of a bicycle pump.
Do not take my steely look as an invitation to repeat your business about having a pound coin but not being able to rent a bicycle pump or whatever sub-Beckett monologue you had misremembered from your youth. Do not do so.
Reflect on the coolness of the response, “Aye, as you said five minutes ago, a bicycle pump. I have one. I was fetching it.”
Reflect on the fact that it has now been my turn at Carcasonne for a full ten minutes. Reflect that my children fear they have been orphaned and my wife, unfairly doubting me, wonders if I might have run off to join a firm of accountants. Reflect on the sad truth that my undrunk beer is now unpleasantly warm, whilst my unshod feet are now unpleasantly cold. Further reflect that it was not always so in my benighted home. Once, not so very long ago, before you knocked on my door jabbering about pound coins and bicycle pumps my children had a father, my wife had a husband and I had warm feet and cold laager.
After reflecting, do not, under any circumstances, repeat your opening line, backwards and in Old Scots.
Do not, as you love yourself and honour God, attempt to explain that the reason you need a bicycle pump is because your bicycle has a flat tyre. Pretend we are men of the world you and I, that we understand the ways of things, of commerce, politics and romance, and, pertinently, light mechanical engineering. Suppose that as we go about our business this cold, clear Hogmanay, I in my nice warm, well light flat surrounded by the loving family I see too little of and you, in whatever MC Esheresque frozen hell your pox addled brain has conjured out of the sub-zero wastes of Marchmont and the Meadows, suppose that we both carry in our minds a model of the universe where the only possible reason a stranger would knock on a stranger’s door after dark on Hogmanay presenting unsolicited soliloquys about bicycle pumps is because the stranger of the first part had a flat tyre on their bicycle and wanted to borrow a bicycle pump from the stranger of the second part in order to inflate the offending flat tyre. Take it as read that, in so much as I ever cared why you wanted the thrice blasted bicycle pump in the first place I leapt to the obvious conclusion that you had a flat tyre on your bicycle which you wanted to fix. Assume that I had assumed that you asked for a specific tool in order to do the specific job for which it was conceived, designed and manufactured viz instanter inflating your flat tyre.
Upon receiving the needful pump do not explain your route home to me, with fully costed options. Instead, pump up your tyre.
Do not try to play the bicycle pump as if it were Charlie Parker’s ever loving trumpet. Instead, pump up your tyre.
Do not drop the pump. Then trip over the pump whilst attempting to pick it up and thus spilling a pocketful of pound coins on to my garden path. Take the pump. Say, thank you, and PUMP. UP. YOUR. TYRE.
Remember, punctuality is the politeness of princes and resolve not to keep me a moment longer from my family. Recall the old adage that a good game is a fast game, that it’s been about quarter of an hour now since you dragged me from my board game and that I can barely remember my oldest child’s name let alone the rules of the Carcassonne expansion we are playing.
When I return wondering if you need a hand, do not chide me for looking a little downhearted after discovering that my wife and child having decided I’d been away from our game of Carcasonne for so long that they felt it legitimate to play a few rounds in my name and had “accidentally” ruined the carefully crafted stratagem that I had spent the last hour of play constructing and thus cost me the game. Instead, remember who is doing whom a damn favour here and keep pumping up your bike tyre. So far we are clocking in at half an hour. Half an hour I’ll never get back and which you will never remember.
Whilst it is true that, statistically speaking it is unlikely to happen, admit that in this case, it actually has happened and has happened to me, the man with the cold feet and warm laager, who is currently doing you a favour and that it is still happening to me and looks like it might continue to happen to me for some hours yet where “it” is an unwelcome, unwarranted and overly drawn out attempt by some dismounted bike riding moron to borrow a bike pump from someone who not only has one but would be more than willing to pump up your damned deflated bike tyre himself if only you’d pump off down the road toot sweet.
Consider how much happier we both would be if, with your bike newly road-worthy you were then able to return to celebrating New Year in your way and I in mine, a heart-warming example of a modern, multi-cultural, 21st century Britain at ease with itself where pumpless half-wits and cold laager drinking pump owners are free to enjoy Hogmanay in whatever way seems best to them.
In short get on with it.
When you have a) inflated your bike tyre to your satisfaction, b) gotten bored and wondered off to inflict your loathsome music hall act for one with compulsory bicycle pump accompaniment on some other poor, unsuspecting and largely innocent Edinburgher or c) been recovered by whatever extra-terrestrial asylum you had escaped from remember to comply with the one request your host and benefactor has made of you – to ring the doorbell and return the pump so that it is not at risk of petty theft or seasonal high-jinx. Do not just leave it propped up, fully extended, against the door so that when the door opens for a third time to see if you can be persuaded to deliver on your side of the lend bicycle pump – pump up tyre arrangement this side of 2014 the pump falls inwards, catching the unwary householder full in the goolies and causing him to spill a precious mouthful of the once again cold, amber nectar.
Whilst on balance it was probably better that you had disappeared silently in to the night rather than loiter to deliver a 17 stanza limerick about your gratitude for the loan of bicycle pump to the needy whilst attempting the solo Madison world record most right thinking people consider it at best a faux pas to booby trap someone’s own door with their own bicycle pump. At worst an act of terrorism. Certainly, in Edinburgh, on Hogmanay, damned unpatriotic. You have won no friends by so doing.
Here is your script. Learn it.
You: Hello. Sorry to trouble you. I’ve got a flat tyre. Could I borrow a bike pump please?
Me: Of course.
*fetches bike pump*
Here you go mate. Just ring the doorbell when you’re done so I can come and get the pump back. Students about tonight, eh!
You: Thanks.
*inflates tyre competently and promptly then rings doorbell*
Thanks again. Happy New Year.
Me: My pleasure and a Happy New Year to you.
All *exit*
It’s not a classic I warrant but what it lacks in lyricism it makes up in brevity.
With luck and a decent director we can finish the sordid business of the dialogue and be back doing justice to our steak pie and pint.
I am not misanthropic but for some people I will make an exception.
If you are a stranger and knock on my door at 9pm on New Year’s Eve, requiring the favour of a loan of a bicycle pump and you do not conduct yourself in as business like a fashion as possible then you have become the exception.
By all means open the conversation with the delightful bit of patter, “If I had a pound coin for every time I’ve asked someone for a bike pump this evening I’d still not have the bike pump I really need. On the other hand, if I had a bike pump for every time I’ve asked someone for a bike pump this evening I’d have a bike pump already and I wouldn’t need to trouble you. Hot Dog. Of course, if you had a bike pump for every time you’d been asked for a bike pump this evening, then I ‘d be very happy.”
However, I give you fair warning that if you have rendered yourself incomprehensible through some combination of drink, drugs, lunacy, hypothermia or self-administered novocaine injections to your own tongue and therefore oblige me to ask you to repeat said patter it will go hard with you.
Do not compound this error by capering like Sylvester McCoy wearing Ace’s underwear whilst I stand in my stocking feet in my open door on the coldest night of the winter so far. Bear in mind that I have a well-deserved reputation for being a bit of dick about board game etiquette and that for every minute you keep me here, in my doorway, against my will whilst it is my turn to play in the epic game of Carcasonne raging indoors and that I was, until distracted by your simian pump-begging charade, winning, for every minute lost I lose the vital ability to pause slightly and then ask rhetorically, “Is it my go?” whilst looking over the table at the family member who knows damn well that it’s their go, that it has been their go for the last five minutes, that everyone else is waiting for them to play their go and that they’ve not being paying sufficient attention and are now guilt tripped in to making a sub-optimal move. Those are precious golden moments and you rob me of them at your peril.
Do not, for the love of God, bow as if you were Anthony Bloody Sheer in a Jacobean comedy at the Swan Theatre.
When your previously charming, now irksome patter is met, not with a hearty chuckle and a knowing smile but with a stern eye and curt, “You want a what? A bicycle pump? Hold on a minute” do not call me back from my errand down the hall, out the back door of my flat, into the common passage to the under stair coal bunker in which any right thinking person keeps their industrial sized bicycle pump in order to tell me that they fear, dear sir, that I may have misunderstood, they do not crave a donation of cash, nay, none so sordid, merely the loan, short term pro tem as t’were, of a bicycle pump.
Do not take my steely look as an invitation to repeat your business about having a pound coin but not being able to rent a bicycle pump or whatever sub-Beckett monologue you had misremembered from your youth. Do not do so.
Reflect on the coolness of the response, “Aye, as you said five minutes ago, a bicycle pump. I have one. I was fetching it.”
Reflect on the fact that it has now been my turn at Carcasonne for a full ten minutes. Reflect that my children fear they have been orphaned and my wife, unfairly doubting me, wonders if I might have run off to join a firm of accountants. Reflect on the sad truth that my undrunk beer is now unpleasantly warm, whilst my unshod feet are now unpleasantly cold. Further reflect that it was not always so in my benighted home. Once, not so very long ago, before you knocked on my door jabbering about pound coins and bicycle pumps my children had a father, my wife had a husband and I had warm feet and cold laager.
After reflecting, do not, under any circumstances, repeat your opening line, backwards and in Old Scots.
Do not, as you love yourself and honour God, attempt to explain that the reason you need a bicycle pump is because your bicycle has a flat tyre. Pretend we are men of the world you and I, that we understand the ways of things, of commerce, politics and romance, and, pertinently, light mechanical engineering. Suppose that as we go about our business this cold, clear Hogmanay, I in my nice warm, well light flat surrounded by the loving family I see too little of and you, in whatever MC Esheresque frozen hell your pox addled brain has conjured out of the sub-zero wastes of Marchmont and the Meadows, suppose that we both carry in our minds a model of the universe where the only possible reason a stranger would knock on a stranger’s door after dark on Hogmanay presenting unsolicited soliloquys about bicycle pumps is because the stranger of the first part had a flat tyre on their bicycle and wanted to borrow a bicycle pump from the stranger of the second part in order to inflate the offending flat tyre. Take it as read that, in so much as I ever cared why you wanted the thrice blasted bicycle pump in the first place I leapt to the obvious conclusion that you had a flat tyre on your bicycle which you wanted to fix. Assume that I had assumed that you asked for a specific tool in order to do the specific job for which it was conceived, designed and manufactured viz instanter inflating your flat tyre.
Upon receiving the needful pump do not explain your route home to me, with fully costed options. Instead, pump up your tyre.
Do not try to play the bicycle pump as if it were Charlie Parker’s ever loving trumpet. Instead, pump up your tyre.
Do not drop the pump. Then trip over the pump whilst attempting to pick it up and thus spilling a pocketful of pound coins on to my garden path. Take the pump. Say, thank you, and PUMP. UP. YOUR. TYRE.
Remember, punctuality is the politeness of princes and resolve not to keep me a moment longer from my family. Recall the old adage that a good game is a fast game, that it’s been about quarter of an hour now since you dragged me from my board game and that I can barely remember my oldest child’s name let alone the rules of the Carcassonne expansion we are playing.
When I return wondering if you need a hand, do not chide me for looking a little downhearted after discovering that my wife and child having decided I’d been away from our game of Carcasonne for so long that they felt it legitimate to play a few rounds in my name and had “accidentally” ruined the carefully crafted stratagem that I had spent the last hour of play constructing and thus cost me the game. Instead, remember who is doing whom a damn favour here and keep pumping up your bike tyre. So far we are clocking in at half an hour. Half an hour I’ll never get back and which you will never remember.
Whilst it is true that, statistically speaking it is unlikely to happen, admit that in this case, it actually has happened and has happened to me, the man with the cold feet and warm laager, who is currently doing you a favour and that it is still happening to me and looks like it might continue to happen to me for some hours yet where “it” is an unwelcome, unwarranted and overly drawn out attempt by some dismounted bike riding moron to borrow a bike pump from someone who not only has one but would be more than willing to pump up your damned deflated bike tyre himself if only you’d pump off down the road toot sweet.
Consider how much happier we both would be if, with your bike newly road-worthy you were then able to return to celebrating New Year in your way and I in mine, a heart-warming example of a modern, multi-cultural, 21st century Britain at ease with itself where pumpless half-wits and cold laager drinking pump owners are free to enjoy Hogmanay in whatever way seems best to them.
In short get on with it.
When you have a) inflated your bike tyre to your satisfaction, b) gotten bored and wondered off to inflict your loathsome music hall act for one with compulsory bicycle pump accompaniment on some other poor, unsuspecting and largely innocent Edinburgher or c) been recovered by whatever extra-terrestrial asylum you had escaped from remember to comply with the one request your host and benefactor has made of you – to ring the doorbell and return the pump so that it is not at risk of petty theft or seasonal high-jinx. Do not just leave it propped up, fully extended, against the door so that when the door opens for a third time to see if you can be persuaded to deliver on your side of the lend bicycle pump – pump up tyre arrangement this side of 2014 the pump falls inwards, catching the unwary householder full in the goolies and causing him to spill a precious mouthful of the once again cold, amber nectar.
Whilst on balance it was probably better that you had disappeared silently in to the night rather than loiter to deliver a 17 stanza limerick about your gratitude for the loan of bicycle pump to the needy whilst attempting the solo Madison world record most right thinking people consider it at best a faux pas to booby trap someone’s own door with their own bicycle pump. At worst an act of terrorism. Certainly, in Edinburgh, on Hogmanay, damned unpatriotic. You have won no friends by so doing.
Here is your script. Learn it.
You: Hello. Sorry to trouble you. I’ve got a flat tyre. Could I borrow a bike pump please?
Me: Of course.
*fetches bike pump*
Here you go mate. Just ring the doorbell when you’re done so I can come and get the pump back. Students about tonight, eh!
You: Thanks.
*inflates tyre competently and promptly then rings doorbell*
Thanks again. Happy New Year.
Me: My pleasure and a Happy New Year to you.
All *exit*
It’s not a classic I warrant but what it lacks in lyricism it makes up in brevity.
With luck and a decent director we can finish the sordid business of the dialogue and be back doing justice to our steak pie and pint.
