Be Excellent To Each Other

‘. . . in and tonic would be fablious yes. Very kind of you I must say to buy a fellow a drink . . . erm? Oswaldo . . . you’re Spanish I’m guessing? Here for the antique market tomorrow morning? . . . No I just guessed, we get a lot of Spanish, Italians, Germans coming over to buy antiques, take 'em back to their own countries, tidy little profit and no questions asked, eh? No need to worry round here mate, centuries old tradition of larceny. Murder, smuggling, prostitution, Oliver Twist wasn’t set in these parts for nothing.
Changed a bit now of course. All the old warehouses and tanneries down Bermondsey Street are antique places, well, some are being made into loft style apartments. Do they have them in Madrid? . . No, thought not, bit of a bloody silly idea really. My name’s Graham, pleased to meet you Oswaldo. Do you know the history of the market? People say if you sell something at the market before the sun comes up and it turns out it’s stolen then you can’t be done for receiving, a sort of Middle Ages thing, that’s why it starts at 4 a.m. Load of bollocks, cojones you know. The market came here to Bermondsey Square in the 1920s, used to be
round the Great Caledonian Meat Market, up at Holloway, closed down during the First World War so they came here.
Staying at the Holiday Inn in Rotherhithe? Yeah a few of the dealers and other single businessmen stay there, some pitch up here to this pub. Go for an early evening stroll up the river, gets dark, they get lost, nothing around but railway arches and gloomy warehouses. Panic, it being somewhat bleak around these parts, specially on a foggy night such as
this, see the pub all lit up and cozy, coziness being a relative term if you know what I mean, Oswaldo, and pop in. Takes a bit of nerve though or a failure to grasp the subtle signihers
that say ‘rough boozer, stay well clear’, I tell you, Oswaldo, if you were at home you would run a mile from the Madrid branch of Simon the Tanner. Actually, it’s all right now but it used to be a bloody rough old dive, much better now, new landlord see, the old one was a right fucking bastard but he disappeared. What’s the Spanish for cunt . . . is it really? I must remember that for if I ever meet Antonio Banderas eh?
Interesting story though, the last landlord . . . no let me pay for this one . . . Gerry same again . . . Cheers, salud, I used to be able to say cheers in about twenty languages - ‘Salia’, that’s it in Arabic, wouldn’t think Muslims would say cheers but there you are, ‘Kyppis’, that’s Finnish, now those cunts do drink. Part of my job in a way . . . no, hah ha I’m not a professional drinker but the next best thing . . . motoring correspondent . . . Auto Mail, know it? We have a deal with your own ‘Noticias Des Coches’, I tell you compadre it is the life and no mistake. 'That’s why I bought the flat in the block next door, did you see it . . . Tanners Yard, converted tannery . . . lovely big flats, I know I went on about lofts but these are just lovely big flats, lovely metal Victorian windows and ironwork, stripped wooden floors. Thing that appealed to me though was the secure parking . . . the whole basement is one big car park . . . automatic gates, CCTV surveillance. See, in my job I’ve got a different flash motor every week and a lot of them you can’t leave on the street. Imagine, stick a Bentley
Azure Continental or a Subaru Impreza Turbo outside this boozer, David Copperfield couldn’t make it vanish faster. So I was dead keen on the place and a pub next door, couldn’t be, better, would have been better without Richard . . . the old landlord. To look at me now you wouldn’t think that once I was a fat man would you? . . . No indeed that’s very kind of you. I was though, very fat indeed. It’s the job you see, they fly us out to all these fablious places, the car makers, and they wine and dine us, wine, wine, wine and dine, dine us. Putting on weight though, you put it on then you can’t take it off.
It’s like those people in the old days- who stole a loaf and were transported to Australia for life, for this tiny crime.
You eat a delicious tagine of baby lamb and dried fruits at the launch of the Talbot Solara in Agadir, remember them? Bloody good on paper . . . shit on the road! Actually shit on paper as well. Anyway, you eat this meal and you put on the fat and it won't bloody go away, honestly I could point to a roll of fat and say, ‘Morris Marina roll out . . . roast pheasant and a Montrachet '47 or Toyota Supra launch, California '89, blue fin tuna in a salsa verde and a bathful of Napa Valley Chardonnay.' I’ll tell you a secret of my trade, the worse the car, the better the launch. If you’ve got a brilliant car then you can make journos come to you, they never roll out Mercedes in Tuscany, they fly you to Stuttgart for an afternoon and you can like it or lump it. If you’ve got a dog of a car then different rules apply. Then, you get the
hacks locked up on some paradise island for a week, they’re bound to write about your motor because they’ve wasted a week of magazine time in the Caribbean, see? Oh there’s been some larks on those trips . . . I’ve personally written off a Daewoo Leganza and a Mitsubishi Shogun and old Billy Ketts of the Express was doing a photo shoot at sunset on the beach at Cannes with the Mark Two Granada, when the fucking tide comes in. Well the old Mark Two granny was a good enough motor in its way but it didn’t fucking float, I can tell you that for nada.
All the time the weight is going on and on. I jogged, I lifted weights, I did aerobics. Nothing made any difference.
Plus I’m a sociable chap, have a deep craving for the company of other fellows in a shallow, meaningless and uncommitted sort of way. Pub’s perfect for that, as long as you don’t think that pub friends are real friends. Downside is, pub friends can be rather nasty in a jocular way if you've got any sort of imperfection. They fasten on to it. Holocaust mentality masquerading as matey joshing.
So they were always going on about the fatness, here in Simon the Tanner, fatness being considered fair game even though it’s recognised as a genuine medical condition by the American Medical Association. I mean if there was somebody in this pub who was an amputee they wouldn’t call them ‘stumpy’. Well, they probably would in here but you take my general point? The bleeding landlord, the governor was the worst . . . Richard always going on about who ate the pies . . . empanadas you call them Oswaldo. ‘You’re looking porkier Graham you fat bastard, you fat bastard, you fat bastard' Obesity though, it’s the curse of our age isn’t it?
I mean your Edwardians could eat those huge breakfasts without putting on an ounce, talk about your full English, full continent of Europe more like! It’s got to be said cars are at fault for weight gain, cars and central heating to my mind because your Edwardians, they walked everywhere and they were always cold in them big houses. It’s the holy grail isn’t it? A way to hang on to all our comforts and stay slim?
What would people do for that, eh Oswaldo?
All that fat stuff got me down, in the end I started going to other boozers, one particular one down by your hotel. Spice Island it’s called, big barn of a place, lovely girls behind the bar. I have to admit, Oswaldo, that I often drove down there, very bad when you’re drinking, no excuse for it really apart from the bastard landlord here had forced me into it. So, anyway, one night I’d had a skinful at Spice Island and I was driving back along Bermondsey Wall, I had the new Volvo C70 coupé, bit of a disappointment to my mind, doesn’t give you what they call ‘the lob on’, if you catch my drift. I’m sticking to the quiet streets along the river so the coppers don’t catch me because obviously a ban would be the end of my so-called career. When suddenly this arsehole on a penny farthing bicycle swerves into my path! Honestly Oswaldo, I didn’t have any time at all to react, I just smashed straight into him. He crashes head first on to the cobbles. I jam on the anchors go back to take a look. Turns out it’s
Richard on his way back from one of his fucking moronic Masonic drinking clubs. Mister Pickwick’s Bicycle Society.
Well that straw boater did not offer much crash protection I can tell you, he was dead Oswaldo, dead as a doorknob.
Want to go Oswaldo? Why’s the door locked? It’s what’s called ‘a lock in’, see we still have these stupid drinking laws in this country. Legally, this pub should have stopped serving an hour ago, so everybody has to be locked in, in case the coppers come around - it’ll seem all quiet from the outside. Nothing to worry about, go on have another
drink . . . there you go . . . now where was I? Oh yeah, so he’s lying there and there’s no way I can get caught with him, so as I said in my review ‘for a sporty 2.5 turbo-charged coupé the C70 certainly has a capacious boot, capable of swallowing several bags of golf clubs or one dead fucking cunt of a publican,’ I didn’t write that last bit of course. I chucks the penny farthing into the Thames, then what I do is I sticks him in the boot and I drives him back here, next door, to the underground car park of my block. Now at that time I was the only one living in the entire block, I’d moved in before the building work was completed. The developers had got into some sort of dispute with the builders and they walked off the job so work hadn’t progressed for about three months. The car park was completely empty . . . not much changed from when it was the cellar of the tannery. I still had to hide him though. What I did was I dragged him out of the boot and I had a shufty around. In one comer I find a load of tools left behind by the tanners: rusty knives and saws and implements for doing God knows what to a carcass. So I gets one of the saws, then I chops him up into bits, head, legs, arms, torso, that sort of thing till he was sort of a kit of Richard. Then I stuffed his bits up one of the chimneys that they had down there. By then it was 3 a.m. I was pissed, I was in shock and I was knackered, I just needed to sleep on it then I’d figure out what to do with him, so I went to bed.
Had one of the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had, to tell you the truth, straight nine hours. Got a shock when I woke up though, the fucking builders were back! I staggered down to the basement and I nearly shit! They’d lit a fire under Richard! They were burning scraps of the oak fioorboards.
Furthermore I couldn’t get to him at night because they’d put this idiot Geordie security man in there. Always prowling about with his mangy Alsatian. I tell you every day I was expecting the police to pull me in. They kept burning wood in that fireplace as well, until I had a bit of luck, after a couple of weeks the builders fell out with the developers again and they quit. So I was able to go and get him that night. If you’re wondering by the way if he’d been missed, the answer is not that much. Publicans are always going missing, it’s that kind of game, attracts that kind of person, itinerant you see, usually they scarper with the week’s takings but seeing as he hadn’t nobody was mounting too much of a search. As far as anyone was concerned he’d just vanished into fat air.
When I got him down from the chimney that night, guess what? He’d been smoked! Smoked like a kipper! Smoked just like your own jamon de Serrano, I remember we had some lovely slices of that when they launched the Fiat Uno. Well I have to say I did a strange thing then, I carved myself a slice of him and I popped it in my mouth. Tasty, very tasty but filling too. A couple of slices and I felt full up, there always was only so much of Richard that I could take. Thing was, I felt energetic too, I hauled him upstairs to my flat bit by bit and I hung him in a cupboard.
Over the next few weeks I found that if I had a couple of slices of smoked Richard in the morning then I didn’t want to eat anything for the rest of the day. I was happy to turn down all the snacks and titbits that had blobbed me out before. Plus I was absolutely brimming with vigour, I hadn’t felt so well for years. I looked great too, sleek and confident, a fat man who’s lost his fat is a happy man. The pounds fell off me until I was down to my perfect weight - Gerry here replaced Richard at the pub, a much more genial fellow and life was good. Two things though. Pretty soon folk started asking me what my secret was and I started to run out of Richard. Now it would obviously be a risky business for me to try and replace him on my own, so after a while a solution occurred to me. What I did was I quietly asked around until I’d recruited a network of wealthy clients who wanted to remain sleek and svelte while partaking of the good things in life. Then I collected a crew of helpers from around these parts, only a variation on what they’d been doing for centuries if you think about it. Finally as for erm . . . what you might call the raw material . . . well foreigners that nobody is going to miss, dodgy characters without attachments are a good start . . . did you like that last drink, Oswaldo? Haven’t been able to move your legs for the last couple of minutes have you? Arms are heavy too. That’s right, well it should reach your brain at any mo . . .’