‘My dear Phil. Cue rheumy tear and violins. This was when you were stuffing newspaper into your shoes as you trudged to your holiday job at t’mill?’
‘Fuck off, Dick.’
‘Claude says this is the last week for Sevilles.’
‘I knew it. I’m going to miss out again.’
‘There’s a pun in Shakespeare on “Seville” and “civil”. Not that I can remember what it is.’
‘You can freeze them, you know.’
‘You should see our freezer already. I don’t want it to become an even greater repository of guilt.’
‘Sounds like those damn bankers – repositories of gilt.’
‘They don’t look very guilty.’
‘I was trying to make a pun, sweetie.’
‘Who’s Claude?’
‘He’s our greengrocer. He’s French. Actually, French Tunisian.’
‘Well, that’s another thing. How many of your traditional shopkeepers are English any more? Around here, anyway. A quarter, a third?’
‘Speaking of which, did I tell you about the home bowel-screening kit the government kindly sent me now I’m officially an old git?’
‘Dick, must you?’
‘I promise not to offend, though the temptation is glittering.’
‘It’s just that you get so potty-mouthed with booze.’
‘Then I shall be demure. Prim. Leave everything to the imagination. They send you this kit, with a plasticky envelope in which to send back the – how shall I put it? – necessary evidence. Two specimens taken on each of three separate days. And you have to fill in the date of each sample.’
‘How do you… capture the sample? Do you have to fish it out?’
‘No, on the contrary. It must be uncontaminated by water.’
‘Then…’
‘I have promised to restrict myself to the language of Miss Austen. I’m sure they had paper towels and little cardboard sticks back then, and probably a nursery game called Catch It If You Can.’
‘Dick.’
‘That reminds me, I had to see a proctologist once, and he told me one way to check my condition – whatever it was, I deliberately forget – was to squat down over a mirror on the floor. Somehow, I thought I’d rather risk whatever it was I might be getting.’
‘Doubtless some of you are wondering why I raised the subject.’
‘It’s because you get potty-mouthed with booze.’
‘A sufficient but not a necessary condition. No, you see, I did my first test last Thursday, and I was just about to do the next one the next day until I realised. Friday the 13th. Not an auspicious day. So I did it on the Saturday instead.’
‘But that was -’
‘Exactly. St Valentine’s Day. Love me, love my colon.’
‘How often do you think that happens, Friday the 13th followed by Valentine’s Day?’
‘Pass.’
‘Pass.’
‘When I was a boy – a lad – a young man – I don’t think I sent a single valentine or got one. It just wasn’t what… people I knew did. The only ones I’ve had have come since I’ve been married.’
‘Joanna, aren’t you worried by that?’
‘No. He means, I send them.’
‘Ah, sweet. Indeed, schweeeet.’
‘You know, I’ve heard of your famous English emotional reticence, but that really does set the bar high. Not sending valentines till after you’re married.’
‘I read that there was a possible link between Seville oranges and bowel cancer.’
‘Did you really?’
‘No, but it’s the sort of thing you say when it gets late.’
‘You’re funnier when you don’t strain so much.’
‘I remember one of the first times I went into a lavatory stall and read the graffiti, there was one that said, “Do not bite the knob while straining.” It took me about five years to work it out.’
‘Is that knob as in knob?’
‘No, it’s knob as in doorknob.’
‘Changing the subject entirely, I was in a stall once and taking my leisure when I noticed something written down at the bottom of the side wall at a sort of slant. So I bent over until I could read it, and it said, “You are now crapping at an angle of 45 degrees.”’
‘I would just like to say that the reason I mentioned marmalade…’
‘Apart from its link to bowel cancer.’
‘Is because it’s such a British phenomenon. Larry was saying how we’re now all the same. So instead of saying the Royal Family or whatever, I said marmalade.’
‘We have it in the States.’
‘You have it, in little pots in hotels at breakfast. But you don’t make it in your homes, you don’t understand it.’
‘The French have it. Confiture d’orange.’
‘Same thing applies. That’s just jam. Orange jam.’
‘No, it’s French to begin with, it comes from “Marie malade”. That Queen of Scotland who had French connections.’
‘FCUK. They were here already?’
‘And Mary, Queen of Scots, or Bloody Mary, or whoever it was, was ill. And they made it for her. So Marie malade – marmalade. See?’
‘I think we were there already.’
‘Anyway, I’ll tell you why we Brits will always remain British.’
‘Don’t you hate the way everyone says “the UK” or just “UK” nowadays? Not to mention “UK plc” and all that.’
‘I think Tony Blair started it.’
‘I thought you blamed everything on Mrs Thatcher.’
‘No, I’ve switched. It’s all Blair’s fault now.’
‘“UK plc”’s just honest. We’re a trading nation, always were. Thatch just reconnected us to the real England that is for ever England – money-worshipping, self-interested, xenophobic, culture-hating. It’s our default setting.’
‘As I was saying, do you know what we also celebrate on February the 14th, apart from St Valentine’s Day?’
‘National Bowel-Screening Day?’
‘Shut up, Dick.’
‘No. It’s also National Impotence Day.’
‘I lurv your Breedish sense of yumor.’
‘I lurv your Croatian accent.’
‘But it’s true. And if anyone asks me about national characteristics, or irony, for that matter, that’s what I tell them: February the 14th.’
‘Blood oranges.’
‘Let me guess. Named after Bloody Mary.’
‘Did you notice a few years ago they started calling blood oranges “ruby oranges” in supermarkets? Just in case anyone thought they might really contain blood.’
‘As opposed to containing rubies.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Anyway, they’re just about coming into the shops, so they’re overlapping with Sevilles, and I was wondering if that happens as often, say, as Friday the 13th precedes Valentine’s Day.’
‘Joanna, that’s another reason I love you. You’re able to impose narrative coherence on the likes of us at this time of night. What could be more flattering than a hostess who can make her guests imagine they’re sticking to the point?’
‘Put that on next year’s Valentine, Phil.’
‘And does everyone agree tonight’s blood or ruby orange salad was fit to set before a queen?’
‘And the neck-of-lamb stew fit to be set before a king.’
‘Charles the First’s final request.’
‘He wore two shirts.’
‘Charles the First?’
‘On the day he was beheaded. It was extremely cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering and have Ye People believe he was frightened.’
‘That’s pretty British.’
‘All those people who dress up in period costume and fight Civil War battles all over again. That’s very British too, I always think.’
‘Well, we do it in the States. I guess in lots of other countries too.’
‘OK, but we did it first. We invented it.’
‘Like your cricket and your soccer and your Devonshire cream teas.’
‘If we can stick to marmalade for the moment.’