1942

So I’m at a midweek football match in a dreary fishing town in the northern half of England with a cousin of a friend I met at a Salvation Army wedding last Spring in Anglesey where I was dumped by my first wife when she realised where the money she had been left by her drunken mother had been unwisely and yet ironically invested.

The match is tense – there are fouls on both sides and the referee is barely in control of the proceedings. Not being a local I am disinclined to overtly take sides but politely shout along with my cousin who gets particularly animated when the opposition’s centre half takes liberties with the shins of the local team’s defence. I’m not really one for football. It’s all working class hopes, bad beer, poor distractions, rotten teeth, bad tempers, forlorn hope and – frankly – a waste of damned time. But he enjoys it and so I feel compelled to barkit wi’ him, as the other bard once so eloquently put it, if only to take his mind off the fact that the factory had closed down and that the new tenants in the flat had brought along a sick child who was prone to crying a lot during the night and who would keep him awake once he moves back in with the girl he met two weeks ago at the Fulton Club when she asked him for a dance and he came back with a retort so witty that she knew their fates were to be forever connected.

Anyway.

The referee makes some ill-advised decision and the crowd makes its deepest feelings known. One guy with less wit than the others calls the referee a cunt. One other shouts out that the referee had been on the drink before the game. Amidst the booze-associated catcalls I hear my cousin shout the words ‘frisky whisky’ at the referee and laugh mildly to himself. He makes no sense in doing so, but only wanted to take part in the shouting and, not being of a great intellect, shouted the first rhyming couplet associated with drink that came into his mind. He is probably regretting it now, but he says nothing.

On the other hand, the expression perturbs me. I have to know what he meant by it and why he shouted it. And one day I will find out. Whatever it takes. One day – I swear - I will.