Some columists are born wutless, others have wutlessness thrust upon them. When Al Gilkes invited me to try out for a NATION spot, I yearned to write lofty diatribes sprinkled with honoris causas and iudicibus dicats.
Instead they saddled me with the Lowdown with its double demands: (1) tell the real story no matter what; (2) keep it earthy and vulgar.
Tennyson Beckles couldn’t write the Lowdown. Not if he sticks to his precious integrity. But what good is integrity if you don’t integrate with your issues? As the young lady told the pope when he was pontificating about contraception, “You no play a da game, you no maka da rules!”
I freely accepted two fish cakes which Owen Arthur brought to my door and in return gave him my loyal and unswerving support. In contrast, David Thompson ensconced himself next to me at Ridley Greene’s birthday party and totalled the fish cakes bowl. Go figure.
Anyway, we now have the issue of the House of Spartacus – private house parties where one wears a mask and nothing else, bar the occasional condom. Patrons may do whatever they like with whomsoever is willing. One gets the impression the organiser wouldn’t object to in depth coverage. But he is totally against anyone going into detail. And he says so “without apology”. Total agreement here, my friend.
Columnist Ricky Jordan has taken a long-distance pot shot, comparing the serpent raising its head in the Garden of Eden and an end to public nakedness. No doubt many serpents raise their heads in Spartacus because of nakedness, but some columnist will have to go in there and get the real lowdown. And you know who that will be.
Antoinette, love, ah begging. Please don’t make me do it. I have a terrible problem with shrinkage. Women have no idea what this does to a man’s psyche.
I mean, on occasion my friend Dr Hoyos puts me in a room and tells me to take off all my clothes while he goes off to tend two other patients and a tennis game.
Next thing, I’m wrestling with this pathetic worm, shaking it like the dickens to bring it to some sort of verisimilitude. A risky business, for should it take in its head to assume full majesty, one might have to quickly wrap it in the blood pressure machine and pump away its mutiny.
The worst case scenario was when I had to have an operation on my Barbados Horticultural Society headquarters. After examining me, Dr Shepherd sketched the procedure on a pad which appeared on a computer screen. And he depicted “it” as a little pointy triangle, the size of a fowl cock’s beak. Accurate, no doubt, but hardly flattering.
Then, after being shaved by an impassive matron, who shifted it this way and that with a tweezers, they took me to the theatre – I now know why they call it a theatre – where a throng of sexy nurses dissolved into gales of mirth as they taped it to one side with a sliver of masking tape and I mercifully lapsed into oblivion.
So, Antoinette, I ’fraid shrinkage in a Spartacus context. And I want out just this once.
Fortunately, however, we’re in luck. There is on the island at this time my brother-in-law Paddy who allegedly has no such challenges. Indeed as an undergraduate in Canada, he clearly demonstrated that the Coefficient of Linear Expansion has no finite limits.
Only recently in an indecent exposure case, the police used him in a waist-down line-up with a suspected miscreant. But the young lady ruled him out right away.
“How can you be so sure?” queried the police.
“Trust me, Officer”, she replied, sneaking another admiring look, “if it were him I never would have complained!”
That’s your man, Antoinette. Wangle an invite and I’m sure he’ll be willing to Spartake and report in depth without going into detail. By the way, I recently mentioned finding a pair of string panties, figuring droves of young ladies would turn up to do a Cinderella-style fitting. No such luck.
However, a Mr Dwight Platt emailed and correctly identified the perfume on them as “Illusion” by Fabragaye.
No need for a try-on, Mr Platt, they’re yours.
• Richard Hoad is a farmer and social commentator.
