All right for some

The only cinema within a 30-mile radius of my home is an Art cinema in a 400-year-old barn. A thatched 400-year-old barn. If the nonsense being shown is the latest cutting-edge nonsense, cottage-based intellectuals flock there from miles around. And to see these intellectuals en masse in the bar before the film is to begin to understand why Guinean President Francisco Nguema had them all executed, then banned the use of the word ‘intellectual’. Admittedly, Nguema, who ordered that church sermons include references to him as ‘The Only Miracle’, may not have been thinking clearly at the time. He had a chip on his shoulder because he failed the Spanish civil service exam three times.

I have no such chip on my shoulder, however. It was conclusively revealed to me at school that I was a fool, had always been a fool and would die a fool; and at the school I went to, you took that as a compliment. And looking around at the local intelligentsia self-consciously sipping their pre-film dry white wines at the bar, I realised I was right to do so. The last time I saw congenital feebleness in both sexes as bad as that, the whole litter had to be destroyed.

But I might not have been thinking very clearly at the time, either. Grief-stricken still after my team’s narrow defeat in the FA Cup Final, I’d been in the pub for three days previously growing a beard. And being that sort of a pub, various concerned parties had recommended (and provided the means, by sleight of hand when the landlord wasn’t looking) that I supplement the beer and fags with illegal drugs.

And for two days after that I’d been ill: physically, with a hangover that became a chest infection; and mentally, with paranoia.