6. An Appetite For Weighty Matters

What Ho Proles!

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.

The old Bard certainly cracked the nail on its bulbous end a few times. At least, he had it right in that life does idle along somewhere in the neutral until we do something that provokes some equal and opposite response, which, I might add, usually involves a chap ruining a perfectly good pair of trousers. But what I can’t recollect is the sin I must have committed to provoke the response that came in the form of The Honourable Frederick Finley. This is a child, remember, whose hairline poorly conceals the marks denoting his satanic heritage.

I spied him when I went downstairs for breakfast the next morning, the sight of which quite put me off my grub and, judging from the number of bangers being indifferently pushed around plates, I’d hesitate to say I was the only one. From what I’d heard, the boy had recently made himself the object of much Tory loathing when he threw an apple at the car bringing a few of the Tory big wigs to the Hall. The apple had narrowly missed Michael Howard and sent David Davies into SAS mode, rolling about the gravel and calling in air support. The embarrassing incident had clearly not been forgotten by any of the candidates who were spread around the dining room as though they were all trying to keep away from the little tyrant.

I had an instinct to do the same but, as I was looking for a place to sit well away from that source of all evil, a hand began to signal to me from a large table at the end of the room not too far away from Frederick F.

‘Ah, thought it was you J.P.,’ said Barry Fry Davis, one of the Welsh Tories.

‘What Ho Welsh Tory!’ I said to him. ‘How’s the bacon?’

‘Excellent grub,’ he said, waving a sausage in the air. ‘Try the bangers. Lovely.’

I grabbed a plate of chow and sat down with Barry who has always been my favourite MP west of Wrexham. He’s a rotund man, balding, with an eye for the ladies but an unshakable belief in bachelorhood. He’s also a patron of the arts and has been known to dress up in silly get-ups to read some of his own poetry at the Eisteddfod. He has a cracking little rhyme involving a milk-maid, a packed of digestive hobnobs, and a dictionary salesman from Rhyl. You should get him to recite it to you some time.

‘I see the saboteur is still in our midst,’ I said, nodding towards the nearby corner table where young Frederick was spooning egg into his mouth.

‘Damn brat woke me at six blowing a bugle from his bedroom window,’ said Barry. ‘Somebody should give him a ruddy good thrashing with the whole brass section of the BBC Light Symphony Orchestra.’

‘A clearly troubled child,’ I agreed and explained about my adventures in the mud the previous afternoon.

Barry’s face darkened in that way only Welsh faces can darken. It was like watching Tom Jones being forced to sit through the Worthington Trombone Society’s cover of ‘Delilah’. ‘He’s a bad one, J.P.,’ he said. ‘I overheard his father talking yesterday. It seems that the boy has taken up the politics of nihilism.’

‘You don’t mean he’s joined UKIP!’ I gasped.

‘Worse than that,’ he replied. ‘He’s become an anarchist.’

‘Oh,’ I said, breathing a sigh of relief. ‘I could have told you that yesterday. Thought there was something very odd about the way he went about eating that apple. Definite anarchist leanings in his choice of a Golden Delicious. Apples for French Socialists, don’t you know?’

Our conversation came to a halt as a woman larger than the broadest girdle entered the dining room. She was followed by an even bigger fellow whose bright yellow braces would have lit up the otherwise drab room had they not resembled some kind of emergency strapping that one was immediately aware might give way at any moment.

‘Rosa Shaw,’ explained Barry. ‘She’s the candidate for R---- L----. Probably win it too. Very sharp mind. Claims to read Proust and understand it too. That’s Jenkins, her campaign manager. Rumours are that they’re a couple, which is a little too New Labour if you ask me. Jenkins is married with three kids.’

‘All very Proustian though,’ I replied as I watched the two figures grab two rather meagre plates of food before and head off to the corner table next to that of the Honourable Frederick Finley. The little anarchist gave them a rueful smile before returning to his eggs, whereas I, seeing all the key players in my weekend plans gathered together, had the perfect opportunity to consider the task ahead.

Rosa Shaw was clearly of that breed of woman of whom the better class of newspapers describe as ‘at home with her size’. And all power to her chubby elbow, say I, a man of six feet and more who has never been able to get much fat on the bone. I admire all people who take a detour around the middle ground of average and Rosa Shaw carried her size with same degree of confidence her sister gained from gaining black belts in obscure martial arts.

Her companion appeared to be less assured about his size, though to be fair to the poor chap, his clothes were on the enormous size of ‘loose fitting’. The poor fellow was gasping as soon as he started to work his fork between his plate and his chin. ‘Unhealthy’ was the adjective that sprang to mind, followed quickly by ‘asthmatic’ and ‘breathless’.

‘He doesn’t seem long for this earth,’ I whispered to Barry.

‘You mean Jenkins? Oh, he’s been like that for donkey’s years, but if you ask this slightly overweight Welshman, I’d say Melvin’s looking a darn sight better than I’ve ever seen him. He’s lost quite a bit of weight.’

I looked again at Rosa Shaw’s campaign manager and realised that perhaps there was some slackness around the collar and an undeniable bagginess in his suit. He could quite easily be a fat man on the slow path to trim and I could see that coming up with a plan that would separate this pair would require utter secrecy, lashings of guile, wit, cunning, and a careful eye to the heart rate monitors.