Julian and I

It was a lizard’s tongue-flick after
England One Germany Four in the World Cup
when armies of churlish chair-hurling Anglo-Saxons
who apparently aren’t Germanic in any way
mid-stanza stopped caterwauling about two world wars
and nineteen sixty-six AD or BC (no-one remembers),
and as a thousand thousand flags of Saint George
snuggled up to banana skins
again,
my rotund computer-programming Swabian chumlet
who’d been named after the son of a walrus
trotted barefoot through the puddled
concrete plastic neon rosehip-sprinkled
streets of Lewisham. I asked,
“Julian, where are your shoes?” 
He replied, chortling like a coalminer 
at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, 
“In Germany we don’t need Jews!”
and I reacted in the British way, thinking
“Nothing to do with me, God, that was
his sin, not mine.”

As we trekked beer-guided supermarketwards he added,
“I’m so glad I’m in England
where I can tell jokes like that,
back home I wouldn’t get away with it!”
Well done, mate,
hitlerious.
To circumcise a long story,
we ambled into a lake of 
skinheads in England football shirts
and tattoos that said “Mum” and “Millwall”
and Julian turned into a gameshow host,
quizzing them, “Can you guess which country I’m from?”

The lemming in my brain chewed his claws
as the guesses flew past, “Norwegian” 
and “Swedish” and “South African”, before,
in a flailing attempt to stop World War Three
erupting outside a Croatian hairdresser’s shop,
I cut in, “He’s Dutch! He’s Dutch!”
and before I could add that he was born 
in a windmill, eats tulips and is always
stoned, there rose an Alp of indignation,
“I’m not Dutch! Don’t insult me!”
and so the lemming scampered
round and round in his wheel
to “Zimbabwean”, then “Danish”, then “German”,
then                                               complete
                     silence.

“Where’s your shoes, you cunt?”

“Well, actually,” enlightened Julian,
the hole in the ground spreading into a canyon,
“I lost my shoes in a bet
that England would beat Germany in the football.”

                                 more
                                                      silence,
and I stood there imagining steel-tipped boots in earholes 
and fists with “Aunty Doris” printed on them
crashing into grinning teeth
but instead there were laughs
and smiles
and Heil Hitlers
and the skinheads mooched cheerily 
on their way, singing something that sounded like
“Port Salut, Salut,
whatever is Brie, is Brie,
so choose your cheese caerphilly,
Port Salut, Salut”
but probably wasn’t.

Three years later 
in the Stuttgart Schlossgarten
Julian and I found ourselves benched beside 
a disarranged aged tramp 
agent-oranged by vodka and shouting 
Heil Hitler!
Heil Hitler!
Heil Hitler!
Heil Hitler!
Heil Hit
before the handkerchief-headed
rolled-up-trouser-legged
fish-and-chip-scoffing
saucy-postcard-scribbling
cricket-bat-brandishing 
tea-with-extended-pinkie-finger-sipping
genocidal-civilian-massacring-maniac-quoting 
war-lover
that prowls around deep deep deep down 
inside even the most European of island-monkeys
burst gushing red white blue in every direction out of me
with a two-fingered 
“We shall fight them on the beaches!
We shall fight them in the streets!
We shall never surrender!
I have nothing to offer but blood
sweat
and tears,
ENGLAND!

ENGLAND!”

To which our damp-trousered neighbour replied,
“Heil Hitler!”, and then,
“Heil Hitler!”, and then,
unexpectedly,
“Barack Obama!”