The Morris

It is the curse of old age not to forget things but to remember them. My mother said that to me and, not for the first time, she was right.

Me and my mother were laughing at my aborted decision to buy a dartboard. I’d become nostalgic in isolation and pined for the carefree winter of 92 when all of life’s problems could be tuned out by a meditative couple of hours chucking arrows.

Thirty years later and I’m thinking of turning my front room into the Lakeside of yore. Fuck it. Who needs two sofas? Get rid of one, stick a board up, kill the remaining years with trebles and bullseyes.

The day I came home to find my girl had gone and my son with her was the day I played darts for five hours solid. Just on my own. Not knowing what to do. Telling myself that if I could get a ton with the next three darts, she’d be back and we could start again. And the next three darts. Change it up. Go for 120. She loves you, she’s just flipped and the moment she realises her parents are only too happy to hate me a little more, she’ll be back.

140. 2 treble twentys and a twenty. Or double top, double 15 and bull. Yeah she’s coming back. Got the yips now you tell yourself. Can’t hit the bull. Love or fucking money. Not a chance.

Alright, fuck it, maximum. All in. If I get the 180 here, she’s not only coming back but we’re going to be happy.

I don’t even notice it’s got dark outside.

Rituals, patterns, codes, signifiers, trends. All my life letting chance and fate and coincidence and randomness guide me rather than just be a soundtrack that occasionally takes over the narrative. The first girl to kiss me was born in January. The second in October. The third in February. Now I’m chasing girls born in November. Whenever I watch the Villa in the Boar they lose, can’t watch the game in the Boar, they lose when I do. No matter that the Villa are shit, no matter that right now we’ve got a forward line of Guy Whittingham and fucking John Fashanu. It’s all down to me and the fucking Boar. Got to watch them in the Pops. They won when you watched them down there. And so on.

I like patterns. I don’t mean wallpaper or fucking shirts. I like patterns. I see things in them. The number of letters in the names of the last three girls I slept with is 11 in each. My daughter was born on the 11th day of the 11th month. Tony Morley. Number 11. 11 letters in my name. Son’s date of birth. 3rd of August. 3+8=11. What’s the house number of the empty room in which I’m throwing darts in the dark to turn my life around? Number 11.

Alabama. Alaska. Arizona. Arkansas. Accrington Stanley. AFC Bournemouth. AFC Wimbledon. Things I say to myself to get myself to sleep. Remember the US states in alphabetical order. The 92 clubs of the football league. Goalkeepers in FA Cup Finals from 1971 onwards. The chronological order of New Order singles, Coen Brothers films and every job I ever had. These night time tortures are only another manifestation of my mind, always wanting to make some kind of order of a universe that has never demanded much of me in return.

This is how the Morris got out of hand.

The Morris was a greasy spoon to end all greasy spoons. The kind of place that environmental health officers would call lawless. A place to harden the arteries just by sitting down. The Morris Tea Rooms. Laughable those last two words. There was nothing dainty or genteel about the Morris. And to me, 19 year old me with my secret, laughable ideas about becoming a writer one day, this was a place to people watch like no other.

I couldn’t believe what a treasure trove of stuff I’d walked into. The prices were bizarre. Nothing was to the quid or the fifty pence. A plate of sausage, eggs and chips was £2.38. A cup of tea was 57p. The food was extraordinary. Man’s food. The kind of man who didn’t plan on seeing 40. Soon me and my friends were regulars. Morris became a verb. The other cafes in town would have to do without us. The Tea Chest with it’s selling point of being up a load of fucking stairs. She loved the Tea Chest. With it’s wide range of jacket potatoes and beautiful china teapots. £3.99 for a fucking spud and some tuna. In 1990. A scandal. Or there was The Seashell. Or The Coffee Pot. Or the West End, purveyors of easily the worst chips in the western world. The Old Curiosity Shop was never entered because of a rule I had just invented about never going anywhere named after a Dickens novel. It was popular with the kind of people that I wrote off as losers, losers because they dared to study and settle down and have ambitions and dreams. Mortgage chasing fools, I would say to myself, as I opened up a Daily Mirror at the horse racing page.

The Morris became a temple for directionless, godless me and my fellow pilgrims on the road from salvation. The tea was served in little plastic Typhoo pots. They leaked easily and, if you were to unfortunately put a pot down on some tea-stained formica, would move like curling stones. The tea, of course, tasted like café tea always did back then. A scalding mix of ashtray and industrial Britain. The full breakfast was sausage, eggs, beans, black pudding and bacon. And fried bread. And if that wasn’t enough to tempt as unsophisticated a palate as mine, raised as it was on working class British fare, then there were chips too. Chips for fucking breakfast. Heaven.

With all the imagination in the world at our behest, we dubbed the blonde waitress with the long neck “Giraffe.” A similar degree of wit and class changed the name of Mr Shute, a regular in the window seat by the front door. We had our regular table. We would race pots of tea, pick horses for bets we wouldn’t get around to making and invent a language and terminology for the rare friends we deemed worthy of inviting to join us. A Continental was a fried breakfast with peas. A Rob was a ham and peas. Mr Morris was only too delighted with the sudden uptake in student customers. I rarely paid full price. Mr Morris saw me for who I was, a revolutionary in greasy food appreciation, Fidel Gastro, Café Guevara. Our number grew, the terminology spread, the rituals became more and more ornate and sacrosanct.

My friends got their shit together. Some of them anyway. And now here I was, darts in my hand, telling myself that 170 with the next three darts would bring my family back. I’d not even heard of The Dice Man, yet alone read it. I had a digital watch which I would consult before making any decision. Stopwatch feature. Click go. Ask it a question. “Should I go to the pub?” The higher the hundredths of a second when I finally clicked was a percentage of favourability. A 98% success you say. Pub it is. 14% - fuck it, let’s go anyway. And if a shit time ensued, it was your own fault for ignoring the Magic Watch.

My friend Darren became obsessed with the Magic Watch, blutacked it to a wall in the front room of the house I ended up sharing when I lost everything, dartboard included. Not a decision was made in that house without consultation. A crazy house. Andrew with his bed shitting, rampant alcoholism and mute girlfriend. Matt with his horror films. Poor Kim, working hard, looking after everyone, not joining in the drinking and the drugs and being the first of us to die, not even 40 and fucking cancer took her. Darren with his regime of medication necessary to give him dignity. Mike with his drugs and his crazy Irish girlfriend. Me with my silent pain and crazed rituals. My new girlfriend with all her secret hurt that I was unwillingly adding to with each of my irritating acts of desperate stupidity.

I stopped going to the Morris when I saw how popular it had got. I was the worst kind of snob like that. I’d go off bands the moment their talent got them fame. It wasn’t the same when everyone else liked it. I can’t remember the last time I went. Maybe one day I’ll remember that occasion, vividly, like my mother said and it won’t be a happy memory at all.

So, I’m not buying a dartboard. I’m buying a new sofa. I’m going to sit on it and get fat and wait to grow old and see what else the past brings me.