I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [57]
‘Thanks, Alan. How can I help?’ she replied, three hours later (we were chatting via email – the ‘you’re looking well’ thing was just me taking a chance).
‘I wanted to ask about half-day rates for your conference room, please,’ I responded, instantly – we were still on email but my assistant had my phone set up so it beeped when anything dropped into my inbox. ‘PS Do you still ache for me?’ I had half a mind to add, but probably in a slightly smaller font so as not to embarrass the poor woman.
A lot of the other staff were pretty joyless, which I thought was a shame because it really was a quality establishment – everything was premier but the price, as Dawn French’s former squeeze would say. That lack of passion was typified by a pair of the hotel’s younger employees. One was a guy called Ben, the other was a girl who often had her hair in a bun. My abiding memory of them is that they were having a relationship. Either that or they were brother and sister, I forget which.
Like I say, though, the one that stood out was Michael. By the time I left Linton I’d ‘converted’ him. He was no longer just an employee paid to do my bidding. He was now a friend, who did my bidding. I was dead glad to have a new buddy, but it was also nice to be able to prove wrong all those people who say that it’s impossible to make a life-long friend out of a hotel employee.
His background was in the army. He’d served in Northern Ireland and Gibraltar. (He’d been in Cyprus too, but I think that was just on holiday.) So perhaps it’s not surprising that he was a firearm enthusiast.
Whereas Michael thought we should all be allowed to own a lethal weapon, I didn’t. In fact I am proud to live in a country where it’s pretty tough to get a licence for a firearm. The last thing we want is to end up like the USA, where buying a gun is as easy as buying a bagel, and probably as cheap as well, though I’d have to check that. That said, the more I talked to him about it – whether at the Travel Tavern, in his largely unfurnished terraced home or at Laser Quest – the more I began to see chinks of logic in his argument.
I’m certainly not saying he won me over. He didn’t. I remain as firmly opposed to gun ownership as ever. But stick this in your pipe and smoke it: what if a burglar breaks into your home when your children are lying in bed at night? Should you just offer to show him the way to the family silver/your collection of semi-antique tie pins? Given the kind of crippling mortgages that this country’s homeowners are struggling with, surely they should be able to repel an intruder with a shotgun? No one wants people killed. But even the most liberal person out there would agree that you should be able to at least get them in the kneecaps. That’s common sense. Just aim low, the law should say.
Or even worse than burglars, what if you’ve got foxes that keep coming into your garden? It wouldn’t be so bad if they stayed on the lawn, but last night, and forgive the language here, they were fucking all over the herb garden. It’s got to stop.
They’re actually very randy animals, and that’s okay, we’ve all got needs. But for Christ’s sake keep off the flowerbeds. Never before had I been so irked by vulpine intimacy. I was so mad last night that I was considering fighting fire with fire. If I’d had a consenting adult with me (female) I’d have gone to their den and had sex in it. And that’s despite the very real danger of coming away with a dirty back.150
Of course, that was all just in the heat of the moment. I soon calmed down and realised that a more measured approach was just to stay calm (after all, these were just wild animals following their instincts) and put poison down.
A lot of people criticised Michael for his love of guns. But at least he loved something. And I think we could all learn from that. After all, surely it’s better to love something than nothing, even if it means a few intruders get paralysed from the waist down, or the neck down if it’s dark and you can’t see where you’re shooting?
By the way I don’t know why