Down These Mean Streets

                                  

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

                                                                       Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely

Raymond Chandler used to say that, while writing, whenever he found himself stuck for what was going to happen next, he’d just write in a man coming through the door with a gun in his hand, and then go from there.

And in many ways that’s what the Taps is during the week and during the day on Saturdays. In a sense which I can’t quite grasp or properly explain, it’s figurative writers block randomly punctuated by a series of men coming through the door with guns in their hands.

Not literally of course, and not anything even remotely as dramatic (although last night – and here I break my general rule about not talking about named people, just because I’m so annoyed – Mark [barred Mark] came into the pub at about half ten while it was just me, Colin, Gareth and Irena doing the quiz on a humid summer night, and said to Irena: ‘I heard you saw my mum in town today…[pause]…fat Jewish cunt.’ And then just walked out), but similar in that on those slow summer evenings or cold winter days where everything and everyone is much the same as always, that sameness, that stillness, that sense of eternally not quite being on the cusp of something happening, is only ever broken by random non-descript men (because they are almost always are men) coming through the door gun in hand.

And just like Chandler, you never know where it’s going to lead. Often – usually, in fact – it’s nothing, a literary red-herring, just a fella having a couple of quiet beers on his way home. But sometimes you get a real plot twist. The kind of thing you can get your teeth into – a real nut nut say. Four kinds of crazy and all different kinds of twisted.

I know that I’m not the only one who does it – I know Jade does for instance, – but every time the door even faintly creaks I immediately look to see what new literary trope is about to walk in through our door and fleetingly into our lives.