on VAT 69 and funny hats

I remembered the moment, I suppose, because I was reminded recently of the walk-in pantry in the house in which I grew up. The conversation drifted on to the pleasures of walk-in pantries. My mind drifted to the memory of a fifteen-year-old boy sneaking into that pantry when his mother was out, not long after his father had died.

He tiptoed in, zeroed in on a bottle of VAT 69, poured it into a glass of milk because he’d read somewhere that’s how to drink whisky, and set about drinking it. Rum and milk might have been better. The toxic, synapse-exploding emulsion put him off whisky for years, and alcohol for, well, weeks.

But how did I  ... (I’ll dispense with the whole ‘reader: he was I’ charade because it was bleedingly obvious, and any psychologist could tell you I was using the foil purely as a psychological ploy by which to distance my adult self from the trauma of having once been an adolescent) ...how did I know VAT-69 was whisky? It was not because I had pored [or poured, for that matter] over Sir Ernest Shackleton’s diaries. Biggles was the limit of my adventurers’ memoirs).

No. Five years earlier I had been told a joke. It went something like

“What’s the Pope’s phone number?”

“I dunno.”

“VAT 69”. Kerchunk-plunk.

As a joke it was not in the big league and I fear I have it wrong. Maybe it was ‘who does the pope call in an emergency?’ I don't do jokes. But it didn’t work at all. I barely knew of the existence of some person called ‘pope,’ did not know he lived in a town (or whatever) called ‘Vatican,’ and had no idea what VAT 69 was.

Funnily enough, because it was the 1960s, the peculiarities of the phone number, foreign to a modern ear, I got. My phone number at the time was 201D. Why shouldn’t this pope fellow be VAT 69? The number was back to front and it would take a while to Morse out V-A-T but I figured he (it never occurred to me he could be a she) lived in England and maybe Brits had back to front phone numbers.

Somehow though I gleaned that the combination of letters and numbers referred to a thing called whisky. Some years later I noticed some in a walk-in pantry. Some years later I mixed some with milk, and blew my synapses.

Some decades later I was an adult. Perhaps because I had consumed too much VAT 69 (in fact I’ve only ever risked it once since, and prefer, on rare whisky occasions, nectars for gods far more discerning) I was an adult of somewhat addled brain. The synapses that were blown out in a walk-in pantry a few weeks after my father died were perhaps specifically those that look after the memory of positions in which I place my wallet, keys, phone and anything else that I place.  Parking doesn’t count. My synapses cope with parking spots. So far.

As an adult I had stumbled into a job called priesthood. Amongst other things this entailed wondering around a small part of a large building wearing funny clothes. The large building was variously called a church, of if committed to a particular role, a cathedral.  Cathedrals have a special chair in them, where bishops – of which I later learned the pope is a special example that I get to ignore – park their bottoms from time to time.  The word ‘cathedral’ comes from ‘cathedra’, which is the Latin name for a bishop’s bottom.

Often, if I was meandering around the small part of the big building I would discover that I had forgotten something. But often the something I had forgotten would be locked away somewhere, so I would need my keys. But often I would forget where my keys were. So, to circumvent this sad side-effect of the alleged papal phone number, I would attach the keys by a lanyard, to my person.

The small part is called a ‘sanctuary’, though in the USA that word refers to the whole kit and caboodle so it’s a bit confusing. In churchy traditions that are a bit ‘high’ (a reference to how much the participants move their bodies around rather than to their altitude, though on the other hand Shakers and Pentecostals move their bodies around a lot, so this won’t do as a description ... let’s try ‘a reference to how much the participants move their bodies around in an orderly and choreographed manner’ … though the choreography is by centuries of tradition rather than by someone creative and dictatorially directive) …

Oh dear. Where was I? Damned synapses.

Oh. In churchy traditions that are a bit ‘high’ you can tell the sanctuary because the people who move around in it wear funny clothes. They look ridiculous, but a bit like the emperor’s new clothes the participants in the moving around believe that they don’t look ridiculous at all. So they wear them.  And this memory-challenged wielder of funny clothes and keys would often attach the latter to the former in case some sort of excursion to a cupboard was needed.

Some wielders of funny clothes never need to excurt (and that should be a word) because they never damaged their synapses with VAT 69, but a few of us struggle with imperfections. Some of the most self-righteous wielders of funny clothes refer to the flawed wielders of funny clothes as ‘incompetent’ but on the whole I think the Jesus-dude who was (is) the excuse for funny rites and clothes would prefer that damaged individuals can be wielders of funny clothes (and keys) too, because sometimes the Damaged are otherly-competented, and those other competences are a gift that sometimes outweigh the lamentable flaws in a few synapses.

So one day this owner of keys and damaged synapses was wondering around in a sanctuary, keys and funny clothes melded with some discretion but apparently not enough. It must have been an important day, because a bishop was there, and bishops are very important, and they wear rather silly hats to prove that, but they don’t know they are silly hats because, well, bishops are a bit like emperors sometimes. They also wear flamboyant rings, because that shows they can write important letters, and they carry a crooked pole, and they wear similar funny clothes to the other people meandering around the sanctuary but more of them, to show that they are much more important or maybe much nearer to God or Jesus or Donald Trump or someone.

And on that day I was indeed wondering around in a sanctuary wearing preposterous looking clothes and the bishop in his (though it could be a her) funny  hat noticed my keys on a lanyard and snarled ‘take them off, they look ridiculous.’ And I glanced at the silly bishoppy hat on the bishoppy head, but I didn’t say anything because bishops are enormously powerful in their own small spheres of influence and I was quite keen to have a job by the end of the day and sadly I am as flawed and corrupt as the next person. So I shifted the keys a little so they were discretely hidden beneath one of the silly-looking clothes I was wearing, and my life and my job went on. Both, I guess only for a while but let’s not get all metaphysical here.

And somewhere between a bunch of keys and some silly clothes I realised it was all about emperors’ clothes (and yes the apostrophe is where it should be) and VAT-69 jokes.

Because VAT 69 jokes are only funny if you know

a)       phone numbers once looked a bit like that, and
b)      the pope lives in a place called Vatican City, and
c)       VAT 69 is a whisky
d)      and whisky tastes lousy with milk.

No – wait … the last doesn’t matter. Different folks, different strokes and all that.

And keys on a lanyard only matter if the observer is so obsessed with emperors’ clothes, so obsessed with protocol and self-importance, so disoriented and disconnected that the clothing of lackeys around him (or her) becomes an issue that may detract from the gravitas of their own clothes, the solemnity of their own ritual, the importance of their own role. Keys on a lanyard matter only if the observer of the keys is so unaware of how it all looks when little boys see the emperor’s clothes (or not), and does not realise that the keys are probably the only readily comprehensible thing in the whole obscure sanctuary and its strange, obfuscating rituals.

VAT 69 jokes work if you know a few things about whisky, Catholicism and phone numbers. Funny clothes can work if you know a few things about their (accrued) symbolism. Keys work, well, pretty much everywhere.

And those of us who wear (or used to) funny clothes in an obscure part of an incomprehensible building might need the occasional reminder that snarling about keys on lanyard might well be a parable about obscurantism, missed priorities, about an utter lack of reality about emperors’ clothes and bishops’ silly hats, and about a growing disconnect from a carpenter’s son named Jesus who at one stage had something to do with the rites in the funny building but who these days might be more likely to be busking in the mall or sleeping rough in a bus shelter, adjacent to a homeless bro with a bottle of VAT 69.