The Real McCoy

Thanks of portly proportions to everyone who was kind enough to leave some words on my message board. I admit that when launching the site I considered inventing notes of encouragement and praise of my own work. After all, who in the world has better reason to promote RAVEN than I? Apart from Dan my agent, perhaps, and he’d have too much integrity for skulduggery like that. Anyway, I resisted the urge to counterfeit and I’m glad. It would take a more inventive writer perhaps than I to come up with the notes currently scrawled on my message board! Besides which, I reckon there’d be the whiff of concoction in the air if I tried. Which brings me to the meat of this blog; genuineness. Authenticity. Bona Fide…ness. Whether something is or is not the Real McCoy. And how cupcakes can lead to violence.

We currently have friends visiting New York. On their first evening we went for dinner. It was a Sunday night and the Meatpacking district was a ghost town but for a few jaded revellers on the wrong end of a three-day bender. It takes one to know one. After a passable meal, Sally whistled a yellow cab to a skewing halt and we all jumped in, our destination Café Wah, a Greenwich Village music venue once shaken by Hendrix and stirred by Dylan. We pulled up behind one of those brawny black American cars that would struggle to mount a British speed bump, and Driving Dad was pointing out to his kids the treasures inside Magnolia Bakery. It’s where the Sex And the City girls buy the cupcakes they clearly don’t eat. Fatefully, Driving Dad had failed to notice the lights had been green for seven tenths of a second and in New York that’s an eternity. Our driver was quick to enlighten DD with a sharp blast of the horn. Windows slid down. Gestures discharged. Words ricocheted. Nothing abnormal. But then our driver questioned DD’s manliness and before we could say ‘cor blimey, Mary Poppins’ both drivers were grappling like grizzlies at a salmon spawning. We sat in the car for another thirty seconds before I suggested evacuating the vehicle, which we did, getting a better view of the fray from the sidewalk. One minute previously, our cabbie was chatting to us about some popular eatery, and now he was rolling around in the middle of the road with a man who had merely wanted to show his kids the cupcake shop. We moved on. Cops showed up, not an hour later as would have been the case back home, but immediately, as though they had come from...well...the cupcake shop.

Interestingly though, not a punch had been thrown. There had been chest bumping, wrestling and rolling, but no punches. It was not, shall we say, the Real McCoy. It was a sham, a contrivance, and yet it drew a crowd like a Tehran stoning. The fight was, like a New York shop that just sells cupcakes, a gimmick. Mind you, just around the corner from me is a shop that only sells rice pudding. Hot or cold, in various flavours, rice pudding. Gimmick or not, somehow it works. It’s always busy.

About my message board...maybe I could leave one message…just a word. Or two.