FRESHIE NEW LIFE

Keen to understand the passion our elders hold for all things conservative, I’ve decided to become a Tory. After all, I share rather a lot in common with them. I too was educated in public school, talk complete nonsense for a living and harbour fantasies of a leather-clad Edwina Currie whipping my bare buttocks red raw while rapping Rule Britannia through mouthfuls of parsnip quiche.

Transfixed by my new leader David Cameron’s groin-grabbing smile, I’ve taken the bold step of furthering his Hug a Hoodie and Love a Lout policies by introducing my own politically naïve manifesto, with the aptly meaningless but hip title Cool Cats & Underdogs. It features such momentous maxims such as Dote on a Desi, Adopt an Auntiji, Roger a Rudeboy, and my personal favourite, Fondle a Freshie – quite simply because it means I get to do what I do best – play with myself.
But you’re not a Freshie you fat freak, I hear you cry. Well weep not so gently into your heaving moist bosom oh my sister, because despite the fact that I’m one of this nation’s great unwashed and thus far from fresh in the scent department, I am a bona fide first generation boatman, raised in the motherland by goats and fed on a diet of daal, jackfruit and petunia petals dried in the basanta sun.

Not a lot of people know this, but that’s only because not a lot of people want to know me, but it was only at the age of 13 that I left the humble surroundings of the chandelier and marble-floored mansion in the Bangladeshi tea estate I grew up in, to find a better life in Peckham. Armed with a heavily Banglacised accent and snatches of lingo borrowed from The Dukes of Hazzard, I arrived at an over-privileged toff’s school to embark on a pastime that would repeat itself throughout my life; getting my head flushed down the toilet by little fat gay boys (although I didn’t have to pay for it back then).

After laboriously mutating myself into something quite alien to my Bangladeshi background by replacing hilsha fish, baul music and disco lunghis with mushy peas, baggy jeans and injecting N-methyl-D-aspartic acid into my eyeballs, it’s been some time since anyone asked me to prove my Britishness. I thought having two beautiful half-English children and the ability to whistle the entire Chas & Dave catalogue through my rectum would be proof enough but oh no, apparently that wasn’t good enough for that lousy Labour lout Charles Clarke. You see, while shedding my inherent Bangladeshi identity was easier than the girls in the office get after a few shandies, my inherited British nature has meant I’ve been too sodding lazy to go about getting myself a British passport. And now that I want one (a decision kindly cemented by the visa department at the American Embassy who saw my first name Muhammad and laughed far too loud and far too strangely), I’ve had to take a British Citizenship Test to prove I’m worthy of owning one.

Now I don’t know how many of you born and brought up here ever felt the need to justify your existence in such a way, but I’m pretty sure none of you thought your cultural identity hinged on questions such as: What is the percentage of children in Britain that live in a step family? What is the difference between the House of Commons and the House of Lords? How often does Prince Charles make tender, fervid love to his pot of geraniums? So I made the last one up but, really, what a nonsensical way of assessing whether someone knows enough about this country to rightfully belong here.

Now had they asked me to down 12 pints of warm urine, pulled my pants down and do a moonie while projectile vomiting kebab missiles, I’d forgive them for doing at least some research into the ways of this country – and don’t forget, this test is designed to prove you can adapt to this country, not that you can memorise pointless stats and facts parrot style. If you wanted to find out if a guy was from the Punjab, for instance, asking him to name its five rivers proves nothing. On the other hand, if his limbs fail to instantly jig when you play him a boliyan or turns down the offer of an aloo paratha and Bacardi breakfast, you won’t have to think twice before carting the impostor to the nearest deportation centre.

Even though my friends assured me that if the inbred in the butcher’s shop managed to pass the test, I should sail through it, I was still stupidly nervous before the day of reckoning. I didn’t feel particularly assured when the Spanish girl at my local taco shop advised: ‘If you don’t know the answer, just say The Queen.’ All that did was put Bohemian Rhapsody in my head (Bismillah! No will not let him go!), and meant I gave up my planned last minute revision for a night at The Queen’s Head pub getting trashed.

Despite the fact that I went on to score 24 out 24 questions correctly, I’m in no mood for celebration. I resent having to prove my identity in such a faceless manner (the only people I spoke to during the test, other than the computer that was to judge me, was a chap with a Caribbean drawl at the reception desk and an invigilator with a comical Chinese accent who asked whether Muhammad was a Muslim name). So do I feel any different now that I am a true blue Englishman? Am I somehow less of a potential terrorist threat just because my passport goes from green to burgundy? Will I suddenly start talking like the Queen Mother? Will all those banks that I’ve been scamming and taxes I’ve been dodging with variant spellings of Muhammad suddenly catch on? Too late, you can’t deport me now.

I don’t care who or what this government, or anyone else for that matter, thinks I am. I know who I choose to be. And at the moment, I choose to be a raging Tory. Although my most recent undertaking, Groom a Gay has found me in a drunken stupor, trimming the handlebar moustache of a rather burly dead ringer for Freddie Mercury, but then God Shave the Queen is the quintessential British mantra, right?

Bismillah? Nah. He will not let me go…