Guy Forks by Will Nett

There have been many Sir William Nettleton’s, the most infamous had his knighthood rescinded by the late queen in 1963 after the incident with the catholic call girls, the CoE bishop of Angleside and Elizabeth II cup final tickets the previous year. It is perhaps to his credit however that unlike modern politicians he was happy to admit and own his indiscretions. Though revelling in them may be been a better description. Certainly he was the one who told the press about the meerkat he let loose in the Tottenham Hotspurs dressing room after partaking of way too much Columbia nose powder .

The current Willam Nettleton claims he shortens his professional name to appear cooler and writes as Will Nett… But many suspect it is merely to escape the notoriety of the Nettleton name…

Occasionally Will Nett sends me blog posts , they tend to be entertaining, well received and deceptively intelligent reads… he normally does this when he has a new book coming out. If he has a new one out he hasn’t bothered to tell me this time. He has never lost a knighthood due to hookers, clergymen and purloined tickets for a cup final.

Guy Forks by Will Nett

You don’t get may ‘Guidos’ these days, do you? In Spain, maybe; but I’m not in Spain. I’m in the UK; God’s Own- Yorkshire. On Stonegate, in York, at Guy Fawkes’ house. It’s amazing to think that England’s most recognised rebel lived within walking distance of a branch of Jo Malone. Given that he is, in my opinion, the first hipster, he would more likely have occupied the nearby eco shop, instead. His credentials all check out.

The son of landed gentry, living off Daddy’s property empire. Takes a gap year in Spain, sidling up to senoras: ‘I’m Guy, but close friends call me Guido’ adopting the Italian version of his name whilst there, safe in the knowledge that it would be difficult to take the piss out of as hardly anything rhymes with ‘Guido.’

He goes on to grow his hair and cultivate Dartagnanesque facial hair- that I can’t mock too much here because I’ve done almost the same and embraced the 19th century Shanghai river pirate look- before returning home with a headful of revolutionary ideas, and presumably a load of wristbands, a fair dose of the clap and a suitcase full of novelty Sangria bottles from Duty Free. The ones with the little sombreros on.

Then he falls in with the Gunpowder gang, using a spectacularly mundane pseudonym- John Johnson- to carry out his nefarious deeds. In fairness, if it was your intent to collectively maim the nation’s entire political elite in a one’r, you’d aim to keep your new identity as incongruous as possible.

On his return to England, he frequents the Duck and Drake pub in The Strand with a bunch of insufferable edgelords; penny farthing repairmen, baristas and chilli farmers, I guess. I say ‘I guess’ are there is still much conjecture around Fawkes lore. When I was at school someone put it around that he ‘invented forks.’ He didn’t invent the ‘fork’ it was explained; he invented ‘forks’ which I took to mean that at his first attempt he invented multiple forks.

But back to the boom boom boys, who between them hatched the ingenious plan of stockpiling cartloads of fly-tipped mattresses and wildly flammable leftover Halloween merchandise beneath Parliament. Amidst this potential bombfire* of slutty kitten outfits, plastic Devil tridents, and that shitty cobweb stuff that’s draped all over people’s houses, a fuse- not the much-missed chocolate bar- would be lit, and the whole lot would be blasted to the four winds, raining down tricorn hats, powdered wigs and crown jewels, right across the city.

He was of course rumbled by some absolute grass, at which our hirsute hero gave the name ‘John Johnson’ as if in some comedic way that was the first

name that came into his head. I like to think there were previous attempts to give a false name.

“Name?”

*short pause* as he looks around and plays for time: “Err….Parliament….Barrels, at your service.”

He was subsequently tortured into a signed confession, and hung, thus giving birth to the multi-million-pound animal-scaring industry of daft fireworks, with even dafter names; we once discharged something called ‘Satanic Desecration’ in the carpark of the Pied Piper. The hole in the ground is still there, almost twenty-five years later. Perhaps the most striking irony of Fawkes’ legacy is that modern Royalists love fireworks- don’t you, Nunthorpe?- but the tradition stems from an attempt to spectacularly curtail the Establishment.

Whatever it is, it’s all very English, as the French will remind you.In the words of a cross-Channel chum of mine: