Britface

Central Market is subject to a special promotion they're calling the British Invasion. The name is a reference to Beatles band and the phenomenal popularity enjoyed by the fab four when they first set foot over here, because Beatles band is one of those things Americans understand about Englishland and its culture, along with the Queen, red double decker buses, and Keeping Up Appearances. The promotion promises that the shelves of the supermarket will be lined with British stuff for the next month or so. The first I hear of this is when someone on facebook proposes that I enter the associated costume competition.

Register for our Passport UK Costume Contest and be entered for a chance to win a trip to London!

Let your imagination run wild and come dressed as any Brit from Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare to Elton John and the Spice Girls. The top costume at each store will be entered to win a travel voucher for two round trip tickets to London, plus a $500 Visa gift card.

Simply register using the link below, get dressed up on September 21st, check in at the main entrance. We'll then take your official party photo that enters you into the contest.

Once you've taken your official party photo, walk through the store to show off your costume and enjoy over a dozen British specialities like tea, shortbread, house-made sausages, smoked salmon, chocolates, English sparkling wine, beer and cider, plus the very ice cream served at Buckingham Palace.

Its all free and proper fun, sure to be a jolly good time. And remember, your costume could be your ticket to ride — to London!

It occurs to me that Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare would be a complicated choice given that they're actually two separate people rather than a single gestalt entity, contrary to what Central Market seems to believe. I consider going as myself, seeing as how I'm actually fucking English, but there are certain depths to which I will not stoop, not even in the cause of sarcasm. On the other hand, it might be nice to stock up on a few things which I can't otherwise get in Texas, assuming that's actually an option.

My hopes are less than stratospheric. Central Market aspires to be, I suppose, the Texas equivalent of Waitrose, a store for a better class of person, as the facelift-happy twats of Alamo Heights who shop there seem to consider themselves. This means that there is at least a place where I can buy Crunchie, Mint Aero and Marmite when the mood takes me.

Marmite costs about seven dollars a jar, in comparison to less than a quid back in England. Marmite is, as I understand it, a by-product of beer. American beer is made at a children's lemonade factory and thus yields no Marmite, so we have to import it, hence the price. I don't mind because although Marmite is nice every once in a while, contrary to the mythology, I can take it or leave it.

Unfortunately, that's about it for me and Central Market. Everything else I can get at my regular HEB, or at least Target; because otherwise even shopping for something as basic as a tin of cat food is a waste of time at Central Market when the only brand on the shelf will inevitably cost four dollars for a tin of what turns out to be minced alpaca seasoned with organic chard.

Bess and I drop in on Thursday evening, having stuffed our faces with curry at the excellent Bombay Hall over on Wurzbach Road. I'm here in the admittedly forlorn hope that they'll have a steak and kidney pie, and I'm expecting disappointment. Bess is here because she's looking forward to the sarcasm with which I customarily express my disappointment.

We enter the store.

'What are we looking for?' I wonder out loud. 'Is it all over the place, or will it be a big pile of British stuff on a table with Dick van Dyke stood next to it?'

'Look,' Bess observes. 'These have little Union Jack flags on them.' She indicates the pricing labels of something I don't immediately recognise, little red criss-crosses on blue and white stuck to a purple ball. The objects are bath bombs, it transpires, and not really my field of expertise; but it answers a question. Maybe these are Benedict Cumberbatch's bath bombs of choice.

The end of the aisle is embellished with a sign instructing us to keep calm and do something or other besides carry on. I still remember the first time I saw one of those posters. I still remember when the joke was funny. The display relates to stacked cans of Irn Bru, which is nice, although I always preferred watching the Irn Bru television adverts to drinking the actual drink. Around the corner is porridge, small boxes of it. I'm pretty sure porridge is readily available here and is known as oatmeal. Happily I've been able to make the semantic leap without experiencing too much culture shock.

We walk on.

I'm expecting really obvious, arguably slightly crappy things that I'm unable to buy over here - Heinz baked beans, Birds Eye fish fingers, Wall's sausages, Mr. Kipling's cakes, custard creams, but they don't seem to have anything along such lines. Everything else I could possibly want, I've learned how to make for myself with the only significant difficulty being getting hold of kidneys for steak and kidney pie.

The deli section is expansive and takes up about half of the floor space of the store. The British Invasion seems more in evidence here, with the alleged foods of Englishland sat in chiller cabinets amongst the usual fare. Much of this supposedly English product seems to have been supplied by one company trading as Jolly Posh, a name which I'm sure had them rolling in the aisles at some board meeting or other. The branding seems ill-suited for what is mostly a pretentious take on what you would eat in a transport caff. The Cornish pastie is the size of a handbag and suspiciously pale. There's also some kind of pie incorporating chicken, but I make a pretty decent chicken and mushroom pie and am disinclined to pay ten dollars for one which probably won't be as good.

On the other hand, I find there's a Jolly Posh black pudding and pork sausages, so I'm having some of that. Black pudding is unknown in Texas, and while we have sausages coming out of our ears, they're of ancestrally German descent and quite unlike the kind which kept me alive from 1988 to 2009. The strangest thing is that I've never been able to work out what the difference could be, only that there is one and it's pronounced.

'What are tatties and neeps?' Bess asks. She's pointing at a plastic container on the top of the counter, some mysterious substance within. I've asked this very same question of every single Scottish person I've ever known, and I still can't remember the answer, something to do with either parsnips or turnips - but definitely potatoes.

'I don't really know, although for whatever it's worth, I've only ever heard them referred to as neeps and tatties, never tatties and neeps. I'm not sure if that makes a difference.'

To my ears it sounds as though I've walked into a newsagent and asked for a packet of onion and cheese crisps.

Adjacent plastic containers house Scotch eggs and Welsh rarebit. That would be cheese on toast which has already been prepared so as to save us the misery of having to slice the cheese and stick it on top of bread, because who has time for that shit?

The Scotch egg costs nearly four dollars and is nice enough, but somehow not quite as good as the ones you get out of the chiller cabinet at your local corner shop in Peckham. Next to the Scotch egg are individual punnets of Yorkshire pudding and kedgeree. I'm finding this increasingly surreal. We seem to be in Iceland territory - the shop rather than the country - foods pre-packaged because someone somewhere never quite got the hang of mashing a fucking potato or slopping a knob of butter onto green beans; and kedgeree is the one food I can't stand. Even the smell of it has me dry heaving. I've eaten crickets, cacti, maguey worms, and all manner of Lovecraftian shite, but I draw the line at kedgeree.

The British Invasion isn't really English food. With a couple of exceptions, it's mostly a cargo cult version of what someone considers to be English food. My American-born wife once took the piss out of English food by referring to jellied eggs, or whatever the hell it is you people eat over there, and I've a feeling that if I asked for jellied eggs - even though there's no such thing - I wouldn't be disappointed.

I ask the cashier if I get a discount, seeing as how I'm actually English and all. She either doesn't hear or doesn't get the joke.

Against expectation, the sausages are great, as is the black pudding. No Mint Aero though, the fuckers.

Worst Halloween Display Ever

There's a house with a chain link fence on a corner a few blocks from where I live. The chain link fence runs across the front lawn of the place, which is unusual. The rest of the street is just regular houses, fairly well-kept lawns, trees, maybe flowers, no chain link fencing. Some of those other lawns are presently host to political campaign advertising, mostly Beto but a couple for Ted Cruz, according to the political leanings of whoever lives there. Beto is standing for the Senate on behalf of the Democratic Party, challenging Ted Cruz who currently holds the seat on behalf of the Republicans. Those dwelling within the house on the corner favour Ted Cruz, and his campaign material is secured to their chain link fence, along with a whole load of other stuff advertising their political sympathies to those who drive along North New Braunfels Avenue. Amongst the other material is a large presumably canvas banner which reads:

We have had it with Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Cory Booker, Chuck Schumer, Colin Kaepernick, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O'Rourke, Socialism, and political correctness. Vote as if your life depends on it, because it does.

To unpack all of this for anyone unfamilar with this array of names, Barack Hussein Obama was our last president - meaning either the president we had before the current guy, or our last president, depending how things go from hereon. The good news for our people behind the chain link fence is that he ceased to be president nearly two years ago, so I'm not sure why they've had it with him, as they put it. Maybe he regularly pisses on their lawn on his way back from the pub, which might also explain the fence.

Hillary Clinton is the wife of another former president, and she herself applied for the job at the same time as Donald Trump, but didn't get it. Again, I wouldn't like to speculate on how she's managed to upset our mysterious family. I can understand why people might not have wanted to vote for her, and it isn't that they're scared because she's a woman and she's brilliant - as one dimwit so memorably put it, but sheesh...

I don't know much about Nancy Pelosi beyond that she's a Democrat politician whose name is routinely employed as a smear in Republican campaign messages. Current campaigning against Gina Ortiz Jones here in San Antonio relies upon her association with Pelosi. Having just come back from a weekend in Houston, I noticed that one of their local Democrat candidates is also supposedly awful due to something or other to do with Pelosi, whom I therefore assume to be a malign Lovecraftian octopus entity manipulating human history from behind the scenes.

Colin Kaepernick is a football player, or at least a participant in a game which Americans call football. He famously failed to stand for the national anthem in protest of institutionalised racism. This caused the heads of certain people to explode due to toxic levels of what Orwell described as primitive patriotism.

It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.

I'm only vaguely familiar with the other names which have apparently struck terror into the hearts of our family behind the chain link fence.

At the risk of shooting a fish in a barrel, these neighbours of mine therefore feel - as is implicit in the last line - that their lives are jeopardised by someone who isn't president, someone who didn't get to be president, a football player, a space octopus from beyond time, a political ideology which has never had much of a foothold here in the United States, and anyone who tells them that they can't say the word n***** because it's disrespectful. This stuff is ruining their lives.

On the other hand it could be that they're just shitheads who don't fucking understand nuffink, instead pooing their pants every time some power hungry nest-feathering plutocrat waves Nancy Pelosi in their faces and growls, she's coming for your children, and she's going to force them to have abortions and gender reassignment surgery. It's always depressing to see people whose buttons can be so easily pressed by almost anyone in a nice suit claiming to be on their side.

Hopefully no-one will take offence at my use of the term shithead here. Angry Moron Who Doesn't Understand Stuff seems cumbersome, and is a little too politically correct for my liking.

The button pressing would seem to be revealed by the inclusion of Barack Obama's full name, given that the banner appears to have been commissioned from a company specialising in such things, in which case I imagine our family would have been charged by the letter, or at least the word; and Hussein, Obama's middle name, is not widely used and is therefore a superfluous inclusion unless attempting to establish an association with Saddam Hussein by means of sympathetic magic. This is the same button pressing favoured by the sort of righties who photoshopped images of Obama with a Hitler moustache, so I suppose our bunch are just passing it on. The possibility that someone behind the chain link fence owns a banner manufacturing business and got this one as a freebie seems unlikely given crude handwritten cardboard signs affixed to other parts of the fence reading God Bless the USA, Secure the Border, Keep Our Guns, and all of the usual rightie concerns for things which either aren't the problem, or are else actively contributing towards it.

Hung from the awning of the house is another home-made sign reading We Love President Trump, and in the garden there's a professionally made one pertaining to a local anti-bullying campaign. Evidently they see no contradiction there.

I was in the middle of an already lousy morning when my wife told me about the signage at the house with the chain link fence, and I found it significantly depressing. There are too many shitheads in the world as it is, and I don't like to think of them living in the town I've come to call home.

While I would agree with the shitheads that there are problems on the left, if they genuinely believe America even has a left, then they're even more shitheaded than I thought. My position is that the difference between Republican and Democrat politicians is that the Democrats at least feel a little guilty after they've shafted you. I don't trust anyone in a suit who tells me they have my best interests at heart, because historically they never have done, and if they did, it would be self-evident and would hardly need stating.

However, the bottom line is that part of being an adult is making peace with the idea that maybe not everything in the world will be exactly as would you like it to be; and if you're an adult you should have the ability to reason and to at least empathise with those in opposition to whatever you happen to believe, to at least understand where they're coming from even if you don't agree with it. That's what being a grown-up is about.

Therefore, when a stranger waves something awful in your face, explains that this awful thing wants to turn your kids into homosexuals, communists, people who can tie their own shoelaces, or whatever else gives you cause to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, when the next thing that stranger tells you is that he or she has the answer to all of your problems - the ones you've only just found out about, thanks to the testimony of this same individual - if it doesn't occur to you that you're being played like a fiddle, then you're either a very small child or a fully grown shithead.

I don't know how much more simple I can make it. It really isn't that hard to understand. No source of information - no news source if you prefer - is without some form of bias; but this simply means you have to use the power of your mind to deduce whatever may actually be going on. Living in the information age, it's not difficult to find varied accounts of any given situation or issue, and it's down to you to reach a decision based on what seems likely rather than on what seems most comforting, most consistent with your existing view of the world, and which requires the least effort expended outside your comfort zone.

If you're unable to do this, then you're a shithead.

If you're a shithead, then your opinion is of no value because you don't understand stuff, and there's no reason the rest of us should be obliged to listen to you or to take your uninformed shitheaded views into account; because when a small child tells you they've just seen a real live dinosaur, it's cute, but hopefully you won't believe in the literal truth of such a claim; which is why we hopefully don't vote for people engaging in cock-obvious attempts to goad you into hatred of whatever easy target happens to be on the table at the time.

The day after I learned about the house behind the chain link fence, I passed by the place on my way to have a root canal. I wasn't in the most buoyant of moods, but nevertheless I had to stop and take photos, just as I would have done had a real live dinosaur been reported in my neighbourhood by someone more authoritative than a small child. I cycled down a street with lawn after lawn playing host to Beto's campaign material, and there it was at the end, like a shit splatter of Info Wars taped over the end of an episode of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, the house which still seemingly fears that Obama is a'comin' for our guns.

I dismounted.

To my surprise, I realised that I felt sorry for the poor dumb bastards. I'm scared of all sorts of things - old age, cancer, and the likelihood of the entire planet becoming significantly less habitable during my own lifetime - but I can't imagine what it must be like to be so terrified of the rest of the human race, even one's own neighbours. I can't imagine daily existence lived in the belief that they're out to get you, with they being whatever some over-moneyed corporate saviour has you scared of this week. I can't imagine how difficult it must be making one's way through life with the comprehension and reasoning power of a typical eight-year old boy; and if this comparison seems unfair, consider that the shitheads are in power, gaining more ground across the world every day, all the cards in their hand, and the fuckers still aren't happy.

So I felt sorry for them, because what else is there?

Underpants, the Denial of Dentistry

I'm on my bike heading for a dental appointment at eleven. The dental appointment is at eleven because they no longer see anyone in the afternoon, which was a better time for me but never mind. Being a dental appointment, it's not something I'm looking forward to, but I suppose it's better than having my teeth fall out. I've worked out that it takes me thirty minutes to get from my home to Doctor Stalker's surgery on my bike, and I've set out at twenty past ten so as to take a slightly longer route through suburban neighbourhoods, thus avoiding the highway and heavy traffic. It takes fifteen minutes to get to Broadway, which is more or less half the distance, and then I'm into the familiar territory of St. Luke's, the middle school from which our kid graduated a few months back.

Unfortunately as I reach Olmos Park, I find the road barred by a barrier carrying the familiar instruction turn around, don't drown. I should have known.

It's not that it doesn't rain much in Texas, but the rain is infrequent and when it rains, it's torrential and makes up for lost time in a single concentrated blast. Creeks swell overnight to ten or more feet of water which will drain away over the next couple of days. The trail I regularly follow becomes impassable as Morningstar Boardwalk is swallowed by a temporary lake, and the city sends some guy out to close the barriers, each one embellished with the hexagonal warning sign.

Turn Around, Don't Drown.

It seems unnecessary. Most of us can tell whether or not it's wise to keep on going, and the familiar wooden walkway being underwater is usually enough for me; and yet nine out of ten times, I'll ignore the warning and skirt around the barrier, because if the waters have receded sufficient for me to be able to see Morningstar Boardwalk high and mostly dry, then I feel fairly confident that I'm not going to drown, and that the city simply hasn't got around to reopening the barrier.

So that's my reaction right now, I can see Olmos Park up ahead, and yes we've had a bit of rain this week, but I'm not turning around now. I have an appointment to keep.

I walk my bike around the barrier and remount, cycling slowly because the road surface is slick with mud. The park is deserted and almost entirely brown in hue, and the puddles are admittedly large. If I can just get through the park to Dick Friedrich Drive I'll be fine. I'm just minutes away.

There's a small bridge I need to cross, and as I approach, I realise that water is flowing over it as well as under. All I can see are the handrails. The water looks to be four of five inches at most. I'll do what I usually do, raising my feet from the pedals to coast along where it gets deep.

Annoyingly, it gets deep, then deeper, and I've slowed so much that it's either pedal or fall over; so I pedal, sinking my feet into water which is now almost up to my knees.

Fuck.

I cross the bridge.

I keep a pair of flip-flops in my saddlebag for eventualities such as this. Once I'm clear of the park I can take off my shoes and socks, and the hygienist will just have to work on a shoeless man with damp trousers.

There are further puddles, some of them thirty yards across by the look of it. Worse still, the ground isn't actually ground, but a six inch layer of soft Texas mud with the consistency of diarrhoea. I make it across the underwater parking lot to Dick Friedrich Drive and see that my intended route presently takes me through an actual lake.

It's not happening.

I look on my phone but I don't have the number. The dentist's office regularly sends messages in the form of jpeg images which won't show on my phone because it isn't a smartphone, because I've never really given a shit about smartphones. I call my wife and ask her to contact the dentist's office and tell them that I won't be showing because I can't get there.

I head back to the main road. There's probably another way through, but it will be more than a mile up the road. I'm apparently stranded in a post-deluge landscape, just mud and water as far as I can see, and yet somehow I'm in a public park in the middle of a city. I don't understand how this can be. There's a fountain of water about six feet high where a storm drain has burst just on the other side of the deserted highway. I'm on the mud planet.

I reason that going back the way I came at least means I won't experience anything worse than I've already come through, so that's what I do. Everything below the knee is soaked, but I make it out of Olmos Park. Once I'm beyond the mud, I stop and switch to flip-flops so that my feet will at least dry out. My sodden socks and shoes go in a bag.

Once again I'm lost in the suburban maze of Alamo Heights, with only a vague idea of where I'm going, so I cycle home by a meandering route as I recover from what has felt like an ordeal. I buy cat food from HEB, then somehow end up at Target on Austin Highway. I remember that I have money in the bank, and that I've been putting off buying crackers and socks for the last twenty years or so. I am fairly certain that at least two pairs of crackers currently in service can be dated to 1993, one wife and two girlfriends ago, originally purchased when Mandy poured scorn upon Y-fronts still hanging on from an era when such items were supplied either by my mother or relatives who didn't really know me too well at Christmas.

I guess there's no time like the present.

I'm treating myself. I buy underpants, a box containing six pairs - no holes through which anything can dangle, no saggy elastic, and not fucking boxers either.

I've been to the mud planet and missed a dental appointment, but I have new underpants. It's an ill wind that blows no good.

One of Those Parent-Teacher Things

I've been rehearsing what I'll say all day inside my head. Theresa Thatcher will see my wife and do that exploding face thing, faking the joy with arms out, pretending it isn't the most awkward situation in the world. She's so glad to see us and how have we been?

I don't want to seem rude, I'll explain, but the thing is that we don't like you very much, so we're going over here now, and we'll walk away, easy as that.

'We'll be polite,' Bess tells me in the car. 'We'll be polite and then we'll walk away.'

'My way would be polite though,' I say, 'maybe a bit direct, but still not actually telling the woman to fuck off.'

Unfortunately I know that my wife is probably right.

The woman isn't really named Theresa Thatcher, but she carries herself with both the warmth and sincerity of the two female British Prime Ministers and has similar hair, so she's Theresa Thatcher for the next couple of paragraphs. She is mother to Devil Boy, possibly the most evil child I've ever encountered outside of an Omen movie. She is motivated almost entirely by money so far as any of us can tell. We thought we'd seen the last of her, but no, Devil Boy has been signed up for this same school. He's in our kid's class.

We're on the way to the high school because it's one of those parent-teacher things. We're late. We were supposed to be there at ten to six, a time which seemed to presuppose that most parents will be wealthy oil tycoons who don't actually have to work for a living. It's a private school, so most parents probably are something along those lines, and we're the exception. The boy decided he wanted to attend this school, and the relatives who can afford to stump up the lolly said yes, so here we are. If it were up to us he'd be at a regular school, but never mind.

Don't worry about it, I told Bess. We'll eat as usual, and we'll go after that and see what happens. If we're late it's tough shit. They should have started at a more reasonable time, like seven.

We're supposed to be there at ten to six to pick up our schedule, whatever the hell that is. My understanding of parent-teacher evenings is that we, the parents by some definition, get to speak to the boy's teachers, but apparently it isn't that simple and we need a schedule. It's going to be an experience of some kind. Even without it being an experience, I don't really see the need.

The teachers are paid to teach.

Logically, they'll either spend the time snorting coke, setting things on fire, rampaging around the school with a hand gun, and telling kids with questions about the curriculum to go ask someone who gives a shit; or maybe they'll do their jobs and teach. I'm banking on it being the second option, and I'm so confident of this being the case that I don't require reassurance or even a demonstration. I seem to recall my mother telling me that she only ever attended one parent-teacher evening and never bothered after that because it was difficult to see what difference any of it made to anything.

The parking lot is full of trucks due to this being Texas. Many Texans drive trucks because they are engaged in work which requires heavy machinery or livestock moved from one place to another in rural areas. Other Texans drive trucks because they're idiots with too much money and are probably compensating for something underwhelming in the trouser department. My wife and I keep driving until we can no longer see trucks, then we park in what space is available.

Once inside, we realise that the parents of the entire school are here, pretty much. The place is heaving. For some reason I had assumed it would be just parents of children in our boy's year, but no - which at least explains the need of a schedule. Each parent has an itinerary based on a typical day of lessons undertaken by their child, but scaled down to ten minute periods. Junior apparently kicks off the day with an hour or so of algebra, so that's our first class, followed by ten minutes of geography, then English and so on. It's all been scheduled so as to prevent disaster should seven-hundred parents have decided they all want to find out what their kid gets up to in the Latin class at the same time.

We collect a schedule from the cafeteria, then make our way to a classroom containing the parents of all the kids who have algebra first thing on a Monday morning. There's a teacher at the front, stood before a massive flat screen where I'd expected to see a blackboard. She's explaining to us that she's going to do her best to teach our kids how to do really complicated sums, and she gives us her email address so we can get in touch if we have any questions. Unfortunately we spot Theresa Thatcher sat at the front, and she's seen us, even though she's pretending she hasn't because it's awkward.

Suddenly this first session is at an end. I'm not sure we're any richer for having been here, and now we have to find our way to a geography class in some other room. The corridors are lined with lockers which doubtless have pin-ups of Michael J. Fox or Cheryl Ladd selotaped inside the door. It feels like I'm trapped in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Everywhere I look I see squareness and team spirit worn with pride. I can see nothing I recognise from my own time at school, other than the basic configuration of hominids within a building.

We dive into a darkened theatre, following other parents similarly swarming towards geography.

'I'm so glad to see you,' beams Theresa Thatcher out of nowhere. 'How have you been?'

Fuck.

She asks whether our boy is taking drama, that being the function of the darkened theatre.

Nope.

We're away through the other door, into daylight. We've escaped.

We climb stairs to the geography room, another teacher stood in front of a massive flat screen telling us his email address. We take seats, those screwy plastic chairs with an arm rest upon which you can lean to write or take notes. They don't even have desks as I understand it, nowhere to carve swastikas, skulls, the logos of heavy metal bands, or messages casting aspersions on the sexual preferences of other pupils. It feels as though we're in training for office work, as I suppose we are.

The teacher fills the screen with a page explaining which parts of the globe the kids will be studying over the coming year. It looks as though it will be mostly in socio-economic terms, with much less emphasis on plate tectonics or colouring around the edge of your fjord with a blue pencil, although I could be wrong. The teacher additionally informs us that he will be taking a dim view of anyone found playing with their phone in class, explaining in no uncertain terms that they will be told to put their phone away. I'm not even sure where to begin with this idea.

The bell goes and our ten minutes are up. The bell is actually a harsh electronic tone of the kind which alerts citizens to the arrival of a new batch of soylent green in a dystopian movie.

Everything is different. My school was primarily about teachers writing things in chalk on a blackboard, following which we would usually take books out of our desks - an operation effected by raising the lid - either to read them or write in them. I recall my dad's account of writing on a piece of slate at his school and how archaic it sounded to me even when he first told me, and realise I am now at a similar remove from the present. I am waiting to see how anything is improved.

We enter the English class. My wife is suddenly excited to see someone and is making all the noises. There's Theresa Thatcher half way up out of her chair in response, but both of us seem confused; then I recognise Duncan's mother. We'd forgotten her kid is also here, so that's nice, and it is indeed good to see her. Bess later tells me she felt hugely awkward, having failed to spot Theresa Thatcher seated in the next row. I had assumed it was deliberate.

The English class seems to combine what I recall as having been two separate lessons, literature and grammar. I glance around the room. There are two book shelves. One contains generic text books. the other is empty. It seems to me that an English classroom should maybe have a few more books. The teacher tells us that she expects her pupils to spend the first five minutes of each lesson reading a novel, something of their own choice. Somehow I don't find this reassuring.

The next classroom is full of sporting paraphernalia, trophies lined up on every surface, framed photographs of winning teams, pin-ups of soccer players, and a fish tank.

'I like the fish,' I tell my wife.

'This is the biology lesson,' she explains.

I look around. There's a poster featuring a cartoon octopus on the rear wall, otherwise it's mostly sport.

'He's the PE teacher,' my wife elaborates. 'Physical education staff over here tend to have a second subject, something else they teach, although it's usually history that suffers.'

I take another look around the room. It's mostly about him, not very much relating to biology. He tells us his email address in case we have any questions, then describes his teaching methodology by means of an acronym, GTS. He doesn't believe in just filling their heads with meaningless facts. He prefers to show them how to find out those facts for themselves, how to Google That Stuff, which is somehow delivered to his audience as a sales pitch.

Science, and specifically marine biology, is one of our boy's favourite things. We now understand why he hasn't been telling us much about the class in his usual way.

The bell goes.

Religious instruction follows. We're invited to ask questions.

'I don't want to seem facetious,' I say, 'but what are you teaching here? Do you deal with other faiths, or are you mainly focussed on Christianity?'

'Well we're starting with the Book of Genesis,' he tells me, 'so that mentions polytheistic faith.'

This answers my question in a way which does nothing to contradict the impression that has been forming over the last hour.

'Tell me,' he asks, 'is there anyone here for whom religion was unimportant when they were growing up.'

About a third of us raise our hands and he starts asking for reasons. Sadly the bell goes before he gets to me.

Finally, we end up in the Latin class. It isn't on the schedule but we were passing and we just happened to see the teacher. It's just the three of us, so we actually get to have a conversation with the guy.

'You know our boy picked this place because of the Latin?'

He didn't, but he's gratified to find this out. He talks some more, at last introducing something positive to my impression of this apparently expensive school. His room is decorated with posters relating to his subject, even with a small mosaic on board depicting the Minotaur at the centre of a labyrinth.

We finally leave with something to consider, and the rest will, I suppose, just have to look after itself.