Spring

The drive to Houston is about three and a half hours, so we've brought a talking book to pass the time; we being myself and my wife rather than the royal we, and the talking book is the autobiography of the DEA agent who arrested el Chapo, but neither of us finds it engaging. The guy reading the book so that we don't have to sounds like Alastair Cooke, who used to narrate his own weekly Letter from America on BBC Radio 4. He sounds old, stately, well spoken, and a poor fit for the testimony of one of those good little soldiers who became a cop because he wanted to make a difference, someone who has buddies and compadres and occasionally likes to cut loose with a few brewskis. Also, the narrator's Spanish is difficult to take seriously, and we've found - to our surprise - that we don't like to hear people speaking ill of el Chapo because, for all his faults, we're no longer convinced that the guy was significantly worse than any of the politicians currently blocking the Washington S-bend. We have a hunch that he may actually be preferable in certain respects. We listen to about an hour and then turn it off in frustration.

We're heading to a convention in Spring, a town about five miles north of Houston. The convention is for people who make and collect a certain kind of spinning top finely-crafted from wood, metal, resin, and whatever else can be turned on a lathe. We went to one of these things last year, and I noticed a fair few of the guests seemed to be hardcore bikers, hardcore in this instance meaning people with their own workshops in which they've hand-tooled their own bike parts. If you know your way around a lathe, I don't suppose curling off a spinning top is much different to the head of a piston. Accordingly the convention has something of a biker vibe and is to be held at Rudy's, which is a barbecue joint, one of those places with rusty bits of farm machinery customarily hanging from the beams.

Neither Bess nor myself are particularly into spinning tops, but I drew the design which they've used for the Topcon 2018 promotional t-shirt. This means we get a free table at the convention. Bess will attempt to sell her painted stones, and I'm going to have some of my canvases on display. I'd say I'm selling, except I have no faith in anyone buying; but fuck it - it's a day out.

This is what I've been telling myself since this morning, when I woke from a hopelessly literal nightmare wherein I found myself obliged to travel to a place I didn't want to go.

'I don't really want to go,' I told Bess. 'I couldn't care less about spinning tops, and we'll only spend the time worrying about the cats.'

We have a number of cats. We don't like to leave them on their own, but have reasoned that one night in Houston won't hurt, and we can set off early on Sunday, arriving home by mid-morning. Obviously they're not going to starve being as there will be no significant disruption to their routine in terms of meal times, but I still don't like to think of them worrying over where we've got to.

We arrive around noon, two-hundred miles from home. It's a while since I've been to Houston, and I'm struck by how unlike San Antonio it is. The countryside is flatter and wetter with more rainfall coming in off the gulf of Mexico. It's more humid and accordingly feels hotter, more tropical, and the countryside looks peculiarly English to my eyes, which is something to do with the trees.

Rudy's is a big old shack full of people stuffing their faces with pulled pork and the like. However, it's nothing like so big as the photo on their website somehow managed to suggest. There is no large, roomy convention hall, just myself and Bess having to squeeze sideways between tables crammed with spinning top enthusiasts.

'What the fuck are we doing here?,' I ask in rhetorical spirit as we are invited to squeeze onto a table from which we will attempt to sell our wares.

Bess has the wheeled carry case in which she ferries her painted stones. She whips out a black table cloth and arranges a couple of rocks upon it, plus one of the vinyl albums she's painted.

'I'm not going to bother,' I grumble. 'There's no room, and there's no point.'

Bess gives me the look, a sort of pleading disappointment with a soupçon of dude, make an effort.

'Seriously, where am I going to put anything?'

I could prop a single painting up against the wall at the rear of the table, but that's about it. I've bought twelve canvases with me, along with the free standing wooden frame upon which I usually display them. This has been a waste of time even before it's started, but then as we've established, no-one is going to want to buy my canvases anyway. Most are paintings of cacti and animal skulls, and not a single spinning top among them.

Bess wanders off in search of the bogs, and a waitress tells me we can't use the table, and that our setting up shop - such as it is - on this particular table constitutes Topcon 2018 extending beyond its agreed allocation of tables to intrude upon the more spacious dining areas reserved for those who've simply turned up for the pulled pork

'Right,' I sigh.

Being half way through my roughly annual smoking jag, I nip outside for a fag, past caring about how that sounds here in Texas.

When I return, we've been moved to the back room, which is less populous. I realise I just about have space for one of my display frames on the table. I go out to the car and bolt the frame together in the parking lot, then carry it inside and secure six canvases to the two horizontal beams by means of g-clamps. Bess arranges her rocks, records, and Christmas tree decorations on the table top and we settle down for the afternoon.

The guy behind us is telling a fellow enthusiast about his best spin time, which happens to be twenty-four minutes and ten seconds.

I get up and go to the bar. While Texas barbecue is invariably delicious, it sits heavy in my gut and leaves me feeling as though I've been pumped full of cavity wall insulation foam. I've promised myself never again, so I'm just going to have a beer. Happily they have Corona, which is Mexican and therefore drinkable.

I drink from the bottle at our table.

Bess has somehow already shifted fifty dollars worth of stuff, and downplays her commercial superiority by telling me that lots of people have said how much they admire my paintings. Regrettably the bar doesn't seem to recognise admiration as a form of currency.

'Okay, I'm bored,' I announce. 'I'm going to paint my beer.'

I've brought my easel, a couple of canvases, oil paints and so on. It takes about ten minutes to squeeze myself into the space between tables and next to the window. I've drunk about two thirds of the bottle, which I now spend a couple of minutes moving around on the table cloth, trying to get it to look interesting.

The next couple of hours pass quickly as I paint a still life with beer and the jar of thinner in which I stand my brushes. I'm cleaning brushes with an old pair of underpants, but no-one seems to notice. Women come and go, chatting with my wife, some buying a stone or telling me that they love my paintings. One of them is from Baltimore. She doesn't seem to like the place much.

'We've seen The Wire,' I tell her.

'That's how it is,' she confirms.

Another fag break is interrupted when my wife brings Phil outside to see me. He too thinks my paintings are really something and wanted to meet the artist. Phil is Australian.

'We're the ones you lot got rid of,' he jokes.

'Not at all,' I say. 'Sometimes I get the feeling we sent you our best people.'

'Everyone thinks he's Australian,' Bess explains, meaning me.

'I guess our accents sound the same to this lot,' I say, and we ask Phil where he's from, like it makes any difference to us.

'Perth,' he says. 'That's on the west coast.'

'My cousin Dawn lives over that way,' I begin.

'He's going to ask if you know her,' Bess laughs.

I wasn't, but now I'm wrapped up trying to remember the name of the town where Dawn lives. I know it's kind of remote, or at least I have that impression, a mining town.

'We've been watching Wentworth,' I hear my wife tell Phil.

I finish the painting. I think I'm quite pleased with it, although I'll know better in a couple of days. It reminds me of Goya, the artist rather than the refried beans.

'Shall we fuck off?'

Everyone else seems to be packing up, so we do the same as it's nearly six. We drive several anticlockwise miles in a vague circle to our hotel, which is fifty yards from Rudy's in the other direction. We can see the same water park out back from our hotel window. We eat at a Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, drive through the old part of Spring in the name of sightseeing, then fail to sleep in the hotel bed. Somehow we're both too hot and too cold for most of the night, which is weird - the quantum superposition of discomfort. The hotel is okay but it's a hotel, and it seems like everything is the least they could get away with. Breakfast is bread toasted on one side with a sort of hockey puck made of egg.

'Where is baked bean?' I demand gruffly, but no-one answers.

The drive back home is another three hours or so, but without some cop casting aspersions on the character of el Chapo. As we arrive back at the house, cats suddenly appear, the full roster bouncing out of the bushes all at the same time, tails aloft and clearly very happy to see us. It's the single greatest moment of the whole weekend.