2018 Without Notes

This was the year during which I learned to paint oil on canvas. I'd had a couple of stabs at it before, once back in the eighties and then again a couple of years ago. Neither attempt was particularly successful due to my having assumed it would probably be just like working with acrylics, only to find out that it wasn't. Anyway, this year I got the hang of it, roughly speaking - thanks in no small measure to the advice of Sean Keating and Chris Hunt.

Sean Keating and Jamie, his younger brother, were the two American kids at our school, Ilmington Junior and Infants in the heart of rural England, a stone's throw from Stratford-upon-Avon. Their father was an actor of some renown who was, at the time, appearing in something or other at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, although I only discovered this recently when encountering Sean - now an artist - through social media. I also discovered that Sean's father had played the villain in a long-running American television series and was as such one of my mother-in-law's favourite actors.

It's all connected.

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre was managed by David Brierley. His son, Crispin, was my best friend at Ilmington Junior and Infants. Many years later and over a hundred miles south as I lived and worked as a postman in London, I found myself about to deliver a letter to a pompous theatrical turd residing in Glengarry Road. I don't remember his name, but he had appeared in the Guardian colour supplement as most promising something or other. His wife, also in the theatrical profession, was much nicer, and I used to talk to her from time to time. One day she turned up in an episode of The Bill, the popular television police drama. Next day I happened to encounter the pompous theatrical turd in the street so I said to pass on my congratulations to his wife. He made a sniffing noise, the sneer of a man who considers himself above watching anything so base as an episode of The Bill, which is why I came to think of him as a  pompous theatrical turd.

Anyway, the letter I found myself about to deliver to him on this occasion was from David Brierley, manager of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. This was too much of a coincidence for me, so I knocked and the pompous theatrical turd came to the door.

'Look,' I said pointing to the name and return address on the back of the envelope. 'That's my best friend's dad from junior school! Isn't that incredible?'

The pompous theatrical turd took the letter, made the same noise he had made when I'd met him in the street on the morning after his wife's appearance on national television, and closed the door. Apparently he didn't think it was that incredible.

At the age of fifty-three I have come to routinely expect improbable coincidences, so I don't suppose I truly regard any of it as necessarily incredible, not any more.

I knew Chris Hunt through fanzine and tape culture back in the eighties, which would be another substantial digression, but the point is that himself and Sean Keating got me started on the oils, introducing me to techniques quite unlike those I knew from working with acrylic paint. So, 2018 was the year I began to paint on canvas, working from life rather than photographs - as has been my preference up until recently - because the medium seems more conducive to working from life rather than from photographs.

I went back to England for a couple of weeks back in the June of 2018, and during this time I visited Dave Hirons, my former teacher from the art foundation course in Leamington Spa. He asked why I had opted for such a fundamentalist approach to painting, and may even have described my work as a rejection of modernism, or at least as being back to basics with the kind of emphasis which summoned unfortunate memories of Margaret Thatcher. I had no answer, and still don't, because the question seemed to require a needlessly polarised justification for why one thing is not something else.

This is tea, not coffee.

Why do you hate coffee?

I paint what I enjoy painting and this year I've also been trying to sell the things, which is a first for me. It's easy enough to keep acrylic paintings in a folder down the side of the bed, but canvases take up more space, plus I need money to buy comic books and all the vinyl records I never got around to buying at the time. I've painted twenty-three canvases this year, with two of those still being works currently in progress. I've sold four of them from which I've made $200, which is probably not amazing, but is better than a kick up the arse. Strangest of all, of the four I've sold, three I hadn't regarded as being anything special and I'd assumed they probably wouldn't sell. I guess I'm not the best judge of my own work.

Also this year, I started buying back all those X-Men comic books I got rid of back in the nineties, simultaneous to filling in all the gaps in my record collection - seeing as it's now become feasible to buy vinyl again. This is what I'm doing in lieu of the traditional mid-life crisis. It's probably the same thing but is more fun for me and less of a pain in the arse for everyone else. Sales of canvas paintings probably cover, at a rough estimate, about thirty back issues of Uncanny X-Men plus holes plugged within the respective back catalogues of the Stranglers, Wreckless Eric, and Eddie & the Hot Rods.

Additionally, I cycled a couple of thousand miles.

We acquired even more cats.

I wrote many, many words. I also painted some book covers and probably had something or other published.

Donald Trump continued to make America great again.

The Earth went around the sun.

I read 93 books, according to Goodreads.

There will have been other stuff too.

So some of that was 2018.

The End of a Fair

We have yet another craft fair booked at Mission Plaza - Bess and myself - although this one is a slightly bigger deal than that to which we're accustomed. Higher attendance is anticipated due to it having been tied in with some cycling event, and there will be a live band. This means we have to leave earlier than usual to set up. Ordinarily this would bother me, but for once I've managed to get my ass into gear and we loaded the car up last night, so amazingly we're there before nine. It's a nice day too, clear blue sky and just warm enough to be pleasant. Without having really kept count, we think this is probably our eighth or ninth stint at Mission Plaza. It feels strange to have become old hands at something we only began this year, and so much so that we can set up without having to think about it.

We put up the canopy, stake it into the soil; out with the table and camping chairs; Bess spreads out her rocks and painted things whilst I bolt together the frames upon which I display my canvases; and soon we're done, ready for the rush - which is usually two or three people every twenty minutes or so. We're situated between the food bank and the Mexican guy who sells cacti. Because it's some sort of special occasion, today the food bank is a whole truck loaded with refrigerators and the like, so they take up twice the normal space. It's a mobile market stall for vegetables mostly grown by volunteers, and they accept food stamps. Last time we were here they gave us some stuff to take home as thanks for our help with their own canopy - butternut squash, potatoes, a massive onion, and a sweet potato I still haven't got around to using.

There are a lot more canopies than usual, and a big huddle of them over the far side of the field. This is something to do with cycling, specifically an organisation called FrankenBike.

The entire field doubles up as a drive-in movie theatre, because I've now reached the point of my acclimation at which it feels strange to refer to it as a cinema. The screen is a huge concrete wall to our right, curved and painted turquoise, excepting the white rectangle upon which the works of Michael J. Fox are projected. At its base is a raised platform which serves as stage when the occasion demands, as it will today. There are doors in the screen, presumably leading to inner rooms and storage spaces. It's a structure unlike any I have previously encountered. Usually someone trails a mains extension out from within the screen to a speaker sat alone at the front of the stage and we spend the morning with a soundtrack of peculiarly unpredictable composition - salsa, tejano, country rock, hits of the sixties, hits of the twenties, and occasional bewildering excursions into dubstep, trance or drum and bass. We're yet to hit the Swedish death metal playlist, but it can only be a matter of weeks. Normally I might find this annoying, but the music has thus far been okay and has in any case kept itself to the background.

By ten we've already had a few nosing around, and Bess has already sold a couple of rocks. A few people have told me they like my paintings, which is nice, and which is what happens instead of me actually selling any of the fuckers; but I don't mind. I know we're in the wrong part of town to sell a painting for sixty dollars. My prices are based on what I myself wouldn't mind paying, and on the fact that I'm not even sure I want to sell at least a few of them so the price has to be one which feels worth my while, and on prices I've seen charged by others. I've noticed very few people asking less than a hundred for an oil painting, excepting the only notionally talented who tend to paint lop-sided pictures of Batman, the Joker, and Harley Quinn, the Joker's girlfriend. I therefore feel confident that sixty dollars is a reasonable price for a proper painting produced by someone who can actually paint, namely myself; and luckily - I suppose - I don't really mind them not selling. I've come to think of our stall as a temporary gallery with knobs on, and it's a nice day out.

Also by ten, we're both inexplicably hungry. There's no sign of Chinga su Madre!, the taco truck which is usually here parked just behind the woman selling home made cookies; and yes, the guy really does trade as Chinga su Madre!, which is doubtless hilarious in neighbourhoods where no-one speaks Spanish. I therefore cross the highway to Nicha's, which sports a banner claiming itself to have been voted San Antonio's best Mexican restaurant. I've a feeling I've seen the same banner outside plenty of other places, but Nicha's is nevertheless decent. Nicha is short for Dionisia, and we've already made all the jokes about how if you gaze long enough into the salsa verde, the salsa verde will gaze back into you.

Happily, there's no sign of Snooki, who usually takes my order. She earned the name through an unfortunate resemblance to Snooki from Jersey Shore and because she always seems to find the taking of my order to be a colossal pain in the ass.

'Chicken fajitas on corn,' I will ask.

'How many?'

'I don't know. Just chicken fajitas on corn. I want however many there is in one order of chicken fajitas on corn?'

'How many do you want?'

'I want however many you gave me the last time I ordered chicken fajitas on corn without having to specify how many I wanted. They're for my wife.'

She'll sigh and narrow her eyes. 'You need to tell me whether you want one or two.'

'I don't know. Two, I suppose. My wife eats them. Usually I'm also eating rather than sitting there counting how many fajitas you've given her.'

'Two chicken fajitas on corn, and what else?'

'Street tacos.' I don't have to specify the required number of street tacos because they always come four to a serving, although I resent having to call them street tacos which sounds suspiciously like hipster terminology. I just adore Mexican street food, I recall a person of my vague acquaintance from Portland once screeching in reference to what is simply known as food in Mexico.

Snooki is nowhere to be seen, and even more exciting is that I saw a help wanted sign on the door. Snooki's replacement seems nicer and is able to take my order without extraneous negotiation. She also likes my accent and tells me that her boyfriend is from France. I tell her that I like the French and I try to remember whether I've been to his bit of the country.

Back at the craft fair, we're half way through Goldilocks and the Three Bears on the stage, as performed for the benefit of an audience of maybe fifteen, but those watching at least seem appreciative. I watch for a couple of minutes. This version of the tale has been given a local spin with the bears making a big deal out of how much chilli they've added to the porridge before going out on their walk. I can't tell if this works or not, but the little kids seem to get a kick out of it.

For the sake of something to do, I embark upon a new painting, having brought my paints, easel, and a canvas. Having taken up oils I'm concentrating on painting directly from life, simply for the sake of stretching my artistic horizons. I paint the tree behind our stall, and because there's a red truck parked next to the tree, I paint the back end of the truck, which seems to make sense in terms of the composition as a whole.

A band starts up on the stage, three middle-aged guys playing the sort of thing middle-aged guys tend to play. Writing about this one week later, it will have become impossible to recall quite what they were doing - but probably generically competent country rock, something of that sort.

Woo hoo.

We sell some more, or Bess sells some more and everybody tells me how much they like my paintings. One woman definitely has her eye on two of them, and will bring money next time we're at the Mission Plaza, which will be March.

'What?' I ask Bess. 'March?'

'Yes, this is the last fair of the year.'

'Really?'

'Afraid so.'

'Damn.'

I now realise this explains the big send off with performance and the FrankenBikes and everything else. A guy sat with our cactus retailing neighbour walks over and gets in the red truck. I feel suddenly awkward.

'I'm going to miss this.'

'I know. Me too,' Bess sighs.

More time passes.

I can't tell if I like the painting of the truck and the tree, and I can't tell whether or not I've finished it. Just in case I have, I cross the field to the public bogs to wash my hands which have begun to feel greasy from the linseed oil with which I thin the paints.

When I return, Bess tells me that the guy who owns the truck came over to examine my work. He liked it.

I mosey over to the cactus stall. 'Hey there. Hope you don't mind me painting your truck. It just seemed to fit the picture.'

I'm surprised at how happy he seems. 'You have a lot of talent,' he says. 'I wondered what you were doing at first.'

'Yeah. I didn't realise it was your truck. That time when you got in, I thought, oh fuck - he's going to drive off and I haven't finished.'

We both laugh, then I go back to the painting. I think I'm starting to like it, although I'm not yet sure that it's finished.

Our friend who sells cacti comes over to see. 'You know he loves that truck. He is very happy to see you have done this.' He points at a large sticker in the rear window. 'He is very proud of that too.'

I squint but I can't quite read it - something to do with the military, so the guy is clearly a veteran.

The stage is now host to a performance by some kind of local tejano class - guitarist and drummer accompanying a string of little kids playing accordions. Some of the kids are significantly smaller than their instruments. Tejano is what happened when the Spanish music of post-conquest Mexico joined up with the oompah bands which German settlers brought to Texas. The ability of the kids, some of whom look to be about seven-years old at best, is astonishing - wheezing ninety mile an hour accordion trills with not a bum note or missed cue to be heard. It's not entirely my thing but it beats the blandly competent country rock we had earlier. The grand finale has all of the kids playing at the same time, seven or eight accordions blasting away on stage; and I come to the strange realisation that one accordion sounds the same as seven or eight played in series.

I finish the painting, hypothetically speaking.

'How much do you want?' the owner of the red truck asks. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might want to buy it, and I hope he doesn't think I painted it in expectation of his coughing up the readies. I feel a bit guilty, so I say twenty because he seems like a decent guy and his obvious enthusiasm makes up at least some of the difference.

It has been a really good day, and as I said, I'll miss this place over the coming months.

Art School Re-onion

The first one had been great against all expectation, but then it was all last moment with phone calls and people who also just happened to be in the vicinity. We met in some pub in Forest Hill - Adam, Gail, Mark, and two Carls respectively spelled with a K and a C. The pub was loud and brash as pubs tend to be, full of the traditional braying Saturday night wankers, but adversity sometimes forges magic of a kind. We all got hilariously pissed. I realised that I'd barely exchanged a word with Adam during the entire three years of the course we both attended at Maidstone College of Art, and thirty years later it proved impossible to work out why - just another one of those stupid things. Similarly it turned out that Carl and Mark had never actually had a conversation prior to that evening. Gail was still funny with a pleasingly dry wit but a different accent to the one I recall, and the other Karl was still massively entertaining. He didn't seem to remember having once made a codpiece of a red plastic utensil drainer nabbed from the kitchen sink for a performance of Cameo's Word Up, but never mind. We ended the evening stood outside freezing our bits off, swaying gently from side to side. It was a great night, and it really didn't seem like it had all been so long ago.

The second one results from a more intensive application of choreography, and my name has been announced on a facebook page as having come all the way from Texas, which I have. It's at some place called the Harp in Covent Garden, or roughly around that way. Central London wouldn't have been my choice, but it's easily accessible to all of the people who have said they will be coming. Carl and I walk across the city because one of the stations is out, although it feels a little like one of Carl's long walks, cheerily innocuous proposals which end up being thirty fucking miles. It feels like one of Carl's long walks most likely because I'm still limping. I arrived in London yesterday, walking from Victoria Station to my friend Rob's place at the rear of New Oxford Street because I'd reasoned that it probably wasn't that far on foot.

I turned up at Carl's place around midday and by six I have begun to suffer from conversational overload, being an otherwise fairly solitary sort of person. We walk across London - or limp in my case - and I feel pissy, whilst simultaneously resenting my own lack of endurance because how often do I actually see any of these people these days? How often do I see anyone?

They aren't upstairs at the Harp, whoever they are or will be. We check downstairs and they aren't there either. Carl and I buy beer and wait upstairs having found a table in a room with a bunch of rugby enthusiasts busily honking and hooting at each other as they do. Happily it's the room in which we are destined to meet the others. Upstairs at the Harp were the actual directions, and there's only this one room. We wait until nine and decide no-one is coming - two hours. On the way out, we find them crowded around the door, out on the pavement. Someone looked upstairs, poked their head into the room in which we'd agreed to meet and failed to recognise either Carl or myself. I'm wearing a stetson and a shirt of material in the pattern of the Lone Star flag, which you would think might have helped identify a person who had come all the way from Texas, as advertised on facebook.

We buy more drinks and go back upstairs, all seven of us this time. There's Sue and Kirsten, then three blokes I don't know. They look familiar in the same way as someone on a TV show can occasionally look familiar, but that's it.

I sit next to Sue. 'So how have you been?'

'Fine.' She regards me as a complete stranger; or worse than a complete stranger. It's that look of fear or even distrust in anticipation of the next question making everything horrible and awkward. Had I asked hey baby, what star-sign are you? her reaction probably wouldn't have been much different.

'You don't remember me, do you?'

'I'm afraid I don't.'

'I don't even look a little familiar?'

'Sorry.'

Sue is the person whom I was looking forward to seeing, knowing she would almost certainly be in attendance. We had been friends, and if not actually buddy-buddy, certainly more than merely acquainted.

'I used to live at the Square in Leeds village.'

'Right.'

'You remember Jane, your best friend for at least a year?'

'I remember Jane.'

'You used to come over to see us. I cooked a couple of times, or tried to cook. You sent me postcards from the Lake District that one summer.'

'I remember the Square in Leeds, but I don't remember you living there.' She pauses, uncomfortable. 'So what are you doing these days?'

Like you give a shit, I think, you don't even fucking know who I am. I mumble something which is reciprocated with a brief summary of her own life as a vaguely successful printmaker, and I am reminded of how little I ever had in common with most of those people at art college, people who stand in one room high street art galleries describing something or other as very interesting, people who go all misty-eyed over the shipping forecast on Radio 4, people who met this really amazing old guy on the side of a mountain in Baja California…

By the same token, I have no memory of the three middle-aged blokes on the other side of me. It turns out they were in the year below me and the painting department. I never really had much to do with anyone in the painting department.

Then there's Kirsten who remembers me well, which is gratifying because I remember her well. She's very funny, very dry, and a couple of the more sarcastic one liners and zingers in my arsenal probably came from her. It's a joy to see her again, as I suspected it would be. It doesn't really seem like a whole lot of time has passed. Inevitably we talk about Charlie, because he and Kirsten shared a house, and I seem to be the only one of us who kept in touch with him.

'He was the only student I ever met who turned up on the day he moved in with an ironing board - bless him.' She's laughing but it's an affectionate laugh.

'Who was this?' Sue asks.

'Charlie Adlard,' three of us chorus.

The name rings no bell, and of course she hasn't heard of the Walking Dead. Someone explains it to her, and why Charlie is now more famous than the rest of us put together, including Traci Emin, another Maidstone graduate.

Sue zips off to catch a train back to the south coast, and I begin to feel less irritable. The rest of us talk and drink for another hour, mostly like strangers who've only just met because that's mostly what we are. I manage to squeeze out another hour of conversation about our having shared the same geographical coordinates some three decades ago, and then I limp back to the tube station with Carl. The past couple of hours seem to have reproduced my experience of art college in microcosm with surprising fidelity.

Lone Hollow

Junior has attended summer camp since he was about eleven. Summer camp is one of those characteristically American institutions I don't quite understand, having no equivalent in my own childhood. I suspect I would have hated the idea of going to one, but I suppose I would have adapted; and our kid seems to think summer camp is amazing so he gets the last word, seeing as how he has the actual experience.

It's November, cold, wet, and we're taking the boy to some sort of off season reunion held at a local high school, specifically one of the knobby ones. We sit in the car, waiting at the gate. The security guard comes out of his bunker.

'Is this a military base?' I ask.

'No. It's a school.'

My wife talks to the guard. He returns to his bunker and the gate slides back. We drive through the grounds. About a minute passes before we see buildings.

'Is this one of those schools where they have their own generator so they can sit out the apocalypse when it happens?'

The boy laughs at my joke, which is gratifying. We're looking for building number forty-one. We can see thirty-nine and forty-two.

'We should park and look around. It must be up here somewhere.'

Some other people wander across the way, but with neither the numbers nor urgency one would expect for something describing itself as a reunion. Still, we follow them and find a site map screwed to a wall. Within another minute we have found our building. There's a temporary sign on a board set up outside, manned by a couple of summer camp types in Lone Hollow t-shirts and evangelical smiles.

'Hey, it's Josh,' observes our boy, or maybe not Josh, but some name in that general ballpark. Josh recognises our boy and somehow manages to grin even harder. I thought he was already at full capacity but apparently not.

We enter the lecture theatre. We sign our names.

'Would you like a sticker?' the woman asks happily.

'A sticker?'

'You can write your name on it so we know who you are.'

'No, you're all right there.' I smile in diplomatic fashion and move on.

They give us publicity material and a DVD, a visual record of the most recent summer at the camp; and suddenly we're walking out.

'Wait,' I say. 'Was that it?'

'No, there will probably be more.'

'Are you leaving?' asks Josh, or whatever he's called.

'We're just going for a walk,' my wife says.

We head for the car.

'Did you want to stay?' Bess asks the kid.

'I don't know. What else was there going to be?'

'I don't know.'

'Shouldn't we go back,' I suggest. 'I don't mind but this seems kind of rude.'

We wander around the grounds for a couple more minutes, then we go back. We find seats high up at the back of the lecture theatre, which isn't difficult. There are a few parents but I count about ten kids.

'How many kids were at the camp? It was more than just ten surely?'

'There were a lot,' the boy says, with the usual emphasis on the quantifier, as though he's hoping to blow my mind, as though I wouldn't believe how many millions of kids there were at the summer camp. 'But they were from all over. There were even some kids from New York,' he says as though this were impossible, and yet he'd seen it with his own eyes.

'Wow,' I concede. 'Do you know any of these?'

'I know Josh. I don't know the others.'

We sit. Bess gives me a bingo card on the grounds of my being good at that sort of thing - sixteen squares of pictograms referring to things they get up to at summer camp - a bow and arrow, a football, a wigwam and so on. Still images of rural activities flash across the screen at the front of the hall and I notice one of the pictograms superimposed in a lower corner. Bess gives me a pencil and I start to cross them out as I see them. It's something to do. 'I wonder what we win.'

The presentation begins. Summer camp people outnumber the rest of us two to one in their cheery blue t-shirts, but then it's a cold, wet Sunday in the nether regions of Texas. The first speaker tells us a load of things about teaching kids to do stuff. It feels oddly like a sales pitch, or something which will conclude with the handling of poisonous snakes.

We watch a film, presumably the one we've been given on DVD - kids in boats, canoes, sliding down zip lines, swimming, running, making art, and quite clearly having a fantastic time. The music is the sort of populist autotuned emo you would expect, aspirational songs about having fun. More than anything, America is about team, about being true to your school, about cheerleaders and loyalty; but I suppose you get used to it.

The film ends and we discreetly leave.

So that happened.