Renf

Checking through the most recent photos on my camera, I find one of what appears to be a portable lavatory built from doors of various shapes and sizes nailed together in haphazard fashion. The structure seems to be in a field. The photograph was taken on Saturday the 4th of May, and while it's sort of familiar, I don't know what I'm looking at or where I was when I took the picture.

The image apparently settles into my thoughts, and three mornings later I wake to a sudden recollection of having taken it at a Renaissance Fair, an event Wikipedia describes thus:

An outdoor weekend gathering, usually held in the United States, open to the public and typically commercial in nature, which purportedly recreates a historical setting for the amusement of its guests. Some are permanent theme parks, while others are short-term events in a fairground, winery, or other large public or private spaces. Renaissance fairs generally include an abundance of costumed entertainers or fair-goers, musical and theatrical acts, art and handicrafts for sale, and festival food. Some offer camp grounds for those who wish to stay more than one day. Many Renaissance fairs are set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Some are set earlier, during the reign of Henry VIII, or in other countries, such as France, and some are set outside the era of the Renaissance.

I am familiar with the general concept through a well-meaning but slightly headachey facebook acquaintance, another Englishman living in Texas who frequently posted pictures of himself dressed either as a character from Star Trek or as some sort of Viking, the latter being the guise he adopts when attending Renaissance Fairs. Also through certain persons of my wife's acquaintance.
 

The certain persons of my wife's acquaintance were forever trying to encourage her to come along with them to a Renaissance Fair. It's such fun, they all pleaded, usually referring to the event as a Ren Fair, because who can be bothered with all those extra syllables? Certainly not me, and I shall accordingly employ the term Renf from here on so as to additionally save time which I might eventually need in discussion of matters other than adults who dress up as Elsa from Frozen.

The Renaissance was a period of European history which I tend to regard as primarily Italian, that being where it seems to have enjoyed its most dramatic florescence. Clearly its influence was felt in England, albeit to an arguably lesser extent. The English setting of your typical Renf may therefore seem a slightly esoteric choice, but I suppose it's because everyone can already speak English, and a few can even do the accent, having seen Cumberbatch on the telly, or having grown up reading Mighty Thor comics wherein characters regularly address each other as my liege. This nevertheless still leaves us with the question of why bother?

The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that Man is the measure of all things. This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later fifteenth century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe: the very first traces appear in Italy as early as the late thirteenth century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.

Or it could just be some need to express one's inner Elsa from Frozen in an accepting and non-judgemental atmosphere in the company of like-minded individuals. We were going to find out, because Bess had heard that there was to be a Renf here in San Antonio, only a small Renf but crucially one which wasn't charging admission.

There was a concern that we might run into certain persons of my wife's acquaintance dressed as Elsa from Frozen, which would be awkward, obliging us to converse whilst refraining from comment upon the manifest absurdity of the other party, but most of them would probably be attending the much bigger Renf in Austin, so it seemed like a chance worth taking.

We drove to the other side of town, then down a winding track onto what resembled common land, overgrown but with rusting sections of gate thrust up from the grass here and there. It felt as though we had left the city, and then began to feel as though we had left the twenty-first century, at least until the Renf came into view with all of its artificial fibres in iridescent colours which aren't to be found in nature. Tents and canopies of conspicuously contemporary design were arranged around an uneven circular green drooping down the hillside towards a knackered looking house, and we guessed we were in what had once been its grounds. We followed the track around hedges and between sprawls of mesquite trees. Here and there it opened up to a patch of irregularly parked vehicles, but no available spaces. Eventually we found one behind the house. The last time we had driven anywhere this rustic, tiny cages too small for the wild hogs they held prisoner had been visible between the trees and the trailer homes.

The Renf was mostly manned by persons dressed as Elsa from Frozen, seven or eight stalls, trinkets and jewellery, and nothing which seemed to warrant a closer look. The stallholders outnumbered the attendees from what we could see. A man in a kilt stood at the entrance to the house. He had a guitar and was singing songs about the auld country and how he did see a maiden fair, which had been a long time ago before the verb to see had acquired a past tense. Bess and myself entered the house where we did see a number of oil paintings, most of them for sale. I recall some of them as having been quite nice. Bess recalls them as having been mostly awful. Neither of us can remember what any of them looked like, or anything else about them. The house was seemingly owned by an artists collective, so I suppose it was their Renf.

Back outside, we passed what appeared to be a portable lavatory built from doors of various shapes and sizes nailed together in haphazard fashion - apparently the only thing worth a photograph. Just beyond the portable lavatory was some sort of jousting event conducted on foot rather than horseback and making use of genuine mediaeval styrofoam tubes as weaponry. Opposite the jousting we did see a man dressed as a knave with a mystery box. The idea was that you should pay a dollar to see what's in his mystery box, if you really give that much of a shit, which we didn't.

By now we had experienced half of what the Renf had to offer, having travelled a full semicircle about the green which we didst see when first we arrived in our marvellous horseless carriage. A steampunk woman now approached us. She wore a seventeenth century petticoat, aviator goggles, and a top hat embellished with cogs and flywheels - all sprayed bronze, because really, it's all about the dressing up box and the rosy nostalgia with which we recall such happy childhood memories from before our lives became weighed down with responsibilities and expectations, before we grew up to recognise ourselves as useless generic consumers of product, before self awareness forced us to recategorise our collective neoteny as somehow quirky and delightful, a sign of character.

Unimpressed by the most indubitably delightful perambulation of that bronzed personage, we headed back towards the house. The petting zoo was mostly chickens caged in cages not much bigger than themselves and arranged outside under full sun in the midday Texas heat. The smell was eye-watering. Beyond the petting zoo was a book stall, but all of the books were self-published by the same author, volumes of poetry and an ongoing series of novels about dragons. The author was dressed as Elsa from Frozen.

The entire excursion took about ten minutes and was shite, but I'm sure a proper Renf must be a quite different affair, with everyone dressed like Elsa from Frozen or Asterix the Gaul and addressing each other as my liege in that hilarious Austin Powers voice.

Oh behaaave, my liege.

Ha ha.

Fucking brilliant.

What a shame that I shall never know.

From the Cheese Cave to the End of Days

'My friend Jeremy will be in Dallas,' Bess said. 'We need to go.'

'We need to go to Dallas?'

'Yes. He has a one man show. The cats will be okay for one night and I haven't seen him in ages.'

'He has a one man show?'

'Yes, and it's in Dallas.'

'Despite our having been married for eight years, this is the first time you've ever mentioned anyone called Jeremy.'

'It is?'

'Yes, and that's why I have certain reservations as to the urgency of this proposed visit to Dallas even before we get to your use of the term one man show.'

'We've been friends for ages, since we were at school. I can't believe I've never mentioned him.'

'Well, maybe you have, but I already have a friend called Jeremy and it's not a very common name in my experience so I'm sure I would have noticed your mention of this additional Jeremy.'

'Well, we need to go to Dallas.'

'For a one man show?'

'Yeah. I don't know. It could be awful, but I have to see him. Even if it's really bad, it will still be exciting to go. We can visit Dealey Plaza.'

'Can't I just stay here? That way we won't have to worry about the cats. I hate leaving them on their own overnight. You should go and meet your friend and have fun.'

In the end we reach a compromise because Bess is similarly uncomfortable with the thought of leaving the cats unattended. We're going to set out early in the car, see Jeremy's one man show, then drive back the same day. It will be a long time spent on the highway, but we did it back in 2013 when we drove to Fort Worth to see a baby elephant then recently born at the local zoo. It's a bit of a hike, but we've done it before.

We leave at around nine. By ten we're already passing through Austin, which seems weird. Austin is usually to be found at the conclusion of a long road trip, but the travel time has passed more quickly on this occasion with Austin now marking off just one segment of a greater distance.

Bess explains how she first encountered Jeremy during a school trip to Washington DC. The trip brought together kids from all across the country rather than from any one specific school, and she and Jeremy were in the same hotel. They hit it off immediately and have kept in touch ever since.

The next major conurbation through which we pass following Austin is Temple. I look at the map and deduce that we should be in Dallas shortly after midday. We've been on the road since nine, it's now eleven, and Temple isn't far short of Waco which looks like two thirds of the total distance to me. We've been listening to a CD of a lecture by Howard Zinn entitled Stories Hollywood Never Tells, about political bias in the movie industry. Andy Martin gave me the CD many years ago and I recall having once found it interesting and enlightening. We tend to listen to either spoken word or stand up comedy on our road trips, and Howard Zinn seemed like a good choice as I hadn't heard the thing in a long, long time. Unfortunately, whilst I continue to sympathise with Zinn's general position, he pauses and mutters and doesn't seem to speak well in public, and there are a whole string of movies conveying anti-establishment, anti-war, or otherwise left-leaning messages to refute his theory; which leaves him sounding like your archetypal whining snowflake - as I believe is the current nominative - and this is a realisation which places me in the company of your archetypal whining Trumpanzee, which is awkward. Bess feels the same so we eject the disc.

Approaching Waco, we begin to notice billboards advertising the Cheese Cave.

'The what?' Bess asks, having missed the billboard.

'It's a cave, probably one of the old mine shafts where they used to dig for cheese,' I propose.

'We need to go there.'

Traffic slows as we come into Waco.

'We could just go to the Cheese Cave and tell Jeremy the traffic was too bad,' I suggest.

'I'm tempted.'

We crawl along, idly making an assessment of the city of Waco based on what can be seen from the highway. We already know they have a Cheese Cave. They also seem to have something to do with a mammoth. Inevitably we get onto the subject of David Koresh and whether or not the city has chosen to remember him with a statue, or at least a blue plaque. Realistically we both know that a theme park would be expecting too much.

By now, we're both hungry. We make several attempts to dine at branches of Cracker Barrel, an eating establishment dedicated to the dining requirements of crackers such as ourselves, but it's Father's Day so the parking lots are all crammed and with lines of customers trailing out of the entrance awaiting seating. We settle for Heitmiller Steakhouse, and Bess takes the opportunity to learn more of the Cheese Cave by reading about it through the agency of her phone. Apparently it's a store selling all sorts of cheese, so we definitely need to go there at some point.

Duly fed and watered, we return to the road. Dallas, when we arrive about an hour later, reminds me of Austin. At least the city centre has the same look about it, which I didn't expect. I think of this as being my third trip to this locality, but the two previous visits were actually to Fort Worth, the neighbouring conurbation which I've tended to regard as being simply west Dallas, at least up until now.

Dallas, the TV show, was pretty big when I was a kid growing up in England. Its influence was such as to have impacted upon the language of myself and my peers, specifically in the coining of a verb, to do a Dallas. Holding two slats of a window blind apart with one's fingers whilst peering out at an approaching visitor, perhaps with a look of suspicion forming upon one's face, was doing a Dallas. I seem to recall that Sue Ellen Ewing spent quite a lot of screen time doing a Dallas, and presume that's where it came from. It seems that I must have watched Dallas, and enough so as to negate the need for anyone to have explained the verb to me, but it was a long time ago and all I can otherwise remember are grassy plains, skyscrapers, and big hats. So this is, after all, a new thing for me.

We pass what curiously resembles a British pub, then find ourselves at Theatre Three. Jeremy's one man show will be performed in the basement, in a subsidiary venue wittily named Theatre Too, and we're here with twenty minutes to spare, which seems like good timing. We purchase drinks in special theatrical sippy cups from a goth wearing a Church of Satan pendant, then head downstairs.

Jeremy sees us in the queue - which isn't too surprising given that the queue comprises just Bess and myself - and is overjoyed that we've made it. Introductions are effected, breeze is shot, and I am relieved to realise that he's a nice guy. This is because my wife is disinclined to befriend arseholes.

The show, which is called Keeping Up With the Jorgensons, isn't well attended, just five or six of us for whatever reason, but is nevertheless an exceptional performance of a wonderful piece of writing. Jeremy spends an hour talking us through the events of a road trip taken with his father when he was a kid. It's both hilarious and horrifying, and most impressive is that I somehow forget I'm watching one man playing all of the parts - himself as a kid, his father, grandfather, neighbours and others; all are brought to life in detail so agonisingly plausible that you can almost smell the booze and the foot odour. It's exhausting to watch, but in a good way.

The hour is up. Jeremy comes out to take a bow, seemingly unconcerned by the poor turnout, and Bess and I get back on the road. The woman who sold us our tickets said something about a tornado warning, which is worrying. Back upstairs, we stare from the theatre doors at a Biblical deluge where before there was sun. We were going to take a look at Dealey Plaza, but this changes things; and Jeremy was supposed to be heading off to the airport to catch his flight immediately after the performance, so it probably changes things for him too. We run for the car, having reasoned that it may get worse, and maybe we can get ourselves out of Dallas before it hits.

It takes less than a minute to get to the car but we are both soaked by heavy blobs of rainfall sluicing from the heavens. We drive cautiously around Dallas, back onto the highway. The streets empty as everyone else takes cover. The sky darkens and we hear thunder. Visibility drops and the vehicle in front reduces to red lights in the dark grey haze of noisy water.

Back at Theatre Too, the woman selling tickets showed us the animated weather forecast, horizontal waves moving west across Dallas and Fort Worth. It looked as though we would be okay south of the city, with the storm proposed to hit Waco no sooner than 6.30PM, and it's only just gone four. I try hard to keep from visualising our car sucked up into the sky.

The rain eases a little and the sky brightens, but the roads are still slick with water and the car hydroplanes across the highway from time to time. Bess grips the wheel and drives slowly.

'It looks okay up ahead,' I suggest.

'Yes,' she says, 'once we're clear of the city…'

The sky darkens, thunder cracks, the rain renews its efforts, and this happens over and over for the next hundred miles or so. Sometimes we even see a thin stretch of blue running along the horizon or hit a dry patch of highway allowing us to go a little faster, but then I look away and when I turn back the storm has somehow revived itself. Lightning flashes, our wheels lose traction, and golfball hailstones batter the car, on and off for the next couple of hours, all the way through Waco, and then Temple. At one point a lightning bolt strikes a light pole about fifty feet away, so quick and loud it makes us both jump. The light at the top of the pole seems to explode and it resembles a special effect.

It's after six as we approach Austin, with more and more blue sky somewhere ahead of us. We're hungry so we stop in at a Cracker Barrel, reasonably confident that it will have cleared by the time we've eaten. We eat and the rain is harder than ever as we once again run for the car.

We drive slow, and eventually it no longer feels as though we're driving through the Biblical end of days, and it's after nine by the time we get home. We survived, and next time we'll go looking for that Cheese Cave.

Emergency Veterinary Clinic

There's something wrong with Fluffy, our eldest cat. He seems fine, and it isn't as though he's acting any different, but for two nights running we've found pools of urine containing traces of blood, and Fluffy is the main suspect. Bess is so worried that we take him to the emergency veterinary clinic. It's seven in the evening, Saturday night.

Fluffy - which is his nickname - is about nine, maybe ten. His actual name is Scarface - chosen by the boy after his class learned about some similarly named Native American hero at school - but I've never been able to bring myself to address him as such because it sounds pompous and pretentious; and he is, by some definition, my best friend.

The internet is full of persons who routinely pour scorn on those of us who like cats. Apparently it means we are emotional weaklings, tantamount to adults who coo over stuffed toys and who probably watch weepy films with our understanding, sensitive partners when we could be out killin' sump'n with a gun in the good honest company of a pit bull or similar. I find it difficult to take such inane Nietzschean bleatings seriously. Anyone cracking jokes about drowning cats in sacks of bricks or quipping that our latest batch of kittens would make ideal bar snacks for their dog can similarly fuck off too. You're not funny. You're just a fucking twat.

I spend more time with cats than I do with human beings. I feel I have come to understand them fairly well. We remain different species and so have variant priorities, but we nevertheless communicate regardless of their inability to either speak or understand English. There are cable channels full of admittedly often twee documentaries about animal companionship, goats who hang out with a favourite horse, the dog which has raised a litter of baby bunnies as its own, and so on. It no longer seems meaningful to regard myself as superior or senior simply by virtue of opposable thumbs and the fact of my traipsing to the store to buy cat food. I look after them, I enjoy their friendship, and that is more than enough. They're more like small people who share our home, and I have achieved more meaningful exchanges with my cats than I have with the majority of human beings I've met, because the simple fact of a common language has no bearing on the quality of that which is communicated. Fluffy's happiness is therefore important to me.

Fluffy doesn't much like being in the cat carrier, and is loudly expressing his reservations. This is where the absence of a common language is particularly unfortunate, and there's very little I can do to put him at ease.

We answer questions at the reception desk. Yes, we've been here before, specifically when Holly broke her leg. The treatment ended up costing six-thousand dollars so we remember it well.

We take a seat and wait as instructed.

An assistant comes to escort Fluffy to the surgery, to where the vet will take a look at him.

We continue to wait in the reception area. There's a flat screen TV on the wall showing Saturday Night Live, one of the episodes which is mostly gales of laughter greeting nothing I actually understand or find funny. Ten minutes pass, then twenty.

We are called into one of the smaller rooms. The vet will be with us in just a moment, the assistant tells us before leaving us alone. Opposite the door through which we were admitted is a second door leading through to the surgery. We can hear Fluffy meowing in distress somewhere in the building, a plaintive wail every ten seconds or so. The room is a little warmer than I like and we don't even have the television as a distraction.

Last time we took Fluffy to the vet, he wailed and meowed and then magically transformed into the world's most sociable cat once the vet showed up. His meowing therefore indicates that he's still in the cat carrier, waiting his turn.

The veterinarian comes in after about twenty minutes, asks the same questions we've already answered, and then talks about what she's going to do and what she will look for as though seeking our approval for this proposed course of action. I don't understand why she's telling us this instead of just getting on with it. We ourselves have no actual veterinary training, which is why we came here seeking the expertise of someone who does; and twenty fucking minutes is not in just a moment.

She will be back in just another couple of minutes, she tells us.

We are alone again, Fluffy distantly wailing through the walls of the building. The proposed couple of minutes, once counted, come to around thirty. I'm not happy.

The veterinarian returns and tells us that Fluffy has a small bladder, an ambiguous statement which we later take to mean that his bladder presently has limited capacity due to being mostly taken up by a growth. She doesn't actually use the word cancer, but she doesn't need to. She talks about treatments which, by her own admission, aren't likely to have much effect. She discusses the cost of these treatments, effecting a weird pantomime of how we're all in this together and why oh why do vets charge so much as she rolls her eyes and sighs at the injustice of medical bills. Amongst all of this blather is the implication that Fluffy has a growth. Our veterinarian is unable to be any more specific, because if it is cancer, it may be of the kind which crumbles when manhandled, making it more likely to spread, leaving it all the more difficult to treat. In other words, we're not going to check for cancer in case it's cancer and the investigative procedure gives him cancer, which he probably already has.

We just want to take him home by this point. Fluffy has had a good ten years and is presently still fine. We're not going to pay thousands of dollars for a treatment which will extend his life by months at the most, has no guarantee of working, and will additionally cause him further distress. It's hard enough ejecting him from the bedroom before we go to bed. Chemotherapy would finish him off.

We just want to take him home by this point, but if we wait just a few more minutes, they'll bring him out to us and sort out some antibiotics in case the thing we can't yet name is infected in any way.

We sit in the waiting room for what feels like an hour.

The receptionist resembles Chassie Tucker from At Home with Amy Sedaris. Each time I catch sight of her forearm I think why doesn't she get that fucking thing removed?, and each time I realise that it isn't a birthmark but a really shitty tattoo, a big dark splotch which only resembles a rose if you get close. She has other tattoos of the kind suggesting a kid without much of an attention span absently doodling on himself with a biro during a particularly boring lesson - I Love You, amongst other heartfelt sentiments. I'm sure she's wonderful but everything is annoying me right now.

Elsewhere in the reception area, a teenager gets excited as the flat screen fills with some generic autotuned superstar singing a sappy song, Girl, You're My Girl, Girl or something of the sort. The artist accompanies himself on a glittering piano. The teenager sings along, not in the least self-conscious. She knows all of the words.

We are customers, and medicine - whether human or animal - is a business. If its custodians cared so much as they clearly would like to have us believe, the charges wouldn't be anything like so arbitrary - two hundred for the consultation, three for the treatment, another two for something else they've just cooked up which hasn't entailed any financial outlay on their part; but they'll charge because they can. I already understood this to be how it worked, so it isn't a revelation.

This latest instalment of just a few more minutes is actually forty. We're called into another room because they're just going to bring our cat so we can take him home. Fifteen minutes later I open the inner door to the surgery. I see three members of staff doing something or other, a row of cages, no-one actually paying attention to me.

'Any danger of getting our cat back?' I ask with considerable restraint, 'It's been fifteen minutes, which definitely seems a lot longer than we're just going to get him.'

The three look at me but say nothing.

The veterinarian reappears. 'I'll be just a moment,' she says.

Five minutes later we are reunited with Fluffy. He's meowing a lot. He's not happy. None of us are.

A young man with a beard intones instructions for care of sick animals from a sheet of paper as though we'll be unable to read it ourselves. Few of the instructions apply to Fluffy. Eventually he gives us the promised antibiotics.

We leave. It's been almost three hours since we got here.

We don't know how long Fluffy has left, but he's happy right now, and obviously not in any pain. We've looked up the statistics and can't rule out the possibility that he may last a long time. It could be benign, or he could have just months left. We don't know.

Worth every fucking penny.

I think of all the poisonous shitheads who'll still be walking around oblivious for decades to come, and yet somehow the clock is ticking for my cat.

It's too much to have to think about.

Anatomy of an Unintentional Nazi Salute

I see her across the other side of the grocery section in my local HEB - our local HEB because I knew she also shopped here. I knew it could only be a matter of months before our paths crossed once more, and that it would be awkward; although at the same time, having been struck from my list of acquaintances, she's someone I never expected to see again, and so somehow - just for a second - I don't recognise her.

My wife signed on to a social networking site called Meet Me, or something of the sort. She was spying on her friend's husband, acting in the capacity of both concerned friend and private detective. She described the site as a car crash of angry, unloveable losers and as such found it unwittingly entertaining. This is how she met Kelli - who likewise passed time on the site chortling at misspelt tattoos proudly displayed or people posing with their guns or fighting dogs - and it turned out that Kelli lived in our neighbourhood.

As they became friends, Kelli explained that she too was in a relationship with a person from across the other side of the Atlantic. Whilst Bess and myself were now married, Kelli remained regrettably separate from her partner, the bass player of some death metal band over in Sweden. Occasionally she'd phone or text, needing a sympathetic ear or a virtual shoulder to cry on because she hadn't heard from her hunky Swede in over a year.

'What do you think is wrong?' she asked my wife. 'Do you think it could be over between the two of us?'

The most recent email she'd received from the guy hinted at his seeing someone else. 'What do you think he meant?' Kelli wailed.

Kelli worked as a merchandising manager for some company which routinely sent her out on tour across the country with bands such as Aerosmith. On one such occasion she needed someone to go in and feed Buster, her cat, for a couple of weeks, and Bess obliged. There was also an occasion during which Kelli somehow ended up in jail at the other end of the country, and Bess once again stepped in to feed poor Buster.

I'd just finished painting a book cover, the one for The Brakespeare Voyage by Simon Bucher-Jones and Jonathan Dennis, so far as I recall. The cover had taken me a long time but I was pleased with the result, as were the authors and publisher. My wife posted a photograph of it on facebook. Kelli responded with a meme, an image of Mike Myers' Austin Powers character grinning inanely whilst holding up an inept looking sketch, something of comically poor execution.

Did somebody say something about a drawing? ran the caption.

The joke is that the comedy Brit is showing us his drawing, but he doesn't realise that it's shit. Ha ha.

This struck me as fucking rude coming from someone I'd never met and who had presumably deduced my character to be an assemblage of hilarious clichés about drinking tea and playing jolly old cricket with Prince Charles. It particularly bothered me because I've always viewed the Austin Powers movies as fucking shite.

Fuck you, Kelli, I thought to myself.

It sinks in. I've seen her here in HEB before. Last time she was stood in the queue at the place where people cash cheques or arrange insurance or whatever that thing is. She was dressed like a 1950s teenager, cut-off denims revealing cellulite, and with way too many polka dots for a woman in her fifties - a look which serves only to accentuate how many years have passed since she was a teenager. This is all down to a hitherto unsuspected fascination with the Stray Cats - a rockabilly revival band amounting to what the Cramps would have sounded like had they been formed by Michael J. Fox.

Kelli's next drama was when the former drummer of Slipknot kidnapped her cat. She moved to a different apartment, was somehow tracked down by this famous ex-boyfriend, and so he kidnapped Buster as part of some poorly defined act of revenge for something or other which wasn't quite clear. Bess and I began to wonder about Kelli. She was unreliable, regularly agreeing to meet but then failing to show, and her accounts of herself began to seem increasingly far-fetched. Also, there were the selfies on facebook, a new one every fucking day and always with some weird filter which smooths out the wrinkles, transforming the subject into a sparkly-eyed anime character. We had met her in real life, so we knew what she actually looked like - an aging Siouxsie Sioux with the biggest nose you've ever seen, about an inch of foundation, and the sort of chin only Basil Wolverton could truly capture - all of which at least explained the angle from which she took her daily facebook selfies, head on so as to disguise the enormity of that hooter, looking up into the lens with the big brown eyes of a Japanese child.

We met her in real life at a bar on Broadway in the company of her friend, Greg, a surly Vietnam veteran who ignored us for the entire hour that we were there. Maybe we were cramping his style.

She broke up with the uncommunicative death metal bass player from Sweden, and announced there was someone else in her life. The only problem was that this one lived in England. He came to America and we met him. He seemed okay, but I couldn't help but wonder if he knew what he was getting into with Kelli.

Kelli had seemingly given up on Meet Me, her energies being devoted to cyberstalking Greg's new girlfriend. She couldn't help but wonder if Greg knew what he was getting into with this woman.

They had never met in person, but she was moving to San Antonio to buy a house, and the two of them were going to get married. They already knew they were made for each other due to a mutual love of buttplugs. Kelli found this hilarious and took delight in sharing what information she could glean with my wife.

Then one day, Bess found herself blocked from all of Kelli's social media accounts. I asked the latest transatlantic boyfriend whether he had any idea what could have happened. Kelli told him that Bess had sent her a message which seemed abrupt and rude, gloating over Greg and his buttplug-based relationship whilst failing to enquire after Kelli's wellbeing, like Kelli was just a source of cheap laughs. My wife was puzzled and went through all the crap stored on her smartphone, eventually finding the conversation which had given such offence. It bore no relation to what Kelli described because neither Bess nor myself had particularly taken to Greg and had found it difficult to care about what he chose to stick up his ass and with whom.

Inevitably we began to wonder, because the pattern had become difficult to miss. Was her cat really kidnapped by the drummer of Slipknot? If someone took any of my cats I'd move heaven and earth to get them back. Maybe she simply moved to an apartment with a no pets policy, we figured; and never mind the drummer from Slipknot, had the Swedish death metal bassist even existed? Even if he had, did six months of transatlantic silence not suggest that the relationship was probably done? Maybe there hadn't even been a buttplug woman moving to San Antonio to buy a house. Maybe that was Kelli as well. Who fucking knows?

Now I remember that we are no longer on such great terms, and that this meeting is therefore awkward; but it's too late. She's seen me. I've seen her. She's seen that I've seen her and vice versa. My arm flies up to wave just as I would greet any other person. By the time my arm is at full elevation I've realised that Kelli is not to be greeted. I lower my arm and quickly look the other way, realising that the gesture probably resembled a Nazi salute; and as I head for the section where they keep the beer I realise I am quietly satisfied with this thought.

Nearly New Kids on the Block

'Look,' my wife chuckled, holding her smartphone so I could see the screen. 'Someone dug up New Kids on the Block.'

I squinted at the tiny font and saw that New Kids on the Block were playing at the AT&T Centre on the 16th of May. 'They'll be a bit long in the tooth by now, surely. I'm surprised trades descriptions aren't after them if they're still going by that name - assuming we have something like the trades descriptions act here.'

We both chuckled and then rededicated ourselves to viewing Wheel of Fortune, smiling as a contestant to whom we had both taken an immediate dislike submitted an obviously wrong answer.

My wife's smartphone rang.

'Hello,' she answered. 'What's up?'

'What are you doing on the 16th of May?' asked Will, her brother.

'Well, I know I won't be going to see New Kids on the Block,' Bess laughed. She laughed because she knew that there was no way her brother would be interested in going to see New Kids on the Block, and he'd be sure to find it funny.

Nevertheless, here we are. A few weeks have passed and we're at the AT&T Centre, myself, my wife, and my brother-in-law. The New Kids are still alive, still performing, and are engaged in something called the Mixtape Tour. This means not only the hits, but appearances by Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Salt-N-Pepa, and Naughty by Nature, so it's mostly an eighties nostalgia thing - a concert based on the sort of stuff which would have ended up on a cassette tape, although not one of my cassette tapes which is why both Esplendor Geometrico and Portion Control remain conspicuously absent from the bill. Personally I don't have a whole lot of nostalgia for the eighties, and particularly not the stretch inhabited by the New Kids, but it's a night out and I figured Naughty by Nature might be approximately worth a look.

Will is here because he's a massive Debbie Gibson fan. He's a very complicated man.

I don't know anything about Debbie Gibson, other than that herself and Tiffany were presented as examples of everything which was wrong with music at the end of the eighties by the comedian Bill Hicks. The routine in which Hicks presents this argument daringly goes against the consensus by suggesting that the music of both Tiff and Debbie was ephemeral and therefore inferior to that of fucken' Hendrix, man. The routine was additionally of such macho shithead composition as to put me off bothering with any further Bill Hicks material ever again and, if anything, to leave me slightly better disposed towards both Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, as people if not as recording artists.

Back in the eighties I was in a band called the Dovers. We hosted a competition during one of our gigs - whoever applauded the loudest would win a copy of our album. The punchline was that our album was a copy of Tiffany's debut which Carl, our singer, had come by at his place of work, a design studio specialising in record covers. We never said it was something we had actually recorded, only that it was an album owned by ourselves.

Ha ha.

Tiffany's cover of I Think We're Alone Now was one of the songs on that record. As for Debbie Gibson, the title Electric Youth rings a bell, but her celebrity otherwise passed me by; and I always thought The Right Stuff by New Kids on the Block was a great song, but have no idea what happened to them after that.

Weren't they one of those dance routine based outfits? Wasn't Mark Wahlberg a member? I wonder whether they managed to lure him back to the fold, given that he's clearly a busy man these days.

Anyway, we're here and I'm sure that all of my questions will either receive answers or else cease to matter in the fullness of time. The AT&T Centre is enormous, on a scale sufficient for basketball and rodeo events, and nevertheless the place is swarming for a phenomenon long past its sell by date. It feels as though we're at an airport as we migrate towards the section of the arena in which we are to be seated. It seems incredible that this bunch could inspire such a turn out thirty years since they could legitimately be described as kids. There are a great many women in their early forties who would have been teenagers when The Right Stuff hit the charts, but the age range of tonight's audience varies wildly, including even men. We see a few women togged out in dayglo rap gear with big hoopy earrings - actually more TLC than Salt-N-Pepa, so far as I recall - but mostly it's fans of the New Kids, big gangs of them, possibly even a few hen parties. More than once I'm fooled into thinking I've spotted someone from the cast of Orange is the New Black.

Will is after a T-shirt so we join one of the many queues. After ten minutes I go and buy a beer, then come back. I've had two beers by the time we get to the front of the queue although to be fair I may be drinking fast, and it turns out that this particular concession is out of Debbie Gibson merchandise. We retrace our steps and find another concession, one with Debbie Gibson T-shirts on display.

Some of us grew up listening to NKOTB, reads the shirt of one woman who passes us by. The cool ones still do, is the punchline on the reverse of the garment. I'm apparently on that planet where New Kids on the Block were cool.

Music starts up.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

I wander over to the entrance for the nearest terrace and draw back the curtain. I'm gazing down into an entertainment grand canyon. Termite trails of fans shuffle towards their seats over on the far side. A rapper and a DJ are at work upon a circular podium at the heart of the auditorium, about a hundred feet below where I'm stood. This is the warm up act, Illtown Sluggaz which is something to do with Naughty by Nature without actually being Naughty by Nature. They sport baseball clobber and the DJ wears a cartoon bear head, like a sports mascot. He looks fucking ridiculous and I feel an involuntary shudder of disgust that I, a fully grown man, should be presented with this Disney teddy as entertainment.

'Everybody put your hands in the air,' suggests the rapper, 'and wave them like you just don't care.'

The DJ segues a few bars of Material Girl into a few bars of The Final Countdown into a few bars of Walk This Way - hits of the eighties, and everyone cheers because they recognise the songs. It doesn't matter that more than half of the songs are shite, because familiarity is the point. To my ears, it may as well be Peter Kay asking who remembers Curly Wurly or Crackerjack. I am more or less watching the twenty-first century version of Jive Bunny

'Everybody make some noise!'

I turn to rejoin my wife and brother-in-law, who has at last bagged himself some Debbie Gibson merchandise. We resume the Tolkienesque pilgrimage towards our section, ascending an escalator to the upper floor past vast stylised murals of the San Antonio Spurs and their mascot, a man in the suit of a chubby coyote with googly green eyes suggesting substance abuse - to me, but apparently to no-one else in the entire city. You would think that being able to afford this futurist space station of a venue, the Spurs could at least slip some grade school kid a few dollars to come up with a less-creepy mascot.

Our seats are on the back row, up against the rear wall, almost in the roof. The incline of the terrace seems perilously steep, certainly more than forty-five degrees, although at least we shouldn't have any trouble seeing the stage, which is still occupied by a man wearing a cartoon bear head playing snippets of Can't Fight this Feeling, The Heat is On, and other crowd pleasers. Gazing upwards, I have a view of the underside of the roof structure criss-crossed with monumental air conditioning, pipes large enough to facilitate escaping prisoners. It feels as though we're underneath the USCSS Nostromo from the movie Alien.

The venue fills to capacity, not an empty seat to be seen. A larger stage is set up against the far side, facing the central podium upon which the Illtown Sluggaz skillfully play short excerpts of familiar songs. This larger stage is picked out in neon strips delineating the shape of a huge cassette tape, and the screen behind is suddenly illuminated. We are shown a short film of the individual members of New Kids on the Block as they are now, mowing the lawn, renewing home insurance, riding a horse, having a colonoscopy…

The crowd go wild.

The face of Donny Wahlburg - brother of Mark, hence my confusion - fills the screen. He holds up a smartphone. He tells us we need to download an app called Appix in order to get the most from tonight's performance, which raises all sorts of questions that I can't be bothered to think about.

'I love you, Donny!' screams the forty-year old woman sat next to me, and she really screams, just like those teenagers in the black and white footage of the Beatles. Now the New Kids take to the stage, five tiny figures dancing upon a giant cassette tape which now has The Way written across it in neon as though by an invisible giant, that being the name of the song they are performing. A woman I uncharitably come to think of as Fat Snooky stands in her seat, directly in front of me, blocking my view. I can see only her silhouette, but what I can see suggests Snooky from Jersey Shore. The women of the three seats adjacent to Fat Snooky also stand. The terrace is at such a profound incline that my knee is higher than the top of the head of the person seated in front, and yet Fat Snooky and her friends somehow need a better view, placing me in the position of being unable to watch something I'm actually not that bothered about seeing, or wasn't until my view was so rudely obstructed.

I poke in the ear plugs as the New Kids go into My Favourite Girl. This reduces the volume, cuts out some of the distortion, and the music actually sounds sort of listenable as a result, even though it's New Kids on the Block. Despite believing that The Right Stuff was okay, they were never my sort of thing. It never bothered me that they were manufactured so much as that most of their material is quite clearly designed to make young girls go week at the knees, and its effect on me is therefore minimal. Beyond that, I'll concede that they have decent voices, and certainly with more actual soul than is the case with most boy bands; but the bottom line is that I couldn't give a fuck about dance routines, and I dislike the sort of blandly efficient corporate emoting which has been normalised by shows such as America's Got Talent and the rest. I thought we'd got rid of it all in the seventies, but somehow it came back bigger and more powerful than ever, much like an X-Men villain.

The writing on the giant cassette tape announces I Think We're Alone Now and on comes Tiffany. She seems older and a little more grizzled, but the on-screen close-up shows the face of a regular person. She reminds me of Wendy. She doesn't look as though she's had any facial surgery, and her make-up is just kind of average. Most surprising of all is that she has a rich, powerful voice, the sort you might associate with a few of the more ruthlessly authentic country artists. I'm sure she didn't sound like this as a teenager in the eighties. I'm impressed in spite of myself.

Tiff is followed by Debbie Gibson who accompanies herself on a piano which emerges from the plastic window of the giant cassette tape. She doesn't seem familiar, aside from a passing disconcerting resemblance to Debbie McGee, wife of the late Paul Daniels. Just like Tiff, she too has a surprisingly powerful voice, and I guess her piano is the only live instrument we'll be hearing this evening. She's knocking out a ballad which sounds like the sort of thing you hear on the aforementioned America's Got Talent. It's not to my taste at all, but I am warmed by just how wrong the late Bill Hicks has turned out to have been regarding this woman's musical chops.

Salt-N-Pepa are up next. I actually have a few bits and pieces of Salt-N-Pepa in my collection. They date from the era of mainstream rap having been mostly annoying and reliant on cheesy nursery rhyme style hooks, and there's only so much of that stuff I can listen to. Salt-N-Pepa give us the hits and are actually pretty entertaining. They perform with an authenticity, a certain rough, lively edge which I hadn't anticipated. It's also pretty clear that they're having a whale of a time, and the audience picks up on this too.

The New Kids return to the stage.

'You know, they said we wouldn't last,' bellows Donnie.

They would presumably be the critics. I don't specifically recall anyone doubting the longevity of New Kids on the Block, the major criticism being that they were manufactured and therefore shit, but never mind. The performance suddenly takes a peculiarly post-modern turn as we're treated to a slide show of other boy bands, everyone from New Edition to the Stylistics, reminding us that the form has occasionally thrown up a song which even miserable cunts such as myself have to grudgingly admit is decent. This is a preamble to Boys in the Band, a new song celebrating the history of boy bands, which is easily the weirdest number of the evening.

Next they tell us how happy they all are to be right here in San Antonio, which pleases the crowd no end. Houston and Austin are both called out as having played host to previous evenings of New Kids magic, which is greeted by good-natured booing from the audience of one-hundred thousand. Anyway, the point is that they like  Texas, a declaration prompting a verse of Deep in the Heart of Texas, but all I can hear are the four quick handclaps which conclude each bar and remind me of The Birdie Song. Next comes the Selena tribute - which of course we've all been waiting for seeing as how Selena was a local and all, and which is essentially karaoke, mostly sung by one lucky young Latina randomly picked out of the audience. I suppose it's the thought that counts.

'You know, life is precious,' Donnie waxes philosophically as preface to a ponderous spoken interlude, doubtless inspired by Selena's passing, and the truism that we're none of us getting any younger.

'I love you, Donnie,' screams my neighbour.

The boys briefly jig to the very worst hits of the eighties in illustration of our all having been younger than we are right now - Living on a Prayer, Eye of the Tiger, and others I would ordinarily cross the road to avoid. Naughty by Nature take the stage, and I realise I had erroneously recalled them as having incorporated Nature, the Queensbridge rapper who famously worked with Nas.

Naughty by Nature are best known for their hit OPP, the central thesis of which is that one should keep an open mind when it comes to nobbing persons already confirmed to be engaged in a sexually monogamous relationship with a third party. I have OPP on some CD somewhere so I've heard it plenty of times, and yet I still don't remember the track. I don't even remember how it goes right now even as it is being performed live on the stage in front of me. The rest of the set is convincing and energetic, but I still can't quite get away from it being just a couple of blokes rubbing their lips together on a podium accompanied by a twat in a cartoon bear head. The words are just a pointless rhythm from where I'm sat.

Blu-blub-blublu-blu-blu-bluh-blu-bluh! That's right y'all.

Salt-N-Pepa return, and then it all begins to blend into a gushing noise that's been going on far too long, unless you're here for more sincere reasons than I am. I have a notebook on my person, and I've been scribbling away for the duration of the performance, the current stretch of which is acknowledged thus:

We conclude with some spiel about how the best people are those who grew up in the eighties, then a song along the lines of you're my eighties girl, which somehow begins to feel a bit Readers' Wives; and then everyone is on stage doing everything at once for a while.

Fat Snooky and her pals make their way to the aisle. Three hours of their bobbing ponytails have left me with an impression of four young girls with Croydon facelifts - even that I've spent this time back in south-east London - but in profile I see that none of them are much younger than myself, and we're still in Texas in the year 2019. We've all had a great time, even if I've had a great time for the wrong reasons; and Will particularly has had a great time, which was the main point as this has been something to do with his upcoming birthday. The woman sat in the next seat along has apparently spent the last three hours hitting on him, but he found her advances a little weird, which is understandable.

He settles into one his monologues in the car on the way back, softly spoken and very witty with the confidence of a man who has more than earned the right to not give a shit about what anyone else thinks of his dedication to Debbie Gibson. The monologue is born from notes compared about staying at Edi's house when she used to live in Houston. Bess recalls a home which was quite different to that which Will remembers. His story expands to include a period of infirmity at Edi's place, confined to bed watching a stretch of late night television dedicated to Mariah Carey; then finding himself somehow about to buy a Mariah Carey album.

'What am I doing?'

He recreates his own reaction, disbelief mixed with horror, leaving me laughing for more or less the rest of the car journey. As with everything, not least being New Kids on the Block, I guess you had to be there.