Let's Think About Living

I first saw Tim Webster perform at Maidstone Art College, probably late 1984 or thereabouts, most likely with the Sputniks. It would have been a college party organised by my friend Carl, who was president of the student union at the time. He'd known Tim since they were kids due to their dads having been good friends. I don't remember the music because I'd only just discovered drinking and was trying to do a lot of it so as to effect my transformation into someone more interesting, or at least more shaggable.

My usual drinking assistant was a fellow student who lived in Chatham, and whom I won't name because he was a massive twat. He shared a house with Tim's girlfriend, about whom he whinged and whined at length because complaining about that which didst emburden his Bohemian soul was his thing, and he'd given me a long list of Chatham persons whom I should consider enemies. Tim was one of them. I don't remember the details, but one of his supposed sins was the noisy and enthusiastic sexual intercourse in which Tim allegedly engaged when visiting his girlfriend. Also, Tim was in one of those fifties revival bands, and they were the enemy too. Having a general suspicion of nostalgia, it sort of made sense to me at the time.

A couple of years passed and I ended up living in Chatham, and because I was unemployed and therefore a gentleman of leisure, I spent most days hanging around a café called Gruts on the high street, near the Nag's Head. I met a lot of people who had been classified as the enemy by my former drinking assistant, and I had realised that actually I liked them more than I liked him because, as stated above, he was a massive twat. Tim's girlfriend - by this point ex-girlfriend - was funny and lovely, for one example; and Tim himself had a workshop just across the road from Gruts, so he spent a lot of time in the café and that's how I got to know him.

On the surface of it, it might seem like that mid-eighties rockabilly revival - the thing which brought us the Polecats and their like - had been a big deal in the Medway towns of Chatham, Rochester and others, but really it felt like something different, as I slowly came to appreciate. Billy Childish, the Milkshakes, the Sputniks, and others - and we may as well include the Prisoners, the Dentists, and the Daggermen while we're here - seemed to be responding to something inherent to their locality, something ingrained within those streets. It wasn't really a revival so much as something which still sounded good, which still worked now reclaimed from the soap powder salesmen who had tried to turn it into Seaside Special. Even understanding this, I was initially wary of Tim because he seemed like a big shot on the local stage, one of the cool kids, or at least someone too cool to bother talking to the likes of me - given my then representing an evolutionary intermediary between Worzel Gummidge and Roy Wood.

Happily I was wrong. Tim was fucking great, one of the best. Now passing fifty, looking back at the list of those I've known - and I'm assuming this will be true for many of us - it's depressing how many people turned out to be nothing like so wonderful as you thought they were at the time, notably my former drinking assistant; but Tim is one of the exceptions, someone you can genuinely say you were lucky to have known, possibly even a living legend by some definition.

He usually spent a couple of hours a day in Gruts, and it turned out that he was interesting, very, very funny, and an Olympic level spinner of yarns, many with shagging as the punchline, and many giving account of his frequent accidents and injuries, and the most viscerally memorable relating his employment at the local crematorium, the only detail of which I recall being a treatise on the art of disposing of ashes around the grounds without leaving them in big grisly piles, and the use of a shovel to smash up any bones which had survived the furnace.

He repaired guitars, amplifiers, motorbikes, scooters, pretty much whatever you had that was broken in his workshop, and in the evenings he was usually playing in some pub or other in one of his bands, the Sputniks, Timmy Tremolo & the Tremolons, Johnny Gash & the Sweet Smell of Success, Dean & the Hammonds, and I've no doubt there were others I never even heard about. I'm sure there were nights when he played twice at different venues with different groups, doubtless tearing across town on foot, somehow changing shirts as he went still with a guitar slung over one shoulder. He was always into something; he was one of those people who kept things interesting and he was great live, always tearing the proverbial roof of wherever the band found themselves that evening.

He taught me how to play chess, possibly so he'd have someone to play against as we sat around in Gruts. He referred to the pieces as prawns, horsies and so on, and I assumed he was some kind of undiscovered grandmaster because he always beat me. I eventually noticed that I seemed to be the only person Tim could actually beat; and Billy Childish routinely thrashed Tim, even if the games seemed to go on for a long time.

At one point, Tim had me draw a strip cartoon - which was sort of a commission - based on Johnny Gash, one of his bands. The idea came from a running joke about all four members combining like Voltron to become the Gashman, a weird, pulpy supernatural figure with a shitload of country and western in the mix. I don't think he knew what to make of what I came up with, but he was polite about it. I don't think I'd quite grasped what he was after, and in any case my efforts weren't really the sort of thing which would have made sense as a poster for a gig.

Eventually I left Medway and lost touch with Tim, but ran into him from time to time during occasional return visits. He always seemed overjoyed to see me while I was sort of surprised he'd even remembered who I was. He always seemed to have some new distracting injury - cast, neck brace or crutches - incurred during the most recent road accident, and his life still seemingly bore resemblance to that of the character played by Robin Askwith in the Confessions films. Tim had always been unusually popular with the ladies, or so it seemed to me, and his testimony often left me imagining him shinning down drainpipes at 3AM or in trouserless flight from enraged shotgun wielding fathers; but it was thirty years ago, and my memory may have exaggerated some of the details, hopefully.

Then he turned up on facebook, as we all do eventually, but hadn't effected the usual transformation into the Duke of Wellington, as tends to have happened with everyone you knew from school. I made the mistake of pointing out a spelling error he'd made during some exchange or other, to which he replied I'm dyslexic, you cunt, or words to that effect, then elaborating by explaining that he'd been expelled from school at fourteen or thereabouts, still unable to properly read or write. I hadn't known or even suspected this, but have to assume it to be true, or roughly truthful, which still surprises me even if it probably shouldn't. The man was a force of nature, like nothing could stop him. He could do anything, and often did. On some level I always knew I'd run into him again at some point, and we'd have a drink and a chuckle over his latest ill-advised escapades, and it would be like no time had passed. There was something fundamental about him and he would always be there doing his thing.

He was living on a boat, possibly on the Medway, or else somewhere up north - I never quite worked out where he'd ended up. I gather he had health problems, but I'm not entirely sure about that either. One evening he went out on the deck of his boat for a fag, then was found dead in his deck chair next morning. I can hear a little voice muttering that it's how he would have wanted to go, although I doubt that it was. He taught me how to play chess and got me through a shitty couple of years, and my life is better than it would have been for having known the man. I'm sure others will say the same. He was the heart of the music scene in Medway for a long time, yet is mentioned only once in Stephen H. Morris's Do It Yourself: A History of Music in Medway, and then for guesting on someone else's album. He taught Billy Childish how to make woodcuts. Traci Emin painted a portrait of him before reinventing herself as whatever she is now, then flatly denied it was her work when he tried to sell the piece. The Sputnik's released one great 10" album, and aside from a few tracks on compilations, that was the full extent of Tim's vinyl footprint.

He seems like someone who should be better remembered.

He seems like someone who should still be here.

Even during this last year, having come to resemble something in the general vicinity of old man Steptoe, it took only one glance to see that here was a man with character, a man of genuine substance; and he would have read this, rolled his eyes, and barked oh fuck off with that Sid James laugh of his.

Today Was a Good Day

I don't really have dentist appointments, but every three or four months I go in for deep cleaning. This is because there was a point at which it looked as though my teeth were about to fall out. They were saved by an American dentist named Dr. Stalker whom I consequently regard as a minor deity. I lost about six, or maybe eight, but he was able to save the rest by means of expensive and then semi-experimental dental surgery of such complexity as to necessitate my being knocked out for three hours. Providing I keep them clean, particularly right down below the gum line, it seems like I shouldn't have any more problems, and so I go in to Dr. Stalker's surgery for an hour of chipping and scraping three or four times a year.

A couple of years ago, my regular hygienist retired. Her successor got the job done, but I found her abrasive and annoying, and worst of all, she insisted that it was only possible to deep clean my teeth using a sonic device which caused me some pain. She described herself, somewhat inanely, as a cheerleader for my teeth, despite which, the thrust of her counsel mostly resembled that of a south-east London garage mechanic who starts shaking his head and sighing even before he's taken a look under the bonnet - or hood if you're American. I began to dread these appointments and considered going elsewhere but felt committed to Dr. Stalker's surgery, possibly much like that fabled lion with the thorn in his paw.

Then after yet another miserable appointment following which I'd vowed never again, I discovered that the surgery additionally employed another hygienist, a woman named Dolores. She was an unknown quantity, and it was difficult getting an appointment, and her hours were unorthodox; but it seemed worth a punt, and she was great. So that's where I'm heading this morning. It's a beautiful sunny day made all the sweeter for my not having spent the last two weeks in a gloom of anticipation. Eight in the morning still seems a bit of an odd time for a dental appointment, but anything is better than another agonising hour spent in the company of the cheerleader.

I cycle through Alamo Heights, and for once the roads are fairly clear due to it being the end of the world. As I enter the more conspicuously wealthy neighbourhood, I pass a house on Cloverleaf with a Trump 2020 campaign sign stuck in the lawn. It's depressing because I only saw two of the things back in 2016, but I guess his acolytes are more emboldened this time around, no longer feeling there's anything shameful about supporting a man who can't actually bring himself to say an unkind word about white supremacists - for just one example. The lawn of the next house supports a sign reading something like, whoever you are, we're glad to be your neighbour, with the message rendered above and below in Spanish and Arabic. Regardless of how sappy one might deem such a sentiment, if fills my heart with joy to consider how the adjacent Trumpanzees must feel about those liberals next door.

I cycle up the hill, zig-zag through the neighbourhood to Olmos Park, then along Stanford to the surgery - forty minutes in all. At the surgery I'm required to fill in a form which could probably be simplified to do you have coronavirus? with yes and no boxes provided, and then Dolores summons me to the chair. This time she's dressed as though for major surgery, facemask, cap, surgical gloves, everything.

'How long have you been back at work?' I ask.

'Today is the first day,' she says. 'I've been off since March.'

'Oh,' I say. 'So I'm your first patient since everything shut down?'

'Yes.'

'How is it? Being back after the pandemic, I mean.'

'Ask me again at the end of the day.'

She settles down to work, chipping away at calcified plaque particles, the stuff I can never quite keep at bay through brushing. She works with a manual pick, which has made me wonder somewhat about the cheerleader's insistence on using the more painful alternative. The pick doesn't bother me at all. It barely even ranks as discomfort.

I rinse with the traditional plastic cup, another thing the cheerleader did away with on the grounds of it being supposedly unhygienic. As she works, Dolores occasionally describes what she's doing, or offers advice, but there's none of the abrasive banter or prophecies of imminent dental doom in which her predecessor traded.

Dr. Stalker comes in for a quick look, as he usually does. He prods at a few points around my gums muttering adjectives such as amazing and incredible. 'You know,' he says to Dolores, 'I really wish I'd taken pictures of Lawrence's teeth before I worked on them. The change is just astounding. You really wouldn't believe how they were when he came in from seeing them now.'

He slaps me on the shoulder and smiles. 'You're doing a great job there, Lawrence. Just keep it up.'

Dolores resumes her work, now chipping away around my upper jaw. I can hear the cheerleader in the background, filling the building with her voice, her aggressively cheery observations, her thoughts on this and that. I hear her enter the surgery somewhere behind, needing to borrow something. I wonder if she realises it's me, or whether she wonders why I might have changed hygienist. Now she's whooping and hollering, entertained by something or other.

'You're sooo small,' she laughs for some reason I don't catch, which strikes me as kind of rude. Dolores is Hispanic and could hardly be described as a giant, but her height seems fairly average. It's a peculiar observation to make, even in the context of whatever it was they were talking about; but thankfully the cheerleader now has whatever she came in for and accordingly fucks off.

Dolores finishes. 'I hope that wasn't too bad.'

'Not at all. No discomfort whatsoever.'

She seems pleased and makes me another appointment for August. As I leave, I sidle up to the receptionist at the main desk. I think her name is Sarah. She's the one who pleaded for me not to go elsewhere when I started having trouble with the cheerleader, or maybe not pleaded but she was obviously concerned.

'Just wanted to say, thanks for sorting me out with Dolores,' I mutter in sotto voice in case the cheerleader should overhear, wherever she is. 'She's very good.'

I cycle off to engage with the rest of the day. It's still only nine in the morning and I can tell it's going to be a great day.

Food to Go During a Global Pandemic

We'd accepted that some things were going to have to be done differently - no more French kissing complete strangers in the local park for example. My wife and I are creatures of habit and tend to dine out twice a week, Thursday and Saturday because it gives me a break from cooking and it's easy to do in America, or at least in Texas where it's not hard to find a decent place to eat and usually pretty cheap; but we accepted that if we were going to continue with date night, it was going to have to be takeaways for the foreseeable future, at least until the end of either the coronavirus or civilisation, whichever came first. So here's what we ate, or at least what I ate.

Jim's Diner: burger, fries, onion rings, apple pie. We reasoned that it's hard to go wrong with Jim's, conveniently forgetting a recent unfortunate trend towards a slightly chewier chicken fried steak brought to your table by someone with distracting personality flaws - such as that weird little guy who kept trying to engage us in conversation about how much he enjoyed watching vehicular collisions occurring opposite the diner along Broadway. Anyway, my wife ordered a chicken salad which looked as though it had been thrown together first thing that morning, perhaps even the previous evening, and both my order of fries and apple pie were absent, which we didn't discover until we got home. The burger was kind of sad too. Jim's is a great place to eat, but I guess takeaway was never really their thing. The entire chain went into suspended animation about a week later - no take out or anything - so I guess at least someone realised Jim's wasn't playing to its strengths. There was a time when I came fairly close to having the Jim's logo tattooed upon my person, so it causes me great pain to admit that this may well have been the worst take out food I've ever begrudgingly stuffed into my face.

LA Crawfish: shrimp po boy, fries, chicken nuggets. The LA prefix refers to the state of Louisiana, and this is a chain which serves Louisiana style stuff, of which the po boy is one example. It's actually just a baguette filled with, in this case, shrimp, but somebody apparently decided to call it a po boy so as to reduce Louisiana's surfeit of things which sound a bit French. I don't really get it. I assume the rebranding refers to the sort of person who might eat a shrimp baguette, specifically a young economically impoverished gentleman. What annoys me about the name is that it obliges me to either assume the identity of a comedy English person by asking for a poor boy, or to impersonate a black man from New Orleans simply by pronouncing it correctly. Anyway, the last shrimp po boy I had from LA Crawfish was pretty good. This one was probably the same, but it turned out that I wasn't so hungry as I'd thought, and I struggled with what is essentially a loaf of bread cut in half length-ways and filled with shrimp, lettuce, mayonnaise, and peppers. It's the sort of thing you would more logically eat with a knife and fork, but no-one does, so it feels weird even to attempt to do so. Also, being a fucking idiot, I forgot just how massive the LA Crawfish po boy tends to be and ordered chicken nuggets as well as fries; so there was way too much of it and it was all too dry.

Hung Fong: sweet and sour chicken, spring roll. The problem with committing oneself to a course of takeaway food is that something which might be enjoyed in a diner or eating place doesn't always work as takeaway - as I learned the hard way with Jim's, or, I suppose, the slightly soggy way. That said, I've regarded Chinese food as primarily takeaway for a long time, at least since I was a teenager, even if I'm sat eating it at a table inside a restaurant. Happily this means that Hung Fong's fare translates to styrofoam conveyance without so much as a hiccup, and makes just as much sense consumed at home while watching Wheel of Fortune. This is nice because, perhaps ironically, Hung Fong's fare tastes like proper food more than it tastes like what I've traditionally come to think of as Chinese takeaway, which is probably the difference between English and American variations upon what Chinese people actually eat. Hung Fong is the oldest Chinese restaurant in San Antonio, having been established back in 1939, and they're friends of the family - or at least Jeff is - so we feel it's sort of our duty to keep the place going until normal service is resumed.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. My wife and myself have regarded Los Dos Laredos as more or less the greatest Mexican diner in the universe for at least the last couple of years. It's one of those little orange buildings you might not immediately notice on the Austin Highway, one of many, a happy cartoon chili pepper wearing a sombrero enthusiastically hand-painted on the window and at least one waitresses with a reassuringly slender grasp of English, and the food is wonderful. Amazingly, it works just as well in takeaway form - which has come as a massive relief - and such is the culinary excellence of the establishment that I even ordered a takeaway coffee where I wouldn't ordinarily bother, because even their coffee is amazing and somehow unlike that served by anyone else. The migas plate, for those unfamiliar with the term, is essentially an omelet made with crushed up corn chips, salsa, and a ton of cheese, so it's basically a crunchy omelet and is absurdly fortifying; and happily it works just as well at home following conveyance by means of styrofoam container.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, salted caramel shake. We were heading for Good Time Charlie's but became fearful that their ordinary fare was of such excellence that the mobile version could only come as a disappointment, so instead we went across the road to Shake Shack, which is part of a chain, and about which we'd been wondering ever since they set up shop on that corner where the Kiddie Park used to be. The chicken was crispy and delicious, and the shake may actually have been the greatest thing I've ever sucked through a straw, not least because I actually could suck it through a straw unlike the usual multicoloured nightmares in flavoured sugar with the consistency of peanut butter. We ate in the car, in the parking lot of Half Price Books so as to watch all the pussy cats which congregate in the area, so it felt like a bit of an occasion.

Popeye's: chicken burger. Having once ordered a Popeye's poor boy, or rather a po boy, at least as cumbersome as the thing I had from LA Crawfish, I wisely limited myself to just the chicken burger, which was actually decent. As the restaurant - if we're now going to call fast food joints restaurants - was fully closed (rather than open but with the seating area cordoned off), I was obliged to sit in the drive-through lane on my bike behind a massive truck like some kind of lunatic. Thankfully my order came through pretty quickly. I think the last time I went inside a branch of Popeye's it took about twenty minutes, which I assumed to be a deliberate delay intended to reinforce the illusion of our being in Louisiana where sitting around on your arse and not giving a fuck actively counts as an undertaking.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, cheese burger, fries, salted caramel shake. We went back but somehow it wasn't as good. I had an extra burger in the belief that just one wouldn't be enough, but it was too much and the chicken wasn't as crispy, plus it was pissing down with rain and I realised I needed new shoes as I crossed the forecourt to place the order. I realised this because my feet were damp.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, salted caramel shake. Yet the third time was just as good as the first, so I have no idea what happened there given that it was still pissing with rain. Perhaps a pall was cast across the previous occasion by the passing of Eddie from Little & Large.

El Jibarazo: carne asada tacos. El Jibarazo is a semi-stationary taco truck parked next to a raised porch built on the side an automotive place owned by the same people. I seem to recall Trump warning us about taco trucks, which really says more about him than anything else. El Jibarazo's food is kind of basic, I suppose, but pisses over pretty much everything else in San Antonio. Their carne asada tacos - or Mexican street tacos if you live in Portland, tend to screech a lot and your fave band is Ha Ha Tonka - may conceivably be the greatest tacos on the planet and are no less amazing eaten at home given that they're already takeaway.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. Still good during the second weekend of the lockdown and made us both feel better after another encounter with a certain passive-aggressive relative who should really have been staying the fuck home rather than worrying about hire cars given that she doesn't actually have any friends to visit.

Guajillo's: mole poblano. Guajillo's was the last place we ate before everything shut down, and their mole poblano is amazing and the best version of this dish I've eaten outside Mexico. It's that chocolate and chilli thing everyone's heard about, and I've tried to cook it myself but have never got the balance right. The key seems to be that it should be just a little more spicy than you like, which is something I find difficult to judge, but whoever rules the frying pan at Guajillo's is clearly a master of the art. Anyway, we didn't even realise Guajillo's was doing take out during the shut down, and hadn't even wondered, assuming their food to be one of those things which wouldn't really work in mobile form. Happily we were wrong and being able to eat Guajillo's mole poblano at home came fairly close to a religious experience.

McDonalds: cheeseburgers, fries, soda. I was ill, but thankfully with diverticulitis rather than coronavirus. This is an occasionally recurring condition which manifests as stomach cramps and an inability to poo, which I usually get around with Milk of Magnesia and a liquid only diet for as long as it takes - usually just a day; and at the end of this particular day I began to experience hunger and so opted for something fairly bland just to be on the safe side. I only seem to eat at McDonald's when I'm ill, and on this occasion it was nevertheless welcome

Sabor Cocinabar: enchiladas Aztecas. Along with Good Time Charlie's, Guajillo's, Los Dos Laredos, and El Jibarazo, Sabor Cocinabar is one of those places which I'd consider top shelf - Mexican food with an unusual gourmet angle, but gourmet Mexican rather than the usual Mexican food for people who don't actually like Mexican food thing which one encounters around this parish from time to time. I'm not even sure what the hell enchiladas Aztecas actually is, but it's gorgeous, seemingly a relative of mole poblano but as an enchilada and involving fried potatoes amongst other things, and with a bewildering suggestion of caramel, or something like caramel. I had doubts it would translate into a takeaway version, and regrettably it kind of didn't, although I couldn't really work out why. There was nothing obviously wrong or lacking except that somehow it lacked spirit, so maybe the ingredient I've yet to identify is witchcraft.

Good Time Charlie's: cilantro jack steak, fries, house salad. We put off the inevitable sampling of Charlie's takeaway service for fear of it failing to live up to the standard of their food as served in house. Charlie's probably qualifies as our all-time favourite diner. We chalked up thirty-one separate visits in 2019, beating Los Dos Laredos by two; of course we should have known better and trusted in Charlie's where even the fucking salad is amazing; and the aforementioned fucking salad was, against all reason, still amazing as takeaway in a styrofoam punnet, contrary to expectations lowered by that weird limp thing we brought home from Jim's the other week. Jim's, to briefly backtrack, is usually great but has been occasionally prone to lackluster intervals depending, I suppose, on who they have working for them at the time, and whilst an actual poor meal at Jim's is a truly rare thing, when they screw up, the food tends to remind you that you're eating at a chain restaurant. Charlie's by comparison is like the very best of Jim's done right to the point of tasting like home cooking, so it's probably significant that they're not a chain. Cilantro jack steak, in case you were wondering, is a hamburger steak grilled with fresh cilantro - or coriander if you prefer - inside, topped with cheese, and I could die happy eating it. It's the sort of food you anticipate eating at the end of a tough day. You can actually feel your soul healing as you dine. The cheese was a little dryer than usual as takeaway, but it was still lush.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. Third visit and still delivering the goods.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, cookies and cream shake. I was going to cook that evening but a power outtage curtailed my plans, obliging us all - even the kid - to go out for a drive because the car has air conditioning, what with this being Texas and all. They were out of salted caramel shake, but the cookies and cream was good. Once again we ate in the car in the parking lot at Half Price, and this time we saw more of the local cats, including the black fluffy one, due to the weather being warm and sunny.

There followed further visits to Los Dos Laredos, Good Time Charlie's and El Jibarazo for the same orders as listed above for a further couple of weeks until the restaurants opened up again, albeit at 25% seating capacity; but writing about every last meal gets repetitive, and I'm sure you get the general idea.

March for George Floyd

George Floyd was a black man who was murdered by a cop while other cops stood and watched. He wasn't the first and he probably won't be the last, unless some crazy genius comes up with a system for screening new recruits so as to prevent dangerous nutcases joining the police force. Previous black persons murdered by cops have included the guy whose candy bar wrapper reflected the sunlight just like a handgun, the woman who was actually doing nothing in her own home when a cop who had the wrong address broke in and shot her, and millions of others whose personal details may be found on the internet if you want to have a look around. The factor common to these killing has been that the murderee has been either a black person or a person belonging to an easily distinguished ethnic group other than white. One might reasonably expect law enforcement officials to implement certain policy changes so as to reduce the occurrence of cops killing black people, but apparently they're not sure where to start or what to do.

Therefore, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, people have been gathering together in all of the major American cities to march, and today was San Antonio's turn. My wife and I went by mainly to have a look, just to see if anything was happening, but seeing as it was, we decided to stick around. We assembled in Travis Park, a small square close to the city centre, and there were already a lot of people. It seemed that a couple of streets had been closed off, with cops and even members of the National Guard stood around looking vigilant, doing the command presence thing. Everyone was masked, otherwise not much social distancing going on, but then Bexar County seems to have come through the worst of the coronavirus relatively unscathed - at least compared to most places - and it's not like anyone was going out of their way to get cuddly with strangers. There were a few speeches delivered from a stage, mostly obscured by news helicopters circling very much like vultures, and this being a part of the country where vultures regularly circle, the comparison is deliberate. The speeches mostly communicated the general idea that black lives matter, and I think most of us already understood that.

So we set off on a route of a couple of miles, winding through the city towards the police station. Mostly we were young and black or Hispanic - simply reflecting our city's ethnic composition - but plenty white, Asian, middle-aged or even old. I saw one Catholic priest fully robed as though about to perform mass and several Quakers, as identified by their t-shirts, somewhat refuting the protest demographic imagined by those who still maintain that the cops are simply doing their job and that you can't make an omelet without breaking an egg every once in a while. We're supposed to be dangerous bomb-throwing anarchists, looters who wish only to cause chaos, and Antifa footsoldiers, but we're just people who would rather not have our country turn into Germany in the thirties if that's quite all right with the rest of you. In fact a lot of us seem to be angry sixteen-year old girls with green hair, demographically speaking. We're Antifa only in so much as that none of us regard Fascism as having ever been a particularly good idea, and we're therefore against it. It really shouldn't need spelling out, but then we've found ourselves in opposition to people who can't actually manage a whole fucking sentence without invoking freedom as a concept, but only as a weirdly specific meaning of the word which somehow allows for the active suppression of information and the shooting of an occasional black person if it seems like the right thing to do. We're dealing with people who don't abide by logic and who are therefore impervious to whatever argument you might have, because - somewhat ironically - it's all about their feelings.

Having known several such persons, my theory is that at the heart of each one of those rightist fucknuggets we have a slightly dim child, a person who wasn't necessarily bad as a kid, but who may have been occasionally slow on the uptake and will inevitably recall one incident in which someone brighter, perhaps wearing glasses and holding a stack of books, made some unkind - if possibly well observed - remark about that person being a bit of a thick cunt; and everything since has been revenge piled up on a deeply ingrained sense of inadequacy. Anything that upsets a liberal, a brainiac, a speccy four-eyes book reader, anyone failing to show prowess on the sports team, failing to salute the flag with sufficient fervour, anyone a bit weird - anything that upsets these people must therefore be good and worthy of elevation, anything up to and including Adolf Hitler, because we're post-facts and it's all about how you feel. Whatever history books written by the sort of four-eyed weirdo egghead liberal braniacs who have the time to write a history book may say about Adolf Hitler, if you feel that he was a man with some very interesting ideas who simply went about things the wrong way, then who has the right to tell you that you're not allowed to feel that?

This is what we're up against in a country where the President wants to declare Antifa a terrorist organisation, despite it not actually being an organisation in any sense, presumably meaning that the alternative to Antifa, namely the Fa, is now something to be embraced.

We're also up against the mid-afternoon heat. Bess and I hadn't really intended to stay for the duration, so after marching for nearly an hour we head back to the car. The march has been peaceful but for the noise. I've barely noticed the cops, and I haven't seen any violence or vandalism, just lots of people marching and yelling and waving placards. Marches in other cities have given rise to smashed windows and looting here and there, leading to the inevitable social media backlash from persons who seem to have misunderstood the meaning of the word protest, flames doubtless stoked by the sort of reactionary forces who ask will no-one think of the millionaires or corporations or trickle down wealth creators? I personally believe that vandalism and looting provide the enemy - because they are the enemy - with an excuse to shut us down and should be discouraged, but to focus on the same is missing the point.

Today really brings it home that such violent action - at least without serious provocation - really is absolutely unnecessary. I've been on marches before, but never have I seen this many people moving in the same direction, so obviously pissed off, voices raised to deliver a single very clear message. It's a show of strength, which is really all it needs to be right now, because psychologically speaking, it's fucking terrifying. If I were on the other team I'd be quacking my pants; and I suspect they are quacking their pants, hence the virulence of responses given thus far.

My wife and I walk back along the length of the march to our car, and each time we think we've reached the tail, another swarm of protesters appears from around the next corner.

As we drive home through empty streets on the other side of the city, we pass a group of five or six men - all white but for one Hispanic carrying a massive flag, all in combat gear with assault rifles. I don't really care about what may or may not be permitted by state law regarding firearms, no-one walking around in the centre of a city with an assault rifle does so with honourable intentions.

Several hours later, we watch the evening news. The five or six men were apparently part of something which calls itself Freedom Force. There are now about twenty of them stood around the Alamo Cenotaph, having volunteered themselves to protect the defenceless granite edifice with their openly carried guns. Someone spray painted graffiti upon it the day before, something about it being a monument to white supremacy - which is probably a bit of an overreach - but the graffiti was removed and the culprit arrested. Freedom Force have turned up to make sure that it doesn't happen again, apparently believing that the two-hundred strong line of armed cops in riot gear isn't enough in the face of thousands of black teenagers and sixteen-year old girls with green hair; but of course, they're not really protecting anything. Even if they were, doubt is cast by how they're all wearing those cool mirror shades after the sun has gone down, just like the action movie bad asses they clearly wish they could have been in other lives. Can any of them even see the Alamo Cenotaph they claim to be protecting? Either their motives are absolutely genuine and no-one had realised how provocative they would appear as white guys turning up to a black lives matter march with assault rifles - which would mean that they're genuinely a bunch of morons - or there's something else going on here. What a puzzler it is!

Comic book readers may recall that Magneto once led a team of supervillains called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants were eventually incarcerated by the Marvel universe version of the US Government, then pardoned and freed conditional to working for the same government agency as politically dubious super-espionage types, and as such they were renamed Freedom Force, which seems telling.

The protests continue on into the night, some smashed windows, some looting, and a shitload of graffiti - much of which is cleaned or repaired by volunteers from the march the next morning, which isn't as newsworthy for obvious reasons.

Normal service is resumed in San Antonio, at least within the limits of the prevailing state of lockdown, and the rest of the country apparently catches fire.

These are interesting times, I guess you could say.