Bishop Street, 1990

The Royal Mail sorting office on Bishop Street in Coventry is the largest building in which I've ever been employed, three or four floors above a huge loading bay full of eighteen-wheelers, expansive canteen up at the top. The blend of exhaust and inner city fog as one enters through the loading bay at 5.30AM, still cold and dark, has an inexplicable tang of diarrhoea. I can never work that one out given that the recipe is logically mostly gases produced by machines and related industrial processes.

The sorting frames are on the first floor, a single vast space occupying the entire length and breadth of the building, with a ceiling so high as to accommodate turbines. It's hard to keep from thinking of it as a factory what with the scale and the rafters, and then the tall expanse of glass at the end, rows of window panes stretching up into the roof like in a place of worship. If architecture has DNA, then there is a lot of Coventry in Bishop Street - that distinctive blend of automotive assembly line and modern cathedral. I first walked in on Monday the 22nd of May, 1989, and immediately knew I'd made a mistake.

The entire city is divided into eight sections, all side by side on the shop floor, like eight individual sorting offices set up inside the same warehouse. My first walk was South-West 10 encompassing Hearsall Lane in Earlsdon up so far as Sovereign Road, amounting to about eight-hundred addresses. The upper limit in Chatham was around five-hundred. After a month or so I've been moved to the North-West at the other end of the shop floor, and kept here just long enough to make a couple of friends, or at least long enough for a few of the postmen in residence to take the piss out of me.

I haven't had my hair cut in over a year, so it's getting quite long. I usually tie it in a pony tail because it gets in the way and I don't want it cut, and because it's the eighties. This means that, so far as my colleagues are concerned, I'm a hippy because it's as easy a way to identify me as any. Adrian Hollands has accordingly given me the nickname Mellow, an acknowledgment of generic hippy demeanour to ironically offset my actual mood and personality, which is anything but mellow and is usually severely pissed off and angry at the unreasonable quota of work piled upon my shoulders on a daily basis. Once I realised there wasn't much point in being additionally pissed off by the nickname, they seemed to accept me and so I've settled in.

Adrian, known as Ade - obviously - is part of a double act with Ian. They're a couple of years older than I am, so mid-twenties, abrim with confidence and funny, but not to the point of being arseholes.

Dennis and Phil are working on the frames behind mine. Dennis is abrasive and best ignored - probably mid-fifties, red-faced and with huge pupils swimming around behind spectacles cut from the bottom of Coke bottles. He always looks outraged about something or other, even when he smiles, which is presumably difficult given that his mouth is naturally down-turned like that of a glum cartoon toad. Aside from the delivery of mail, his main job seems to be laughing at Phil's jokes. I can't really hold it against him because Phil's jokes are usually very funny.

Phil is fat, blonde, red-faced - an example of a type which will eventually be identified as a Gammon. He's abusive, but his abuse is dispensed more or less regardless of whoever is at the receiving end and is simply an extreme method of letting off steam; and we tend to generate a lot of steam in this job. His jokes, to be fair, aren't really jokes as such, but rather are expletives and insults delivered with such shocking force and conviction that amusement seems the only fitting reaction.

'Hot today innit, Phil?' Dennis suggests in conversational spirit. 'I'm sweating here.'

'It's too hot for a WANK!' Phil reports, and you can actually hear the upper case letters of the last word, bold and underlined for emphasis. 'Don't you bristle your moustache at me, Mr. Bhatt!'

This last instruction has the defensive attitude of chair legs abruptly screeching backwards across the floor of a bar. Had there been a piano player, he would have stopped. Mr. Bhatt is our driver, a large pacific man of Indian heritage with a proud moustache. Each morning he silently cruises the aisles between the sorting frames looking for parcels he might take out on the van. This isn't so much altruism as that he doesn't want us chasing him down the road with our larger parcels later on once he's already got started.

'You are agitated, Mr. McCrystal,' Mr. Bhatt observes. 'I think you are unhappy about something.'

'I'm unhappy because I'm doing the work of two fucking blokes, Mr. Bhatt.'

'But you are normally doing the work of two, Mr. McCrystal,' the driver adds thoughtfully. 'That must mean that today you are doing the work of four men!'

This is an example of Mr. Bhatt's sense of humour. It's mostly in the delivery, and he smiles a little as he silently heads off towards the end of the aisle to speak with Guy, our supervisor.

Guy has a fire engine which he fixes up in his spare time and takes to fairs and the like. I guess we all need something.

Ade can be heard delivering comic threats to Tony. He could quite easily have Tony beaten up, or done over, or something. He doesn't care how ridiculous it sounds.

'How are you going to go about that then?' Tony enquires, dismissive and slightly camp, like a fatter Kenneth Williams - forever disappointed and underwhelmed by everything.

'I have my contacts,' Ade reports, matter of fact.

A moment goes by, just a little too long for the baton of repartee to be passed along.

'Yeah!' Mouse blusters in the usual spray of saliva. 'Contact lenses!'

Mouse is younger than I am but looks about forty, balding, a bit greasy with rodent qualities, hence the nickname. Everyone pauses to look at mouse.

'Good 'un, Mouse,' says Ade with a fake grin. 'Good 'un!'

Ian meanwhile effects staccato bursts of insincere laughter. 'Contact lenses - brilliant!'

Mouse goes back to sorting letters while silently working on his material.

'Small business? Small business???!!!' Phil explodes with what sounds like genuine outrage. 'One fucking bloke and a ladder! Small business??? Cunts!'

He's just got to the Enterprise Allowance mail, of which a great quantity has been sent out this morning. He speaks for all of us. He compares notes with Dennis, both muttering, now providing critical commentary on those who dare to receive mail on Phil's route, and what sort of fucking cunts are sending it to them. One particular diatribe gains volume, concluding with fucking pony-tail cunt from fucking London!

'I heard that!' I swivel around to face him.

'Oh - he heard that!' He's already looking at me, right in the eye and laughing, but cruel laughter which somehow makes it funnier. 'You were fucking supposed to hear it!'

I started with Royal Mail in Chatham then transferred, which in Coventry terms broadly makes me some cunt from London. I knew the move back to the Midlands was a mistake even at the time, but felt I was otherwise out of options. I've therefore put in for another transfer. I will start work at Catford sorting office in south-east London on Monday the 6th of August, 1990.

I've already told Phil.

He said, 'I'll give it about three weeks before you end up selling your arse around Piccadilly Circus.'

Be that as it may, I'm going to miss the horrible cunt.

The Cheese Cave

We passed through Waco, Texas on the way to Dallas some time last year. We'd been through Waco before without having any reason for stopping, but this time we saw billboards for something called the Cheese Cave. The distance from San Antonio to Dallas is such as to render minor excursions from the main part of the journey impractical, but we made a mental note because in our heads we imagined vast underground caverns full of cheese, and who wouldn't want to see that?

So now that we have the time, we're going to have a proper look at the Waco Cheese Cave. Furthermore, we're peeling the kid's face from whichever screen it has become affixed to and we're taking him along for the ride so that it will be an experience, so that one day he'll be able to look back and remember that time when he was in a moving vehicle, far, far away from his laptop. Ordinarily he would have been at summer camp but it was called off due to coronavirus. He's still a bit pissed off about this but we're doing what we can.

I'm still cycling twenty miles a day, five days a week, but I've switched my schedule so that I get out on the bike at around 7AM, then arrive back a little after nine to throw myself into the daily round of cleaning up and emptying litter trays - chores undertaken prior to going out on the bike up until a few weeks ago. This is because we're having one of those hot summers and it's hit 100° some mornings, which is 37° in old money in case anyone was wondering - a little too hot for riding a bike across the prairie. Anyway, this change of schedule means I can get in my daily twenty miles before we drive to Waco, which is nice, because I'm not crazy about long car journeys, particularly if I haven't had any exercise that day.

We get going at around ten in the morning. It's a fairly straightforward haul, two-hundred miles or about three hours depending on how you look at it, up I-35 passing through San Marcos, Austin, and Temple. Luckily my wife enjoys driving.

The boy sits quietly in the back. After a while I realise he actually isn't absorbed in playing a game on his phone and is instead taking in the scenery. He turned seventeen about a week ago and I'm not yet accustomed to this newly contemplative version of my stepson. Even without the distraction of pixelated elves, he might ordinarily have spent the journey delivering a long, long list of snakes of Texas, famous medical miracles, or the unsung achievements of Nikolai Tesla. His chatty periods can be quite entertaining, but the quiet nevertheless makes for a pleasant change.

Three hours later we locate the Cheese Cave off a small road just the other side of Waco. It's actually an eighteenth century agricultural building converted into a store, a former shed or workshop or something. We go in. They have yoghurt, toffee, and other things handmade on site. They have cheese, but in nothing like the quantity I would have anticipated given the promise of the name. I've actually seen more cheese in my local supermarket. Also, it's hard to get a good look at the cheese as there are two other customers in the store, two older women stood in front of the refrigerated cabinets talking loudly about favourite cheeses they have eaten. It doesn't seem to occur to them to move, and they don't even seem to be buying. They are cheese enthusiasts.

'Just trying to buy some cheese here,' I say between politely gritted teeth as I forcibly interpolate myself between them and the cabinets. 'Thank you so much.'

The cheeses on offer are mostly cheddar with a few of the mouldy varieties, all wrapped in wax paper. I pick out a block of ghost pepper cheddar and read the label which lists four types of chilli among its ingredients. It sounds interesting so I head for the counter, passing the boy who is picking toffees out of a jar.

'You know what a ghost pepper is?' my wife asks, concerned.

'It's the hottest one, right?'

She nods, still evidently concerned, and now the boy has taken an interest. This is because every six months he tells us about the YouTube video featuring an idiot eating a raw ghost pepper as part of some challenge. I've seen the video, most of which shows the idiot groaning and clutching his stomach before being taken to hospital, which didn't really impress me. I like chilli peppers, but once you're past being able to taste the food, I can't see the point; however, I tell myself, this is obviously some fancy cheese place, as proven by the cheese vats - or whatever they are - which we are able to view through a window at one side of the store. If they've made cheese using ghost peppers, then flavour is almost certainly a priority, with hopefully few concessions to the sort of persons who might engage in competitive endurance eating.

'So where's the actual cave?' I ask the woman at the till.

Once outside we follow her directions to what may have been an outhouse. There are stone steps within, leading down to a window behind which is some large subterranean space with shelf after shelf of cheeses maturing down in the cool beneath the baking soil of Texas. The aroma of cheese is overpowering.

'So that was the Cheese Cave,' I observe once we're back in the car, back with gloriously cold air blasting from the AC. 'I must admit I expected more, but I'm glad we came.'

Three hours drive for five minutes spent buying cheese seems eccentric, but my wife points out that Waco also has something called the Mammoth Monument and the Dr. Pepper Museum.

The Mammoth Monument is in a national park, and as we pull up to the gate we realise there's an admission fee, which we weigh against how much we want to walk around a park at midday in 100° heat. It turns out that none of us are keen on the idea, at least in the absence of further information regarding what we're likely to see. We presume the remains of a mammoth were once found somewhere in the vicinity, and our projected worst case scenario is that the discovery may now be acknowledged by a monument in honour of the mammoth; so we probably aren't likely to see anything which actually was a mammoth at any point of its previous existence.

We head back into the city, which is bigger than any of us recall, and more picturesque with a lot of nineteenth century buildings around the centre. We pass the Dr. Pepper Museum commemorating the history of said fizzy drink, which was apparently invented right here in Waco. Dr. Pepper is one of those flavours resembling nothing found in nature and I'm not really a fan. I try to imagine what we might see were we to enter the museum. I imagine a diorama with a manikin of Dr. Pepper himself, sat in his dentist's chair, invited to rinse and suddenly realising he could turn that flavour into a drink and sell it to people.

The boy is quite keen on Dr. Pepper but even he's less than stoked about the prospect of the museum, and so we head back to I-35 secure in the knowledge that at the end of the day we will have clocked up four-hundred miles in the name of buying cheese.

Back on I-35, it begins to dawn on me just how stupid are most of the billboards we've seen today. I suppose they were always stupid, but it's not often that I spend six hours having them flash past, one after another. I've become accustomed to advertising which aspires to sophistication in its own gormless way, which regards itself as slick or even witty, but out here on the highway we're back to lowest common denominators and no-one going broke through underestimating the stupidity of the general public.

The first I notice are billboards promoting the idea of not being a massive dick when one's journey is delayed by roadworks. The billboards show smiling roadworks people in hard hats and hi-vis clothing. Do I speed in your place of work? one of them asks in friendly rhetorical spirit.

Well, no, I suppose some PR person imagines us sheepishly admitting, no, you don't, as we ease off the gas, settling down to a more leisurely eighty. The other variants are even more conceptually basic. Along similar lines, we pass a billboard reading, when the push comes to the shove, don't, then, please be civil. It seems to suggest that we, as a people, are getting angrier - not just those temporarily inconvenienced by roadworks along I-35; and I suppose we are.

There are Buc-ee's billboards every five or six miles advertising what is essentially the motorway service station equivalent of underwhelming relatives who were never quite so funny or popular as they believed themselves to be. Buc-ee's billboards are mostly all the same thing, their badly drawn cartoon beaver logo with text. The slogans were never anything side-splitting, and were usually slightly bewildering - THE EYES OF BUC-EE'S ARE UPON YOU, being one example; but just recently they may as well be speaking in tongues. There's STOP - NUGGET TIME!, which I assume alludes to MC Hammer's allegedly classic U Can't Touch This without bothering to include an actual joke; BEAVER FREEZER which helpfully includes an image of some ice lollies and presumably appeals to those reduced to hysterics by combinations of words which sort of rhyme but don't; and BRISKET NOW, JERKY LATER for which I can't even be bothered to compose facetious commentary.

Given recent events, it's beginning to feel as though America is  becoming progressively more stupid, and this time next year Buc-ee's billboards will feature suggestions along the lines of EAT CANDY BAR - MAKE HUNGER STOP!

We pass an eighteen-wheeler which seems to underscore my train of thought. The rear door features a bumper sticker of text written above and below the stars and stripes. The text above speaks of supporting our troops, while the text below concludes with, give comfort and aid to the enemy? No way!, which is possibly the most retarded sentence I've encountered this year, despite heavy competition. The arbitrary nationalism might not be quite so objectionable were it not phrased in the language of an NFL-addled jock teenager whose sexual preferences have been called into question.

No way, dude! No way!

Eventually, half an hour from home, some idle comment passed around as part of the journey unexpectedly blossoms into a conversation, specifically one which yields the information that my stepson considers Bram Stoker's The Snake's Pass to be one of the most boring things he's ever read. He elaborates, describing what happens in the book, what he liked and what he didn't like, and all the while my head is spinning. I know he reads but have never truly worked out at what level, assuming most of his reading to be undertaken because he can't get out of it - an assumption supported by my never actually having seen him with a book.

The thing is, I haven't even heard of The Snake's Pass. I tell him it sounds as though it suffers from the same problems as Stoker's massively overrated Dracula; and suddenly, for the first time ever, I'm having a conversation with my stepson about books, and books other than Harry fucking Potter. We talk about Dickens, Catch-22, and others, and most of it is what we don't like about this, that or the other; but it's a conversation I never thought I would ever have, and it's obvious that he's considered what he's saying at some length; and somehow it's all thanks to the Cheese Cave, kind of.

Where They Are All Coming From

My wife has been working from home since before it became fashionable. Her company decided it could use the office space for some other more lucrative undertaking, and so she has her PC, screens and everything set up in our front room, all chained to the internet through a link provided by the company which seems depressingly less prone to failure than the service through which we try to watch television or make phone calls. By the time coronavirus drove everyone else away from their respective workplaces, Bess had already built up a substantial head of cabin fever. She hadn't actually wanted to work from home at all, much preferring to keep her job as something separate, something from which she could leave behind and forget about at the end of each day, but general corporate policy now knows what we want better than we do, just like in the old Soviet Union where citizens were regarded as proud extensions of their work; except apparently it was bad in the former Soviet Union, but now it's good due to freedom of choice 'n' stuff.

This is why we like to get out and do something at weekends, specifically because Bess has been cooped up inside for most of the week and is usually gagging to get out, even if only for the sake of a drive. Today we're heading for Bandera, a fairly small town in the hill country, and mainly just for the sake of getting out and because we haven't been to Bandera in a while. Actually, I've only ever been through Bandera because there doesn't seem to be a whole lot there which isn't directly catering to inhabitants of ranches, but as I say, it's just something to aim for, something to do.

Bandera is in the general vicinity of Mico, which is even smaller, and we have vague memories of there being stuff to look at in and around Mico.

First there are the camels in a field at the side of the highway. The field isn't where I remember it being, but we chance upon it eventually, and accordingly stop and get out to look at the camels. They share a field with longhorn cattle and a donkey. I seem to remember seeing elephants and a giraffe when we were here last, whenever that was, but it's probably been five years or more so I could be mistaken. Temperature-wise, it's way up in the nineties, so we don't actually spend much time looking at the camels.

Medina lake is interesting, not least because I thought it was somewhere else. It's surrounded by a sprawl of dwellings, a town in itself built up steeply sloping hillsides and which cuts off all access to the lake. You actually have to live here if you want to swim or paddle or just stand at the edge. We drive around the terrifying single lane roads which wind up and down the hillside for a while, then head for Mico.

Mico seems to be built along the length of a winding rural road, and for us the main attraction is a particular house occupied by someone who makes sculptures out of trash, anything they've found laying around by the look of it. A wooden sea serpent snakes across the raggedy lawn towards a wheeled animal made from a vacuum cleaner, amongst other things. Last time we visited there was a plastic baby doll hung from one of the trees smoking a cigarette. Now she has a home and watches us from the balcony of something like a bandstand made out of twigs and crap. It's funny, inventive, and also slightly disturbing, the work of someone who would doubtless have been canonised by the Surrealists had they been born a century earlier.

Bandera itself has a natural history museum, a place we visited on the day it opened, back when they had just one fibre glass dinosaur to their name. Now a whole load of them have taken up residence in the grounds around the building. They seem crudely detailed and maybe a little hokey, but are good for providing a sense of scale and it's hard to fault the enthusiasm of the enterprise as a whole. The velociraptor is small, about the size of a labrador, and I recall the boy explaining during one of his many, many paleontology lectures how the beasts in Jurassic Park were actually specimens of the less easily pronounced deinonychus upon which the producers bestowed the cooler sounding name.

Finally we make it to Bandera itself, although we may actually have been through Bandera prior to Medina Lake, Mico and so on. It's too hot to keep track.

There's a stall at the side of the road selling MAGA caps. MAGA, as you probably know, is a slogan associated with President Trump standing for make America great again, something which presupposes it wasn't already great - which seems a little unpatriotic if you ask me - and which additionally strikes me as running contrary to the actions of his time in office.

'I didn't realise anyone actually sold those things,' Bess observes. 'I assumed they were just handed out or something.'

We stop at the gas station and go inside to get something to drink. There are more MAGA hats on sale just inside the door along with related Trump campaign paraphernalia, mostly taking the form of slogans printed on baseball caps, the usual shit about saying what you think and how political correctness is ruining everything.

I don't normally see this sort of shit due to living in a city, but I guess this is where it has its foothold, out here in the middle of nowhere where folks ain't ashamed to live up to the stereotype of the shithead from the south. Somehow I experience a sudden and profound understanding. I suppose I kind of knew on some level, but this is like a giant pair of celestial buttocks have parted to poo the effluence of enlightenment unto me on this day.

You don't actually have to be stupid, just maybe not the sharpest tool in the box. One day someone who reads books looks down upon you, perhaps pointing out the idiocy of something you've said, and you simply don't have the wit or literacy to form a truly satisfying comeback, because go screw yourself, college boy only seems to prove their point. But now there's a man who understands you, and who speaks to you, and he makes a lot of sense. At least what he says sounds like the real world, the one you know about; maybe he's a bit rough around the edges, but you shouldn't believe everything you hear; and even better, every long-haired book learnin' freak who ever sneered down a nose at you hates the guy. Just the mention of his name makes them squirm, and it feels good at last having something that hurts those snooty fuckers! So hell yes, you're voting come November.

Damn straight.

SMH

We're back at Jim's diner, the second time in a couple of weeks and once again the car is there. I'm no good with automotive brands and think of it as a Lincoln, which it probably isn't. It's new but is styled more like something from the seventies, clean and brilliant white with a scatter of political stickers across the trunk and rear window - proud supporter of President Trump, amongst others, most of which propose that the driver is additionally a proud supporter of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't understand why anyone would want to advertise their personal preferences on their means of transport, but this sort of thing particularly gets on my nerves because it also seems to advertise their stupidity as though it's a boldly chosen stance - I done a smelly poo right in me knickers, laughed in your face with a big happy smile.

The car is parked right in front of the entrance and, as I say, this isn't the first time we've seen it. The glass door of Jim's is decorated with the usual array of literature concerning coronavirus and the requirement of masks to be worn within, but there's other stuff too and it takes me a second to decode what I'm looking at: colour images on paper, presumably printed off on a home computer. There's a photograph of Hillary Clinton with a caption referring to the supposed suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. I can't even tell what is implied here, which I guess means I don't spend enough time on the internet, but the political angle is implicit in the other images, each pasted on the door with a single strip of tape. The other two are too bland to stick in my memory, but something rhetorical along the lines of what those liberals will come up with next. It's the cosy syntax of persons who have learned all they needed to know at the university of life, and are not only secure in their ignorance but feel it represents an achievement, the sanctity of a mental virginity kept pure from anything with too many long words. I've encountered these people online, usually in response to some not unreasonable proposition - cops probably shouldn't shoot innocent people, for example - and their stock response will be SMH, which stands for shaking my head, or something borrowed from someone else about the sad effects of a mind destroyed by liberalism. It's not really an argument. It's barely even coherent as a sneer.

'You know, I think I've changed my mind,' I say. I've deduced that this material probably doesn't actually represent views endorsed by either Jim's management or staff, but it bothers me.

'I know, but I'm hungry.' Bess goes in and I follow.

'Take a seat,' the waitress suggests, pausing on the way to someone's table.

I wait for her to deliver the tray then catch her attention. 'I don't know if you realise, but someone has pasted a load of right-wing crap on your door over there, and it's kind of annoying.'

She sighs in a long-suffering way and mumbles something about dealing with it, and I immediately realise who is behind this. I said right-wing crap quite loud and he's staring at me from a few tables away. He's a little old man, maybe in his eighties, wearing a cap identifying him as a Korean war veteran. His jacket is similarly adorned with badges. He likes to advertise. He was in here last time with a friend of similar vintage and the same cap. He's small and the lower half of his face protrudes like that of a monkey or someone in a thirties Popeye cartoon. He's Cotton from King of the Hill.

I'm kind of tired of the fetishisation of the military in this country. I have no problem with anyone signing up with the military, but would hope they do so for reasons besides the eternal gratitude of complete strangers who bark thank you for your service at the first whiff of khaki. Military service does not mean you're a sentinel of freedom, and I'm suspicious of anyone who advertises having been in the military regardless of whether it's on a hat, a car sticker, or tattooed on one of their mighty biceps. Merely walking around with a gun on foreign soil does not make you a hero; and if your actions have been genuinely heroic in the service of your country or some cause you consider noble, you shouldn't need your ass kissed by the rest of us on a daily basis. I find it difficult to truly respect those who advertise their having served in the military, because it feels a little as though they have something to prove; and had they seen the sort of action which might be discussed in terms of heroism or courage, my guess is that they wouldn't feel the need to prove anything, much less by means of something so trite as a bumper sticker. I've met one veteran of the Korean war, my wife's uncle Elton. He told us all about it, particularly about the mass graves filled with the bodies of Chinese people, and it sounded nightmarish. For some reason he chooses not to advertise his military experience with slogans displayed upon either his person or vehicle.

Monkey Man regards us with fearful piercing eyes as we take a seat in the booth adjacent to his. He knows he is old and feeble, and he knows that I don't like him very much and could crush him, and he knows that it will take more than his veteran status to get me swooning like a seventies schoolgirl at a David Cassidy performance. I'm one of those people he's been warned about, here to ban everything reasonable with my mighty powers of political correctness, here to force your children into gender reassignment surgery regardless of their own personal feelings on the matter, and I do this because I'm following orders passed onto me from the mighty Antifa world headquarters inside a hollowed out mountain of the Sierra Madre. Ordinarily he might only frown to himself, then an uncharitable chuckle as he types a damning SMH before moving on to the next thread; but this isn't that kind of situation.

The waitress comes to take our order.

'Sorry to be that customer,' I say, waving my hand in the general direction of the door, 'but we just came out to eat and I don't want to see that sort of stuff. It's like having the worst of facebook following you out into the real world.'

She understands. She explains that the person who decorated the door is a regular diner of many years, leaving her in an uncomfortable position, but the memes are coming down just as soon as he's paid up and left. She speaks quietly. Although we're in the booth next to Monkey Man, a glass partition divides us at head height, and my guess is that his hearing may not be the greatest. The waitress is evidently smiling behind her face mask, but it's clear that she's on our side and that this is some bullshit she really could have lived without.

Our food arrives and we eat.

Monkey Man begins his long, slow pilgrimage towards the cash register with waiting staff as he goes. Eventually he makes it outside to the car driven by a proud supporter of President Trump, obviously himself. We hear the waitress agonising with the guy in the kitchen, just wishing this sweet old guy wouldn't be such a dick, then she goes to the door and removes the liberal-baiting crap.

One day he'll be dead.

They will all be dead, and the world will be a nicer place to live at least in that respect. I think of the people I've known who managed to make it into their eighties without turning into Enoch Powell, or at least a massive pain in the arse. Thankfully they outnumber Monkey Man and his kind by a significant margin.