2021: The Bits I Can Remember

This was the year Texas froze like nothing I've ever known. I've seen England freeze on numerous occasions, but England is used to it and has gritting lorries and warm clothing so it's not usually a massive deal. Here, in a city where we can somehow experience a power cut because it rained a bit, we were fucked. Nowhere was open. No-one could get around. Power went and pipes froze and it lasted about a week. Our household didn't have it too bad - aside from the lack of hot water - and once everything returned to normal I lagged all the pipes which seemed like they might need lagging and adopted the practice of keeping about a month's supply of tinned cat food squirrelled away in a cupboard just in case.

I didn't bother hoarding toilet paper during the pandemic because we produce only a normal quantity of poo, but we have an indeterminate number of cats - somewhere in double figures - so I'm reluctant to take chances on that score, not least because the cat food supply chain has been intermittent since September, at which point the pandemic slowed to a trickle.

 

No-one I knew well died this year so far as I can recall, at least no hominids. That said, we lost a rabbit around the beginning of the year. His name was Tony. He was only a baby and was our third rabbit to go in roughly the same number of months due to a combination of extraordinarily shitty luck and what happens when rabbits develop a taste for cardboard. We were both devastated and vowed no more bunnies for a while because it's too heartbreaking and they seem unusually prone to pegging it whilst in our care. We lasted until March, at which point the empty hutch in the corner of the front room became too depressing, then adopted Oreo who, already being five, seemed more likely to survive our hospitality. Thankfully this has turned out to be the case, so it seems that losing three rabbits in quick succession really was just extraordinarily shitty luck. Gus II, one of the feral cats who lived in our garden and whom I fed daily also passed away, which was similarly incredibly depressing. Being feral, she remained suspicious, but always seemed pleased to see me.

 

Inevitably, we've acquired more cats during 2021. First came the litter of kittens comprising Lucy, Luna, Lilly and Mr. Meow Meow, the latter of whom was given that name by the people who ended up adopting him. We kept the other three and have since added Ollie, Polly, and Otto to their ranks. Otto is the most recent arrival and is presently still a kitten. He has a German name because we watched the movie Cabaret followed by the first two series of Babylon Berlin. We tried the third series but I kept falling asleep and couldn't get into it as I had with the first two series.

 

We rescued a raccoon too. She was a baby found out on our porch, presumably abandoned during one of those pseudo-Biblical storms we have here from time to time. We gave her to a woman who raises raccoons, who named her Roxie.

 

In addition to Babylon Berlin, we watched Wolf Hall - thanks to my mother sending Bess the DVD for Christmas, Succession, the Sopranos yet again, and a ton of Wheel of Fortune. I'm sure we watched other things but nothing comes to mind right now, aside from a couple of episodes of Doctor Who which I attempted out of morbid curiosity and which were complete shite. On the other hand, I read a ton of books, the greatest of which were probably by Robert Moore Williams, Andrea Dworkin, D.H. Lawrence, Isabelle Nicou, and José Saramago.

 

I also published a ton of books, or self-published four if we're going to be pedantic. These were Golden Age, Missing Words, Bess News and The Bunker. Golden Age was my first science-fiction novel since 2013's Against Nature, and all sorts of enthusiastic noises were made, none of which amounted to anything - which was about what I expected.; Missing Words was yet another mammoth collection of previously published essays, and The Bunker is a found novel - as I'm calling it - which I spent two years transcribing from no less than thirty cassette tapes of testimony from a maniac of my former acquaintance. It's been an admittedly esoteric undertaking, but I feel it has been worth it, at least in artistic terms.; Bess News collects a series of newsletters my wife produced about herself when she was a teenager back in the eighties. Some person at her high school made a comment along the lines of if you're so special you should have your own fan club, which was intended as criticism but which she took as a challenge. Bess News reproduces all of the existing issues of the same - about thirty in all - in lavish full colour and is not available in the stores. In fact, having been put together as a Christmas present, it isn't actually available unless you know myself or my wife personally.

I've also been writing a novel, more science-fiction, and approximately a sequel to Against Nature, or maybe a response. It's called Inward Collapse at the moment and will be available from the same publisher as the last one, unless I'm somehow exposed as an admirer of Adolf Hitler and find myself subsequently cancelled prior to publication. It will probably be my final Faction Paradox thing on the grounds that I hadn't actually intended to make a career out of it.

 

Musically, I will have had a new Retirement Community EP out by the time anyone reads this, all going well. It features sonic tributes to Pat Sajak - the host of Wheel of Fortune, el Chapo - one of Mexico's most successful businessmen, and is much harder to dance to than the first record.

 

I've been painting too, at least on and off, mostly book covers but I sold the oil painting of the apples for a hundred bucks, so busy-busy-busy.

I'm older and I still don't have cancer.

We discovered a new palace to eat, El Potosino on San Pedro which is one of those Mexican diners which feels like it's actually in Mexico, and rural Mexico judging by the fleeting glances of confusion when we've gone in. This is a good thing because it keeps the white people out, even though we're white people, technically speaking. That sentence may not make much sense to anyone who doesn't live in San Antonio. Anyway, English is the lesser of the two languages spoken at El Potosino, and they have a deafening live Tejano band on Saturdays, complete with a fucking tuba, so the clientele rarely seems to include persons named Josh, Greg or Tammy and the food is astonishing and affordable.

I'm sure other things of note happened during 2021, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

Everybody Having Fun

Christmas comes but once a year and when it does it clogs up airwaves and supermarket PA systems with the worst music you've ever heard; although a few of them probably sound okay when you're drunk or if you're the sort of twat who simpers awww, how can you not love ELO? when someone correctly explains that ELO were shit*. Anyway, here's an arbitrary and mercifully incomplete list:

Gene Autry Here Comes Santa Claus (1947) I'm not sure I ever heard this one back in England, but you can't escape from the fucker here in Texas. It does pretty much what you would expect of a song called Here Comes Santa Claus which may or may not be addressed to listeners under the age of three - it's kind of hard to tell. For some reason, the most irritating line is the one describing Santa's proposed route of travel via Santa Claus Lane. Aside from it being common knowledge that he can fly by admittedly mysterious means thus precluding the need to stick to roads, highways or any other existing feature of the urban landscape, the idea that he might arrive via a thoroughfare named after himself seems too coincidental to be even remotely plausible.

Awkward Geisha All I Want for Christmas Is You (2019) Awkward Geisha is Ade Rowe from Harsh Noise Movement and friends. This one comes from 100 Soft Rock Anthems, an album which also features moving and apparently sincere tributes to Barry of the Chuckle Brothers and Geoffrey from Rainbow, so we're dealing with individuals who rightly shun the general concept of guilty pleasures. This cover is therefore more faithful to the original than you might expect, given the pedigree and despite a free jazz approach to some of the instrumentation. It's a bit odd but I would be quite happy to hear this version blasted over the tannoy in my local supermarket.

Band Aid Do They Know It's Christmas? (1984) I don't even know that anything really needs saying about this one, and the general nobility of the cause doesn't make it a decent record, let alone excuse Bono suggesting that you should be glad it's them rather than you. Somehow my first exposure to the song was during a festive talent show at Maidstone College of Art. With everyone else juggling hard-boiled eggs or performing peculiarly ponderous comedy sketches, the kids from the art foundation course banded together to perform this song - all forty or fifty of them. I'd never heard it before and assumed it to be their own composition. The kid who handled most of the main vocal, and who probably came up with the idea, had a George Michael hairstyle and turned his back to the audience at the end of the song to reveal feed my ego printed on his t-shirt, which I assume was supposed to be a punchline amounting to, I'm not really an arsehole whom you've just watched performing a non-ironic cover of the current number one. Never having heard the song, much less being aware of its placement in the hit parade, most of this was lost on me. I simply assumed that the art foundation department had suffered a fall and hit its collective head or something.

Maria Carey All I Want for Christmas Is You (1994) She married the head of Sony, a man twenty years her senior who was, I'm sure, a lovely man with a great personality and I doubt that his using one-hundred dollar bills to light cigars was really a factor. She sings in that wobbly voice style which is mostly just notes, and I find it very, very difficult to believe that she would have been happy with just the person to whom the song was addressed on Christmas morning, a hunch I base on the b-side of the song being called What? Not Even a Pair of Fucking Socks, You Cheap Cow-Son? To my ears, the sincerity of the song seems therefore questionable. Awkward Geisha's version was better. Also, she resembles a pre-Toy Story CGI chipmunk.

Bing Crosby & David Bowie Little Drummer Boy (1977) While I can't really fault White Christmas, I've never found this a convincing duet. It's okay, and it's not actually offensive, but that's hardly a glowing endorsement. My favourite thing about Little Drummer Boy was my wife's aunt announcing that she'd discovered a duet sung by Bing Crosby and David Bowie, and it was a Christmas song, and it was this Christmas song, and it was 2017 meaning that my wife's aunt was the only person on the planet who hadn't heard it by that point. This didn't stop her playing the song at us on her soundbar while smiling beatifically as though she'd recorded it herself and it was her gift to the rest of us.

Eazy-E Merry Muthafuckin' Christmas (1992) While some may object to the work of Eazy-E for its reckless moral irresponsibility, enthusiastically violent message and emphasis on sexual acts and substance abuse, the rest of us recognise this as pretty much the greatest Christmas song ever recorded, or if not the greatest, it's at least top two.

The Go-Go's I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek (1964) Oh just fuck off. Learn to use an apostrophe.

The Greedies A Merry Jingle (1979) The Greedies were actually the Greedy Bastards, an amorphous supergroup formed mainly for the sake of gigs and pissing about by members of Thin Lizzy, Chris Spedding, and Cook and Jones from the Sex Pistols. Regrettably this was the only record that came from the enterprise, although more was recorded. It's a bit shite but it's Cook and Jones, which is good enough for me.

Bobby Helms Jingle Bell Rock (1957) I assume the reference to rock was made so as to tap into the lucrative juvenile delinquent market because the song is otherwise a million miles away from anything ever recorded by Charlie Feathers and doesn't rock even a little bit, which is why it's fucking annoying. One might anticipate an exemption by virtue of its use in Mean Girls, which is arguably the greatest movie of all time, but no - the only reason it works in Mean Girls is specifically because it's fucking annoying.

Jethro Tull Christmas Song (1972) It's taken me the best part of a decade to work out quite what I feel about Jethro Tull, specifically that one should tread very, very carefully once past the first album and Witch's Promise. There's a live version of Living in the Past which Ian Anderson introduces with the words, this is an oldie that we've utterly loathed for fifteen long years but it's now resurrected in a slightly more tricky form to make it a little more fun to play. To my ears, this sounds somewhat akin to a complaint about those who, having paid to get into the venue, might want to hear the hit single when they could be improving themselves with that four-album song cycle about Gandalf written in 3/17 time; and Christmas Song conveys the same snooty attitude but more so, amounting to a passive-aggressive rendering of Once in Royal David's City which suffixes what little cheer it concedes with I just hope you're satisfied, you selfish cunt; because if anyone is qualified to deliver condescending sermons on the evils of greed and materialism, it's a man who once bought an island.

The Kinks Father Christmas (1977) It's a song about Father Christmas being mugged by inner city hooligans of some description - possibly bovver boys given that it was 1977. The b-side is a song called Prince of the Punks which is about how Tom Robinson thinks he's all lush with his gobbing, pogoing and safety pins but his real name is Tarquin, and so on and so forth. The Kinks were way past their best by this point and it's all a bit Two Ronnies if you ask me. Also, play this record immediately following the mighty Bully For You by the Tom Robinson Band and it sounds like Russ fucking Abbott, quite frankly.

Eartha Kitt Santa Baby (1953) I know it's Eartha Kitt but sorry, this is horrible. It's general delivery seems to ask us to consider Santa in a sexual context, which doesn't greatly appeal to me.

John Lennon & Yoko Ono Happy Christmas (War is Over) (1971) Possibly not quite so condescending as the Jethro Tull offering, but pretty close, and there was obviously something in the water that year. Apparently it was in part a protest song about the Vietnam war, and doubtless sounded great if you were living in New York in the early seventies. Unfortunately it sounded like pure ballsache if you were living in London between 1990 and 2009 and were obliged to endure the cheerless fucking dirge on the radio approximately every twenty minutes during the busy Christmas rush of a Royal Mail sorting office, which was already sufficiently stressful and miserable without having this pair of wankers turning up to sneer over your shoulder about what you haven't done to end the war in Vietnam.

Paul McCartney Wonderful Christmastime (1979) Irritating as fuck, but it means well and I've thawed to the McCartney in recent years. At least it isn't Happy Christmas (War is Over).

The Pogues Fairytale of New York (1988) I know this always comes up as somehow more authentic than the rest, and I suppose it is when compared to Christmas in Smurfland, and yes, we all miss Kirsty MacColl obviously; but I've never been particularly struck on the Pogues and this one didn't do anything to change my mind.

Frank Sinatra Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (1948) While I'm disinclined to disparage Ol' Blue Eyes, his golden tonsils, or any of the legitimate Italian-American businessmen with whom he was allegedly associated, this one was written for Judy Garland five years earlier and never struck me as a great choice of cover. As a song it's mostly harmless but what the fuck is a merry little Christmas supposed to be? I presume it would be a low-scale celebration with just a few pals and maybe some tinnies, but quantifying such an undertaking as little sounds wrong somehow, almost as though the writers just needed two syllables in there so that the thing would scan right. I would have gone with Have Yourself a Merry Fucking Christmas, but I suppose that would have been frowned upon back in the forties.

Slade Merry Christmas Everybody (1973) I know it's become something of a cliché to claim this as the greatest Christmas song of all time, but it probably is.

Bruce Springsteen Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1985) I expect Bruce was simply covering somebody else's song here, but I don't care enough to find out who got there first. I'm not a massive fan of the Springsteen but accept that he has his moments. Unfortunately this wasn't one of them.

Shakin' Stevens Merry Christmas Everyone (1985) I remember Shakin' Stevens as a comical holiday camp Elvis knock off who was so stuffy and square that he probably didn't even know what the first Joy Division album was called, let alone where it was recorded or the name of the producer; but time passed and I found myself grudgingly forced to admit that actually, he didn't sound even remotely like he was trying to impersonate Elvis and his cover of Ricky Nelson's It's Late was pretty decent. These days I'm past caring. I'd listen to Shakin' Stevens before anything by Sonic Youth, and if Merry Christmas Everyone isn't quite up there with the true masterpieces of seasonal novelty songs, I've heard much, much worse.

The Waitresses Christmas Wrapping (1981) This rocks. In fact it's generally better than the thing it's singing about. I've always thought Christmas was a bit of an overrated institution.

Wham! Last Christmas (1984) I can't remember whether we're presently supposed to regard Wham! as having been pure shite or the most 'tastic thing ever, but I've never really had a strong opinion about them apart from their being better than Depeche Mode, which is hardly an achievement. I probably could have done with hearing this a bit less on the works radio, but at least it wasn't that John and Yoko shite, and it was always entertaining when my pal Richard sang along, changing the words to last Christmas, I gave you my arse, the very next day, you said I was gay, and so on and so forth. It was funny because we were working class so we read the Sun and had unenlightened views about things. Not like it is today.

Wizzard I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day (1973) I know Roy Wood was in ELO but he at least had the sense to leave, and clearly wasn't entirely without talent as Ball Park Incident demonstrates; but no-one sane wishes it could be Christmas every day, and glam rock hyperbole doesn't really excuse the idea. As a child in the seventies, I vaguely recall some light feature on our local news show about a man who celebrated Christmas every single day of the year. I don't remember how he financed this undertaking, but I don't doubt that the offending Wizzard single was striped onto the soundtrack of the piece at some point. Light-hearted magazine show chuckles aside, the man was clearly mental.

*: I will admit that, to their credit, ELO don't seem to have recorded a Christmas song so far as I'm aware - although admittedly I'm disinclined to check. I concede this information because it's Christmas, a time of goodwill unto all, even simpletons.

Saying Something Twice

Classical Nahuatl, the language spoken by the people we erroneously recall as Aztecs, achieves emphasis by means of something called reduplication wherein a morpheme is repeated. For example, where the adjectival prefix meaning old is hue—, something very old is therefore prefixed huehue—. Depending on the context, reduplication may also be used to denote the plural form, so that teotl - amounting to god - becomes gods when rendered as teteo, and ancient gods is huehueteteo. Reduplication can also be found in contemporary Texan speech. Although Texas was colonised by Spaniards ranging north from Mexico, and they bought a number of Nahuatl speakers with them, I'm not convinced that Texan reduplication is a direct continuation of some Nahuatl precedent. Nahuatl sounding place names are found all over northern Mexico, notably the state of Coahuila immediately south-west of San Antonio - although the etymology is often vague; and yet I've encountered reduplication mainly in Mexico and Texas. It's probably a coincidence, but it's nevertheless a suspicious coincidence; and because it irritates the living shit out of me, I've decided to compile a list.

Cow-cows. This was said by my stepson during a car journey as he attempted to draw attention to cattle gathered in a field which we were passing. The full sentence was, 'Look, Mom - cow-cows.' I don't recall how old he was at the time, possibly about nine. In any case, he seemed kind of long in the tooth for such an affectation. In his defence, he's presently about six months short of switching over to discussing animals exclusively by their Latin classification.

Dadad. see Momom.

Gus Gus. Another one from the boy, this time referring to a cat named Gus - short for Asparagus, a cat from a poem by T.S. Eliot. In full, the frequently repeated exclamation was usually, 'Look, Mom, it's Gus-Gus!' drawing attention to a cat who had, more often than not been sitting in the same place for at least an hour, and whose presence therefore scarcely required any sort of announcement, and certainly not one seemingly defining the speaker as the observational prodigy who has at last found the elusive cat for which the rest of us had been searching. To be fair, the boy has always been a little tightly wound, and his locating a cat which wasn't actually missing was probably less exhausting than the redundant greeting of hi, Mom! delivered roughly every fifteen minutes despite both parties having been in close proximity for at least the previous half hour.

Kia Kia. This was the signature call of a man dressed as a hamster in a television commercial for World Car Kia, an automotive dealership based in San Antonio specialising in vehicles produced by the Kia Corporation of South Korea. Television advertising for local car dealerships tends to be pure arseache by definition, but this one really pushed the boat out. The commercial features the usual amateur sales pitch gushing over stock footage of cars in the lot of the local showroom; then the image of a man dressed in a hamster costume zips across from the left side of the screen by agency of the sort of cheap CSO video effects no-one has used since 1989. The hamster is dressed as though having come direct from an eighties rap video with baseball cap and satin jacket, and quickly throws some kind of pose while saying Kia twice in a high pitched voice, then back off the left side of the screen - all over in a split second and lasting no longer than it takes to say Kia Kia! It's difficult to work out what the hell anyone thought this added to the already pointless commercial, perhaps an element of fun, given that some people can be entertained by a light bulb turning on and off or videos of babies falling over. I like to think that some fucking idiot in marketing imagined that naming this particular vehicle manufacturer twice in a squeaky voice would become a popular catchphrase echoed across playgrounds all over San Antonio, and I additionally like to imagine that said fucking idiot soon found himself back at the labour exchange, or whatever it is they have here. The commercial mysteriously vanished from our screens after about a week, so I know it wasn't just me.

Merry Merry. A particularly bewildering addition to the canon here, this was a Christmas specific greeting proposed by some relative or other as the first thing one should say upon meeting another person on Christmas morning; and, unless I'm getting my wires crossed - which I sort of hope might be the case - one responds to Merry Merry by saying Christmas Gift, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever and does little to increase the ambient seasonal jollity of the day so far as I'm able to tell. The person who came up with this greeted me with Merry Merry one year and more than anything I just felt embarrassed for her. It probably works better if you're five and have just formed a secret club of the kind which requires passwords.

Momom. Momom was my wife's grandmother, an obvious reduplication of Mom or mother serving to make a generational distinction. I always found the term, which was mostly informal and affectionate, a bit weird, and was told that it was just something my brother-in-law came out with one day. Although this may be true, I've now heard a number of Texans refer to grandparents as Momom and Dadad, so I guess it's actually a thing. Interestingly, my wife refers to her great grandmother as her great grandmother rather than Momomom, I suppose because it would eventually get ridiculous.

Pizza pizza. This is the call of a small cartoon Julius Ceasar who serves as mascot for the Little Caesar chain of pizza outlets. He's drawn as he would be had he escaped from a sixties Pink Panther cartoon. He carries a pike upon which is speared a slice of pizza, and he says the word pizza twice at the close of each advert in that voice we adopt when impersonating John Major or nerds. I guess it's supposed to be an earworm, a sort of audio meme, and it's almost certainly the inspiration for World Car Kia's mascot disaster; but, lacking the sort of explosive delivery which would suggest enthusiasm, it's just someone saying a word twice for no obvious reason. It perhaps doesn't help that I've never been tempted to try a Little Caesar pizza because they don't look massively appetising in the television commercial, and boasting about how cheap they are doesn't do the brand any favours.

Pop and dip, pop and dip. Because I can't be arsed to write it all out again, here's a direct lift from my facebook page about a year ago.

I'd like to open discussion regarding the current Popeyes' advertising campaign, expressed as two similarly themed but variant television commercials. The first features webcam footage of a woman who, so it is claimed, has been so moved by the quality of Popeyes' chicken that she's decided to sing about it. We then see the woman happily dipping a chicken nugget in a small pot of sauce of some description while saying pop and dip twice, presumably in reference to her actions. The second commercial shows a woman of possibly Polynesian ethnicity playing a ukulele while singing a couplet about how much she enjoys Popeyes' chicken. My objection is that the first woman, introduced as the author of a song, merely says pop and dip twice. My understanding of music theory is admittedly patchy, but saying something twice is not the same as singing a fucking song; while the woman in the second commercial is introduced as merely expressing her thoughts on Popeyes' chicken, thoughts which quite clearly take the form of an actual song with two lines, a time signature, a tune and so on and so forth. This shit keeps me awake at night.

Of course, pop and dip may be effectively considered a full sentence within the context of this list, and is therefore an example of idiocy rather than reduplication, but pəˈteɪtəʊ, pəˈtɑːtəʊ...

Ray Ray. I've never met the man. He's the nephew of a friend of my wife's aunt. His name is Rayfield, which sounds like a surname but isn't, and everyone refers to him as Ray Ray for reasons I will probably never understand. Should I ask about Ray, they know exactly who I mean and nevertheless refer to him as Ray Ray in the response. Recently I learned that Ray Ray has a son similarly named Ray, or possibly Ray Ray. I therefore fucking give up.

Yummy yummy snack snacks. My stepson habitually talks to himself - although this shouldn't be considered strange in and of itself - and this was what he said to himself one afternoon when looking for something to eat. He passed where I was working, heading down the hall towards the kitchen. I heard the pantry doors open and he then said, yummy yummy snack snacks, quite loudly. He was about thirteen years of age at the time. Even now, the memory of this incident causes me to frown so hard that I can carry pencils in the creases.

Zom-zoms. It's possibly unfair to dwell on vocal tics dating from when my stepson was more tightly wound and less verbally dextrous, but then life isn't fair and it's not like I made him say any of that shit. Back when he referred to cattle as cow-cows, and many years before he developed a taste for yummy yummy snack snacks, he had a thing about zombies. From what I can gather, the zombies he encountered were mostly in fairly innocuous video games or slightly edgy children's cartoons - more Phineas & Ferb than Night of the Living Dead. He was fascinated and yet terrified by the general concept. Stranger still was that he was genuinely star struck when meeting Charlie Adlard, artist of Image's Walking Dead comic book whom I've known since we were at college together, although I'm not sure he'd actually read an issue of the comic book; and yet even at that age - thirteen, maybe fourteen - he'd get pissy if any of us said the z-word, thus apparently reminding him of the source of his combined terror and fascination, and to whom he would indirectly refer as zom-zoms because apparently that defused some of the fear he felt regarding this thing which doesn't actually exist.

Terry & Dune

It was a warm summer morning at the dwelling of Terry and June. Sun shone in through the French windows overlooking the patio, illuminating the front room. June sat, comfortably reposed with her tea served in an ornate goblet, reading from her book which was a great leather bound volume of archaic appearance with the name of the scribe creeping across the cover in copper filigree, Viscount Jeffrey of House Archer. Just as she turned a page, a great wailing came from afar to assault her ears.

'Why oh why oh why…'

June looked up from her reading. 'What is it dear? I thought you would be happy this morning.'

Terry floated in, huffing, puffing and steering his bulk about the room in a red sweater with a golfing motif knitted across his generous belly. Here and there, tiny wisps of gas sputtered from junctures where his flesh had grown around the anti-gravity suspensor webbing which kept him aloft.

'I thought so too!' he spluttered, indignant.

'Well, whatever is the matter? Do you not like your book now that the postman has bought it?'

'My book!' Terry hovered red-faced by the window. 'I was really looking forward to learning all about the history of sweaters, jumpers and cardigans.'

'So what's the trouble this time, dear?'

'What's the trouble?' Terry blustered rhetorically. 'Look what they've sent me!'

June lent forward a little, peering through her spectacles as Terry held up a large book for her to see. The cover was a black and white photograph of an elderly military gentleman sporting a large Victorian-style moustache, medals arrayed across the chest of his heavily brocaded jacket. 'David Saul,' she read from the cover, 'The Life of Lord Cardigan.'

'See!' Terry spluttered. 'It's all about the Crimean war - not a solitary item of comforting knitwear within sight!'

'Oh dear.' June stifled a giggle. 'They must have got it mixed up with the one you wanted. What are you going to do?'

'I'm considering syphilis.'

'I mean about the book, silly! They've obviously sent you the wrong item.'

'Well, I suppose I'll have to nip down the post office and have it sent back.'

'In that case, there's a list of a couple of things we need for tonight, if you could pop into Tesco while you're there.'

Terry's brow darkened. 'Tonight?'

'You'd forget your own head if it weren't attached by a cluster of artificial bioflesh ligatures.' June rolled her eyes and chortled. 'You invited Mr. Johnson from the Banking Guild over for dinner, remember?'

'Oh - that's right. I did.' Terry's brow remained tenebrous as he passed over the coffee table like a smelly indoor thundercloud. 'Do you know, I really wished I hadn't.'

June tutted and spared her husband an indulgent smile. 'Well, if you will keep beating him to the final hole on the golf course…'

Groaning, Terry floated away towards the kitchen in search of the shopping list which he knew his wife would already have written out for him.

* * *

That evening, Terry was to be found floating up near the front room ceiling, peering from the window as the suns went down. He glanced to the clock on the wall - five minutes before seven - then back out across the garden. 'No sign of him yet. I do hope he isn't going to keep us waiting.'

Culinary sounds came from the kitchen, cutlery and plates arranged ready for dinner to be served. 'I'm sure he'll be here on time,' said June.

'I see the sandworms have been playing merry hell with my radishes again.' Terry sighed and vented a particularly expressive cloud of gas. 'Oh! Here we go. He's here!'

'Goodness!' June exclaimed, rushing in to finish setting the table.

Terry flipped a relay in his suit and the French windows drew slowly apart to admit their guest. Once they had reached their full extent, Mr. Johnson's vast mobile tank projected into the front room, with Mr. Johnson's huge mutated cranium just visible within the swirling orange mist. 'Good evening, Fletcher,' his voice boomed mysteriously. 'I do hope I'm on time.'

'Prompt as always, Mr. Johnson.'

'Please, we're not at the club now - call me Bernard.'

'Bernard, yes of course.' Terry tried and failed to conceal a nervous laugh. 'Please take the weight off er—' He gazed helplessly at the chair he'd just drawn back from the table, then at his guest before tossing the chair to one side. 'Please make yourself comfortable, Bernard. Dinner shall be served forthwith.'

'Hello, Mr. Johnson,' June beamed, dashing in from the kitchen with a couple of plates now piled high with food. 'It's so nice to meet you at last. Terry has told me so much about you.'

'Delighted.' Johnson's v-shaped oral flap twisted into something approximating a winning smile, providing one was familiar with the super-evolved physiognomy of a stage four Bank Manager. 'I am so looking forward to this.'

June zipped back and forth as Terry floated to his place at the other side of the table, and within moments they were ready to enjoy dinner.

'I do hope it's to your liking,' said June as she poured the wine. 'Terry and I don't often have rice, but I've tried my best.'

'Rice?' said Mr. Johnson ominously, his deep blue eyes opening and closing within the smoky depths of the tank.

'Yes, rice,' said Terry happily. 'You told me it was your favourite dish, so that's what we're having.'

'I said spice.'

'Oh dear,' said June, in preface to a further twenty-five minutes of similarly laboured misunderstandings, some of which were faintly amusing, if not on the scale proposed by the ubiquitous laugh track.

Terry had asked Mr. Johnson what was his favourite dish, but apparently he had misheard the answer because he had been concentrating on his golf!

You're welcome.

Cibolo

It's Marcie's birthday so we're going to Cibolo. Marcie is one of the women who turns up to paint rocks every Sunday as part of Bess's group, because my wife is now some sort of guru in the field of decorative rock painting. Bess doesn't know the woman very well, but some of the others will be there and it will be fun, possibly, so that's why we're going.

Cibolo is a small town just past Randolph Air Force Base - not actually San Antonio and we almost make open country before we get there, but it's not much of a distance. Marcie is celebrating her birthday at Ernie's Patio Bar so we're outside with a couple of food trucks and a live band setting up beneath a covered stage which probably used to be a barn. We meet Catherine, whom I've met before; then Fung Yui On, whose name I probably have wrong but I'm determined to make the effort. She's originally from China and is of short stature, or whatever the acceptable term happens to be this week. As we shake I am astonished by the size of her hands, which resemble those of a child, but she seems nice so I'm trying not to be a dick. Chris, Marcie's husband, tells me that he lived in Putney in London for a while. I tell him I vaguely know Putney, although I lived in the south-east, and that's more or less the end of that conversation.

I get myself a Modelo then have something from the Philippino food truck, mainly out of curiosity because I have no idea what people eat in the Philippines. It turns out they eat egg rolls and noodles, amongst other things, and the noodles are in particular pretty great.

I meet Marcie. She asks me to tell her about myself, about England, about where I'm from, about everything, so I guess it's going to be one of those conversations.

'You know Teletubbies,' I begin, reeling off the usual spiel whilst trying to keep it interesting for myself, but she has the twinkly smile of someone who may or may not be listening.

'What do you do?' she asks.

'I'm a writer,' I say, although I'm getting closer and closer to just making something up - I'm a taxidermist, or I work at the VD clinic.

'What do you write?' she asks, then tells me what she writes. It's something personal and it's for her therapist. There's a lot of metaphor. She scrolls through things on her smartphone and then says, 'I'm embarrassed now. It's very personal.'

'Okay,' I say, because actually I'm not massively interested.

'Can you do an American accent?'

'Not when I'm asked. I get too self-conscious.'

Cupcakes are passed around and evening descends. I'm introduced to more people whose names I will have forgotten in minutes. I don't like having the conversation about being from England over and over, given that I've now lived in Texas for a decade, and I worry that I'm beginning to sound like the annoying animated Cockney ghecko from the Geico television commercials.

Chuck Shaw and his band take to the stage and play driving, bluesy country and western. It's sort of uptempo but with an element of pathos, and it's played with heart and confidence. You can tell they're having a great time. It's the sort of music which, even if it's not your thing, you can't help but appreciate it; and is as such a whole different ball game from the shitty, slick country and autotune we had piped at us in the Longhorn Steakhouse on Thursday evening.

It's getting cold, so Bess goes to the car to raid the Goodwill bag she's been carrying in the trunk, never quite getting around to dropping it off. I get a shirt to go over the shirt I'm wearing, and it does the job. I stand at a distance from the group because it feels less awkward. I've never been the most sociable individual and I don't really have much to say to anyone.

Chuck's forth or fifth song features a deafening solo from a passing train which renders the music inaudible for the best part of a minute. They keep playing and you can tell they find the interruption hilarious. Applause greets the end of each song, although there aren't actually many of us here - probably less than ten who aren't here for Marcie's birthday. Marcie's young daughters run around yelping, doing sarcastic impersonations of enthusiastic young men at rock concerts making the dude noise. It actually seems kind of rude.

Eventually we leave.

I feel awkward, but it turns out that Fung Yui On is herself a woman of very few words, and that my impression of Marcie is about the same as everyone else's impression of Marcie; not that it matters because we're heading home. I didn't exactly have fun, but I didn't not have fun, so it was okay.

Arse Camera Revisited

It's that time of year again, the time when a member of the medical profession is paid to shove a camera up my bum. I was on a five-year schedule until the aforementioned medical person found a polyp which he described as almost cancer. He took it out, and apparently in the nick of time, then proposed I switch to a yearly colonoscopy schedule, so here we are.

I've been dreading it - not the insertion of a Kodak Instamatic on a spring, nor even what horrors it might reveal because they're not yet sufficiently real as to induce concern. I'm dreading the preparatory day of fasting and shitting myself, and I'm dreading it because Suprep®, the medication by which I am to cleanse my bowels in readiness, is the worst thing I've ever had in my mouth. The prescription comprises two six fluid ounce bottles of the stuff and costs eighty fucking five fucking dollars even with medical insurance chipping in. You dilute the contents of each bottle with a further ten fluid ounces of water to make a pint of the stuff, then down it in one, or at least as quickly as possible. It's something involving magnesium but the manufacturers have attempted to render it more palatable by flavouring it to resemble Dr. Pepper, a drink which tastes like cheap perfume and reflects nothing found in the natural world, hence its being named after a scientist. I've never liked Dr. Pepper and now, thanks to Suprep®, the smell alone makes me gag; and having paid eighty fucking five fucking dollars for this vile shit, then spent an entire day squirting rusty water into the lavatory bowl, I'm expected to complete this course of treatment by making up a second pint of the stuff with the other bottle.

This time, once I was through to the doctor's office and had made an appointment, I begged for some alternative to Suprep®, and begged at such length that the technician who answered the phone actually seemed to find it a bit weird.

'Okay,' he said. 'You have a couple of other options. There's a similar drink with a different flavour, or a course of tablets. I'll put you down for both, then we'll see which one gets sent to your pharmacy. It all depends on what the medical insurance will pay for.'

Next day, I dropped in at my pharmacy.

'Here you go,' said the young man handing me a paper bag. 'That'll be eighty-five dollars.'

'Eighty fucking five fucking dollars!' I screeched like a figure in an H.M. Bateman cartoon, unable to contain my horror whilst knowing it was hardly the fault of the guy behind the counter. I called my wife to make sure I had the funds, then popped my debit card into the slot. 'You know,' I told the pharmacist, 'I wouldn't mind but I'm sure I could get pretty much the same result eating an out of date curry for about a tenth of the price.'

He seemed sympathetic, amused even.

I got the bag home and discovered it to be something called Clenpiq® which seemed suspiciously similar to Suprep®, thematically speaking, and the promise of it being cranberry flavour wasn't massively reassuring.

'Next time, we'll get you the tablets,' my wife said from the other room. 'I don't care what it costs.'

Clenpiq® wasn't great, but the not-quite six fluid ounce bottles could be downed in one without my being required to turn each into a pint, and the taste wasn't quite so appalling, and was significantly easier to wash away with black coffee and ginger ale.

Monday comes and I remember that the technician to whom I spoke asked that I call back once I've picked up my prescription to let the surgery know which I've been sent. This is so I can sign consent forms or something of the sort, which sounds ominously like it may lead to a patient portal, one of those ingenious online solutions to having an actual human being do the job, and for which I will be expected to create my forty-millionth new password this year.

I call and it's a recorded message.

All of our representatives are busy right now…

I am on hold and in a queue. Weirdly, the queue comprises zero calls awaiting the attention of one of their many representative - according to the automated voice. I'm not sure if this means that I'm first in line, or that there are literally no calls awaiting the attention of a representative because I don't exist. Minutes of low resolution corporate jazz pass before the message repeats. Now there are three people in the queue, then a few more minutes and we're back to zero. It's difficult to work out what's going on, and I give up after thirty minutes.

Next morning I call at 9AM determined to beat the rush.

The voice tells me, 'our office hours are 9AM to—'

'It's nine right now,' I protest.

'No it isn't. It's 8.57AM.'

'Are you seriously telling me to call back in three minutes time?'

'There's no-one here,' she says. 'Not even me,' she could have added without significantly elevating the surrealism of the scenario.

Three minutes later, I call back. The phone is answered by a person with an impenetrable accent, which feels sort of deliberate. I try to tell him that I am simply attempting to pass on a message, a message of just one single brand name comprising seven letters; but he insists I call back later for reasons which aren't entirely clear.

Later, I spend another thirty minutes listening to low resolution corporate jazz whilst pondering over whether or not I really exist before I get through to a human being who is able to take my call.

Next day I fill in the online consent forms.

The day after, I receive umpteen text messages and two phone calls reminding me of my appointment. One of them is a courtesy call regarding insurance details which are wasted on me because I don't understand any of it, and the other is a technician asking whether I received Clenpiq® or whether they sent me the tablet form. I tell him the former, and that I've already spent an hour on hold trying to relay this information to his office, apparently without success. I don't suppose they received the multiple text messages I sent suggesting that they employ someone to answer the fucking phone either.

Diarrhoea day arrives and is relatively painless, just boring because I can't eat anything; then the day of my colonoscopy - early morning which makes a nice change from last time.

I take a book with me. It's actually one of my own books which I'm in the middle of proofreading prior to vain attempts to fool strangers into buying the thing. This time last year I spent a couple of hours hooked up to an IV drip waiting for the doctor, so I figured I should make use of the time. The technicians are amused that I'm reading my own book. One of them asks what a book is in jocular fashion. They seem like a decent bunch of people.

'Is this morphine?' I ask as the general anaesthetic is added to my drip. Morphine is the one I've heard of, even though I'm not actually sure it can be used as an anaesthetic. It turns out to be Propofol, which I've never heard of. I feel suddenly warm and dark, as though I'm within a cave looking out.

'I think it's working,' I say.

I wake. It's been over for ten minutes. About half an hour has passed and my slumber has been deep and powerful. They removed one tiny polyp, nothing to worry about and I'm probably good to leave it for another five years, by which time I'll be in my sixties. I could have lived without a full hour of low resolution corporate jazz, but otherwise I came through and it feels great.

Our Friend, the Couch Panther

 

I don't know if it's ever either fair or meaningful to say you have a favourite cat in cases such as our own, where my wife and myself have lost track but suspect the feline head count is somewhere north of fourteen; but Bean was my favourite cat, at least for a while. He was one of four kittens we rescued from a local crazy person back around June, 2019. Mark, who is generally a lovely guy despite his brain occasionally sending him down some very strange avenues, feeds the feral cats which turn up in his garden and doesn't get them fixed; so kittens come into being in large quantities and we rescue them on the grounds that, as Mark will himself admit during his more lucid moments, his cat husbandry is cranky and intermittent. We had noticed a fresh bunch of kittens springing around his yard a couple of times, mumbled the usual concerns to each other, and then Bess came home with all four of them cradled under one arm like hastily gathered fruit.

Junior gave them names almost immediately, but nothing too headachey for a change, nothing from a console game or Disney. Sylvester was the little black and white tuxedo cat whom we initially thought was a boy; Muffin was the traditional female tabby; Bear, so named because the kid thought she looked like a tiny bear, was all black and female; and Bean was the runt of the litter, an all black male about half the size of the other three - named for his being of leguminous volume in comparison to the rest. Bess was worried he wouldn't make it due to being so improbably small, but I'd seen him in action at dinner time and had a feeling he would be fine. At first I plopped a single tin of cat food in a foil tray and let them all go at it. Bean's technique was to dive right in, roll around in the food pushing the others away, then combine the subsequent clean up with dinner, eating until he became spherical, resembling a small black tennis ball with legs.

They grew and we found homes for Sylvester and Bear, but kept Muffin and Bean because we couldn't stand the thought of parting with them, and two more wasn't going to make a whole lot of difference. Both of them bonded to me to an unusual degree, possibly due to my being the human who was usually around as Bess didn't switch to working from home until 2020.

Bean climbed onto me each evening as I slouched back in the couch, digesting my dinner. He'd make himself home on my chest, purring away and occasionally licking my nose. He followed me everywhere and was my little buddy. Strangest of all, or so it seemed at the time, was his smell. Bess has told me about the smell of a new baby, how it's positively intoxicating and pushes all the motherhood buttons, or was in her case when she had Junior; and finally I felt I understood because Bean smelled amazing - a scent to his soft, silky black fur which remains difficult to describe but is maybe something in the vicinity of fresh cut hay.

I began to notice something which hadn't quite occurred to me before, or at least to piece together parts of a pattern I was only just beginning to recognise as such: there really is something special about black cats. Of course, they historically have a reputation associated with the occult and are typecast as the familiars of witches and wizards, and I began to wonder if there might be a reason for this, at least beyond the hysteria and general misogyny.

Bean had certainly cast a spell on me by some definition - not least by the release of oxytocin as I stroked his improbably silky fur to induce purring, and those eyes looking out from the solid black seemed to know something. He seemed hypnotic somehow.

Bean wasn't even the first.

Our first and currently oldest black cat is Nibbler, whom the boy found as a kitten hiding under a car back in 2012. Since then there has been Jack - who was black and fluffy and therefore amazing - Enoch, Tony, and Jessie - all ferals from our yard who eventually - presumably and hopefully - found other homes, or just moved on; and also Ava, another alumni from Mark's garden who still hangs around but rarely comes inside the house.

Nibbler was the first cat I've seen play like a dog, fetching something thrown for him, bringing it back and dropping it in your lap for another throw. Nibbler also made himself the feline equivalent of a teddy by pulling the stuffing out of the sofa and forming it into a lump which he then slept with in his paws.

Ollie, our latest black cat also fetches things and has that amazing scent to his fur, and has now learned how to open the kitchen door so he can go out into the garden. This is a door held shut by a heavy spring when unlocked, so heavy that one has to physically shoulder it open when carrying a laundry basket. Ollie - who is presently about three or four months old and is still small, has learned to not only push the door open, but he's worked out how to get back in again. We still haven't witnessed him doing it, and presume he must hook a paw under the door and pull, which seems like it really should be impossible given his size and the strength of the spring, but it happens nevertheless.

This isn't to suggest that any of our other cats are necessarily idiots, but it really seems that whatever gene is associated with black fur brings other features to the party - which I state as a general observation rather than an actual scientific thesis. Perhaps we are witness to the birth of a genuine feline master race.

We lost Bean around July 2020, the same time as two other cats - Squeak and Holly went missing. We still don't know what happened. We have at least one shitty cat-hating neighbour, but he really doesn't seem like he would have the balls to do anything horrible. Holly definitely had a second home somewhere and was in the habit of staying away for days at a time; and another kitten had just turned up, which always puts everyone's noses out of joint, so it could be an unfortunate coincidence, strange though it may seem, and in the absence of any actual information whatsoever, that's how we've thought of it because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about. Needless to say, eighteen months later I still miss Bean and I think about him every day, but there's probably not much point in beating myself up over what may or may not have become of him.

We still have Muffin and the others, and Ollie is doing very well at carrying the traditions of his people forward.

Three Birthdays

 

Debbie is our neighbour, or at least she's the ex-wife of our neighbour. Our neighbour is a lovely guy, tall and dark with the haunted expression of an amiable ghost. He talks and moves real slow, as we say in Texas, but he never says anything when there's nothing to be said so my wife and I like him a lot. We're not entirely sure how Debbie managed to move back into his house, but assume he never intended it to be any sort of permanent arrangement given that their relationship seems to be only vaguely platonic, bonded by nothing more than previous association.

Debbie is small with raven dark hair suggesting some distant familial relation to Johnny Cash, which I state with authority as my wife's stepmother was the daughter of Johnny's cousin. Many of her family members have that same raven hair and hawk-like appearance, and Debbie is originally from Tennessee, so who knows?

I tend to think of Debbie as rootin' tootin', which shouldn't be taken as an insult so much as an indication of her being a certain type - white, working class and not averse to country music, although she recently revealed a love of techno, which was confusing. She's chatty and chirpy with a disconcerting habit of delivering terrible news with a big smile.

'You two going out somewhere nice?' she chirps. 'You're such a cute couple. It makes me happy just to see the two of you. The doctor told my pappy he has cancer and now he has to have his arms and legs amputated. Y'all have a blessed day now, you hear.'

At other times we'll hear all about her plans. She has a job interview. She's going to have money and she'll be able to afford an apartment and everything's going to be just fine once she's moved out, away from that man; and always the interview falls through, or they take against her for no reason, or she realises she ain't gonna be able to get there if she takes the job, but the good news is she just bought her some boots at that fancy place. They were seventy dollars. Those boots usually cost more than a hun'erd.

The job interviews come along, often two or three a week, and there's always a reason why she can't take the job. We get the impression that she's just telling herself she wants to get some money and move out, but it's not really our business.

It's Debbie's birthday and she says she wants to take us out to dinner to celebrate. Bess pays because she knows Debbie is on welfare and can't really afford it so it would feel awkward. We go to Las Palapas, which is actually pretty great, much better than I remember. Debbie picks at her food because she doesn't eat much, drinks margaritas, and tells us about her life and her family. She's interesting and a lot of fun, and as with her ex-husband, the impression is formed that it would be difficult to dislike her.

Weeks pass and it's our birthday. Bess and I were born on the same day of different years. Debbie again proposes to take us out for dinner, to return the favour; but Bess insists on paying because it doesn't seem fair otherwise, that elusive first paycheck still having failed to appear for some reason. We go to Charlie Brown's because it's a bar which serves good food and we expect Debbie will like it and feel at home, which she does. We feel we owe it to her. Every other week she's at the door with brisket or cookies or carne asada or the best jalapeno poppers I've ever eaten, because she made too much and figured we might like some, that being the neighbourly thing and all. We sort of wish she wouldn't. It's not that the food isn't appreciated, but we're both on diets - nothing absurdly stringent except that neither of us eat during the day, usually fasting until the early evening; and the one surefire way of knowing when a person is on any kind of diet is to take a look at the line of friends and relatives stretching all along the block and around the corner, all waiting their turn to offload an extra cake they made or a tray of deviled eggs for which there was no room in their own fridges.

We drive to Charlie Brown's and Debbie pipes up about illegal immigrants and how sleepy Joe Biden just ain't doing nothing, which isn't a good start. I don't mind people having political beliefs which differ from my own providing they're not simply downloaded verbatim from Fox News. I have friends who voted for the orange billionaire, and for the most part they've had reasons I've understood even if I don't agree with them, so it makes me uncomfortable when someone threatens to unveil contentious opinions or biases.

We eat and we drink, and somehow the evening lasts much longer than either Bess or myself intended. Debbie nurses a margarita for the best part of an hour, both of us watching the glass like it's a steel mill clock on Friday afternoon. She orders another and the evening extends.

'This is fun,' she chirps. 'I'm having a real blast here. We need to do this more often. Are y'alls having fun?'

'Yes,' we tell her each time she asks the question.

'I got you a cake,' she tells us as we drive home.

'You shouldn't have,' we say, both smiling the smile that hurts.

It takes ten minutes to get the candles to stand up straight, then lit, and the cake is huge and sweet, so sweet it makes our teeth itch. We keep smiling.

Once she finally goes home, the rest of the cake is shared with the raccoons in our yard.

We're not doing that ever again, we tell ourselves, and the sense of guilt feels nevertheless kind of good, even liberating.

Lost Masterpieces

The title is ironic, obviously. As tireless archivist of my own work, I've retained a reasonably thorough recall of all my creative dead ends - undertakings which never really came to anything, or which at least stumbled before achieving whatever fruition I had intended for them. Sometimes I simply ran out of steam, but more often than not I recognised the enterprise as bollocks before I'd fully got into the swing of it; or sometimes it was just something I had to get out of my system before moving on. Here, mostly from memory are projects - for want of a less twatty word - which deflated in the manner of a premature souffle before I could get them out of the oven. These are works on which I spent sufficient time and energy as to forge a memory of my labours, as distinct from anything less intensive such as doodles on the back of a phone book whilst enjoying the Post Office dial-a-disc service. The best that can be said of any of them is that they made sense at the time, so there are no lost masterpieces here. If Kevin J. Anderson is reading and feels inclined to finish off any of this shit after I'm dead, he's welcome to give it his best shot.

The Burps (1975, possibly earlier)
This was my first attempt at drawing a strip cartoon series, and I seem to remember churning out hundreds of these, each one a single A4 landscape format page rendered in whatever biro I happened to have to hand. The Burps were spherical aliens with antennae resembling a stove pipe topped with a conical rain cap growing from the tops of their heads, which were also their bodies, much like the Mister Men. Each strip ended with one of them doing a massive burp, possibly emphasised with green felt tip. I don't think there was ever much of a story and I remember my granddad leafing through the stack then commenting, 'there seems to be rather a lot of burping in these.' I think he approved of my productivity but was a bit disappointed by the repetition of the same punchline. To my way of thinking, the repetition was what made it hilarious.

Tiny the World's Biggest Hitler (1976 or thereabouts)
I'm not even sure what I was aiming for here, but it was my own one off magazine, or would have been, created mostly using material snipped from either the Sunday Times colour supplement or back issues of the Topper and inspired most likely by either The Goodies File or Spike Milligan. Of what little I can remember, the oddest detail was my apparently having decided to make my own artisan paper by coating A3 pages cut from a scrapbook with glossy brown parcel tape onto which I glued my vandalised images and text. I wrote the text on regular writing paper, and then cut out each individual line and typeset it with Uhu, so with hindsight it was all a bit Jamie Reid. I'm not sure how many pages I managed, but the only one I remember was Tiny the World's Biggest Hitler, which was Tiny the World's Biggest Dog from the Topper rendered more sinister by the addition of a toothbrush moustache, swastikas, and cruelly slanting eyebrows to make him look angry. I don't know if I ever gave the enterprise a formal title, and I was very much a fan of Tiny the World's Biggest Dog so maybe I couldn't take the guilt.

Robot funnies (late seventies)
I drew eight or nine of these and although I don't recall a specific overall title for the series, I had some vague idea about submitting  them for publication and perhaps even syndication. They were mostly two or three panels drawn on landscape format A4 with plenty crosshatching inspired by Paul Sample, usually some laboured gag involving robots - two robots regarding a petrol pump with concern, one saying I think he's trying to commit suicide in reference to the gun-like nozzle seated against what our boys have apparently mistaken for the pump's forehead. This particular joke, such as it is, was shamelessly recycled from the funnies pages of Doctor Who and Star Trek annuals, as were most of the others. I had some vague idea of producing definitive versions of the gags in question. A couple of them made it onto the walls of the school art room, which was thankfully about as far as it went.

Poo Corner (1983)
I'd been reading Sounds music paper for a couple of years, and particularly enjoying Savage Pencil's Rock 'n' Roll Zoo strip. Alan Moore's The Stars My Degradation - which was also a significant influence - had come to an end so I figured there was an opening. I drew about ten episodes of Poo Corner, each some self-contained tableau taking a wry sideways glance at the lighter side of either the music industry or being a teenager - only one of which I had any experience, resulting in what was more or less a recycling of Rock 'n' Roll Zoo combined with stuff other kids had said at school which seemed hilarious. I sent them in to Sounds explaining that I was ready to start work immediately but the reply must have been lost in the post or something.

 

Twenty Pages (1985)
Once I realised that I would probably never be able to afford to have anything printed, I resigned myself to the photocopy as the principal medium for my visual material; and because the double-sided photocopy was likewise beyond my means, I concluded that single-sided copies loose in a plastic wallet - actually the protective PVC covers which could be bought for 7" singles from WHSmith - seemed reasonably artistic in comparison to single sided sheets stapled down one edge like some shitty school magazine. Because my visual material was, at the time, mostly news items about local murders cut from newspapers and therefore underwhelming, I enlisted contributions from fanzine, tape and weirdy music people of my postal acquaintance - just a page the same size as a 7" single, artwork, text, whatever you like, I told them. Andy of the Apostles wrote out an imaginary interview with a generic punk rocker, which was quite entertaining, and a couple of the collages were quite good, but by the time I had twelve of the proposed Twenty Pages I realised that the thing was a bit of a waste of time on the grounds that I probably wouldn't have bought it had someone else been trying to flog it to me for the price of a stamped addressed envelope.

 

Newspaper strips
There were several attempts, mostly the same format as Peanuts, George & Lynne, Fred Basset and the rest. Having obtained my fine art degree in 1987, I soon came to the realisation that I was more or less unemployable and that strip cartoons seemed to be about the only working string to my bow in terms of making money off anything - a realisation informed by the fact that most newspaper strips were bollocks while everything I drew was hilarious. The first was a series of unrelated comically surreal vignettes abandoned before I could come up with a title (1986); then Mr. Temper (1987), a sharply-dressed curmudgeon who went about beheading anyone he didn't like the look of while politely explaining the essence of their supposed transgressions; and The Rock (1988) which was me thinking, well, if Alan Moore can get paid for Maxwell the Magic Cat then I'm quids in, and which may as well have been the Mister Men but with more sarcasm - a formula which apparently failed to make much of an impression with the editor of the Chatham Standard.

 

Avanti! (1987)
This would have been the third and final weirdy music cassette compilation from my mail order tape label, Do Easy. While the first two had failed to set the world on fire, they had featured some genuinely great music from the likes of We Be Echo, Irsol, the Unkommuniti and others, and had sold fairly well by my standards - somewhere in the region of thirty or forty copies each, often to people I didn't actually know. I'd already been sent new material by We Be Echo, Virrullex, ESP Kinetic, and Man's Hate, and it could have been great but I simply ran out of steam, enthusiasm, and disposable income; which is probably for the best given my edgily deciding to name the thing after the newspaper which first got Mussolini up and running.

 

The Dovers comic book (1987)
This was probably my first attempt at drawing a vaguely coherent comic strip, or at least one which was only 75% crap jokes strung along an improbable narrative. Inspired by an unlikely combination of X-Men comics, Viz, and the work of Robert Crumb, it was a massively fictionalised account of the adventures of my band, the Dovers, featuring Carl Glover and myself, wherein Chris, the  drummer of our previous line up, is possessed by forces from beyond the dawn of time, our manager is former US President Richard Nixon - now living in Lewisham - and I find myself recruited by Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. I drew three and a bit issues of the thing - amounting to 72 pages - assuming that I would find an affordable means of getting it all printed and that it would be worth the effort. I eventually realised that I wouldn't and it probably wasn't, but it kept me busy for about six months.

 

Berserker (1987)
I had begun to tire of my own crap jokes, as exemplified by the proposed Dovers comic books, and recognised them as a deflection from the fear that any more serious undertaking to which I might apply myself would probably be drivel; so I decided to grasp the thistle and produce a really, really, really grown up real world superhero but not actually a superhero comic strip like all that Alan Moore stuff. The main character is some dude who gets diddled in a flying saucer and subsequently develops amazing psychic powers, influenced by X-Men comics, cranky UFO literature, and the work of Gary Numan. After fourteen or so pages of heavy cross-hatching, wonky figures with stern expressions, and ludicrously portentous dialogue, I realised there was still some room for improvement, possibly not even a room so much as an aircraft hanger.

 

Small World (1988)
Unwilling to piss away all the frowning and clenching I'd squeezed into Berserker, I revised the thing and came up with this when Charlie Adlard asked me if I'd written anything he could draw so that the two of us might make our first attempts at breaking into the comic book industry. Small World was the same thing but marginally better written - albeit not by much - and certainly better drawn, but it still wasn't enough. The slight improvement in quality only served to expose the fact that I didn't actually have a story, and oblique references to Richard S. Shaver weren't much of a substitute. We took the thing to Martin Skidmore of Trident Comics who correctly pointed out that I didn't actually have a story, although he was very polite about it. Charlie Adlard subsequently went on to international megastardom as artist of Image's Walking Dead comic, the rewards of which mean he now lives in his own hollowed out volcano with ICBMs and a fleet of flying Rolls Royces. When asked about the early days of his career, Small World never seems to warrant a mention - which is frankly understandable.

 

Three Empty Chairs (1991)
I'm still a little vexed that this one never came to anything. My friend John Jasper kept an exercise book of short stage plays which he wrote entirely for his own amusement, despite which they were fucking brilliant, slightly harrowing and genuinely hilarious - a combination of Alan Bennett, Samuel Beckett and Derek & Clive pushed to an uncomfortable extreme. One of the greatest was set entirely in the hallway of a council flat and involved two characters having an argument over a packet of custard creams with one side of the argument shouted entirely through the letterbox because the other guy refuses to open the door. I was still to blossom into the world's greatest comic artist in 1991, but had developed a sufficiently capable sense of realism for the adaption of John's Three Empty Chairs into strip format, partially on the grounds that he clearly wasn't going to do anything with his book of plays. I still believe I did a reasonable job, and showed him the first thirteen pages hoping he would be pleased, or at least somehow flattered. This is amazing, he told me to my face, then later told my friend Carl that he was massively pissed off by my having decided to illustrate his work. I had photocopied the entire book of his plays, and later lent the stack to a friend with stage connections who began to murmur about actually getting one of the things performed in front of an audience, but that also made John angry, so bollocks then.

 

Tract 002 (1995)
I'd started a religious cult based around the worship of Ringo Starr. We had about twenty members, all carrying nicely laminated membership cards. Tract 001, the first official communication of thee Church ov RINGO looked decent and seemed to have gone down well with everyone who read it, particularly existing members of the Church of the SubGenius - and I'd had about three-hundred printed. The second issue was coming together with contributions from people besides just myself and the other guy, when the other guy went into the sort of creative overdrive that results from quality control going out the window. The whole idea had been something which made us laugh because it appeared to take itself far too seriously in its obsession with the Beatles' former drummer, and one of Ringo's songs was playing in an episode of Pobol Y Cwm last month and here are seven VHS tapes of all the episodes broadcast since July tee hee hee seemed to be missing at least some of the point, and this was the general spirit of the barrage of Ringo crap the other guy took to sending me on a nearly weekly basis - jiffy bags bulging with ephemera found in charity shops and page after page of stuff printed off the internet. The final straw was the print out of a full length Robert E. Howard novel wherein our man had used his find and replace function to substitute every mention of Conan the Barbarian with Ringo. It really sucked all of the fun out of the enterprise, which had started off as something fairly light and silly. So I gave up and turned my back on the thing because I could no longer stand to think about it. Annoyingly, one of the other contributions for the second issue that never happened had been a highly entertaining article by Nigel of Nocturnal Emissions about depictions of Ringo found in the early neolithic carvings of Britain - complete with illustrations - so I felt quite bad about that. There always has to be one who spoils it for everyone else.

 

 

Grudge Bunny (1996)
Partially as a result of the genius who magically transformed a Robert E. Howard novel about Conan the Barbarian into one about the guy who played drums on all those Beatles albums, 1996 was probably the most embittered year of my life. The aforementioned genius who bombarded me with jiffy bags bulging with ephemera was simultaneously in correspondence with a million other fanzine or otherwise countercultural types and therefore ended up with a ton of DIY tapes and photocopied missives which he didn't want, or couldn't be bothered to keep, and he seemingly sent most of them my way just in case there was anything of interest. Occasionally there was something good, but most of it was pure shite which left me profoundly depressed about the state of the DIY counterculture; and whilst I nevertheless appreciated the freebies, it sometimes became a real chore just wading through it all. One of the good things, however, was Outlaw Trainspotter, an A5 zine about trainspotting. Regardless of the subject, it remains one of the funniest, and most gleefully acerbic fanzines I've ever read. I couldn't even tell whether it was taking the piss or not, although I heard a rumour that it was actually the work of the late Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs, so probably the former. Anyway, Outlaw Trainspotter combined with the weapons grade sarcasm of David Stubbs' wonderful Mr. Agreeable column in Melody Maker brought me to the realisation that it might be fun to do a fanzine dedicated to how much I hated almost everything else that was happening in 1996. I slapped Grudge Bunny together as quickly as possible so as to preserve the negative energy with paper, scissors, glue, typewriter, scrawled ink, and swearing, taking delight in ripping apart substandard fanzines, indie comics, tapes, and bands who needn't have bothered, and then ran out of steam after eight pages. It can be a lot of fun spitting righteous truths about creative endeavours which actually aren't much good, but becomes quickly exhausting, then even a bit depressing after a while.

 

Uuuuugh! (2002)
I had been obssessed with Doctor Who when I was a kid, then drifted away by the time I discovered fags, booze, and sexual intercourse. I rediscovered it in the nineties when my friend Andrew gave me a VHS copy of Terror of the Autons for my birthday. Being well disposed towards culty things, I discovered that the series had continued in novel form by the agency of Virgin publishing and thus was my enthusiasm reignited. I was surprised to learn that the show still had a substantial following of like-minded shut-ins despite having been off the air for nearly a decade, and so I came into contact with fandom. Because the worst aspect of anything is usually its stupid fucking fans, I began to feel like someone really needed to take the piss out of the whole thing and so Uuuuugh! was born, named after the noise made by a slow moving monster as portrayed by a guy in a rubber suit. Uuuuugh! was put together on a fancy computer, the very same one by which Ed Pinsent produced the early issues of Sound Projector. He'd upgraded and sold me his old one, so Uuuuugh! also served as a means of putting the machine through its paces. I churned out twenty-four pages of sarcastic material amounting to a conflation of Charlie Brooker and Viz comic, then realised that the only people who would get the jokes would most likely be the same people who actually wouldn't find them even remotely funny; so that was thankfully the end of that.