Ice Age

The kid is staying with his father. It's the first weekend we get to ourselves in what feels like ages and so we decide to go somewhere just because we can. We drive to Fredericksburg which is a little over seventy miles north of San Antonio. Cold weather is on the way but we haven't felt it so much in the city, so we're curious about how it may have affected the surrounding counties. We drive north, then at some point just past the town of Comfort we notice that the landscape has changed. We left San Antonio driving cautiously, just like everyone else because the roads are icy. Now we're the only people left on what is ordinarily a relatively busy highway, and everything is either white or grey. I suddenly remember reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Fredericksburg itself is stranger still. The temperatures have dipped to around ten degrees below zero during the night and everything has frozen, I guess mostly with moisture drawn from the air. Each blade of grass, each leaf, each individual twig is encased in a sleeve of transparent glass of about a half centimetre thickness. There isn't really any snow, nor even anything you could call frost, just this slightly sinister coating of ice everywhere you look. It's not like anything I've ever seen, and having lived in a much colder part of the world for the first forty-five years of my life, I assumed I pretty much knew all there was to know about ice and snow. We last five minutes on the streets of Fredericksburg. It's too cold, hardly anywhere is open, and the sidewalk planters full of doomed succulents embedded in blocks of knobbly ice are depressing; so we get in the car and drive home.

We've been having trouble with the snow guard under the car - a large metal panel preventing snow and ice getting up into the underside of our Honda Civic. A speed bump dislodged it a few months back, bringing it down to scrape loudly against the road surface when in motion. The car is so low to the ground that we can't get under to do anything about the rear edge of the sheet still being bolted to the chassis. My wife took the car to a garage where they bolted the trailing edge back up. Bess had actually asked them to remove the thing entirely, and sure enough it dropped back down again about a month later; then seemed to right itself, or snap off, or something.

Now, on the way back to San Antonio, just as we pass through Comfort, a sudden, deafening and terrifying racket starts up which suggests we're about to crash, or that the entire front end of the car has fallen away and is being ground into the asphalt by our forward motion. We pull to the side of the highway, amazed to be alive, and an inspection reveals it's the fucking snow guard again - hanging down and forward, angle-grinding itself into oblivion yet still somehow attached so we can neither fix the thing, shove it back up, nor yank it off.

We drive on with forty or fifty miles ahead of us. We'll stop if we see a garage but nowhere is open due to the weather conditions. Our snow guard must surely be one of the most deeply ironic features ever to come with a car sold to someone living in San Antonio, Texas. We drive slowly and our journey is accompanied by loud industrial music playing beneath the car for most of the journey - a constant cement mixer grind combined with distant squeals and screeches lasting about forty minutes until the snow guard breaks off, or feels better, or whatever other mystifying reason accounts for its sudden silence. The noise was such that, had I a means of recording it, I would have done so. I could have named it after the work of some racist Japanese author and released it on Bandcamp with a photograph of dead leaves for the cover.

It snows on Sunday and the temperature plummets to something like twenty below, specifically 9° Fahrenheit. I'm not convinced I've ever existed at 9° Fahrenheit. We get about three inches of snow. I've covered the vulnerable plants in the garden but - let's face it - they're probably fucked at these temperatures. The water bowl I leave outside under the porch for the cats is a solid block of ice and that's sheltered, so a bit of cloth probably isn't going to save the Chrysanthemum or Esperanza at the other end of the garden. More worrying is our bewilderingly crappy hot water pipe which winds its way out of the garage wall, around the flower beds, then into the house at the other side like a plumbing afterthought. About half of its length is beneath the patio but the rest is exposed, presumably because frost isn't a problem in Texas.

We have thirteen cats, although two of them aren't really ours and won't come in the house even when invited. Of the other eleven, usually more than half of them spend the night outside doing cat stuff, but we have all of them inside on Sunday evening. The three least likely to start jumping up and down on either of us at 3AM get to stay in our bedroom, and the others have the rest of the house.

Miraculously, Monday morning comes and there are no lakes of protest urine or strategically misplaced turds to greet us as we rise. Also, there's no hot water, although the cold seems to be coming through fine. I spend an hour trying to defrost the pipe first using a tiny kitchen blow torch, then boiling water, and my wife later has a go with a hairdryer on an extension chord, but to no avail. We've also lost internet access, telephone, and television. We have power, although the electric company wants us to use as little as possible because a lot of the city is blacking out. It feels a little like the end of civilisation.

I go out around noon in five layers of clothing and wellington boots, but HEB, the local supermarket is closed as are all the other stores on Austin Highway. I need cat food. We have several sacks of the dry stuff, but we'll have a lot of deeply unhappy cats if I try to fob them off with that first thing in the morning. I trudge gradually up the Austin Highway. There are no vehicles on the road, and Walmart is also closed. I keep going, all the while bitterly reflecting on all those useless arseholes who drive massive trucks quite specifically designed for conditions such as these, most likely presently stuck back at the mansion house weeping over some game involving a bouncy ball having been snowed off.

Amazingly, Target is open. They're expensive and their selection of human food is oddly crappy and conspicuously lacking in certain areas, but they have cat food. I usually buy whatever I'm going to cook for Bess and myself during my daily trip to the store, but we probably have enough stocked up as to allow for some improvisation. The queue in Target is about two-hundred yards long snaking around the store, allowing for social distancing measures. I stand behind a guy who has apparently braved the apocalyptic freeze to buy a miniature barbecue grill. Somewhere behind I can hear some Alamo Heights Barbie doll whining, ohmagerd I can't believe they closed everywheyar. Maybe she lives in Target and hasn't actually been outside today. Maybe she doesn't understand what snow is.

It's still cold on Tuesday and we're still without hot water. We have a huge ten gallon stainless steel pot designed for cooking whole turkeys - although neither Bess nor I have any idea why we have it or where it came from - which we now use to boil water. It takes a while, but if we fill it about half full and work in shifts with additional top-up water boiled in smaller pots and pans at the same time, it takes about two hours to get a hot bath going. It feels like civilisation is hanging on, and Logan calls by in the afternoon, bringing us a huge bottle of clean water. He's heard that the water supply may go altogether so he's just trying to be a good neighbour. The supermarket is still closed. I spend the afternoon working on something called I Mentioned It Once, but I Think I Got Away With It which requires time spent looking things up in diaries and related correspondence written during the nineties and then the first decade of this century. It's actually a little depressing, but I realise that even life in this deleted scene from The Road beats my twenties and thirties, most of which were spent trying to distract myself from my own misery.

On Wednesday the city asks us to boil any water we intend to consume, which chimes somewhat with Logan's suggestion that the entire infrastructure is at the point of collapse. That said, our hot water is back, albeit at what is obviously reduced pressure. It feels like progress. Tuesday was sunny and the Texas sun is strong even at this time of year, clearing away most of the snow in just a day. Wednesday is overcast, so what snow we still have remains as it is, but the temperature climbs above freezing during the afternoon.

It snows again on Thursday, but the water pressure is back up and we have full internet access once again. At noon, I head out to the store because Randy has told us that it was open for a couple of hours on Tuesday afternoon. I wear five layers of clothing and wellington boots, as before. I stand in a queue in the snow outside HEB for about forty minutes. Once I've shuffled the several hundred yards to the front, I find they have no meat, no dairy, no milk, no eggs, and not a whole lot of anything else; but thankfully they have cheese and cat food. The cashier tells me that the huge distribution centre on I-35 hasn't had power all week.

In the evening we go out to eat at Cazadores, a Mexican diner just around the corner from our house. It's the only place we've seen open all week, although Siete Leguas was apparently doing business earlier in the day.

Friday morning brings more sun, and this second lot of snow - again a good three inches - is gone by the early afternoon where it would most likely have been hanging around for three or four miserable days if this were England. I lift the garden blankets to inspect the damage. The chrysanthemum looks okay but I'm guessing everything else is fucked.

Maybe some of them will recover once spring gets underway.

Maybe Something Nice Will Happen

 

It began when I made khlea, or specifically it began when my wife and myself ate the final batch. Khlea is a Moroccan dish. You fry minced lamb in oil and beef suet with a ton of cumin on a low heat for a couple of hours until it's dark, dark brown and almost crunchy, then store it in an airtight jar. The idea is that it will keep for months without refrigeration if done right, which doubtless makes a lot of sense if you happen to live in Fes. You spoon it into the skillet from the jar, crack a couple of eggs over the top, and serve it once the eggs are done. It's delicious. It's also very filling so a decent size jar of khlea should be good for several servings spread out over a couple of weeks.

Anyway, I'd come to the bottom of the jar, and the last lot of khlea still looked good, smelled good and tasted fantastic, but was probably past its best. We ate it on Friday. On Saturday we both had stomach cramps. Bess was fine by the afternoon, but mine endured until Monday. The discomfort was actually pretty mild, but my bum lost all interest in doing a poo for the duration, and I wasn't able to eat much either.

I was okay by Monday evening so we went out to eat at Laguna Madre. The food was great except that I seemingly lost a filling while eating it. The strange thing was that at no point was I aware of anything small, hard and dental going suddenly free range in my mouth. If it was a filling, I still have no idea where it went and think I would have remembered swallowing or biting down on it. I was eating battered cod and became suddenly aware that a lower rear molar had a sharp edge which felt wrong against my tongue. I had assumed I'd moved beyond the point of those teeth I still have falling out or breaking in half; so that was depressing.

Then the weather turned colder with skies so grey as to remind me of how much I used to dislike living in England.

I went to the dentist on Tuesday, hoping it would be a straight in and out sort of deal. I hadn't lost a filling, but rather a piece of the tooth had broken off. It seems this tends to happen with the molars at the back once you pass a certain age. It bothered me because I'd assumed, following a pretty rigorous course of dental treatment undertaken when I first moved here, surprises of this sort were mostly behind me, but no - I need a new crown and he'll start work on that next week. Never mind.

At some point we found out that Stacey's father had died of coronavirus. Nearly a year into the pandemic and the numbers don't seem to be going down. Stacey is a neighbour, one of the good ones.

Another neighbour is Justin who thankfully seems to have quietened down of late. Someone was broken into on Monday or Tuesday, front window smashed opposite Justin's place and two doors down. It didn't really seem like the sort of thing Justin would have done, for once. He might just happen to turn up in your yard, trying doors in case one should be unlocked, or he might just happen to try the trunk of your car - as he did with the one parked in our drive about a month ago - but actively smashing a window seems like it would require more planning than he could handle; plus most of his glass breaking activity is limited to bottles in the road in front of our house. To be fair, he hasn't smashed bottles in the road in front of our house in over a month, although there was what I assume to have been the stem of a crack pipe just last week - glass tube, broken at one end, brown staining. I'm not sure what else it could have been.

On Tuesday morning I got up to discover that Muffin, one of the cats, had been trapped in the rabbit hutch all night. Tony, the rabbit, roamed the house during the day, and cats - being nosy - will be in and out of his hutch which is in our front room. He got on fine with the cats so it wasn't usually a problem, but he may not have been too thrilled to spend eight hours in such close proximity to Muffin.

He didn't eat all day, and neither did he leave us the usual scattering of cocoa puffs, which seemed out of character. I assumed it was the stress of having spent the night with Muffin and that he would recover. My wife was less confident and made an appointment to take him to the vet on Wednesday evening. On Wednesday morning she was still sufficiently worried to make an emergency appointment and take him there and then. They kept him for observation. We lost the two previous rabbits the same way - digestive issues leading to complications, and all within the previous six months, Charlie in October, Maisie in December. It couldn't happen again so soon - surely? Tony was a young, healthy rabbit.

The vet called Wednesday evening. It wasn't looking good.

It may have been stress induced, or it may have been something he ate in the garden. She couldn't say for sure but it was the same deal as with the previous two - constipation, insides getting knotted up as happens with cows, and not much chance of recovery.

We drove to the vet and she bought Tony out to see us for one last time so we could say goodbye. He twitched his little nose at us but didn't look happy. He probably wasn't going to last the night, she said.

We brought his body home in shock beneath dark grey clouds which made it seem as though we were driving through hell. Tony was barely six months old. We still hadn't quite got over the shock of losing Charlie, then Maisie so soon after.

Today it's been raining, and raining so hard that I can't even dig a hole to bury him in the garden.

Both Bess and myself know bunny people on facebook who routinely feed their rabbits with pizza or lettuce after lettuce after lettuce or those stupid yogurt coated bunny treats which the manufacturer claims are just fine for a vegan animal with no means of digesting lactose. Since Charlie, and especially since Maisie, we've been pretty strict about our rabbits having the right diet - mostly just hay - and yet somehow we just can't seem to keep one alive. It feels like we've been cursed in some way. It feels as though 2020 continues to cast its foul fucking shadow across the present - each day bringing some fresh kick in the teeth.

It's too fucking much.

Mucky

Being in my fifties, I now have a hard time dating anything from my childhood, particularly anything from the junior school years. My memory seems to have reduced to mostly toys and comics because that was what was important at the time, or seemed important. I'm told we see colours brighter and sharper during the first ten years, before our optic rods and cones begin to deteriorate. I can therefore now remember colours I'm no longer able to see, not in the same way.

Looking online, I recognise the cover of the Dinky catalogues from 1973 onwards but not the 1972 edition. I seem to recall that the catalogues were dated for the coming year, so I'm presumably able to remember something I saw in 1972 when I was either six or seven. I seem to recall that Mucky was always the first to get hold of the new Dinky catalogue and bring it to school, which was Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants. He was the first kid to get hold of the Eagle Transporter from Space 1999, then the first to have a Dinky Starship Enterprise the following year - which would have been 1975 from what I can work out. We shortened his surname from McFarlane to Mucky so as to save time, which may seem a little cruel with hindsight, although I don't remember the abbreviation carrying the sort of fecal connotations it seemingly implies now that we're all in our fifties. He seemed reasonably clean most of the time.

I was eight or perhaps nine and my entire personality was spaceships, space monsters, robots, aliens, flying saucers, anything a bit weird or futuristic, and particularly if there was a die cast toy to be had. My friends were Sean, Matthew, and Mucky. They were all from the year above mine. We weren't really a gang, more like different parts of a Venn diagram. I have a vague memory of Matthew discovering girls before the rest of us, or at least the general idea of girls, but don't recall him sharing our obsession with Gerry Anderson's spaceships; which just goes to show how wrong you can be. Here he describes our having correlated the school climbing frame with Skydiver from Gerry Anderson's UFO:

 

I can vividly remember mucking about on the climbing frame and all of us being totally in the zone and each playing a certain role on Skydiver, especially exiting via the shoot.  It was a case of whoever reaches the climbing frame first claims control of it, and if the little kids (from Mrs Price's class or lower) got there first then one of us sounded a red alert thereby triggering action stations and they were swiftly removed from the spaceship. Mission accomplished.

 

Matthew seems to have a much better memory of the time than I do, which is depressing considering that I'm slightly younger and don't have any significant periods of living anything which could be described as a rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Apparently I've even managed to forget Mucky's characteristic noise:

 

I can hear the ol' Muckster now as he used to play on the wooden climbing frame while buzzing-humming. Just try this at home now: create a really goofy expression with your teeth protruding as far as possible yet resting on your bottom lip. Now try to hum while blowing saliva bubbles to the tune of Spiderman. It used to piss me off big time when he did that.

 

I dimly recall one occasion of Mucky making this noise as we played on a see-saw and he instructed me on the individual powers of each of the original line-up of the X-Men, but this memory may be partially formed by Matthew telling me about the buzzing-humming thing long after I'd forgotten.

Mucky introduced me to Marvel comics, or at least to the black and white English reprints. I'd seen them in newsagents but somehow had the impression they were kind of trashy. I had the usual Beano annuals at Christmas, and The Topper was still delivered to our house on Sweet Knowle Farm every week, but I hadn't really considered that there might be other options. Every Wednesday a coach took the kids from Ilmington to the swimming baths at the high school in Shipston, and Mark chose one such journey to catechise me with five A4 pin-up pages torn from various Marvel reprints. I don't know why I should specifically remember there being five of them, but I realised that these characters almost certainly qualified as either weird or futuristic and were therefore of obvious appeal. There was Dr. Strange looking dark and mysterious within his abode, stood directly beneath his famous funny shaped window; then an image of the Avengers all running out of a tunnel, for some reason - Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor and some others; then probably Spiderman, maybe the Beast from the X-Men and I'm not sure about the rest. I was fascinated, particularly by Iron Man rendered in reds and yellows which I'm no longer able to see. Mucky took great pleasure in telling me all about these characters, whom I had assumed were real people by some definition. He told me their names, their affiliations, their powers, even a few personal details.

'Who's that?' I asked as he showed me a pin-up of the Fantastic Four, of which there were clearly five.

'That's Crys,' he said, pronouncing the short form of Crystal as cries. 'She's the girlfriend of the Human Torch.'

'What can she do?'

'She cries.'

This was Mucky's sense of humour, I guess.

On the 8th of March, 1975 - according to the Albion British Comics Database - Marvel UK launched a comic called The Super-Heroes featuring black and white reprints of Silver Surfer and X-Men comics. Naturally Mucky was right at the front of the queue, and kindly lent me a stack of back issues once he'd built up a collection. At least the covers of the first ten look mostly familiar.

It was probably Sean who lent me his copy of Spiderman Comics Weekly, issue 111 dated to the end of March, 1975. I would have attributed it to Mucky but for a distant memory of Sean always wanting to be Spiderman when we played around on the farm on which I grew up. I was usually Thor, having read about the Thunder God in one of those Marvel Treasury Editions printed at broadsheet scale, twice the size of an ordinary comic book. I recall Sean wishing I'd impersonate some other superhero on the grounds that Thor just flew here and there and didn't jump around much. Anyway, whoever lent me that issue of Spiderman Comics Weekly probably felt sorry for me in my ignorance of super-powered costumed adventurers, or maybe just needed an accomplice. It felt a little like forbidden fruit. This was the issue which ends with Peter Parker exclaiming holy fucking shit as he sprouts four additional limbs, rendering him somewhat more spidery than before - which was particularly ironic given that he'd spent most of the issue telling everyone he was about to pack in the whole Spiderman business so as to concentrate on his photojournalism. It was drawn by Gil Kane - although the name meant nothing to me at the time - and made a big impression.

It impressed me so much that I decided I was going to join FOOM, the Marvel comics fan club as advertised in that very issue. FOOM stood - rather chummily - for Friends of Ol' Marvel. I filled in the little form, folded back the cover in hope of concealing the identity of the publication, and took it to my mother for the obligatory parental signature. She took the magazine, then unfolded it to see what the hell I'd been reading.

'Oh my God,' she groaned, rolling her eyes because it was American or something. She probably didn't realise that this issue had been drawn by Gil Kane, but signed anyway. Six to eight weeks later I received membership materials and issue nine of the FOOM magazine. I didn't really understand it because it was mostly writing so I just cut out the pictures and lost them. FOOM issue nine is now worth two-hundred dollars in good nick.

I went to visit Mucky just once. He lived in a house on the Mickleton Road. It was on its own next to the woods, and could be seen from the playing field at the back of the school. It looked like a fairy tale place, a lonely dwelling which might conceal a troll or an ogre, which actually turned out to be true.

Mucky's mother was a bit abrupt and the front room belonged to a terrifying and slightly smelly old man resembling Albert Steptoe who was cemented into an armchair facing the television. I was told that his name was Maverick and I couldn't understand a fucking word he said to me with his possibly toothless mouth, at least not until the end of whatever his address had been when I distinctly heard something hostile about how I thought I was too good for them, them being the McFarlanes. This made me cry and want to go home which, with hindsight, leads me to conclude that I probably was too good at least for this disagreeable old cunt who had no problem bullying eight-year old children.

I was never invited back and I don't remember much about Mucky from that point on. He did well at his eleven plus and went to the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. Sean, Matthew and myself ended up at the comprehensive in Shipston. I encountered Mucky just once, possibly 1977 or maybe 1978, coming out of Martins newsagent in Shipston just as I was going in. It took me a moment to recognise him in his fancy school uniform.

'Hello!' I exclaimed, delighted to see my old friend.

'Oh,' he said, 'it's you,' and marched off towards the bus-stop by means of a stride which made it quite clear that there was no point in my following any further line of enquiry which involved him.

Matthew's final sighting came a couple of years later.

 

The last time I saw Mucky was in 1983 while on my moped on the way from Ilmington to Stratford to work one cold and frosty morning. I actually remember the occasion very well as I was riding my Yamaha RD 50cc while our Mucky was riding his Honda 100cc. As I was in a mischievous mood at the time, I remember seeing him coming up behind me on the straight bit near your old farm. Well, as he got closer, I started to move out and kinda block him from overtaking. Silly, I know. To be honest, I think I was just jealous that he was off to a good job with prospects at IDC while I had a bum admin job at Saville Tractors; but surely that is not the reason why the ol' Muckster didn't reply last month to my message to become reunited after twenty-four years?

 

Mucky had briefly showed up on Friends Reunited around 2008 or thereabouts, but failed to respond to my request. Matthew didn't have any luck either.

 

I sent him a cheery note but heard nothing. I could see his picture online but he didn't wanna reunite with me. Putting the ginger hair to one side, it would be good if we could include Mucky in our den (if only to see if he still has a runny nose). He still has that Total petrol tanker Dinky toy I lent him, so it would nice to get that back.

 

Sean, Matthew and myself met up at Sean's house in Rugby in March, 2008. We hadn't seen each other in nearly three decades, but it was wonderful and we've stayed in touch, albeit intermittently, ever since. In some email or other, I wrote:

 

As a brief testimonial to the benefits of Friends Reunited, I've just come back from Rugby where I met with Sean Downham and Matthew Beecham, my best pals when I was about ten. It was fucking great. Both now have wonderful children and jobs I don't quite understand. Matt writes articles about shock absorbers. Although the reunion was strange, it was strange in a good way. There was much talk of things that are not like they were in our day and so on. We drank beer, ate pizza, admired Sean's funky bass playing and unusual pets - a corn snake and a tarantula called Bubbles. Soon we were all swapping toy cars and rubber monster pencil toppers like it was only yesterday; not really, although we did get a pretty major haul of penny chews from the corner shop whilst Matthew distracted the shopkeeper by pretending to have a grazed knee.

 

Mucky could have shared in some of that magic, but I guess it wasn't to be. His loss, I suppose.

Let's Not Eat Mexican!

As a supplement to Let's Eat Mexican!, here are ten of my favourite San Antonio diners and restaurants which aren't Mexican in no particular order. Usual terms and conditions apply.

Hung Fong, 3624 Broadway, TX 78209.
Established in 1939, Hung Fong is the oldest Chinese restaurant in Texas which - aside from being in America rather than England - vastly differentiates it from most of the Chinese restaurants I grew up with over the pond, most of which seem to have been established in the seventies so far as I understand. The American version of Chinese food seems to be additionally substantially different from the English translation of the same although they're recognisably related - and, of course, such generalisations are made on the doubtless ludicrous basis of Chinese food being definable as one consistent gastronomic continuity. Anyway, while I find a lot of Chinese food has, in my limited experience, a sort of stewed quality I'm coming to enjoy less and less as I get old, Hung Fong distinguishes itself as serving dishes which taste as though they've been prepared fresh by an actual chef just on the other side of that wall, which makes for a pleasant change. It's no longer my favourite cuisine, but when I'm in the mood for it, there's nowhere quite like Hung Fong. The staff are also great, particularly Jeff who is an old friend of my wife's family; so if you're reading this, hello Jeff!

Tandoor Palace, 8783 Wurzbach Rd, TX 78240.
My general cooling with Chinese food at some point within the last decade or so has corresponded to my increased appreciation of Indian, so I'm not sure what that's all about. It isn't that I ever really disliked Indian food but it was never my first choice, and yet now it tastes amazing to me, for some reason. Happily, San Antonio has a ton of Indian restaurants - contrary to my expectations. Apparently our Health Science Center, associated with the University of Texas, presents quite a draw for overseas students and medical practitioners and so most of the Indian restaurants are in that part of town, as are most of the middle eastern places as it happens. I haven't had a bad Indian meal in San Antonio, but some places have been more to my liking than others. Bottom of the list was probably ruthlessly authentic something or other - bland formica tables like a transport café, Bollywood piped directly to all three wall-mounted television sets - the kind with cathode ray tubes - bored staff and a menu of just three dishes, each of which was brown and hotter than the surface of the sun. Tandoor Palace, on the other hand, reminds me of several places I've eaten on the Foleshill Road in Coventry, so I don't know what the difference is, but I assume it's authentic to something and therefore ticks my boxes without necessarily being the Indian equivalent of McDonalds. My vote is additionally swayed by the excellence of their all you can eat buffet and the fact that the staff remember us every time we visit.

Good Time Charlie's, 2922 Broadway, TX 78209.
Charlie's may actually be my all-time favourite place to eat. I kept track of my urban eating habits for the duration of 2019 and Charlie's came out top with thirty-one visits. The salad is amazing, the steak is amazing - particularly the cilantro jack steak - the fries are amazing, the onion rings are the best onion rings in the known universe, the waitresses are wonderful - particularly Jessica - and the service is great. I don't know if it makes a difference that Good Time Charlie's is a single establishment rather than one of several, or even a chain, but it might account for the suggestion of good home cookin', and if you suspect the claim of good home cookin' is usually just advertising copy, you need to eat at Charlie's. The cuisine, if we really must call it that, is what my wife refers to as general American, so it's steak, chicken fried steak, a few local variations, some Mexican influence. Actually, it's a lot like what you would eat at Jim's, although while Jim's is wonderful, Charlie's is sort of like the Platonic perfect diner of which Jim's is merely the noumenal expression.

Sea Island Shrimp House, 322 W Rector, TX 78216.
Amongst the more common myths regarding life in the United States is that you can't get decent fish and chips such as you might find on the front at Skeggy. While it's true that we don't have a chippy on every street corner due to being an entirely different country, Sea Island comes pretty close and, to be honest, does it better than more or less all but two of the chip shops I had cause to frequent when living in England; although for that matter, the same could be said of the Long John Silver's chain. The chips aren't the big, fat greasy ones traditionally served in newspaper, but neither are we talking McDonald's potato-style snack fries. The food is pretty great at Sea Island even though yes, it is indeed a chain, but the whole chain restaurant thing seems to be different here in Americaland, and everything served at Sea Island is fresh and properly cooked by human beings. Although it might be pointed out that Americans don't seem to understand sausage in batter, they compensate with hush puppies which are deep fried balls of the kind of sage and onion stuffing associated with an English roast dinner, and which work very well with fish and chips. America also has the additional attraction of not being Skegness.

The Hungry Farmer, 7015 Interstate 35 Access Rd, TX 78224.
This may actually be the most profoundly Texan place I've ever been - 1930s tractors in the parking lot, hood ornaments, tin-plate gas station advertising, firearms on the walls, and country music playing while you eat - and I mean the proper stuff too, none of your autotuned crap and definitely no fucking alt-country, whatever the hell that is. Under almost any other circumstances it would be obnoxious, but the Hungry Farmer is a one-off and the real deal so it's not even an affectation or a sales pitch. The food is mostly simple - steak, fries, things involving jalapeño peppers and so on - but prepared with the genuine loving care of that good ol' home cookin' you're always hearing about. Also of note is their own garlic dressing which is so astonishing as to present the temptation of just poking a straw into the jug and drinking it like a milkshake. The staff are great too, except the one who was refusing to wear a mask when we were there a few months ago, but they had her back in line in time for our subsequent visit. Also, they no longer have A1 sauce so it's wise to take your own. We asked a waitress and she said whoever runs the place had decided it was too expensive.

Jim's, everywhere.
I've had periods of near evangelical devotion to Jim's, and I know it's not just me. They're a chain, but a local one with a lot of diners in San Antonio. I've a feeling there may also be one in Austin by now, but I'm not sure. On paper, Jim's may not seem like anything special - sort of like Denny's with less polish and a more local flavour - but it's pretty difficult to get a bad meal at Jim's, excepting an uncharacteristically chewy chicken fried steak I had back in 2013; and wherever you are in San Antonio, you're never more than five minutes drive from a Jim's, plus they seem to be open all the time, possibly even Christmas day for all I know. I go through phases but at the moment it's the huevos rancheros which gets my vote as the greatest thing on the menu (and possibly in the universe), but all of their breakfasts are exceptional; and, I'd swear, with healing properties under certain circumstances, such as those experienced when one is somewhat worse for wear, having been on the sauce.

Longhorn Steakhouse, 7439 San Pedro Ave, TX 78216.
I'm not sure why but the first time I ever went to this place, I thought it was amazing, and it's been mostly good since, but never quite like that first time. They're a chain and are therefore everywhere, so maybe it's simply that the first place had a better chef on that night. They're kind of like an expensive version of the Hungry Farmer or, if you like, where the Hungry Farmer might be missing a few teeth and have straw and bits of twig in its beard, upmarket rappers of the kind who enjoy being seen to have money probably wouldn't be too embarrassed to be seen to have money while dining at the Longhorn Steakhouse; and although I say expensive, it's actually very reasonably priced. The steak is usually more than respectable, the mashed potato is nearly always wonderful, and although it could be argued that the décor is kind of corny - pretend oil paintings of western scenes, mountains, cattle rustlers and so on - I actually kind of like it, excepting the weird portrait of a gentleman resembling Enoch Powell by the entrance - probably isn't him but it's still a bit odd.

Cracker Barrel, 6330 N Interstate 35, TX 78218.
Also jokingly referred to as Caucasian Barrel, Cracker Barrel is a vast corporate chain which bills itself as an old country store - complete with rocking chairs out on the porch for those who might wish to set a spell - and yet somehow gets away with it, because the food is great and even the store is not without a certain charm. Aside from the signage, you really wouldn't think you were inside one outlet of a chain and each branch might, I suppose, be deemed unique in terms of décor by virtue of all the old shit they fix to the walls - more or less anything predating 1950, washboards, old photographs, box cameras, mysterious agricultural tools, vintage tractor parts, and tin-plate advertising for anything you've never heard of - Nargon, which was allegedly America's favourite cola back in 1932, for example. The downside to this surfeit of Americana has usually been the presence of at least one family of fellow diners sporting MAGA hats, a sartorial trend which is now hopefully on the wane for obvious reasons. Cracker Barrel's fried chicken is, in all honesty, so fucking fantastic that it cannot be described without swearing - as I've just demonstrated - but most of their menu is pretty great. I once had something called, I think, tater tot casserole which was so good that I still think about it from time to time, even though I don't seem to be able to find it on the current menu and therefore presume it must have been some kind of special. For what it may be worth, the associated store is sort of folksy and leans heavily on gift items, old style candy, faux bottles of Nargon, and country & western paraphernalia, but most of the stuff seems to be quite good quality, or at least above what you might expect. A few years ago they had a stuffed toy horse in the store, a battery operated one which walked forward and did a little wiggle when you threw the switch on its back. Despite the fact that I'm very much not an eight-year old girl, it seemed like the cutest thing I'd ever seen and it took all my powers of self control to keep myself from buying the little guy and taking him home. I look for that horse every time I return to Cracker Barrel but he's gone from the shelves. I don't know why I just didn't buy him at the time. I'm a fucking idiot, nothing but a damn no-horse-havin' fool.

Demo's Greek Food, 7115 Blanco Rd #120, TX 78216.
There are three of these and we normally go to the one on St. Mary's, but I'm sure they're all pretty much the same deal. There's not much I miss about life in English cities, but one thing is the mighty doner kebab and I'm sure I've had at least a decade during which I ate nothing else. It's not that you can't get a doner kebab here in Americaland, but that which you are served when asking for the same tends to be different. I don't know if it's actually a more authentic relation to the original Greek template, or as much a regional variation as whatever those things were that I used to eat in England, but it tends to be served in a lighter, puffier flatbread, and never comes with chilli sauce. This may be on the grounds that everything else in San Antonio does come with chilli sauce, even ice cream in the more Hispanic neighbourhoods, but I nevertheless find it disconcerting, for as my former Royal Mail colleague Vince once observed, a kebab without chilli sauce is like an elephant without a trunk. Anyway, leaving aside anything too close in spirit to my father's partner expressing disgust at being unable to get a decent plate of egg and chips in certain EU countries, of all the Greek or Mediterranean places in San Antonio, Demo's seems to be about the best, or at least is my favourite by some margin; and their kebabs are so close to what I would consider a proper kebab as to greatly reduce the conspicuity of the absent chilli sauce. I realise that probably doesn't sound like much of a recommendation, but it is.

Bill Miller Bar-B-Q, 4500 Broadway, TX 78209.
Mary, who technically would have been my stepmother had my father opted for a third marriage, once asked, what do they eat in Texas? before answering her own mostly rhetorical question with, it's all barbecue innit. For the sake of quantifying the report, she also told me that the thing she liked about President Trump was that you never hear anything bad said about him. Needless to say, it's really not all barbecue - a cuisine to which I've never fully acclimatised, because most places serving it tend to overdo the rustic charm - bits of rusty tractor nailed to the wall and all that - and just ain't that great unless you're into diarrhoea and hangovers. Bill Miller, on the other hand, being a chain and one of those with a diner on nearly every other street corner, sort of rescues barbecue from its own authenticity and serves something edible, mostly delicious, and with a genuine hint of home cooking which tastes rich, spicy, just unhealthy enough to be pleasurable, but which won't exile you to a lavatory cubicle for the next twelve hours. Technically, I'm cheating here as most branches of Bill Miller are presently working curbside service only due to disease and stuff, and it's actually a couple of months since I visited one; but I told myself I'd write about ten restaurants or diners here because it's a nice round number, and Hooters - where my wife and myself ate last night - didn't quite make the grade.