Let's Think About Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He seems like someone who should be better remembered.

He seems like someone who should still be here.

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

A Gastropsychogeography of England

Philip Best of notorious room clearance outfit Consumer Electronics observed that I was a food pusher. I was visiting him in Austin and making delivery of some of my home made pork pies - because it's easier to make too many than it is to make too few and we can't get them in Texas - and the comment came as I was describing a brief period of the nineties during which Jim Macdougall stayed over at my place every other weekend and I'd make us a chili in the hope of keeping him alive - his strict diet of beer, fags, bar snacks and Temazepam being nutritionally questionable; so Best's observation seemed fair. Thus deciding to embrace the role, I hereby declare my invention of gastropsychgeography, a philosophical discourse in which one gives account of what is eaten, where, and what it means. This follows on from psychogeography, a practice devised by Ivan Chtcheglov which seeks to map the meaning of a place in terms of its history, and psychochronography in which Sandifer ingeniously lists what was at the top of the hit parade when certain episodes of Doctor Who went to air. Gastropsychgeography is therefore, in essence, a travelogue of meals consumed by an author except much more important; and this is where it begins. This time next year you'll be reading Alan Moore's brooding testimony of Northampton's finest chip shops and Sandifer will be self-publishing tallies of previously obscure forms of iconic artisan bread consumed whilst binge watching Who, but it was all my idea. You're welcome.

Fish and chips, Earlsdon.
My mum gave me a tenner and sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. Being fifty-four years of age, I was conscious of this being one of those grand English traditions once immortalised in the likes of Beano and Dandy, so grand in fact that I'm surprised some red-faced gammon has yet to fume over imagined EU rulings preventing English mothers sending their offspring up the chippie with a tenner. We had two portions of battered cod and a single helping of chips between the two of us, because Gabriel's single helping is a shitload of chips in itself. It was pretty great, and we ate while watching Downton Abbey, an episode in which one of the butlers gives in his notice and the other one gets a bit sniffy about it.

Doner kebab, Earlsdon.
This time my mother sent me in the other direction, down the road for doner kebabs which I didn't enjoy quite so much as I thought I would. They were okay but not amazing, the main selling point simply being the pleasure of a doner kebab served in pita bread with chilli sauce, like nature intended - as distinct from a puffy flatbread with no sauce of any description, which seems to be a Greco-Texan thing. We watched The Curse of the Were-Rabbit whilst dining, which I hadn't seen before, so that was nice. Less entertaining was that Motecuhzoma took a small measure of his revenge on the both of us the following morning, so that's a lesson learned until next time.

 

Battered sausage with chips, Foleshill.
I was out with the intention of catching performances by Cristiana Ilie and Hainbach at the Tin, a venue situated in Coventry's new fangled Canal Basin, but I hadn't eaten. I'd called at the City Arms, a Weatherspoon pub, about an hour previous in the hope of ordering their Full English breakfast, discovering that it is only served until noon. With my gastronomic plans having been thus foiled, I therefore had to ask around and was directed to the Sandy Fish Bar in Sandy Lane, which was just around the corner. The expedition impressed upon me how the Tin is but five minutes walk from the home of Martin of Attrition, and I'm surprised he doesn't have some kind of residency there, knocking out a set of handbag house standards every Sunday evening or whatever. He literally lives so close that there wouldn't even be much point getting a taxi for the sake of a cumbersome tuba. Anyway, I ate my sausage in batter and chips on the seating provided at the aforementioned Canal Basin, all the while monitoring the venue for signs of activity seeing as I'd arrived about an hour before even the bar staff. The sausage was, in particular, pretty good.

Sausage sandwich, Coombe Abbey.
I asked for a sausage roll and this was the closest they could manage, although it was decent so I'm not complaining. I was at the Café in the Park with my dad. We were up that way having gone out for a stroll during which he hardly mentioned Brexit at all, although there were several ominous remarks hinting at a sceptical view taken regarding climate science. It didn't seem like there was anything to be gained in rising to the bait, so I didn't. I was a bit surprised by the general youthful bewilderment which greeted my attempts to describe a sausage roll to the café staff, but never mind.

Dinner, Binley.
This was prepared by my dad some hours after the above, and comprised steak pie, roast potatoes, runner beans, carrots and squash. The pie was hand crafted and amazing, and the vegetables were all from his allotment. The squash seemed an initially incongruous addition, but was slightly sweet and went very well with everything else. We manged to avoid talking about Brexit, although on a related note, my dad's wife - or at least the woman who would have been his third wife had they bothered to get married, which they didn't - opined that the good thing about Donald Trump is that he's not afraid to say what he's thinking. I couldn't be bothered to argue. Whatever gets you through the night.

Persian takeaway, Earlsdon.
Grilled lamb, rice, and houmous delivered by the Cyrus Restaurant once the guy on the other end of the phone line grudgingly conceded that yes, they did deliver if we really weren't able to get down there to pick it up. The food was at least as good as anticipated, and the rice in particular was delicious, light and fragrant. We ate while watching an episode of Midsomer Murders during which I realised that I sort of fancy Camille Coduri. I knew I'd seen her on telly somewhere before, but couldn't remember where. Later I looked it up and found out that she once played the mother of Bingo from the Banana Splits in Eccleston era Who, which was a bit disappointing.

 

Cream tea, Coventry Cathedral.
Part of the reason for my visiting England, aside from seeing my parents and other people, was because Lynda would be there. Lynda is my mother's younger sister - my aunt. She moved to Australia in 1973 and none of us had heard from her since. Thankfully the reunion was a delight and not at all awkward as a few of us had feared it might be. Part of Lynda's visit entailed wandering around Coventry like tourists with myself and my dad - who likewise knew her back in the sixties due to his having married my mother. There was a lot to look at in Coventry, and certainly one fuck of a lot more than there had been when I lived there. Our particular favourites were the Doom Painting in the Holy Trinity Church - a recently restored fifteenth century mural depicting what happens to sinners in enthusiastic detail - and the Cathedral. My grandfather - Lynda's dad - was a structural engineer whom they consulted when they were building the thing so as to ensure that it wouldn't simply collapse into the tunnels dug by coalminers from Keresley colliery, so it's all connected somehow. Anyway, we had cream teas in the Rising Café in the basement of the modern cathedral, which was nice. The central axis of a cream tea is a scone, which is like the thing which an American would call a biscuit for no obvious reason, but better. A biscuit in the American sense is usually too salty to be considered a scone and is therefore thematically equivalent to a gammon flavoured ice lolly, at least from where I'm stood.

Pizza, Earlsdon.
My mother and I stayed home and had a Waitrose pizza, which was probably a bit scant between the two of us but then she doesn't eat a whole lot and I was probably still full of scones. Midsomer Murders had inexplicably vanished from the television schedule so we watched Have I Got News for You? because I hadn't seen it in fucking years, and it's one of the few English shows I miss. I had no idea who at least three of those involved were, but Paul Merton is still funny. One of the most amusing exchanges concerned an elephant dentist from Peppa Pig. Sarah Kennedy - whom I know from my art foundation course in Leamington Spa back in the eighties - provides the voice of Nanny Plum from Peppa Pig. I think Sarah also had something to do with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so like I said, it's all connected. Alan Moore probably hasn't even heard of Peppa Pig.

Full English breakfast, Earlsdon.
I was vaguely inclined to give Weatherspoon a miss, my enthusiasm for cheap beer past its sell by date having waned since the homeless Thundercat who owns the chain started banging on about Brexit; and my friend Carl pointed out that most Weatherspoon pubs have the atmosphere of a cross-channel ferry due to the surfeit of red-faced gammons on a quest for cheap booze; but a full English breakfast is a full English breakfast. I had mine with a couple of slices of black pudding and it tasted fucking fantastic, just as it always does. I had no reading matter to hand and was dining alone, so reluctantly browsed the Weatherspoon corporate magazine. Naturally there was a special feature on Brexit, lifting opinion columns from publications on both sides of the political divide, because that's how much the homeless Thundercat - whose name is Tim Martin, by the way - loves democracy. Each piece was supplemented with commentary from himself under the byline of Tim Says which, in the case of those pieces in support of the remain argument, tended to kick off with what the author fails to realise is that blah blah blah, reducing the enterprise as a whole to something of a stacked deck. The rest of the magazine was mostly interviews with bar staff, so I watched the telly instead, sound down but with captions. They were showing live footage from the Supreme Court legally proving that Boris Johnson is a massive cunt, which was more interesting than the Weatherspoon corporate magazine.

More fish and chips, Earlsdon.
Once again my mum gave me a tenner and sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. The queue wasn't quite so enormous this time, comprising just three people. As usual, there was some fish left over, so that was saved for next door's cats, Geoff and Pig who are brothers and both ginger with white bits. By the end of my stay in Coventry, Pig had taken to meowing his head off every time I went into the garden in presumed anticipation of my handing a tupperware box of cod over the fence. I think that's how he got the name.

Bread and cheese, Earlsdon.
My aunt Lynda told us that her favourite food is bread and cheese, and specifically sourdough bread because other types of bread tend to give her digestive trouble. My mum therefore gave me a fifteener and sent me up the road for sourdough bread and an assortment of cheeses from the Co-op in Earlsdon, Coventry. I came back with edam, brie, one of the blue mouldy ones, and a fourth cheese I can't remember. Lynda was delighted beyond expectation. It turns out that this love of cheese is apparently a familial trait. Some doctor once told my mum that she might like to think about cutting down on the cheese. She told him that it wasn't going to happen because were she to make such a dietary adjustment there would be no point in being alive.

Curry, Greenwich.
Back when I lived in London, I often went for a curry with my friends Carl and Eddy, their choice because whilst I enjoyed Indian food, there were other things I preferred. We usually went to the Mogul in Greenwich. Since moving to America, my love of curry has increased for reasons I don't fully understand, so I was fairly keen to revisit the Mogul and give it another go. Unfortunately the Mogul experienced some kind of civil war in my absence, resulting in a diaspora which led to the establishment of the Mountain View on the Trafalgar Road, so that's where we went. I recognised the staff, and even shook the hand of Ron, who I believe runs the place and for whom Carl and Eddy seem to be the equivalent of season ticket holders. I had chicken korma with saag paneer, which was gorgeous.

Tunnock's tea cakes, Solihull.
I went to visit my friend Martin who lives in Solihull. I know Martin from the art foundation course we took with the woman who went on to become the voice of Nanny Plum. Martin was in the very first line up of the Cravats, and later played in different bands with both Carl and myself. As we'd scheduled an afternoon of just hanging out rather than alcoholic abandon, we started with a trip to the corner shop for Mr. Kipling's cherry bakewells and Tunnock's tea cakes, following which we drank tea and listened to the Shameful Ca$hin album. Shameful Ca$hin is Martin's current band and they've recorded an album at Woodbine Street Studios in Leamington Spa, soon to be issued on vinyl, all going well. The album reminded me a little of the punkier incarnations of the Cravats with a touch of the Stranglers and a bit of a rockabilly undercurrent. It's possibly the greatest thing Martin has ever recorded. I opted for Tunnock's tea cakes out of curiosity, having no real memory of them whilst being aware of a wave of nostalgia having spread their legend across certain stretches of social media. They're essentially chocolate covered marshmallows, arguably the English equivalent of American snack foods such as Hostess Twinkies and the like. I thought they were okay but nothing special, and Martin didn't seem to like them at all. Also worth noting is that Martin has a ginger cat called Jeff. He really loves that cat.

Thai curry, Earlsdon.
My mother and I stayed home and had a Waitrose Thai curry, which came in a natty little wooden box, and was excellent. Midsomer Murders had once again inexplicably vanished from the television schedule so we watched three episodes of Upstart Crow on DVD as I'd never seen it before. Having grown up in close proximity to Stratford-upon-Avon, I'd pretty much had enough of Shakespeare by the time I was seven, so I didn't know what to expect but nevertheless found it very watchable. I don't actually have anything against either Shakespeare or his works, unlike Martin who is of the considerably stronger opinion that it's all bollocks, but Upstart Crow almost made me wish I'd developed more of an appreciation. My mum on the other hand thinks Shakespeare is the shit, to phrase it in terms with which she is most likely unfamiliar.

Melted cheese sandwich, Shrewsbury.
I went to visit my friend Charlie who lives in Shrewsbury. I know Charlie from the fine art degree we took with Martin who was in the very first line up of the Cravats. Charlie is best known as artist of the Walking Dead comic book and is accordingly now a local celebrity, which was impressed upon me when I noticed that the local art gallery was advertising an exhibition of his work with his name in massive letters. We went for a bite to eat at a small café called, I believe, Ginger & Co. We talked mostly about comic books, superhero movies, comic book publishers assuming that, having finished with the Walking Dead, what Charlie really, really, really wants to draw next is even more zombies, and we talked about Comicsalopia, a comic art convention which was held in Shrewsbury a few months ago. Apparently it hadn't gone so well as hoped due to organisational complications arisen from one of the major sponsors screwing up with the wonga whilst failing to fully understand the genre, expressed as an unusual fixation with Peppa Pig. The sandwich was fancy and involved spinach and possibly mozzarella. It was very tasty.

Another full English breakfast, Coventry.
I had this one at Café 37, Earlsdon, which seems almost like it's just some bloke's front room. I've been there a few times over the years and don't ever recall any other customers, so I'm glad it's somehow managed to stay open. The food was good, sort of like the Weatherspoon version but with a bit more soul. Options for reading material were Coventry Evening Telegraph, Daily Mail, and the Sun. I tried with the Coventry Evening Telegraph but it mostly seemed to be articles on the level of how some local sports club had purchased a new tennis racket. The only piece I read in full was something about the council intending to pull down the swimming baths, which makes me a little sad as they were structurally engineered by my grandfather. I reluctantly switched to the Sun and was pleased to notice that whilst the right-wing bias was such that it actually came off on my fingers, the paper generally wasn't quite so rabid as I remembered, its mania being concentrated in small, evenly distributed flare ups within the wider context of a generally gormless whole. The only article which really caught my attention was an argument against the closing of private schools, at least partially predicated on the notion that if Jeremy Corbyn thinks it's bad then it's actually good. I don't know where the readership stand on the matter, but it's always entertaining to see members of the working class moved to fuming indignation over threats to the well-being of chinless Etonian twits who regard them as, at the very best, a slightly smelly economic resource.

Yet more fish and chips, Earlsdon.

It was my last evening in England, at least for a while, so my mum gave me a tenner and once again sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. This time was a bit later than usual. My mother is an independent benefits advisor, meaning she gives advice to, or even represents in court, those who have been wrongfully denied benefits, which is pretty much everyone who has been denied benefits due to government policies which hold that numismatic hand-outs are the only thing preventing most claimants from becoming high paid executives. Anyway she had two such persons turn up at six in the evening seeking her advice, one of whom had no head and only one leg but had nevertheless been declared fit for work and denied disability benefit. My mother had anticipated that their case would take about fifteen minutes to sort out, so I should go up the road for fish and chips once they were done. Unfortunately their case took about an hour to sort out, and in the meantime Sue from next door, patron of Geoff and Pig, came round. She was trying to separate the two sections of the tubing of a vacuum cleaner which had become stuck. I was unable to pull the two lengths of tubing apart. One of the people who had come to see my mother gave it a go, but he couldn't do it either. Anyway, it was close to seven before everyone left and I was able to go up the road for my final fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. Now as I compose this account in a house built on a different continent, I know that even as I write, Geoff and Pig are probably finishing off the bit of cod that we couldn't manage. It's a circle, my friend.

Full English breakfast with Japanese influence, Heathrow.
I'd got up at ten to five in the morning so as to catch the flight back to lovely, lovely Texas, and yet somehow I'd managed to end up with hours to burn, just bumming around the airport; so I figured I may as well eat to pass time. Wagamama caught my eye because I recall having loved their food back in the nineties, and there was a full English on the menu which struck me as weird. I went in thinking about bowls of big fat noodles with crunchy ginger stuff, but somehow just couldn't not order the full English because it would be my last one in a while and its presence at Wagamama, which let us not forget serves primarily Japanese and Asiatic cuisine, seemed improbably incongruous. It came in a bowl and incorporated spinach and shitake mushrooms, but was otherwise the genuine article - sausages, bacon, couple of fried eggs and so on - and yet it had some Japanese quality which seemed to justify its place on the menu and yet was difficult to pinpoint, something in the subtle flavours department stemming from how it was cooked; or it could just be that I was prevented from blobbing the customary dollop of tomato ketchup on the side. Naturally I asked for ketchup, even qualifying the request with sorry to sound like a caveman, but… - but they didn't have it, and I was therefore forced to tackle the flavours unalloyed, which was okay because it was delicious. I read some more of The Face in the Abyss by Abraham Merritt as I ate. It's about four hard boiled blokes who go off in search of lost gold, and who keep having arguments about which one of their party might be considered the dirty double-crossing rat. They talk like James Cagney in a gangster movie, often finishing sentences with an interrogative see. So far I'm enjoying it. I picked the book up at the Oxfam shop on Broadgate in Coventry, which is a fucking great shop and seemingly the closest England comes to having a branch of Half Price Books, albeit a somewhat compact one. I also picked up a Rupert Bear annual and two Hornby Railways catalogues which I had as a kid - which is apparently what my midlife crisis looks like. I only mention these details because I haven't found a way to shoehorn Peppa Pig, Shakespeare, or anyone named Geoff into the account.

Nearly New Kids on the Block

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

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

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

My wife's smartphone rang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ha ha.

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

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

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

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

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

Music starts up.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

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

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

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

'Everybody make some noise!'

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

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

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

The crowd go wild.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Kids return to the stage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What am I doing?'

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

Holi

It's Saturday afternoon and we're heading for something called Holi. This was Bess's idea. Holi is a traditional Hindu festival celebrating the arrival of spring, amongst other things. Bess has a number of co-workers from India and Nepal, and one of them told her about it. Having previously lived in Coventry - which enjoys a substantial Asian presence - I'm a little surprised that I myself have never heard of it.

'They throw paint at each other,' Bess explains.

I called my mother earlier in the day, it being her birthday. I told her we would be going to a Holi celebration.

'That's the one where they throw paint at each other,' she said.

We leave around two, taking the kid along because it sounds messy and therefore the sort of thing he will probably enjoy; plus it will be good to scrape him off the screen for a couple of hours.

Bess follows directions on her smartphone, leading us to what resembles a scout hut lost somewhere in the leisurely tangle of San Antonio's suburbs. There is a stall set up next to the hut, although we can't tell what goods are on offer, and there are just three other people here, one of whom is of either Indian or Latino ancestry. Our source seemed to think it would all be kicking off around two, but this was apparently an optimistic estimate.

We go home, then return around four. This time the roads are crammed, and there's a cop waving vehicles on towards the associated parking lot. We're at a crawl, so Bess drives off elsewhere, two, three streets away until we find a place to park. It's outside someone's home but hopefully they won't mind seeing as all their neighbours also have stranger's cars lined up along their stretch of road. We get out and walk.

Figures approach from the other end of the street. The first is a guy covered from head to foot in bright primary colours. It's a peculiar sight and he smiles because it's funny.

Once, as a student, I was on the way to some house party in a neighbouring village with my friend Carl, who began to describe a scenario in which bewildered figures emerge from the fog ahead of us, blackened faces with their clothes still smoking. This, he explained, would indicate that we were about to attend the greatest house party of all time. I've honestly never been wild about house parties, but the image has stayed with me and I am reminded of it right now. Rainbow coloured survivors stagger towards us and we can hear twangy Indian pop music in the distance. This is not what you expect to see in some average urban street. It's like the polychromatic Bollywood version of that zombie apocalypse you always hear about.

'I guess we missed it,' I say, basing this on our being the only people heading towards the noise. When we get there, it's obvious that I was wrong. Things are just beginning to get going.

There's a field behind the building I assumed to be a scout hut. The building is actually the center for the India Association of San Antonio, and the field is packed with people of all colours. By all colours I mean blue, green, purple, yellow, orange, red and so on, and the air is full of similarly hued dust clouds as everyone pelts each other with handfuls of powdered paint. The field is most likely additionally packed with people of all colours in terms of ethnicity, but it's no longer possible to tell with most of them, excepting a few in traditional Hindu dress.

There were many people of Indian descent around the places where I lived in England, and I found that I missed them when I moved to San Antonio. We have people from India in San Antonio, but they don't seem quite such a visible presence. Bess tells me that their numbers tend to be concentrated around the medical center and University of Texas campus in the north-east part of the city. Amongst her former colleagues was one Dr. Ramamurthy, mother of the actor Sendhil Ramamurthy, best known for his role in the television series Heroes.

There are a couple of decent Indian restaurants, notably the wonderful Tandoor Palace on the Wurzbach Road, but outside of such places, I no longer see Indian people in large groups; which is partially why it's so nice to be here at this festival. I'm not sure I even realised I'd missed this sort of thing, although that is perhaps an inevitable reaction for someone living in a different land to the one in which they were born.

Bess wanders off and finds the stall selling the bags of paint. She returns with four or five and hands a couple to the boy. I decline because I think I would feel weird chucking paint at strangers. Strangers, on the other hand, feel less reticent about chucking paint at me. My assailant grins and springs off to bombard someone else, and I'm trying not to laugh because it's funny and stupid, and there's something cheery about it; and I'm aware that my attempts to clear bright purple powder from my face duplicate those of Oliver Hardy as he blinks haplessly from the screen, his hair white with brick dust.

Another couple of minutes and none of us are the same colour as when we arrived, which is apparently the point. The paint sets everyone on an equal footing, and in the end we are all the same, equally ridiculous.

Junior goes off to buy more paint.

I'm tempted to dance, but I'm still a little fearful it will be the white guy dance, like I'm someone's dad at a wedding. The music is mostly what I think of as bhangra, or at least what I associate with Bollywood - modern beats rooted in Indian tradition. There's a group of young people dancing in a circle, some barefoot, and presumably Indian judging by the sandals, a couple of topknots and the raw energy of their moves. This clearly isn't their first rodeo, as we say around these parts and, reminded of just where I am - it's wonderful to be outside at some large celebration without the barbecue smoke or country & autotune wailing away in our ears.

I watch the dancers, envious.

We spend an hour or more, just soaking it all up, gradually changing colour as wave after wave of paint hits us. If the object of the celebration seems unclear, at least to me, it doesn't seem to matter. Eventually a bonfire is set alight  at the center of the field in reference to the burning of Holika, the sister of the demon king, from which comes the name of this part of the festival. We all watch the flames and savour the smoke, and it feels as though we've all come through something important together.

Art School Re-onion

The first one had been great against all expectation, but then it was all last moment with phone calls and people who also just happened to be in the vicinity. We met in some pub in Forest Hill - Adam, Gail, Mark, and two Carls respectively spelled with a K and a C. The pub was loud and brash as pubs tend to be, full of the traditional braying Saturday night wankers, but adversity sometimes forges magic of a kind. We all got hilariously pissed. I realised that I'd barely exchanged a word with Adam during the entire three years of the course we both attended at Maidstone College of Art, and thirty years later it proved impossible to work out why - just another one of those stupid things. Similarly it turned out that Carl and Mark had never actually had a conversation prior to that evening. Gail was still funny with a pleasingly dry wit but a different accent to the one I recall, and the other Karl was still massively entertaining. He didn't seem to remember having once made a codpiece of a red plastic utensil drainer nabbed from the kitchen sink for a performance of Cameo's Word Up, but never mind. We ended the evening stood outside freezing our bits off, swaying gently from side to side. It was a great night, and it really didn't seem like it had all been so long ago.

The second one results from a more intensive application of choreography, and my name has been announced on a facebook page as having come all the way from Texas, which I have. It's at some place called the Harp in Covent Garden, or roughly around that way. Central London wouldn't have been my choice, but it's easily accessible to all of the people who have said they will be coming. Carl and I walk across the city because one of the stations is out, although it feels a little like one of Carl's long walks, cheerily innocuous proposals which end up being thirty fucking miles. It feels like one of Carl's long walks most likely because I'm still limping. I arrived in London yesterday, walking from Victoria Station to my friend Rob's place at the rear of New Oxford Street because I'd reasoned that it probably wasn't that far on foot.

I turned up at Carl's place around midday and by six I have begun to suffer from conversational overload, being an otherwise fairly solitary sort of person. We walk across London - or limp in my case - and I feel pissy, whilst simultaneously resenting my own lack of endurance because how often do I actually see any of these people these days? How often do I see anyone?

They aren't upstairs at the Harp, whoever they are or will be. We check downstairs and they aren't there either. Carl and I buy beer and wait upstairs having found a table in a room with a bunch of rugby enthusiasts busily honking and hooting at each other as they do. Happily it's the room in which we are destined to meet the others. Upstairs at the Harp were the actual directions, and there's only this one room. We wait until nine and decide no-one is coming - two hours. On the way out, we find them crowded around the door, out on the pavement. Someone looked upstairs, poked their head into the room in which we'd agreed to meet and failed to recognise either Carl or myself. I'm wearing a stetson and a shirt of material in the pattern of the Lone Star flag, which you would think might have helped identify a person who had come all the way from Texas, as advertised on facebook.

We buy more drinks and go back upstairs, all seven of us this time. There's Sue and Kirsten, then three blokes I don't know. They look familiar in the same way as someone on a TV show can occasionally look familiar, but that's it.

I sit next to Sue. 'So how have you been?'

'Fine.' She regards me as a complete stranger; or worse than a complete stranger. It's that look of fear or even distrust in anticipation of the next question making everything horrible and awkward. Had I asked hey baby, what star-sign are you? her reaction probably wouldn't have been much different.

'You don't remember me, do you?'

'I'm afraid I don't.'

'I don't even look a little familiar?'

'Sorry.'

Sue is the person whom I was looking forward to seeing, knowing she would almost certainly be in attendance. We had been friends, and if not actually buddy-buddy, certainly more than merely acquainted.

'I used to live at the Square in Leeds village.'

'Right.'

'You remember Jane, your best friend for at least a year?'

'I remember Jane.'

'You used to come over to see us. I cooked a couple of times, or tried to cook. You sent me postcards from the Lake District that one summer.'

'I remember the Square in Leeds, but I don't remember you living there.' She pauses, uncomfortable. 'So what are you doing these days?'

Like you give a shit, I think, you don't even fucking know who I am. I mumble something which is reciprocated with a brief summary of her own life as a vaguely successful printmaker, and I am reminded of how little I ever had in common with most of those people at art college, people who stand in one room high street art galleries describing something or other as very interesting, people who go all misty-eyed over the shipping forecast on Radio 4, people who met this really amazing old guy on the side of a mountain in Baja California…

By the same token, I have no memory of the three middle-aged blokes on the other side of me. It turns out they were in the year below me and the painting department. I never really had much to do with anyone in the painting department.

Then there's Kirsten who remembers me well, which is gratifying because I remember her well. She's very funny, very dry, and a couple of the more sarcastic one liners and zingers in my arsenal probably came from her. It's a joy to see her again, as I suspected it would be. It doesn't really seem like a whole lot of time has passed. Inevitably we talk about Charlie, because he and Kirsten shared a house, and I seem to be the only one of us who kept in touch with him.

'He was the only student I ever met who turned up on the day he moved in with an ironing board - bless him.' She's laughing but it's an affectionate laugh.

'Who was this?' Sue asks.

'Charlie Adlard,' three of us chorus.

The name rings no bell, and of course she hasn't heard of the Walking Dead. Someone explains it to her, and why Charlie is now more famous than the rest of us put together, including Traci Emin, another Maidstone graduate.

Sue zips off to catch a train back to the south coast, and I begin to feel less irritable. The rest of us talk and drink for another hour, mostly like strangers who've only just met because that's mostly what we are. I manage to squeeze out another hour of conversation about our having shared the same geographical coordinates some three decades ago, and then I limp back to the tube station with Carl. The past couple of hours seem to have reproduced my experience of art college in microcosm with surprising fidelity.

Children of Abraham I

Byron's invite stated quite clearly that he was expecting guests to make a bit of effort with their costumes this year, and he'd said more or less the same directly to Bess. Last year's Halloween party had been poorly attended due to torrential subtropical rain. I recall about eight of us showing up and I was wearing a sardonic t-shirt purchased from the local supermarket bearing the slogan this is my costume. I like to think that I was playfully questioning the medium of the Halloween party, obliging it to examine itself in a post-structuralist context, but I guess Byron didn't see it that way.

'Fuck it,' I said to myself whilst cycling to McAllister Park on the Wednesday morning. 'Why not?'

I don't really do fancy dress, or parties for that matter; and when I've made an exception I've historically regretted it, or at least spent most of the time wishing I were somewhere else. I once turned up to a costume party thrown by my friend Carl in work clothes. I was a postman at the time so I just wore the uniform, telling anyone who asked that I'd come as Sid James as seen in Carry On Postman, embellishing the conceit with an impersonation of Sid's distinctive laugh; and in case anyone feels inclined to check, no, regrettably there was never any such film as Carry On Postman.

On the other hand - so ran my train of thought on the aforementioned Wednesday morning - being fifty, I'd long since forgotten what the problem had been, so fuck it.

Cycling back from McAllister Park, I stopped to have a look around the local Goodwill, a charity shop large enough to house several fighter jets, should Randolph Air Force Base be having a spring clean. I figured I'd see something ridiculous which I could buy and wear, or which might at least provide inspiration. I saw a few decent looking suit jackets and a large cuddly tiger with such a winning smile that I found it really difficult to leave the store without buying him, but otherwise nothing seemed to suggest itself.

On the other side of the parking lot from HEB - the local supermarket to which I was ultimately headed - I noticed that an ordinarily vacant retail premises had once again been turned into a Halloween store. Once again because this is a yearly occurrence, the retail equivalent of tumbleweed or those fish suddenly born to puddles formed in the desert after rainfall, living just long enough to leave fertilised eggs drying in the mud, ready for next year's wet season. The Halloween store was full of costumes - Abraham Lincoln, Snooki from Jersey Shore, Spiderman; for just fifty dollars or thereabouts I might be instantly transformed into any of these through the magic of flimsy one-shot items of clothing and related accessories secured by elastic. I'd never been in this kind of store, so I found it weird and fascinating. I had no intention of purchasing one of these complete pre-packaged party identities. I was planning to improvise my costume, whatever it was. I just needed inspiration, some prop I could combine with whatever I already had at home.

The prop turned out to be a fake turban and a long grey false beard provided so as to effect transformation into a person of Indian or perhaps Arabic decent, a Muslim, you know - one of those people. Ignoring the obvious alarm bells, I decided I could combine these props with a kaftan and goatskin sandals brought back from Morocco and attend the party as Osama bin Laden. I made my purchase, then picked up a pack of party balloons in HEB along with the usual groceries.

Once home, I inflated one of the balloons and spent a day or two turning it into a bomb by means of papier mâché, acrylic paint, and a length of twine - specifically the kind of bomb wielded by villains in silent cinema or the Spy vs. Spy cartoons in Mad magazine, an ominous black sphere with a fuse and the word bomb painted across it in block capitals.

Next day I picked up an assault rifle from Walmart, a child's toy costing ten dollars. It was bright green and came as part of Kid Connection's Military Action Play Set recommended for ages five and upwards. I think it was supposed to light up and make a noise but the batteries were dead. I stood in the store reading the box.

Kid Connection toys are kid-approved and built for fun. Easy to understand with no complicated instructions, these durable toys keep you and your children happy. Day after day, smile after smile.

It's a fucking gun, I thought, which had obviously also occurred to the good people at Kid Connection:

Warning: This product may be mistaken for an actual firearm by law enforcement officers and others. Altering any state or federal required marking or coloration in order to make products appear more realistic and/or brandishing or displaying the product in public is dangerous and may be a crime.

To be honest, this bright green plastic toy was about as unrealistic a firearm as could be imagined without actually being the inflatable M16 I'd seen in the Halloween store marketed as Tony Montana's weapon of choice from Scarface; and in a country where Andre Burgess was shot by a federal agent whilst brandishing a gun which turned out to be the silver wrapper of a Three Musketeers candy bar, is it really going to make any difference?

The assault rifle came with a tiny plastic hand grenade and a similarly bright green handgun. It lacked any sort of carrying strap so I improvised one from velcro and the detachable strap of a holdall. Next day I noticed a far superior kiddie assault rifle in less lurid colours on sale in HEB for the same price. Aware of how seriously I was beginning to take this project, I didn't buy it.

I told my wife I was going to the party as Osama bin Laden, showing her the novelty turban and beard. She seemed initially shocked, then amused. 'Wouldn't you say that's a bit er...'

'I'm not going to black up, if that's where you think I'm headed.'

'Well, if you're sure.'

I'd considered all of this, wondering what distinguished me from minor royals dressed as Nazi stormtroopers on the cover of the Daily Mail. The point was shock and chuckles, I told myself just as Prince Gingerbollocks had doubtless told himself; but I've known many turbaned gentlemen, some of them Muslim, and I quite like Islam on the whole, in an admittedly wishy-washy liberal sense. I suppose I might potentially piss off the more redneck elements of the party, this being Texas and all - disgruntled fatties I imagined stumbling angrily towards me mumbling something about the twin towers and how I damn well better respect something or other. I suppose I liked this idea. Not to intellectualise a Halloween costume, but the problem with the political climate in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Centre as I see it is that Osama bin Laden is remembered as a cackling mediaeval demon, a silent cinema caricature clutching a comedy bomb and twirling his moustache. He hated us and that's all we need to know. God forbid that we should ever try to understand the situation, or what drives those we term terrorists to do what they do, or that we should recognise a political landscape of any complexity greater than what you'll find in a Batman comic.

So that's what I told myself.

'I wasn't going to bother,' Bess said, 'but now I feel I have to make the effort.'

Saturday arrives and we attend the party as Osama bin Laden with his bomb and his bright green assault rifle, and Mrs. bin Laden by virtue of a burqa my wife has improvised from various scarves. I have my bright green handgun in a shoulder bag along with four bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale.

Junior wears his gas mask, a hooded cloak, and a novelty AC/DC t-shirt featuring not images of the Australian heavy rock band but Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. He tells us that he is Timeshare Man, which is something derived from his own private mythology. About a year ago he took to asking people if they would like to buy a timeshare, because he finds it hilarious for reasons which probably make sense when you're twelve.

'Would you like to know where the timeshare came from?' he asked us one day in tones promising a rare glimpse into the mind of a comedy genius.

'Yes,' we said. 'Please tell us.'

He described his hiding behind some door at school, then asking the next person to open the door whether or not they would like to buy a timeshare. I started to explain that this was simply an account of the first instance of his cracking the supposed joke and as such provided little insight into either its origination or why he considered it funny, but I gave up, recognising my enquiry as pointless. Junior does what he does unburdened by either disingenuous humility or an excess of self-awareness, and it's just how he is. It's not uncommon for his jokes to be supplemented with spoken appendices regarding how funny they were and how well he told them.

I really liked it when I said that.
 
Byron has as usual gone to obsessional lengths to decorate his house with the trappings of Halloween, and no rubbish either. The front room is a clutter of animated skulls, tiny haunted houses dispensing ghoulish noises, portrait paintings which become skeletal at a specific angle. Junior's contribution is the question would you like to buy a timeshare? painted on the door to the bathroom, and now here he is to complete the picture in his gas mask and his cloak and his hood, making hilarious sense mainly to himself. I'd suggest he's come as the general concept of trying too hard, but I don't wish to seem uncharitable given how much pleasure this bewildering timeshare schtick obviously brings him.

It turns out that Roger has come as a pimp - purple suit with zebra pattern trimmings and a huge floppy hat. There's something which makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable about the only black man at the party having dressed as an ethnic stereotype, but maybe that's what he was going for. He mentions something about Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch but it's okay. I get it, and I appreciate that it somehow takes the heat off me. No-one is going to expect either of us to explain ourselves, because it's a Halloween party not a thread on a self-important internet bulletin board.

It's only just gone six, still light, and not many people here, so we make our way out onto the decking and talk to Byron's parents and his brother. Byron's parents, for the sake of reference, may represent the closest I've come to meeting real life Ewings - as seen on the television show Dallas during the days of Ron and Nancy. Their fortune is founded on oil somewhere back in the depths of time, but there the resemblance more or less ends. They're sharp, quick-witted but personable, and despite that they might legitimately regard me as some sort of cuckoo rather than a mere stepfather, they seem to think I'm great. Jay, the brother, has been living in Austin whilst studying for what I understand to be a position in the Episcopalian Church. I ask him how it's been going. His answer seems to take the form of a protest, although I'm not sure against what because I don't quite follow what he's telling me beyond that no, he's not yet doing whatever vicars do full-time.

Bruce and Lori turn up as respectively a demon and an angel, personifying a moral balance which Lori probably jeopardises whilst allowing me to cadge a ciggie. Time has passed and it's dark and we're all gathered under the trellises Byron has built in the rear part of the garden. He's growing grape vines up the supports. He's going to make wine, and in keeping with the ambience I'm on my second bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. It's going to my head because I don't ordinarily drink so much, or even at all. I don't smoke either, but I ask Lori if she can spare one because the moment seems right. I spend a second wondering what the acceptable American for gi's a fag might be, knowing it almost certainly won't be that. I'm unable to recall any scene of Humphrey Bogart helpfully scrounging snouts, so I try could you spare a cigarette, which is a bit like buddy, can you spare a dime?

It works, and thankfully I don't enjoy smoking it anything like as much as I thought I would, which at least means that this isn't me relapsing.

Bruce has turned himself into a demon simply by affixing two small horns to his forehead with adhesive. The horns really suit him, which is weird, although it's probably fitting that he's now telling us about some home brewed alcoholic concoction known by the delightful name of Thunderfuck.

'What's Everclear?' I ask, recognising the brand name from somewhere. 'Is that pure alcohol?'

Turner, who seems to know about these things, nods. My guess came from the context in that we seem to be talking about moonshine, or something like it, relating anecdotal instances of its distillation by agency of Everclear. I assume it's like the bottle of pure alcohol I nicked from the college chemistry department so I could clean the workings of my tape recorder, but it's alcohol brewed from corn and sold for human consumption in all but the nine states which have banned it.

Bruce made a batch of something called Thunderfuck at some point of his college years, and everyone else sat at the table beneath the trellis has a similar story.

I make it through a third Newcastle Brown and realise I'm drunk, or at least more light headed than I've been in years. It's quite a nice feeling, but it also means I'm done for the evening. Thankfully my wife is similarly partied out so we gather up Timeshare Man and head home. The hour, which we anticipate as being around ten or eleven in the evening, is half past eight. I've spent just two-and-a-half hours as Osama bin Laden, and it was a lot of fun.