Englishmen (pl.) in Texas

When I first got here, my wife feared that, deprived of the companionship of my own countrymen, I might wither on the vine. Whenever she heard of some English guy in the vicinity she would joke about setting up a playdate so we could meet and talk about Coronation Street and figgy pudding, or something. This was how I met Clive, whom Bess encountered through Toastmasters. Toastmasters was a lunchtime club at her place of work to which she found herself volunteered. It sounded a little like a writers group, but a writers group specialising in after dinner speeches, motivational or otherwise, and as such an unfortunately significant draw for those who enjoy the sound of their own voice without necessarily having much to say. On one occasion of my being away in England, Bess went to some Toastmasters weekend in Houston for the sake of something to do, and there she met Clive.

'He's English,' she told me, clearly energised by the discovery, 'and he lives in San Antonio!'

Clive and I met at La Madeleine, the French style bakery and cafe. It turned out that he was originally from Eastwood, the town in which D.H. Lawrence grew up. He had childhood memories of a few more ancient neighbours scowling about how that young David Herbert had been a rum bugger and no mistake. As an admirer of D.H. Lawrence, I found this quite exciting. Clive was in San Antonio because, like me, he'd married an American. He'd recently bought a disused diner which he was planning to reopen as a hot dog restaurant.

That's all I can recall of Clive. He seemed like a nice guy, but I'm just not very sociable and we didn't stay in touch, possibly because there was never any strong reason to do so. His diner remains vacant. Each time Bess and I drive past, we wonder what happened, and then why anyone would consider a hot dog restaurant a good idea.

There have been others, but once we've established our shared point of origin, there hasn't usually been much else to be said; possibly excepting Chris, another person my wife met through her job. Chris was from Catford in south-east London, specifically from an address to which I almost certainly delivered mail at some point during the early nineties, so that was funny. Chris is all right, but he's about ten years younger than I am with very different priorities.

The celebrated writer Michael Moorcock spends some of the year at his American home in Bastrop county, which is about an hour's drive. I've read and enjoyed plenty of his novels, and we communicate on facebook, but otherwise I'm a bit too starstruck to introduce myself directly; besides which I'm told he tends to avoid the company of expatriate English people. I'm beginning to see why.

Malcolm is Brook's long-distance boyfriend. They met on the internet and now he's flown all this way to visit her, so we simply have to meet - as everyone keeps telling us. Our first exchange is on facebook, through Brook. I tell him Newcastle Brown Ale can be purchased from HEB, our local supermarket chain. I tell him this because American beer is undrinkable, and it's the sort of information I would appreciate were I in his shoes.

Newcastle Brown Ale is even worse than American beer, he tells me with what I imagine to be a sneer. He prefers Pabst.

This places me in the position of fearing that I have become a real ale bore whilst resenting what felt like Malcolm telling me to stick my friendly advice up my arse, whilst additionally resenting the retort on the grounds that Pabst is fucking awful, the 8-Ace of the Americas.

'I haven't even met the bloke,' I grumble to Bess, 'and I already think he's a dick.'

Nevertheless we meet, and much to my relief he seems okay. He works in the oil business and travels the world as part of his job. He's visited the United States many times before, so I can see my attempted friendly advice may have seemed condescending. He's from the north-east and therefore speaks with one of my all-time favourite regional accents. He has none of the abrasive quality I had begun to anticipate.

On the other hand, he begins a sentence with the words, 'one thing your Mr. Trump has got right…'

I have two bikes so I invite him to come over and join me for my daily twenty miles. He's clearly into exercise and agrees because it will be fun.

The morning comes and he's at my house at the agreed time, having jogged three or four miles from where Brook lives. Clearly I don't have to worry about whether he'll be able to keep up.

I make him a cup of tea - something I don't get to do very often - and we talk; or rather Malcolm talks. I don't even know how he got onto the subject, but it's something about long distance relationships. He once had one with another American, someone in the north-east. She told him she would be seeing other people in between his visits.

'That's how women are,' he tells me. 'They're all like that. I don't care what anyone says.'

'Okay,' I submit, before abruptly changing the subject.

He picks the mountain bike and we head out. He doesn't seem to experience any confusion regarding which side of the road we should take, which is a relief. We cycle a mile or so to Holbrook, then onto the Tobin Trail, leaving the traffic behind. He cycles at my side and talks. I realise there's been no point during which he's shut up since he arrived thirty minutes ago. He's been talking all this time. I'm not even sure what about.

His work takes him all over the world.

He's been to Mexico several times, specifically to Tampico. He was reluctant to sample much of the night life due to the visible presence of the drug cartel, something beginning with s, whatever they're called...

'The Sinaloa Cartel,' I suggest.

'That's the fellah.'

We cycle to Los Patios, then on to Morningstar Boardwalk. He says hello to everyone we pass. Some respond. Some don't. I recall how I too greeted almost everyone I met when I first came here.

We're off the boardwalk, heading for the bridge at Wetmore, then up the hill, and all the while he's been talking. He never fucking shuts up. Yap yap yap the whole bleeding time.

We come to McAllister Park, and we're back to sharing the thoroughfare with the occasional truck. I realise - as just such a vehicle approaches - that I've been in the middle of the road, politely attending to Malcolm's never ending monologue.

Blah blah blah…

I pull back and slip to the side of the road to get out of the way, but as I do so, Malcolm inexplicably turns right. My front wheel grinds into the gear assembly of the mountain bike he's riding and I'm off.

'Oh fucking hell,' I scream.

I land on a knee and an elbow and roll onto my back in the grit. He's shouting oh no and I'm so sorry.

We gather ourselves together in a daze. The gears on the mountain bike look fucked, but the wheel is good so we should be okay; except my front tire is somehow flat, which makes no fucking sense at all.

I fitted both bikes with brand new tires and tubes about two weekends back. We push the bikes over to the picnic area. I invert mine and make ready with the puncture repair kit.

'I'm so sorry, Lawrence.'

'Yeah.'

I try to pump up the tire but it's not having it, and I realise the valve has somehow torn itself away from the tube during the collision. 'How the fuck does that even happen?'

'Do you have a spare inner tube?'

'No. I'll have to call Bess, get her to pick us up.'

There's a station wagon parked across the way. The guy comes over. Just what we need.

'You need help.'

'No, you're all right, mate.'

'You're not from around here?'

'No,' we both answer.

'Where you from? Australia?'

'England,' Malcolm tells him.

I'm saying nothing because I'm not having this fucking conversation again given that I actually live here, and anyway I'm trying to call Bess.

'What's up?'

'We've had an accident.'

'Oh no!'

'Can you—'

'I can't. You know I have that thing.'

'Shit.' I'd forgotten. 'Maybe—'

'Let me call Byron. He owes me.'

She calls Byron, then Byron calls me, and I try to describe our location. Malcolm is still talking to the driver of the station wagon. I just want the guy to fuck off and leave us alone.

'Byron's going to come and get us.'

'Okay.'

'I have to take Gary to the vet at about three, so I need to get back.'

'I'm so sorry about this, Lawrence. I feel terrible.'

'Don't worry,' I say. 'It's just one of those things. I shouldn't have been so close behind you.'

'I didn't realise that we were going straight on, so I turned.'

'I'm just collecting wood,' the guy from the station wagon announces. He has half a tree in the back of his truck and a branch held in one hand, recently chosen from the ground nearby. He's clearly having a whale of a time. I wish I were at home, having an ordinary day.

There's a huge crater in my arm, just below the elbow, and yet there's no pain beyond a little soreness. I compare it with the other elbow and realise something is very wrong. A few more minutes of flexing leads Malcolm and myself to conclude that it's simply a bruise. The crater is actually the illusion of a dip formed by the side of lump such as you would ordinarily see on the head of the teacher in the Bash Street Kids after Plug, Danny or one of the others has dropped a housebrick on him from a great height; except it's on my elbow.

Byron turns up after about twenty minutes. My directions were not the best. We lift the bikes into the back of his truck and he drives us back into town. Byron's company comes as unusually welcome. He talks, but not constantly, and I at least feel I understand him. He's a known quantity. Malcolm sits mostly silent in the rear seat.

He feels terrible about the accident, and I'm still not convinced it was particularly his fault, but all I can recall is the constant fucking yap yap yap yap blah blah blah…

Byron drops us off at my place. Malcolm leaves after another few minutes. He's not a bad guy, but it will be nice to not have to think about him for a while.

Kids Farting into a Tape Recorder

I date the arrival of my first tape recorder to 1978, and almost certainly to my thirteenth birthday in September of that year. It was a Crown CTR-300, a mono portable and pretty basic, but nonetheless magical so far as I was concerned. Within a couple of weeks I'd got hold of a five pin DIN lead by which I could connect it to our family radio and tape songs from the Top 40 Countdown on Sunday evening, and amongst the first songs I recall having taped were Public Image Ltd's debut single, Germfree Adolescence by X-Ray Spex, and Tommy Gun by the Clash - all prominent around November 1978 according to Wikipedia. I almost certainly recorded other, patently shittier chart toppers during those early efforts to kill music through home-taping - Olivia Newton-John, Sarah Brightman and the like - but some subconscious process tends to select those memories which better allow me to think of my younger self as a cool little dude. I suppose we all do it to a greater or lesser extent.

It's all delusion of course, and I should probably be thankful that my formative recordings were all committed to a single ninety minute cassette, because I was unwilling to save up my pocket money and invest in a second tape; so any regrettable evidence of my once having enjoyed the rocktastic sounds of both Racey and Showaddywaddy were erased within weeks, and by 1979 I'd turned my single C90 into a canvas upon which was painted a moderately more creative effort which I vaguely remember calling Pirate Radio Burton. I'm no longer even sure I actually knew what a pirate radio station was, but I'd picked up the term somewhere and apparently liked the feel of it. I did all of the voices and played all of the characters, executing ham-fisted pre-pubescent parodies of things I'd seen on television, and it was shite, but even at the age of thirteen I understood my branding it pirate radio to be an ingenious acknowledgement of it being shite, which paradoxically made it even funnier, so I believed. Of the great and subsequently lost tonnage of comedy gold submitted to my crumbling overworked 129 metres of ferric oxide, all I can recall was a wry satirical sideways glance at the Cadbury's Flake advert from the telly comprising my attempt to sing the only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate refrain, concluding with a racist observation likening the chocolate bar to a specific kind of penis; and because it was still the seventies and I was thirteen and nothing like so witty as I believed myself to be, I stood in our kitchen, proudly holding the tape recorder as I played Pirate Radio Burton to my mother, all twenty minutes of it including the racist penis joke. She laughed, although with hindsight I suspect it was probably uncomfortable laughter.

At least I was doing something creative, I suppose.

Eventually I graduated to more considered works, notably a semi-pornographic take on Keith Michell's Captain Beaky alternating the trumpet break lifted directly from the record with my spoken verses, toilet-humoured variations on the original turned to the cause of amusingly slanderous allegations made against my friend Gordon. By 1980, possibly due to an increase in pocket money, I had also graduated to the habit of buying a new cassette tape when I wanted to record something, in preference to adding another notionally archaeological layer to my long-suffering C90; and I took to making covers for these tapes, turning my felt-tipped pens to the design of amusingly titled compilations such as Songs for the Hard of Thinking.

Well, possibly not that amusingly titled, as I realised even at the time. Songs for the Hard of Thinking had a second and final volume before I switched to a new series of compilations of stuff taped off the radio under the banner of The Illegal Tapes as a witty challenge to the home-taping is killing music lobby - who seemed to be kicking up quite a fuss at the time - inlay cards rendered with Jamie Reid style ransom note lettering to show them I meant business. The Illegal Tapes volume one kicked off with a Simple Minds live set recorded from In Concert on Saturday 19th July 1980. This time I would get it right, I told myself: my own private library of free music, and only the cool stuff - no Racey, no Matchbox, and definitely no fucking Barron Knights. Novelty records were behind me now, given that I was a big boy and nearly fifteen, although my good stuff was not so Cromwellian a term as to exclude episodes of The Burkiss Way as broadcast on BBC Radio 4, a weekly comedy show which was actually funny despite the possibility of having provided some of the inspiration for Pirate Radio Burton. I've a vague feeling that the name the Pre-War Busconductors may have derived from The Burkiss Way, specifically from Fred Harris dully intoning an increasingly ludicrous itinerary of invented band names in parody of John Peel.

Regarding the Pre-War Busconductors, I was up to the eighth volume of The Illegal Tapes and for no reason I can remember, it occurred to me that it would be fun to take my tape recorder around to Grez's house and to record ourselves making a noise. Santa had furnished me with an acoustic guitar the previous Christmas, and Grez had been teaching me to play a few things - Babylon's Burning or Kings of the Wild Frontier plucked out on single strings.

Grez was in my class at school, and had weened me off the same four Beatles records by lending me a Devo album, which freaked me out at first but was ultimately for the best. I got to know Grez a little better and began to make regular trips to his house to listen to Stranglers albums, which was how I met Pete, a boy from the year above our own at school, and who lived in the same street as Grez. One evening I called around on Grez and found himself and Pete sat at the living room table inventing bands. They had exercise books and were drawing album covers for groups existing entirely in their own imaginations, chronologically ordered catalogues encompassing line-up changes, singles, b-sides and so on. I probably should have found it strange, but it seemed in some way related to my Songs for the Hard of Thinking compilations. Clearly it was some intensely personal thing, possibly not unlike having imaginary friends, and yet neither Pete nor Grez seemed particularly troubled that I had caught them engaged with such an indulgence.

On Saturday the 13th of September 1980, all of the above factors came together with our forming a band. We were around Grez's house. It was pissing with rain, too wet to do anything outside. We had instruments and it seemed like it might be fun, and the name Pre-War Busconductors had lodged in my head from somewhere or other. To be specific I recall the entire undertaking as having been my idea, as something to which I recruited the other two, but then it was a long time ago and most likely I'm remembering it wrong.

We had an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a semi-acoustic bass owned by Grez's older brother who never seemed to be around enough to object to our borrowing it. Also, Grez had an ITT Combat radio which came with its own microphone and could be used as an amplifier. It wasn't particularly loud, but we could produce a terrific overdriven din by placing the microphone inside the guitar. Somehow we also had a pair of drumsticks acquired from somewhere with which we bashed away at a drum kit assembled from whatever was to hand - cardboard boxes, an upturned biscuit tin, Grez's space hopper, and an Action Man assault craft - basically a big solid lump of injection-moulded plastic in the shape of a rubber dingy for your action figures - which made a great snare drum. The first problem we encountered was that we couldn't really play, although we didn't see this as either a problem or even necessarily relevant. Grez could handle a few hesitant chords - enough to hammer out something at least bearing passing resemblance to a tune; I could manage notes on one string, and if our collective sense of rhythm was a bit on the undeveloped side, we made up for it by enthusiastically failing to give a shit. More significantly, Pete could really sing and was spontaneously funny.

He was an unusual child, always seeming confident and quick witted, but occasionally he would overload and effect transformation into some kind of human jack-in-the-box, refusing to communicate in anything but siren noises and generally running riot. One of the most vivid episodes ended with myself and Grez stood in his driveway, both watching Pete bouncing up and down on a spacehopper on the garage roof whilst serenading us with a song comprising mostly bleeping noises. Grez was going wild because his parents were due home any moment.

Meanwhile back on that wet September afternoon, we'd just pressed play and record. Grez thrashed out an uneasy sequence of bar chords. I plucked out random arrhythmic notes on his brother's bass whilst singing in the voice of a thick person, like the little man from Monty Python with the knotted handkerchief on his head, or some skinhead grunting away on a television documentary. Diligently dropping my aitches, I made up the words as I went along, words which were repeated and even harmonised with embellishments by the astonishingly soulful Pete. This is punk at its worst, he half-sang, half-boasted as we came to the end of a chorus, and it was. That was the whole idea.

We all read Sounds music paper every week. Grez and Pete read Grez's brother's copy, and I'd been buyin' one for meself since about February; and if there was one fing we agreed upon it was 'ow much we enjoyed Garry Bushell's articles, albeit for the wrong reasons. For the most part we listened to the sort of music which Bushell 'ated, but nevertheless found ourselves drawn to his enthusiastic Alf Garnett-style traditional workin' class knees-up themed reviews of the Cockney Rejects, Angelic Upstarts, and others associated with Oi! music, as it 'ad become known. We were fifteen years of age, rustic, and clueless, but even we could see there was somethin' weird and 'ence immensely entertainin' in Bushell's testimony and the world 'e described as though terrified that anyone might ever mistake 'is little 'ooligan scene for anything posh, poofy or otherwise stuck up. Each time 'e set pen to paper, 'alf the word count was taken up wiv some wheedling testament to 'ow these boys weren't afraid to kick in a few 'eads if they didn't like the look of you, just so that we'd know his lads were the real fing and would put you in fackin' 'otspital, you caaaant; usually followed by disclaimers of 'ow they loved their mums and wouldn't 'urt a fly, and it was just workin' class culture wunnit, and it definitely ain't racist or nuffink to love yor country. He told us the Cockney Rejects were the best band he'd heard in two years and then quoted the lyrics, the immortal words:

I like punk and I like Sham,
I got nicked over West Ham.

Something about those two lines from Police Car entertained the living shit out of us, and I don't think it was just us either. I've since met people who've never heard a note of the Cockney Rejects, yet who are nevertheless familiar with that couplet. One evening we saw Oliver - one of the older kids who now worked at Discovery Records in Stratford-on-Avon - staggering home from the pub with a friend, singing those same lines from Police Car over and over, then muttering bloody brilliant and collapsing with laughter.

Of course, we all liked punk, and I for one liked Sham 69 and still play their records today; and it wasn't that we were better than the Cockney Rejects, or that there was anything wrong with good, honest, stupid fun, or that rock lyrics had to suggest something dripped from the quill of Shakespeare himself; but Police Car was just a bit too fucking stupid for its own good, and then there was Bushell trying far too hard with his desperate impersonation of a Cockney barrow boy, and this whole idea of taking pride in being a thick fucker, a position with which we were painfully well acquainted at school on a daily basis. We just couldn't not take the piss.

Accordingly I can't even bring myself to name our first ever song because the whole thing was horribly racist, and that was the point of it. We were trying to make something so stupid that even Bushell would have sighed, shaken his head in despair, and dismissed us with an amusingly witless quip about our being about as much use as a copy of Men Only in Larry Grayson's dressing room. I listen to the song now and it sounds like badly executed Alf Garnett, and I doubt anyone could ever take the words on face value; but it will nevertheless stay under wraps because even taking all of this into account, our first ever song remains uncomfortable listening. We were fifteen and had grown up in rural Warwickshire in the seventies, and there were two black kids at our school of about six-hundred. Black faces were not particularly common on British television, and although Pete, Grez and myself shared an inherent understanding of racism as essentially absurd and we listened to music by black artists, a certain lack of cultural sensitivity came with our environment. Racism seemed ridiculous and was therefore funny to us because we had no experience of it. I had learned nothing since that Flake advert on Pirate Radio Burton.

Five years later, my friend Garreth came to see me at the house in which I lived in the village of Otham, Kent. He was looking through my cassette tapes, all the Pre-War Busconductors albums with the hand-drawn artwork.

'What's this?' he asked, bewildered. He'd picked out the tape carrying the title which shall remain nameless, its general concept illustrated on the cover by four cartoon Pre-War Busconductors in smiling Al Jolson tribute, jazz hands and bones through noses above the somewhat unconvincing promise, a pisstake of racism.

'It's a piss-take of racism,' I explained unconvincingly, trying as hard as I could to sound casual, as though I hadn't just been rumbled. 'Like those skinhead bands, that sort of thing.'

I longed for the ground to swallow me whole, and in case it isn't obvious, Garreth was black.

'I understand,' he said, and I felt terrible - a king-sized arsehole.

I spoke about this to friends some years later, and it turns out that almost anyone of my generation and background who was ever in a band went through a phase of shocking Bushell-inspired ironic skinhead anthems.

The second song the Pre-War Busconductors ever recorded - just a few minutes later - was executed in much the same spirit of militant stupidity as the first, but thankfully without invoking Oi the Elephant in the Room. This elephant was Little Blue, the star of his own animated children's cartoon series who had taken his mummy's fountain pen and broken it in two. The ink had squirted in the water, as the theme song reported, staining him blue in colour, hence the title, with predictably hilarious consequences. I'd never seen the show and had no idea of the tune - which admittedly didn't make much difference - but Grez had, and he improvised an impressively nihilistic adaptation of the lyrics.

Little Blue, Little Blue,
Farting in the bath as some of us do,
He pulled out the plug and he got sucked down,
He couldn't swim so he had to drown.
The blood it spurted in the coffin - wow!
His mummy's got a dead boy noooooooow.....

We came up with two further tracks - a pitiful cover of the Stranglers' In the Shadows and something called Sodding Off - and that was our first session, immediately followed on volume eight of The Illegal Tapes by a couple of Jam singles I'd borrowed from Grez, When You're Young and The Eton Rifles. Playing back the tape and hearing our own clanking efforts alongside proper music like you would get on the radio seemed to legitimise what we were doing, and so we carried on, reconvening the very next day at my house to thrash out another four songs, notably a terrifying cover of the theme song for the children's show You and Me. Somehow it felt as though what we were doing was important, and it clearly wasn't just some one-off experiment.

We got together most weekends at whichever house contained the fewer parents and began to build up a body of work; and the more I listened back to our efforts, the better they sounded; and I realised it would make sense to have everything on one cassette. I borrowed Grez's tape recorder, plumbed it into mine with my five pin DIN lead, and copied all we had thus far recorded onto a single C90. This was to be our first album, and we came to this decision without being aware of the wider independent cassette scene which was just getting into gear at around the same time. I decided my tape label would be called Busconductor Records, and got out my felt-tipped pens and set to work on a cover.

In December we acquired a fourth member, Eggy who was in the same class as Grez and myself and had begun to wonder why we never seemed to be around at the weekend. He wasn't particularly musical, but it wasn't like he could make it any worse. We remained more or less a complete fucking racket for the first six months - enthusiastically cacophonous covers of whatever we felt like taking the piss out of, everything from the usual kid's show theme songs to the BeeGees' Tragedy; or potentially libellous songs about people at school; or further Bushell-inspired stupidity. Usually there was a tune tucked away in there somewhere behind the sound of something being banged hard to a rhythm more closely associated with home improvement than music; and usually there was some less melodic accompaniment, one of us honking away on the harmonica or similar. We would take it in turns to sing, depending on who had the most inspiration, and usually either Pete or Grez were the best at this, both having a better developed sense of surrealism than either Eggy or myself, even genuine wit you might call it; and so it didn't matter too much when Pete decided to sing an entirely different song to the one we'd apparently been playing, often a freshly improvised eulogy to the impressive girth of that which could be found within his trousers. Even pausing the performance to fart directly into the tape recorder made little difference to the thematic integrity of our songs.

The sum of the parts may have sounded a little less like a complete fucking racket were it not for our approach to mixing which amounted to each one of us trying to be either louder than the other three, or else nearest to the tape recorder; and the occasional disruption of proceedings by the intrusion of something so fucking funny it just couldn't wait: me yelling nipple blue into the condensing microphone as we recorded Little Blue for one example, which was funny because of tits, and because it sounded a bit like the title of the song. Nipples are rude, you see. This was why Pete and Grez were more suited to vocal duties than myself.

The elevated musicality of Grez and Pete was rudely illustrated when they went solo, breaking away as a duo under the name of the Desolate Accountants. Specifically it was Saturday the 15th of November, and we'd planned to convene as the Pre-War Busconductors, except I'd gone to the local cinema to see Breaking Glass at the last minute leaving the other two to their own devices - Eggy not yet having joined at that point. Desolate Accountants recordings were less raucous than those of the Pre-War Busconductors, and surprisingly musical in places because Grez could actually play and Pete could genuinely sing. Of all the cacophonous crap ever committed to tape by any combination of the four of us, the Desolate Accountants were the lot you might get away with pressing onto vinyl and selling to people, and in our small private universe their formation seemed to mean that we were not merely a band, but an actual scene. No longer feeling obliged to spontaneously piss about only when all members were present and incorrect, Grez and I recorded together as AA Book of the Road, and with Eggy as Half a Pound of Pork Sausages; and once Eggy had joined the Pre-War Busconductors, we rebranded the original three man line-up as Eddy & the Ogdens and recorded a series of Coronation Street themed cassettes.

Having acquired a second mono portable tape recorder - specifically a Panasonic RQ2106 - I was now able to bounce terrible quality backing tracks from tape to tape to produce my own multilayered solo material as the Post-War Busconductors, just like that Brian Eno. Grez similarly took to solo work as the Anthropod Lithontriptic Band, producing songs which, if poor in terms of recording quality, nevertheless still sound good today, at least to me. He was developing a definite style with the guitar and he really knew how to string a tune together, often using chords of his own invention; and it helped that he was witty, and that he really understood the romance of stupid:

Don't wanna take no exams.
Don't wanna take no CSE.
I just wanna break things,
And have bricks chucked at me.

Don't wanna know no long words.
Don't wanna learn to spell.
Every other word I say,
Is usually fucking hell.

Don't wanna live in a loony bin,
Or any snobs' place like that.
I just wanna smash in windows,
And go round being a prat.

This could have been half the kids at our school, and singing about it kept us sane.

The first Pre-War Busconductors album was completed in February 1981 and was named Little Blue after the cartoon elephant. I drew a cover, and Pete made a copy for himself, duplicating my cover in his own somewhat neater hand - it being another few months before any of us discovered the magic of the photocopiers which had only just begun to turn up in public libraries and the offices of estate agents. Neither Grez nor Eggy seemed too bothered about having  copies of our work, presumably preferring the performance. I on the other hand began to ruthlessly archive everything we did, even paying a few quid for the original tapes of the first two Desolate Accountants albums when Pete and Grez decided that they weren't very good and that they might as well record over them.

After the Sex Pistols, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, and all that self-aware Jamie Reid artwork, I'd become obsessed with the idea of music as mythology - for want of a better way of putting it - as an art form divorced from its own creation. The Pre-War Busconductors weren't so important as the understanding of ourselves as important, regardless of how scatalogically ludicrous the songs may have been - when you could even call them songs; and so I kept a copy of everything.

We recorded a traditional disappointing second album which was called PWBII, and then a third, by which point we had somehow began to develop rudimentary musical qualities. Grez was playing well, and I was at about the level of musicianship at which Grez had been when we started - good enough to pluck out a rough bass line on the Teisco electric guitar I'd bought for a tenner from Andy Scrivener down the sportsfield. Inevitably we began to play live concerts, although to be fair these concerts differed only from the studio recordings in so much as that we all cheered, clapped and whistled at the end of the songs, impersonating an audience, shouting out requests to ourselves and then introducing the next one as being a little something off our new album. Sometimes there would be a double bill of the Desolate Accountants and the Pre-War Busconductors, keeping the count of audience, support band, and headline act to just the same four people. The venues were our respective houses, usually when parents had gone out somewhere for the afternoon, although Grez's mum had become something of a regular at both our live performances and studio sessions.

'It's been going on all day and it's far too loud,' she would desperately opine, meaning we knew to limit ourselves to no more than another seven or eight numbers, and probably none of the angrier protest songs like Police Harassment. We always assumed disgruntled, temporarily deafened parents were exaggerating about the volume, and simply wanted to censor us because they were squares and their lives were over whilst we were the kids on the street with something to say, until one day, as the Desolate Accountants played live in the spare room of my house, I wandered out into our garden to see how much I could hear from out there. The spare room was on the top floor of a three story house, with only a small air vent in the wall overlooking the garden. Pete and Grez were playing acoustic instruments, without amplification, and yet somehow - even from about fifty yards distance through a thick wall - it sounded like angry giants fighting in a scrap yard, albeit marginally more tuneful.

Aside from the gigs at our respective houses, there were a couple of outdoor events too, one at the Nodder Nest - a secluded corner of the local sportsfield devoted to romantic pursuits, judging by all the spent johnnies - and the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park. It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon as the town geared up for the royal wedding celebrations in the evening, and I kept watch while Pete and Grez vanished into said public lavatory with a guitar and a tape recorder. A moment later, a terrific noise emerged, amplified by the acoustics of ceramic tiles. It was a new song, one specifically tailored to the occasion.

Public bog - the place to be,
Public bog - the public lavatory.
Public bog - the place to be seen.
Public bog - the local latrine.
It really stinks around this place,
And you get peed in the face.

The song lasted about a minute, and then we ran away, laughing like hyaenas. As gigs went, it wasn't quite Elvis at Caesar's Palace, but as performance art it made even the best of them look like wankers.

We kept at it throughout 1981, relentlessly filling one cassette after another, slowly evolving towards a point at which the chaos began to sound almost composed. It wasn't so much that we'd improved as simply discovered our weaknesses and learned how to play to our strengths, such as they were. The songs remained essentially shambolic and puerile, but were easier on the ear in certain respects, and so our ambition increased accordingly - although more in terms of what we were already doing rather than becoming a real band or taking it needlessly seriously. In this adventurous spirit we wrote and recorded The Truth About Croydon, an epic undertaking by our standards spread across three C60s, a trilogy in fact. The Truth About Croydon was our Hard Day's Night, our Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, except it was on cassette tape rather than film for obvious reasons. The Truth About Croydon was partially autobiographical and mythologised the story of the Pre-War Busconductors, our formation and rise to imaginary fame, before going off on a traditional quest narrative in which we attempted to track down Simon Jordan, a kid we'd known at school who had supposedly gone to live in Croydon a few years earlier. We played ourselves as well as most of the other characters, but for the occasional bemused parent drafted in for lacklustre readings of it's been going on all day and it's far too loud, or my mum helping to recreate the historic phone call of that fateful day when Grez called and she had to tell him that I'd gone to see Breaking Glass. Of course there were songs - seminal numbers from the early days of the group for the historical section, then songs about what was happening within the story, new material for the fans - that being ourselves - effectively classifying the undertaking as musical theatre.

The Pre-War Busconductors became our identity, the closest thing we had to being in a gang. It gave us purpose, and of course an endless supply of jokes which only the four of us understood. Writing exercises in both French and English at school became marginally more engaging when we found ways to sneak in some mention of our band. If word didn't exactly get around, a few selected kids borrowed one of the two existing copies of Little Blue, although I don't really remember what they thought of it; excepting Steve Harris who apparently thought enough of it to join the band, becoming the potential fifth member but for only appearing at a couple of recording sessions; and three decades later my friend Crispin told me he'd always been impressed by my having recorded a song called Nine Inch Turd in the S-Bend.

Inevitably it couldn't last. Pete was the first to go due to his parents moving away. The rest of us carried on for a little bit, limping along with just the three of us but it wasn't the same, and sixteen seemed a bit old to still be thrashing out ironic covers of the Get Up and Go theme music. It was probably for the best in so much as circumstances pulled the plug on the Pre-War Busconductors before we started taking ourselves too seriously and bought real instruments. We sort of kept in touch, but something always seemed to get in the way, possibly ourselves.

By coincidence, Pete and I ended up at the same art college at the other end of the country, by which point he had his friends and I had mine. Grez went to university in London, then ended up dropping out under circumstances I never really liked to ask about given that he'd clearly had a rough time. Eggy lived about three streets away from me in London for a decade or more, and I only discovered this three weeks after he had moved to Dublin. I'm pretty sure I delivered his mail at one point without even realising. Similarly absurd - given that we'd all started out in rural Warwickshire - Pete ended up living at about two miles distance from where I had settled in London, and although we spoke to each other on the phone from time to time, we met on maybe two or three occasions at most.

He turned up with Grez on one such occasion and we got out the guitars and began recording. Pete's voice was as great as ever, and Grez had become an accomplished guitarist during the intervening decades, but somehow it was difficult to work out what we were trying to do or what we expected to get from the session. Forty-year old men chugging out a jazz-funk Eggs, Beans & Mayonnaise in 2006 would have been too depressing.

In 2015, having lived in Texas for four years, I flew back to England, to my mother's place in Coventry, with the intent of bringing back as much as I could of the crap for which I hadn't found room in all the boxes shipped over in 2012. This comprised mostly cassette tapes, and these had been left behind mainly because I wasn't sure what to do with them, and partially because I was scared of discovering that they were all blank, the ferric oxide having crumbled from the tape years before. Amazingly this not only turned out to not be the case, but the quality of them is astonishing - material taped over thirty-five years ago sounding as though it had been recorded just yesterday. I guess the lesson in this is not to take too much notice of the aggressive turnover of new and purportedly improved formats pushed by the music and consumer audio industries every five years or so.

I have all these cassettes, and I'm slowly digitising the collection so as to save it for posterity if and when the tapes finally degrade, as promised by those who want me to throw my lot in with downloads and soundbars, whatever the fuck those things are. I still find the songs funny and even kind of musical, or at least sonically interesting in places. I've spoken to Pete and Grez about this essentially archaeological exercise, but I can't tell what they make of it. I even have the impression - possibly wrongly - that Pete is in some way embarrassed by our body of work, possibly regarding Little Blue and others as damning evidence that he was once less cool than he is now; and whilst it's true that some of it is awful in certain respects, I can't see the point in regretting any of it. Nevertheless he insists it be not only kept to ourselves, but off the internet, and shared between us only in physical formats. Indeed, his concern has been expressed with such vigour that I considered giving him a false identity for the purpose of this essay, but the idea has struck me as ludicrous so he'll have to make do with my having withheld his surname. In any case, I can't see that he's even particularly likely to read this, so it probably won't make a lot of difference.

When each conversation with a friend concludes with either we really must meet up, or else we must do this more often, chances are it isn't going to happen, and there are usually good reasons why you've lost touch with each other, reasons which might seem awkward should they become subject to examination. The Pre-War Busconductors happened for a short time and it did its admittedly stupid job, and then slipped gracefully backwards into the realms of an origin story. Even if we all remember it differently and with different degrees of affection, it's how we came to be here, and this much will remain so long after the tapes have crumbled. The sad thing is that I sometimes wonder if those tapes of the four us farting into a tape recorder weren't as good as it will ever get, the last honest art made by any of us.

Agency

At some point during the summer of 2010, having decided there was nothing else for it, I signed up with an employment agency called Parkhouse Recruitment. The job situation in Coventry could be described as an employer's market, meaning that there were very few jobs available for anyone who wasn't already in work, or who lacked the necessary can do attitude regarding jobs paying significantly less than they might otherwise receive in benefits.

The term employer's market implies that it was just one of those things, and that we should all be happy for those lucky employers who get to choose the one person they deem best qualified to press a button causing a blob of paste to come out of a spigot every four seconds from a group of two million applicants. It implies that we should all be happy for the one lucky jobseeker who ceases to number amongst those dole scrounging chav sponge monkeys busily bringing a once great nation to its knees by stealing from the honest pockets of hard working shareholders.

Anyway, I had failed to find a job, and those I might have considered were mostly only available through employment agencies, because employers apparently felt it unfair that they should be expected to treat their workers as anything other than disposable labour units to be hired and fired as the almighty market dictates. I was reluctant to approach an employment agency, because they have a habit of keeping the lion's share of whatever you earn from whoever hires you; but it was that or another six months spent explaining to a twenty-two year old Department of Work and Pensions clerk with an overinflated sense of his own power just why I felt that cleaning the bowls of a busy public toilet with my own face for twenty pence an hour was beneath my dignity.

Nevertheless, I dutifully trudged along to the tower block that Parkhouse had borrowed for recruitment purposes in the pedestrianised centre of Coventry. There were twenty or thirty of us, mostly Asian, which I suppose identified our group as hanging from the lower branches of the socioeconomic tree, the ones who couldn't afford to be too choosy. Expecting interviews, we were simply given forms to fill in, most of which seemed to relate to ensuring potential employers that Parkhouse would not be supplying them with car thieves, compulsive arsonists, or the sort of greed-driven leftie maniacs who would kick up a fuss should we lose limbs or heads in industrial accidents occurring on their premises. As it turned out, it didn't even really seem to matter whether we could speak English provided we were able to follow basic instructions. The young Indian guy sat at the next desk told me we would probably be sent to a Parcel Force depot in Leicester. This was a good thing he suggested. He'd been to the place before, and the work was relatively light providing you didn't mind a shift beginning at midnight and ending at eight in the morning. Even without the issue of how I would get to Leicester, I didn't like the sound of this. I'd spent the previous two decades working relatively antisocial hours, and felt I had done my time.

Ellie, a chirpy blonde who looked to be about twenty-five years of age gathered our application material and promised to phone as soon as work became available. A few days later, the call came, or at least a call came. It wasn't work - although that would be happening very soon, she assured me - but I needed to fill in some of my forms again, as those copies already submitted had been lost due to an administrative error. A few more days and I was given my security pass, the passport photograph I had supplied stapled onto a square of card. It didn't look particularly authoritative, but it would apparently get me into the building once the work began to flood in which - thankfully - probably wouldn't be anywhere quite so far away as Leicester.

A few months before, I had attended the signing in day at another agency, and found myself in a room with a bunch of seasoned brickies and plasterers.

'Everyone got a hi-vis?' the recruiter had asked, prompting a mumble of concurrence from everyone except me. I wasn't even sure what he meant, although I guessed he could be referring to the kind of fluorescent plastic waistcoat worn so as to prevent a loss of profit resulting from fork lift drivers accidentally running over any agency workers they hadn't noticed stood on the loading bay at three in the morning; but I wasn't going to ask because my ignorance would reveal me as someone who probably wrote poetry and enjoyed pressing flowers. After a few more minutes I realised that, contrary to that which had been stated in the advertising, the only work available here was to be on a building site. I seriously doubted that I would be physically up to the demands of such work, and I lacked the requisite experience of my fellow applicants. Furthermore, it saddened me to realise that men who had laid bricks and built homes - surely the very definition of useful - were now reduced to seeking a living through an employment agency.

Ellie now asked me that same question, whether I was in possession of a hi-vis jacket, and this time I understood what it meant. I didn't, but I found one for about thirty quid at Go Outdoors, a warehouse-sized camping supplies outlet. Duly equipped, I turned up as requested at six in the morning at the Baginton National Parcel Force depot on the outskirts of Coventry, about four or five miles from home, or twenty-five minutes by bike. It was a long time since I had been the inexperienced new recruit, the guy whose job was to do as directed and try not to mess it up, and cycling past the unpleasantly aromatic Walker's Crisps factory each frosty morning before sunrise emphasised the resumption of my status as a cheap industrialised labour unit, but there wasn't much point resenting the fact.

The workers from the previous shift trickled out from the gate, and our lot filtered in. I showed my identity card to the security guard who confirmed that yes, I was indeed expected that morning; and so I was allowed on through with all the others, all filing into a building that could have been an aircraft hanger.

'I like your jacket.'

This was a full-time Parcel Force employee, a middle-aged woman. It took me a moment to recognise this as a straightforward statement. She really was admiring my hi-vis tabard. The compliment had confused me, and I had initially taken it for sarcasm because I couldn't imagine what it would be like to admire the hi-vis jacket of a complete stranger.

'Thanks.' I dispensed a diplomatic smile, hoping that this would suffice and followed everyone else into the building.

There were thirty or forty casual staff, and countless full-time employees. The better jobs entailed processing large packets and parcels as they were ferried into the depot on a line of large automated trolleys drawn along a chain-track set into the floor, specifically scanning barcodes and sorting by region - Scotland, Wales, Greater London, North-east and so on. A little further down the industrial pecking order were those employed in loading these parcels onto the conveyor belts of the appropriate bays set around the circumference of the depot. Each belt was mounted on a hydraulic boom which could be extended into the back of a trailer.

At the lowest end of the food chain of labour were those who, like myself, ended up in the back of a trailer, stacking whatever came down the belt until the thing was full and was thus ready to be driven off to another part of the country.

The steady running of the conveyor belt was dependent upon the removal of the item that had arrived at its end, as detected by a beam of light. If one failed to take the next parcel, the belt remained stationary. This prevented the possibility of employees buried alive beneath a mountain of packets, having paused for a second to adjust a pair of ill-fitting underpants. Unfortunately, this stop-start motion also tended to result in blockages out in the depot as a great many more objects were piled onto the belt than that with which one person could reasonably cope. As soon as a blockage occurred, a warning light outside the bay would draw the attention of Marcie, a stern but efficient woman resembling Peppermint Patty's friend all grown up and somewhat embittered by life in the West Midlands.

'Get this belt moving.'

It was never anything like a request, and her tone made it clear that you could be replaced very easily, which was of course the entire point of agency staff. The problem was that in order to keep the belt moving one had no choice but to cut corners, even to ignore the care which any sane person would take in such a job in an effort to avoid stacking the extremely heavy on top of the extremely fragile. The sound of unsuspected glass objects smashing inside some parcel as another was hoisted on top was a more than hourly occurrence, because you didn't actually have time to break wind, let alone subject each item to any sort of inspection. This was regarded as simple natural breakage by Parcel Force staff, something that statistically could not be avoided, particularly considering the weight of some of the objects being sent by mail. It was not unusual to find a complete motorbike engine mummified in polythene wrap on the belt, or the entire fibre glass siding of a car. Legally we weren't allowed by eminently sensible European law to lift such weights by ourselves, and officially we were expected to seek assistance, but again this proved impractical if you were to keep the belt moving and thus also keep your job. It was tough and exhausting, and it went on from six in the morning to two in the afternoon with two half hour breaks. My time at Royal Mail had amounted to twenty years of humping heavy weights in pouring rain whilst a man in a suit told you to pull your finger out, but this was much worse, much more demanding.

I lasted three days, then told Ellie that I'd had enough for one week. Perhaps conveniently it turned out that the National Parcel Force depot rarely required its complement of agency workers outside of the three heaviest days of the week, and I wasn't needed again until the following Tuesday; so it sort of worked out, aside from the fact of eighty or so pounds seeming a poor weekly wage for something quite so physically strenuous. It was almost a quarter of what I had earned working a five-day week at Royal Mail.

I went back of course, reasoning that a two or three day working week was manageable, despite those two or three days occasionally resembling some sort of conflation of the various tasks famously allotted to Hercules with what happened to Apprentice Mickey in Walt Disney's Fantasia. Over time, the job became, if not exactly bearable, at least do-able, and it was better than signing on. A social element would have made the working day more pleasant, but wasn't really practical whilst I was stuck grunting and sweating in the back of a trailer for the best part of the morning, even aside from the registry of my fellow agency workers being more or less different from one week to the next. Marcie was likeable in a gruff sort of way, consistent and thus trustworthy if not particularly warm or sympathetic; but it was clear that she was under at least as much pressure from the amoral boardroom counting machines as that which she applied to us, and even when she called you a useless arsehole, you knew it was never personal. The only other regular agency worker was Billy with his coke-bottle glasses and displaced Manchester accent, always borrowing just two pound coins for the canteen or the drinks machine, always delivering some weird announcement to no-one in particular.

'As soon as I get home I'm straight on facebook to all me mates!'

It wasn't just reportage of plans made for the rest of the day. It was offered as a mission statement, not so much what Billy would do as what he was, and God help the fool who tried to stop him. I always wondered who he was talking to; and I also wondered how someone so seemingly undernourished, how this weird little chain-smoking Bash Street Kid as written by Alan Bennett could spend all morning lifting concrete blocks onto a conveyor belt without complaint. He would lecture me during tea break, although I didn't mind. He would share tales of similarly tough agency work undertaken at other depots, day shifts enthusiastically grasped immediately following a night shift. I think he just liked to stay busy.

'As soon as I get in there,' he told me, referring to some new warehouse full of heavy machinery in which he'd made himself a permanent fixture, 'I get straight to that radio and it goes on Mercia!'

It seemed that his speciality was doing things immediately upon arriving somewhere. I'd never listened to Mercia, a local radio station playing what I imagined, perhaps wrongly, to be the usual mix of Spandau Ballet, Dire Straits, Status Quo and other favourites of those who don't really like music that much. It was strange to hear it held up as a proud standard of all that must be considered right and true, a cause in which Billy believed with some passion.

I lasted as long as I could at the National Parcel Force depot. The work became no easier, although I almost got used to it, and after a few weeks stuck in the back of trailers, I graduated to being given other duties every so often just to break things up a little. It was whilst humping parcels, motorbike engines, and other crap from the automated trolleys onto the belts that I lifted a crate which turned out to contain the smashed remains of a dozen bottles of red wine. I was soaked through and I smelled like an alcoholic, but it got me out of work for thirty minutes, and Marcie found me a Parcel Force uniform from the store as replacement for my own sodden clothes. I kept the uniform on the grounds that no-one asked for it back, and I continued to wear it to work in vague hope of being mistaken for a full-time employee and someone who might therefore deserve a slightly cushier number every once in a while.

No-one was fooled, although I was mistaken on one occasion for an Australian.

'No,' I explained, entirely bewildered. 'I'm English.'

'Oh I thought what with your vest,' - her words trailed off as she contemplated my ridiculous fluorescent tabard. 'It's really different.'

This wasn't even the same woman as before, so clearly my stupid bright yellow waistcoat was somehow so different to those worn by everyone else as to be worth noticing. Mine was purchased from a place specialising in sports and camping supplies. Everyone else, it turned out, wore the regular Parcel Force issue which was given free of charge even to agency staff. I could, I realised, have saved myself thirty quid and at least two weirdly bewildering conversations. I didn't even understand how anyone would notice the minor differences between their reflective jackets and mine, much less have so little going on in their lives as to consider it a worthy topic of conversation; and why Australian in particular? It didn't look identical to the kind worn by everyone else, but it's not like I'd accessorised with a hem of corks and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo sew-on patches.

At the point at which I'd had about enough of the slog, I found myself unexpectedly assigned to the International Parcel Force depot, a different warehouse sized building accessible by the same security gate. Whilst the change initially struck me as an immense pain in the arse - beginning somewhere new all over again - I got over my reticence when I realised the work at the other depot was conducted at a more humane pace with more reasonable demands on the individual. For some reason even the atmosphere was more pleasant, and instead of the vast industrial cavern I found myself walking in a brightly lit labyrinth of staircases, ladders, overhead walkways, and mysterious elevated tracks carrying packets here and there. It was like a chocolate factory designed by Jules Verne, which seemed preferable to industrial Tolkien.

I was introduced on my first day to Jim, as I'm fairly certain I remember him being called, a man in his fifties with a slight Irish accent, and an archetypical old boy of the kind with which a previous girlfriend had told me I was obsessed. The accusation had annoyed me, particularly coming from someone whose only experience of the working classes was when ordering room service or asking how soon something could be repaired. It wasn't that I was obsessed with old men as she had so cluelessly put it, but in every place I'd worked, the funniest and usually sharpest of my colleagues were almost always those of either my parents' generation or older. Jim fitted this bill, not least because he was very funny, and had perfected the art of taking the piss out of whoever was available without a hint of mean spirits. He took me under his wing almost as though I were an apprentice in the traditional sense, possibly being well-disposed towards me because I'd been a postman for so long. The international parcels tended to be of the kind sent by individual people to family members living in England, and less in the line of heavy machine parts as had been common at the national depot. Loading up an international trailer was therefore a slightly more relaxing affair conducted at a more reasonable pace, so much so that on slow mornings I was able to catch up on my reading; although shame obliged me to drop the habit on the morning when a slightly disgruntled supervisor visited my trailer to point out that my quota of parcels seemed light that morning because I hadn't actually turned on the belt, and the entire depot was now held up, waiting on Mary Shelley and myself to pull our respective fingers out. I saw the same supervisor a few hours later in the canteen reading something or other by Isaac Asimov, which I guessed accounted for why he hadn't been quite so angry as he might have been. It seemed like a good sign.

Occasionally Jim and I would swap roles to break the monotony. He would extend a boom into the trailer and I would load the belt, or scan the packets using a small computer which strapped onto my forearm and was linked to a laser scanner worn on the tip of one finger. It made me feel like a character from a Judge Dredd comic strip and appealed to my inner child.

These duties alternated with stints in the customs inspection room, watching as customs officials opened random packages of samurai swords, firearms, sex aids, or - most gruesome of all - parcels of bush meat sent from Africa by people who hadn't quite realised that bits of monkeys might not be quite so fresh by the time they reached England. For some weeks I had noticed a terrific eye-watering stench would occasionally pass through the depot like a huge smelly ghost. This turned out to be the signifier of each newly discovered consignment of bush meat. There was an element of novelty to working with the customs people, but the duty involved very little beyond standing around in a hot room for three or four hours at a time, and quickly became boring, almost as undesirable as working over at the national depot in its own way.

I spoke to Ellie on the phone and told her that if possible I'd prefer to not work than be sent to the National Parcel Force depot again. As with Royal Mail, it was an environment in which productivity demands had become such as to make it impossible to do the job as it should be done. She didn't seem to like this, but accepted that it would at least save her phoning with offers of work I was only going to turn down.

My time at Parcel Force ended with a few months in the arrivals section of the international depot, unloading trailers as they came in from the airports. It was harder work than before, but not unreasonably so. I would spend the morning extending a boom into the back of a trailer of parcels from China, India, or America whilst listening to my CDs of David Sedaris or Tony Hancock. Sometimes there would be two or more of us unloading a trailer together. Most of the others were okay, and they were at least an interesting mix. There was a young liberal democrat councillor from Ryton-on-Dunsmore, and an amateur boxer who didn't seem to like black people much, but was otherwise okay provided he could be kept from straying into his default conversational racism.

'I can't stand that bloke,' he scowled, glowering at a young guy of obviously Indian origin working over near the peculiar overhead monorail by which large bags of parcels were carried across the depot. 'He's so arrogant.'

Typically, I found myself getting on better with the supposed purveyor of arrogance than the amateur boxer. It turned out that he wasn't even remotely arrogant, but was simply a guy trying to get on with his job.

Eventually the work dried up and Ellie stopped calling me, aside from requesting that I come into the office to fill in my application forms a third time as they had been lost yet again. Given that I'd been on their books for a good nine months, I wasn't entirely sure how this worked. It also turned out that she now required references from previous employers. I did what I could, submitting an email from my old boss at Royal Mail, which for some reason turned out to be unsatisfactory. Ellie sent me a text message which read I'm sorry but I cannot except this. I couldn't bring myself to care about why I  needed to submit an application to do something I had already been doing for the best part of a year, but I was slightly appalled that the particulars of my employment were in the hands of someone unable to distinguish between except and accept. I was a manual worker, a man paid to lift up heavy objects and put them down somewhere else, and Ellie herself was paid through my doing this. Parkhouse people, so the website states, are chosen for excellence - and hired for their passion, attitude, pride and fun, but apparently not for their understanding of basic grammar or spelling; but then I had endured six months of my name rendered as Lawerence on pay slips, so it wasn't a huge surprise.

My problem, so I gather, was that Parkhouse preferred workers who would take whatever jobs they were given without question, and I had limited myself by refusing work at both the National Parcel Force depot and weird shifts in neighbouring cities. It was disappointing, but at least it meant an end to my turning up as requested only to find that I hadn't been added to the list that day, contrary to promises made during the previous evening's phone call; and it was an end to work which, if pleasant enough in its own way, paid so little that I could quite easily blow half of my daily wage in the canteen at lunch.

It was marginally better than being on the dole, and I could happily have carried on indefinitely at the international depot had I not made other plans, and that's about as much as can be said about it.

Englishness in Texas

I often wear a Stetson. Explanations for this millinerial choice posited by those of my friends who have neither lived in Texas nor ever worn a Stetson tend to vary, including my going native, irony, and it being a knowing wink to an episode of Doctor Who in which Matt Smith wears just such a hat, despite my strong dislike of the show in question. In actual fact I've been wearing hats quite similar to the Stetson at least since 1999 when I first travelled to Mexico and discovered it to be a good means of keeping my distinctly pale face from burning in the hot sun as I dislike having to apply sun-cream. In addition, such headgear also provides good cover during showers of rain, and has proven useful as a means of pooling coins, keys, and other metal objects when travelling through airport security; and it really is that simple.

I purchased my current Stetson at a branch of Cavender's Boot City, a chain of warehouse capacity stores specialising in western wear, as they call it. I guess my friend Dave probably wandered into a branch of Cavender's when he came to Texas in November. Dave was a tutor on the art foundation course I took at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further education back in England in the 1980s, just after I had left school. He and his wife had come to America, and had hired a car so as to tour a number of the western states over a period of a few months. Texas was their final port of call, so my wife and I took them to our favourite Jim's diner for chicken fried steak.

'There was this store,' Dave explained to us as though bringing back his report from the new world, 'and there were hats and boots as far as the eye could see, just hats and boots and nothing else.'

It had made an impression on him, as had the real live cowboy he'd met in New Mexico a few weeks earlier. As we ate, he described these wonders, and we couldn't work out whether it had occurred to him that, living here, we found neither cowboys nor their apparel out of the ordinary. We guessed that he was most likely setting his thoughts to order, thinking aloud, a hypothesis supported by some of these selfsame thoughts later cohering as Boots On The Ground, the blog he'd been keeping as documentation of his trip across America. I am referenced in Boots On The Ground as the Englishman in Texas, presumably to preserve my anonymity when Dave asks so who is this particular Englishman, with his self-styled moniker and blog of the same name? He attempts to answer the question by explaining that even after two years exposure to American life in San Antonio, he remains resolutely unaffected, having neither adopted any accent or phrases nor shaken off a predisposition towards serving tea as his afternoon beverage of choice!

The most puzzling thing for me was that I didn't really recognise myself from any of this. An Englishman in Texas was picked without much serious consideration as a reasonably descriptive title which might negate the requirement of at least some explanation. It was never a mission statement, nor an intentional reference to any song by that bloke from the Police; and the tea in question was brewed in a teapot I had purchased only a month earlier in Boerne, a town some thirty miles north-west of San Antonio. It was the second time I had used the teapot and I haven't used it since because I prefer coffee.

Nevertheless, a certain impression was either given by myself or taken by my visitor, and one that puzzles me a little. Complete strangers and even members of my extended family occasionally try to engage me in conversation about what is going on with the English royal family, or they will refer to some old country event so newsworthy as to have crossed the ocean perhaps believing I might be personally acquainted with those affected. At least one person, fully cognizant with the fact and duration of my marriage, asked how I was enjoying my stay in Texas, like being here is just a phase I'm going through. Others have launched into bewildering Dickensian caricatures in my presence as though I too am quietly amused by my own nationality. It becomes exhausting.

'Still black, I see,' I might say to our African-American mailman. 'I'm glad that's working out for you. Keep it up!'

No less exhausting was an encounter in an antique shop in the previously mentioned Cotswold town of Boerne. It isn't actually a Cotswold town, although I tend to regard it as such for its being one of a number which remind me a little of that region of England on the Gloucestershire-Oxfordshire border. Boerne was built from limestone in the nineteenth century by German settlers and does not resemble the typical American town as commonly seen on television; and the shop wasn't exactly an antique shop in the sense of selling antiques. I was on the look out for Christmas presents, and was considering an old ceramic teapot with a human face and the characteristics of a lemon, presumably made so as to appeal to fans of lemon tea. It had put me in mind of the ceramic pots collected by my father, pots combining human facial features with assorted vegetable characteristics and intended to store piccalilli, chutney, horseradish and so on. The price seemed reasonable and I had told the proprietor I would think it over and perhaps return, and so my wife and I continued to browse in the other shops along Main Street.

As we reached the end of the block, we entered another shop. A woman in her early fifties - I guessed - with long red hair was sat behind the counter, speaking to someone on the phone as a compact disc of The Smiths played in the background. We looked around the clutter of the store and, seeing little that immediately caught our eyes, went into the room at the back.

'Does she sound English to you?' I asked Bess.

We both listened, but neither of us could quite place the proprietor's accent beyond that it was clearly not American. We browsed further and the phone call came to an end.

'I'm sure she's from England,' I said.

'Go and ask.'

'I don't like to.' I didn't know why, but it struck me as a thin premise upon which to open a conversation. I was curious, but not actively interested.

My wife gave me a prod, possibly inspired by her occasional fear that deprived of the company of countrymen, I might pine and whither away to nothing, requiring a restorative course of Marmite and warm beer. 'Go and ask her if she's from England.'

I knew it would bug me if I didn't find out, so I shuffled up to the counter, half-wishing we hadn't entered the store. The woman wore orange lipstick and green eyeshadow which I found unsettling. Her appearance spoke of someone who clearly regarded themselves as a bit of a character.

'Excuse me, I hope you don't mind my asking but' - I hated myself for falling into the usual bumbling Hugh Grantisms - 'are you from England. It's just that I noticed your accent—'

'I am indeed,' she grinned. 'And so are you!'

She explained that she was from Manchester with the inflection of someone who clearly regarded themselves as a bit of a character, and I wished I hadn't asked. There is a specific brand of regional pride found in certain persons from the north of England I have never quite warmed to, a peculiar inverted snobbery based on the bumptious proposition of their being collectively more down to earth than anyone else, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. It seemed like this woman subscribed to this view, telling me how she had been in Texas for two decades and yet still never missed an episode of Coronation Street, a long running soap opera set in Manchester. I couldn't actually remember when I'd last seen Coronation Street, but it was probably not much later than 1985.

'So are you a City supporter or do you prefer the scum?' she asked. It took me a moment to unscramble the question as referring to my preference for either Manchester City or Manchester United football teams.

'Well, I don't really—'

'Who do you support then?'

I could have said either Gillingham or Millwall on the grounds of these being teams to which I will admit a minor degree of loyalty through mainly geographical and social associations without ever having felt the need to attend a match, but it didn't really seem like a conversation worth having. 'Well, I'm really not so big on football—'

'You like rugby then? Or is it the cricket?'

I indicated the dusty stereo system behind the counter. 'Is that the Smiths you're listening to?'

'Aye.' She seemed pleased. 'You like the Smiths, do you?'

Whilst I would agree the band had recorded some great songs, I've generally come to regard them as an overrated institution, but again it didn't really seem like a conversation I wanted to get into. 'So have you read Morrissey's autobiography?,' I asked, steering the subject like a canoe over the rapids.

The story of the former Smiths' vocalist's life had just been published by Penguin back in England, so this seemed a safe conversational gambit, at least equivalent to discussing the weather.

'I've got it on order. I can't wait.' She grinned and then nodded her head to emphasise some point or other. 'I love Mozzer, me.'

I shuddered inwardly at hearing the nickname, the use of which denotes the true fan, specifically the true fan of a man who had in my view come to epitomise the most parochial aspects of English culture. For all that Reel Around The Fountain was but one of many cracking tunes, this is the man who wrote crap like Bengali in Platforms and America Is Not the World, a song carrying the startling proposition that the United States is a land of fat people who eat hamburgers.

'So have you read it?' she asked.

'Not yet.'

I glanced at my wife, a silent plea as I pointedly orientated myself towards the door; but Bess seemed genuinely interested, apparently believing I'd found a kindred spirit; and so we listened as the woman expanded upon the theme of herself as a bit of a character, turning to those subjects to which English people always turn when their paths cross in foreign lands. As I listened it occurred to me that of all the things of the old country my kind are supposed to miss, there are very few which I miss at all. Furthermore, I don't understand why anyone would come to live here if they're going to spend the rest of their lives pining after sausages in batter or The One Show. I don't understand why anyone would wish to live in a distant land if they weren't going to bother engaging with it, and preferably on its terms rather than those they've brought with them.

We left the store, stepping quickly through a hole in the conversation, and crossed the road. I had decided that I would return to the first shop and buy the strange lemon teapot with the human face, but first we dived quickly into a third antique emporium, this one thankfully run by a Texan from whom I purchased a teapot for myself, a more traditional kind with a plain brown glaze from which I would serve tea to my two English visitors in but a few weeks time.