My Year in the Avant-Garde

I was still sixteen in May, 1982, and things felt as though they were moving, artistically speaking, even if I wasn't quite sure of their direction. I'd produced my first cassette of formative industrial music made by hitting a bedspring with a pencil, then taping over the end with a sinister sounding television news report about a local man arrested for terrorising ducks; Rod Pearce of Fetish Records had told me that he would give my tape a listen, which I'm fairly sure he did because that was the last I heard from him; and I'd joined some sort of avant-garde band on the side.

The invitation had taken the form of a postcard pinned up in Renton's Records in Leamington Spa, which seemed to be the only place which stocked music by the Residents. Persons wanted, it said, for avant-garde band based in Stratford-upon-Avon. I'm paraphrasing but the request definitely specified avant-garde, which I'd recently learned referred to artists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and myself. I phoned the guy, who told me his name was John Mullins. I said that I was a guitarist, roughly speaking, and he assured me that musical ability wasn't really a consideration.

My best friends at the time were Eggy and Graham, and Graham had an older brother named Martin, occasionally known as Peewee for reasons I didn't quite follow. I never saw much of Martin but regarded him as an elusive and mysterious role model. He had an amazing record collection comprising albums by Alternative TV, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Faust and others, and on the few occasions when he spoke to us, he always said something cool. Additionally, he played bass in the Abstracts, who were amazing and who impressed me most by being the first band I heard where the bass and the guitar seemed to be playing two entirely unrelated yet somehow complementary parts of a song. Just this year, someone on facebook shared a photograph of the Abstracts taken at the time, and it was kind of shocking to see three grown men with some little boy. The little boy had been Martin, and so at last I understood the nickname. This realisation brought with it the understanding that Graham, myself, and my other contemporaries must have seemed like foetuses to those older kids.

I mentioned the possibility of my joining the John Mullins band to Graham and he told Martin, and Martin was surprised because he knew John from school and knew him well. John Mullins, so I was told, suffered from epilepsy, which worried me because I didn't really understand what it was. What little information was passed onto me from Martin suggested I should proceed with caution for reasons which remained unspecified.

My dad dropped me off in Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday the 15th of May, according to my diary. I bought some blank tapes, the 12" single of Temptation by New Order, and borrowed an album of Stockhausen's Stimmung from the local library, after which I went to meet John Mullins at his parents' house in quite a nice part of Stratford.

John was tall, distinguished, fairly handsome with floppy blonde hair and glasses. He dressed like a concert pianist or someone who had been to one of the better schools, which I suppose he had given that he knew Martin. He seemed intelligent and witty, someone who probably wouldn't respond to fart jokes, and I tried hard to avoid coming across like some immo - as was Mark Harrison's blanket term for the terminally immature. It was therefore probably fucking lucky that I'd chosen that day to check a record of Stockhausen rather than Blaster Bates out of the library.

Naturally we talked about music. I think he may have mentioned Cabaret Voltaire as a potential influence on the phone, to which I had responded favourably. Now I had to admit that I hadn't actually heard anything by them, although I was a big fan of Throbbing Gristle, of whom John had heard only very little. He played me The Voice of America, which I found electrifying. He'd just bought their most recent album, 2X45, but said he'd found it disappointing because they hadn't fed the drum kit through any special effects. This led directly to tracks from Soon Over Babaluma by Can. I'd never heard of them. I was impressed by the cover printed on some sort of foil, but I found their music underwhelming then as I do now. This, John suggested, was the sort of thing he was hoping we would play, something in this general vein.

As the morning swung around to noon, Andy turned up with Vanessa - whom I took to be his girlfriend. She was still at school and presumably the same age as me, albeit more emotionally developed, as seemed to be more or less everyone else in my age group. Andy was the other guitarist. Vanessa briefly left to retrieve Paul from the pub, and Paul turned out to be Paul Gardiner, the drummer from the Abstracts, which I found massively exciting. Paul brought someone called Henry with him. Henry was into Queen and Ted Nugent.

John directed us in a couple of extended jams, himself accompanying us with funky bass and prepared tapes of short wave radio noise. The first piece had a vaguely Latin feel, which we followed up with something in C major, which I noted in my diary without quite understanding what it was. My job was to agitate my guitar by scrabbling fingers across the strings like a spider, slowly allowing two particular high notes to emerge, to chime like a bell. It was all a bit of a racket and I found it hard to tell whether what we'd just done had been amazing or shite. I wasn't getting much feedback from the others, who possibly regarded my presence as puzzling - a sort of foetal scarecrow from one of those Deliverance themed towns on the way to Oxford. Anyway, John seemed approximately happy, or not actively displeased, and proposed another session on Tuesday evening.

He phoned me once I was home from school on the Tuesday and  said the session had been cancelled due to something about Andy being crap, but he would let me know as soon as anything else happened. This was kind of weird. I'd assumed that if anyone was crap it had been me, but Andy had apparently kept sneakily introducing tunes to our improvisations. Additionally he'd been playing in time with the percussion on the second track despite having been expressly instructed to do otherwise.

My diary records that John and I spent one afternoon in June messing around with reel to reel tapes, although I don't remember it.

Another few weeks after that, he let me borrow a stack of albums as clues to where he was coming from, musically speaking - Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca, James Blood Ulmer's, Are You Glad To Be In America?, plus Gruppen and Carré by Stockhausen. He told me he had a gig at the Green Dragon on Tuesday and that I should come along and see; so obviously I wasn't in the band, whatever it was, which was something of a relief as I still didn't really understand what John was trying to do. If he had some great vision, it wasn't anything I recognised.

I didn't go along, and Martin relayed that it had been a bit of a disaster with John pissed to the point of being unable to stand whilst hectoring the audience to vote Labour.

We didn't really speak to each other over the summer. I was too busy shitting myself over having left school, feelings of alienation, and all the usual stuff. I was feeling particularly alienated by Eggy who had taken to referring to my seemingly sophisticated friend as John Muggins. Eggy had become somewhat Cromwellian since leaving school and had delivered at least one speech in which he lambasted the sort of people who can record a piece of music which is just one note going on for a hundred hours and yet who don't know how to make a cup of tea. He wasn't naming names, but he didn't really need to. It wasn't like I was even listening to much Stockhausen myself, let alone forcing it upon him or going on about it; and I actually made a pretty decent cup of tea.

By September I was at the South Warwickshire College of Further Education in Stratford retaking all of those 'O' levels I'd messed up. Happily this meant occasionally bumping into John at lunchtime, going for chips, or maybe just a pot of tea in the second hand bookshop at the end of Henley Street. We talked about music, or he talked about politics while I listened. We both seemed to understand that our band was never going to happen and was therefore not worth discussing. Being politically naive, I'd heard somewhere that Tony Benn wanted to abolish private property, which obviously upset me given how long it had taken me to build up my collection of twenty albums, not to mention all of those back issues of 2000AD comic.

Our conversation therefore ground to a massively awkward halt when I told John I wasn't too sure about that Tony Benn. Strangely, he didn't set me straight, which was either down to his good manners, or that it didn't seem like I'd yet developed the brain capacity necessary for any sort of understanding.

Our phone calls and random encounters became more and more infrequent, eventually reducing to just a series of anecdotes. He was living in London. He was working as Peter Tatchell's secretary in the run-up to the Bermondsey by-elections. He was dead, an alcoholic, or had been almost incapacitated by his epilepsy. While I remain ignorant of his eventual fate, I can entertain the thought that maybe things worked out well for him, because he was a nice guy and I wish we'd known each other better. We may not have much more to discuss now than we did then, but he made my teenage years a good bit more interesting than they otherwise would have been, even if I still, to this day, don't really understand what any of it was about.

I hope he found whatever he was looking for.

2018 Without Notes

This was the year during which I learned to paint oil on canvas. I'd had a couple of stabs at it before, once back in the eighties and then again a couple of years ago. Neither attempt was particularly successful due to my having assumed it would probably be just like working with acrylics, only to find out that it wasn't. Anyway, this year I got the hang of it, roughly speaking - thanks in no small measure to the advice of Sean Keating and Chris Hunt.

Sean Keating and Jamie, his younger brother, were the two American kids at our school, Ilmington Junior and Infants in the heart of rural England, a stone's throw from Stratford-upon-Avon. Their father was an actor of some renown who was, at the time, appearing in something or other at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, although I only discovered this recently when encountering Sean - now an artist - through social media. I also discovered that Sean's father had played the villain in a long-running American television series and was as such one of my mother-in-law's favourite actors.

It's all connected.

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre was managed by David Brierley. His son, Crispin, was my best friend at Ilmington Junior and Infants. Many years later and over a hundred miles south as I lived and worked as a postman in London, I found myself about to deliver a letter to a pompous theatrical turd residing in Glengarry Road. I don't remember his name, but he had appeared in the Guardian colour supplement as most promising something or other. His wife, also in the theatrical profession, was much nicer, and I used to talk to her from time to time. One day she turned up in an episode of The Bill, the popular television police drama. Next day I happened to encounter the pompous theatrical turd in the street so I said to pass on my congratulations to his wife. He made a sniffing noise, the sneer of a man who considers himself above watching anything so base as an episode of The Bill, which is why I came to think of him as a  pompous theatrical turd.

Anyway, the letter I found myself about to deliver to him on this occasion was from David Brierley, manager of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. This was too much of a coincidence for me, so I knocked and the pompous theatrical turd came to the door.

'Look,' I said pointing to the name and return address on the back of the envelope. 'That's my best friend's dad from junior school! Isn't that incredible?'

The pompous theatrical turd took the letter, made the same noise he had made when I'd met him in the street on the morning after his wife's appearance on national television, and closed the door. Apparently he didn't think it was that incredible.

At the age of fifty-three I have come to routinely expect improbable coincidences, so I don't suppose I truly regard any of it as necessarily incredible, not any more.

I knew Chris Hunt through fanzine and tape culture back in the eighties, which would be another substantial digression, but the point is that himself and Sean Keating got me started on the oils, introducing me to techniques quite unlike those I knew from working with acrylic paint. So, 2018 was the year I began to paint on canvas, working from life rather than photographs - as has been my preference up until recently - because the medium seems more conducive to working from life rather than from photographs.

I went back to England for a couple of weeks back in the June of 2018, and during this time I visited Dave Hirons, my former teacher from the art foundation course in Leamington Spa. He asked why I had opted for such a fundamentalist approach to painting, and may even have described my work as a rejection of modernism, or at least as being back to basics with the kind of emphasis which summoned unfortunate memories of Margaret Thatcher. I had no answer, and still don't, because the question seemed to require a needlessly polarised justification for why one thing is not something else.

This is tea, not coffee.

Why do you hate coffee?

I paint what I enjoy painting and this year I've also been trying to sell the things, which is a first for me. It's easy enough to keep acrylic paintings in a folder down the side of the bed, but canvases take up more space, plus I need money to buy comic books and all the vinyl records I never got around to buying at the time. I've painted twenty-three canvases this year, with two of those still being works currently in progress. I've sold four of them from which I've made $200, which is probably not amazing, but is better than a kick up the arse. Strangest of all, of the four I've sold, three I hadn't regarded as being anything special and I'd assumed they probably wouldn't sell. I guess I'm not the best judge of my own work.

Also this year, I started buying back all those X-Men comic books I got rid of back in the nineties, simultaneous to filling in all the gaps in my record collection - seeing as it's now become feasible to buy vinyl again. This is what I'm doing in lieu of the traditional mid-life crisis. It's probably the same thing but is more fun for me and less of a pain in the arse for everyone else. Sales of canvas paintings probably cover, at a rough estimate, about thirty back issues of Uncanny X-Men plus holes plugged within the respective back catalogues of the Stranglers, Wreckless Eric, and Eddie & the Hot Rods.

Additionally, I cycled a couple of thousand miles.

We acquired even more cats.

I wrote many, many words. I also painted some book covers and probably had something or other published.

Donald Trump continued to make America great again.

The Earth went around the sun.

I read 93 books, according to Goodreads.

There will have been other stuff too.

So some of that was 2018.

The Future of Art

I discovered art as a teenager, the age of fourteen or maybe fifteen; and by art I mean fine art; and by fine art I mean painting. I vaguely recall being taken to see the Dalí exhibition at the Tate back in 1980, and I was given Painting in the Twentieth Century by Werner Haftmann for Christmas, 1982. From this point on I began to regard certain paintings as though they were pieces of music in terms of how important they seemed - or what they said to me, if you prefer. Marc Chagall's I and the Village had at least as significant an impact on me as that first Joy Division album. Art - by which I still mean painting - seemed like this alternative universe with its own parallel history, its own languages, and I found it very exciting.

Having fixated on Italian Futurism, I myself took to painting in a  style heavily derived from the work of Fortunato Depero. I attended art foundation course, and then took a fine art degree at Maidstone College, although most of this course of study - if that isn't too generous a term for my four years of pissing about and mumbling - was dedicated to time based media, specifically film and video. I had unfortunately lost most of my enthusiasm for this mode of expression by the time the course came to an end, rudely depositing me upon the doorstep of the rest of my life.

I returned to painting from time to time over the years which followed, gradually developing the sort of ability which I probably should have picked up at art college, and doubtless would have done had I not spent all that time chasing what was ultimately an artistic dead end, at least for me. I didn't even manage a life drawing class, because I was seemingly developmentally a couple of years behind most of my peers and was mortified at the thought of having to sit there drawing a nude woman. I mean, a real nude woman - what if I got so aroused that I spunked my pants? Whilst I really wish one of my tutors had sat me down and forced me to learn how to draw and paint properly, obliging me to learn techniques taught in art schools at the turn of the previous century, I have only myself to blame. Art education at the end of the twentieth century might be caricatured as a load of bollocks about self-expression bypassing the requirement for actual talent, but I see it as having had more to do with the motivation of the individual. If you really wanted to learn, you could go a long way, but if you didn't have it in you then it probably wasn't meant to be. I suppose for myself it's simply that my timing was out.

Another factor might be that I realised I didn't actually have much interest in or sympathy for the contemporary art world as it was by the time I graduated. In terms of art history, by the end of abstract expressionism - excepting rare outliers - fine art became something else, divorced from ordinary life. It became an exclusive club founded on inflated sums of money, wearying novelty, something with its own private language which defies criticism and the identification of nudist emperors by looking down its nose and declaring that obviously you don't understand. It embraced the new purely for the sake of the new.

One of my wife's friends is an artist, and a contemporary artist, meaning that's how he makes his living. One of his pieces was a spunk-stained sofa, an old living room couch upon which he did what I feared would have befallen me had I taken a life drawing class; and this he sold as art. We attended an exhibition of his work, by which point he'd moved on to conceptual pieces wherein a model of, for example, a microscope or a pair of binoculars, is made from wood physically cut out of a painting - oil on board - of a subject pertaining to the resulting model, the image of a bacterium or else something seen from a distance. It was amusing and quite clever, but I need more from my art than amusing and quite clever, and this wasn't sufficiently amusing or quite clever enough to dispel the conceit of Spunky Couch or whatever he'd called it. Not everything has to have the sledgehammer populism of Soviet propaganda, but Spunky Couch struck me as a smug man marching up and down a street with a placard reading you are stupid! Such art supposedly defies our expectations, asking why a man can't slap one out over his sofa and then stick it in a gallery, but as soon as we answer, we're told that we don't understand because we're too vulgar. Art creates its own elite, generates its own audience inculcated with the correct responses.

At the other end of the spectrum we have Painting with a Twist, a corporate chain of venues as much as painting classes for people who probably won't end up ejaculating over household furniture.

Invite your friends, sip your favourite beverage and enjoy step-by-step instruction with our experienced and enthusiastic local artists. You'll leave with a one-of-a-kind creation and be ready to come back again. We also host private parties for every occasion. From birthday and bachelorette parties to corporate events and team building, we'll help you celebrate your creativity.

I have a cousin-in-law - if that's an actual term - who regularly attends Painting with a Twist. Paints, brushes, and canvas are provided, and although I gather you're welcome to do your own thing should you feel so inclined, generally the group will follow the lead of the organiser, painting whatever subject has been picked that week. My cousin-in-law has an arts degree of some description, and yet regularly returns from Painting with a Twist with a fresh irony-free canvas depicting Winnie the Pooh or characters from The Lion King, so whatever her artistic awakening may have been, I'm guessing it probably wasn't Marc Chagall's I and the Village - or indeed anything I would recognise as art on my terms; and somehow I can't help but feel that this is where Spunky Couch and its like have brought us - that same retreat into the safety of the soft, rounded, and childish as is currently promoted by most contemporary media right now, the same rebellion against intellect and qualification we see in the political sphere - because we don't really need to grow up in order to be dutiful consumers. In many ways, it's actually better that we don't.

Wasn't art supposed to make a difference of some description? Wasn't it at least supposed to be more than a diversion?

I've therefore decided to start again. I'm painting, and I'm painting in oils for what is somehow the first time.

That's not strictly true. Someone gave me a blank canvas, already primed and stretched back in 1987, so I borrowed some oils and had a go, but the results weren't great. Having noticed that art supplies stores now sell ready made primed and stretched canvases I bought a stack of them in 2015 and took another shot, but that was similarly a bit of a disaster because I was still using oil as though it were acrylic.  Now it's 2018, and I'm going at it again, but this time I've sought the advice of both Sean Keating and Chris Hunt - acquaintances respectively encountered at different stages of my existence, and both well accustomed to working in oils. I've decided I'm going to paint something every Sunday afternoon, something quick rendered in the general spirit of the Impressionists with the emphasis on light and mood. I'll be working from life, no gimmicks or novelties, no crowd-pleasing kitsch, no talking down to anyone, no Winnie the fucking Pooh, just good, honest painting in the hope of making the world a better place in some small way. At the time of writing, I've produced four canvases, each arguably improving on its predecessor as I ease myself into the application of new techniques, relearning how to do that which I picked up during many years of working with acrylic. Of these canvases, I've somehow already sold one for sixty dollars.

This enterprise is partially inspired by my wife and the rocks she paints, as described here. We're collectively trying to add to the global stock of beauty - or thereabouts, and to serve as an example by aspiring to do something of greater relative worth than either the kitsch or spunky couches with which we're supposed to be satisfied; and once I've generated sufficient quota of respectable canvases, we're going to start hitting the craft fairs.

With all of this in mind, we are now driving across San Antonio, just a little way down the Austin Highway after eating at a Caribbean place near where we live. We find the house easily enough. They could have come to our house, but it turns out that they're both allergic to cats. The woman produces pours - assuming that's the plural form of pour as a noun. A pour is a canvas upon which acrylic paint has been poured, allowed to mix, and then to set, forming a colourful pattern much like what can be seen in a blob of oil. She contacted my wife through facebook to propose a collaboration, so Bess is going to paint her mandala-style designs upon canvas pours. I'm here because we do everything together and I'm told that the husband of our pour artist is himself a painter, and that he has exhibited his work in galleries and should be considered a professional. He sounds like someone worth knowing.

We are invited in.

The place is full of canvases, large and colourful, abstract designs which remind me a little of Roberto Matta or satellite photographs of Jupiter's upper atmosphere, and I get talking to the guy. He took up painting just two years ago following an injury at work. He seems fascinated by the fact that I'm from England and tells me about the time he and his wife visited London. He tells me he's had his ancestry dissected by one of those companies which extrapolates such information from a DNA sample, and some of his ancestors were English. Otherwise he's also about 40% Native American, which makes sense being as he has that sort of face. There are postcards of Mexican pyramids on the wall.

'Chichén Itzá,' I exclaim happily. 'I've been to Mexico a few times but I never made it that far east.'

'It's a beautiful place,' he tells me. 'You know all of those pyramids, they are built upon a secret chamber. All over the world, they have found open spaces below the pyramids.'

I vaguely recall reading of a cave system beneath the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, a subterranean structure supposedly divided into seven chambers bearing suspicious concordance to ancestral Mexican myths of Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caves from which the Nahuatl-speaking tribes were reputedly born; but I have an uncomfortable feeling our host is referring to something else entirely, one of those things modern science can't explain, at least providing you ignore whatever existing explanation modern science has probably already given.

We talk about painting instead. I ask about the one I saw on his facebook page, three figures arranged before the Mexican national flag. It seemed reminiscent of the murals of Diego Rivera, and therefore not without promise.

'The Child Heroes,' he tells me. 'They were young boys who defended Chapultepec in the Mexican-American war.'

I recall Niños Héroes, a tube station one stop south of Balderas in Mexico City. I guess that the children would be those whom the station commemorates. If I knew the story of the Child Heroes, it seems I have since forgotten it.

He shows us the rest of his work. It's mostly representational, a little raw but not bad. The exhibitions turn out to have been stalls at comic conventions, and he shows us large canvases depicting Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and some other Batman character I don't recognise. I sigh inwardly. Harley Quinn's mouth sits at a peculiar angle, distracting me from questions of why anyone would wish to buy such a thing, let alone why anyone would want to paint it in the first place.

So much for that idea.

The meeting makes me feel bad for our hosts, and uncomfortable at my own uncharitable regard. I could lie and say it's wonderful work and that at least you're expressing yourself, but I'm not sure anyone who copies a character out of a comic book is really expressing anything, and I don't know that a pat on the head and well done, you is really fair on any of us.

I don't want that to be the future of art, so from this point on I'm going to shut up and get on with it.

Tim's Last Moon

Tim's First Moon was a single page comic strip written and drawn by Simon Cox and myself in July, 1984. We'd come to the end of our one year art foundation course at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further Education and I suppose you could say that we were letting off steam. The Tim under discussion was a fellow student and the subject of some mockery. He seemed an oddly conservative figure on a course populated by colourful characters, teenagers making the most of having left school, of being able to dye their hair, wear outrageous clothes, smoke, drink, and do all that stuff you really need to do when you're a teenager. His conversation, which often seemed to be channelling an Alan Bennett monologue, was peppered with references to his mother and to a home life seemingly much like that of Ronnie Corbett's Timothy character in the sitcom Sorry! The issue was, I guess, not specifically that Tim was hilariously square, socially awkward, and conspicuously in the thrall of a seemingly domineering mother, but that he was all of these in conjunction with being loud and sometimes quite pushy. He was an abrasive personality and didn't seem to realise it. He had about him the quality of a manic schoolboy and people found it unsettling.

I liked Tim, or at least I didn't actively dislike him. His artworks were large and weird, huge canvasses covered in scribbled equations and navel-gazing essays on the subject of himself as artist, or his peculiar pastiche of the paintings of Julian Schnabel using paper plates. His work was about art as medium, the art industry, art as a commodity and so on; or so it seemed. Tim's explanations never really made any sense to me. At the time I assumed this to be because these explanations went over my head. I didn't understand his viewpoint although it seemed interesting, not least because it was completely unlike anything else being produced by anyone on the art foundation course. I imagined he stood a reasonable chance of becoming the next Gilbert & George if he could just manage to go five minutes without pissing someone off. The problem was that, I guess, he just wouldn't listen, which pretty much defeated the point of his taking the course. Whatever the tutors suggested apparently failed to get through, and his work remained incomprehensible to more or less everyone but himself.

Tim's First Moon was drawn, I suppose, in response to his manic exhibitionism, his inability to take a hint or to judge any given situation before steaming in, making a fool of himself, and giving everyone the hump. His interest in girls, for example, was expressed in comedic drooling and gurning as he rolled his tongue around in his mouth and made grabbing motions with his hands. My guess is that it was intended to be funny, even disarmingly ridiculous, but it just came off as peculiar. The story of the cartoon strip, such as it was, involved Tim's breakfast bowl of sugar puffs laced with hallucinogenic drugs by fellow students in the hope of broadening his horizons. It concludes with Tim revealed as having three buttocks as he moons the college Principal at a public function. Simon and myself made ourselves howl with laughter as we drew the thing, and then we screen printed a few hundred copies on cheap paper and gave them out to anyone who wanted one.

Tim should have been mortified, but it seemed he loved the attention, which is probably a clue as to whatever his problem was in the first place. We'd taken the piss out of him, gallon after gallon, and with such enthusiasm that I began to feel a great sense of guilt when we started printing off those first copies on the silk screens. Nevertheless Tim seemed to think it was great. I suppose he saw any publicity as good publicity.

As our year of art foundation drew to a close, some of us were preparing for degree courses elsewhere. I myself was headed for Maidstone College of Art in Kent. Tim hadn't been accepted anywhere, although it should be noted that he had applied only to colleges within travelling distance of home, and so he signed up for another year of the art foundation course. For some reason, we exchanged addresses and struck up a correspondence. With hindsight I still have no idea why this happened. It wasn't like we had a great deal in common, and we hadn't really been close friends at college. I felt a certain degree of guilt over Tim's First Moon, disliking the image of myself allied with all those legions arrayed against the poor fucker, hooting with laughter as we pointed at his spots and silly hair, daring him to say a rude word in front of mother almighty. The fact of his purporting to have enjoyed our cruel cartoon only seemed to make it worse.

On the other hand, having started a mail order DIY tape label in order to distribute my own home-made music, I'd passed Tim a couple of cassettes, and he had responded with enthusiasm, which was of course very flattering.

So we corresponded for a couple of years on the subject of something or other. For two years running he failed to be accepted for a fine art degree course at any college within travel distance of his home, and so changed direction, some secretarial course or whatever, business studies - that kind of thing. I regarded his reluctance to move away from home as a little odd, although having myself found the experience somewhat difficult, in some ways I understood, and it was clear that there was no joy to be had in telling him to move out, to get out from under that woman. He was unreceptive to such arguments, and besides it was the same song as had been sung by those who had spent the year taking the piss out of him with such enthusiasm.

Instead he seemed to be concentrating on something called Media Bunker, a name with a logo which appeared to be a huge paintbrush launched from an ICBM silo. He was making plans, writing manifestos, collating photocopied notes in presentation folders. He phoned me and spent an hour raving about a television commercial in which Victor Kiam reported liking Remington razors so much that he'd bought the company, and he raved as though it should be obvious what this had to do with anything.

The trouble was that in the three or four years of Media Bunker, as discussed in both letters and the occasional phone call, I never found out what Media Bunker was actually supposed to be. Was it a building, an art gallery? Was it an agency, as suggested by his contacting and in a few cases pissing off an assortment of local artists? Was it a magazine? What the fuck was it?

I never found out. Neither did I find out quite what the Rock Drill Rockers were supposed to be, beyond the scribbled drawings he sent in the mail - Epstein's Rock Drill, Brancusi's Mademoiselle Pogany and other iconic modernist sculptures playing instruments as backing band for the Art Assassin, which was Tim looking moody in a trench coat wielding a gun shaped like a paintbrush. I had seen a balsa wood maquette of the paintbrush gun, but that hadn't made a lot of sense either. It could have been a proposed installation or performance, a laboured metaphor for something or other, or a ponderous Saturday morning cartoon show.

'Tim was ever so disappointed,' his mother told me when finally I met her. 'He thought you would be moving back here and you could help him with his thing—'

'Media Bunker,' Tim interrupted, pulling a face - disappointment seasoned with acceptance of its inevitability. 'I thought after you finished college we could work on Media Bunker together.'

This was news to me. I was stood at the counter of an antiques stall in a covered market in Stratford-on-Avon. This was Tim's mother's stall and Tim himself now worked here. This was his job. He was, he told people, in the antiques trade. The antiques in question were antiques in the sense of being stuff he and his mother had found in the attic. There wasn't anything quite at the level of faded jigsaw puzzles or boardgames with missing pieces, but tat was nevertheless as good a description as any. To gaze through the glass top of that counter upon the treasures carefully arranged below, each with its own handwritten price tag, was to experience crushing sorrow on behalf of everyone involved. Tim had a job in so much as anyone who ever put on a yard sale has a job for just as long as they're trying to sell that massive telly with the picture showing in just cancer-blue down the left side of the screen.

I had read a lot about Tim's mother in the letters, the matriarch who refused to let him leave home or make his own way, the wicked old witch holding him back. This, he wrote, was the truth of the situation, contrary to the general thrust of the jokes we had told at college. I didn't know what to expect of her.

She was a short, unhappy looking women with long grey hair and a strong Midlands twang. Contrary to my expectations, she seemed sharp-witted, and I found that I quite liked her.

'I wish you'd have a word with this one, Lawrence.' She regarded her son with icy frustration. 'He's bloody never going to leave home at this rate. He'll still be there when I'm pushing up the daisies, mark my words.'

This was a different take on the story, and one that seemed more plausible to me. It had become obvious that Tim lacked natural curiosity, anything you could describe as a sense of adventure. He wasn't really interested in other people, places, or indeed anything much outside himself. The notion that he might have been somehow held back by this small, faintly acidic woman whilst straining at the bit to make that degree interview in Dundee did not ring true.

I'd visited the antique centre having moved from Kent back to Warwickshire, or specifically to Coventry, in 1989. After about a month I came to the realisation that this hadn't been the best idea I'd ever had, and so I put in for a transfer with my job and moved back down south, to London. I'd resisted the drive to move to London which seemed to have swept up so many of my contemporaries like eels to the Sargasso as we finished our degrees. I had told myself I would never live in London, but by 1989 it didn't seem like there was anywhere else left to go.

Tim and I maintained our correspondence on and off as I took to cartooning in earnest, mainly short absurdist efforts which were printed in an assortment of fanzines. He sent me a detailed plot outline in the post, written and drawn in his scrawled hand until the A4 sketchbook was full. It was, he explained, something he had been working on and perhaps I might like to use it in some capacity. The story opened at a graveside, the funeral of our hero's younger sister, killed by drugs. Our man reflects that he never really understood the acid house phenomena, for surely everything that could be said in that genre had already been done by Heaven 17 and the Human League. All he knows is that the drug dealers will pay for the death of his younger sister. Accordingly he refits his car with the best that British engineering has to offer, crafting a mighty chariot by which to hunt down the drug dealers...

I skipped to the end, to a car chase at Heathrow Airport, and struggled to understand why Tim had thought I would be interested in this crap. Even without the fumbling childlike narrative, his understanding of the cultural phenomena of acid house made your average cockwomble Daily Mail journalist seem like Timothy Leary; but sadly I knew that there was no point trying to communicate this

Over time we graduated to tape letters spoken onto cassette, which made for quite nice little art objects and saved the time spent writing out several pages of news and views which would probably be ignored, or else struggling to decipher Tim's handwriting. We spoke on the phone, and ultimately by email, although I had increasingly begun to wonder why I was friends with this person. We had nothing in common. These accounts of his plans and ambitions, such as they were, made no more sense to me than had Media Bunker or any of the other stuff. I felt some pity for him, this unloveable, awkward, eternal manchild, but no man was ever the better for being pitied, as D.H. Lawrence observed in The Plumed Serpent.

This time, he's not getting the new email address, I would tell myself, or the phone number, but somehow he always did, and I would resign myself to further incomprehensible nonsense.

He phoned me at work as I was busy and hardly in the mood for rambling crap. I'd just got my first mobile phone, a crappy but functional Nokia, and so he spent ten minutes telling me about his mobile phone, a BlackBerry or something of the kind with full QWERTY keyboard. 'Everyone calls it the beast,' he snorted down the line from Warwickshire. I tried to imagine a scenario in which passing strangers regarded Tim speaking on his mobile telephone with awe, never before having seen such a wonder. I tried to imagine what Tim would be talking about, or to whom he might be talking if not me. It was seven in the morning and I was pissed off and already knackered, and my imagination was not up to the task.

'Do they really call it the beast?'

'Yes!'

'Wow.'

Royal Mail had introduced changes to working conditions which had made the job extremely difficult, and all in the name of savings, regardless of the detrimental effect upon both quality of service and working conditions. I found this so stressful that I went briefly mad and was obliged to take time off work having been diagnosed with mild clinical depression. I felt, if not literally suicidal, then something in that direction. The one thing which had prevented my employer from forcing me to work in excess of eight hours weekly overtime on top of a back-breaking forty hour week was European Union employment law. Royal Mail wanted to be able to work us for as long as they liked, threatening anyone refusing the overtime with disciplinary action on the grounds of delaying the mail, but thankfully they couldn't because of EU employment law. I explained this to Tim on the phone one evening, having already endured fifty unbroken minutes of his thoughts on the British aerospace industry, then I listened as he delivered his verdict, a stream of aspirational management bullshit pretty much identical to the crap by which my employers had justified the changes. I had the actual experience of the matter, but he knew better because he always did. He effectively told me I had failed to understand that which I was directly experiencing on a daily basis.

When finally I got a word in edgeways, he cut me short.

'Mum's nagging me to get off the phone,' he chortled. 'She's just put out the sticky toffee pudding,' which was followed by ten minutes on the subject of sticky toffee pudding - yum yum yum. I had never heard of sticky toffee pudding, and looked around to see if Mike Leigh was crouched down behind the sofa directing a cameraman.

A couple more years up the line as he settled into another lengthy monologue on the subject of the aviation industry for no reason I fully understood, I set the telephone receiver down on the arm of the sofa and went to make myself a cup of tea. When I returned some ten minutes later, he was still talking, having failed to notice my absence. Eventually he swung around to asking how I had been, how my life was going.

'I have a girlfriend,' I reported. 'Her name is Marian.'

'That's great!,' he chirped in the voice of an overenthusiastic seventies disc jockey. 'Well done, mate!'

It actually wasn't that great, much as I wished it were. Following the initial few weeks of euphoria, Marian had invited me to an intimate gathering with just thirty or forty close friends and together they had attempted to passive-aggressive me into joining their brainwashing therapy cult, an organisation charging several hundred pounds a pop for courses I didn't need to take on account of already having a job and a functioning personality. The relationship had more or less been exposed as bullshit before it had really got started, and I was very upset about this. I spoke without interruption - which I found odd - telling Tim how distressing it was for about twenty minutes.

'She sounds a great little lass!' he chirped in response, sounding like Paul Daniels on speed, and I recalled that he'd never really been too interested in other people. When in dialogue with another person he seems to regard their contribution as time in which to compose whatever he'll say next so as to supplement whatever he said before.

I went to visit Tim for one last time just a few days before I moved to the United States. I hadn't seen him in a while and anticipated at least a couple of questions about the details of my move, some level of curiosity, but no; I sat and listened for more than thirty minutes as he explained his latest big idea, a new kind of science-fiction television show. It would be, he said, like a cross between Doctor Who and Star Trek. He described the build up to the big revelation for about ten minutes, at length coming to, 'and then we close in on the wreckage and we see that the sign reads,' - pause for dramatic effect as he licks his lips - 'United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.'

Why the fuck did I bother?, I wondered.

'I hope you let Lawrence get a word in edgeways,' his wife chided as she emerged from the kitchen twenty or so minutes later. 'Tell me you haven't been bending the poor boy's ear all this time?'

Tim laughed his loud, awkward laugh. 'We've just been having a bit of a natter!' Then he turned to me. 'She does love to make a fuss!'

I will never have to see this person again, I thought to myself.

I moved to the United States and got married, and Tim diminished further to an internet presence, the eternal Prince Philip of my facebook page, ever ready to step in and piss someone off with an ill-informed observation. It was almost a year before he ran out of things to say about the foreign policy of former president George W. Bush, apparently having assumed my Texan wife - who was also using facebook - would respond well to these ill-judged comments, and perhaps might even take the opportunity to personally apologise for her part in all that business with Afghanistan. I made a serious effort to impress upon him just why Bess was no more accountable for Bush's presidency than Tim himself was for Margaret Thatcher's tenure in office. This inspired him to share a lengthy anecdote about the time he met an American at the antiques centre, some fifteen years before. Apparently the tourist in question had been a really smashing chap. I think this anecdote was offered as some sort of testament to Tim being the last person who would make sweeping gestures regarding issues of nationality.

More recently on facebook I posted a link to an article about the criminalisation of persons attempting to feed the homeless here in America. This is typical Republican thinking is what I am thinking, was Tim's less than grammatical verdict on a law which might be characterised as the exact opposite of Republican thinking, the most basic Republican principle being that of less government interference in the lives of its citizenry. The criminalisation of persons attempting to feed the homeless was actually quite typical of the more state-orientated Democrat party, but either way, in lieu of bothering to consider any research beyond repeats of Dallas on UK Gold, Tim had effectively delivered the equivalent of thank God the English mineworkers' unions at least had Margaret Thatcher on their side. This pissed me off because I now have Republican supporting facebook using relatives who are actually very nice people regardless of their voting habits, and it pained me to see them so insulted because every time Tim opens his mouth or sets forefinger to keyboard it's like mad uncle George just stumbled in and - oh fuck - it looks like he's found the sherry again.

Following this, our social networking took a more depressing tone, with Tim still offering comment regardless of whether he actually knew what he's talking about, ever lengthier essays with the usual loose differentiation between their and there, accept and except, and punctuation dispensed more or less at random. His relationship to language and communication had always been at something of an angle in comparison to the rest of us, particularly where words of seven or more letters were involved. Following on from Do Easy, my DIY tape label, I had published comics and fanzines under the banner of Runciter Corporation, as borrowed from Philip K. Dick, or Russinter Corporation as Tim pronounced it. His first girlfriend, who arrived on the scene in 1994, suffered an eating disorder known as bulmia, he told me. This meant that she was bulmic. After a couple of times I stopped bothering to make the correction. Maybe he suffers from some sort of dysexlia, I figured. Now he was going off the deep end, always rhetorically asking so why else do you think that Gene Roddenberry would - then describing something the Star Trek producer had done which you'd never heard of, didn't care about, and couldn't see how the fuck it related to anything. He would make forceful points about things which didn't matter, often exposing his own bewildering cultural isolation in the process, falsely identifying long-running and fairly popular internet memes as jokes originated by The Big Bang Theory, a somewhat laboured American situation comedy. Communication was ever of the sort traditionally associated with ear-trumpets and shouting.

More annoying was his steady progress towards a vein of politics he bewilderingly regarded as centre left, as I first noticed with the sharing of one of those stories in which some hijab clad foreigner insults the Queen - as depicted on the coins comprising her change in a British supermarket - inspiring a passing retired Colonel to deliver the if you don't like it you can fuck off speech to much applause from the assembled own business minding shoppers.

So this really happened, did it? I asked.

Tim explained that even if it didn't happen, it was the principal of the story which mattered. Perhaps not surprisingly he is now an enthusiastic supporter of an English political party which by definition might be seen to epitomise fear of the unfamiliar. I would rather not grant them the oxygen of publicity - or the oxygen of oxygen for that matter - so let's identify them as the Party of Our Pound Sign, POOPS for short.

I have no idea what has made Tim as he is, what psychology informs his way of thinking. I suspect he may have had a difficult upbringing in many respects, or at least one which has left him insecure and perhaps lacking some degree of self-esteem. He has always seemed so fearful of change and unfamiliar circumstances as for this to border on a form of mania; and so he has done very little, so far as I am aware, to broaden either his experience or understanding of the world beyond his own postcode. It sometimes seems not so much as though he mistakes the map for territory, as that he lacks awareness of there being anything besides the map. Some of this would probably account for his forceful overstatements, offering that which he feels he has understood as proud symbols of achievement which define him as the person he feels he would very much like to be, namely a man who speaks with authority. It would probably also account for why he seems to be a sucker for a chap in a nice suit and tie, the uniform of those who embody the sort of success to which he aspires - the self-made man as defined by his financial acumen, the solid, happy guy untroubled by any of that Bohemian nonsense. I know doctors, dentists, and architects, Reeves; proper people, not like yourself, as one of Bob Mortimer's characters used to say.

He went back and forth with the POOPS, at one point horrified to discover what seemed to be their policy regarding disability benefit - for one example - then presumably reconciling himself to the leopard changing its spots, or that it wasn't so bad once you read the small print, or that it was one of many examples of fake POOPS websites set up so as to spread misinformation and make Poopers look like a bunch of raving Nazis. He tried to sell me on immigration reform by invoking my fear of all those Mexicans flooding across the border just south of where I live, having somehow missed the crucial point of being an immigrant myself and quite happily living in a city of 60% Hispanic constitution. He talked about something he termed political correctness taken out of context in relation to the 2012 sex trafficking convictions in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. He would emphasise the great numbers of Muslims, Jews, and other foreigners who had all become loyal Poopers, proving to me once and for all that he really had sat next to one on the bus and had been proud to do so.

His facebook posts and responses began to read like party political broadcasts rather than arguments, reiterations of what may as well have been what some bloke said in a pub for all I could tell. I asked that he desist, so he filed off the serial numbers, making vague but nevertheless unnecessarily lengthy references to fringe parties which had some really interesting things to say. Somehow such obvious hints failed to intrigue me as was presumably intended.

I began to take some pleasure in sharing blog posts and newspaper articles showing POOPS to be an opportunistic party, lacking coherent policies beyond whatever fed into voter insecurity that week. I hoped Tim might either wise up, or else unfollow my facebook feed, but sadly he rose to what he clearly took to be a challenge, composing longer, ever testier defences of the thing which seemed to have given his life some purpose, and as he did so he became ruder and less coherent. My facebook friends responded in kind and were usually met with something in the general vicinity of whatever had been said, rather than any specific dissection of points raised.

It was the same as it had ever been.

He never really understood the acid house phenomena, for surely everything that could be said in that genre had already been done by Heaven 17 and the Human League...

Sticky toffee pudding - yum yum yum.

She sounds a great little lass!

...and then we close in on the wreckage and we see that the sign reads United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.

So why else do you think that Gene Roddenberry would...

This is typical Republican thinking is what I am thinking.

Then on the seventh of January he invited himself to expound upon the POOPS view of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, following my linking to a Robert Reich article about something which wasn't the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and it all went pear-shaped. A number of my more eloquent and informed friends tackled his commentary admirably, and he took increasing quantities of umbrage at their failing to see his point despite all of the details having been explained. He began telling people to grow up, and to suggest that they lacked experience of the issues but rather were something called armchair jockeys. He asked me why I should even care given that I had run away from the nation in question, then suggested I get off my fat arse and return to England and get myself elected. I had a response, asking whether it was now official POOPS policy that those not actively standing for election were not entitled to form an opinion, then suggesting that I might defer to Tim's great wealth of worldly experience and knowledge, but it seemed like it would be better to simply block him from my facebook page. Funnily enough, he beat me to it and defriended me first.

It was for the best. The situation wasn't making either of us any happier, and nor were any lessons being learned beyond don't come between a man and that which gives his life purpose. I still wonder if Tim noticed the irony embedded within any of his protestations before hitting the unfriend button, although given his parting shot, I doubt it.

Firstly, even calling me xenophobic is me a clear disgusting and horrid insult that I cannot help but take personally. That is the problem that all the Far Left seem to suffer from, a love of throwing insults and then when someone throws them back most get all defensive.

It was just over thirty years since Tim's First Moon, and this was his last, or at least the last moon to shine that triumvirate of buttocks across my world, and the last moon to unleash that which squirts forth from those twinned stars of opprobrium and cross-purposes. I wish him the best, and hope he finds something which makes him happy - providing I don't have to hear about it. If not fun, then I suppose it's been interesting, but nothing lasts forever. All this time, I really should have known better. I tried to be the nice guy by crediting someone with more reasoning power than was ever within their grasp, and probably because I liked the idea of myself as the nice guy in contrast to the horrible cunt who drew that cruel cartoon with Simon Cox back in July, 1984; and so I'm pissed off when I realise that the cartoon, cruel as it was, was nevertheless pretty much on target. So I knew it all along, but simply didn't like to admit it. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I subconsciously nominated Tim to be some sort of marker post, a point by which I could measure how far I have travelled from my insular, small town teenage self. Maybe then I have only myself to blame.

The Quiet and Pleasant Man

Robert James Shepherd - my grandfather on my mother's side - was born on the 8th of March, 1910 somewhere in Liverpool, England for the sake of argument. He was one of a fairly large working-class family tracing its ancestry back to Northern Ireland, and possibly to Scotland before that. I almost certainly have some of the details wrong, but this is as much as I can recall from my mother's genealogical research which takes our family tree back to the late 1600s. Somewhere in there lurks a member of the Orange Lodge, but we don't like to talk about him too much, not least because we don't really know enough about him for anything more than a short sentence.

My grandfather's parents were Joseph and Emmeline Shepherd, and his military documentation gives his home address as 17, Hotspur Road in Bootle, which is technically Merseyside rather than Liverpool depending on who you ask and when; and providing you ask someone other than my grandmother who would customarily adopt a face of stony and silent disgust in the event of anyone mistaking her for a Scouser, which occurred with some frequency due to her fairly distinct Liverpudlian accent.

What I have left of my grandfather's story is cobbled together from fading childhood memories; a couple of hundred black and white photographs which, if numerous, remain nevertheless mysterious; and a lever arch file containing military documentation, certificates of training, pay book, and all sorts. From these I know that he was a joiner by trade - following in his father's footsteps so I believe - who enlisted with the Royal Artillery on the 1st of April 1933. The next few sequential documents I have are third and then second class certificates of military education passed in English, mathematics, map reading, and a subject termed army and empire. He is identified as a Driver on these certificates, ascending to the rank of Gunner on his first class certificate of military education dated to the 16th of October 1935. He transferred to the Army Reserves at the rank of Bombardier on the 29th of January, 1939. Notes made in his Certificate of Service booklet dated to the 28th of September, 1938 describe his conduct as exemplary, with some officer whose signature I am unable to decipher describing my grandfather as follows:

A first class surveyor and a reliable and trustworthy NCO. He is very intelligent and is methodical and painstaking. He has a quiet and pleasant manner.

England went to war with Germany on 3rd of September, 1939, from which point my grandfather's story is told mainly in photographs as he sits atop a camel before the Great Pyramid in Egypt, along with other scenes of his life in India or the North African desert. Two formal uniformed portrait photographs delineate his promotion from Corporal to Staff Sergeant, and then there are the medals - notably the Africa Star - and what little I am able to remember him telling me of his time with Montgomery's Eighth Army when I was a kid.

My mother was born just after war ended, and a receipt for the payment of an examination fee dated to the 3rd of November, 1948 testifies to my grandfather's return to civilian life as a structural engineer - or an architect if the more specific term seems a little obtuse. He may not quite have designed the buildings, but he made sure they didn't fall down. This trade was much in demand in the city of Coventry in the West Midlands, much of which had been flattened by the Luftwaffe during the war, although it could probably be argued that Coventry City Council spent the next two decades bulldozing the bits which Hitler's finest had missed. Anyway, the point is that my grandparents moved to Kenilworth, Warwickshire, just down the road from Coventry, which is how my mother ended up in that part of the country, and ultimately how I came to be born. Kenilworth had become aspirational in the years following the second world war. You were someone if you lived in Kenilworth, which pleased my grandmother as much as anything pleased her. My grandfather, who had never suffered any particular shame in acknowledging his Merseyside roots, may have felt differently, but work was work and I suppose he tended to keep his thoughts to himself.

My mother has described her home life as pleasant up until the age of twelve or so, at which point my grandfather apparently found himself bewildered as to how to cope with teenage girls. Where he would once play with my mother and her younger sister, read to them and tell them stories, he became a distant and apparently humourless authority figure inspiring my mother to rebel further when charged with inconsequential accusations made purely for the sake of authority.

He seemed to do well as an architect working for Coventry City Council, and he had his friends and his fishing at the weekend, but the war had stayed with him in certain respects, unfortunately leading to a spell in the nuthouse during which he was subject to electroconvulsive therapy. It probably didn't help that my grandmother had never quite been the sharpest tool in the box, and had always been a somewhat self-absorbed individual. Whilst she doted upon me as a child, and I in turn thought she was wonderful, even at that age I could see she had something of a martyr complex. Nothing my grandfather did for her was ever quite good enough, and he did plenty.

'Never mind,' she would say with a laboured sigh. 'I suppose at least you tried.' She herself had been the least favoured of three children, the one with neither the beauty nor any particular talent to speak of, and so she grew up with a vague sense of being owed something which she could not quite articulate. She apparently fell some way short of being the world's greatest mother, and I always wondered if she saw my arrival in terms of atonement, as a way of making up for lost time. I was indulged as her own children had never been.

The happiest days of her life had been as a land girl on the farm of Sammy Shellew in Cornwall, and memories of the same were frequently invoked for the sake of contrast with an endlessly disappointing present. If only she had married Sammy, or if only she had not moved so far from the wonderful Thelma, her greatest friend in the whole world. She met with Thelma a few times in the seventies, but eventually fell out with her; and then the venerable Sammy Shellew came to stay, which didn't work out so well due to his having interpreted my grandmother's gushing praise as a sexual overture, which probably wasn't entirely his fault.

For most of the 1970s I would be taken to stay with my grandparents every other weekend, arriving Friday evening and coming back Sunday afternoon. It was a regular thing, a routine, and like many children, I loved routine and found it comforting, something upon which one might rely in a world which appeared chaotic through not yet being fully understood. One of my earliest coherent memories is of watching Neil Armstrong landing on the moon as viewed on my grandparents' black and white television on Sunday the 20th of July, 1969. I would have been three years old, two months short of four. My grandfather was ten years older than I am right now.

Weekends generally began with breakfast, usually my grandfather making buttered toast - your bog standard Mother's Pride white sliced bread and probably Stork margarine, but somehow I've never been able to make toast quite so good as he did. Tea was stewed until bright orange - or at least the complexion of Judith Chalmers from that holiday show. The cocktail cabinet built into the sideboard was well stocked with kid drinks, Cresta or else bottles of Nesquik syrup for milkshakes and a selection of drinking straws, but they got me onto tea quite early on, always served from a pot into a cup with a saucer, one of those matching sets invoking some level of sophistication.

'He's been a proper little tea urn this weekend,' my grandmother reported one Sunday as my parents arrived to take me home, and it was true that I had been guzzling one cup after another. I can still recall my overpowering thirst of that particular weekend.

Some Saturdays I'd awake before my grandparents and would go downstairs and find something amazing in being the first to rise, in being the one to draw back the curtains upon a new day. On one such occasion I switched the radio on just as Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty was playing, and right in the middle of that Bob Holness saxophone break which I have ever since associated with an early Saturday morning at my grandparents' house; and the thing is, I'm not even sure of this being a real memory as opposed to some sort of association made after the fact.

My grandparents didn't seem to like anything racier than Jim Reeves so far as I could tell, so modern pop music was absolutely out of the question. My grandfather had apparently taken some delight in mocking his youngest daughter's love of Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders by referring to them as the Bananabenders, and I don't recall the radio ever having been tuned to anything that would have featured Baker Street. My parents took me to see Grease at the cinema in Stratford-upon-Avon when it came out, and the next Friday as they ferried me over to Kenilworth, I begged them not to tell Grandma we'd been to see the film. I somehow felt that such an admission would bring disgrace upon us, but I still have no idea how I thought this would work or what would happen if our terrible secret should be revealed.

Breakfast was usually prefaced by my grandfather walking up Caesar Road to the newsagent for a newspaper. I would tag along and he would buy me one of the small, brightly-coloured plastic dinosaurs from the display on the counter, or in later years the new issue of 2000AD comic; and I have a very specific memory of reading issue sixty-eight with the gruesome cyborg Artie Gruber on the cover at the breakfast table with my hot margarined toast and orange tea. My grandfather quite possibly passed some faintly disparaging comment on my reading material, thus cementing the memory in place. 2000AD comic was one of the first things I understood as belonging to my generation and thus beyond the scope of adults. Six weeks later as our family headed off for a week's holiday in Delabole, Cornwall, my mother frowned at the cover of issue seventy-four upon which Judge Dredd is seen on the verge of being devoured by a tyrannosaurus.

'It's very violent,' she observed in disapproving fashion.

'It's violence in the cause of good,' I explained somewhat ineptly.

After Baker Street, the orange tea, toast, and my weekly dose of violence in the cause of good, my grandparents and I would bundle into the navy blue Morris Minor and drive to Leamington Spa. My grandfather drove cautiously, perched forward in his seat, gripping the wheel and generally refusing to talk. Often he would whistle Bizet's March of the Toreadors from Carmen, and he would whistle it with such enthusiasm and frequency that I came to regard it as his signature tune; although specifically I have a better memory of him whistling it when it was just the two of us. He seemed less given to flourishes of carefree cheer in my grandmother's company, and my mother tells me that he was once in the habit of singing to himself, Pennies from Heaven and other songs of the time. I suppose by the seventies he generally felt less moved to song.

By the eighties, having invented experimental music, I produced a track attempting to invoke his memory by recording the running of a friend's Morris Minor whilst whistling March of the Toreadors. It seemed like an important thing to do, but the recording was disappointing.

Once in Leamington Spa I would be unleashed in a labyrinthine Regent Street toy shop called Toy Town, there to blow what feeble sum of pocket money I'd managed to save on model railway accessories, Ellisdon's jokes and novelties, Micronauts, Dinky's die-cast Gerry Anderson vehicles, model kits of dinosaurs, Shogun Warriors, or Faller alpine houses earmarked for the aforementioned model railway. I was good at spending money but not at saving it, so my model railway comprised mainly accessories and scenery with very little actual railway. With hindsight it strikes me as a little weird how I would buy and build bungalows, houses and shops past which no miniature electric locomotive would ever trundle on OO gauge tracks, and I can't help wonder if my granddad ever noticed this and imagined I might have some subconscious drive to one day follow him into the architectural trade. Having been a joiner, he still had all of his carpentry tools and so jollied me along by making a couple of wooden tunnel entrances which might eventually parenthesise the locomotive passage through a hillside of papier maché and chicken wire.

I repaid him by never getting around to constructing my hypothetical layout, and by nominating him test subject for all the Ellisdon's jokes and novelties I bought once I gave up on the model railway idea. Whilst he never struck me as particularly lacking a sense of humour, he tired of the job fairly rapidly then resigned during breakfast one Sunday. He'd responded to the loud farting rasp of the whoopee cushion on his chair with an indulgent smile. He'd found the plastic fried egg on his plate considerably less amusing, and the novelty double-sided suction cup by which I had attached his cup of tea securely to its saucer was the last straw.

'Your mother shall hear of this,' he muttered darkly, carrying the still full cup and firmly attached saucer to the kitchen. It had been a long weekend for him. The day before, my grandmother had only just talked me out of trying my joke sweets on him by suggesting there was a possibility that I might kill him. I'd made the sweets myself from everything I could find in the kitchen cupboard. To my grandfather's credit, he made no attempt to throttle me, despite probably knowing that no court in the land would have found him guilty. He never raised his voice to me, because I suppose he understood that, being a child, I was essentially psychotic and that it was therefore nothing personal. He was nevertheless able to induce me to behave with just a few words. It was probably the military training.

My grandmother's approach to child care was based on flattery, giving me stuff, and assuming it would be appreciated. It generally was appreciated, although I nevertheless got out of hand from time to time. Standard child psychology would have termed it a testing of limits, which I could have told you even back then. I had become irritable at being addressed as sweetheart or similar endearments with such frequency, and so I began to experiment with basic rudeness, making strident demands, complaints about the quality of service, and on one occasion directly calling her an old bat. I was probably about six or seven and I thought it was funny because I knew she would let me get away with it.

'Don't speak to your grandma like that,' my grandfather suggested, momentarily fixing me with the mildest of glances; and in that moment I saw myself as the repulsive brat I had become. It felt awful and I learned my lesson immediately. It was as though I'd been punched in the stomach.

On Saturday afternoons I would play with whatever I'd bought back from Leamington Spa, or sometimes we drove to Coventry to visit the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, and my grandfather would point out which buildings he'd helped design as we drove through the city. The swimming pool was one of his, as were parts of the university, so I believe, and it had been his job to make an assessment of the extent of the coal mining beneath the city and whether or not the ground would be able to support the weight of St. Michael's Cathedral.

Some Saturday afternoons, he would take me down to Abbey Fields in Kenilworth to catch fish from the stream, or around Kenilworth Castle; and I have no idea what we talked about during those walks, but I recall that we talked at length. As my mother has observed more recently, whilst some of his views were staunchly conservative and typical of his background and times, he was essentially a decent and intelligent man who was interested in things. He had seen some of the world and had come back the better for it in most respects but for those more directly related to the war. He would take me to Leamington Spa and have me splash around in a kayak for an hour or so at a small boating lake near Jephson Gardens, and I would notice the Indian women in their saris and remark on how strange they looked.

'I think they look very pretty,' he observed somewhat forcefully, possibly even wistfully given the time he'd spent in India, belying the generalisation of his generation's supposedly inherent xenophobia.

His creative energies went into plays and letters hammered out on a typewriter which he would sometimes encourage me to use. He wrote a play called One Bad Apple or something similar, a heavy-handed cautionary tale of a hearty and generally conservative workplace ruined by one of those shifty labour union type fellows, and there was another play about a wayward and rebellious daughter coming to no good. He didn't really seem to get much interest in this material, but it was significant that he at least tried.

He encouraged me in my formative attempts at storytelling, listening patiently as I read him by Bod fan fiction. The opening scenario in which Bod had a beautiful dream about a bowl of strawberries and cream was a direct lift from the barely animated children's television cartoon, but the conclusion - the world ends and in the next world Bod is a gorilla - was all my own work. There were also many, many episodes of Doctor Stew, a sequence of single page cartoon strips drawn on a long, long roll of rough hand tissue which had never made it to the dispenser of the cattle shed in which my dad worked.

'There's an awful lot of burping in these,' my grandfather observed reading through my scrawled efforts. It didn't seem like he disapproved exactly, but I got the impression he was concerned. Each episode - and there were at least a hundred of them - usually ended with Doctor Stew eaten alive in time for his devourer to emit a satisfied burp in the last panel, which was also the punchline.

Concerned or otherwise, it impressed me that my grandfather had taken the trouble to at least read my incoherent and extraordinarily repetitive attempts at humour. My grandmother would customarily have sung my praises more or less irrespective of what I had done, which was nice but ultimately didn't count for much.

Saturday evenings were television - The Pink Panther, Doctor Who, Basil Brush, The Generation Game, Starsky & Hutch - all of those shows which have since become tarnished by the overwhelming and disproportionate sentiment of their own nostalgia; or my grandfather would turn off the television and tell me about his time in the war, which was always something of a treat. Perhaps it was because I could tell how much he enjoyed reliving it with me, drawing maps of Tobruk and North Africa with arrows to illustrate movements of troops and tanks, and himself in there somewhere.

Sundays were different, at least following breakfast. Sometimes he would take me fishing, the one activity in which he still took real pleasure, so it seemed. He had made me a kid-sized fishing box in his workshop in the garage, and off we would go with flasks and sandwiches to some point along the River Leam or the Avon or the Sowe. He was keen on outdoor activities, and the boot of the Morris Minor was always well stocked with camping equipment, a kettle, tin mugs, a tiny Primus stove and so on. Alternately we would just go for another walk to Abbey Fields or one of the usual places.

'I've been feeling a bit depressed,' I told him in response to some question or other as we headed out of the door one morning, our breath misting the crisp air. I don't recall how old I was, younger than thirteen, and young enough for it to seem strange that I would articulate such a thing.

I got the impression that he was quietly horrified. 'You shouldn't be depressed at your age,' he said, a trace of pain in his voice.

At the time I had no idea of his own history of depression, the hours sat silently rocking back and forth before the fire described by my mother, nor any really developed idea of what the term even meant. I was trying to articulate a vague feeling of insecurity based on the knowledge that I was getting older and one day the fortnightly visits would cease. I recall this as a fairly specific fear I had voiced in relation to my grandmother's stated ambition to run a tea shop. She had predicted a peculiar future in which I would be riding around with my followers as part of some biker gang. Everyone would draw to a halt behind me as we approached the crossroads.

'Come on, lads,' I would say, 'my grandma's always good for a cup of tea and a bun,' and off we would all ride. The image amused me, but was followed by the altogether more apocalyptic, 'of course one day you'll stop coming to see us altogether.'

I was briefly inconsolable.

Sure enough, my visits became less frequent as I got older, and as my grandfather contracted bowel cancer some time in 1979. We visited him in the hospital in Warwick, and it terrified me to see him frail as a bird in his huge bed, happy to see us but barely enough of him there to fill the pyjamas. I'd always suspected that some elements of the world were subject to change and would ultimately become different, and now it was happening. I didn't cry when I heard he had died because it didn't make sense, but I was distraught at the funeral.

Denied the supposed source of all her woes, my grandmother became a quite different figure, certainly more tragic, but not so tragic as to excuse her increasingly eccentric passive-aggressive behaviour. The jokes she told about her terrible husband lost their jovial tone to become a spiteful, insecure whine about how she could have wasted her best years on such a useless man; but the complaints served only to underscore her own failings, her sense of having been owed something she could never quite articulate. What photos remain of my grandfather are those she somehow missed when she was throwing it all away, and from amongst what little is left of him I have a letter that was never posted, typed on a sheet of lined foolscap and addressed to John Newbury of the BBC. It is dated to the 15th of June, 1979:

I listened with interest to your programme on depression on Wednesday last, and as one who suffered from this complaint over a long period in the past, and having been cured I feel I should inform you of some of my experiences in the hope that you will pass on any relevant information to others who are suffering.

I suffered this sickness from 1944, on my return from five years continuous service in the Middle East and India until about five years ago when I learned about and obtained acupuncture treatment; and apart from one brief spell I have not experienced any depression since. The one instance occurred about four years ago during the transition from a busy working life to one of retirement.

Concerning the discussion on your programme I believe that any lowering of morale for which the causes are known - external conditions such as bereavement, domestic conflict etc. - is really only a sadness which, generally, time will heal. In my opinion, depression is a complaint which has no known cause and exists only within the patient, and can occur at any time regardless of circumstances. In my experience, lonely people are not more prone to this sickness than others. During my last period in hospital I found the other patients to be a typical cross-section of people including a works manager, school teacher, miner, and a policeman. One particular character was a hearty, boisterous person, apparently happily married with children, liked his job and was financially secure, circumstances which should promote contentment; but he suffered and frequently cried for no apparent reason. This was real depression.

I have found that these attacks can occur in different ways, one being like a huge mass of black fluid flowing into one's mind and another like a thousand different thoughts racing through the mind without pause until I feared for my sanity.

I felt a deep sympathy for the people who took part in your programme and I hope that you will tell them that they have no need to continue to suffer, that there is a cure and that I sincerely hope they can avail themselves of it and obtain relief.

Thirty-five years later, there may be days which pass without my thinking about him, but I am not directly aware of them. I often wish I could go back and talk to him as I am now, or at least take back some of the utter crap I almost certainly came out with, although there's probably no need. I'm fairly sure he understood that I was just a kid, and talking rubbish was my job.

As the years pass, I come to see myself in what I am able to recall of him all the more, and this impression has been cemented by a couple of photographs taken in the early 1950s which may as well be photographs of myself; and it occurs to me that there's probably no need to invent time travel just for the sake of apologising for my having been ten and slightly gormless, because he never entirely went away and, as I have said, I'm sure he would understand.