Quiet Words

Graham started at Royal Mail sometime in the nineties. New recruits came and went but if they lasted the first three weeks, they usually stayed for at least another couple of years. Graham immediately made an impression, if not necessarily a great one.

He was about my age, late twenties to early thirties, and cut a peculiarly slight figure. He was small without being either short or seeming necessarily weak. It wasn't that he was feminine, but neither was he particularly masculine. He seemed like a small, slightly fierce Charles Hawtrey without any of the camp. There was a suggestion of upper class heritage, or at least equivalent delicacy. He had short dark hair and pretty eyes, like a male Sinéad O'Connor, and naturally we all assumed he was probably gay. I imagine that being homosexual in a blue collar profession as was ours must be a pretty tough gig, but probably not so tough as people might imagine.

We were postmen, and of course postwomen, predominantly working class. We liked a pint. Many of us were into football, and not actually that many of us were into performance art or tone poetry. Of those of us who were into football, a few were in it mainly for the joy of kicking someone's head in after the game. Some of us read the Sun - but not everyone - and many of those who read the Sun did so in the knowledge of it being mostly complete bollocks. With one or two exceptions, the shit thick, xenophobic generic Sun-reading working class you may have heard about never really existed except in the imagination of a terrified middle class. Everyone at Royal Mail knew somebody who was gay, and mostly we were past caring because we all had our own shit to worry about; and those few suffering from raging homophobia presented a much bigger, weirder target than the actually homosexual. Gay people were easier to get along with and would even joke about uncomfortable particles of sweetcorn trapped beneath the foreskin, just for the sake of getting a reaction.

No-one knew whether or not Graham was gay, but in any case, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he was quiet, and quiet to the point of being rude. He didn't speak to anyone. He didn't engage in small talk. If you asked him a question, he'd answer with three or four clipped words or he wouldn't answer at all, wouldn't even look at you. Most of us took offence at one point or another, but no-one acted on it because he seemed kind of intense and he did his job, which was all anyone could ask. Maybe he was just pathologically shy.

Years passed, and those clipped three word responses gradually blossomed into sentences, even exchanges which, if not exactly friendly, at least suggested there was a human being in there somewhere, just one who tended to keep his mouth shut unless he had something to say. He did his job, and no-one had any reason to complain, excepting one summer morning so hot that he went out on delivery wearing just shoes and a pair of shorts so brief that locals phoned the office to complain that their postman was walking around in just hotpants, and it was weird. Whatever Graham's thing might be, we guessed that being shy wasn't really part of it.

Another year passed and Graham volunteered to be our union rep on the grounds of no-one else wanting the job. To everyone's surprise - now that he had something to say - he revealed himself as erudite, fiercely intelligent, and riotously outspoken. He went to all of the union meetings and made many enemies, not least being Jim Cunningham, our area manager, the individual charged with shuffling in all of the changes to which the union and particularly Graham as our representative, were opposed.

I am hopeful that I never again receive correspondence from you written in the manner of this letter, Cunningham wrote in response to one of Graham's missives. Graham was amused, apparently enjoying sparring with upper management types, most of whom were unfortunately nothing like so sharp or canny as they believed themselves to be. Graham made copies of his exchanges so that we could all enjoy the spectacle of him going full Paxman on the mealy-mouthed tosspot who was doing his level best to make our working conditions that much less bearable in the name of savings.

If a man gets in the habit of dealing out blows, Graham told our common enemy, sooner or later he ought not be too surprised to receive a blow in return!

We were impressed, and I found in Graham someone with whom I was able to have an actual conversation. He remained a private person, disinclined to give away too much about either himself or his upbringing, but he was clearly educated and had read books. We talked a little bit about Mexico as it turned out that he had spent six months in South America, apparently in an effort to find himself although he didn't seem to regard the expedition as a success. He hadn't found whatever it was that he'd been looking for.

We sort of became friends, in so much as that one can become friends with anyone so private. We became close enough to laugh at each other's jokes. I asked about the apparent change in his personality from when he had first arrived at our sorting office.

'I think it would be fair to say that I was having a nervous breakdown at the time,' he told me with a confessional smile.

His parents hadn't wanted him, he told me, and so he had been raised by nuns. This seemed to explain almost everything.

He took an interest in my first attempts to write, notably an article on indigenous Mexican music proposed for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector magazine.

For a start, a mythological figure who disputes the necessity of human sacrifice has as much place in pre-Colombian Mexico as a sped-up Benny Hill comedy chase sequence in the Bible. The very notion is completely inconsistent with indigenous thought of the time. The rest of the tale provides a good example of the Nahua propensity to explain and justify the present as the conclusion of a predestined past, even if that predestination only occurred in retrospect. The fact of the story of Quetzalcoatl disappearing on a raft appearing in no native record until a long time after the events it explained is clear indication that the tale is of interest more as an example of the Nahua attitude to history than as something worthy of consideration as a literal historical occurrence.

I was not accustomed to writing long articles with academic aspirations, but felt I was doing fairly well with this one. My writing style was significantly influenced by the strident and often sarcastic tone of Andy Martin's writing in SMILE magazine and on the covers of various records by the Apostles.

Somewhere on a Pima reservation two families are enjoying a civilised evening meal to the delicate accompaniment of Traditional Songs and Chants of the Millwall Wrecking Crew. Glasses are refilled and a second course approaches as the earthy and mysterious refrain of you're gonna get your fucking heads kicked in rattles the speakers.

Having effected what I considered to be a reasonable impersonation of Andy Martin's tone, I asked Graham to take a look at my most recent draft of the unpublished article. I asked for his feedback but didn't really want it. What I wanted was for him to confirm that my borrowed wit was indeed as sharp as I imagined it to be, perhaps even to join me in laughter as we considered all those unenlightened people quaking in fear as I set them right on a few of their silly assumptions regarding indigenous Mexican music.

He took what I'd written, and then came back with a response, mainly taking issue with the tone I'd adopted, and my tendency to switch between sarcastic funnies and po-faced self-importance. He quoted Cervantes in illustration of his point, and at the time I had no idea who Cervantes was, or even what Graham was trying to say beyond that he had apparently failed to recognise my genius.

You may have made the mistake of thinking that, as an 'expert', you can cry sanctuary, and be exempted from the ordinary rules of successful communication. Or, you may be thinking that, unless your subject is made to look suitably complicated, even gloomy, you won't win the respect of fellow experts.

I was stung, but above all I was embarrassed because I knew on some level that he was absolutely right. I recognised his criticism as both valid and helpful, but couldn't get past the idea that I'd written something which was essentially ridiculous, even if that hadn't been what Graham was suggesting.

Things became uncomfortable between us, and our tenuous friendship seemed to dissolve, vanishing like mist on a warm summer morning. At some point he left the job, and then I left the job, and that was that. He has no internet presence that I am able to trace, because more than anything I want to be able to tell him that he was right, and to apologise for having taken his criticism so personally, and I would at least like to know that he's still alive and is approximately happy, but some stories simply don't have any tidy ending. Clearly this has been one of them.

London Calling

I'm never sure what to say when people ask me where I'm from. Generally, I tell them England, but if they're after anything more specific - usually on the off chance of their having spent a holiday there - it's tricky. I grew up in Warwickshire, specifically on the farm which eventually became home to the Teletubbies, which sounds a bit insane when offered as a response to enquiries regarding my origin; so more often than not I'll say London. I'm not from London, but I lived there from 1990 to 2009, nineteen uninterrupted years, which is the longest I've lived anywhere. My personality was probably in flux for most of the years prior to my moving to London, so I'm not convinced I was properly myself when living in Shipston, Maidstone, Chatham, or Coventry, at least not by any terms I still recognise; so it feels as though I'm from London.

London was the first place I felt I belonged, and is therefore high on the list of places I need to visit whenever I return to England to stay with my mother in Coventry. Unfortunately though, it can be difficult. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, it's easy to fire off emails announcing my proposed arrival and reiterating the awful hey, we really must meet up for a drink - awful because it's usually the mantra of people I haven't seen in decades, despite my best efforts to prise open a window in their busy schedules, which always seem to be at least as dense as the crust of stuff you find stuck to the event horizon of a black hole.

Then when I arrive in England, I remember that the train fare from London to Coventry is usually about a million pounds return, and we're talking off-peak; and that I can't afford hotels or bed and breakfast and that I'm far too old to sleep on the floor; and that I haven't actually told anyone I'm coming because I didn't want to be pinned down to an itinerary I might not be able to keep, or in which I might feel trapped; and that I've just spent eighteen hours on planes so I don't feel well disposed towards further travel; and that I hate crowds; and that I hate having to squeeze onto public transport, and how long it takes to even get anywhere in the city; and that I fucking hate London…

I don't hate London, but the circumstances of my last couple of years in the capital were somewhat shitty, which has left a lasting and unfavourable impression; but the bottom line is that I actually have mentioned my being back in the country to a couple of people, so I'll look like a twat if I fail to make the effort.

I've already reeled in my travel plans. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, I had all sorts of grand ideas about taking a bike on the train, then having a couple of days in London, cycling down to the Medway towns and Maidstone, seeing all those people I've been meaning to see for years and years. It would have taken up most of the second of my three weeks in England, and I've now whittled it down to a single afternoon in London, conditional to the existence of a train ticket costing less than a million pounds, and I might stay overnight on someone's floor or sofa, but probably not as I'm already depressed by the idea.

Amazingly, there's a return ticket costing just thirty quid, travelling at specific times with a rail operator no-one has heard of, and stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way. The comparative cheapness of the ticket means I'll probably be sharing a carriage with people who've been on the Jeremy Kyle Show, but the price is right.

I arrive at Euston around noon. The promised stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way has turned out to be just Watford Junction, Rugby, and the usual places, just like in the good old days when I could afford any old train fare. Not being a regular on the railways, I forget that those ordinary extortionate fares tend to be for journeys at the speed of light stopping at no stations other than the one at the end of the line.

Euston isn't too bad in terms of crowds, and I seem to be on a roll, so I think fuck it, I'll get the tube. I have an Oyster card from the last time I was here, and amazingly it still works and even has a couple of quid on it, so I top up at a newsagent and head for the underground. My memory of travel in London is mostly buses, because I dislike crowds and ended up with a hatred of tube trains. I've been left with a falsely distended impression of how easy it is to get anywhere, and find it weird that I'm stood on Tottenham Court Road in just a couple of minutes. I can't work out if the crowds are less congested than once they were, or whether it's all been so long that it seems like a new thing and I haven't had time to get sick of it.

I head to Forbidden Planet because I'm after the latest issue of Interzone magazine, and Forbidden Planet seems like the sort of place which might stock it. The latest issue of Interzone features a story by Erica Satifka, author of the novel Stay Crazy; and Stay Crazy is wonderful, so I'm trying to support both a new writer and the general concept of visiting shops in order to buy things which have been printed. Amazingly, they actually have the copy of Interzone I'm after, which is probably a first, and so I read it on the train to Greenwich - a trip of about ten minutes.

I left London in 2009, at which point I vaguely recall the first of the new, funny-shaped skyscrapers going up somewhere in the vicinity of Elephant & Castle. At the time I was spunking away three-quarters of my weekly wage on renting a rabbit hutch in Camberwell, despite holding down a reasonably paid, if back-breaking, full-time job; so I felt more than a little resentful as my city went all Blade Runner whilst overmoneyed tosspots banged on about posterity and capital and investment and growth and ways forward. Returning as a foreigner of sorts, carnivorous progress no longer directly affects me beyond that I can't afford to stay in a hotel, so it no longer feels personal; and I sort of enjoy the spectacle of what is to be seen from the window of the train. They're everywhere now, gleaming prongs thrust miles into the sky above London like the city seen on the cover of David Louis Edelman's Infoquake, and not a single one of them is regular skyscraper shape. It's as though the architects have been in competition with each other to come up with the strangest, most ostentatiously surprising design. There's the Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheese, the Sex Aid, the Pokémon…

'Computers,' Carl tells me. It's due to the development of certain architectural software that we are now able to throw up any shape of building we fancy.

I'm at Carl's house in Greenwich.

I arrived twenty minutes ago.

He lives in a square with a small central garden, or at least a barbecue pit and a bench surrounded by bushes. Upon arrival, I sat on the bench and had a fag in preparation for ringing the doorbell of my friend whom I'd not seen in at least a year. As I sat smoking, I heard the sound of a door, then approaching footsteps, then an indistinct verbal address which sounded like Carl's voice. In my mind, it already was Carl, and I imagined him calling out Loz in the usual way, so I went to reply even though I was replying to a call I had only anticipated, and somehow I myself called out, 'Loz!', having mixed up the two components of the predicted exchange.

It wasn't Carl. It was some elderly woman who regarded me suspiciously, possibly because I had just emerged from behind a bush to yell my own nickname at a stranger.

Now I'm within Carl's house watching him finish up and save what he was doing on the computer, specifically retouching photographs of REM for some book or other. He's a designer, and he's also working on a book about Japan.

We discuss this for three or four minutes before I realise he's referring to the band rather than the country. I forget that he knows a couple of them, and he tells me they were originally from Catford - which is one of the places I worked for a couple of years. It feels as though Carl and I have been transported into a weird future, a world we never made - whatever the hell that means.

He places the cherry boldly on the futurity cake by informing me that another mutual acquaintance is now working as a prostitute, specifically a BBW prostitute specialising in bondage, domination and the like. This is another eventuality I could never have foreseen, but apparently she makes eight-hundred quid a session and enjoys the work, so why not? I'm somewhat out of my depth with the profession, but I always imagined that dominating people for money would probably be one of the better sex work options providing one could find the right clientele - for example, a frustrated bank manager who would happily clean your toilet and then pay for the privilege, thus avoiding the necessity of finding oneself penetrated by anything too ghastly.

The subject resumes later as we approach Herne Hill station. We've had a wander around Greenwich park, a bit of lunch and then caught a series of trains to Herne Hill. The conversation resumes because I'm reminded that I've recently read Stupid Baby by New Juche, an autobiographical account of life amongst prostitutes in one of the rougher bits of Thailand. It's one of the best books I've read in a while and is written with a refreshing honesty and none of the hysteria one might expect, given the subject. The funny thing is that it's published by Philip Best, formerly of Whitehouse, who now lives in Austin and is therefore almost a neighbour. I consider this funny because Carl and I are on our way to visit Pete.

I was at school with Pete many years ago, back in Shipston, and we were both friends with Graham, who may or may not be turning up tonight. Graham and I saw Whitehouse live in Birmingham back in the eighties, during which Graham was injured by an object casually launched from the stage by Philip Best, who was probably the most hated man in underground music for much of that year.

I've been wondering how to broach the subject.

You remember that time we saw Whitehouse, and you remember the bloke who was chucking stuff into the audience, and how you got hit? Well, he lives down the road from me and we seem to be pals these days, sort of. I think he's calmed down a bit in recent years. Anyway, he seems like a decent guy.

I tell all of this to Carl, and so we talk about Glenn, because somehow we'd both forgotten that Glenn was also in Whitehouse. Carl and I recorded music with Glenn at one point. Glenn left a keyboard at Carl's flat for a couple of months, apparently on loan from William Bennett - also of Whitehouse - who was living in Spain at the time. When you switched the keyboard on, the name Susan Lawly would scroll across the LCD display in greeting, that being the name of Bennett's record label. The connections form a peculiar imaginary cat's cradle in my thoughts. I'm beginning to think that current estimates regarding human population are grossly exaggerated, and that there are actually only about twenty of us.

We arrive at Herne Hill and walk to Pete's house.

I'm hoping Carl and Pete will get on okay, given that neither of them have been in the same room since about 1987, and were never conspicuously close in the first place.

Here's how it works: I was at school in Shipston, Warwickshire, with Pete and Graham back in the eighties. Pete's family had moved to Shipston from somewhere down south a couple of years before, and once Pete left school, they moved again, to Eastbourne down on the south coast. I left school and did an art foundation course, at the end of which I was told I should have a look at Maidstone College of Art if I wanted to take it further. I didn't actually have the faintest idea of what I wanted to do, but it seemed like as good a plan as any, so I went for an interview at Maidstone and was accepted, thus dispensing with the need to bother looking around any other colleges. By sheer coincidence, it turned out that Pete had already been at Maidstone a year, studying graphic design. Carl was also at Maidstone, a former graphics student by that point serving as president of the Student Union, so that's how I met him, and how he and Pete came to know each other.

Back at school, Pete, Graham, and myself had been in a band, calling ourselves the Pre-War Busconductors amongst a variety of other interchangable, wilfully ludicrous names. We barely had any instruments, couldn't really play, but nevertheless churned out tape after tape of scatological songs about people at school whom we regarded as twats. Having spent the last couple of years digitising these tapes, I now have our entire body of work saved on memory sticks, one for Pete and one for Graham. This is partially the purpose of our meeting tonight, so I can hand over the sound files and we'll all have copies.

Carl, Pete and myself walk to the Half Moon. Pete tells me it seems unlikely that Graham will be along after all, presently being in Devon with his girlfriend. We buy drinks and sit outside. Most of the talk is between Pete and Carl, because they're simply chattier individuals than I am, and somehow we get onto the subject of how Pete came to move to Shipston in the first place. I recall that he had lived somewhere down south prior to Shipston, and that somewhere turns out to have been the Medway towns - which is where Carl grew up. Furthermore it turns out that Carl and Pete both attended the same junior school, the Hundred of Hoo as it was known, without having been aware of each other at the time, or having been aware of this fact until right now in the year 2018; and I've a feeling this may also be the school attended by Jayne, Glenn's first wife.

The cat's cradle seems to be approaching critical mass.

Eddy and Neil turn up, which is wonderful as I haven't seen either of them in years. It's also wonderful because I have to ask Eddy whether it will be okay for me to kip on his floor. The latest specific time I can return to Coventry on the ticket purchased from a rail operator no-one has heard of is nine this evening, which would leave thirty minutes in which to have a drink with my old pals. The thing is that I feel awkward asking Eddy because I haven't actually spoken to him since his mother passed away. He's one of my favourite people in the universe, but somehow he only makes sense in person. We've communicated on facebook, but you're either hanging out with him, or arranging to hang out with him which, combined with my not being much of a fan of the telephone, means we haven't spoken for a while and it will feel a bit fucking cheeky when I ask if I can kip on his floor for the night; but like a true friend, he doesn't give a shit and is simply glad to see me, and of course I can sleep on his floor.

So we all catch up, getting cautiously drunk in the way middle-aged men get cautiously drunk. Everyone gets on fine, even though Pete is from a different shard of my existence to the others. Neil is, as ever, darkly entertaining with his tales of dealings with showbiz types, recent clients including Helen Mirren and Idris Elba. He doesn't seem to have a particularly high opinion of Idris Elba.

Eventually it's time to go and Eddy drives, being the one of us with a car and sobriety. His flat, which I've never seen before as he moved in just over a year ago, is small but functional. Money is tight, but he's getting by. Money is tight for everyone I know still living in London. I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Eddy assembles a camp bed purchased from some hardware place. It comprises canvas stretched across tubes of steel and works like a hammock. Two of the steel tubes are missing, but it doesn't matter because I'm not seven foot tall. We have a cup of tea, watch an episode of Urban Myths - which dramatises the true story of a regular dude giving Public Enemy a lift to one of their shows in his Ford Focus - and then go to sleep; and against my expectations, I sleep well because the camp bed is very comfortable.

Next morning we have a walk to the caff along by the Thames. Eddy points to a house over on the other side of the river.

'That's where Helen Mirren lives.'

I have two sausages, egg, and chips in the caff and it tastes fucking amazing. I realise how much I've missed this place and its people. I can still feel my roots here, reaching down into the tarmac and cracked paving, in the newsagents and pound shops and the bite of cold far too early in the morning. I'm quite happy to live a long way away, but I'm glad I came back, just for a day.

Funny Foreign Food

Here's what I ate whilst back in England visiting the folks, nothing I've been unable to live without, but food which I've nevertheless appreciated on some level, and have eaten as something like exotic cuisine, despite having grown up with it.

Pork pie. I think it was from Sainsbury's or somewhere of that general type, and it made for a respectable restorative as I wrestled with a jetlag hangover resulting from the previous eighteen hours spent in more or less constant motion. Having failed to find pork pies in Texas, and being reluctant to pay $70 refrigerated postage for something I would ordinarily eat only twice a year, I have learned how to make my own. The process is a bit long-winded but has resulted in the best pork pies I've eaten by a wide margin. The one I ate in England probably wasn't great by comparison, but timing is everything.

Full English breakfast. This was at the City Arms in Earlsdon, Coventry, which is a Weatherspoons pub - fried egg, baked beans, a sausage, bacon, couple of fried slices and black pudding; of which only the fried egg and bacon can be conveniently reproduced back in Texas with any degree of authenticity. I'm not sure what's different about American sausages, but they are different, possibly due to the influence of the mighty German sausage. American bread is also different for no reason I can really pin down, and English baked beans are sweeter. So far as I'm concerned, most of these serve as a vehicle for black pudding, because it would probably be weird just eating solo black pudding, although that's the one thing I really can't do in Texas. There used to be an Argentinian delicatessen which sold something that was a lot like black pudding, but the establishment converted to an exclusive club accessible only to persons in the catering trade, which was a pain in the ass, so no more stateside black pudding for me. I suppose I could try to make it myself, but the recipe seems laborious and messy and would in any case prove prohibitively indulgent when I can't even pay my own wife to consider black pudding as edible. Anyway, the saga of this specific full English breakfast - such as it is - was that, feeling jetlagged, I realised I couldn't be arsed to walk a couple of miles to Carphone Warehouse to buy one of those cheap disposable phones used by crack dealers, so instead opted to stuff my face at the pub, an enterprise which, like that with the pork pie, proved similarly restorative.

Here it is again.

Meringue. I've tried to make them but my meringues are comical, like something from an overambitious school science project. Texas doesn't seem big on meringues either, so it had been at least a year since I ate one. The first was nice but smaller than I remember them being, which struck me as related to those factors which make it appear as though policemen are getting younger and younger. The second meringue was about the size of a football with a swirly orange pattern giving it the appearance of the planet Jupiter. The swirls were due to it being a passion fruit meringue, although you couldn't really taste anything but meringue, not even the cream. This was because it didn't have cream, although clearly needed some for sake of contrast with everything else. I obtained the Jovian meringue from Warren's Bakery in the precinct in Kenilworth, ten foot from a hole in the ground which had once been the local toy shop when I was a kid, and from which I made purchase of a number of Micronaut figures, vehicles and accessories, notably the Crater Cruncher which was a sort of futuristic digger. Although Warren's meringue needed work, his Cornish pastie was pretty great, and the shop proudly sells pies and cakes from beneath an athletic looking sign reading Forever Fit owing to the presence of a gymnasium on the second floor of the building, which is amusing.

Fish and chips. I've always thought fish and chips were a little overrated, but when the moment is right, they're amazing. The Long John Silver restaurant chain here in Texas does fish and chips which are so close to the real thing without being quite the same as to constitute a decent alternative, at least in the sense of methadone being an alternative to heroin; but actual fish and chips served in a chip shop by a fat bloke with a red face takes some beating. All the same, I'm nevertheless left a little weary by the mythologisation of fish and chips as one of the five things Americans understand about being English*.

Two sausage, egg and chips. This was my proverbial daily bread for at least twenty years, and is difficult to recreate in America mainly due to the sausage thing. Not only are we talking about an English sausage, but a caff sausage which I suspect has been prepared using very specific techniques understood only by those in the biz - possibly fried beforehand, then kept at a specific temperature by heated buffet technology. The first two sausage, egg and chips of my trip was consumed in a caff in Bermondsey, which is significant because two sausage, egg and chips was actually invented in Bermondsey - and you can check that on Wikipedia if you don't believe me. As I ate, an elderly diner at an adjacent table congratulated a small boy on his choice of football team with the words, yor a little Gooner, aincha!, so it was the real thing; and it was beautiful, although I somehow propelled some of my egg from off the side of my plate and onto the floor during the excitement. I ate the dish again, or at least a variation on the dish additionally incorporating baked beans, at the Star Cafe in Coventry, which is part of the coach station. This second serving was okay, but the situation obliging one to petition a caterer for sachets of tomato ketchup in the absence of anything squeezy readily available at the tables, was disconcerting. As a city, Coventry has had a troubled history characterised by Hitler's bombs and whatever scrapping compelled the formation of the racially progressive Two Tone record label, so I assume there's still some concern that hooligans might use ketchup dispensers as weapons were they more freely available. Also, the sausages weren't so good as those eaten in London. I propose that this deficit results from the Star Cafe's distance from the two sausage, egg and chips epicentre and their cuisine can as such be likened to the shadow of two sausage, egg and chips cast upon the wall of Plato's cave.

No ketchup dispenser? Thanks a lot, Hitler!

Co-Op sandwich. My dad and I ate Co-Op sandwiches in the absence of pub food, which the White Bear in Shipston-on-Stour didn't seem to feature. I'm pretty sure the George, twenty yards up the road, still did pub food, but it probably would have been served on square plates and involved jus. Therefore we went across the square to the Co-Op, which had been a post office back in our day - as distinct from the Co-Op which had been Fine Fare back in our day - and which is bewilderingly situated at a mere fifty yards distance as you head for the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park in what is a very small town - not somewhere you might expect to be served by two supermarkets, and definitely not two branches of the same supermarket virtually next door to each other. We had consumed beer, we had shared hilarious anecdotes of inept local law enforcement, and we were hungry, so sandwiches it was. We both chose bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Following purchase, we walked down to the River Stour, just by the Old Mill, and discussed things we could remember when they were all fields. Those were probably the best sandwiches I ever bought from a supermarket chiller cabinet.

The River Stour which my dad and I were able to remember when it was a field.

Doner kebab. I have been confused by the differences between English and American variants of the mighty doner, particularly with the latter being served in something more closely resembling naan bread and without chilli sauce. I suppose, given that I live in San Antonio, the absence of the seemingly crucial chilli sauce is something to do with how everything else I eat is usually drowning in the stuff. The American doner kebab is nice enough, possibly even more authentic for all I know, but I can't see it being much use at two in the morning after forty pints and a homeward bus trip to the wrong part of town with your trousers worn on your head. Somehow I failed to reacquaint myself with the mighty English doner kebab when I was last over that way, so this time I made a point of getting myself down to that kebab place on the Butts, which is an amusingly named street in Coventry rather than a sequence of arses. A crusty looking bloke with tattoos stopped me to ask for a light before I'd made it into the shop. I whipped out a lighter and he said, 'thanks - a fucking human being, at last,' which seemed to contribute to the experience somehow.

'I'm going to enjoy this,' I told the bloke behind the counter. ' I haven't had one in two years,' which led inevitably to a conversation about the state of American kebabs, and why the bread is so weird, and how Disneyland Florida isn't as great as you might think, and why people voted for Donald Trump.

The kebab was good, but not so good as I remembered, so possibly I was specifically thinking of London kebabs; unless it's just that I wasn't sufficiently pissed.

The man we discussed in the kebab shop.

Chinese takeaway. I once loved Chinese takeaways and would order them as a treat for myself on occasions when it seemed like I deserved it, and always sweet and sour pork balls with egg fried rice. Then one day - I would guess late nineties - some sort of paradigm shift occurred within the world of Chinese takeaway, sweeping away all that had been served in those tidy little foil trays and replacing it with something which seemed broader in culinary scope, but just not as nice. Thankfully this development coincided with the advent of Pizza Pan, who delivered, had an outlet on Barry Road, and who got to know me so well that all I had to do was phone up and ask for the usual please, Kristos. Where Chinese takeaway once crunched, it became a sort of warm slurry dominated by the tang of monosodium glutomate, so I moved on. A conversation about Chinese takeaway with my mother somehow resulted in our ordering from Lucky Star - who had popped a delivery menu through her letterbox at some point - despite the thrust of the conversation having been that I'd gone off Chinese takeaway and she'd never liked it in the first place. Anyway, Lucky Star proved to be lucky mostly for those who like their chicken balls to resemble scotch eggs in terms of volume and structure - bland, chewy chicken embedded in a thick mantel of bland, chewy batter. We didn't eat much of it, then pulled off the alleged batter so as to give the chicken to Geoff, next door's cat, who seemed to enjoy it more than we did. A couple of nights later, we tried again. My mother gave me, a fifty-two-year old man, a tenner and sent me to the Chinese at the end of the road. Unfortunately it was closed so I found one called Peking House up the next road along - surprising myself at the fidelity of a vaguely remembered impression of another Chinese takeaway having been somewhere in the vicinity. The food was a little better, and the inch-thick layer of batter at least had a bit of crunch, but Geoff still had most of it in the end.

Geoff, or possibly Geoff's brother.

Biscuits. It's not that you can't get biscuits in America, but choices are often limited as the market is swamped with cookies, which are soft and doughy and are therefore not biscuits. Cookies came about when a Chicago biscuiteer named Herb Cook decided he didn't have time to finish cooking a batch of biscuits because he needed to play a video game and support his local football team while eating a burger, so the cookies - as they came to be known - came out soft, and achieved popularity with those who don't like the distraction of anything crunchy while playing a video game or supporting their local football team while eating a burger. This is a shame because biscuits are fucking great where cookies are truthfully a bit shit, on the whole. Consequently I ate my way through three or four packets of Fox's ginger custard creams during my stay in England.

*: The others being the Royal family, the Beatles, Keeping Up Appearances, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Handegg

It's called football but I can't get used to it. I've lived in America for over six years and I'll say gas rather than petrol, cookies rather than biscuits, but football goes against the grain. I was never the most ardent devotee of the English game, but there it was in all our lives regardless of personal preference, and it was hard to miss the crucial detail of it involving persons moving a ball around a field by means of a foot, hence the name. Here in America, the ball is shaped more like an egg and, aside from an occasional kick, it's mostly conveyed around the field by hand. The game looks more like Rugby to me, and I hated Rugby at school so I have trouble seeing the attraction.

Every evening I watch the local news on KENS5, even though there's never much actual news. Usually it's five minutes of shootings on the southside and then straight to fifteen minutes of weather reported in far more detail than anyone could ever possibly need, particularly given that nine times out of ten, the forecast is that it will probably be fucking hot. As the forecast ends, big-faced Bill Taylor does his John Wayne swagger across the studio to where big-faced Joe Reinagel is waiting, and thusly does slow moving horseplay ensue, how 'bout them Cowboys, and that sort of thing with playful upper-arm punches. Big-faced Joe Reinagel turns to the camera and tells us something about either the San Antonio Spurs, the Dallas Cowboys, or Tim Duncan, and he tells it as though it's important. We'll get a clip of some player discussing an upcoming game. Usually the player will express the hope of his team winning the upcoming game, and maybe he'll offer reassurance that he himself will be doing his absolute best to ensure that his team wins the game; and somehow we need to see this night after night, year after year, as though any of it matters; like it's ever going to be anything different.

So, LaMarcus Aldridge, your guys are up against the Houston Armadillos tonight. How do you think that's going to play out?

I'm hoping we lose!

Big-faced Joe Reinagel will talk a little more about sports, then flash a cheeky grin and promise us a sight like unto none which has ever before been beheldest by man, coming right up after the break; then two minutes of commercials promising an end to either constipation or diarrhea, and back to the studio for a YouTube clip from the Cowboys game at the weekend.

The ball is thrown.

The man catches the ball.

Then he drops the ball.

Hooting and hollering is then generated by Bill, Joe, Sarah, and the guy with the creepy eyebrows, whatever the fuck he's called. Can you beat that!? You see how he just dropped that puppy!? He had it in the bag but - man oh man - he just couldn't hold onto that thing, and he dropped it.

We watch the clip two or three times as the hooting and hollering increases. Well, did you ever see anything like that!?
 
Nevertheless, here I am at the Dub Farris Athletic Park to watch a friendly game of handegg. Dub Farris was a much celebrated high school handegg coach around these parts, and I don't understand the name either. Let's just assume his parents were fans of King Tubby. I'm at the Dub Farris Athletic Park to watch Brandeis playing Clark, rival high school handegg teams. I don't really have a horse in this race, or even any interest in being here beyond the purely anthropological, but Tommy plays saxophone in the Brandeis marching band and he's one of Junior's best friends.

'Give it a chance,' my wife almost certainly tells me at some point or other, although the main reason she ever brings me along to this kind of thing is because she finds my sarcasm entertaining.

We join a long, long queue for tickets. The field and stands are just behind us, fenced off, and things are already warming up - cartwheels, cheerleaders, some bloke dressed as a horse and so on. It's like a child's drawing of the circus in which every act occurs simultaneously in different parts of the ring, except this is really happening. Imagine a science-fiction scenario in which the universe will cease to exist should its creator ever experience even a fleeting instance of boredom. Maybe that's what's going on right here, right now. Five minutes shuffle along until we have tickets, so we go in.

We walk along before the bleachers. To our left is the field and a million entertainments occurring all at once in a last desperate bid to keep the creator amused because we don't want to die. To our right is seating occupied by a multitude of parents, relatives, friends, and possibly also the guy who made the universe and everything in it. The blue and orange of Brandeis are to be seen everywhere, on clothing, painted on faces, and even a couple of comedy wigs resembling a duotone version of the one worn by Jonathan King when he performed One For You, One For Me on Top of the Pops back in 1978. There's so much blue and orange that we could be in some high contrast drama about an android hunting down meth-cooking alien prostitutes in cyberspace.

We pass before a large phalanx of cheerleaders, then up the steps to the back. The cheerleaders are in front of us as we look down, and the band are to the right, all dressed as Quality Street soldiers. They're jittery because they're kids, all nervously fingering flutes, cornets, a tuba, twirling drum sticks and so on. Far across on the other side of the field I see bleachers full of Clark people, parents, relatives, friends, and their own phalanx of cheerleaders directly facing our lot, and the same with our respective marching bands. Maybe they're going to engage in some kind of face off, trying to out pom-pom each other, or to blast each other off the back of the stadium with honking and hooting. The Clark mascot is dressed as a cougar, whilst ours - and I'm somehow already thinking of Brandeis as us - is a bronco, specifically a horse. The potential seems endless, even without anyone having mistakenly thought I was referring to a sexually adventurous older woman.

Tiny figures are moving around on the field, hunching together, but I can't tell if they're warming up or the game has started. There's a scoreboard to my right but I don't understand that either. I seem to be experiencing information overload. Everything is happening at the same time and at maximum amplification. It's a lot like listening to the first SPK album.

Time passes and I am able to identify which part of the scoreboard counts down towards full time - or whatever they call it here - four quarters, each of fifteen minutes duration. The game is in progress and I missed it. There was no change in emphasis to mark the transition from pre-game horseshit to actual play, possibly because the game is the least important part of why we should all be gathered here this evening.

Once the egg is in play, it's up to the players to get it as far along the field towards the opposition's end zone. They can kick the egg, or they can pick it up and run with it. Once the egg and those players in possession have vanished beneath a mountain of bodies, everything stops, then starts again from this new position further along the field. If you're watching the game on television, the time during which play remains suspended will be given over either to advertising, or to the punditry of commentators describing what we've just seen with our own eyes, or even to interviews with the players in which they describe what we saw them doing with our own eyes and then tell us whether they feel either happy or sad about it.

It isn't like Rugby after all, or at least there's enough of a difference for even me to be able to see it. Incredibly, it looks a lot more violent, and at last I understand why players wear all that padding and the helmet. A couple of them are concussed and carried off on stretchers during the first half.

On the other hand, it reminds me a lot of basketball. As with basketball, I'm watching a distant huddle of people, and it's fairly difficult to tell what is going on; and the shortfall is addressed by the information overload of the band and the cheerleaders and the audience responding as one with carefully choreographed enthusiasm. It's probably not quite so shit as basketball because there's no Jumbotron exorting us to make some noise, and no fucking DJ, but it's close enough as to make no difference.

One thing which handegg doesn't remind me of is football, meaning the game in which players move a ball around with their feet, the game which you can actually identify as being a game. The beauty of football is that you can see what's happening from halfway across the stadium, and something usually is happening, and is happening up and down the full length of the field, and it can continue happening without stopping every thirty fucking seconds. Due to the nature of the game, supporters will give the play of the ball their full concentration, because the game moves and it's quite easy to miss something; and support will be expressed spontaneously, just whatever comes into your head without the need of bells, whistles, and associated horseshit designed to plug every single orifice in your attention span.

We lasted the first half, comprising a couple of distended periods of stop-start-stop-start-stop-start play each adding up to fifteen minutes. Half time is more of everything happening at once, but with marching bands on the field, honking away as they form Busby Berkeley patterns across the pseudo-grass - oh say can you see and the usual selection of star spangled hits, then a few others thrown in, hooting interpretations of popular hair metal ballads and Seven Nation Army by the Shite Stripes, and then Rock and Roll by Gary Glitter, hit maker and renowned kiddy fiddler. I guess his reputation didn't take quite the same nose dive over here as it did back in England, although in its defense, the song does go do-do-dooo-do Hey! do-der-do so it's real catchy and all.

We leave at half-time, having dutifully watched tiny distant figures form patterns and make music, and one of those tiny distant figures was Tommy. I don't know how the rest of the game will go, but it doesn't seem to matter because I have no idea how the half that I've just seen went; because it never was about the game, and handegg is not really even sport as I understand it.

Handegg is about the experience of being there, being part of the team and singing along with the approved anthems. Watching handegg is more or less the same as standing in Red Square back in the good old days of the cold war, watching tanks roll past, prefixing marching legions of perfectly choreographed soldiers turning as one to salute Brezhnev without breaking a step, then more tanks, then those massive trucks with ICBMs on the back. Handegg is the American wing of the Spectacle reinforcing itself by yelling at you in surround sound for a couple of hours, occupying every sensory node with a dumb patriotic noise whilst reminding you that if you fall behind on those payments then maybe you don't really love America, freedom, and Gaaard after all, you communist!

So personally, I'm not a fan, but at least I'm now able to loathe it with authority.

Ripper

On Sunday the 8th of May, 2016, Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs left the following inspirational post on facebook:

Blackpool was worryingly quiet last Monday for bank holiday and a good table at Harry Ramsden's was too easy to get at teatime. But this weekend things have perked up - the most badly behaved conference attendees ever, the Young Farmers are in town. In my youth before cheap foreign travel became a reality the rampages of 'Scots Fortnight' were a thing feared by locals. Going back almost a century, the Wakes Weeks had whole mill towns like Wigan visiting en masse and hospitalising, infecting and impregnating each other under the piers. Not quite the sanitised version as portrayed by dear old Gracie Fields, there are remarkable stories in local history books surrounding the 1930s Blackpool Carnivals and why they were abandoned - too much carnival.

My first sight of the farmers tonight was a man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier. Magnificent. The bars, drug dealers, brothels, police cells and A&E cubicles will be doing a roaring trade tonight and glad of the farmers' custom. These people are very dangerous and absolute scumbags, the men and women both. I walk through it all unscathed always, I dress in a nondescript style and don't catch anyone's eyes and don't feel fear. I love bad behaviour from humans very much. The hell with laws and sense. The hell with morals and art and politics. Drink, Fight and Fuck!

As a sensitive child, I would have found such sentiments appalling, but at the age of fifty, the words just made me think of Ripper, a person with whom I never really had anything in common beyond a job, and whom I probably haven't even set eyes on this century, but who nevertheless made a huge impression; and he made a huge impression because he was terrifying, and could quite easily have been that magnificent man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier.

Ripper wasn't actually his name, but that's what everyone called him. I never found out why. I always assumed it to be because he was, as I said, terrifying, just as Peter Sutcliffe was terrifying. Having a nickname which attempts to make jovial association with dismembered prostitutes will strike many as extreme and possibly disgusting, but I'm setting the story down from memory rather than making it up, and that's just how it was.

Ripper was a couple of years older than me as I was in my twenties when I started work as a postman at Catford delivery office. He was tall, a little skinny, and with a ratty sort of face - which isn't supposed to be an insult. He wore his hair tied back in a ponytail, but otherwise bore a strong resemblance to the Nick Cotton character from EastEnders, in terms of both personality and appearance; or at least his face always seemed to be twisted into the devious leer of Nick Cotton cheerily asking cup o' tea, ma?, having just raided his long-suffering mother's savings account and spent the lot on nose candy. Maybe it's just me, but Nick Cotton was the only reason I ever watched EastEnders. He was great.

I started work at Catford delivery office in August 1990 and immediately understood Ripper to be my natural enemy. I was trying to grow a moustache and beard at the time, but my efforts were straggling and pitiful, and Ripper gave me the nickname Catweazle based on my resemblance to a similarly unkempt character from a children's television show of that name. The problem wasn't just that he only ever referred to me as Catweazle, or that it annoyed me; it was the raw delight he took from my displeasure, and his peculiarly creative use of the nickname. He was a van driver, whilst I was a postman, and our duties were such that we had no real reason to interact; so to circumnavigate this obstacle he'd stand behind me and just repeat it in a peculiarly squeaky voice.

Catweazle. Catweazle.

This meant that the nickname never lay fallow or neglected, and he applied the same delivery system to other victims, Ralph being one. Ralph had picked up Big Bag as a nickname owing to how much mail he'd managed to stuff into a single delivery sack on one particular morning.

Big Bag, Big Bag, Big Bag, in that weird squeaky voice like an obsessive-compulsive chaffinch or someone operating the Pop-O-Matic dice bubble from a seventies board game; and then somebody else would usually chip in with the inevitable variation on Burt Bacharach and Hal David's song, what's it all about... Ralphie?

Ralph always looked ready to kill someone.

Being a bit of a knob, I attempted to engage with Ripper, to decommission his campaign against me with both logic and an appeal to his better nature, but he wasn't interested in the first and didn't possess the second; although my efforts weren't entirely wasted in that they clearly brought him further satisfaction, sometimes inspiring him to elaborate on the theme by asking me questions, whether I had a toad called Touchwood, or when I called in sick if I did so by means of a telling bone.

My role was as a source of amusement by which he might tolerate the indignity of being at work. In fact that's how he saw most of us. He didn't really do communication in any conventional sense.

Being a van driver, it was his role to deliver packets which were too big for the postmen to carry; so if anything too humongous erroneously found its way into your packet bag, you just took it over to your driver - Joe or Robby or whoever it was that week.

Unfortunately Carl's driver was Ripper. He shuffled over, politely setting forth the proposal in his nasal John Major voice. 'Here - are you doing Boundfield Road this week because—'

'Fuck off,' Ripper suggested, kicking the parcel out of Carl's hand so that it sailed upwards in an arc to the far side of the sorting office. He had a bit of a hangover that morning, and was in no mood for idiocy, or people asking him to do things.

I worked at Catford for two or three years, eventually getting to know everyone fairly well, as well as you can know anyone at work, eventually fitting in as much as any of us ever fit in. Ripper would still take time out of his busy schedule to taunt me by meaninglessly repeating my nickname in a high voice, but was no longer quite the enemy, if he had ever been. I was invited to the fairly regular piss-ups down the pub, and outside of work I got to see a different side of Ripper, although it was actually more or less identical to the first side. I was still Catweazle, but the difference was that we were now buying each other drinks; and only drinks. I took Zammo's advice and just said no when it came to the nose candy. It wasn't just me who said no.

'Have it your way,' Ripper growled bitterly at the other one who had declined the offer, 'but don't come crying to me at two in the morning when I'm sat there with a big red hooter!'

When I announced that I had put in for a transfer to another sorting office, I was surprised at Ripper's response. It actually seemed like he was going to miss me, as though we were friends by some definition.

'What you want to go there for?' he asked philosophically. 'That's a fucking rent boy's office, that place.'

Nevertheless I transferred, and the last I'd heard of Ripper was that he'd got married, and the presiding vicar had supposedly asked are you really sure about this? during the ceremony.

I've no idea where Ripper is now. He might be dead or in prison for all I know; and this isn't really a story with any sort of moral or point, just an assemblage of stupid annoying shit which passed the time, and which had nothing to do with art, or a better world, or people being nice to each other. The point of this - if we're going to pretend that there is one for the sake of closure - is that sometimes it's healthy to find oneself surrounded by dangerous arseholes, or failing that, people who aren't necessarily going to agree with everything you say, or even care whether you say anything. The contrast is good for the development of a healthy sense of perspective. Like Simon Morris, I too love bad behaviour from humans very much - which on closer inspection probably isn't strictly true; which therefore conversely proves it to be a wonderful thing specifically because it makes my inner Lord Longford squirm with horror.

Ripper was a monster, but just like that man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier, he was also magnificent - maybe still is, for all I know - and not least because he was right about me. That beard I tried to grow really was ridiculous.

I suspect this is one of the things we, as a society, often dislike about bullies, or a certain kind of bully: sometimes they're right.

Ceremony

The aspect of the American continent which first caught my attention with sufficient seriosity as to implant the idea that I might one day live here was the history of its first people. By America's first people I hope it is clear that I refer to those so often dubiously identified as Indians, the descendants of the settlers who came across the Bering Strait from northern China way back whenever. Anyone inclined to muttering about ginger-haired skeletons, Leif Erikson, or an Arizona petroglyph apparently depicting Egbert of Wessex should at this juncture feel free to take their eyeballs elsewhere.

It was pre-Columbian Mexico which first drew my interest. Initially I studied its cultures more or less in isolation, before inevitably discovering that beyond a certain level of attention, any specific focus ceases to remain useful given that no pre-Columbian Mexican culture existed in isolation; and eventually one inevitably ends up noticing parallels between - for example - the Central Mexican practice of flower war and the potlatch ceremonies of the Tlinglit and others up in Alaska and the far north. Such parallels are always interesting, and often useful in the formulation of a broader, more thorough picture.

I've met Huichol and Tarahumara people in Mexico, and others most likely descended from the Mexica, but the realisation - as I moved here - that I would at some point encounter those native to this corner of the Americas seemed a different prospect. For one, their legend had been with me since I was a child reading Riders of the Range in my dad's old Eagle annuals, as opposed to something approached with a more open and hopefully elevated mind in recent years. Secondly, even given no group of people ever having been conquered for the better, the colonial history of Mexico went quite differently to that of the country on this side of the Río Bravo del Norte. I had read about the indigenous peoples of the United States, and at least some of what has befallen them in the years since the arrival of my lot, often characterised as a slow genocide and unfortunately with some justification. I even spent time on a First Nations bulletin board in an effort to engage with representatives of the cultures I found so fascinating, and to engage by means which wouldn't relegate them to a detail of history, or reduce them to ethnic mascots.

I had always imagined that were I of Native American heritage, I would either hate all white people, or at least want as little as possible to do with their fat, over-entitled asses. This seemed to me an understandable position considering all the massacres, betrayals, and political cards played with loaded decks.

Happily, most Native Americans I encountered online have tended to take a more philosophical view, having had little choice but to accept that simply getting angry with the world never really made it a better place. They are, in my limited experience, nice people, but I have felt that the weight of history has sometimes made meaningful dialogue difficult, or at least uncomfortable from my point of view. The bulletin board was subject to frequent visits from young, mostly white teenagers interested in this or that detail of native life, generally those new-agey types who, despite the best will in the world, can sometimes come across as a little patronising. I had no wish to be identified with such people, or even to add to the increasing volume of essentially Caucasian voices on a forum dedicated to an entirely different group who, I imagined, might possibly have appreciated the chance to talk without persons such as myself butting in.

There was a joke told on the forum, something about the white visitor who is taken back to the generic teepee to meet my wife, my son, and my anthropologist. After all, it could be that a Native American might not even wish to discuss his or her close relationship with nature, or how it feels to be Native American - at least not all of the time. So eventually I dropped out of the forum, for once doubting whether I was really justified in joining the sort of club which would welcome me as a member.

My part of Texas was historically inhabited by numerous indigenous groups of nomads now collectively identified as Coahuiltec prior to the arrival of Europeans, but others came later, passing through as they were driven south by the settlers. There are three reservations in Texas, and none anywhere near San Antonio; but given Texas having been part of Mexico up until 1836, and that the population of San Antonio is predominantly identified as Hispanic, then it seems likely that I encounter persons of at least some indigenous heritage on a possibly daily basis. Many of the women working in my local supermarket are of a distinct facial type which reminds me very much of the profiles carved on Mayan stelae and ceramic ware - strong noses, high cheekbones, and not much going on in the eyebrow department. Having grown up in England, it still seems incredible to me that our two cultures should now meet over my purchase of cat food and bratwurst.

Each Spring, the city of San Antonio is host to Fiesta, a week long cycle of events and celebrations commemorating the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto. One such event is an official Native American Powwow billed as promoting the traditions and culture of the American Indian in the most positive manner possible providing Indian people the opportunity to participate, practice, teach and exchange tribal traditions among all tribes and enlighten the non-Indian about the history and culture of America’s first inhabitants. I had already seen men in feathered garments dancing for pesos in Mexico, and had never been sure what to make of it, quite where the tradition ended or where the holding the tourist upside down and giving him a shake began; but this seemed to be something potentially very different.

Admittance was free, and the event - which had been going on for three or four hours before my wife and I showed our faces with Junior in tow - was held in a gymnasium. The bleachers lining one side of the venue were full of spectators, but the crowd was not excessive. The main court was occupied by a large oval of individuals, those in native dress mingling with spectators who had decided to join in. A large drum was slowly beaten somewhere at the centre of this, scoring the rhythm for many pairs of feet engaged in the same slow, sideways shuffle.

'They're doing the Mario,' I told my wife.

The Mario is a dance requiring that one swing one's arms from side to side whilst performing a similar action with the feet, as described in the closing theme song of the Super Mario Brothers Super Show. As one YouTube commentator observed, the Mario is actually a lot like walking, and it was this observation which cemented the thing into my imagination, such as it is.

The dance ended and everybody gradually returned to their seats, some pausing for photographs taken with representatives of the tribes in all of their finery. From the website I gather that those assembled included Navajo, Choctaw, Osage, and Cherokee, amongst others, so this was logically some modern synthesis of older, presumably variant traditions, something intended to speak to people here in the year 2015, and in which capacity it was a success. Drummers were assembled at the centre of the hall, and the dancers worked around them. The moves seemed vaguely familiar from endless imitation under customarily more hokey circumstances - dancers hopping from foot to foot, arms spread wide to mimic the flight of birds, feathers bobbing behind. The difference was that this felt subtly different to anything I had seen before. The choreography was forceful and dramatic rather than graceful or necessarily meticulous. It was conducted to its own purpose, and as such appeared to have nothing to prove, just as the composite indigenous tradition of music and dance as I understand it so rarely seems to even acknowledge the concept of a passive spectator because it generally involves everyone present. So what we were seeing, it could be argued, was no invocation of times passed, not even so much a spectacle as the real thing, the act itself, the act on this occasion being communication - if that doesn't sound too horribly pretentious.

That which was communicated was, so it seemed to me, nothing more profound than we are still here, which maybe wasn't anything deep, but was nevertheless good to know. I would have liked to have learned a little more than was communicated by the distorted voice introducing each dance over the speaker system, but then this was, after all, a primarily visual event. We watched for a while, and left once we felt we had seen enough, impressed that men and women in such flamboyant and colourful dress could be part of one of the most profoundly dignified ceremonial performances I have witnessed.

Fiesta continued for the rest of the week, expressing itself through different events at different times and places, and for our part culminating with the Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo at the Majestic Theatre. Each year the Coronation of the Fiesta Queen - or at least the Fiesta Queen of the Order of the Alamo - follows a different theme, and this year the theme was the Court of Captivating Islands.

Me neither.

The Majestic Theatre was built in 1929 and, roughly speaking, equates to the world's most ludicrously ornate wedding cake turned inside out. Brightly painted columns, balconies, architectural peacocks, and related eccentric flourishes beneath a ceiling purporting to represent the star-spangled heavens make perfect sense as a product of the era of Gaudí, Surrealism, and Le Palais Idéal of Ferdinand Cheval. Majestic does not seem an overstatement, and although the baroque décor skates perilously close to its own Disneyfication, it falls mercifully short of actual camp, and thus as a venue seemed apposite to the event we had come to see.

As the lights went down and a flock of young pages fluttered  across the stage to take their places, the scene was set by our narrator, the Lord High Chamberlain, a nautical character describing his numerous voyages across the oceans of the world, and all the magnificent sights he didst see - all very seventeenth century. The curtain rose upon an array of twenty-six unoccupied plinths in pseudo-classical style, and we met our first contestant, floating on ethereal and iridescent wings of the Madagascan sunset moth, Her Grace Jewel Osborn of the House of Croswell, the Duchess of Eternal Threads - as she was introduced. Jewel made her way towards the stage trailing ten or more feet of glittering ceremonial cape, or what is known as a cathedral train in dressmaking terms. The garment was of such length as to require manual assistance from the pages as Jewel ascended the steps to the plinth on which she would presumably remain seated for the rest of the performance. The garments are covered in coloured sequins and Swarovski crystals sewn into patterns purportedly illustrating that which the Lord High Chamberlain had been telling us of the wonders he hadst done did seeneth in Madagascar.

Now I understood why Bess hadn't bothered trying to describe any of this to me. It was something along the lines of a beauty pageant, perhaps with ceremony replacing the more conspicuously competitive aspect, and each year it was themed to some different and presumably arbitrary concept. Each girl would be introduced with a preamble of our host inviting us to imagine the wonders of one exotic island or another - Hawaii, Greenland, Cuba, Manhattan or wherever - and on she would come, pulling her glittering train of rhinestones shaped into patterns depicting pineapples, exotic birds, or in one case a volcano. Thematically they kept it light, so Cuba was expressly identified as old Cuba, unfortunately denying us the spectacle of a rhinestoned Che smoking a cigar. I kept my fingers crossed for the Isle of Dogs bringing us a glittering vision of skinheads, Terry Hurlock, and Stanley Kubrick filming bits of Full Metal Jacket, but I was fairly sure I would be disappointed.

Jewel was followed by Her Grace Elizabeth Adriana of the House of Garza, the Duchess of Romanov Reflection, whatever that is, and I realised that this was probably going to last hours until each of the twenty-six plinths had been occupied. After about six more girls, as we gradually worked up to the introduction of Princesses and I suppose the Queen, a new detail was added. Now each Duchess would perform a full bow before her similarly teenage Duke in preface to his leading her by the hand to her plinth. The full bow entailed each girl going down on her knees, lowering her head almost to the floor before turning to bestow a wide, slightly discomfiting smile upon the audience. Even from our seats way up in the balcony, it seemed a peculiarly awkward moment, conveying the sort of pleasure staged whilst looking directly into the camera for productions traditionally featuring something called a money shot.

The girls all seemed to be from wealthy Texas families, and my wife told me that each individually sewn train might cost up to fifty-thousand dollars. The Order of the Alamo is a conglomeration of wealthy families and businessmen, and is thus upper class in the American sense of the term. I'm sure the Order of the Alamo must be a noble institute, doubtless with all sorts of charitable functions to its name, but it quickly dawned on me that the Coronation was about spectacle, prestige, and swimming pools full of wonga. Neither America nor Texas has a royal family, and so instead it has this sort of deal, and typically fumbles the ball in attempting to communicate the idea of an elite - it's wealth, but vulgar wealth with a heavy hint of Liberace, and whilst the orchestra scores the arrival of each Duchess with an individual classical flourish, some get Bach or Prokofiev, whilst others arrive to the themes from ET and Jurassic Park; and the Duchess of Heavenly Illuminations ends up with something written by some guy called Gustav Hoist, according to the programme.

The Coronation spares no expense, and it tries hard, and it means well, but ultimately it's the whitest thing I've ever seen. This occurred to me as we were introduced to the Duchess of Delicate Winged Beauty, because nothing says Trinidad and Tobago like a bejewelled débutante who makes Britney Spears look like Nina Simone. I asked my wife, and apparently this event represents the Coronation of just one symbolic regent, and others are available should you be of either Latino or African-American lineage. The latter pageant is called the Queen of Soul, and whilst I've no doubt that a good time is had by all, I can't help but wonder if this variety somehow defeats the spirit of Fiesta, the carnival, the celebration in which all peoples come together to admit that living here in San Antonio is a pretty sweet deal, generally speaking.

We watch about two hours of one teenage Duchess after another and the stage is still half empty, so my wife tells me, 'it's okay - we can go now if you want.'

It's been an experience, if not one that I would necessarily care to repeat in a hurry, but ultimately it seems strange to see so much money blown on something of so little obvious value beyond its own sense of occasion, the repetition and reiteration of whatever the hell it was all for. The wealth is deemed old money, but I'm from England and it really doesn't seem that old to me, and genuinely old money is fairly easy to identify, being nothing if not dignified. The Coronation was style, and sadly not even great style, without substance; and it seems oddly ironic how it all felt kind of cheap when compared to the hooting and hollering of the Powwow, which is at least conducted by people who understand that ritual should always mean something.

Go Spurs Go

My wife had won tickets to watch the San Antonio Spurs playing the LA Lakers at the AT&T centre, our local sports and related entertainments arena in which one could fit the city of London several times over. The tickets were for seats costing over $300 a head and she had won them at her office, so this wasn't some old tat - the boss handing over a can of fizzy pop on Christmas Eve and telling you to keep up the good work. A few of her friends had offered to take the extra ticket. Resenting the implication that I myself might not wish to attend on the grounds of a lifelong hatred of organised sports in all of its forms, I accepted the invitation, reasoning that it would be something new and therefore interesting.

I considered the Spurs - the home team. I was already out of my depth. 'They're er— basketball, right?'

My wife nodded.

I had seen basketball on television a few times because my wife watches the occasional game if the Spurs are playing. It's the one I recall as having been called netball when I was at school in England. The girls played it, and we would sit and pretend not to watch from the English literature classroom. LeBron James plays basketball, and I know his name from when he featured on a massive poster which came free with an issue of Hip Hop Connection magazine a few years ago. I didn't hang it on my wall because I didn't know who the hell he was at the time, or why the poster should have been given away with an English music magazine. Charles Barkley also plays basketball, and I know him from the Godzilla vs. Barkley comic and because he hates San Antonio for reasons which aren't very interesting. Shaquille O'Neal used to play basketball and was apparently quite good at it, although I've heard of the guy mainly because my wife knew him from having attended the same classes at school. Finally, there's Kobe Bryant who plays basketball for the Lakers, although I'm not sure why I've heard of him; and that is the sum total of my basketball knowledge.

It transpires that our tickets also cover a parking spot, which is nice. We park and file into the arena with everyone else, finding our seats five or six rows from the front of the sloped terrace. I've been here before to watch the rodeo. From my point of view it's like Wembley Stadium were Wembley Stadium built around a small bowling green rather than a football pitch. There are screens everywhere, the largest being four of them set on each side of a huge central mount hanging down from the roof. We are sat amongst fans of both teams. I reflect that this would seem odd in England, comparing the arrangement to my admittedly limited experience of football.

'So you never get any trouble, fights breaking out between rival fans or anything?

My wife shakes her head, and I think about all of my friends who support Millwall back in London, and then the one guy who follows West Ham.

The noise is already deafening and we have thirty minutes to go. Players jump around on the court or the pitch or the trapezoid or whatever it's called, and voices blast from speakers all around as statistics appear on the screen, a featurette for each grinning player detailing height, performance, match statistics, superpowers, and which issue of The Avengers he first appeared in. Music blasts, familar songs but just ten second snatches of introduction, just long enough for one to recognise Thriller or Highway to Hell or The Final Countdown and cry out oh hell yeah or that shit's my jam right there, motherfucker! or something of the sort. It's all about the excitement of the thing without the substance of the thing itself.

The section in which we are seated apparently comes with its own team of waiters who will take our orders for burgers, fries, nachos, soda or whatever, but it's still too early for them so we make our way back up the stairs to the concession stands. My wife takes a tray of nachos and I have a burger. It is about as good as I expected it to be, better than McDonald's but nothing which would inspire a special trip. After I've eaten I am no longer hungry, so that's good.

A match or game or tournament of basketball divides into four quarters each of fifteen minutes duration. The rules are pretty much as they are with football, with nets representing goals, everything stopping for the equivalent of a penalty, and so on - football here meaning football as played with a spherical ball, not the game they call football in this country which looks to me like rugby played by Transformers.

The game begins before we've even realised, and it occurs to me that in its natural state this may be one of those games you're better off to be playing than watching. The action occurs within a very small area with players crowded together. It happens quickly and can be difficult to follow from a distance, unlike football in which events can be observed and appreciated as unfolding at a more reasonable pace from the other side of the stadium. Football has more of a narrative; and football has the additional dimension of all those wonderful songs - You're Going Home in a Fucking Ambulance, or Who Ate All the Pies?, or You Live in a Caravan - which city-dwelling Millwall fans sing to Gillingham's semi-rural supporters to the tune of Go West by the Village People, and You've Never Seen a Tree, which is the response sung to the tune of You'll Never Walk Alone. I guess that this sort of thing doesn't happen with basketball, at least not here or this evening. Audience creativity is firmly schooled by instructions and announcements from speaker and screen, efforts to hype us up into a screaming mass. High up in the rear of the stadium, someone called DJ Quake plays us the first ten seconds of every hair metal record to ever feature on the soundtrack of a Tom Cruise film, switching according to the demands of the game. The Spurs are on the attack, so he plays a looping bar of a drum break followed by three hard beats as everyone chants GO! SPURS! GO!; then the Lakers take the ball and everyone crowds around the Spurs net and we get a different beat - thump thump DE! FENCE! thump thump DE! FENCE! over and over. It's not like anyone really needs this sort of jollying along, or a Spurs fan would be unable to tell what his or her team were up to without musical cues, so I suppose it's simply that everyone likes a sing-song, that everyone likes to feel included.

Someone scores a goal - or whatever it's called in this game - and the screens flash further instructions make noise, get loud, or some other unnecessary exhortation to celebration.

ON, the screen flashes. YOUR it continues, then FEET! followed by a photograph of a heeled cowboy boot just in case anyone was left struggling with the general concept of feet. No supporter left behind.

The game appears to have stopped and some guy in a coyote costume runs about waving arms and encouraging us to make more noise. He holds up a sign which reads this is our house, which is probably the most stupid message of the evening. The coyote suit is peculiar, googly green eyes staring in different directions. I like coyotes as they are in the real world, and I like Wile E. Coyote the animated nemesis of the national bird of Texas, but this one resembles a cautionary lesson on the perils of substance abuse, or he would do were it not for the running around and the somersaults. I notice that he wears a Spurs shirt with coyote spelled out on the back, which I suppose at least reduces any possible ambiguity.

Play resumes without warning. It may have resumed a few minutes ago but we were busy making noise, getting loud, rocking out to DJ Quake up there on his wheels of steel, this time playing an entire song all the way through, which is unfortunately by the Electric Light Orchestra, the worst band of all time.

Make some noise.

Yes, we know.

This must be what it's like inside the head of a hyperactive child on a Sunny Delight and candy binge. It reminds me of Crackerjack, an English children's show from my childhood which seemed to involve a lot of screaming. Even at the age of seven I considered it headachey. Saddest of all, I would suggest that all this spectacle does the game and its players a disservice. It suggests a lack of confidence in our being sufficiently entertained by ten men bouncing a ball around for an hour. Ignore the flashing lights and distractions, and although basketball happens quickly and in a small area, watch for long enough and you begin to see the skill involved and to appreciate the game. I suppose DJ Quake and the flashing lights are here to keep it interesting to those for whom basketball is not enough in and of itself, for whom it needs to be an enveloping experience. I recall certain footballing authorities aspiring to turn the beautiful game into something for all the family, which never struck me as a necessarily worthy intention so much as an exercise in raking in more money. All football ever needed to do was appeal to those who enjoy football. It never really needed to cater to anyone who doesn't enjoy football, just as there's no need for such a thing as a vegetarian beef steak; and the same surely applies to basketball, although I'm not sure where this leaves me given that I'm sat here watching the Lakers take the lead over the Spurs. It isn't that I'm not enjoying it, but it's odd, and I might enjoy it more were I not being asked to get loud every fifteen seconds. The game seems like the least important detail of the whole.

At the end of an hour padded out to three with generic entertainment-style spectacle, the Spurs lose by 110 goals to the Lakers' 112 - or points or scores or tries or whatever it is with this game. We all leave, either happy, or happy to at least have been here, which I suppose ticks all the boxes that needed ticking. It really wouldn't have taken much to convert me, to switch my generally tepid allegiance from football as my default sport of choice, but the Spurs just couldn't manage it. To be fair, it probably wasn't their fault.