Where I'm From

People notice the accent and ask where I'm from. Some assume I'm Australian. I've never quite settled on an answer, but have recently taken to saying Stratford-upon-Avon. Everyone's heard of Stratford-upon-Avon because of Shakespeare, and that was the nearest large town when I was growing up. Since then I've spent five years in Kent, about three in Coventry, and nearly twenty in south-east London - pacing around the country like I was trying to get out. 

I'm no longer certain of the dates - late nineties and maybe some small change, but no later than 2002. It's seven in the morning at Royal Mail. Some days I'll take the unofficial ten minute grace break, but not today. I have too much work. We have a workload amounting to about nine hours of work which we have to fit into an eight hour day, so breaks tend to go out the window. If this week's acting governor is an arsehole and any mail is left undelivered because someone bothered to take the break to which they're entitled, it could mean an entirely unethical first stage warning for delaying the mail. No-one has the time or energy to argue.

I usually spend the grace break - if I take it - talking to Carmen. She's the woman who runs our canteen. She works for a catering contractor rather than Royal Mail, and has been assigned to our place. We're about the same age, but she's from a Caribbean background. She's coffee coloured with a smile that warms my heart, and - to commit what may well be racial stereotyping - a soft, lilting voice which sounds almost as though she's singing. We are both lost souls of some description. She asks about my possibly ludicrous attempts to write a novel, and I tell her about Lawrence Miles, my favourite author. She says that he sounds interesting. She lives in Plaistow, miles away in East London, and attends a reading group once a week. She's even read some Philip K. Dick. I like her because she seems to like me, and because she's interested in things. There's more to her than tea and toast.

'It's not Philip K. Dick, but it's probably better than Jeffrey Archer,' I joke, having lumbered her with a stack of pages from my cranky novel, printed from my PC last night.

'You shouldn't laugh at him,' she says, not unkindly. 'He's sold a lot of books.'

But today I work through the break to a soundtrack of Jackie swearing in the next bay along from mine, mostly cursing those to whom she delivers mail for either getting too much of it, or for it being mostly junk. I can never tell whether she's genuinely outraged or just passing time. She seems neither happy nor unhappy, just world weary.

Ted passes and jokes, 'Do you know who the father is yet, Jack? Must be one of this lot innit?' He grins and casts his gaze around the sorting office so as to imply that any one of the thirty or so males present could be the father of Jackie's impending child.

'Yeah,' she sighs, playing along. 'I'll probably just name him SE22.' This is the postcode covered by our sorting office.

'Wasn't you was it, Oscar?' Ted now asks me. 'You didn't get our Jack up the duff, did you?'

'Sorry, Ted. Not guilty.'

'It weren't Lawrence,' Jackie confirms. 'I'm sure I would have remembered.'

On the subject of mysteries, I still haven't pinned down why Ted took to calling me Oscar. Some days it seems to be a reference to Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, others it's after Oscar Wilde - which may be an obscure play on words referencing how wild I apparently seem when I'm pissed off.

'I'll have something for you later,' Ted tells me in a more furtive tone, which reminds me that I have Sue's record. I have it in my bag. I take it out and go around to the next aisle of sorting frames.

'Here you go,' I hand it over. It's Blade's The Lion Goes From Strength To Strength, double white vinyl, very rare these days.

'Did you like it?'

'Fantastic - reminds me a bit of Public Enemy. You know, that kind of full on sound, very dense.'

'Yeah - it's good. Did you make a copy?'

'Yes. I'll burn you the CDR tonight if that's all right. It came out really well.'

It was quite a surprise when I found out Sue was into rap in a big way. She used to be one of those teenagers with a hoodie and a spray can forever breaking into train yards, or whatever it is they do. She's tall and skinny, kind of smiley. But for a slight Kentish twang she seems more like someone who has adventures in a children's book than a reformed b-girl.

Eventually I have all of the mail in the sorting frame, so I'm working my way through the redirections. The information is printed on a series of yellow cards kept in clear plastic wallets, one for each address. I work through the cards, pulling mail from the frame to check it isn't addressed to whoever has moved away. In instances where it is addressed to someone who has moved away and has accordingly paid for the service, I take a sticker for the new address from the rear of the plastic wallet and slap it on the envelope, covering the old address. After about twenty minutes I have a stack of thirty or so letters and magazines destined to be forwarded to other parts of the country. I head for the other side of the office, to the outward sorting frame to which we sort mail headed for Scotland, the Midlands, Cornwall and so on.

I encounter Alan, the fake Rasta, as I turn the corner of the frame. He's our acting governor this week and he's an arsehole. I think of him as the fake Rasta after Nadim gave him the name.

'I saw that fake Rasta last week,' Nadim told me. 'I was just walking along, you know.'

'Yeah?'

'He slowed down like he was going to chat shit. He had this big fuckin' smile, man.' Nadim made the noise, sucking air between his two front teeth. 'I looked down and there was this brick just on the road, so I picked it up and looked right at him, like weighing it up in my hand, yeah?'

'Seriously?' I began to laugh, relishing the thought of Alan terrorised by a former employee.

'Yeah, man. He didn't look too happy about that. He wasn't smiling no more, you know what I'm sayin'?'

'What? He drove off?'

'Yeah. He put his foot down, man. I'm tellin' you.'

Anyway, right now I'm headed directly for the outward sorting. There's no other place I could possibly be going given that I'm on this side of the office. I'm holding a big stack of mail in front of me, redirection stickers plainly visible. My purpose is fucking obvious.

'Lawrence,' Alan says.

'Huh?'

He wags a finger as he strides past. 'Don't let me find any redirections on your frame. Take them to the outward sorting otherwise I'll be giving you a first stage warning.'

'Okay.' I think of Nadim stood at the side of the road, screw faced with a brick in his hand. I liked Nadim, but he was given the heave ho, for reasons which seemed unconvincing to just about everyone. Black guys seem to have a tough time in this job, particularly if there's a black manager who feels he needs to prove something. They actively look for failings, pouncing on minor irregularities about which no-one gives a shit if you're white. The white supremacist contingent always chuckle to themselves about the bad attitude of black workers, but it's bullshit. Mostly the supposed bad attitude seems more like a justifiable reluctance to lay back and take it whilst being fucked over by upper management, which is unfortunately how the job works.

Call me Ben Elton, but this is why I generally prefer working with black people. They know when to tell the governor to fuck off. They're attuned to detecting when they're being diddled from above.

I'm on the sorting with Jimmy Axton - whom Carmen calls Jimmy Ackleston, unless I'm thinking of Lucy. It's just the two of us because it's Saturday and we're on late duties. Jim fancies a fag but doesn't want to light up in case Frank, the acting governor, is still hanging around. I first met Frank when he was acting governor at Catford, and vividly recall him locking himself inside his office as Robbie Finley tried to smash the glass with a broom, bellowing, 'Come out and face me, you cunt!' Robbie lost his job but was later briefly eulogised in song, something adapted from a number which had become popular at football matches.

Robbie Finley, he's our mate.
He's our mate. He's our mate.
Robbie Finley, he's our mate.
He smacks governors!

The song transposes both the name and the violent action of the original - smacks governors for kills coppers - and isn't strictly accurate in so much as that Frank remained safe in his office, which I suppose was for the best given that Robbie's objection was not entirely without foundation.

I walk up to the hatch of the PHG cage to see if Frank is hanging around within, as is sometimes the case. He isn't, but Sav is in there with the others. They're watching porn. The woman on the screen wears stockings and is on her back. She has quite a nice arse, and I don't think I've seen this one. I'm sure I would have remembered.

'Blimey, Sav,' I observe.

'Lawrie,' he exclaims, and we both make the established noise of greeting - uuuuuuuh, like a moose.

'Whose video is this?,' I ask. 'Is this one of Ted's?'

Enter Mel.

'What the fuck do you want?'

'Is this your video?, I ask. 'Can I borrow it?'

'I don't know whose it is.'

'Video?' Sav snorts derision. 'This is on the telly!'

'Live & Kicking has changed a lot.'

A brief silence ensues as we all watch appreciatively.

'If I was in charge,' I propose, 'I would make it illegal for women to be not wearing suspenders at all times.'

Mel scowls. 'Say that again?'

'I said it wrong. What I meant was that if I was in charge I would pass a law requiring that they wear stockings and suspenders at all times.'

Sav chuckles. 'What? Men as well?'

'No. For men it would be on a purely voluntary basis.'

'Oh yes?' Sue asks, coming in from the other room, amused by our sudden discomfort. 'What's all this?'

'No, honestly,' I stutter in response to the accusation I've imagined. 'I was looking for Frank and I got distracted.'

I flash a glance at the television set. Someone with lightning reflexes has turned it off. Sav stares from the window as though he has something on his mind. Mel leaves the room shaking his head.

It's Saturday evening, September 2002 but probably not the same Saturday. We're meeting at the Crystal Palace Tavern, but I'm the only one who has turned up. I have a drink with Snowy who is sat in the saloon bar, as is probably usual. He's bigger than ever. He's put on a lot of weight since taking extended leave, and it doesn't look like he's  coming back. It's wonderful to see him and it's been a while. He's one of the funniest people I've met but has had a few setbacks of late what with the death of his dad and his own declining health. He's still a handsome bastard though, even with all those chins which somehow give him an aristocratic appearance, and the full head of snow white hair swept back with a bit of a duck's arse at the front.

We chat shit for a while, how are things back at the sorting office and which useless arseholes have been left in charge, how bad it's getting; but his breathing seems laboured and there's no longer quite such a twinkle in his eye. I get the feeling that this will be the last time I see him, which will eventually turn out to have been unfortunately prescient of me. He's a survivor of better days in the job, of life in general. He will be missed when he's gone.

Paul turns up, and it's just the two of us, which is unfortunate because he can be hard work. He got the boot a few months ago, and now he's full of conspiracy theories about why he was sacked and how he's going to blow the roof off that place using secret cameras and exposés, the results of which will be broadcast on Channel 4. He has delusions of cinematic aptitude, and has been pushing his autobiographical motion picture which is named My Heart is Broken. He talks it well, but only two of us have seen the single videotape which is slowly making its way around the office. Terry's verdict, for one example, was that it was very good, very professional, but he'd expected it to be longer than fifteen minutes. The story of the film is based on Paul's own childhood, which sounds less than idyllic. We all have the promotional postcards he's been giving out featuring a still of the boy who plays Paul as a kid.

'I used to smear myself with my own shit and hide in the cupboard,' he tells me. 'That was so he wouldn't hit me any more.'

'I know,' I say, having heard the story many times. The thing with Paul is that it's impossible to tell how much is made up, and it's frustrating because there's clearly some awful truth in there; plus he's not a bad bloke, just a bit manic.

Carmen arrives at eight, all the way from Plaistow, which is a massive relief. I wonder what it says about her personal life that she's chosen to hang out with us sad sacks on this warm September evening. Unfortunately our combined presence is not enough to get Paul off the subject of himself and how a lot of people are going to be very sorry.

Sue arrives half an hour later with some friend from outside work. The drink was Sue's idea, but never mind. Her friend seems okay, bit shrill, nothing much to say of any great interest seeing as she doesn't know us or any of our colleagues whom we're now busily slagging off behind their backs, but her presence is at least sufficient to dilute Paul's mania.

Kingsley arrives after nine, and that's it. There are just six of us out of the whole office, three of whom either no longer work there or never worked there. Kingsley takes a shine to Sue's friend and somehow transforms into a more slimline Barry White. I hear him asking about her star sign with a big smile, and he's lost to us for the rest of the evening.

We drink, and Paul resumes his ranting and raving, and I think about how Carmen has travelled across London for this.

'I must go,' she sighs, and no-one questions because we all appreciate she has a long trip back. It still seems early.

'I'll walk you to the bus-stop,' I say.

We talk as we stroll down Whateley Road towards Lordship Lane, nothing amazing, just writing and the stuff we talk about on the rare occasions when I take a grace break. She tells me in passing that she once went to North Africa on a roots thing and was surprised to find that Africans came in all shapes, shades, and sizes. She's always interesting.

I know it wouldn't ever work between us, but sometimes it's nice to pretend that it would; and it's nice just to enjoy her company without feeling any sort of pressure to impress or perform.

There's almost a moment when the bus comes. I kiss her on the cheek, and that's that.

I walk up the hill, back to my flat in the basement of a four story house. There doesn't seem to be much point in going back to the pub. I'm lonely, but I'm used to it. I don't recall any other state of being. The financial powers which rule the city are doing their best to gouge me out of my present security, to oblige me to pay more for less, even though I'm already pretty much reduced to a utility because they haven't yet invented a robot which will do it cheaper.

I have my doner kebab and something disgusting borrowed from Ted, and I'm under no illusions about anything.

On the other hand, I'm cautiously settled. If I can just hang on until I eventually die, I'll be happy. I have no-one, and probably never will for reasons I don't yet understand, but that's okay. I no longer have the desire to move on because I'm not sure there's anywhere left to go. One day I'll look back on all of this and see things in a very different light, but for now this is where I am, so this is where I'm from; and it's the closest I will ever come to a definitive answer.

The Trouser Conflagration

Mandy once had a flatmate called Andrea, and Andrea was dating Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian. Anyone already bewildered should probably note that I'm referring to Japan the 1980s new wave band rather than Japan the country. The notion of an entire country designating a single individual as its drummer is clearly absurd, even without bringing up the fact of Japan the 1980s new wave band being from Catford. Of course, Mandy and her friends were eager to meet Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian, but each time he dropped Andrea off at the pub or a friend's house, it seemed like he always had somewhere else to be and would rush off without saying hello - probably had to go and do some drumming or something. Inevitably, as time went on and Andrea's boyfriend - Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian - continued to shun his fiancé's friends, questions were asked, questions which Andrea countered with photographic evidence of the relationship as something real and not just a load of stuff that had happened inside her head. Unfortunately the evidence was not unanimously accepted as convincing due to the picture of Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian, having quite clearly been cut out of a magazine. 

Telling lies can be a lot of fun, and as hobbies go there are probably worse. Anyone who's ever been in a band will tell you that an accomplished liar is worth at least two and a half averagely competent guitarists, unless you plan on spending the rest of your life performing Splodgenessabounds covers to an audience of three visiting French students who got lost on the way to the bureau de change. In this crazy music business, the very practice of telling lies can sometimes be equivalent to a fifth band member - conditional to the band in question being a quartet.

At the age of fourteen I formed a group with three of my friends. We called ourselves The Pre-War Busconductors and we weren't particularly musical, but then tunes weren't really the point. It was more about making a racket and coming out with stuff that made us laugh until our sides ached. It was about the performance, which was awkward given that we never played any gigs, nor let anyone who wasn't actually in the band listen to our cassettes. We got around this by becoming our own audience. Everything was taped on a mono portable cassette recorder, and we differentiated live from studio recordings by clapping and cheering at the end of each song, whistling, shouting out requests, telling ourselves to piss off and so on - just like it would have been at a real gig. I'm pretty sure Peter Frampton did the same thing. I know his live album was supposed to be some big deal, but I've never met anyone who was there.

At the age of nineteen or thereabouts I played guitar for a group called The Dovers, formed with my friend Carl who sang and jumped around. Although we played live gigs before audiences comprising people who weren't other members of the band, we nevertheless took great pleasure in making things up - tour posters listing dates all across the globe, the Budokan, Madison Square Gardens, Shea Stadium - all regrettably cancelled but for the one solitary gig at the Blue Lagoon in Chatham. Carl had a gift for telling fibs, of which my favourite  was the suggestion that we change the name of the group to Live Dinosaur on Stage in hope of fooling people into turning up expecting to see a real live dinosaur.

I know at least one musician who has claimed with a straight face to be secretly working for the KGB, and there's Sun Ra who insists he's from Saturn, and Malcolm McClaren desperately scrabbling to get just one person to believe the Sex Pistols were his idea. Then there was this other band in which I played, one which remained obscure in England whilst having sold many thousands of CDs in Germany and the far east, at least according to our cover story. The theory ran that the potential punter would be encouraged to believe every other person in the universe was into us, had bought our CD, and had been playing it constantly. Everyone thinks we're amazing, we were saying, but apparently you didn't get the memo, so you must be different; you probably smell a bit funny or something - the you in this instance being the entire population of the British Isles. It was a sound enough concept - sort of like when Adolf Hitler visited Rome and Mussolini had forty miles worth of fake buildings painted on wooden panels either side of the railway track in order to make the city seem all the more impressive, except we were selling shirty punk rock rather than an illusory testament to Fascist ideology expressed in architectural terms.

In case I appear to be taking any sort of moral high ground here, I still burn with embarrassment to recall when fifteen years ago I told John Eden how some of my mother's side of the family were from Mexico, which obviously they weren't. I suppose it was at least original. I'm uncertain of general trends, but in terms of lying about one's nationality in pursuit of kudos, I get the impression that pretending to be Mexican is fairly rare.

Race is of course another matter, particularly with the potential anonymity now afforded by the internet, which leads us to the self-proclaimed cult film and TV forum for black people. This was a message board run by a white man posting in the style of what I suppose he imagined to be an amusing black persona, for example dismissing those opinions not to his liking as lickle white bwoy shit or some such, because as you know that's how black people speak. I posted there for about a year but managed to get myself banned before I realised it was an elaborate and weirdly pointless put on. As I do actually have black friends - by which I mean friends outside the context of some guy who serves me a burger or drives me to the airport - it struck me as sad and possibly a bit insulting when I discovered the truth, vaguely akin to a clutch of drunken white media studies students quoting Samuel L. Jackson zingers and addressing each other as my nigga.

As lies go, I'd mostly characterise the above as tics - or at worst, errors of judgement - small fictional flourishes that don't really hurt anyone and make life a little more colourful for those involved. However, from what I was told, Andrea's delusion always seemed like a different kettle of prevaricating fish - the kind of lie that inspires only pity and suggests something fundamental has escaped from the author's psychological menagerie. When a child claims to have seen a dragon, not for a moment considering the possibility that stating something as truth will not in itself make the story seem plausible to others, it can be cute. When an adult does the same thing, it's just weird and disturbing.

My own personal Andrea introduced himself as John Schölle. He had placed a postcard in the window of Gruts cafe in Chatham back in the late 1980s. The postcard made some promise I didn't quite follow about organising a sound system and wishing to enlist the help of interested parties. I knew a sound system to be something to do with reggae, of which I've never really been a huge fan, but I got the impression that there was nevertheless some sort of musical common ground - at least in the more unorthodox recordings of Scientist and the like - so I called the number and went around for a cup of tea.

The guy lived three streets away from me, so it turned out. He was a few years older, living with his girlfriend Janine and a hyperactive dog called Jack. He played and recorded music that wasn't a million miles from the sort of material I'd been doing, and we both enjoyed a lot of the same things, and it seemed to me that we hit it off straight away - which was nice because he was one of the funniest people I had ever met. His sense of humour struck a fine balance between raucous and deadpan and found its most vivid expression in a series of plays he set down in an exercise book for his own amusement.

These plays were, very roughly speaking, a conflation of Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and Derek & Clive. One of my favourites involved two men fighting over a packet of biscuits whilst shouting at each other through a letterbox for the duration of the notional performance - I think the pivotal biscuits were custard creams. Another play was entitled Three Empty Chairs and featured Ted, an ageing bully regaling his indifferent companions with unlikely accounts of former glories, each conversational turn inspiring a fresh revelation of better days and what people used to call him. At one point the electricity meter runs out, plunging the room they share into darkness. Someone asks for a tanner for the meter and our man explains, 'I used t'ave tons of loose change when I was a youngster... Rattler Ted they used to call me.'

Reasoning that John probably wasn't going to do anything with Three Empty Chairs - which I regarded and still regard as a masterpiece - I had a go at turning it into a Pinteresque cartoon strip, but gave up after thirteen pages. The play was long and I lacked patience, and although John said he liked what I'd done, he later confided to Carl that it had pissed him off greatly. I still don't know why he couldn't have just told me, but never mind...

Similarly entertaining were The Joneses, John's imaginary band parodying The Smiths - amongst others - without quite sounding like a parody due to the incongruous use of sped-up tapes, armpit generated farting noises, and a drum machine. It was really more of a grotesque than a parody in the strictest sense, a sort of precursor to Chris Morris with jangly guitars:

A man at work keeps touching my knee.

Is he dangerous?

I'll wait and see.

Ooooooh horror at the office.

He's after my orifice.

Then there were John's videos, crash edited on a domestic VHS from footage off the TV, old films and what have you. They were funny in a way, but mainly just odd, although you could tell John loved putting them together, amusing himself regardless of how ludicrous the results might seem to others; which was what I liked about him.

So that was John Schölle, except after about six months I realised Schölle wasn't even his real name. We recorded some tracks together, but I still didn't quite get the sound system angle. He gave me a tape made by someone who had written to him, beefy electronic rhythms from an individual calling himself C.S. Teknono - the initials standing for Christopher Smith - who would be helping in setting up this mythical sound system. I loved the tape, then about a month later I bought Major Malfunction by Keith LeBlanc and recognised it as the same material. I told John and we sat down to listen to the album. He rubbed his chin and seemed uncomfortable, and I genuinely believed he'd been hoaxed by this Christopher Smith, what with my tending to look for the best in people and having failed to put two and two together regarding John already being quite the fan where Keith LeBlanc was concerned.

Months passed, John and Janine got married, and I failed to spot his increasingly erratic behaviour. He seemed often unreliable, failing to show at agreed meeting times, and I only began to regard this as peculiar when my friend Carl and I visited him one day. We had been invited but nevertheless John didn't appear to be in. It wasn't the first time he'd let us down, but listening at the door we heard sounds of movement which stopped dead as we resumed knocking. So he was in but hiding from us. It was hard not to take that personally, and I gave up on the guy and eventually moved away from Chatham, increasingly flaky friends being one of a number of factors that had contributed to the diminishing appeal of the Medway towns in my eyes.

John and Janine resurfaced in Beckenham about five years later, by which time I was living in East Dulwich. With John being difficult to dislike and easy to forgive, we resumed the sporadic habit of an occasional drink to lubricate rambling conversations about music, art, films, literature, and Derek & Clive. Inevitably after another few months, he once again dropped off the radar - no reason given, just the sound of a telephone left ringing. If I was really that much of a pain in the arse, I concluded, hopefully he would know better than to bother next time around.

Another five years and he reappeared for one single raucous drink at The Uplands during which he told me that he and Janine had separated - which seemed a shame - and that he was living with his mum in Peckham on disability benefits, prevented from working by  some psychological condition - which actually made a lot of sense. Then he vanished again, up until his most recent manifestation about a year ago, now reduced to an internet presence, just a YouTube account living in Leicester and apparently spending his days editing segments of old films into faintly amusing clips. I responded to his slightly cranky email with little enthusiasm, and then forgot about it.

John was a comet, his eccentric solar path bringing him around roughly twice a decade leaving observers bewildered as he once again buggered off back to giggling obscurity. It always seemed a shame, because aside from his being a genuinely talented musician, and his plays so impressing my friend Rob that there was even talk of getting one performed before an audience, John did a convincing impersonation of being great company. It wasn't like he really needed to make stuff up in order to appear interesting; he was already more interesting than most people; but for some reason he just liked to live a life of reckless invention. As with Steve Jansen, drummer of Japan and brother of David Sylvian, specifically his short-lived relationship with Andrea, I guess you just have to enjoy it for what it is while it lasts, because even if it's just a story, at least it was a good one.

On Camels Failing to Pass Through the Eyes of Needles

A moral high ground is so often adopted where Stuff is concerned, specifically the possession of large quantities of Stuff. We see someone whose shelves sag with the bulk of whatever crap they've accumulated over the years, so we frown and shake our heads. Conversely, we greet the same person sat smiling beatifically in a bare room whilst contemplating a grain of corn with contemplative one-handed applause. We admire their wisdom, their having shaken off the need of material distractions, and then we go home and listen to John Lennon telling us how fab it would be if we could just live without Stuff, just like he did. You can't take it with you when you die, well-wishers remind us, as though anyone in the entire history of the human race with the possible exception of certain Pharaohs ever failed to grasp that particular clause of the mortality contract.

Of course, there are those who really do have too much Stuff, who make compulsive purchases in the doomed hope of achieving an elusive happiness, who accumulate vast libraries of overpriced tat they will never read or watch because, having failed to develop critical faculties, they are obliged to assess value by the criteria of whether or not something has a Doctor Who logo printed on the cover - to specifically identify one road I might have travelled but for the grace of having become a fully grown man. There are those who really, really don't need a jet-ski, or another pair of shoes, or two houses, or books explaining what J. Michael Straczynski was trying to say with Babylon 5. Having long known that neither the simple purchase nor possession of an object has ever done much to raise my spirits during times of sorrow, I'm pretty sure I am not one of those people. At least I hope I'm not one of those people, even though it's true that I do have one hell of a lot of Stuff.

I justify my ton of Stuff - mainly records, compact discs, cassettes, books, and comics - by periodically getting rid of anything I have in my possession just for the sake of it. If I'm unlikely to look at or listen to some vaguely cultural artefact again, there's not a lot of point in keeping it, and I try to avoid buying anything through either boredom or habit; but that said, I still have a lot of Stuff. The occasional purge is okay, but there's no point in getting rid of things just for the sake of a purge. I've done this before, mainly with books, and only ended up buying them again, which has at least helped refine my sense of what I can live without.

Girlfriend number three was a big fan of getting rid of Stuff, or decluttering as she called it, having presumably read the term in one of her four million self-help books. She was also a big fan of television programmes like How Clean is Your Arse? and Well, I Just Hope You're Satisfied in which self-proclaimed advice gurus hector and bully regular people into feeling worthless for the sake of ratings.

'Oh Doctor Gillian,' number three would chortle, inadvertently commending a bum-faced snake oil peddling televisual quack for reducing a fat person to tears over a bag of sodding Maltesers. 'What are you like, Doctor Gillian?' number three would titter at the screen as though sharing in some private joke communicated by means of long-distance telepathy, simultaneously earning the dubious distinction of being the last person in the entire Milky Way galaxy to believe in Gillian McKeith's medical qualifications. For whatever reason, somewhere along the line, girlfriend number three had learned to associate distress and abuse with self-improvement, apparently missing the crucial point that telling somebody off is never really an end in itself and is more productive when there's a subject. Of course, she saw all my shelves of books and comics and, unable to appreciate the skips full of cranky UFO-related literature that I had already Joseph Stalined from my own personal timeline, she helpfully set me a challenge. Each week I was to pick five books I didn't need and give them to Oxfam, and she would be checking up on me.

One week later she checked up on me and found that I had failed to pick five books or to give any away. I explained that this was because I had no intention of accepting her idiotic challenge regardless of what conversations may have transpired inside her head. Besides, I didn't exactly need any of them, I just liked having them. It didn't strike me as difficult to understand.

By the time I fled the house and my nonsensical entanglement with girlfriend number three, aided and abetted by a genial chain smoking Irish motorist and his van, I was painfully aware of just how much Stuff I had accumulated, having moved three times in as many years. The fourth move was to my mother's house in Coventry, an undertaking distinguished by the additional task of my having to carry all that Stuff up a flight of stairs.

By this time I'd met Bess, and we had drawn up tentative plans to marry and live together in Texas, so I spent eighteen months selling half of my Stuff on eBay in order to afford shipping costs for the other half. I suppose the point of my describing all this is to set forth the thesis that by 2009, if I owned a particular book, record, comic book or whatever, then I owned it for a reason other than pure sentiment. After twenty years of carting Stuff around, you tend to hang onto the things that repay your investment.

Anyway, to gradually approach the purpose of all this, in 2011, I had sold about as much as I could on eBay, and all the immigration papers had come through, so I crammed a couple of suitcases with books and compact discs and flew to San Antonio, Texas. For nearly two years I lived with access to just a small percentage of my Stuff, specifically that which I was able to bring back as luggage following two return visits to the United Kingdom. As for the rest of it, I hadn't even started the process of packing and shipping before I left England, there having been too much else to do; and Bess and I had not at the time agreed upon where we would live once married, so there hadn't even been an address I could have given the shipping company. After a year, I went back for a few weeks and discovered that this wasn't really sufficient time to sort out the shipping, so I ended up spreading all the paperwork, handshakes, and shoving things in boxes over two visits, the second of these occurring in November 2012. As it happened, I didn't actually get all of my Stuff in those forty boxes of approximately 20kg each, but I got most of it, enough for what remains at my mother's house to constitute luggage following the next few visits.

So after nearly two years of getting by on a bare minimum of Stuff - just a few essential Ice Cube albums and Clifford D. Simak novels - the van has been and gone, dropping off forty boxes packed three months earlier in cold, wet England. I haven't yet built the shelving to accommodate all of this Stuff, so it remains in the garage for the moment. So far I've opened just one box out of curiosity, mainly to assess the chance of everything still being in one piece, and so this week has been soundtracked by old favourites not heard for at least two summers: Dandy Warhols, Dizzee Rascal, DJ Rap, DMX, Tha Dogg Pound, Dresden Dolls, Električni Orgazam, El-P, Eno, Eminem, and Eels - who for some reason I've only just identified as being Nirvana directed by Tim Burton, which probably accounts for why I was never too sure about that album, but anyway...

It's been great having all my Stuff once again under the one roof, although at the same time it's been quite strange. Another one of those massive jobs that has been years in the planning no longer requires my attention, and at the same time, I realise there's no longer anything like so much of me left back in the old country; and strangest of all, opening up just that one box felt somehow like going through the house of somebody who died. Whoever I was two years ago, there's probably an argument for my now being someone slightly different, and certainly less pissed off.

At a push, Stuff might be considered an extended phenotype of sorts. Ownership of No Limit compact discs or the novels of D.H. Lawrence probably isn't encoded in my DNA, but it might be possible to trace a line back in that general direction, at least allowing for a major diversion through nurture and the like. Birds make nests, and chimpanzees poke sticks into holes in the ground, and as my mental faculties aren't quite up to eidetic recall and replay of the entire Scarface back catalogue, I have these material extensions of memory which I carry around from place to place.

This is what I meant by there no longer being much of me left back in England. If I am by some definition comprised of all this Stuff, most of it's now here in Texas.

To possess Stuff is only human nature. We like to have things around us, and anyone who regards that as necessarily bad is probably an idiot, or at least not someone with whom you would want to spend an entire weekend. I appreciate love, friendship, wildlife, cats, thought, a beautiful sunset and all of those things that you can't stick on a credit card without feeling the need to use my appreciation to score points; but I can also appreciate a lovingly maintained vinyl copy of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album, or Philip K. Dick's novels arranged in chronological order; and if you can't understand that, then you have my pity.

Like water being wet and the rest room facilities of which bears traditionally avail themselves, it always struck me as self-evident that a man lacking qualities beyond the contents of his wallet cannot, by definition, enter the kingdom of heaven; although as for why anyone would wish to thread a camel through the eye of a needle - I never really got that one.

The Mysteries of the Pyramids

During my own personal and thankfully brief dark ages, girlfriend number three asked if I would like to come out for a drink with a few of her friends. This was back near the beginning of the relationship, and I was still a little puzzled by why she so rarely referred to these people, so I said yes, of course. When we arrived at the pub, thirty or more of her friends were there. Within a minute of my taking a seat, some woman I didn't even know made puppy dog eyes and asked why I had set myself against attending an ISA workshop. This was a set-up, and apparently I had already caused her to have a great big sad.

ISA stands for the Institute of Self Actualisation, which in itself probably tells you all you need to know. I realised that by friends, Marian actually meant people she didn't really know that well, but with whom she shared a common bond of attendance at self-improvement seminars run by this organisation. I wasn't interested and had already told Marian as much, but being Marian she assumed this meant I hadn't understood. Those people I met in the pub that evening all spoke of success and overcoming an assortment of perceived personal failings, but the testimony sounded scripted with the same key phrases used over and over. Marian's supposed friends seemed broken or lost, and I found most of those with whom I spoke abrasive and faintly unpleasant; but worst of all, I sort of felt sorry for them. These people were true losers. I've known heroin addicts with more character.

Last week my wife Bess mentioned that she had received a text message from her friend Laura, or at least from someone I'm going to call Laura. I have something cool to show you, the message read, bring your guys along this Sunday.

Neither cool nor awesome have much currency with me, and I'm not sure I've yet discovered anything described by either word that actually is. Cool might as well mean front row tickets to see Bon Jovi where I'm concerned, and awesome is the word used by some guy who pours beer over his own head. Bess was similarly sceptical, but decided it would be rude to decline the admittedly ambiguous invitation, not least because it meant Junior and Nick - Laura's son - would get to play together. Nick has autism to some degree or other, although so far as I can tell this amounts to his being somewhat blunt, and perhaps more honest than is strictly necessary. Otherwise he seems like a decent kid, and he always has a blast with Junior when they get together.

Sunday came and we loaded Junior into the car, leaving our scruffy little corner of the hood for an address that turned out to belong to a huge, ostentatious house within a gated community. Laura invited us in so we could meet her other guests, pretty much in keeping with our declining expectations. It was a party, of sorts. The side table was strewn with brochures pertaining to cruise holidays and the like, and a kitchen counter had been given over to bowls of Doritos and the sort of corporate sauce-style dipping putty that makes no sense in a city this close to the Mexican border. Twelve or more other guests milled around, each identified by a sticker of the kind proclaiming hello, my name is Noodles.

His name probably wasn't Noodles, and his introductory line wasn't anything like so casual as I'm sure he imagined it sounded.

'Do you like to travel?'

I think he expected a gurgling response in the voice of Goofy, Disney's dog-style cartoon character of whom I'd been put in mind when Junior took to impersonating Mickey Mouse during the car journey. Well goll-eee! I would hiccup, why as it happens I surely do like to travel, seeing as how you come to be aksing and all.

I really wanted to look him in the eye and tell him that I hated travel, but instead I pretended not to hear, and Bess interjected, pointing out that as I was from England, most of my travel was done with the purpose of visiting friends and family.

'Oh, he's from England?' Initially thrown by the information, Noodles was rolling with it, adjusting to the new data. 'Mind the gap,' he chuckled, explaining that you hear this announcement everywhere  you go in England. 'Mind the gap!'

For one moment, it felt as though I had been magically transported back to the old country*.

Thankfully, Wendy introduced herself and asked what I did, so I told her I was a writer, because I suppose I am in some sense. She told me that her daughter is writing a novel as part of a degree course, then asked about my book, and we got talking. It turned out we both liked Anne McCaffrey and Frank Herbert. She wasn't a fan of Asimov but I suggested she try Ursula Le Guin, and then she began talking about Doctor Who. I smiled and said that I used to enjoy it, and strategically went to look for my wife.

I realise that no-one believes me, and some may suspect I just say this sort of thing so as to cultivate some sense of superiority, but I like very little television, and I like a great many books. Most television shows I can watch for about five minutes before I start thinking about whatever I'm reading at the time. When I talk about science-fiction I'm talking about novels, and something like Doctor Who is now so far outside of the Venn diagram that it might as well be The Jetsons or The Clangers, but for the fact that The Jetsons and The Clangers at least retain some of their charm.

Bess had been cornered by some face-lifty woman of ambiguous vintage who'd Peperamied herself into a sort of mummified Eva Peron. 'Has he got that accent?' Face Lift asked all agog upon learning of my nationality, then sidled over so as to listen in on me saying things like cheerio, Mr. Darcy and I suppose long live Her Royal Highness.

Bess and I grabbed handfuls of the crisps we had brought with us - potato chips to US readers - and retreated outside to watch Nick and Junior playing together. Junior had devised a new game by combining elements of baseball and football - as in the American version which entails play with an object that isn't shaped like a ball by agency of something other than a foot. Once they were done with this, they took it in turns to shelter within Nick's wooden playhouse whilst the other bombarded the exterior with whatever large, heavy objects they could find. Unfortunately Laura, having noticed our absence, called us inside as the presentation was about to begin.

'We'll stay to be polite and so that the boys can play,' Bess whispered to me through gritted teeth, 'and then we're out of here.'

Everyone found a seat, and our hostess played a DVD, a presentation by some guy who had apparently been homeless, alcoholic, and born without arms, legs, or head, but was now a millionaire. We too could be millionaires, he suggested.

'Well, all right!' A fellow guest in a blue jacket punched the air and hollered, and he really did holler - a word that was absent from my vocabulary up until now - and he pronounced all right as alraaahhht! like the singer of a 1980s hair-metal band. I looked around the room and realised that drinking a Budweiser and listening to Kiss was probably dangerous and Bohemian for these people.

The DVD explained how we could sell cruises and holidays in luxurious resorts to our friends and associates for a massive profit; and it wasn't a pyramid scheme, it was stratified product transference or something. Following the DVD - emphasis provided by short bursts of applause, whoops, and exclamations of sweet! and well alraaahhht! from Blue Jacket - four of the group explained how they themselves had become millionaires thanks to this opportunity that was absolutely nothing like a pyramid scheme. All of them mentioned that they now drove BMWs, which was a little wasted on me as south-east London taught me to associate that particular automotive brand with crack dealers. 'You could be driving one of those babies in just under sixty days,' promised one of the newly made millionaires, rather redundantly in my case seeing as I've never learned how to drive.

The presentation concluded with the identification of three kinds of people. Myself and Bess found ourselves categorised in Group C because we weren't interested in this amazing opportunity and we don't enjoy saving money, according to Face Lift or Blue Jacket or one of the other morons. We gathered Junior, managed to squeeze a brief and thankfully normal conversation out of Laura - who turns out to be quite pleasant when not trying to rope you in on some dodgy scam - and got out of there.

The experience reminded me of that meeting with Marian's thirty or more friends. In both cases, the talk was of success and empowerment as almost abstract ideals, like success was some mystical force that might be invoked by use of certain words and gestures just as a voodoo practitioner summons his loa by strangling a chicken; but there was about these people an inherent sense of desperation. They lacked either the character or imagination to be anything other than what they were, and that was what they wanted more than anything in the world - to be something other than what they were; but then who could really blame them?

During her post-DVD testimony, Face Lift qualified her success by telling us she had gone on vacation thirty-six times, which seemed such a specific number as to suggest that the score had been more important than the experience; and of course it was more important, because all those BMWs, resorts and cruise ships meant she wasn't just a lonely old woman with no real interests slowly turning herself into beef jerky.

I couldn't drive a BMW even if I had one, and when I visit other countries, I generally go with aims other than being surrounded by the sort of people I would ordinarily avoid at home. Like Marian's friends, forever crippled by some imaginary failing that is never quite their own responsibility, there's something faintly obscene about people who already live in gated communities trying to Gollum themselves into becoming Donald Trump. Bess and I live in a slightly crappy neighbourhood with our weird kid and four cats, but we already have everything we need. It might be nice to travel some more, and hopefully some day I'll be able to afford to visit the United Kingdom with greater frequency, but in the meantime if I ever get homesick, all I have to do is close my eyes and say to myself, mind the gap, mind the gap...

*: In the event of it not being obvious, this statement contains traces of sarcasm.

The Valentine's Day Potlatch

Potlatch, as Wikipedia will tell you, is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and United States. This includes Heiltsuk Nation, Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Makah, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka'wakw, and Coast Salish cultures. The word comes from the Chinook Jargon, meaning to give away. In essence, potlatch is war waged with gifts, a means of destroying one's enemy with obligation through the display of such generosity as to place them forever in your debt. It's the offer that cannot be refused, the thermonuclear strike of passive-aggressive behaviour.

The first Valentine's Day card I ever received had cartoon mobsters on the front in keeping with its promising that I was about to be made an offer I could not refuse. Opening the card, the subject of this offer was identified as the person of an anonymous sender simply referring to herself as me. For about an hour I was delirious, believing this to have been sent by Anne-Marie Polley, a red-haired girl sat in the front row of the biology class. I had idolised Anne-Marie for a long time, writing truly shitty poetry which I never showed anyone, imagining improbable and slightly lurid scenarios in which my bicycle succumbed to a flat tire directly as I passed her house, with this one thing inevitably leading to another. Now that it's no longer 1979, I find it impossible to guess at whatever drive singled out Anne-Marie for my distant attention. She was tall and a little skinny with freckles and Deirdre Barlow glasses. I'm not sure if she had a particularly interesting personality because I never summoned up the courage to speak to her. I have a feeling her appeal may have been that she was conspicuously available, and I had decided on some subconscious level that she wasn't really in a position to be picky.

It turned out that she was at least a little picky. The furtive glances and chortling from the front row were not shy, girlish excitement, but probable discomfort deriving from her having been stitched up by the cartel of girls who sent the card. She was apparently flattered by my interest, but still, she unfortunately had some standards. The same could not be said of myself judging by the quality of the unusually shitty poetry I wrote that evening in response - the grey, heartless universe that had murdered me to death until I was a bit like a zombie or a Frankenstein, and so on...

The next Valentine's Day greeting I received came a few years later, a preposterous and over the top gushfest with hearts and puppies on a card large enough to temporarily shelter two homeless people. Both ridiculous and appreciated, it had been sent by girlfriend number one in a fit of irony. The initial irony was that we both wore black clothes and liked industrial music and so, as part of some ill-defined cultural elite, were therefore above sending such hilariously tacky cards. The second level of irony was that we separated soon after on the grounds of her having met some boy who wore even darker clothes and that I now lived 150 miles away. This was because I'd moved to Maidstone, Kent in order to pursue a degree in really, really expressing my inner self.

I had a couple more Valentine's Day cards whilst at Maidstone, received as part of a pact drawn up between myself and two girls from the illustration course. Ain't no-one gon' send us shit, we agreed, so let's cleverly send cards to each other and pretend we don't know who they're from. It worked, but didn't feel that great seeing as I fancied one of these girls to a quite sickening degree, and had therefore sent a genuine Valentine's Day card with the pretext of it pretending to be genuine, just like in a Philip K. Dick novel.

The tenth anniversary of my first Valentine's Day card came and went, and I met girlfriend number two. She was a friend of a friend who caught my attention with what might be argued as having been the first true Valentine's Day card I received - true here defined as a card anonymously sent by someone you don't know very well and who is interested in the contents of your pants. A relationship ensued, perhaps not the greatest relationship in the world, but not without its merits, and it took us both where we needed to go, if that doesn't make it sound too much like a management training exercise.

Now returning to the theme of potlatch, in September 2005 I became involved with girlfriend number three. For the sake of anonymity I'll call her Marian - although as that's actually her name I ask the reader to pretend I mean a different person called Marian.

Marian had issues - self-esteem, motivation and the usual bullshit - which she dealt with by attending a series of dubious self-help courses and learning how to accept that almost anything could be blamed upon someone else through application of the right sort of tortured logic.

'You have just shot me in the foot using a handgun,' I might point out as I bled onto her expensive carpet.

'Oh! So now I'm not allowed to shoot you in the foot using a handgun?! That's the law now is it?!' Marian would screech, eyes popping out of her head as a precursor to that thing which Karen Gillan equates with acting when playing Amy McBoggle in The Doctor Who Show. 'It always has to be about you, doesn't it!'

Being something of a knob, I always imagined she might improve over time. She might notice how I didn't spend every waking minute being angry at something or other, how I actually had a job and seemed relatively happy. I hoped she would ask herself how can I learn to be more like that? Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself always seemed like a nice idea, and hopefully one that could be spread without too much of a headache.

Valentine's Day approached, and Marian informed me how she had certain expectations regarding the quality of my offering, and she was not looking to be disappointed. By this time I'd grown accustomed to brushing off such low level emotional blackmail, rationalising it as simply a part of Marian's unusual and potentially delightful personality. Within weeks of the formation of our relationship she had explained to me how easily she grows bored with people, so I would therefore need to ensure that she had cause to remain interested. I imagine she thought she was helping me out.

I'd already been planning a fairly distinctive Valentine's Card, regardless of the ultimatum. I had recently got back into woodworking, having made myself a load of shelving, and so I made a card from two squares of thick pine the size of LP record sleeves. These I joined with hinges, cutting a heart-shaped hole in the one I had chosen for the cover, then painting the whole thing. It was laborious and absurdly extravagant, but the point was here, I made this. I love you, and although you just keep on giving me bullshit, I put all this effort into something to show you that I care regardless, and that you will always be able to rely on me, and you might therefore like to think about cutting out some of the crap. Look at this and tell me again how I only ever think of myself.

The evening of February thirteenth, Marian pointed out that tomorrow would be Valentine's Day, and began to explain to me when and where she expected delivery of her card, and how she did not want to see my name written within so as to preserve the tradition of Valentine's Day card anonymity and avoid spoiling the magic. I said that I had not signed the card with my name, but that as it was rather large I would be unable to post it through her letterbox as per her instruction.

'I'll leave it on the table,' I said.

'But then I'll know who it's from.'

I could see a spark of anger in her eye, the fires ignited by always having to do everything herself and so on and so forth.

'Well, yes,' I sighed, 'but I'd really rather not just leave it on the doorstep, and you already know who it's from.'

'You don't understand,' she raged, this being her standard reaction to anything other than compliance. You have failed to obey, went the logic, therefore you cannot have understood what I said. The argument ran around in a circle for maybe an hour. In the morning I left my stupid wooden card on her living room table, because that was the only practical option. When I returned later that day, no comment was made, although it was still there on the table.

'Did you get my card?' she asked with a slightly superior tone, speaking with the authority of one who had correctly observed tradition and thus preserved the magic, unlike some...

'Yes,' I said. 'Thank you.'

Having developed an unusually healthy sense of that which she saw to be her due, I believed she might question the sincerity of my gratitude, something she did often. Instead she asked if I had liked it.

The card had appeared through my letter box that morning and it had not been signed. It had been purchased in a local card shop, and I'm pretty sure I'd been present when she bought it. It was one of a typically twee series by greetings card artist Giles Andreae, The Interesting Thoughts of Edward Monkton which Google describes as quirky and philosophical musings on life. She had given me Edward Monkton cards at Christmas and on my birthday, and I still didn't know how to tell her I found Andreae's wearying brand of self-conscious surrealism profoundly depressing. The thoughts were neither interesting nor even particularly funny, the sort of thing that happens when people who run holistic healing workshops try to prove that they too have a sense of humour:

These drawings would like to be your friends. Use them for inspiration. There is no corner of life into which they cannot shine the bright torch of insight.

See what I mean? I hadn't liked the card, but I said that I did because it was easier. If I had said no she would have explained that her card had been carefully chosen whilst mine showed neither thought nor effort, contrary to what I might cheekily describe as evidence. For Marian, social interaction was a form of potlatch. It was all about the value of what you could give being by definition less than the value of what she could give, and because she wasn't really in the habit of giving anything, she became an expert in promoting and inflating the worth of her own stock. She eventually addressed my handmade wooden card in terms of suggesting that I should think about making more and selling them to people, thus I suppose finally acknowledging that it hadn't been a complete waste of time.

I've never been a huge fan of Valentine's Day. There's just too much that can go horribly wrong, not least because if you can only really express your feelings to someone by sending them a card on the same day every other bozo in the universe is sending a variation on the same card for the same reasons, then frankly you're screwed; and no-one likes being reminded of that. I often wondered why Marian was always so angry, and in the specific case of Valentinesgate, I'm in two minds. Perhaps the incident served as a painful illustration of the utter futility of our relationship; or perhaps it was simply that she just needed to be angry about something, that thirst for feeling wronged because it's easier than accepting that maybe you were the one who messed up; but actually I hope it's because just for once during those three crappy years, I beat her at potlatch.

My Struggle

I'm sceptical as to whether anyone genuinely has much of an idea of what they want to do with their lives at the age of eighteen or thereabouts. I vaguely hoped to achieve renown for weird, unlistenable music, so I signed up for a fine art degree at Maidstone College of Art specialising in Time Based Media, the institution's recently rebranded film, video and sound department. I reasoned that this was a place where I'd be able to continue churning out a shambolic noise, cleverly passing it off as film soundtrack, inevitably become famous and thus not have to worry about getting a day job once the three years were up. It didn't quite work out that way, and with hindsight I realise neither my music nor my efforts in the fields of film and video were particularly remarkable. Significantly though, I met Carl Glover and Charlie Adlard whilst at Maidstone College of Art, and also Glenn Wallis of the groups Whitehouse and Konstruktivists and who wasn't at art college but lived a few miles away in Gillingham. Celebrity watchers might like to know that I also met Mark Hodder and was regularly subjected to cruel but nevertheless accurate observations made by Traci Emin with regard to my hair, at the time modelled on that of Alan Moore, but anyway...

After three years I had a degree but none of the anticipated fame, and I moved to Chatham, it being near to Maidstone and home to a thriving live music scene. During the last year of art college I had played guitar in a band called Total Big with Carl singing and our friend Chris New playing drums. As I moved to the Medway Towns - a Kentish sprawl encompassing Chatham, Rochester, Gillingham and others - Chris moved to Dover so we bought a drum machine and named our duo The Dovers in his honour. We played numerous gigs all over, probably nothing too outrageously musical but fun to watch according to those who turned up.

I was still dabbling in my own noisy music, perhaps with reduced enthusiasm, but was also considering becoming a cartoonist having been faced with the possibility that I might not end up quite so famous as hoped. Inspired by the likes of Robert Crumb and Bill Griffith I began drawing my own strips, some of which showed up in local small press efforts, and one of which got me low paid but regular work drawing a strip for Brian Moore's Head football fanzine - a continuing story which ended up running for maybe seven or eight years. At the same time I began writing strips, or at least attempting to write vaguely mainstream efforts in collaboration with Charlie Adlard who would draw them in somewhat more accomplished form than anything of which I was then capable. Charlie hadn't quite fitted in back at Maidstone. He dressed well, had manners, wore jackets with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, liked Simple Minds, and was above all a conspicuously nice guy. We had hit it off immediately through a mutual interest in comic books and possession of a sense of humour. As a brief creative partnership, we had a few collaborative false starts, but completed a few things which we hawked around the comic conventions hoping to get noticed; but ultimately I lacked the patience and returned to my underground roots, leaving Charlie free to become sickeningly successful with The Walking Dead and others.

After two faintly miserable post-degree years on the dole, the formerly generous English taxpayer began to look at me askance and suggest I find work seeing as I had conspicuously failed to become famous as projected. This was how I ended up as a postman. As a school kid giving up my paper round about five years earlier, I'd vowed that never again would I wake at an ungodly hour in order to tramp the streets shoving stuff through letter boxes, so the irony was difficult to miss, not least because I stayed with Royal Mail for the next twenty-one years. Oddly enough, at the time it turned out to be exactly what I needed. It was money, and it obliged me to hang around with people who neither knew nor cared about Genesis P. Orridge, Carl Andre, or that miserable hat-wearing fucker out of The Mission; people who - much to my surprise - turned out to be one hell of a lot funnier and more interesting than those who did care about Genesis P. Orridge, Carl Andre, and that miserable hat-wearing fucker out of The Mission - even if they did like football and Coronation Street and that. Who would have thought...

After two years living in Chatham, and still lacking fame either as underground cartoonist or guitarist with The Dovers, I'd grown restless, and so transferred my job to Coventry. In Coventry I lived with my dad who had recently moved there from the market town of Shipston-on-Stour where I grew up. Almost immediately I realised this move had been a mistake, so I transferred again to London on the grounds that at least I knew some people living there to whom I wasn't related, notably Carl.

We picked up where we'd left off with The Dovers, and I started working for Royal Mail in Catford, drawing more and more cartoons, self-publishing some of them, and also joining Konstruktivists, the group formed by Glenn Wallis. Perhaps conscious of having fingers in too many pies, I later strategically withdrew from Konstruktivists. It was nice that we had released a few CDs through World Serpent Distribution, but it was difficult being in a group with a guy who lived two or three counties away. Despite intending to concentrate on my own dubiously musical efforts, I somehow got recruited to play guitar and keyboard for Academy 23, the group formed by Andy Martin and Dave Fanning of The Apostles with whom I'd been in correspondence since the early 1980s. Gigs were played, music was recorded and put out on CD and vinyl, until in roughly 1995 I became somehow tired of being me, and of almost everything I'd been trying to do up to that point.

Academy 23 had become UNIT, with added progressive rock time signatures requiring more patience and ability than I could muster; I'd just split with girlfriend number two; the world of small press cartooning had taught me that I actively hated the work of all but a handful of other cartoonists; and the relative success I was beginning to enjoy as a cartoonist for football fanzines was serving only to bring in requests for stuff I had no interest in drawing.

Somehow this coincided with a newly developed fascination with Prehispanic Mexico, specifically the culture generally but wrongly remembered as Aztec. I dropped everything and started reading whatever I could find. I knew myself well, and that I had a history of dabbling, of getting bored and leaving things unfinished; and whilst I wouldn't exactly have called myself a moron, Richard Dawkins' lecture Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder and conversations with Andy Martin had impressed on me that I didn't really know much beyond trivia - Doctor Who, comic books, art history, industrial music, flying saucer lore and so on. I was dissatisfied with myself, realising I had spent many years as the sort of gurgling clueless berk I would have crossed the road to avoid. From this point on, I vowed whilst holding a flaming sword aloft to the blood-drenched heavens, if I do something, I'm going to do it properly or not at all. This is my brag.

With hindsight, it felt as though I'd spent many years in search of something of poorly defined qualities, never really coming close - not exactly purpose, but something of that nature. Mexico, or at least my interest in Mexico seemed of more inherent value than a pile of tatty unexplained mysteries of the mysterious paperbacks or Throbbing Gristle bootleg tapes. Possibly my brain just needed something to work with besides novelty.

Anyway, I got deeper and deeper into Mexica culture - Mexica being what the Aztecs called themselves at the time - to the point of requiring specialist literature because I'd read everything else; and I resumed painting - having dabbled some years earlier but packed it in when I hit a dead end - more or less painting as a point of focus for the whole Mexican thing; I started writing unjustifiably pompous essays on the subject, really just thinking aloud and working out ideas; until it got to the point where it would have been ridiculous to continue without actually having been to Mexico. I'd never before left England, but it had to be done, so in September 1999, I went to stay in Mexico City for a couple of weeks, and I think it sort of changed my life, even if I can't quite say why.

As the twenty-first century got under way, I found myself with all this obscure knowledge of Tlatilco and Zacatenco pottery phases, obscure Goddesses with names like Chiconahui Izcuintli Chantico, and a burning need to do something with it all, to vent the ideas with which the subject had inspired me. The paintings became a hypothetical book, an aspirationally definitive bestiary of the entire pantheon of central Mexican Deities - something which to the best of my knowledge remains yet to be compiled with the level of detail I envision. A decade later I'm still working on this, slowly due to having become sidetracked into writing fiction.

Never before having considered this point, I recently realised that I've been writing fiction for some time, at least so far back as  collaborative efforts with Charlie Adlard and strip cartoons written and drawn for Brian Moore's Head. Excepting Philip K. Dick, D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, and - I suppose - comic books, I had never been a particularly avid reader of fiction - at least not up until about 2008 - but I had read the odd Doctor Who novel; and so ended up trying to write my version, set in fourteenth century Mexico because I was pretty sure that sooner or later someone else would use the same setting and they would most likely get it horribly wrong, so it was an attempt to stake out territory in some sense. Smoking Mirror - as it was called - was rejected, although by this point I had become increasingly disillusioned with the somewhat insular Doctor Who microcosm, much preferring the distantly related Faction Paradox mythos created by Lawrence Miles, and so I forged ahead, doing it all again as a Faction Paradox novel with the benefit of lessons learned. This I finished just as Mad Norwegian press announced they were to discontinue the line of novels instigated by Lawrence Miles, and just as my landlord died.

I had lived in the same place since 1995, just over a decade, a slightly damp but otherwise wonderful basement flat with a garden in East Dulwich, with Bill, my amiable landlord, occupying the upper floors of the house and none too bothered about charging a fortune providing he had a tenant who wasn't an arsehole, which apparently I wasn't, so it all worked out well. This was 2006 and the beginning of a couple of rough years made all the less bearable by my having become romantically involved with a girl who was basically insane. She was related to both Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, and back in about 1985 she had an affair with a member of a well-known weirdy music outfit, a guy I'd been writing to at the time, and still know to this day. The sheer coincidence seemed too big to ignore, and I'd been alone for so long that my cherry had grown back. Also, I'd been living in a bubble of reasonable rent and relative security for ten years, and I now found that I could barely afford to live in London. Initially I moved to a smaller flat costing half of my weekly wage, then when the rent increased, I moved into the smallest room of my girlfriend's house - or rather the house her mother had bought for her.

She didn't work, or at least no more than a few days a week conducting door to door surveys. Everything was the fault of someone else. She had two shelves groaning with self-help books and had been a regular attendee at self-improvement workshops run by an extremely dubious therapy cult, and had thus learned to argue like some bizarre conflation of rottweiler and lawyer. She spent three years telling me where I was going wrong, how I should be running my life, explaining how my reluctance to join her creepy therapy cult constituted a direct assault upon her self-esteem, and for the final ten months taking rent off me. She made it clear that I would soon be asking for her hand in marriage, and that it had better be a decent ring - not some old shit from Peckham market. She was horrible, and I knew I had to escape by whatever method presented itself before the situation became so bad as to redefine suicide as a reasonable option. I did this by finding a place to live - tiny and costing almost two thirds of my weekly wage but better than the alternative - and hiring a bloke with a massive van to get me and all my crap out of there in double-quick time.

Life immediately became better than it had been at any point since 2005 when I returned from my most recent trip to Mexico. My Faction Paradox novel had drawn the interest of a publisher who took up the line in the wake of its initial cancellation, and I began to consider writing more seriously. Also at this point I met Bess, an American woman whom I immediately recognised as the person with whom I was supposed to be all along - not believing in destiny or any of that crap, this is unfortunately the only way I can put it; and years later, now married and settled, my views have not changed in this respect. Anyway, as I met Bess, I had been tiring of London for a long time, and had in addition spent a good few years with one eye cocked in the general direction of Mexico as somewhere I might consider living had things turned out different. Bess being from Texas, one-hundred miles north of the Mexican border, just seemed too good to be true, one of those ridiculous points of synchronicity which seemingly drew us together, or at least had us boggling with disbelief - both having the same birthday being another good one.

It was meant to be, we decided, and so it was.

Twenty-one years with Royal Mail and nineteen in London had been enough for me, so I packed it all in and moved to my mother's place in Coventry, there to write my novel, get some short stories under my belt, and flog one half of all my accumulated crap on eBay so as to pay to ship the other half of it to Texas. Bess and I jumped through all the required legal hoops and after eighteen months I had my green card. I moved to San Antonio and we got married.

It's now eighteen months later. I'm writing daily, even getting paid for it on occasion with more work to come, looking after a house and garden bigger than any in which I've lived before, and married to the woman who really did turn out to be the girl of my dreams - and I'm aware how that sounds but that's just how it is.

All this time, I suspect I've been looking for something, and although I'm still not sure exactly what it is or how to describe it, I believe I've found it. It might be easy to beat myself up with all the if I knew then what I know now, but there really doesn't seem like a whole lot of point. I suppose it's a bit vexing that I'm a fat, old man approaching fifty, but I guess that's just how it goes; and had I not made the journey - to briefly wax Waltonsy - I probably would have ended up in the wrong place. There's a popular line around these parts - not quite a joke, something between a zinger and a bumper sticker: I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here just as soon as I could, and that's probably as good a summary as any for these last 2,792 words.