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 Road to Nowhere

'Let's go see the painted rocks,' Bess suggests. 'I've never been up there and I've always wanted to go.'

I already know what she's talking about because this isn't the first time we've discussed the trip. The internet has this to say about the painted rocks in question:

On a bluff along the banks of the Concho River in west-central Texas lies the most remarkable rock art site on the Edwards Plateau. The Paint Rock pictographs number over 1,500 and cover nearly a half-mile of a limestone cliff face a short distance upstream from the town of Paint Rock. In tones of red, orange, yellow, white, and black, native artists painted animals, such as buffalo and deer, human figures, some appearing to be clasping hands in a dance or ritual, and a kaleidoscope of geometric designs on the high bluff. Some left their handprints, perhaps as a way of signing their work or merely indicating that they had been there.

The Paint Rock site is unusual in that it is one of only a handful of sites in central and northwest Texas. Rock art is much more prevalent, more ancient as a rule, and better preserved in the Lower Pecos and Trans-Pecos areas. While it is impossible to know the date of the earliest pictographs at Paint Rock, archaeological investigations at the site have recovered arrow points and sherds of earthenware pottery. These artefacts indicate that the site was used at least as early as the Toyah period (ca. A.D. 1300 – 1650), and are reflected in drawings of hunters carrying bows and arrows. Paintings of horses and a church demonstrate that use of the site by native groups continued after contact with the Spanish.

'How far is it?' I ask.

'Two, maybe two and a half hours drive.'

It's Saturday morning, the sun is out, and the boy has gone to Ruidoso with his dad this weekend. It's not like we have anything else on.

'Okay.'

We drive up I-10 so far as a town called Junction, which is about half the distance, getting on for a hundred or so miles; then take the smaller US-83 heading north towards Paint Rock. The strangest thing is that we're suddenly no longer in the hill country. The hills have levelled, the valleys have filled in, and even the plants at the side of the highway seem different. Looking on the map, I find we really are miles from anywhere. We have another hour of driving in a straight line, and we'll pass through a town called Menard, then one called Eden, and that's it, nothing else for miles and miles, just rolling planes on either side. It's not quite desert, but something in that direction with small scrubby trees, cactus, yucca and not much sign of human endeavour aside from the thing we're driving along. It feels as though we're quite high up, and the landscape reminds me of what we saw on the way to Roswell a couple of years ago.

We talk about nothing, or we listen to Lewis Black and Jim Gaffigan on CD. We pass through Menard, which has a population of several thousand, but still somehow seems a bit too small to have been left out here on its own. We're fine for gas so there doesn't seem to be any really good reason to stop.

Eden is about the same, and we make the predictable jokes: so this is where it all happened, and we talk about looking for a garden centre for the sake of a wearyingly obvious photo opportunity.

'I have the Road to Nowhere stuck in my head,' Bess tells me as we're expelled from Eden by agency of internal combustion rather than Himself upstairs. 'Was that the Talking Heads?'

'Yes,' I sigh as the song glues itself to my own internal jukebox.

We're on the Road to Nowhere…
 
Sun, sand, cacti, not much else, and we have about forty miles to go. Eventually we're there. Paint Rock has a population of just 273, according to the sign. I do a mental calculation and work out that this is probably less than the population of my local supermarket on an average weekday. It's a dusty road with buildings and a lot of space, propane tanks behind wire fences and no discernible corporate presence. We stop at the grocery store opposite a building purporting to be a Wool Warehouse. This would strike me as odd given that I've been in Texas since 2011 and am still to see a single sheep, but I'm too preoccupied with trying to imagine what it must be like to live in a town with a population of 273, at least forty miles from the nearest Dairy Queen.

There are two guys sat at tables eating tacos in the grocery store. The cashier is stacking shelves or something. They look at us but don't say anything. I buy tea and some sort of flapjack. The cashier fails to make the usual observation regarding my accent, which is nice. Maybe she realises that you ain't from around here carries a potentially disturbing subtext in a town where only 270 other people can actually be said to be from around here; and by definition almost everybody ain't from around here.

Bess returns from the khazi just as an enormous rooster struts up to the door outside and begins pecking on the glass. We watch him for a couple of seconds, sharing the inevitable jokes about what a big cock. He takes to marching back and forth as though waiting to be allowed in.

'Can you tell us how we get to the painted rocks?' Bess asks.

'Did you make an appointment?' the cashier asks in return. 'You need to call Betty Jo. She arranges all of the tours.'

'Do you have her number?'

The woman looks around herself. 'You know, I don't have it. Sorry.'

We return to the car, Bess fiddling with her phone, looking up a website. 'Here it is.'

She connects the phone to the speaker system by special magic of a kind I don't quite understand, or even see as necessary. Betty Jo answers. She sounds very old.

'Well, I'd just love to show you the paintings but you see I just got back from this morning's tour. I'm so sorry. You see I'm ninety and I can't manage more than one tour a day. I just can't do it.'

We wave our hands in the air as though she can see us. It's an inconvenience, but it is what it is, as they say. We're not going to force a ninety-year old woman into showing us the rocks if she's already knackered.

'Where are you from?' asks Betty Jo.

'San Antonio,' we tell her.

'Oh my - and you came all of this way. I'm so sorry.'

'It's fine. We'll make sure we phone to make an appointment next time.'

We turn around and head back towards Eden. It's been a day out, so we're not complaining. As we reach Eden, we take a left and head down US-87, reasoning that we may as well take a different route back for the sake of variety. The land east of Eden is a little more populous, significantly more farmed, and for the first time ever I see fields full of sheep here in Texas. In fact I see more sheep than I've probably ever seen before in any one day; so that clears up that one particular mystery and explains the Wool Warehouse, although it's only now that I've realised it had struck me as unusual.

We pass through a town called Melvin, which I find pleasing, and then the more familiar territory of Fredericksburg where we stop for something to eat, German sausage in my case. We seem to have had a pretty good day without really doing anything.

Tits

I've had another sleepless night for no reason I can identify, except possibly that it's uncommonly fucking cold and Bess and I have let Kirby stay in our room. Usually the cats get either the rest of the house or outside when we retire depending on which they prefer, but Kirby often spends the night on the corner of our bed because she's generally well behaved. Last night was the exception to the rule and she spent the hours of darkness walking across my face or otherwise engaging in cat aerobics; although I have a feeling I wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway. These days if I can't get to sleep - which admittedly isn't often - I get up and spend a couple of hours writing stuff no-one is ever going to read, then return to bed when I'm properly knackered; but on this occasion it hasn't worked.

So I have a slow day, forcing myself forward through the drudgery of my usual housewifely chores at quarter speed. I make the mistake of having the radio on and tuned to one of the stations which isn't wall to wall Tejano, but it's mostly news about how our President-elect is planning to outlaw rainbows believing they promote homosexuality, or he's appointed Dylann Roof to be the next Minister of Black People. A few weeks ago I made a mental note to avoid the news, but I keep forgetting. Later I go out on the bike, but it's still fucking cold. Frost is infrequent in Texas, but we compensate for the shortfall with icy wind of the kind Alex describes as a cold winter bastard in A Clockwork Orange. The Nahuatl speaking Mexica of Tenochtitlan - Mexico City as it has been since 1521 - associated their land of the dead with the north and divided the mythic realm into nine tiers, and one of these regions was called Itzehecayan roughly translating as Where the Wind Is Like Obsidian Knives, possibly deriving from some ancient fact-finding mission to San Antonio in the middle of January, or Izcalli as it would have been by their calendar.

It's been a long, slow day and by the time evening comes we decide to eat out seeing as the boy is staying with his father. We get in the car and Bess asks, 'Where do you want to eat?'

'Fuck it,' I say. 'Let's go to Hooters.'

Hooters is a sports-fixated restaurant chain seemingly sold on the idea of all the waitresses having great big tits. It was parodied as Bazooms in an episode of King of the Hill, and when I first moved here I was surprised to discover it was real. It seemed like an anachronism, something left over from Benny Hill's little known tenure as governor of Texas, but Bess had told me that despite any other concerns, the food was good, which primed me with the puzzling notion that people go to Hooters for the food.

Sure.

'Isn't it kind of er...'

I didn't need to finish the question for obvious reasons.

'Kind of,' she told me, 'but the food really is good.'

So along we went. The place is clean, bright, and cheery, but not quite with the depressing efficiency of McDonalds, and there are a million flat screen televisions attached to armatures all around the ceiling. There is a football game in progress, or handegg as it should probably be known. I don't know who is playing because it's not a game I understand - the Washington Racists versus the Fresno Basset Hounds or something. We are seated and tended by a waitress called Meghan who seems nice but is thankfully not my type. Being a happily married man, none of them are really quite my type even without taking the age gap into consideration. Having reached fifty it has come as a great relief to find that I'm not significantly attracted to younger women. I always feared becoming a dirty old man, but most women under thirty now seem physically peculiar to me, somehow nascent and unformed. I suppose the media has spent so much time presenting a certain female type as a physical ideal that I mistook it for how we actually work, and thankfully for the most part we don't. Although were I still in my twenties, I'm sure my nuts would have exploded before Meghan had even brought our drinks.

According to Wikipedia, an older version of the Hooters Employee Handbook reads:

Customers can go to many places for wings and beer, but it is our Hooters Girls who make our concept unique. Hooters offers its customers the look of the All American Cheerleader, Surfer, Girl Next Door.

So actually they're mostly just regular gals, admittedly very presentable regular gals, but far from the megatitted trainee strippers I'd been expecting. One of the team seems to be wearing a vest top which somehow has straps which, buckled tightly, make it appear as though she's transporting a couple of blancmanges - wibble wobble wibble wobble - but she's the only one. It comes as a bit of a relief. Despite the above protestations, and despite my inner Ben Elton, I am nevertheless a man who knows what he likes and who responds in certain ways to certain things even if I sometimes wish I didn't, and I'd probably find breasts above a certain volume something of a distraction whilst trying to navigate a menu, particularly with them hovering mere inches from my face.

Bess describes another branch of Hooters where most of the waitresses seemed to be moonlighting as strippers and had those weird fake boobs which appear solid and overinflated, more like what I expected; so either that's just a different place or Hooters has been reigning it in a bit, going for a more family friendly vibe. The sign outside displays the name Hooters written with the oo as the eyes of an owl, although the oo also resembles tits; and okay, so owls make a hooting noise but the chain knows it's not fooling anyone. I had assumed the owl allusion might be part of some recent self-conscious rebranding, but apparently it's been around more or less from the start. Nevertheless my inner Ben Elton still isn't having it.

Hooters is selling sex, isn't it? Its success is reliant on the objectification of women, on reducing women to objects set on parade for our pleasure. Well yes, and three men sued the company for sex discrimination back in 1997, specifically for denying them employment and presumably because being men, their knockers weren't much to look at; to which Wikipedia responds:

In employment discrimination law in the United States, employers are generally allowed to consider characteristics that would otherwise be discriminatory if they are bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQ). For example, a manufacturer of men's clothing may lawfully advertise for male models. Hooters has argued a BFOQ defense, which applies when the essence of the business operation would be undermined if the business eliminated its discriminatory policy.

So it is what it is, as they say. It's a symptom of a condition of society, and if we need to get pissy and start shaking fists, there are probably a million more deserving targets. The waitresses here seem just like waitresses anywhere, only with slightly less clothing and it's hard not to feel a little sorry for them. Even if you're a complete idiot and all you have going for you in this world is breasts, waitress at Hooters was probably never anyone's dream job; and it really doesn't feel like a strip joint. The place is rammed, and about a third of the customers are women, and there are children running around. The men are mostly big, hairy trucker types, paunchy and balding, oily jeans and baseball caps featuring the logos of agricultural feed suppliers. I just hope none of them came in here expecting to score. Surely no-one is that delusional.

Meghan brings our drinks. I order smoked wings and my wife has a burger. When the food arrives it really is delicious, and so delicious that you actually would go out of your way to eat it; so it genuinely isn't just about the boobies, which is a nice surprise.

A place like Hooters will always have its knockers etc. etc.

Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Dora R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn

In the dream I'm walking up the long road to the houses and buildings of Wimpstone Fields farm. This is in rural Warwickshire in England, and Wimpstone Fields was the next farm along from Sweet Knowle, the farm on which I grew up. Wimpstone Fields was a poultry farm, and Paul, the son of the family who ran the place, was my best friend at the infants and junior school in the village of Ilmington. We lived on neighbouring farms and we were roughly the same size, so that was that.

Paul now lives in Australia, and yet here I am in the dream walking up the road towards his house as I remember it. The large farm building at the end of the road has been converted into a Royal Mail sorting office, and that's where I'm heading, because that was my job for twenty-one years. It's been converted to a Royal Mail sorting office without utilising any of the actual features you might find in a Royal Mail sorting office - packet frames and so on - but none of us are worrying about this too much. We're just getting on with it, because it's a dream and is therefore under no obligation to make sense. I'm sorting letters inside a brick structure within the building, like a rectangular space with an opening for entrance and exit at opposite ends of the two longer walls which face each other. It's about the size of a lavatory or a large broom cupboard. Lee Cooper, my manager at Royal Mail, appears. He looks worried.

My most enduring memory from growing up on Sweet Knowle Farm is of the dark. We were miles from even the nearest small town, or anywhere with street lights. When I looked out of my bedroom window at night, if there was neither moon nor starlight, all I could ever see was black and then the near black of sky up above. Sometimes I saw that the lights were still on over at Wimpstone Fields across the shallow dip of hills dividing us, if it wasn't too late; and on such occasions it felt like Paul and myself might be the only two kids left in the universe.

Back in the dream. Lee looks worried, but then he always had that kind of face. He probably wasn't the greatest manager in real life, for the simple reason that he tended to empathise with those he managed and lacked the nastier, more ruthless qualities required by modern business practice. Some regarded him as a soft touch whilst others considered him ineffectual. Being as I was never that bothered about trying to wriggle out of anything I'd been asked to do, I never had a problem with the man. He was one of the few managers I wouldn't cross the road to avoid were I to see him now.

I do see him now and he looks worried, although as I say it's a dream. He seems to be apologising and I understand when Dora the Explorer enters the building. She must have come and asked if I was here, and Lee has brought her in to see me. Her name isn't really Dora the Explorer but I'm calling her that because there's a resemblance and it amuses me. Dora was my girlfriend for three unfortunate years. We broke up in 2009 because it was either that or top myself, and I know this because I know that I'm dreaming. Dora the Explorer turning up at a Royal Mail sorting office on Wimpstone Fields farm makes no sense otherwise.

She has somehow found a way to print out the entire run of my bank statements for the duration of our relationship, and she is showing them to me with her customary blend of righteous indignation and glee. She has found me out and it makes her so happy that she can barely contain herself, but she is also angry because of what she has found out and because she is always angry regardless of contributing factors.

What are you going to do about this, Lawrence?

She has added up the wages I made during those three years and decided that she was entitled to half of the sum, and now she would like to know what I've done with her money.

Luckily it is at this point that Enoch wakes me up. Enoch is our smallest and loudest cat. I usually put him outside at night, but it has been cold so I've let him stay in, hoping he will behave; but as usual he's taken to walking around the house meowing his head off at four in the morning. It sounds like somebody playing jazz trumpet, so I have to get up and put him outside. As I do so, I roll the dream over and over in my thoughts, hoping to remember the details.

I don't know why I still get these dreams, specifically subconscious episodes in which Dora the Explorer remains very much the passive-aggressive predatory presence she was in daily life. I suspect she might even be pleased to know that her image continues to inspire discomfort, to belittle and hector in my thoughts without any active effort on her part. She didn't really do active effort as such. The eternal failure of everyone else in the entire universe was really more her thing.

The last time I heard from her was Wednesday the 10th of June, 2009, a text message reading don't bother about yr stuff in attic, I'll ask someone else 2 help. I won't contact u 4 6 months.

When I moved out of her place the previous December, I had left some of my belongings in the attic because I was keen to be gone as soon as possible, it wasn't stuff I needed, and I was past caring. Specifically it was a small wooden rack I had made to hold compact discs - about four foot in length by eight or so inches high, a cassette deck which no longer worked and I had been carting around with me for a couple of years for no good reason, and maybe a carrier bag of old newspapers. Together, these didn't take up a great deal of room in Dora's attic, besides which, she never went up there due to being too short to make the ascent from the uppermost step of the stepladder. I couldn't even work out how she had realised that I'd left these few things behind. Maybe someone had given her a periscope.

Anyway, when she discovered this latest crime against her person, she phoned to tell me that the presence of a knackered tape deck in the attic was destroying her life, and what was I going to do about it, and why oh why oh why did she always have to do everything herself? She had never quite grasped just how counterproductive it can be to treat someone like a cunt as you attempt to enlist their assistance, but happily I was no longer obliged to deal with her bullshit. I told her that I didn't know, and that I didn't really care, and I suggested that maybe it would be an idea if we had no contact with each other for a while. The six months passed without yielding any reason why either of us should speak to each other ever again, and so we didn't.

In June 2015 I was back in England, stood outside the Plough in East Dulwich waiting for my friend Pete, when I saw a small, angry looking figure heading towards me along Eynella Road. It was Dora the Explorer and I experienced genuine terror, a queasy feeling deep in my gut; but luckily she either hadn't seen me, or had seen me and was pretending that she hadn't. I ran into the pub and peered out, waiting for her to pass, as she did. I was still shaking a little when my friend Pete arrived at the agreed time.

These days, whilst my life may not be perfect, I have no cause for complaint and there is much which makes me happy. I sometimes wonder over the meaning of these not-infrequent nocturnal visits from the Ghost of Christmas Which Would Have Been Much Better If You Hadn't Ruined Everything and Why Do I Have to Do Everything Myself? She might be an expression of my subconscious reminding me that those who attribute all the evils of the world to a former, now shunned partner tend to be arseholes who might be well-advised to take a look at their own lives; although if this is the case, my subconscious clearly doesn't know what it's talking about, and the existence of arseholes who might be well-advised to take a look at their own lives does not preclude the possibility of Dora the Explorer having been a genuine sociopath. She herself might suggest it is my conscience kicking me in the shins for the burden of guilt of the three years I spent letting her down, ruining her life, and failing to obey orders; but to suggest that, she would have to hear about it in the first place, which isn't going to happen.

Sometimes I compose an imaginary postcard, something I will send from Texas bearing a US stamp.

I've been happily married for five years now, and I'm not sure my wife and I have had anything you'd really call an argument in all that time, so I guess it really was you after all. Isn't it fucking funny how things work out?

Of course, I don't do it and I never will, because whilst the thought may be a lot of fun, it won't benefit anyone in the real world and nothing will be learned. I've exorcised the pain, and have now written up almost every significant or otherwise memorable incident of those three years so that I can at least take pleasure from reading it back as farce. There's nothing left to write and yet still I have the dreams from time to time, although it's probably no coincidence that this is also how Cthulhu communicates his will to minions and victims alike.

The point is, I suppose, the contrast, or at least that's what I take from it. The point is that I survived, and that some days I just can't believe how fucking fantastic it feels to be able to say that; so thank you, Dora the Explorer.

Thank you for showing me just how bad it could have been.

After I've put Enoch outside I go back to bed, but I doze rather than sleep. I get up to feed the cats at a quarter to seven. The sun is rising over Fort Sam, or whatever there is to be found at the back of the houses opposite. The sky is crimson and there's a light frost on the front lawn. It will be another good day, if that doesn't sound too sappy.

Escape Velocity

I had been with Marian since September 2005, three years and four months. The honeymoon period had lasted about three weeks, until about half way through October 2005 beyond which point I spent a great deal of time telling myself that things would even out and get better if I could just hang in there and have patience. I was wrong. Nothing I did ever seemed to be good enough for Marian, and the central issue of any disagreement always became my problem, my poor attitude, my refusal to listen, my inability to respect Marian's innate right to be the forever injured party in any given situation, my stubborn refusal to attend expensive self-help workshops held in Leeds by an organisation of dubious qualification. It became exhausting, but I hung in there having decided that it was somehow better than being single.

Three years later I felt like killing myself in an absolutely literal rather than figurative sense. I could see nothing positive in my future. I was trapped both economically and emotionally, and all the fight had been passive-aggressived out of me. I was resigned to a future with Marian, one in which I would forever be in the wrong, and in which my performance as a purveyor of caringness, acceptitude and other qualities invented by snake-oil peddling authors of self-help literature would be under constant evaluation; and I would be found continually wanting. Each time I lay soaking in a hot bath after a tough morning at work, just before that day's roll call of ways in which I had been found wanting, I was aware of the possibility of my opening up a wrist and just letting it happen. I could see no other way out of this slow death. I no longer had the energy necessary to achieve escape velocity.

Nevertheless, the fight or flight response eventually kicked in, possibly brought on by the prospect of my third Christmas with Marian, another one spent listening to her explain how I had ruined everything, how she hadn't liked the presents I had bought her, and how this had once again exposed my essentially selfish nature. I began looking for a flat of my own. I had been living as a lodger in Marian's spare bedroom for nearly a year. I knew I would be most likely unable to afford even a medium-sized flat despite my working full time and bringing home a reasonably respectable wage, but it was get out or die, and almost anything would be better than the situation as it stood. I would get out and then, from my newly secured position of relative safety, I would tell her it was over and that it had been over for a long, long time. I would once again have a front door of my own which I would be able to close and lock with Marian on the other side.

'I'm moving out,' I told her. 'I'm looking for a flat. It's too cramped with us living on top of each other like this.'

She didn't see it that way. She worked a part time job, usually a few days a month, and had become reliant upon what I paid in rent as her principal means of income. This was a good deal for her, in addition to the satisfaction she clearly took from reminding me what a big favour she was doing me. As my stated intentions now represented a clear deviation from Marian's vision, they were essentially selfish and inconsiderate. She stopped talking to me, which was actually surprisingly pleasant. When I entered a room, she would leave. Terry at work proposed that I should stand at the entrance of whichever room she was in, and then walk backwards and forwards across the threshold, in and out, in and out, over and over, just to see what she would do.

I began to look at other flats. They were all tiny, horrible, and ridiculously expensive. I was returning from looking at one in Peckham, happening to arrive back at our front gate just as Marian returned from the shops. As we were no longer officially speaking to each other, she had taken to making her own shopping trips under protest. This replaced the existing system which had entailed her sending me out with a list of obscure and pretentious ingredients no-one had ever heard of, then blaming me for the failure of local shops to stock whatever it was which had been demanded by this week's ostentatious fad diet.

'Where have you been?'

'I've been to look at a flat,' I told her. 'It was horrible.'

'Good,' she exclaimed with undisguised pleasure, and we went inside to resume hostilities. The silence lasted until, I suppose, Marian realised I was sort of enjoying the admittedly somewhat icy calm, and so she changed tack.

'When are you moving out?' she demanded testily. 'I need to know. Either you're staying or you're going. You need to stop dragging your heels. It isn't fair on me.'

Now it couldn't come soon enough. She had allowed me to move in with her, albeit as a lodger, in good faith, and she had known all along that it was a mistake; and she had been right. I had let her down, as usual.

Against expectations, I had soon found a flat in Linwood Close, Camberwell, small but very clean and nice enough, and I was already moving stuff in there, one box at a time. It didn't really seem like there would be much point keeping Marian informed. The only reason she was even interested was for the sake of ammunition, whichever detail of the latest development could be weaponised as evidence of my continuing failure as a human being. It wasn't so much that Marian was unable to feel good about herself, as that she was unable to feel good about herself without pushing down on someone else so as to achieve the desired elevation. She needed the failings of others for the sake of contrast by which she was able to see herself as roughly functional.

I packed and moved as quickly as I could, keeping out of her way and then hiring a man with a van to take the great bulk of all my crap in one big hit. Marian had said she would be out that Saturday morning, but of course she wasn't, having failed to get out of bed on time followed by the customary change of plan. She complained as the man with the van smoked in her hallway, specifically she complained to me. I relayed the objection and my hired hand shrugged and put out his cigarette. We brought boxes down the stairs whilst Marian glowered and offered the occasional objection to the noise or the disruption to the ordinarily smooth running of her household. Eventually we carried the two large bookcases I had built myself down the stairs. Some paint was scraped from a banister, and Marian added sixty pounds to my final rent cheque to cover the cost of paint and general distress. As we carried the bookcase along the hall and out of the front door, I brushed against a woollen hat hung from the hall stand. I had asked if we could move the hall stand out of the way whilst carrying all my stuff out, but this would apparently have been too great a disruption, and so the precious woollen hat was knocked from its hook and fell to the floor.

'Are you going to pick that up, or were you just going to leave it?' Marian almost screamed, emerging from the front room.

My hands were full of bookcase, the transportation of which was of such difficulty that I wasn't even able to turn my head. I didn't bother to offer a reply.

'Jesus fucking Christ,' mumbled my driver. 'I can see why you're moving out.'

Later that day, I was in my own flat in Camberwell, a bus journey and a ten minute walk away from Marian. The silence was wonderful. The sense of freedom was incredible. I unpacked and began to settle in.

Three weeks had passed since I told her I was moving out. I had not yet told her that our relationship was over so far as I was concerned. I had not yet summoned the courage. Christmas had been and gone, and had been roughly as much fun as anticipated. I hadn't eaten for an entire three days prior to Santa's visit, not even a packet of crisps. I was dimly aware of this being unhealthy and possibly indicative of a serious degree of stress, but I got through it because I was at last on the home stretch. I told Marian that I had been so unhappy as to have not eaten for three days, and naturally she took it as further evidence of my basic psychological deficiencies resulting from my failure to take her advice, or even to listen to anything she ever said. New Year's Eve was coming up, and she was already thinking about which party we would go to, what I would wear and so on. We were apparently on talking terms again. I suppose she had grasped the falsehood of my moving out being ultimately for the best in terms of our relationship because she preferred it to the thought that I might wish to end that relationship. It had seemed politic to let her believe as much whilst I arranged to move out, because I had feared coming home to find she'd made a bonfire of all my stuff; but now that I was done, there no longer seemed much point in prolonging the agony.

'I can't live like this,' I said, 'flaming rows over nothing every single day.'

'All couples argue, Lawrence,' she told me as though it were self-evident. 'It's the sign of a healthy relationship.'

I smiled and told her it was over.

She ranted and raved and made numerous accusations, all of which could have been levelled at her with some justification.

'You're projecting,' I observed.

'Ooh projecting,' she parroted in a ludicrous attempt at sarcasm. 'Do you even know what it means?'

Marian had the shelf full of books with titles like Success Be My Rainbow, had attended expensive self-help workshops held in Leeds by an organisation of dubious qualification; and I had made a psychological observation without first seeking her permission. I was impinging on her territory. Only Marian understood such things. I myself was far too simple, which was why I never listened.

I laughed because it was funny. 'I know what it means, and that's what you're doing, because it's what you've always done, and what you will always do. Nothing is ever your fault, is it, Marian? Nothing is ever your responsibility.'

It felt good telling her that, and even better saying 'oh just fuck off,' in response to the subsequent stream of psychobabble drivel she unloaded in further illustration of my inherent uselessness.

We spoke on the telephone a week later, by which time I had become a much happier person. Her tone was light, conversational, as though no exchange of harsh words had occurred. She was working on Thursday afternoon and for most of the evening, and wanted to know would I be able to stop by and feed the cats for her. She had no other friends to whom she could turn for such favours, for reasons which are probably obvious.

'I live in Camberwell now,' I pointed out, in illustration of why this was quite a lot to ask. I was actually surprised she had asked me.

She began to rant and rave about how selfish I was, and how she was glad to at last be rid of me.

'I don't have to listen to this shit any more, Marian,' I said. 'If you want a favour from me, it's in your best interest to keep a civil tone, and use of the word please wouldn't hurt either.'

She immediately calmed, and even sounded a little shocked by my response; and I said yes because it was the cats, and they were the only thing about life at Marian's house I would ever be able to recall as a fond memory. So I cycled over one evening, still with my own front door key, and fed the cats.

It happened a couple of more times, and I didn't mind because it was the cats and I was at last in a position to say no without my failure to obey orders incurring some sort of character assassination. Then she came over on the pretext of using my PC to look up jobs on the internet. I wasn't entirely happy about this, but it seemed like it would be more awkward saying no than not. She twittered away happily, complimenting me on my new flat, acting as she had done when we first met, the happy little elf girl with the sparkly eyes. She fell asleep on my bed for two hours, having failed to find whatever it was that she had been looking for on the internet, and then I said, 'I'll walk you to the bus stop.'

As we walked, she talked and I realised that she understood our separation to be merely a hiatus, that we would be together again before too long. It was just something I had needed to get out of my system, me with my poor simple man brain. It was a mid-life crisis.

'I expect you'll find a new partner before I do,' she joked, or suggested with the inflection of a joke, now contradicting her previous assessment of our new relationship.

'I already have,' I said, because I had.

We walked on along Grove Park, and I couldn't tell whether she had heard me or not. We crossed Camberwell Grove, and then went along Stories Road towards her bus stop.

'I'm sorry if I was a bit school ma'am-ish,' she told me, and put her arms around me as we reached the shelter on Dog Kennel Hill. School Ma'am-ish didn't really seem to cover those years of passive-aggressive bullying, but I didn't care enough to argue and I was more bothered by this apparent resumption of physical affections.

'Did you not hear me saying I'd met someone else?'

She leapt back as though subject to an electric shock. Evidently she hadn't heard. 'But what about us?'

'We are no longer in a relationship. I thought that was pretty clear.'

'We're just having time apart.'

'No. We aren't.' Despite everything, it was difficult to take pleasure from this awkwardly distended termination.

'I wish you would make sense.' She was getting angry as usual, telling me I had been playing a game, leading her on. 'How am I supposed to feel about that, Lawrence?'

'I don't know. It's up to you.'

She fell silent and furious for a moment, then, 'Who is she?'

'Someone I've met. We get on really well. She's American.'

'How old is she?'

I lied, adding five years to Bess's age, having recognised Marian's idiotic assumption that the only reason I could possibly have chosen someone over her was due to my being mid-life crisis man seeking the younger model.

The bus arrived and Marian climbed aboard, taking that last wonderful ride out of my life.

Five years later and I am only beginning to process some of this stuff, and I am constantly astonished at how generally wonderful my life has become in comparison to the crawling misery of the years with East Dulwich's most violently well-adjusted bachelorette. Sometimes I think back and feel sorry for her, forever lost to the misery of her own making and unable to understand why. Other times I am tempted to send her a postcard:

Very happily married four years and not one flaming row in all that time, so I guess it really was you all along!

I like to think I'm better than that, and generally I am. I cannot take pleasure in someone else being unhappy, no matter how big a twat they may be or how deserving, and so I write in order to make sense of it all, and in order to turn some of this shit into something which, if not quite gold, is at least no longer shit.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, as they say.

Leave Home

On Sunday the 23rd of September, 1984, my parents drove me to Leeds with a few boxes of my crap, the bare essentials of records, tapes and Doctor Who books. This was Leeds, the village in Kent rather than the northern city wherein the Who famously recorded a live album. Leeds village was a few miles outside Maidstone, and I was about to begin a three year degree course at Maidstone College of Art. I'd just turned nineteen, I was moving away from home for the first time, and I wasn't entirely happy about the fact.

I recall the first few minutes of my very first day at Ilmington Junior & Infants School fairly well. I had started at the school in the village of Alderminster which had closed down due to there being too few kids to teach in that corner of rural Warwickshire - or something along those lines - and so I'd been relocated to Ilmington. My teacher was Mrs. Daglish. She wore horn rimmed spectacles, perhaps unsurprisingly, and we sometimes referred to her as Mrs. Dagger-bum, because that's how it works.

'This is Jeremy,' Mrs. Daglish told me at the very beginning of that first day, indicating a small wide-eyed boy with a brightly coloured jumper and tidy hair. 'You can sit next to him.'

So I did, and we became good friends, and I believe we remained in the same class right up until we finished secondary school, by which point we'd developed some shared interests, not least being industrial music - for want of a more dignified term. By the time I was halfway through my art foundation course at the Mid Warwickshire College in Leamington Spa, Jeremy had acquired a girlfriend called Sarah, and she too enjoyed industrial music.

I'd been recording tapes of my own weird abrasive sounds on the family double tape deck music centre - which was the closest any of us came to having access to a recording studio - and Jeremy had been over to record his own version of Throbbing Gristle which, annoyingly, actually sounded somewhat better than mine, at least to me. Jeremy's girlfriend was also quite keen to visit and have a go on my recording set up, and when she did come over, I realised I was quite keen to have a go on her.

Of course I knew this could never be, despite which it eventually was, and mainly due to our writing letters to each other and the fact that she'd been meaning to sack Jeremy from his position as boyfriend for a long, long time but had never quite worked up the courage to do so. Naturally I felt quite bad about all of this, but not quite bad enough to refrain from entering the somewhat indecisive girl when the opportunity arose. Being eighteen and having not yet done it with a nude woman, my hormones had accrued sufficient explosive force to destroy most of central England, and Sarah helpfully insisted that she would tell Jeremy it was all over just as soon as the time was right. Thus did we give in to our most biological desires, or at least we gave in to our most biological desires as much as was practical on a busy Saturday afternoon in the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, which delicate readers may be relieved to discover wasn't much at all - sadly not even enough to get you thrown out of a cinema. Even more frustrating was this occurring on the day before I was about to be driven to Leeds with a few boxes of my crap, the bare essentials of records, tapes, and Doctor Who books.

My education had generally taken me in an artistic direction. I already recorded my own music, drew cartoon strips and painted, and by the time I was seventeen it was probably obvious that I was effectively useless where the job market was traditionally concerned, and art seemed to be the way to go in lieu of any better, more coherent idea about what I wanted to do with my life. Nevertheless, I was then just as sceptical of what I regarded as the art establishment and its support system as I remain today, and I had agreed to pursue the fine art degree because I couldn't really think of a reason not to. Furthermore, much as I disliked Shipston, the rural market town in which I'd spent the previous seven or eight years, I was scared shitless at the thought of moving away from home. I had no experience of the world out there, and from what little I knew of it, it sounded terrifying.

So to summarise, I was passing up the opportunity for sexual intercourse, an opportunity which had for the very first time been presented to me as definitely on the cards the previous afternoon, and I was doing this in order to take a course wherein I was fairly sure all that I enjoyed about the process of producing art would be discouraged for reasons I wouldn't even understand, and I was leaving what few friends I had behind, going to live amongst complete strangers and fending for myself; and I also understood that I had no choice in this matter. I was doing this whether I liked it or not. More depressing still, my parents' marriage had imploded earlier in the year and they were already separated. I no longer quite had a home to which I could cling even had it been an option, just one unhappy pappy hanging around in the place we once lived like a sad, confused ghost.

So there I was in Leeds village at the door of a house in which a room had been allotted to me by the student accommodation offer. I couldn't get in because I was the first to arrive and I had no key. My parents drove me into Maidstone, to a house in Terrace Road at which my friend Pete lived and entrusted me to his care. I knew Pete from school back in Shipston, and by absurd coincidence he'd started at Maidstone College of Art a year before me, taking a graphic design course. We were already friends, and it was an accident of fate that we should now both end up in the same county, but lucky for me given that I needed somewhere to stay for just one night. It was a piss poor start to the first evening of the rest of my life, although I guess it could have been worse.

Next day I began college. It was a bewildering experience. I knew a sum total of three people - the aforementioned Pete, then Martin de Sey and Jason Pierce, both of whom had been on my art foundation course back in Leamington Spa. Like myself, Martin was signed up for time based media - film, video and sound as it was then termed. Jason was taking painting, not that it made a whole lot of difference as we'd barely spoken more than three sentences to each  other during the previous year, and he was quite interested in heroin and hippy music, neither of which held great appeal for me, so we had very little in common. Over the months that followed, my contact with Jason was limited to my asking him if he had the money he owed our mutual friend Howard for the leather trousers.

'Just tell him you haven't seen me, yeah?' Jason suggested with characteristic lack of charm, before dropping out and becoming famous with Spacemen 3 and eventually Spiritualized, allegedly pausing only to allegedly mug my friend Carl with an alleged knife in an alleged effort to allegedly raise funds for more of that yummy heroin. What a lovely man.

Thankfully as evening came I was able to insinuate both myself and my belongings into the house in Leeds village. I was sharing with a painting student and a sculpture student, Kevin and Reuben respectively. Kevin was mellow, worldly, and he liked jazz. Reuben was handsome, square-jawed, and apparently abrim with confidence. They both seemed to have a good idea of why they were here and what they wanted to do, and when they opened their mouths, intelligent, witty remarks and observations emerged without any obvious display of effort. I felt conspicuously like an awkward schoolboy, and that the boxes I had brought with me might as well contain an Action Man, a stack of Beano annuals, and a pair of Rupert Bear pyjamas.

Being last to arrive, or specifically last to arrive with a front door key, I ended up in the smallest room of the house, which was fine being as I didn't have a lot of stuff. At last unpacked and settled but nevertheless shell-shocked and still completely out of my depth despite having spent more than twenty-four hours out in the big, bad world, I followed my housemates to the Ten Bells, the village pub. I had discovered pubs whilst taking the art foundation course, and had worked my way up to drinking three pints of whatever was cheapest without throwing up. I liked pubs because I was young and able to get drunk fairly easily, and I was usually more entertaining when drunk so far as I could tell. Alcohol was a great way of levelling the social playing field, I had decided.

In the pub I learned that two houses in the village were rented out as student accommodation, the one at the Square, in which I lived, and Milstead Cottage, a half-timbered dwelling down the road near the shop. Milstead was home to Jim, Steve, Bill, and Jane. In addition to this, a girl from the printmaking course named Lynne rented a room in the home of some big cheese in the psychiatric profession who lived opposite the pub. I quickly discovered that the pub jukebox contained both When Doves Cry by Prince and Desmond Dekker's Israelites, my two favourite songs by which to get drunk and attempt to pass myself off as much cooler than I was, which I hoped to achieve by appearing unconcerned as to whether or not anyone considered me cool. To this end I took up smoking.

I had thus far in my life had two curious puffs of borrowed cigarettes and become fanatically opposed to smoking with the sort of passion of which only the very young and clueless are capable. Then, at the end of the art foundation course, Howard - who is probably still awaiting payment for those leather trousers - introduced me to a special kind of herbal cigarette favoured by the sort of musicians enjoyed by my housemate, Kevin. The experience was weird and euphoric and kind of enjoyable, leading to the relaxation of my attitude to smoking in general.

'Fag?' Jane asked, referring to the packet of Marlboro cigarettes she held towards me rather than questioning my sexuality, given that this was England. We had only just met, and she hadn't realised that I didn't smoke.

'Don't mind if I do,' I like to think I said, and proceeded to smoke as my fellow students offered hints and tips about inhaling so as to get the full benefit, reassuring me that yes, this was a normal cigarette and was thus entirely legal in response to my passing comment on the euphoria of the initial rush of nicotine; and as I smoked I noticed that the combination of a fag and a pint seemed particularly pleasing. I realised then that contrary to received wisdom on the subject, and despite the numerous drawbacks of which we are all pornographically aware at this stage of western civilisation, smoking actually does make you cool, or at least makes you less of a berk. Smoking means that you have other more important matters to worry about, even if you don't.

'Sorry,' Jane later apologised with some amusement. 'I thought you were a smoker.'

'Well, I am now.'

I had my pint and my fag and When Doves Cry had just come on the jukebox again. Maybe things were going to be okay.

Lacking conventional domestication, at nineteen I was not yet fully schooled in the art of throwing stuff away, and often had no understanding of why you would even want to. By December I'd glued all of my empty Marlboro packets into a tower to form a monument to my new hobby. It comprised four individual towers glued together, side by side, and stood on my bedside table about four foot tall.

'I see you've started smoking,' my mother observed when she arrived to drive me back up to Warwickshire for the Christmas holiday. Like Jane, she seemed amused, as though recognising the comic inevitability of my newly acquired habit.

I regarded the monument standing in overwhelming support of my mother's hypothesis and squeaked, 'oh I just found them laying around,' hoping that it would be obvious that this was the sort of thing I did now, gluing old fag packets together because I was an artist or whatever; but I'm getting ahead of myself...

Meanwhile back in September I had survived three nights, and on the Wednesday evening I strolled down to the village payphone and called my dad. 'I'm coming home,' I said. 'It's not working out.'

'Is this about that girl?' he asked, not unreasonably, his tone making it fairly clear that whatever answer I gave was quite likely to further piss him off given how much he and my mother had been looking forward to my flying the nest for a long, long time.

I said I would stick at it a bit longer, just to be certain, and then caught a train back to the Midlands on the Thursday evening.

My diary entry for Saturday the 29th of September reports:

I spent today in Stratford with Sarah, although Heaven would have been a more appropriate name for any place where I'm in her company. I sold her my Psychic TV records. She insisted on paying something for them.

I returned to Leeds on the Monday, put in a couple of days of shuffling listlessly around the college, and then spent the second weekend of my degree course back in Warwickshire. Needless to say the train fare was prohibitive, but it seemed worth it given that I would almost certainly be having it off with a girl any weekend now. My grant cheque for the term had been the full wack, six-hundred pounds or thereabouts of the taxpayer's lovely money, five-hundred and fifty pounds more than the largest amount of money I had held in either my hand or bank account up until that point. I was fairly sure it would last no matter how quickly I spent it.

By the third weekend I had succumbed to malnutrition and was so ill as to be unable to make the pilgrimage back to Warwickshire and Sarah's knickers; well, maybe not malnutrition, but it seemed possible that the acute tonsillitis and mouthful of ulcers may have been linked to recent changes in my diet, specifically a change from  a diet of actual food to one of mainly beer, cigarettes, cheese and onion crisps, and the occasional box of Mr. Kipling's Bramley apple pies when I felt like treating myself.

Sometimes I would buy a tin of baked beans and cook it up, having added a shake of every herb and spice I could find in the kitchen. A pinch from one particular jar of dried herbs might improve a meal, I had reasoned, so all of them would logically render it fit for a king. Eventually I learned how to heat things up, even to combine them based on what I could recall of my parents' culinary efforts and what I saw Reuben and Kevin doing when they got hungry. Instant mashed potato was easy, I discovered, and so I went through an instant mashed potato phase, then gradually developing a new kind of dish which I generously termed my pies, expanded from a crude understanding of shepherd's pie being just baked mashed potato and other stuff. I would fill my Pyrex oven dish with whatever I'd bought from the village shop, choices usually dictated by whatever was cheap and therefore less impactful on funds otherwise earmarked for beer and fags. A diagram of one of my pies drawn in cross-section in my diary shows geological strata of baked beans, cheese, and a cocktail layer of tomato ketchup, soy sauce, and every herb and spice I could find in the kitchen, because that was a lesson I was still to learn. I also recall one pie incorporating layers of hard-boiled eggs and vermicelli, which might eventually have become an acquired taste, but developed a premature fuzz of grey mould inside the fridge before I had the chance to acquire it.

I made another couple of expensive weekend pilgrimages to Warwickshire and was eventually rewarded with sexual intercourse, but by November it became clear that six-hundred or thereabouts pounds of the taxpayer's lovely money was not so limitless a resource as it had initially seemed. The relationship switched to a long-distance footing, which coincided with Sarah and I finding ourselves rumbled by the unfortunate and justifiably displeased Jeremy. He communicated this to me in a series of terse and yet surprisingly reasonable letters, and so the friendship facilitated by Mrs. Dagger-bum's introduction roughly fourteen years earlier came to an end, or at least to a low from which it never fully recovered.

Thankfully, I still had the pint and the fag and When Doves Cry, and I found I was beginning to enjoy the company of my fellow students more and more, and so much so that the appeal of escaping back to Warwickshire had begun to diminish, regardless of the boobs awaiting me at the other end of the journey. Having come through the initial euphoria of having a girlfriend, even a geographically distant one, I began to find that I enjoyed the time I didn't have to spend thinking about how horribly complicated it was, whether Sarah would ever get around to telling Jeremy, and what it said about me that I could do this to my friend of so many years standing. In the case of this last one, it said that I was possibly a bit of a knob, or at least someone with pronounced knob-esque tendencies, so of course I didn't want to spend time thinking about it; and it helped that my new friends seemed for the most part either unaware of my knob-esque qualities, or else were unconcerned.

Bill, Kevin, Lynne, Jim, and Jane at least seemed to think that I was okay. I'd heard Lynne praise one of our colleagues with the words at least he isn't stingy with his fags, and as I too made a point of offering the packet around whenever sparking one up, I aspired to this same category. I seemed to get on well with Steve at least some of the time, although I found him occasionally abrasive, as did the others it later emerged. Reuben and I seemed to get on very well. We liked the same music, which immediately united us against Kevin with his love of jazz and all of its folksy workmanship when the domestic situation became strained, as it often does when two or more people find themselves having to chip in to pay communal bills.

Kevin grumbled some gruff parting shot and shuffled off.

'Synthesiser!' Reuben spat at his back as though it were the magic word which would exorcise our grumpy technophobic demon. 'Drum machine!'

Reuben's father had once received a visit at their home from Brian Eno for reasons I forget, and whilst there, Eno had autographed their coffee table. This impressed me no end, as did Reuben's record collection - including DAF, Chakk, Heaven 17, Shriekback, Cabaret Voltaire and others - and the tape he lent me of some group called Nagamatzu whom he had known back in Ipswich. We also shared a similar sense of humour, and after one particularly disappointing drink at the Ten Bells, chose to express this in song, improvising with a tape recorder as we sat shivering and laughing around the kitchen table. I hammered out tunes on my acoustic guitar, and Reuben improvised lyrics about people we knew. The song about Bill was just a riff with the name Bill repeated at the end of each bar, because we couldn't think of anything bad to say about him. The increasingly abrasive Steve Coots fared less well.

Wanger Coots! Wanger Coots!
People laugh at him but I don't give two hoots!

It wasn't exactly Peter Gabriel, but it did the job. Steve was outgoing and could often be very funny, but it was difficult to really like him. He combined a cloying, needy quality with a bitter and vindictive side which would emerge whenever he suspected that you would rather he piss off and leave you alone; and so he seemed to be forever cycling through some complex psychological resentment of whoever had deigned to spend time with him. Worse still if you were female and found yourself on the receiving end of his oleaginous charm offensive, not least because the level of charm involved was entirely subjective.

He slimed Sarah during one of the weekends she came to visit me. A year later, once I'd moved to another student house in a neighbouring village, he dropped by on the occasion of splitting up with some girlfriend or other, then left a note for Gill - my younger, conspicuously pretty housemate - explaining that he wanted to see her because he really needed a shoulder to cry on. He'd met Gill on one previous occasion amongst mixed company, and they had spoken for about five minutes. Gill hadn't expressly told him to fuck off, which was as good an invitation as any in Steve's world.

Since my arrival in September, our local group had expanded to accommodate Mark Hodder and Sasha Rosen. Mark would have been in the third and final year of the course I was taking, but had concluded that he'd had enough and had thus dropped out, continuing to live at Milstead Cottage whilst he decided what his next move would be. Initially he was a strange, brooding figure who lived with Jim, Bill, and Jane. He didn't seem happy, and I had no idea what to make of him. The ice broke one evening when one of my hard boiled egg and vermicelli pies expressed itself as a series of violently noisy farts erupting from my nether regions during a drunken after hours game of Monopoly at the cottage.

Mark offered some surreal, incredulous, and justifiably appalled observation about the sound of fish being slapped together, which evolved into a monologue about me keeping fish in my underpants. The more it amused him, the more he warmed to his theme, and I couldn't help but enjoy the finely crafted thrust of his mockery despite being its target. It is of course this same vigorous imagery and razor wit, once wielded so harshly against my own sphincter, which has made Mark Hodder the best-selling and Philip K. Dick award-winning author he is today, and I am only glad that he still remembers his old pals from those days, and that he has in addition stopped addressing me as Slapfish.

Sasha Rosen was American, Jewish and therefore exotic in terms of my then quite limited experience. She wasn't a student, but something or other in the psychological profession visiting the family with whom Lynne was lodging. She joined us in the Ten Bells and we all found her fascinating. I believe her speciality was some form of art therapy, and so she offered us free art therapy sessions because I suppose she found us just as fascinating as we found her. My session entailed my forming a picture from coloured plastic shapes on a tray. Sasha interpreted the image as a horse, and discussed it in terms of a fear of horses from which I wasn't entirely sure I suffered. It looked like someone falling from the top of a tall building to me, but the food Sasha prepared was delicious, and there was something very enjoyable in being psychoanalysed, albeit in a purely recreational capacity.

Christmas came and was a fairly miserable affair, my parents having become separate entities with only myself occupying the intersection of the Venn diagram. I was overdrawn at the bank, Sarah had downgraded our relationship to a purely platonic arrangement, and the place in which I had grown up had become strange and only partially familiar. It was a relief to get back to Kent in January.

The new term brought a fresh grant cheque - of which only a little was swallowed by my overdraft - and a letter from Sarah reporting that we could once again resume our relationship if I was still interested. In the name of keeping everything open and honest, this being the way forward following the confusion of the Jeremy situation, she admitted to having spent a portion of the Christmas period boffing some fanzine writer. I was upset, but also fully aware of the irony.

Does she make a habit of this sort of thing?, I asked myself, then wrote back to confirm that I would be glad to resume our relationship, such as it was, being still to receive any better offer. She yet again visited me in Kent, but it soon became obvious that neither of us should have bothered, and so whatever we'd had fizzled out of its own accord. My diary notes how when I met up with her for a drink the following Christmas, she had somehow acquired a strong Mancunian accent, inspiring me to wonder what I had ever seen in her in the first place.

A dramatic overnight freeze burst the pipes of our house on Monday the 11th of February, 1985 - just over a week after Kevin had moved out for reasons best known to himself. I discovered this as I returned home following a day at college. Our house was in a terrace with four others, and was now distinguished as the one with icicles the size of inverted fir trees suspended from upper floor windows. It was like Disney's magic kingdom carved in ice and viewed upside down. I stepped from the bus and approached the house, surrounded by locals from the pub, most of whom had brought along either a camera or a sense of humour. Admittedly it was pretty spectacular as disasters go, and peculiarly, the pipes had burst drenching the interior of the building in such a way as to leave my own small room at the back unaffected. The kitchen and front room, recently vacated by Kevin, were fucked, and Reuben was screwed, as was his record collection and his clothing. Reuben stayed elsewhere, and I stayed put as the landlord made the necessary repairs over the next few weeks, and by Spring, everything was back in shape.

Jane from time based media - as distinct from Jane who lived at Milstead Cottage - moved into the newly refurbished house, meaning unfortunately that Steve became an almost permanent presence. This had the effect of further reducing Reuben's attachment to a house in which the sum of his worldly possessions had recently taken the form of an ice sculpture, and so he and Steve swapped rooms, with Reuben moving down to Milstead Cottage. To give Steve his due, he had redeeming qualities. He was often funny and helpful, but was almost completely unable to take even the mildest criticism. Politely telling him to piss off was therefore never an option had either Jane or myself even been capable of such directness. It seemed crazy to allow him to move in, but Jane reasoned that with his own room in our house, he no longer had justification for sleeping on her floor when it just happened to be really late. No longer being a guest, we could not be expected to entertain him as we had felt obliged to do on previous occasions. I suppose some of this must have worked out as hoped given that we didn't end up burying his body in the garden, but I have a stronger memory of forever finding myself drawn into his passive-aggressive universe of bullshit.

He would hang around your arse all day like a lost puppy delivering speeches on his philosophy of what a wonderful world it would be if the rest of us were more like him, if the rest of us could only be induced to give him a bit of space every now and then. He wrote shitty poems about people failing to do their share of washing up, just like some character from The Young Ones - and with himself very much a less than shining example on that score. He wrote shitty poems which read one hell of a lot as though written about me, seemingly in direct response to comments he can only have read in my diary whilst I was out. He wrote shitty poems about how fucking some unidentified female was like an escape from a sunken helicopter during a bewildering attempt to turn himself into Billy Childish, and he seemed unusually pleased with assumptions of the sex in question being something which had occurred external to his imagination and which had occurred specifically in relation to Jane, who was significantly less flattered by the insinuation.

A couple of times he drove off in a tremendous huff late at night, usually in response to Jane spending time in the company of friends without his approval. The implication of his dramatic exit was usually that here was a man who had been pushed to the edge, who could take no more, but he would always be back next morning angling to find out just how worried we had been. Never in my life have I encountered anyone with such a burning need of martyrdom, and accordingly he formally changed the spelling of his surname to Kütz - as it had been with his Latvian forefathers - and under this name began publishing booklets of poetry about the rape of his homeland, which struck me as funny given that I'd known him for a year and this was the first time he had mentioned it at all. I suppose it was one of the many cuts running so deep that he himself hadn't even known about it.

By Monday the 23rd of September, 1985, one year after I initially left home, I was living in Hollytree House in the village of Otham and had begun the second year of my degree course. I'd spent the summer holiday in Leeds village, mostly avoiding Steve, and making a sort of living from drawing the kind of pictures of people's homes which look good framed above the fireplace. My overdraft had peaked in July at about ₤700 in debt, and by my own impetus I had managed to pay this off and get back in the black.

My entire understanding of the world had changed in just twelve months. I was still single and would remain so for some years to come, and my cooking wasn't up to much, but I had survived more or less without a safety net. Reading the diary I kept at the time, I am reminded mainly of the cold, and of being hungry and miserable. It was probably the hardest year of my life, but of course it had to be done. My mother later admitted that she didn't necessarily have any particularly high hopes for my future as a great artist, but art college had been a means of getting me to leave home and to fend for myself when I most needed just such a push, before the rot set in. Knowing at least one individual who never had that push, a contemporary who remains in the house in which he grew up, and who somehow considers his inexperience equal to the experience of those of us who have had no choice than but to grow up, I am eternally glad that my mother knew exactly what was best for me, even when I didn't.

If the best days of your life occurred during your early twenties at college, I tend to suspect that you've probably been doing something wrong; and if my diary recalls mainly the misery, then the attendant memories have mostly gathered around the details that were worth remembering - the friendship of Jane, Reuben, Mark, Lynne, and others, the fags and the lager, the fart jokes and When Doves Cry, my introduction to the world of having it off, and the fact that I became marginally less knob-esque than I had been the year before.