The Blue Hole

We are driving to Wimberley, Texas, a journey of an hour or more. Some woman has asked Bess to paint a design on canvas using specific colours, and we've worked out that it will be easier - and certainly cheaper - to hand deliver the finished piece to the woman's parents than to stick it in the mail; plus we're probably due a day out. Bess tells me that I've already met the people we're visiting - although I have no memory of them - and that they are old and will therefore most likely hold with certain views and opinions. I am to be on my best behaviour. It's news to me that I'm ever less than delightful even in proximity to the absolute worst kind of shithead.

Wimberley is pretty and of surprisingly alpine character for this part of Texas. It reminds me of Ruidoso, New Mexico, which is way up in the mountains. Houses are spread out, hidden by walls of cypress, down gullies or up the side of a hill. We follow winding roads and eventually arrive at our destination.

'Be nice,' Bess reminds me.

'Okay.'

Marie and Marvin are indeed of a certain vintage, both retired, and I remember them from Bess's grandmother's ninetieth birthday celebrations. Marvin reminds me of both Hank - Walter White's brother-in-law from Breaking Bad - and Yondu from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, although not bright blue. He's gruff but genial, and immediately comes across as a nice guy.

They invite us in. They compare notes with Bess - mutual friends, Bess's grandmother, and Pearsall, the town serving as a common point of origin for everyone in the room except me.

I look around and notice a bookcase with actual books. This seems like a good sign. It's something I don't see very often.

'So how did you two meet?' Marvin enquires.

It's the inevitable question and I can hardly blame anyone for being curious. We give the answer we always give, which somehow leads on to Marvin asking what I think of all the business with Prince Andrew. You can tell he's treading with care, choosing his words just in case I whip out a sword and challenge anyone insulting her majesty to a duel; or possibly just in case I'm a raving republican.

'I don't really know, but I don't think a lot of it,' I tell him. 'To be honest, I try not to think of the younger royals at all. I think Princess Anne was probably the last one of them who wasn't completely useless.'

I'm surprised by my own later-life monarchism, which is either something to do with having just finished watching the third series of The Crown, or possibly being a displaced Englishman living in a country which has chosen an illiterate fucknugget for its supreme being; but it's true that I've never had strong feelings about the royal family one way or the other, beyond that they seem a wearyingly easy target for those who somehow believe their abolition will lead directly to some kind of classless utopia. I appreciate that there may be a republican argument to be had regarding leaders who've risen to positions of authority without having been democratically elected, but given the dangerous fucking maniacs who have risen to the top through the democratic process, I'd suggest there's a shitload of wiggle room in that proposal.

Marvin chuckles and mutters something about Boris Johnson.

'He was a comedy game show contestant when I was living there,' I say, 'just a bumbling cartoon toff, and he was very good at it. I have no idea how he ended up where he is. He's terrible.'

'Well, we have the exact same problem here, as you know,' Marvin tells me, and it's clear we're on the same page.

We give them the painting which is to be passed on to their daughter, then Marvin shows us his workshop. He creates art by burning lines into wood with a heated stylus much like a soldering iron. This is a new one on me, and he's very good at it, achieving a surprisingly subtle realism in the images he crafts.

We stand by the car saying our goodbyes. Bess hugs Marie.

'I don't do all this hugging thing,' Marvin explains.

'Me neither,' I report with obvious relief and we shake hands.

'You two are the same person,' Bess laughs.

We head to the centre of the town, to the local museum.

The local museum is a log cabin with two rooms. I manage to look at the grinding stones of the old corn mill for about five seconds before the attendant helpfully explains that these are grinding stones which were originally used at the old corn mill. He then describes their operation, how water would drive a mill and the corn would be ground into flour between these two stones. I'd point out that, having attended school as a child, I am very much familiar with the concept, but his monologue presents no gaps in which I can wedge my interjection.

I move on.

All around the room, the walls are adorned with informative essays and illustrations from old books describing the founding of Wimberley. I try to read but the attendant follows me and takes to summarising each piece of writing. I guess he's just glad to have someone to talk to.

The next room is concerned mainly with Jacob de Cordova, a Jewish man of Spanish ancestry born in Jamaica, and who founded The Gleaner. I recall The Gleaner fairly well as the newspaper of choice for almost every Londoner of Caribbean heritage I ever knew, so this seems like an interesting story with more than its fair share of peculiar random swerves. Bess and I look at the picture of Cordova's grave, and the map of Texas he famously drew, and a painting of the Battle of San Jacinto, but it's difficult to work out how all of these elements might be connected whilst our chatty host is yacking away, and now he's somehow onto the subject of James Bond, the famous English spy who wrote all of those books and who had the idea for them while living in Jamaica.

We give up and leave, trying hard to be polite about it.

We wander through Wimberley, taking in a few of the galleries.

Finally we head for the Blue Hole, which is to be found in the local park. Unfortunately, it being Autumn, it's the Orange Hole at this time of year, what with all the leaves covering everything. Bess summons a picture to her phone and shows me how it looks in summer. It's a small lake, surrounded by cypresses, beautifully clear waters with a terrifying limestone orifice at the centre. It reminds me of the cenotes of Mexico which were traditionally believed to lead to the realm of the dead.

We pass another couple as we leave and Bess detects an English accent so we have the usual conversation.

'He's from Coventry,' Bess says.

The woman mutters something about Dorridge. This rings a major bell for me although I can't remember why.

'It's near Coventry,' the woman explains.

'I know,' I tell her as the penny drops. 'I went on a sort of pilgrimage to Dorridge a couple of years ago. Do you know John Wyndham, the writer?'

'No,' she says.

This floors me for a moment. 'Well he was born in Dorridge so I went there to see if I could find his birthplace. You must know The Day of the Triffids?'

'Oh yes,' she confirms happily and we all spend a moment talking about John Wyndham's famed predatory plants.

'Do you remember Quatermass?' she asks, having apparently mistaken the focus of our conversation for scary stuff we can remember seeing on the telly.

Bess and I discreetly extricate ourselves from the conversation for the second time today. Even as the Orange Hole, it has still been worth the trip.

Back in the Saddle

'Everybody make some noise!'

Bess and I are back at Mission Marquee Plaza craft fair. Following a couple of fallow months spanning the season during which Texan temperatures dip to not actually very warm at all, this is the first such fair of the year and it's good to be back - particularly after such an uncommon week. This winter has been genuinely cold, wet, grey, and relentless, feeling more like English weather than I am comfortable with; and we were all ill last weekend - Bess, myself and the boy with some chest infection which hit each of us on consecutive days. I'm still recovering. I went out on the bike just one day but had to get off and push whenever I came to a hill.

Then I noticed that all of the boy's anecdotes about occurrences at school hinge upon the phrase he then proceeded to as prefix to the thing which the person did, which is rarely anything of consequence sufficient to justify either the build up or application of such long, long words.

Then a white supremacist murdered fifty Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, prompting our president to quickly delete the tweet he'd allegedly posted thirty minutes earlier linking some Breitbart opinion piece about how all Muslims are bad.

These are the contributing themes from which the general mood of the week has been woven, so it's really nice to be back to something familiar, and no longer coughing or sneezing as we had both feared might be the case. We loaded up the car the night before without even really having to think about it, and here we are, back on our old pitch to the right of the stage area and the drive-in screen. Being the first craft fair of the year, there are a lot of people here, and even some entertainment.

We've set up between a couple of women selling jewellery and a younger woman with bags of fresh herbs, all from her own garden. She also has a little dog, a friendly terrier called Radio, although we never get around to asking why he is so named. The cactus family arrive as I'm attaching my paintings to the display frame. We're usually right next to the cactus family, but never mind.

I pop over to say hello.

'It's good to see you,' he responds.

'Yes,' I say. 'Where's your friend with the truck?'

'My friend with the truck?'

'You remember I did a painting, and his truck was in the way so I painted it as well. He said he was going to buy the painting.'

'He might be along later. I don't know.'

'Well, no problem. If he's changed his mind that's fine too, but I have his painting with me just in case.'

We get ourselves settled. It's still a little cooler than we like, but better than it has been. Bess has already sold a few rocks.

The entertainment is a festival of sorts, something billed as Loopfest 2019. Performers have come from all over the world - Mexico City, California, Costa Rica, Holland and so on - and today they're going to do their thing on stage for us. There are about seven people sat around on the grass up at the front. I assume they are either the audience, or other performers watching the show whilst waiting for their own turn in the spotlight. These people are Loopers, someone explains over the PA.

It's a whole new kind of music.

It's the latest thing.

It's people playing music, sampling themselves, and then using the looped sample as accompaniment. I recall seeing it done in a pub in Coventry back in the eighties, except the guy was mostly applying his sampling technology to covers of House of the Rising Sun and the like. I've even done this sort of thing myself but with tape loops; but some nineteen year-old has a go and it's suddenly a fucking movement because he thought of it and it's like, awesome 'n' shit.

The first guy sounds like Fatboy Slim who some may remember tickling the charts two whole decades ago. Then there's a guy looping the noises he generates with an electric cello - which is actually pretty good; followed by some tool with a keytar looping his own vocal beatboxing - and the rest seem to be variations on country and western which would sound exactly the same played by a full band, perhaps better, and which makes me wonder whether the Musicians Union didn't have a point all those years ago when they tried to ban the synthesiser. If it sounds like Waylon Jennings with full band and yet it's all coming from just you and a pedal, my first thought is that you're performing with samples because you don't have any friends, and my second thought is that there may be legitimate reasons why you don't have any friends. Generally this is the most underwhelming amazing new thing I've encountered in a long time, which I state as someone who still finds vapourwave quite exciting.

'Could you do a rock with the badge of the marines?' asks some guy who stumbles up to our stall. My wife smiles and makes amiable noises, but it's clear that the answer is piss off, and rightly so.

Hi there, I don't like anything you have enough to want to buy it, but if I could persuade you to paint something completely different to any of the stuff you're selling here on your stall, then there's a possibility I might consider making a purchase.

We love these people almost as much as those whose unrequested advice begins with, you know what you ought to do?

I head off to buy tacos just as some hairy dude approaches mumbling something about Salvador Dali. I recognise his type from having spent most of my art college years avoiding him. I just know he's about to dump a load of useless suggestions on my wife, maybe if she could paint mandalas on a bong or a cigarette lighter or a Grateful Dead album…

I buy tacos and by the time I return, the hairy dude is stood alone in the middle of the field watching people sample themselves on stage. He walks backwards and forwards, and after studying him for a couple of minutes, we recognise this as dance. He holds two brightly coloured balls, one in each hand, and he's throwing them into the air then catching them. It isn't quite juggling.

'So what was he saying?'

'He read the sign,' Bess tells me.

We have a sign hung from the awning of our canopy, something along the lines of Bess & Lawrence Burton, Original Artwork in chalk. It seemed necessary to qualify ourselves as having produced original artwork so as to effect some aesthetic distance from persons selling their homegrown paintings of Batman and the Joker.

'He read the sign,' Bess tells me, 'and said something like, well, it's not exactly Salvador Dali, is it?'

'Huh?'

'I know.'

'What a fucking twat. I wish I'd heard him.'

I expect it was something well-intentioned which came out wrong, or was an innocent but fumbled attempt to introduce himself as a bit of a character, or at least as a guy who has heard of Salvador Dali. Arseholes will usually have heard of either Salvador Dali or Pablo Picasso and may even know that Mona Lisa was not the name of the person who painted her picture. When they attempt to engage you in banter on the subject of art, being way out of their depth they will assume that you will be fooled by mention of either Picasso or Dali. A very early issue of 2000AD comic, back when it was actually read by children, featured a letter from a young reader proposing that the art on Judge Dredd was so amazing that not even Picasso could have done a better job. It seems a fairly safe bet that the lad hadn't actually given much thought to how a tale of Mega City One's toughest lawman would have looked had it been drawn by the celebrated misogynist and pioneer of Cubism; and that's the mental age we're dealing with here.

Bess and I eat our tacos and watch a lone buffoon dancing in the middle of a field to country and western played on an effects pedal. Occasionally he raises up his arms to flash peace signs at no-one in particular. As usual, I haven't sold shit, while Bess has been pretty much cleared out.

It's nice to be back.

Desesperación

Once again it's market day. We loaded up the car last night and we're heading out to a spot where we'll set up our canopy, table and a couple of chairs. We will be attempting to sell our stuff to complete strangers - Bess's painted rocks and my canvases. Usually that means it's Saturday and we're heading for Mission Plaza, but today is Friday and we have a pitch at the Desesperación Community Centre*. It's their annual peace market, as it's called, a three day event, Friday to Sunday with a 9AM start; and it's a benefit for the LGBT community. We haven't even got started and somehow it already feels like work, but we're telling ourselves this is simply because it's something different and we've grown so used to the set up at Mission Plaza.

Some people make thousands of dollars over the three days of the festival, we've been told. We usually pull in about forty at the Mission, and that's entirely my wife because no-one can afford my paintings, relatively cheap though they may be. Mission Plaza is on the south side, which isn't really where the money is, but I'm personally not too bothered. People seem happy just to see my paintings and that works for me; but it bothers Bess, which is why we're here at Desesperación, which is fancier and is therefore patronised by overmoneyed Alamo Heights types looking to offset their economic footprint with something cute, ethnic, and preferably hand crafted.

The street is closed off for the market. We park at the Bill Miller barbecue place, which is opposite the Community Center. It's still early and there are only a couple of other vehicles in the parking lot. They surely won't mind and we can move the car elsewhere once we're unloaded. Between us, it takes two trips, fifty yards between the car and the spot which has been reserved in our name, Bess and Lawerence scribbled on the curbstones in chalk, my name spelled with a vestigial e. The first trip is punctuated by some Desesperación official letting us know we'll have to move the car once we've unloaded because Bill Miller is likely to get pissy.

Yes, we know.

The second trip is more complicated. I'm carrying an easel and a case full of paints whilst pulling a wheeled carrier containing Bess's rocks, one of those things with an extending handle. I have eight house bricks piled precariously on top of the wheeled carrier and I'm pulling it along with great care over the uneven pavement so as not to dislodge them. We're on grass at Mission Plaza where everything can be pinned down with stakes so as to prevent it blowing away, but here we're on asphalt so we've picked up a stack of bricks from Lowes with which to weigh everything down.

I'm pulling the wheeled carrier along the pavement at the back of stalls which have already set up and I come to a power line, a thick length of cable duct-taped to the ground. I'm having trouble getting the tiny plastic wheels over the thing. Someone more important than myself, whose time is more precious, dances around me so as to get past, obliging me to manoeuvrer, spilling my house bricks across the pavement. There are eight bricks in total and three of them smash in half.

'Thanks a lot,' I call out to the important person. 'That's great!'

I lift the wheeled carrier over the power line, gather up the bricks and the pieces of bricks, and eventually get to where Bess has already got our canopy set up.

She heads off to move the car.

I bolt things together and unpack more stuff.

We're next to a guy selling bead jewellery similar to the Huichol crafts you see in Mexico. The guy opposite has silver jewellery. To our left is the end of the street where they're setting up a stage and a PA. Ours is the stall nearest to the stage. Somehow I'm having a tough time feeling positive about any of this.

Behind us is the building of the Desesperación Community Centre, some sort of converted warehouse. There are two floors and a number of rooms within, presently all occupied by other traders. Some of them have come from Mexico, places such as Malinalco and Oaxaca, and these are the people who reputedly pull in thousands of dollars over the weekend selling art, crafts, clothing, jewellery, and delivering what they refer to as Aztec Horoscopes - which I'm not touching with a fucking bargepole. I've spent a lot of time up to the eyeballs in the Mexican Tonalpohualli calendar over the years, and I don't like to see it repackaged as a money spinning one size fits all new age nick-nack.

As with Mission Plaza, we don't have to pay for our pitch, but unlike Mission Plaza, Desesperación wants a cut of whatever we make. Bess and myself had our name down for a ten foot street pitch, which means they'll want 35% of our takings at the end of the day, assuming we sell anything. Smaller pitches were available for a lesser percentage, but we needed ten feet for the canopy because we don't want to take chances with the weather. Indoor pitches will be obliged to cough up 40% of their takings.

This was explained to us during the induction which we attended on Tuesday evening. First we had to apply, showing examples of our work because they don't want anything too shit lowering the tone. Having been accepted, we came to the induction hosted by four of the organisers, three young women and an older one, a Matriarch in traditional Oaxacan dress. The young women were like of the kind who, you know, when they talk they're all like ermahgerd this and, you know, ermahgerd that, and they're all like giggling and stuff and like they don't know words and everything they say sounds like a question, which didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence. The Matriarch - whom I shall call Ermintrude for the sake of both convenience and insult - had horrible hair and nasty shoes, although it was Bess who noticed this second detail. She seemed officious and humourless, like an unforgiving school teacher. I hated her upon sight and immediately understood that this was all a terrible idea. She put me in mind of the definition of a false wise man recorded by Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún in the late sixteenth century.

The false wise man, like an ignorant physician, a man without understanding, claims to know about God. He has his own traditions and keeps them secretly. He is a boaster, vanity is his. He makes things complicated; he brags and exaggerates. He is a river, a rocky hill.

Ermintrude immediately struck me as a woman who makes things complicated. The induction rambled on for far longer than seemed necessary on the topic of how it was going to be. Here's what we were going to do. Thanksgiving was coming up so there would be all that leftover food, and maybe we could bring it along to help feed the volunteers. In fact, maybe we could just take a day out to fix tacos for them, and don't worry about making too many, and we should advertise the market on all of our social media platforms. Everything was about what we could do for Desesperación, rules we should observe so as to keep ourselves from getting in the way or becoming a nuisance, how we were to pay the money we owed at the end of each day, how to sign our contracts…

Never trust a hippy, I thought darkly to myself. Anyone who projects their inner serenity with that much emphasis is invariably overcompensating for something, usually their inner Heinrich Himmler.

Yet here we are, because they had us sign a contract, and there has to be an upside to anything with that much small print. Maybe I'll sell a ton of paintings.

I wander around before the crowds start to thicken, checking out the other stalls. It's mostly clothing and jewellery, some animalitos,  muertitos and the like. The art is mostly decent, but nothing I'd want to buy, nor anything which makes me feel uncomfortable about my asking for eighty dollars a canvas - price adjusted so as to account for Desesperación wetting its beak every time we make a sale. One stall has a typically inept painting of the Joker and his girlfriend, Harley Quinn on sale. So much for filtering out those who might lower the tone.

It's ten, and the crowds begin to arrive. A group from the Centro Cultural Aztlan are engaged in a ceremony at the end of the street, four of them in approximately traditional Mexican dress chanting, saluting the four cardinal points, greeting the sun, and asking Ipalnemoani to bless the craft market. They also mention Huitzilopochtli a couple of times, which seems a little incongruous given his famed penchant for human sacrifice on a massive scale. The incense burning in their censer is cedar rather than copal, as it probably should be, and it feels hokey. Next, a Tejano band start up on the stage, effectively drowning out any attempts at conversation we might make. Tejano is a traditional fusion of country, Mexican music, and Bavarian oompah bands with particular emphasis on accordion. In between songs, our accordion player introduces himself as being in some way related to Flaco Jiménez, a local Tejano boy made good who was won awards for his accordion playing in some peculiarly specific capacity like fastest, loudest, or most annoying. I have nothing against Tejano music, but I prefer narcocorrido - a variant which celebrates the deeds of various drug lords - and I'm not crazy about the volume. The band play about a million songs, all of which sound more or less the same to me, and then on comes our compère. She resembles a hybrid of Yoko Ono and a Hispanic version of Toni Arthur who used to present Play School back in the old country. She smiles like it hurts, and it seems as though she's addressing an audience of small children. She screeches and her speech is seasoned with ill-fitting phrases borrowed from rap. She introduces people as being in the house, asks that we give it up for them, and so on. She is exhausting to watch.

Now it seems that Ermintrude is in the house, so we give it up for her. Ermintrude repeats some of what she told us at the induction. The thrust of her speech is that as we approach Christmas, maybe we shouldn't be giving our money to the multinationals who are destroying the Earth, but instead opt to ethically spunk away all that lovely lolly on independent traders, such as those gathered here today. Desesperación raised a million dollars last year, and the city matched that sum with a further million, and now - maybe if we really make an effort - we can raise another million for Desesperación over the coming days. Ermintrude is kind of vague on what this money is for.

'We save buildings,' she explains. 'We campaign for preservation orders. You know, we have many beautiful historic buildings in San Antonio, and that's partially thanks to our campaigning work. Also, last year we fought the city when they wanted to raise taxes to pay for a new pipeline for the water system, although we lost that one.'

Given that San Antonio's water and sewage system is in famously poor shape, I'm not sure how I feel about Ermintrude's apparent attempt to preserve its state of historic disrepair; and a few more taxes to keep us from turning into Flint, Michigan doesn't seem an unreasonable proposition. Furthermore, I realise that in all this time I haven't heard a single fucking word about the LGBT community for whom we are supposedly raising funds. Mostly it's been about our money and how we can help out. At one point I go to take a piss, and pinned to the walls of the rest room are flyers with DONATE in bold letters.

Never trust a hippy.

The Tejano group is followed by a mariachi performance, a band backing an elderly female singer in flamboyant dress who prowls the makeshift stage as though about to drag one of those nice young men off into the bushes. Her voice is unfortunately a shrill screech and far from seductive.

Then there's another elderly woman wearing an unusual amount of makeup and lamenting mislaid love, after which it all blends into an endless conversation stopping racket which has made its home at the end of the street, punctuated only by further announcements of who is now in the house along with requests that we either make some noise or give it up for them.

I've bought my easel, oil paints and a freshly prepared canvas, because I had a feeling this was going to be one fuck of a long day, and it's not even eleven. Seven hours to go. I set to painting the tree on the opposite side of the street, incorporating elements of the revolving sign of the Bill Miller restaurant. Within minutes my view is blocked by people watching the band, but never mind. I do what I can, pushing paint around the canvas until it looks like it's in more or less the right place.

The mariachi performance is followed by Yoko Arthur screeching and telling us who else is in the house, then drawing a few raffle tickets. Each trader was asked to provide an example of their best work to be given away as prizes in the raffle. Bess gave them one of her painted rocks. I didn't give them anything.

The Centro Cultural Aztlan people are back, reborn as a rap group. This time there are two of them along with a woman playing a flute, rapping to a backing track of hip-hop beats. It sounds okay, and they're lyrically pretty tight; but as with the ceremony, it feels too much like an impersonation and not enough like that which it aspires to impersonate. Generic ad libs asking where my people be at? and the like don't really help.

We're right here, I suppose.

Next is a woman named Azul. She sings and plays vihuela, and is backed by an approximation of a mariachi group. She tells us her music draws from the traditions of Veracruz on the Mexican gulf coast. It reminds me of Tarascan music and is happily lacking the oompah of Tejano. It's the best thing we've heard so far by some margin. Of course, I still find something to annoy me - there's a woman sat at the front in a turquoise shirt, late fifties, bit of a spare tire with the face of a librarian. She is lost in music. Her arms sway slowly in the air as she snaps her fingers. Her head is back and her eyes are closed in rapture. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone look quite so smug. She is every social worker I've ever met, and only now do I realise she's been doing the chair dance all fucking morning, just sat there being a spirit demonstrably more free than the rest of us. I never realised there was a female equivalent to the dance famously done by dads at weddings, but now I've seen it with my own eyes.

I paint the tree and Bess sells rocks.

Yoko Arthur returns, now treating us to a full screeching half hour of what seems to be either a one-woman play or performance poetry which outstays its welcome. Her voice swoops up and down as she describes the trauma of childhood jealousy. She wanted the Commodore 64, but they gave her a ballerina doll seeing as how she was a girl and all. Gender stereotyping is a bad scene. Her brother got the computer, but she isn't bitter because she saw the alien. It was in her room one night, like the aliens you always hear about with the bald heads and big eyes and everything. It blinked at her and was definitely real, and that was better than having a Commodore 64.

'Who the fuck is this for?' I ask Bess.

She shrugs and sells another rock to someone.

Yoko Arthur concludes her performance and we give it up for her, and then for another poet who is now in the house. This one seems a little nervous as she takes the microphone and informs us that this is a poem about when she had uterine cancer.

Death sits at a desk and in my uterus, she explains, and I'm so astonished that I jot the phrase down in my notebook. It was actually the doctor who diagnosed her cancer sat at the desk, but that's poetry for you. This poem just keeps on going like a more depressing Energizer Bunny™, becoming bleaker and ever more bereft of light by the minute. It's all we can do to not laugh.

I purchase beer and tacos from upstairs, and the music resumes, more Tejano, more horseshit, and then the world's most efficiently workmanlike blues band. The bass player used to be in Question Mark and the Mysterians who had a massive hit with 96 Tears. This doesn't mean a lot to me because I preferred the Eddie & the Hot Rods version.

I paint.

Bess sells rocks.

The woman in turquoise is still doing her dance, such as it is, arms in the air, fingers snapping, moves requiring nothing which formally acknowledges rhythm.

'Now she is why people voted for Trump,' I tell my wife.

I come back to the painting from time to time. I can't tell if it's any good. Bess swears that it is, but then she usually does. It feels like we've been here for at least a week.

Yoko Arthur introduces yet more people as being in the house.

I paint.

A little girl goes crazy over a small canvas my wife has decorated with a mandala, first asking that my wife sign it, then to have her picture taken with the artist.

'Now that has made it all worth while,' Bess explains happily.

Hours drag past.

My painting begins to look kind of okay.

It gets dark and I still haven't sold a single canvas, not that I'm hugely bothered. I pack up my paints.

'I'm going to take this stuff to the car, okay?'

The car is in the parking lot of San Antonio College, not actually a whole lot further than Bill Miller.

I return and it's twenty to six. Bess starts to pack away her rocks.

'You can't pack away yet.' Ermintrude appears from nowhere to deliver the warning like we're naughty children. 'You have to wait until six.'

'Sure. Whatever.'

We wait until six, and I tell Bess to leave the packing up to me. She has to take our receipts to the office so they can work out how much we owe them, and the queue is already long.

I pack things away. Bess returns after about forty-five minutes. She is strangely quiet as we carry our stuff back to the car.

'Are you okay?' I ask.

'Fine,' she grunts. 'Tired.'

We no longer even need to have the conversation about whether we're coming back tomorrow. We signed contracts stating that we would, but the penalty of breaking the contract is that we won't get invited back next year. Boo hoo.

We drive to a branch of Jim's. We're tired and hungry.

Bess tells me that we took $130 - which was all her rocks. The Desesperación people looked at our receipts and reckoned it was $133, by which point Bess no longer cared enough to argue. They said that we owed them 25% of our takings because we had actually been given an eight foot rather than the full ten foot pitch. Bess said she wasn't bothered and that we'd signed a contract to pay 35%, and in any case she'd already written out a check for $53.20, that being 35% of $133. They said we owed $54 because they had rounded it up. Having stood in a queue for three quarters of an hour, Bess threw a dollar bill at the woman and told her to keep the change.

We eat and we leave a tip.

The knowledge that we won't be returning tomorrow, that we've managed to reclaim our weekend from Ermintrude and the forces of evil is a feeling so wonderful that it has left us almost lost for words.

Never again.

*: Names changed because I've no doubt they have some really mellow and tuned-in lawyer ready to destroy the lives and empty the bank accounts of anyone who might be legally proven responsible for a bad vibe.

The End of a Fair

We have yet another craft fair booked at Mission Plaza - Bess and myself - although this one is a slightly bigger deal than that to which we're accustomed. Higher attendance is anticipated due to it having been tied in with some cycling event, and there will be a live band. This means we have to leave earlier than usual to set up. Ordinarily this would bother me, but for once I've managed to get my ass into gear and we loaded the car up last night, so amazingly we're there before nine. It's a nice day too, clear blue sky and just warm enough to be pleasant. Without having really kept count, we think this is probably our eighth or ninth stint at Mission Plaza. It feels strange to have become old hands at something we only began this year, and so much so that we can set up without having to think about it.

We put up the canopy, stake it into the soil; out with the table and camping chairs; Bess spreads out her rocks and painted things whilst I bolt together the frames upon which I display my canvases; and soon we're done, ready for the rush - which is usually two or three people every twenty minutes or so. We're situated between the food bank and the Mexican guy who sells cacti. Because it's some sort of special occasion, today the food bank is a whole truck loaded with refrigerators and the like, so they take up twice the normal space. It's a mobile market stall for vegetables mostly grown by volunteers, and they accept food stamps. Last time we were here they gave us some stuff to take home as thanks for our help with their own canopy - butternut squash, potatoes, a massive onion, and a sweet potato I still haven't got around to using.

There are a lot more canopies than usual, and a big huddle of them over the far side of the field. This is something to do with cycling, specifically an organisation called FrankenBike.

The entire field doubles up as a drive-in movie theatre, because I've now reached the point of my acclimation at which it feels strange to refer to it as a cinema. The screen is a huge concrete wall to our right, curved and painted turquoise, excepting the white rectangle upon which the works of Michael J. Fox are projected. At its base is a raised platform which serves as stage when the occasion demands, as it will today. There are doors in the screen, presumably leading to inner rooms and storage spaces. It's a structure unlike any I have previously encountered. Usually someone trails a mains extension out from within the screen to a speaker sat alone at the front of the stage and we spend the morning with a soundtrack of peculiarly unpredictable composition - salsa, tejano, country rock, hits of the sixties, hits of the twenties, and occasional bewildering excursions into dubstep, trance or drum and bass. We're yet to hit the Swedish death metal playlist, but it can only be a matter of weeks. Normally I might find this annoying, but the music has thus far been okay and has in any case kept itself to the background.

By ten we've already had a few nosing around, and Bess has already sold a couple of rocks. A few people have told me they like my paintings, which is nice, and which is what happens instead of me actually selling any of the fuckers; but I don't mind. I know we're in the wrong part of town to sell a painting for sixty dollars. My prices are based on what I myself wouldn't mind paying, and on the fact that I'm not even sure I want to sell at least a few of them so the price has to be one which feels worth my while, and on prices I've seen charged by others. I've noticed very few people asking less than a hundred for an oil painting, excepting the only notionally talented who tend to paint lop-sided pictures of Batman, the Joker, and Harley Quinn, the Joker's girlfriend. I therefore feel confident that sixty dollars is a reasonable price for a proper painting produced by someone who can actually paint, namely myself; and luckily - I suppose - I don't really mind them not selling. I've come to think of our stall as a temporary gallery with knobs on, and it's a nice day out.

Also by ten, we're both inexplicably hungry. There's no sign of Chinga su Madre!, the taco truck which is usually here parked just behind the woman selling home made cookies; and yes, the guy really does trade as Chinga su Madre!, which is doubtless hilarious in neighbourhoods where no-one speaks Spanish. I therefore cross the highway to Nicha's, which sports a banner claiming itself to have been voted San Antonio's best Mexican restaurant. I've a feeling I've seen the same banner outside plenty of other places, but Nicha's is nevertheless decent. Nicha is short for Dionisia, and we've already made all the jokes about how if you gaze long enough into the salsa verde, the salsa verde will gaze back into you.

Happily, there's no sign of Snooki, who usually takes my order. She earned the name through an unfortunate resemblance to Snooki from Jersey Shore and because she always seems to find the taking of my order to be a colossal pain in the ass.

'Chicken fajitas on corn,' I will ask.

'How many?'

'I don't know. Just chicken fajitas on corn. I want however many there is in one order of chicken fajitas on corn?'

'How many do you want?'

'I want however many you gave me the last time I ordered chicken fajitas on corn without having to specify how many I wanted. They're for my wife.'

She'll sigh and narrow her eyes. 'You need to tell me whether you want one or two.'

'I don't know. Two, I suppose. My wife eats them. Usually I'm also eating rather than sitting there counting how many fajitas you've given her.'

'Two chicken fajitas on corn, and what else?'

'Street tacos.' I don't have to specify the required number of street tacos because they always come four to a serving, although I resent having to call them street tacos which sounds suspiciously like hipster terminology. I just adore Mexican street food, I recall a person of my vague acquaintance from Portland once screeching in reference to what is simply known as food in Mexico.

Snooki is nowhere to be seen, and even more exciting is that I saw a help wanted sign on the door. Snooki's replacement seems nicer and is able to take my order without extraneous negotiation. She also likes my accent and tells me that her boyfriend is from France. I tell her that I like the French and I try to remember whether I've been to his bit of the country.

Back at the craft fair, we're half way through Goldilocks and the Three Bears on the stage, as performed for the benefit of an audience of maybe fifteen, but those watching at least seem appreciative. I watch for a couple of minutes. This version of the tale has been given a local spin with the bears making a big deal out of how much chilli they've added to the porridge before going out on their walk. I can't tell if this works or not, but the little kids seem to get a kick out of it.

For the sake of something to do, I embark upon a new painting, having brought my paints, easel, and a canvas. Having taken up oils I'm concentrating on painting directly from life, simply for the sake of stretching my artistic horizons. I paint the tree behind our stall, and because there's a red truck parked next to the tree, I paint the back end of the truck, which seems to make sense in terms of the composition as a whole.

A band starts up on the stage, three middle-aged guys playing the sort of thing middle-aged guys tend to play. Writing about this one week later, it will have become impossible to recall quite what they were doing - but probably generically competent country rock, something of that sort.

Woo hoo.

We sell some more, or Bess sells some more and everybody tells me how much they like my paintings. One woman definitely has her eye on two of them, and will bring money next time we're at the Mission Plaza, which will be March.

'What?' I ask Bess. 'March?'

'Yes, this is the last fair of the year.'

'Really?'

'Afraid so.'

'Damn.'

I now realise this explains the big send off with performance and the FrankenBikes and everything else. A guy sat with our cactus retailing neighbour walks over and gets in the red truck. I feel suddenly awkward.

'I'm going to miss this.'

'I know. Me too,' Bess sighs.

More time passes.

I can't tell if I like the painting of the truck and the tree, and I can't tell whether or not I've finished it. Just in case I have, I cross the field to the public bogs to wash my hands which have begun to feel greasy from the linseed oil with which I thin the paints.

When I return, Bess tells me that the guy who owns the truck came over to examine my work. He liked it.

I mosey over to the cactus stall. 'Hey there. Hope you don't mind me painting your truck. It just seemed to fit the picture.'

I'm surprised at how happy he seems. 'You have a lot of talent,' he says. 'I wondered what you were doing at first.'

'Yeah. I didn't realise it was your truck. That time when you got in, I thought, oh fuck - he's going to drive off and I haven't finished.'

We both laugh, then I go back to the painting. I think I'm starting to like it, although I'm not yet sure that it's finished.

Our friend who sells cacti comes over to see. 'You know he loves that truck. He is very happy to see you have done this.' He points at a large sticker in the rear window. 'He is very proud of that too.'

I squint but I can't quite read it - something to do with the military, so the guy is clearly a veteran.

The stage is now host to a performance by some kind of local tejano class - guitarist and drummer accompanying a string of little kids playing accordions. Some of the kids are significantly smaller than their instruments. Tejano is what happened when the Spanish music of post-conquest Mexico joined up with the oompah bands which German settlers brought to Texas. The ability of the kids, some of whom look to be about seven-years old at best, is astonishing - wheezing ninety mile an hour accordion trills with not a bum note or missed cue to be heard. It's not entirely my thing but it beats the blandly competent country rock we had earlier. The grand finale has all of the kids playing at the same time, seven or eight accordions blasting away on stage; and I come to the strange realisation that one accordion sounds the same as seven or eight played in series.

I finish the painting, hypothetically speaking.

'How much do you want?' the owner of the red truck asks. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might want to buy it, and I hope he doesn't think I painted it in expectation of his coughing up the readies. I feel a bit guilty, so I say twenty because he seems like a decent guy and his obvious enthusiasm makes up at least some of the difference.

It has been a really good day, and as I said, I'll miss this place over the coming months.

Spring

The drive to Houston is about three and a half hours, so we've brought a talking book to pass the time; we being myself and my wife rather than the royal we, and the talking book is the autobiography of the DEA agent who arrested el Chapo, but neither of us finds it engaging. The guy reading the book so that we don't have to sounds like Alastair Cooke, who used to narrate his own weekly Letter from America on BBC Radio 4. He sounds old, stately, well spoken, and a poor fit for the testimony of one of those good little soldiers who became a cop because he wanted to make a difference, someone who has buddies and compadres and occasionally likes to cut loose with a few brewskis. Also, the narrator's Spanish is difficult to take seriously, and we've found - to our surprise - that we don't like to hear people speaking ill of el Chapo because, for all his faults, we're no longer convinced that the guy was significantly worse than any of the politicians currently blocking the Washington S-bend. We have a hunch that he may actually be preferable in certain respects. We listen to about an hour and then turn it off in frustration.

We're heading to a convention in Spring, a town about five miles north of Houston. The convention is for people who make and collect a certain kind of spinning top finely-crafted from wood, metal, resin, and whatever else can be turned on a lathe. We went to one of these things last year, and I noticed a fair few of the guests seemed to be hardcore bikers, hardcore in this instance meaning people with their own workshops in which they've hand-tooled their own bike parts. If you know your way around a lathe, I don't suppose curling off a spinning top is much different to the head of a piston. Accordingly the convention has something of a biker vibe and is to be held at Rudy's, which is a barbecue joint, one of those places with rusty bits of farm machinery customarily hanging from the beams.

Neither Bess nor myself are particularly into spinning tops, but I drew the design which they've used for the Topcon 2018 promotional t-shirt. This means we get a free table at the convention. Bess will attempt to sell her painted stones, and I'm going to have some of my canvases on display. I'd say I'm selling, except I have no faith in anyone buying; but fuck it - it's a day out.

This is what I've been telling myself since this morning, when I woke from a hopelessly literal nightmare wherein I found myself obliged to travel to a place I didn't want to go.

'I don't really want to go,' I told Bess. 'I couldn't care less about spinning tops, and we'll only spend the time worrying about the cats.'

We have a number of cats. We don't like to leave them on their own, but have reasoned that one night in Houston won't hurt, and we can set off early on Sunday, arriving home by mid-morning. Obviously they're not going to starve being as there will be no significant disruption to their routine in terms of meal times, but I still don't like to think of them worrying over where we've got to.

We arrive around noon, two-hundred miles from home. It's a while since I've been to Houston, and I'm struck by how unlike San Antonio it is. The countryside is flatter and wetter with more rainfall coming in off the gulf of Mexico. It's more humid and accordingly feels hotter, more tropical, and the countryside looks peculiarly English to my eyes, which is something to do with the trees.

Rudy's is a big old shack full of people stuffing their faces with pulled pork and the like. However, it's nothing like so big as the photo on their website somehow managed to suggest. There is no large, roomy convention hall, just myself and Bess having to squeeze sideways between tables crammed with spinning top enthusiasts.

'What the fuck are we doing here?,' I ask in rhetorical spirit as we are invited to squeeze onto a table from which we will attempt to sell our wares.

Bess has the wheeled carry case in which she ferries her painted stones. She whips out a black table cloth and arranges a couple of rocks upon it, plus one of the vinyl albums she's painted.

'I'm not going to bother,' I grumble. 'There's no room, and there's no point.'

Bess gives me the look, a sort of pleading disappointment with a soupçon of dude, make an effort.

'Seriously, where am I going to put anything?'

I could prop a single painting up against the wall at the rear of the table, but that's about it. I've bought twelve canvases with me, along with the free standing wooden frame upon which I usually display them. This has been a waste of time even before it's started, but then as we've established, no-one is going to want to buy my canvases anyway. Most are paintings of cacti and animal skulls, and not a single spinning top among them.

Bess wanders off in search of the bogs, and a waitress tells me we can't use the table, and that our setting up shop - such as it is - on this particular table constitutes Topcon 2018 extending beyond its agreed allocation of tables to intrude upon the more spacious dining areas reserved for those who've simply turned up for the pulled pork

'Right,' I sigh.

Being half way through my roughly annual smoking jag, I nip outside for a fag, past caring about how that sounds here in Texas.

When I return, we've been moved to the back room, which is less populous. I realise I just about have space for one of my display frames on the table. I go out to the car and bolt the frame together in the parking lot, then carry it inside and secure six canvases to the two horizontal beams by means of g-clamps. Bess arranges her rocks, records, and Christmas tree decorations on the table top and we settle down for the afternoon.

The guy behind us is telling a fellow enthusiast about his best spin time, which happens to be twenty-four minutes and ten seconds.

I get up and go to the bar. While Texas barbecue is invariably delicious, it sits heavy in my gut and leaves me feeling as though I've been pumped full of cavity wall insulation foam. I've promised myself never again, so I'm just going to have a beer. Happily they have Corona, which is Mexican and therefore drinkable.

I drink from the bottle at our table.

Bess has somehow already shifted fifty dollars worth of stuff, and downplays her commercial superiority by telling me that lots of people have said how much they admire my paintings. Regrettably the bar doesn't seem to recognise admiration as a form of currency.

'Okay, I'm bored,' I announce. 'I'm going to paint my beer.'

I've brought my easel, a couple of canvases, oil paints and so on. It takes about ten minutes to squeeze myself into the space between tables and next to the window. I've drunk about two thirds of the bottle, which I now spend a couple of minutes moving around on the table cloth, trying to get it to look interesting.

The next couple of hours pass quickly as I paint a still life with beer and the jar of thinner in which I stand my brushes. I'm cleaning brushes with an old pair of underpants, but no-one seems to notice. Women come and go, chatting with my wife, some buying a stone or telling me that they love my paintings. One of them is from Baltimore. She doesn't seem to like the place much.

'We've seen The Wire,' I tell her.

'That's how it is,' she confirms.

Another fag break is interrupted when my wife brings Phil outside to see me. He too thinks my paintings are really something and wanted to meet the artist. Phil is Australian.

'We're the ones you lot got rid of,' he jokes.

'Not at all,' I say. 'Sometimes I get the feeling we sent you our best people.'

'Everyone thinks he's Australian,' Bess explains, meaning me.

'I guess our accents sound the same to this lot,' I say, and we ask Phil where he's from, like it makes any difference to us.

'Perth,' he says. 'That's on the west coast.'

'My cousin Dawn lives over that way,' I begin.

'He's going to ask if you know her,' Bess laughs.

I wasn't, but now I'm wrapped up trying to remember the name of the town where Dawn lives. I know it's kind of remote, or at least I have that impression, a mining town.

'We've been watching Wentworth,' I hear my wife tell Phil.

I finish the painting. I think I'm quite pleased with it, although I'll know better in a couple of days. It reminds me of Goya, the artist rather than the refried beans.

'Shall we fuck off?'

Everyone else seems to be packing up, so we do the same as it's nearly six. We drive several anticlockwise miles in a vague circle to our hotel, which is fifty yards from Rudy's in the other direction. We can see the same water park out back from our hotel window. We eat at a Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, drive through the old part of Spring in the name of sightseeing, then fail to sleep in the hotel bed. Somehow we're both too hot and too cold for most of the night, which is weird - the quantum superposition of discomfort. The hotel is okay but it's a hotel, and it seems like everything is the least they could get away with. Breakfast is bread toasted on one side with a sort of hockey puck made of egg.

'Where is baked bean?' I demand gruffly, but no-one answers.

The drive back home is another three hours or so, but without some cop casting aspersions on the character of el Chapo. As we arrive back at the house, cats suddenly appear, the full roster bouncing out of the bushes all at the same time, tails aloft and clearly very happy to see us. It's the single greatest moment of the whole weekend.

Craft Unfair

Okay, I say to myself in unconscious homage to Henry Rowland, this time for real. It's our second crack at selling stuff from a stall, and we're feeling confident. We're nothing if not prepared.

Two weeks ago my wife and myself did our first craft fair, which was at an old people's home in Boerne. No-one came and we didn't sell much. Now we're at a bimonthly farmers and artisans market on the southside, which seems more promising. It's a regular event, the weather is good, and there are already more people here than were at our previous outing, maybe three times the head count of vendors and mostly the real thing - no thrift store clowns painted dayglo to be seen, at least not yet.

The place is outside, a drive-in cinema during the evening, thus necessitating some sort of canopy beneath which Bess and myself can set up shop. Luckily it turned out that we already had one, bought five or six years before when I found it cheap in the local supermarket. The original idea was that I could set it up and weed the garden in the shade on particularly hot days, but the setting up was more laborious than I'd anticipated, so I put it all together, took it down, then shoved it in the garage and forgot about it. Earlier in the week, I had a look for the thing, then set it up in our garden once more by way of a dry run for today. The canopy is a sheet of something artificial stretched over a lightweight frame of tubular struts. I spent about forty-five minutes failing to assemble the frame. Each time I poked the end of one tube into another, the whole thing shifted and a tube at the other end popped out. There was quite a lot of swearing, until - following my finally bothering to look at the instructions - it dawned on me that one is supposed to construct the roof support, then pull the covering over it so as to hold everything in place before attempting to attach the legs. Armed with this new information, I was able to erect the thing in about fifteen minutes without too much difficulty. One of the tubes now had a kink in it but seemed to hold up okay. The kink came from when I hurled it across the garden whilst shouting bollocks following the millionth occurrence of it having disconnected itself from a neighbour, so the struts are probably made from aluminium foil, or maybe the wrappers of 1970s chocolate bars.

I left the canopy standing overnight. The guy ropes had come out next morning, causing the whole structure to lean. I replaced the original tent pegs - or whatever the fuck you call those things - with gardening staples, which are U-shaped and much tougher, after which the canopy stayed up for another two nights without giving any indication of being about to explode, catch fire, collapse or whatever. I took this all to be a good omen, despite my having invented at least three new swear words during my initial attempt to raise the thing. I also chose to ignore the omen of Grace, one of our cats, peeing on the  sheet of covering material as I was engaged with slotting the tubes together. She backed up, raised her tail, and just let rip. The plastic material yielded quite a lot of noise when hit by this jet of liquid and Grace looked pleased. That's what I think of your shit canopy, she seemed to be saying.

Once again I've made sandwiches, a ton of pasta salad and filled a couple of flasks with iced tea, and here we are. We unload the car and dump it all next to the pitch of a guy selling wares in patriotic red, white and blue, wooden letters spelling out the word mom and so on. It's kind of windy, which you only really notice when trying to assemble what is effectively a massive kite, but we get there, albeit with some swearing; and then come to mooring it all down with garden staples, simultaneous to my gaining new insight into just how hard Texas soil can be after baking under a hot sun month after month. I hurt my fingers trying to push the things into the earth. I may as well be attempting to push nails into concrete, so it necessitates some swearing.

'Fuck this,' I hear myself saying. 'Let's go home.'

'Here.' Our neighbour comes over. He's taken pity on us because I expect it's obvious that we're new to this game. He has a couple of bright red saddle bags and he ties one to each of the guy ropes I've been unable to secure. 'These bags were cheap at the dollar store,' he tells us. 'I fill them with sand. You can get the sand at Lowes.'

I pick up one of the bags then place it back down. It's pretty heavy, so I get to work on my display frames. I've made them myself, and it took a few weeks - wooden beams no longer than four foot so as to fit in the car, holes drilled so I can bolt them all together like Meccano. Usually each would stand seven foot tall, but the canopy won't allow for such height, so instead of one frame upon which I would display twelve canvases, I have two four foot frames holding six canvases each, one set up at either side of our pitch. Each frame has holes in the feet through which I can drive tent pegs so as to keep them from blowing over, except I have the same problem with the guy ropes, and I can't ask our neighbour for more sandbags. In the end, each frame gets two pegs each, one front, one back, and even these I haven't been able to drive all of the way in. The frames rock back and forth in the wind every so often.

Between the frames we have the table upon which Bess sets up her stones and other things she has painted. We also have a couple of folding chairs. At length we're sort of ready and all we have to do is wait for the crowds. Some vendors are still arriving and setting up, so I guess we've done all right.

We sit and wait, watching the shadow of the canopy creep across the grass at the front of our pitch. We realise we're sat in full Texas sun, and that we should have set up facing south. It's going to be a hot fucking day. The wind keeps us sort of cool, and if things are flapping a little in the breeze, we should be okay.

'Did you see the other guy's paintings?' Bess asks. She points down the line, past our helpful neighbour to another pitch selling canvases.

'I'm going to have a look around,' I tell her.

I cross the field to the screen of the drive-in, a peculiar deco construct painted sky blue on the far side. This side is a curved wall with a raised concrete stage at its base. It reminds me of the sound mirrors along the Kentish coast, back in England. Facing the screen is our semicircle of pitches, thirty or forty stalls selling all manner of stuff. There are houseplants and cacti, and the homegrown vegetables - potatoes, squashes, and peppers - look pretty good. Then there's the usual jewellery, the obligatory and puzzling presence of an insurance company, or possibly someone selling double-glazing, and of course wooden toys, some hardware. Two other stalls sell painted canvases. One features mostly views of the Alamo, technically competent but probably reliant upon how much you like the Alamo. One of their pictures is on sale for $200, which makes me feel good because my paintings are cheaper and - I would like to think - more interesting.

The next stall features canvas renderings of Harley Quinn, the Joker, Batman, various superheroes and cartoon characters, and nebulously identified Aztec rulers copied from what were probably illustrated children's books. The colours are bold, but otherwise it's ugly and amateurish, and is as such a further boost to my confidence in the worth of my own work.

Having walked the full circle, I'm back at our pitch.

'How was it?'

'Mostly pretty good,' I say. 'Better than Boerne.'

'I'll have a look around in a bit.'

'You should.'

The punters begin to arrive, hardly a tsunami, but we nevertheless experience more interest during the first thirty minutes than we had for the entire day at the retirement home. This seems encouraging. Bess sells two painted rocks, and everyone seems to like my canvases. One woman additionally notes that, ranging from $60 to $40 based on how much I'd personally be prepared to pay, they seem reasonably priced; although she isn't buying.

We sit. We wait. My pictures sway in the wind.

An old guy with a soft voice and the biggest ears I've ever seen tells us how he himself was once a painter. He likes my work. We both know he's not buying but we don't mind because he seems such a nice guy.

'Did you see those ears?'

'I couldn't really miss them,' Bess says.

'What did he say anyway? I was trying to listen to his story but I kept thinking about his ears. You know that your ears supposedly never stop growing for as long as you live?'

'It was distracting,' she agrees.

'He must have been about three-hundred.'

The wind steps it up a notch. Out tablecloth flaps but is kept in place by the weight of the painted rocks. The sun is really punishing on our backs and the tops of our heads, but the piped music coming from a speaker set up near the stage is mostly old blues records,  some bluegrass and Tejano - an improvement on the autotuned stadium country we had piped all day at the old folks' home.

'This is still preferable to Boerne,' I say, and the wind gets a little stronger. We watch the canopy shift restlessly for another half hour, interspersed by conversations with people who don't buy anything.

Suddenly the canopy is leaning. One of the guy ropes has popped out, the one at my back. Its opposite sags accordingly.

'Fuck's sake.'

I stand and another gust hits my canvases on the frame to the right, twisting them forward and snapping the wooden beam to which they are secured. The whole structure seems suddenly drunk.

'Bloody hell!'

'It'll be okay!' Bess rushes forward in an attempt to set things right, but there's really nothing she can do.

'I think I've just about had enough.'

I loosen the clamps holding my paintings to the broken wood, because I'm going to take these canvases back to the car, having nothing on which to display them. I find I am also stacking up the paintings from the undamaged frame without having consciously decided to do so. I can't sit in the blistering heat wondering whether the wind is going to screw it all up for us, not all afternoon, not for another three hours. A great deal of preparation went into this and it seems as though it has been in vain. This undertaking has felt like one of those dreams in which you're back at school without trousers.

'It's okay,' I tell Bess. 'I'm just packing up my stuff. We don't have to leave.'

She's already wrapping up her rocks and placing them back in the travel bag. I feel awkward, as though I've ruined it.

We're giving up, even though it's only noon.

'This was only forty dollars,' our helpful neighbour tells us as we cast envious glances at his canopy, a sturdier affair than ours, steel bars and springs which collapse down to something that fits in the trunk, and which can be assembled in minutes - as we've seen because everyone else has the same type of canopy.

It turns out that Grace was right.

Next time will be better, we tell ourselves as we drive home to our air conditioning.

Craft Fair

I paint a canvas every Sunday afternoon, just something small about the size of an album cover. I'm working with oils. I've been painting with acrylics for decades, but I'm new to oils and the techniques involved are very different so I'm having to relearn a lot of things. I've been at it since the beginning of the year and I now have a stack of canvases which I'm ready to sell.

Bess meanwhile has been painting rocks for a year or more, decorating stones with mandalas and related designs of increasing complexity. She protests that she has no artistic ability, but the evidence of her work suggests otherwise. She's posted pictures of her rocks on facebook and strangers have asked to buy them.

Having both arrived at the same place, we've decided to hit the craft fairs, to try selling our work from a stall. We've looked at a few such events and have settled on a fair held at a retirement community in Boerne as a good place to start. The pitch costs twenty dollars and there are no weird restrictions about bringing our own food. We had a look at the fair held regularly at the Black Swan Inn just down the road, and they were asking fifty dollars a pitch with a ban on anyone inclined towards self-catering, presumably so as to guarantee business for whichever food trucks might be in attendance.

So now it's Saturday morning. We're up early. We've fed the cats and we drive out to Boerne to set up, ready for when the doors open at nine. I've spent the last week making a free standing wooden frame upon which I can display my canvases, seven foot tall, but it all comes apart so that it's no big deal getting it in the car. It's made with beams of poplar bolted together and I'm quietly proud of it. My inner pessimist has already predicted that no-one will give a shit about my paintings, but I will have at least one Hank Hill type conversation about the pleasures of woodworking and craftsmanship.

We arrive at the Kronkosky Senior Center around eight and it takes about half an hour to set up. I bolt my frame together and attach rows of canvases using small G-clamps. Bess spreads a black cloth across the circular table we've been allotted, then unwraps all of her rocks. There seem to be hundreds of them, as well as a few vinyl albums she's repurposed and decorated with similar designs.

The hall is of medium size, most likely a canteen during the week. There are fourteen other pitches, described thus in my diary:

• Custom hair bows by emo-country goth chick, her Tristan-esque boyfriend*, and their dog.
• Black lady selling unpleasant kitsch ornaments repainted in clashing dayglo colours.
• Overcharging artist community of wizened burnouts asking $200 for the one painting I actually liked.
• Crazy grandma in red, selling items of redwear.
• First timer selling mason jars as tissue dispensers and personalised Starbucks cups.
• Cactus lady.
• Quilts advertising John Deere heavy agricultural machinery.
• Crochet stuff lady.
• Hostile jewellery lady who writes books about driving the arrogant British out of Ghana.
• Gay men selling pots of plants mixed in with gnome housing.
• Blind artist, formerly a Brigadier in the USAF.
• Tacky arrowhead art.
• Soap woman.
• Creepy custom handbag guy.

Nine o'clock ambles past, and we eventually realise that the doors are indeed open by virtue of three or four very old people seen wandering amongst the stalls. They don't seem to be buying anything, but it's clear that they aren't selling either. The big rush comes about an hour later with numbers up in the sevens and eights, and all very old.

'These are people from the retirement home,' I tell Bess.

'I get the feeling they didn't advertise very well,' she says.

'How far are we from Boerne, like the main strip?'

'About a mile.'

The main strip of Boerne is crammed with stores selling antiques, trinkets, nick-nacks, collectibles, and other junk, and it gets pretty busy, particularly at the weekend and on a warm day such as today. We should hopefully begin to experience some of the run off any minute now. It's still early. No-one goes out before noon.

'I'm bored,' I say, 'I think I'll have a sandwich. Do you want one?'

'Not yet.'

I've made sandwiches, corned beef for myself, ham and mustard for Bess. I've also made pasta salad and filled a couple of flasks with iced tea. I eat one of my sandwiches, reasoning that I'll save the other one for later as something to look forward to.

No-one is looking at my paintings. They are behind us but against the wall at an angle. I wonder if it might not occur to people that they are for sale, that they're just part of the hall, but I'm not sure what else I can do. It's not like they can't be seen. I've been painting simple still life compositions - flowers, cacti, and a couple of deer skulls, because these are things I see in Texas. It occurs to me that paintings of skulls might not be the sort of thing likely to sell well in a retirement home.

'These are nice,' an old woman coos over Bess's rocks. She circles the table picking up various examples for closer inspection, then wanders off to buy a fucking horrible plaster clown painted orange and green from the next table along.

Bess and I sit and stare at the woman's wares, scarcely able to believe anyone would try to sell such abominations. We guess that she goes around thrift stores buying cheap, kitschy ornaments from the sixties and seventies, then brightens them up a bit. Somehow she found a way to make that stuff worse. We should probably be impressed.

'What's with the woman in red?' I ask.

There's a round old lady at the other side of the hall dressed entirely and flamboyantly in red. Even her hat is red. All the clothes for sale at her table - all hand made by the look of it - are red.

'It's some sort of senior thing,' Bess explains.

'Like black power for old people?'

'Kind of.'

'So cute!' Another woman is examining a rock. 'My grandson will love this!'

The rock is one of the three or four that I've painted with silly cartoon characters, just little things which take about five minutes to do because Bess asked me to do them. This one is a banana with a face and a big grin - the sort of thing one used to see in the margins of comic strips by Leo Baxendale.

'Three dollars,' says Bess, and we have our first sale of the day. I'm a bit embarrassed that it's one of mine.

Another hour dribbles past.

Aunt Edi shows up. She has driven all the way out here to lend moral support, but also to buy a painting from me. It's for her friend Becky who is visiting from Phoenix, but who is presently staying in San Antonio. Edi takes photos with her phone, and Becky relays that she is interested in a particular painting of the nopal and agave cacti in our garden.

'How much?' asks Edi.

Going by the shite I've already seen at other craft fairs, I'm underpricing myself, but I've divided my paintings into two groups - those which actually I like, and those which I'm not too sure about, for which I'm asking $60 and $40 respectively. I'm trying to sell paintings, and I'm going by what I myself would pay. I'm not trying to skin anyone.

'That's forty dollars,' I tell Edi.

Becky relays that she is very happy with this and so that's another sale. She also relays that she was looking for something which would remind her of Texas when she heads back to Arizona, and so my painting of cacti apparently ticks all of the right boxes. The strange thing for me is that the painting was my first effort, one I could never quite decide whether I liked it or not. It was the one during which I learned that you can't paint in oils using techniques learned from working with acrylic, so if it came out okay - as Becky clearly believes - then it was in spite of me. I didn't actually anticipate anyone ever wanting to buy it, so that makes me happy.

Edi takes a seat and shoots the breeze with us for another hour, then leaves.

Bess eats a sandwich.

A couple of people buy a few of her painted rocks.

An old guy asks, 'How many records did you ruin making these?' He means the vinyl albums upon which Bess has painted her designs. She picks up job lots of junk albums no-one wants and decorates them, because it's 2018 and no-one sane still cares about Ferrante & Teicher's Bouquet of Hits collection.

'Ha! Ha!' we respond because we can't tell whether the old guy is joking or just being a cunt.

Noon arrives and I do a circuit of the hall to see what other people are trying to sell. I've waited until noon so as to break up the day a bit.

Our fellow first timer seems nice, but the stuff she's selling - and which people are actually buying, it should be noted - seems weird to me. The personalised Starbucks cups are, as described, generic plastic cups from Starbucks to which she has added Mark's Cup, for one example, perfectly lettered and everything. I'm not sure who would want to buy such a thing - someone called Mark, I suppose.

I stop at the other stall trying to sell oil paintings. They seem like old hands at this thing and there's a bunch of people at the table. Their canvases are huge, some vaguely representational, nothing too kitschy, and a few abstracts, but the sort of abstracts which tend to be painted by people who paint abstracts because they otherwise can't actually paint.

'These aren't all by one person?' I ask.

'There are three of us,' the woman explains. 'We're an artists' community.'

Of everyone here today, they seem the most at odds with a consumer demographic which will pay for a unicorn in violet, silver and turquoise.

'How much is that one?' I indicate a small portrait of a woman, something vaguely post-impressionist and quite nice.

One of them picks it up and studies the reverse. 'Two-hundred.'

Fuck me, I don't actually say, but I think it. 'Well - good luck,' I offer as a fellow artist trying to sell to senior citizens, a group notoriously reluctant to part with their money.

I pause at the jewellery stall because there are books. I pick one and study the cover.

'I wrote those,' the woman tells me in a defensive tone.

I read the blurb on the back, something about people of Ghana pitted against the arrogance of the English colonial forces at the turn of the nineteenth century.

'I know all about the arrogance of the English,' I chuckle in an attempt to break the ice, and to convey that I'm impressed by anyone who has published their own novel.

'Have you been there?'

'Well, I'm from there.'

'Where are you from?'

'England, I mean. Not Ghana. Have you lived in Ghana?'

'Yes, I lived in Ghana.'

I guessed this from what is written on the back of the book, and because her accent is an unfamiliar hybrid of something or other.

'I've been to North Africa. Well, Morocco, which I know isn't the same.'

She looks at me.

'I lived in London. I knew a few blokes from Ghana.'

'The novels are ten dollars each.'

'Well, I'll probably look back a bit later.' I smile, unsure how best to remove myself from her strangely frosty presence.

Maybe she just hates the English.

Back at the table, we eat our pasta salad. Bess has sold a few more rocks.

The lady in red is now browsing. 'These are very nice,' she says. 'I'd buy one but I'm trying to get rid of everything before I die.'

The organisers asked to stay until three, but a couple of tables have already given up and gone home, and it's clear that there isn't going to be an early afternoon surge.

Bess goes off in search of soda.

The woman with the horrible clowns picks up a rock as she passes by our stall. 'You did this?'

'My wife painted them.'

'I can't even draw a straight line!'

I smile because I don't know how else to respond.

Bess returns and I relate the exchange for her consideration. We both look at the table of dayglo clowns and Disney characters and wonder how she's managed to sell anything.

'Did you hear what she said to the goth chick?'

'No,' I say.

'They were talking about their dog, and how it's a service dog. She just said, I hate dogs!'

'What a lovely woman!'

We sit and watch as more tables vanish like stars going out during the final heat death of the universe.

'I sure have heard a lot of country music today,' I say.

We've been tuned to a country station since we got here, twanging and whining across the hall, hour after hour. That said, it's probably not so much country music as what we now have instead of country music - which is like country music but with autotune, trap drum machine pinging away, and Jed, Jethro, or Tammy whining about poor cellphone reception in rural areas.

At two we decide to call it a day.

We've made about eighty dollars, all told.

I sold a painting to someone I already knew.

Bess sold a few rocks, but considering how most of them cost just a couple of dollars, and they're beautifully painted, she should have cleaned up; which at least means it wasn't us.

It was them.

*: Resembling Tristan, whom my wife knows at work.

Powwow

It's April so the Powwow season is upon us once again - same place as last time, although when I check I realise that last time was actually 2015. Now that I'm in my fifties, now that I've finally got all my thoughts working in a straight line, the time just rockets past.

It's Saturday morning, which began with a craft fair drive-by in the name of research for when Bess and myself start selling our stuff. This one was open air, on the land just behind the drive-in cinema on the southside. It's held twice a month and pitches are free, which possibly correlates with what we saw as we went by - a row of ten stalls and seemingly no actual punters, although I suppose it was early and the skies were a little grey.

We picked a Mexican diner for lunch, or possibly late breakfast. It's difficult to pick a bad Mexican diner in San Antonio, but not impossible. You can usually tell a good one by the hand painted signage on walls and even windows in emulsions so bright that it hurts to look at them, and also by how many white people can be found amongst your fellow diners. The fewer there are, the better the food will usually be. It's depressing but that's how it works.

I have huevos rancheros and Bess has taquitos and we're set for the rest of the day, so we drive along to Woodlawn Lake. We can already hear the drumming before we've parked, the familiar monotonous beat in 1/1 time - Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom…
 

We talk about Tiana who lives up North somewhere, who came down to meet us in Austin last year. She's mostly Native and a regular face at the Shinnecock Powwows - at least I think they're Shinnecock, one of the tribes I hadn't heard of. Bess has been to Powwows in New Mexico and Arizona, and they're not all the same thing, not by a long way. She tells me she has felt like an intruder at a few of them. Not all are so open or welcoming as the one we're going to, which is possibly something to do with it being part of Fiesta, the local annual holiday which takes over a week or two of April.

As usual we're in a repurposed basketball court, and as we find seats, there's a ceremony already underway, but it's as much to do with Fiesta as anything - the shaking of hands, swapping medals, men in full tribal dress sharing jokes with those declared royal for the duration of Fiesta, some distinguished by the sky blue uniforms of the Order of the Alamo. Eyes cast around the room find no clear line demarcating where Natives begin and the rest of us end, which I guess is similarly true of the local gene pool. I suppose we have extremes represented by the obviously Indian in regalia of feathers and animal bones contrasted with a few of the Alamo Heights set, usually most easily identified by face lifts and the look of having recently starred in an episode of Dynasty; but inclusivity is at least some of the point of this thing. On some level this might be considered an Indian Show, but then we're all having fun, which is probably better than invisibility.

There's a circle of guys at the centre of the hall, gathered around their drums and all in black shirts and Stetsons. The master of ceremonies speaks through a tannoy too distorted for me to really follow what he says, but it seems there will now be a dance. A larger circle forms around the drummers, all facing inwards.

Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom…

So many people are milling around that it's difficult to see who is actually dancing, but the rhythm is accompanied by a traditional chant, albeit with modern words, a chant probably very much like the thing you're imagining, having just read that sentence. It's familiar and yet experienced in the raw it sounds new and more powerful than one might have anticipated. The rhythm may seem rudimentary but the drums are huge and the skins resonate with a power felt in the gut, a deep bass that somehow makes me think of rave music and techno.

'There will be a cakewalk,' the announcer tells us, and that's all I understand, except that we are invited to participate. We are given paper plates with numbers written on the back. We form in a circle, again facing inwards, and place our plates on the ground before us. I'm still not actually sure what I've agreed to do.

Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom…

We dance. It's a shuffling motion whereby we all move sideways, clockwise around the ring of participants.

Fuck it, I say to myself. I'm going for it.

I dance next to a younger representative of the tribe in full dress, huge fans of eagle feathers running down his sleeves and back. I copy his moves and then improvise, hopping from foot to foot, putting a bit of elbow grease into it because it's actually fun - all very immersive. Another minute passes and we stop with the music, all picking paper plates up from the floor in front of us.

The master of ceremonies reads out a succession of numbers, and those with plates bearing the numbers run to the podium to received baked goods, pies, even a box of Little Debbie snack cakes. I suspect this tradition has been a more recent development, say the last couple of years rather than anything handed down from one generation to another. We've combined musical chairs with the tombola and the Mario, a dance famously described in the closing theme to the Super Mario Bros. Super Show.

Do the Mario!
Swing your arms from side to side
Come on, it's time to go!
Do the Mario!
Take one step, and then again,
Let's do the Mario, all together now!
You got it!
It's the Mario!
Do the Mario!

One YouTube commentator pointed out that the Mario is a lot like walking, and so is the cakewalk.

'He's from England,' I can hear Bess explain to some other dancer, but I missed whatever point she was trying to qualify, and I don't really care because we're off again.

Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom…

We keep going until they've shifted all the cakes. Neither Bess nor myself won any of the cakes or pies, but then we're still full of huevos rancheros and taquitos so we're not too bothered.