SMH

We're back at Jim's diner, the second time in a couple of weeks and once again the car is there. I'm no good with automotive brands and think of it as a Lincoln, which it probably isn't. It's new but is styled more like something from the seventies, clean and brilliant white with a scatter of political stickers across the trunk and rear window - proud supporter of President Trump, amongst others, most of which propose that the driver is additionally a proud supporter of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't understand why anyone would want to advertise their personal preferences on their means of transport, but this sort of thing particularly gets on my nerves because it also seems to advertise their stupidity as though it's a boldly chosen stance - I done a smelly poo right in me knickers, laughed in your face with a big happy smile.

The car is parked right in front of the entrance and, as I say, this isn't the first time we've seen it. The glass door of Jim's is decorated with the usual array of literature concerning coronavirus and the requirement of masks to be worn within, but there's other stuff too and it takes me a second to decode what I'm looking at: colour images on paper, presumably printed off on a home computer. There's a photograph of Hillary Clinton with a caption referring to the supposed suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. I can't even tell what is implied here, which I guess means I don't spend enough time on the internet, but the political angle is implicit in the other images, each pasted on the door with a single strip of tape. The other two are too bland to stick in my memory, but something rhetorical along the lines of what those liberals will come up with next. It's the cosy syntax of persons who have learned all they needed to know at the university of life, and are not only secure in their ignorance but feel it represents an achievement, the sanctity of a mental virginity kept pure from anything with too many long words. I've encountered these people online, usually in response to some not unreasonable proposition - cops probably shouldn't shoot innocent people, for example - and their stock response will be SMH, which stands for shaking my head, or something borrowed from someone else about the sad effects of a mind destroyed by liberalism. It's not really an argument. It's barely even coherent as a sneer.

'You know, I think I've changed my mind,' I say. I've deduced that this material probably doesn't actually represent views endorsed by either Jim's management or staff, but it bothers me.

'I know, but I'm hungry.' Bess goes in and I follow.

'Take a seat,' the waitress suggests, pausing on the way to someone's table.

I wait for her to deliver the tray then catch her attention. 'I don't know if you realise, but someone has pasted a load of right-wing crap on your door over there, and it's kind of annoying.'

She sighs in a long-suffering way and mumbles something about dealing with it, and I immediately realise who is behind this. I said right-wing crap quite loud and he's staring at me from a few tables away. He's a little old man, maybe in his eighties, wearing a cap identifying him as a Korean war veteran. His jacket is similarly adorned with badges. He likes to advertise. He was in here last time with a friend of similar vintage and the same cap. He's small and the lower half of his face protrudes like that of a monkey or someone in a thirties Popeye cartoon. He's Cotton from King of the Hill.

I'm kind of tired of the fetishisation of the military in this country. I have no problem with anyone signing up with the military, but would hope they do so for reasons besides the eternal gratitude of complete strangers who bark thank you for your service at the first whiff of khaki. Military service does not mean you're a sentinel of freedom, and I'm suspicious of anyone who advertises having been in the military regardless of whether it's on a hat, a car sticker, or tattooed on one of their mighty biceps. Merely walking around with a gun on foreign soil does not make you a hero; and if your actions have been genuinely heroic in the service of your country or some cause you consider noble, you shouldn't need your ass kissed by the rest of us on a daily basis. I find it difficult to truly respect those who advertise their having served in the military, because it feels a little as though they have something to prove; and had they seen the sort of action which might be discussed in terms of heroism or courage, my guess is that they wouldn't feel the need to prove anything, much less by means of something so trite as a bumper sticker. I've met one veteran of the Korean war, my wife's uncle Elton. He told us all about it, particularly about the mass graves filled with the bodies of Chinese people, and it sounded nightmarish. For some reason he chooses not to advertise his military experience with slogans displayed upon either his person or vehicle.

Monkey Man regards us with fearful piercing eyes as we take a seat in the booth adjacent to his. He knows he is old and feeble, and he knows that I don't like him very much and could crush him, and he knows that it will take more than his veteran status to get me swooning like a seventies schoolgirl at a David Cassidy performance. I'm one of those people he's been warned about, here to ban everything reasonable with my mighty powers of political correctness, here to force your children into gender reassignment surgery regardless of their own personal feelings on the matter, and I do this because I'm following orders passed onto me from the mighty Antifa world headquarters inside a hollowed out mountain of the Sierra Madre. Ordinarily he might only frown to himself, then an uncharitable chuckle as he types a damning SMH before moving on to the next thread; but this isn't that kind of situation.

The waitress comes to take our order.

'Sorry to be that customer,' I say, waving my hand in the general direction of the door, 'but we just came out to eat and I don't want to see that sort of stuff. It's like having the worst of facebook following you out into the real world.'

She understands. She explains that the person who decorated the door is a regular diner of many years, leaving her in an uncomfortable position, but the memes are coming down just as soon as he's paid up and left. She speaks quietly. Although we're in the booth next to Monkey Man, a glass partition divides us at head height, and my guess is that his hearing may not be the greatest. The waitress is evidently smiling behind her face mask, but it's clear that she's on our side and that this is some bullshit she really could have lived without.

Our food arrives and we eat.

Monkey Man begins his long, slow pilgrimage towards the cash register with waiting staff as he goes. Eventually he makes it outside to the car driven by a proud supporter of President Trump, obviously himself. We hear the waitress agonising with the guy in the kitchen, just wishing this sweet old guy wouldn't be such a dick, then she goes to the door and removes the liberal-baiting crap.

One day he'll be dead.

They will all be dead, and the world will be a nicer place to live at least in that respect. I think of the people I've known who managed to make it into their eighties without turning into Enoch Powell, or at least a massive pain in the arse. Thankfully they outnumber Monkey Man and his kind by a significant margin.

China Grove

It's Saturday night and we're going to eat out while we still can, before the lockdown resumes, as it surely will.

'Let's go to China Grove,' I suggest.

We discovered the place just last week on the way to Victoria. We saw much Trump campaign material that day, big signs and flags secured to the gates of ranches as we headed for the coast. Keep America Great, they proposed. It was depressing, but seems significant that Trump's support is at its most visible way beyond the city limits, and that it's nearly always ranches - people with money rather than the trailer parks, contrary to some of the mythology.

China Grove has a few trailer parks, probably more than average, and has the reputation of being the place where all the crackers live. This makes it sort of exotic from where we're sat, so that's where we're going, knowing full well that we'll almost certainly end up listening to stadium country as we eat our barbecue. Without wishing to seem too anthropological, we just want to see what the place has to offer. Bess finds a list of the top ten places to eat in China Grove on her smartphone and we hit the road. Top of the list is something called the Den, with second, third, and fourth places all occupied by different outlets of Dee Willie's BBQ Smokehouse. The rest are mostly Mexican diners.

We follow directions for the Den, and end up exploring more of China Grove than we expected. We go through a neighbourhood which is clearly better off than where we live, so that's interesting, and the map is once again proven to be distinct from the territory. We drive on and realise that we're leaving China Grove. The Den is in fact in La Vernia, some seventeen miles east of China Grove. This seems to represent a derailment of our expedition, but never mind. It makes us feel a bit sorry for China Grove given that the best place to eat in China Grove isn't actually in China Grove.

La Vernia is outside the city. It's of a decent size but is spread out, as towns in Texas tend to be. It looks clean and modern and well maintained for the most part. The cremains of Bess's father were interred at a church here for reasons no-one quite remembers in the absence of any particularly obvious familial association with the town. As we approach, her phone goes - a text message from the city warning us to stay in our homes so as to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It feels a bit apocalyptic, but we're already here so we may as well eat.

We were doing so well. We had chalked up about sixty total deaths among the two million inhabitants of Bexar county, with fewer and fewer new cases coming in each day. Mayor Nirenberg was on top of it, but found himself overruled by Greg Abbott, the state governor, who seemed particularly bothered that anyone might have to pay a fine for exercising their freedom to not wear a mask, and seemed sympathetic to those who claimed that the way forward would be to pack as many of us into the churches as possible so as to deliver a prayer for the end of the pandemic of such force that God would have no choice but to do the right thing. So this seems to be why the numbers are back in upwards freefall and we're once again in the shit. The masks have been demonstrably shown to slow the spread, but no-one is wearing them if they don't have to. No-one has been wearing a face mask on the Tobin Trail or in McAllister park because that's exercise, and walking a chihuahua at two miles per hour apparently counts as exercise.

Arseholes are quite naturally blaming the Black Lives Matter march attended by a fraction of the city's population, and every single one of them masked, because it's always the fault of those who have the most to lose. That's how it works, I guess.

We approach the Den and I can already hear the country music. Trucks are lined up outside and the place looks like a gymnasium. Bears abound in La Vernia, and I presume some local sports team will be known as the La Vernia Bears or similar, hence the Den. I assume bears have dens. It seems like a quiet town. I find it impossible to imagine what it must be like to grow up here. I have no frame of reference.

Masks, on the other hand, don't abound in La Vernia, at least not here, even if the Den is otherwise observing all of the other social distancing procedures. We find a table in what really, really looks like a gymnasium and order iced tea and beer from a waitress with false eyelashes like a couple of spiders. Five or six flatscreen televisions are mounted high up on the walls around the room, three of them tuned to Fox News, currently in the middle of an opinion piece which actually seems to be criticising Trump.

'Maybe the tables are turning,' I say to my wife.

We order food and are given an electronic buzzer which will go off when its ready, letting us know we can go to collect it from the serving hatch.

A man named Bubba now appears on Fox News, a NASCAR driver. NASCAR is some sort of motor racing event associated with economically impoverished white people. Bubba seems to be mixed race and the news item concerns what seemed to be a hangman's noose left in his dressing room. We're trying to work out if it was racially motivated, just a joke, or merely a bit of rope coincidentally resembling a noose which happened to be there and we're all way too sensitive these days. The feature which follows is some woman explaining what great jobs our cops do, so I guess the tables, if they have turned at all, haven't actually turned that much.

The buzzer goes off. I collect our food, and it is genuinely excellent, way above what we had begun to anticipate. It has been worth the expedition. The coronavirus has returned worse than before, and the Texas sky is presently full of Saharan dust, but we're glad we got out, just for this one evening.

Drive-By Graduation

Although America was designed as an alternative to the stuffy hierarchical bureaucracies from which its inventors originally set sail, it has spent the last two centuries rendering every last deed and word as the most important and stately thing ever. For something which regards itself as better than monarchy, we sure seem to spend a lot of time and energy on approximating all the trappings right down to the last, most pointlessly baroque detail. There's a ceremony for everything, because everyone gets to be king for a day, or so the promise would have it. The main features of my own departure from my English secondary school were, for example, that I was present at the school for a period of time, and then I was absent from the school for the period which followed, and I never went back and that was that. Here there's a ceremony involving caps, gowns, awards, speeches and so on. I've been to one American high school graduation ceremony. It lasted about three hours, comprising a line of kids in gowns marching across a stage punctuated by the worst motivational speeches you've ever heard, material which could have been written for William Shatner at the height of his gestural powers.

As these young people go boldly into the future whence destiny shalt be their red carpet and the fame we see snatched from the jaws of failure here today in this most hallowed space blah blah blah...

Thankfully, every cloud has a silver lining and it seems that the global pandemic is no exception, and so are we invited to a drive-by graduation. Our boy's cousin has finished school this year. We'll put on our masks, drive past his house, wave, call out well done, and his mother will hand us cup cakes through the car window.

That's the plan.

We pull up to the house and notice the personalised license plate of the vehicle in front. 'That's Byron,' I say, surprised. 'I didn't think he would come. In fact I guess he's leaving already.'

We watch the truck drive away as we park in the space it has vacated. Byron underwent serious eye-surgery this weekend, and Bess suggests he was probably driven here by one of his friends. She glances across to the lawn of the house upon which twenty or thirty unmasked persons are gathered. 'I don't think he was too happy about this gathering. He's been pretty keen about sticking to the lockdown.'

This doesn't sound like Byron, a man rarely seen without an entourage of fellow barbecue enthusiasts, but then he's full of surprises and I'm sure the surgery will have had a sobering effect.

'I thought this was a drive-by.'

'Me too,' says Bess, and we get out of the car, donning our masks.

The graduate is with his friends in a group. I still think of him as a little ginger kid with piercing eyes, but he's taller than I am and has somehow come to resemble a young, muscular Alan Partridge. His friends look as though they should be fooling around on yachts. His mother comes over and herds us towards the table with the cupcakes. I take one with soft green icing tasting like nothing found in nature, the sort which is actually quite nice every once in a while.

No-one is wearing a mask.

We do the elbow bump greeting with the graduate's older brother, who now resembles Rick Moranis. Bess jokes that I'm enjoying the pandemic because it means I'm no longer obliged to hug complete strangers, which is true. I still don't like the elbow bump though. It replaces handshakes and other forms of physical contact which I never saw as necessary in the first place.

We congratulate the graduate for having lived to the age at which he's no longer required to attend high school. He seems happy. He has plans to become a veterinarian, or something in that direction.

'You remember Jeff?' my wife suggests.

I sort of do, and Jeff grins, and his great big hand sails towards mine like a side of ham. Contact is made and we shake unnecessarily.

I hear myself observing that the term drive-by made me think of Boyz n the Hood, but it's the wrong crowd for such references. 'We're the only people wearing masks,' I say to Bess.

'I know. We'll go in a minute.'

I meet a few more people I've met before but don't remember, and then we shuffle back to the car and head home. As we leave, I gaze at them all stood around on the lawn and wonder if this has been some kind of low-level protest at having to wear a mask, inspired by those fucknuggets in the news who've decided that it somehow violates their constitutional rights. None of them exactly look like Trumpanzees, but then they're all white Caucasian, all wealthy, all well-dressed in a city with a 62% Latin or Hispanic populace.

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell.

I try not to think about it.

Food to Go During a Global Pandemic

We'd accepted that some things were going to have to be done differently - no more French kissing complete strangers in the local park for example. My wife and I are creatures of habit and tend to dine out twice a week, Thursday and Saturday because it gives me a break from cooking and it's easy to do in America, or at least in Texas where it's not hard to find a decent place to eat and usually pretty cheap; but we accepted that if we were going to continue with date night, it was going to have to be takeaways for the foreseeable future, at least until the end of either the coronavirus or civilisation, whichever came first. So here's what we ate, or at least what I ate.

Jim's Diner: burger, fries, onion rings, apple pie. We reasoned that it's hard to go wrong with Jim's, conveniently forgetting a recent unfortunate trend towards a slightly chewier chicken fried steak brought to your table by someone with distracting personality flaws - such as that weird little guy who kept trying to engage us in conversation about how much he enjoyed watching vehicular collisions occurring opposite the diner along Broadway. Anyway, my wife ordered a chicken salad which looked as though it had been thrown together first thing that morning, perhaps even the previous evening, and both my order of fries and apple pie were absent, which we didn't discover until we got home. The burger was kind of sad too. Jim's is a great place to eat, but I guess takeaway was never really their thing. The entire chain went into suspended animation about a week later - no take out or anything - so I guess at least someone realised Jim's wasn't playing to its strengths. There was a time when I came fairly close to having the Jim's logo tattooed upon my person, so it causes me great pain to admit that this may well have been the worst take out food I've ever begrudgingly stuffed into my face.

LA Crawfish: shrimp po boy, fries, chicken nuggets. The LA prefix refers to the state of Louisiana, and this is a chain which serves Louisiana style stuff, of which the po boy is one example. It's actually just a baguette filled with, in this case, shrimp, but somebody apparently decided to call it a po boy so as to reduce Louisiana's surfeit of things which sound a bit French. I don't really get it. I assume the rebranding refers to the sort of person who might eat a shrimp baguette, specifically a young economically impoverished gentleman. What annoys me about the name is that it obliges me to either assume the identity of a comedy English person by asking for a poor boy, or to impersonate a black man from New Orleans simply by pronouncing it correctly. Anyway, the last shrimp po boy I had from LA Crawfish was pretty good. This one was probably the same, but it turned out that I wasn't so hungry as I'd thought, and I struggled with what is essentially a loaf of bread cut in half length-ways and filled with shrimp, lettuce, mayonnaise, and peppers. It's the sort of thing you would more logically eat with a knife and fork, but no-one does, so it feels weird even to attempt to do so. Also, being a fucking idiot, I forgot just how massive the LA Crawfish po boy tends to be and ordered chicken nuggets as well as fries; so there was way too much of it and it was all too dry.

Hung Fong: sweet and sour chicken, spring roll. The problem with committing oneself to a course of takeaway food is that something which might be enjoyed in a diner or eating place doesn't always work as takeaway - as I learned the hard way with Jim's, or, I suppose, the slightly soggy way. That said, I've regarded Chinese food as primarily takeaway for a long time, at least since I was a teenager, even if I'm sat eating it at a table inside a restaurant. Happily this means that Hung Fong's fare translates to styrofoam conveyance without so much as a hiccup, and makes just as much sense consumed at home while watching Wheel of Fortune. This is nice because, perhaps ironically, Hung Fong's fare tastes like proper food more than it tastes like what I've traditionally come to think of as Chinese takeaway, which is probably the difference between English and American variations upon what Chinese people actually eat. Hung Fong is the oldest Chinese restaurant in San Antonio, having been established back in 1939, and they're friends of the family - or at least Jeff is - so we feel it's sort of our duty to keep the place going until normal service is resumed.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. My wife and myself have regarded Los Dos Laredos as more or less the greatest Mexican diner in the universe for at least the last couple of years. It's one of those little orange buildings you might not immediately notice on the Austin Highway, one of many, a happy cartoon chili pepper wearing a sombrero enthusiastically hand-painted on the window and at least one waitresses with a reassuringly slender grasp of English, and the food is wonderful. Amazingly, it works just as well in takeaway form - which has come as a massive relief - and such is the culinary excellence of the establishment that I even ordered a takeaway coffee where I wouldn't ordinarily bother, because even their coffee is amazing and somehow unlike that served by anyone else. The migas plate, for those unfamiliar with the term, is essentially an omelet made with crushed up corn chips, salsa, and a ton of cheese, so it's basically a crunchy omelet and is absurdly fortifying; and happily it works just as well at home following conveyance by means of styrofoam container.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, salted caramel shake. We were heading for Good Time Charlie's but became fearful that their ordinary fare was of such excellence that the mobile version could only come as a disappointment, so instead we went across the road to Shake Shack, which is part of a chain, and about which we'd been wondering ever since they set up shop on that corner where the Kiddie Park used to be. The chicken was crispy and delicious, and the shake may actually have been the greatest thing I've ever sucked through a straw, not least because I actually could suck it through a straw unlike the usual multicoloured nightmares in flavoured sugar with the consistency of peanut butter. We ate in the car, in the parking lot of Half Price Books so as to watch all the pussy cats which congregate in the area, so it felt like a bit of an occasion.

Popeye's: chicken burger. Having once ordered a Popeye's poor boy, or rather a po boy, at least as cumbersome as the thing I had from LA Crawfish, I wisely limited myself to just the chicken burger, which was actually decent. As the restaurant - if we're now going to call fast food joints restaurants - was fully closed (rather than open but with the seating area cordoned off), I was obliged to sit in the drive-through lane on my bike behind a massive truck like some kind of lunatic. Thankfully my order came through pretty quickly. I think the last time I went inside a branch of Popeye's it took about twenty minutes, which I assumed to be a deliberate delay intended to reinforce the illusion of our being in Louisiana where sitting around on your arse and not giving a fuck actively counts as an undertaking.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, cheese burger, fries, salted caramel shake. We went back but somehow it wasn't as good. I had an extra burger in the belief that just one wouldn't be enough, but it was too much and the chicken wasn't as crispy, plus it was pissing down with rain and I realised I needed new shoes as I crossed the forecourt to place the order. I realised this because my feet were damp.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, salted caramel shake. Yet the third time was just as good as the first, so I have no idea what happened there given that it was still pissing with rain. Perhaps a pall was cast across the previous occasion by the passing of Eddie from Little & Large.

El Jibarazo: carne asada tacos. El Jibarazo is a semi-stationary taco truck parked next to a raised porch built on the side an automotive place owned by the same people. I seem to recall Trump warning us about taco trucks, which really says more about him than anything else. El Jibarazo's food is kind of basic, I suppose, but pisses over pretty much everything else in San Antonio. Their carne asada tacos - or Mexican street tacos if you live in Portland, tend to screech a lot and your fave band is Ha Ha Tonka - may conceivably be the greatest tacos on the planet and are no less amazing eaten at home given that they're already takeaway.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. Still good during the second weekend of the lockdown and made us both feel better after another encounter with a certain passive-aggressive relative who should really have been staying the fuck home rather than worrying about hire cars given that she doesn't actually have any friends to visit.

Guajillo's: mole poblano. Guajillo's was the last place we ate before everything shut down, and their mole poblano is amazing and the best version of this dish I've eaten outside Mexico. It's that chocolate and chilli thing everyone's heard about, and I've tried to cook it myself but have never got the balance right. The key seems to be that it should be just a little more spicy than you like, which is something I find difficult to judge, but whoever rules the frying pan at Guajillo's is clearly a master of the art. Anyway, we didn't even realise Guajillo's was doing take out during the shut down, and hadn't even wondered, assuming their food to be one of those things which wouldn't really work in mobile form. Happily we were wrong and being able to eat Guajillo's mole poblano at home came fairly close to a religious experience.

McDonalds: cheeseburgers, fries, soda. I was ill, but thankfully with diverticulitis rather than coronavirus. This is an occasionally recurring condition which manifests as stomach cramps and an inability to poo, which I usually get around with Milk of Magnesia and a liquid only diet for as long as it takes - usually just a day; and at the end of this particular day I began to experience hunger and so opted for something fairly bland just to be on the safe side. I only seem to eat at McDonald's when I'm ill, and on this occasion it was nevertheless welcome

Sabor Cocinabar: enchiladas Aztecas. Along with Good Time Charlie's, Guajillo's, Los Dos Laredos, and El Jibarazo, Sabor Cocinabar is one of those places which I'd consider top shelf - Mexican food with an unusual gourmet angle, but gourmet Mexican rather than the usual Mexican food for people who don't actually like Mexican food thing which one encounters around this parish from time to time. I'm not even sure what the hell enchiladas Aztecas actually is, but it's gorgeous, seemingly a relative of mole poblano but as an enchilada and involving fried potatoes amongst other things, and with a bewildering suggestion of caramel, or something like caramel. I had doubts it would translate into a takeaway version, and regrettably it kind of didn't, although I couldn't really work out why. There was nothing obviously wrong or lacking except that somehow it lacked spirit, so maybe the ingredient I've yet to identify is witchcraft.

Good Time Charlie's: cilantro jack steak, fries, house salad. We put off the inevitable sampling of Charlie's takeaway service for fear of it failing to live up to the standard of their food as served in house. Charlie's probably qualifies as our all-time favourite diner. We chalked up thirty-one separate visits in 2019, beating Los Dos Laredos by two; of course we should have known better and trusted in Charlie's where even the fucking salad is amazing; and the aforementioned fucking salad was, against all reason, still amazing as takeaway in a styrofoam punnet, contrary to expectations lowered by that weird limp thing we brought home from Jim's the other week. Jim's, to briefly backtrack, is usually great but has been occasionally prone to lackluster intervals depending, I suppose, on who they have working for them at the time, and whilst an actual poor meal at Jim's is a truly rare thing, when they screw up, the food tends to remind you that you're eating at a chain restaurant. Charlie's by comparison is like the very best of Jim's done right to the point of tasting like home cooking, so it's probably significant that they're not a chain. Cilantro jack steak, in case you were wondering, is a hamburger steak grilled with fresh cilantro - or coriander if you prefer - inside, topped with cheese, and I could die happy eating it. It's the sort of food you anticipate eating at the end of a tough day. You can actually feel your soul healing as you dine. The cheese was a little dryer than usual as takeaway, but it was still lush.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. Third visit and still delivering the goods.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, cookies and cream shake. I was going to cook that evening but a power outtage curtailed my plans, obliging us all - even the kid - to go out for a drive because the car has air conditioning, what with this being Texas and all. They were out of salted caramel shake, but the cookies and cream was good. Once again we ate in the car in the parking lot at Half Price, and this time we saw more of the local cats, including the black fluffy one, due to the weather being warm and sunny.

There followed further visits to Los Dos Laredos, Good Time Charlie's and El Jibarazo for the same orders as listed above for a further couple of weeks until the restaurants opened up again, albeit at 25% seating capacity; but writing about every last meal gets repetitive, and I'm sure you get the general idea.

Doctor, No

Six months before I moved to Texas I had a blood test. The results came back confirming my being in possession of so much cholesterol that I could have caught fire at any moment, and that my blood pressure was so high as to facilitate my fighting crime as a sort of blood-gusher-based superhero by opening a vein and blasting criminals with a high-pressure geyser of claret.

'It's winter and everywhere is frozen,' I explained to my doctor, 'I've been sat on my arse for the last six weeks, but okay - I'll make the effort to get out and about a bit more.'

She wasn't having it and prescribed Simvastatin, which struck me as a little premature seeing as I felt fine. I had the feeling she was just really into writing out prescriptions.

After three days of taking the drug, I hadn't slept for so much as five minutes, hadn't even felt drowsy, and I wanted to kill myself. By suggesting that I wanted to kill myself, I don't mean to imply that I felt a little bit glum and went around with a frowny face. I mean that I wanted to kill myself. I therefore stopped taking the pills and immediately felt better.

My doctor told me off, saying that I should have consulted her before quitting the prescribed medication and that I'd been very irresponsible.

'It's because I couldn't sleep and wanted to kill myself,' I explained.

'Of course, there are sometimes minor problems of that nature,' she admitted, 'but side effects usually pass after the first couple of weeks.'

'I would have killed myself by then.'

I refused further medication, instead knuckling down to riding my bike fifteen miles each day regardless of ice and snow. Six months later I underwent another medical examination at a Harley Street practice, as required by the immigration people. My cholesterol was fine and my blood pressure was normal.

Gosh.

More recently I underwent a medical examination at the Oakwell Farms medical center, something required by my medical insurance. I came close to weighing 210lbs before Christmas and had therefore been trying to get my weight down, mainly just through increased exercise and less snacking. It seemed to be working, and I was down to about 194lbs when I went for the medical.

'Shouldn't I take off my clothes or something?' I asked.

'No. Just get on the scale,' said the nurse. 'Do you know how much you weigh?'

'I was 194lbs this morning.'

'Well, you're 205lbs now.'

'That would probably be the boots and the three layers of clothing.'

The examination was over in minutes and struck me as lacking attention to detail. The results came back confirming I had more cholesterol than anyone who had ever lived in the entire history of triglycerides, and my blood pressure was so high that I could have severed my feet at the ankles and blasted myself off into outer space like a human rocket.

The results pissed me off so I ignored them. For one thing, my blood pressure was usually normal when I had it checked at the periodontist's office three or four times a year.

Another couple of months later I decided to have yet another medical examination. It seemed like high time I should have a doctor stick his finger up my arse in search of prostate cancer, and I figured I might as well have a proper check up on the same ticket. I was exercising every day, losing weight and doing well, so I wanted to know just how well because the previous examination had been a bit of a joke.

The nurse weighed me, stood me next to a tape measure, filled five big Cumberland sausage sized test tubes with blood, and asked a string of questions.

Do you smoke?

How much do you drink?

How many fingers am I holding up?

Can you tell me the name of the president?

I pulled a face answering the last one, and so did she.

The doctor came in.

'Are you going to stick a finger up my arse?' I enquired.

'No. No. There's no need. Cancer screening is all part of the blood test these days.'

'Okay.'

'I see that you smoke,' he said happily.

'No.'

'You don't smoke?'

'No, I don't.'

He seemed disappointed. 'Well, your blood pressure is a little high.'

'Is it really?'

'Yes, if I could—'

'I can tell you now, I'm not taking statins.'

'Statins are used to treat cholesterol, not high blood pressure.'

'Oh okay.'

'Well, perhaps we'd better wait until the results of this latest blood test come back.'

We waited, but I'd already knew I didn't like the guy. He was younger and fatter than myself, and I was somehow the wheezing porker in the equation. I could already sense him angling to prescribe something. He seemed to be fishing around in my medical history for anything he could work with. That was the impression I received, and the phone call came a few weeks later.

'The doctor urgently needs to discuss the results of your blood test. You have so much cholesterol that we've had to invent a new number by which to quantify it, and your blood pressure is such that at first we thought it was simply that Hulk Hogan was somehow living inside you.'

'Oh fuck off,' I didn't say, not actually slamming the phone down. I made an appointment, then cancelled it and made another for a day on which my wife would be able to come along, because she works in healthcare and is fairly adept at bullshit detection.

We were bang on time because they charge twenty-five dollars for missed appointments, a fine imposed because they could have spent those minutes curing someone, and healing the sick is the only thing with which they are concerned. Forty minutes later we were at last ushered into the presence of my doctor.

'You have a 13% chance of contracting heart disease before you reach seventy,' he smiled.

'Well, no-one lasts forever,' I said, 'and 13% - aren't those about the same odds as I have of being hit by a meteorite?'

My wife pointed out something statistical regarding the hereditary aspect of heart conditions such as the one which had an alleged 13% chance of killing me. I didn't really understand all of what she was saying, but the doctor did, and didn't really seem to have an answer for it, not directly.

'So, is there any history of heart disease in your family?'

'It isn't really a disease though, is it? I mean you can't have a stroke because you ate a sandwich with heart disease germs on it, or have I failed to understand some aspect of my impending doom?'

'It's a very real condition,' he said, apparently not having grasped my point. 'Do you know if anyone in your family has suffered with heart trouble?'

'No-one whatsoever, although significantly more or less all of them have had cancer, which was the actual reason I came here seeing as that seems a more pressing concern from where I'm sat.'

'Well, you're fine on that score.'

'That's good to know.'

'Everything is looking good aside from the cholesterol and the blood pressure.'

'Well, I'm not taking statins as I already told you.'

'Statins have come a long way and have been greatly improved over the last couple of years.'

'I don't care. I'm still not taking them.' I reiterated the account given in the first nine paragraphs above, mainly because it seemed as though he'd forgotten our having met on the occasion of the examination which had yielded the results now under discussion.

'Yes, I've heard all about your NHS,' - he curled off a wry smile, almost a sneer - 'no diagnosis, just chucking a handful of pills at you and sending you on your—'

'There's nothing wrong with the NHS,' I said, noticing I'd used that tone of voice which expresses openness to the possibility of finishing the conversation outside in the parking lot. I wasn't having this fucking tosser running the NHS down.

'Well, for now we can consider other options, healthier eating and so on.'

'I eat healthy,' I said. 'I suppose you're going to tell me I should cut my McDonald's intake down to just four visits a day, or something of the sort.'

'We eat very healthily,' my wife confirmed. 'He does all the cooking and it's all fresh. We don't eat salty things.'

'You may not think you do, but even when you open up a can of Campbell's soup because it's in the recipe, well, the salt content—'

'That isn't,' I cut him off with just a hint of Margaret Rutherford in my voice, 'the sort of cooking in which I engage.'

My wife has a recipe book typed out by an ageing relative during the great depression. I barely recognise any of the recipes, which truly belong to a culture to which I am alien. Many of them seem to combine ingredients which are already recognisably food, a tin of mushroom soup poured over battered onion rings, then baked as a casserole - and the recipe concluded with a bewildering comment of sooooooo good or similar. It seems like the sort of cooking I tried when I was fifteen, baked beans plus a teaspoon of every herb or spice on the rack because if one is good, then twenty-six will surely be amazing. I like to think I've evolved beyond the culinary level of a bewildered teenager left to his own devices.

'I apologise if it seems like I'm on the defensive,' I said without feeling even remotely sorry, 'but you have to appreciate that I eat pretty well, I don't smoke, hardly drink, and I cycle one hundred miles a week, and you're telling me that it isn't enough. I may as well be sat on my arse scoffing pies and cakes all day for all the difference it makes. That's what you're telling me.'

'Well, I'd like you to imagine the effects of a stroke, being unable to speak, maybe one side of your body paralysed—'

Now he was trying to scare me, somehow imagining I had no idea what a stroke could be or how it might affect a person. 'Sure, but if you don't mind I'll just keep on as I am. I've lost a stone since Christmas and a little bit more drops off every week, so I'm not even sure what I'm doing here.'

'Well, we can see how you're getting on in another six months.'

'Fine.'

We left with no real intention of coming back. It seems I put on weight when I first moved to America, because the government forces us all to eat a cheeseburger whilst saluting the flag every morning; I have about a stone to go before I get back to what is supposedly my ideal weight for my age and height. I will get there, and if my blood pressure and cholesterol remain high then I'll just have to assume that's how it's going to be.

Barbecue Quest

It's that time of year again. Byron is competing at the Barbecue Cookoff and has bunged us a couple of tickets. We're going along partially because it's his weekend with the kid - Byron's son, my stepson - and there's probably a limit to how much fun Junior can absorb from such an event whilst his father is busily setting lumps of meat on fire, so we're going to pick up the boy and whisk him back to the safety of his room and his games system. The Barbecue Cookoff is ordinarily part of the annual Stock Show & Rodeo, which is nice because it means we get to see the cows; but this year the event has been moved to a different site for some reason, one without much in the way of available parking. The plan is that we park at the AT&T Center, which is where the Barbecue Cookoff has been staged up until now, and we take a shuttle to the new site which is two miles away. The shuttles have been specially laid on. There must be a reason for this new, somewhat laborious arrangement, but neither Bess nor myself can work out what it might be.

This whole thing about parking then taking the shuttle seems like a pain in the ass. Bess looks on the map and notices that the site is about ten minutes walk from the Jack White Park Trailhead, or that's how it looks. The Trailhead is part of a greenway which follows Salado Creek south towards the old Spanish Missions. We've both been along there before, and it makes for a pleasant walk through a largely wooded strip of land away from the noise and traffic of the highway. So that's the box we're ticking.

We park at the Trailhead, oblivious to the fact of an empty parking lot suggesting that no-one else considered this seemingly obvious shortcut. We cross beneath the interstate, then a smaller railway bridge, and we follow the creek. We can hear stadium country in the distance and the smell of barbecue faintly smokes the breeze. Stadium country is country and western without the redeeming features, more X Factor than Hank Williams; but in its favour, it can always be heard at great distance and as such provides useful navigational information to the occasional questing wanderer.

'It can't be much further,' Bess suggests.

Sixty seconds later, we notice that the music now seems to be behind us. We look to the source, to the eastern line of trees, and the possibility occurs to us that we're on the wrong side of the creek. We turn around and head back for the interstate.

'Maybe if we head up that way,' I suggest, pointing.

'That's along the highway,' Bess says. 'We won't get very far.'

We're both looking at the headquarters of the Lucifer lighting company, which is at least on the same side of the creek as the Cookoff. The grounds of the Lucifer lighting company slope down towards the water, and there seems to be a path worn into the grass, so again we head off.

'That always struck me as a funny name for a lighting company,' says Bess. 'Like Beezebub plumbing or Satan parcel delivery.'

'You know Lucifer means light bringer?'

'Really?'

'Actually I'm not sure, but it's something like that. Luce means light in Italian, so…'

'Well, the fallen angel - I guess he was supposed to be pretty hot after all.'

Approaching the railway bridge, the path takes us into a labyrinth of reeds, dried stalks of Arundo donax, an invasive species which can grow up to twenty feet in height and does well in really shitty, contaminated soil. It's one of those things which thrives around industrial estates and places you probably don't want to go, and the earth beneath the bridge is accordingly decorated with flattened beer cans and burnt patches. Forward progress becomes difficult.

'I'm having my doubts about this one.'

'Let's turn back,' Bess sighs. 'I don't feel like getting assaulted today. I suppose at least we tried.'

We return to the car, and grudgingly drive to the AT&T Center where the parking lot is already filling and we have to pay ten dollars on top of the Cookoff ticket price. We follow the crowd on foot, everybody drawn to the point from which the shuttle will depart. Everyone is wearing a Stetson and my head feels suddenly naked. I'm overdue a haircut, that being one sin for which a Stetson usually compensates. I've been meaning to buy a new hat for some time. My current Stetson has had a lot of use and is consequently so old, crappy, and distressed that it could pass for the cover of a Nine Inch Nails record.

The shuttle arrives and we all pile on. It's actually a school bus, the large yellow kind as driven by Otto in The Simpsons. I've never been on one of these buses before, and yet they are universal to the experience of almost everyone I know. The interior is cramped and crappy and it feels as though someone will almost certainly bring either a goat or chickens on board at any moment.

'You must have seen that in Mexico though,' Bess says.

'Not really. The buses seemed a bit scary and confusing. I took coaches out of the city but that was different.'

'No chickens?'

'Mostly businessy types. I caught a Pesero in Tula but there was no-one with a chicken on there. It was a bit freaky because I was just following what everyone else did, and no-one seemed to be paying when they got on, so I sat down and assumed you were supposed to pay when you got off. Then the next few people who got on paid the driver, making me look like an arrogant cunt tourist.'

'What did you do?'

'I paid him when I got off and tried to explain that I was a clueless gringo. He didn't seem to care that much.'

We head off and I think about Mexico, and then crazy school bus drivers described by Henry Rollins in his spoken performances. Thankfully our guy just seems to be doing his job. We take a side road I've never noticed before into what may as well be open country, and yet we're still in the middle of the city because that's how San Antonio works. We are surrounded by scrubby fields of cacti and we pass stables with horses stood around.

Finally we arrive. We get wristbands and find a map posted on an information board, from which we learn that Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em have a concession just a little way further along the main thoroughfare. The place is packed.

Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em is the name of Byron's barbecue team, apparently taken from a song by Ted Nugent. I have no idea when it all got started, but he's always been a good cook. Apparently someone at some point told him he should compete in barbecue competition events, so he did, and in doing so acquired a whole team of helpers, crew, hangers-on, or whatever you want to call them.

'So what do the rest of those guys do?' I ask my wife, because she's telling me the story. 'Do they just hang around and maybe pass him an onion if he needs it?'

'Pretty much,' she tells me. 'Byron does most of the actual cooking. They turn things on the grill while he's doing something else, or they stand around and make sure the beer is drinkable.'

'So it's really Byron who wins the competitions?'

'Yes, but to his credit he's never really been about personal glory in that way.'

It transpires that Byron has a rival team formed from Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em dissidents who felt sidelined by his superior cooking ability, despite his repeated emphasis on everything having been a team effort, even when it wasn't. We're better than this, they apparently cried out. We can barbecue as good as any man, and no more will we stand in the background occasionally handing a tomato to some superstar…

We find the concession and we have wristbands which grant admittance. There's a marquee and a bar. The barbecue trailer is at the back, a huge open-sided thing on wheels with Byron and a couple of others working away. We find Junior in a caravan next to the trailer. He seems glad that we've arrived, but we have to tell him that we're not leaving just yet seeing as we only just got here.  We talk to Byron and Robert and have sodas from the bar. One of the bartenders wears a hat resembling a turd, specifically a furry cartoon turd with a smiley face. It's not that much of a surprise.

Having found our bearings, Bess and I take a walk. There are a couple of stalls selling hats around the corner, including Stetsons. It takes a few tries but I find one which fits my apparently massive head, and it's only twenty dollars. I buy it and feel that the journey has been worth my while. We wander a little further but come perilously close to where some band are still belting out the stadium country by which we forged our earlier path. We head back to the Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em concession.

Just outside the concession I pause to read postcards pinned to a board. They're from little kids, all addressed to Byron and mostly thanking him for buying their cow or pig. I get the impression that in most cases, the cow or pig in question has been hand-reared by the child who wrote the card.

'Did you see this?' I ask Bess.

'Oh yeah,' she says. 'He does a lot for those school 4H clubs.'

'4H?'

'Horticulture, husbandry, and a couple of other Hs.'

'Hogs?'

'No.'

'But it's like agriculture and stuff?'

'Yes.'

I take another look at the postcards. It seems like these kids put a lot of love into raising their animals. 'They know what Byron does, don't they, why he's buying their animals?'

'Oh yes.'

This is one I'm just going to have to keep from thinking about too hard, given that I already know where meat comes from.

Byron appears, jovial as usual. We shoot the breeze for a couple of minutes, wishing him luck with thrashing the dissidents in the upcoming competition. He horses around as is his way, a man truly in his element.

Then we gather up the kid, and head home.

High Society

We're driving along a certain road through Alamo Heights, and we're driving slowly because it's dark. The road winds down a hillside and Bess snatches glances at a map she has displayed on her phone. We pass another road on the left, a junction with bright lights illuminating expensive cars tended by smartly dressed men. The scene suggests valet parking, which is what we're looking for.

'How do we get back there?' Bess is trying to make sense of the directions given by her phone.

'We turn around,' I suggest.

We do so, returning the way we came, passing the junction of brightly lit motor vehicles before taking a right.

'What are you doing?' I ask. 'It was back there.'

'I don't think that was the road.'

'Did you not see all those cars?'

'Yes, but that wasn't their address.'

'No, but if their house is on a corner - as that one was - then it will be alongside a second road other than the one given as the address,' I explain, fully aware of my having begun to sound like Peter Cook. 'I therefore put it to you that we've just driven right past the place we're trying to get to. Turn here.' I point.

We approach the cars and the lights from the other direction.

'This must be it,' I say.

'I don't know.'

'That's valet parking if ever I saw it, and the invitation said there would be valet parking.'

'Okay.' She winds down the window and asks the guy who is about to open her door. 'Is this the Pace residence?'

He smiles and confirms that it is, and tells us he will be happy to park our vehicle.

'No, we just wanted to know we had the right place.'

'Let's just go with the flow,' I say. 'You saw the streets around here. We could end up having to park miles away.'

Bess concedes the point. We get out and a complete stranger climbs in and drives our car off around the corner, albeit a well-dressed complete stranger.

Some years ago, back when I was living in England, I developed a fascination with Mexican culture and by association a taste for Mexican food. I made my own salsa, but more often than not I'd buy a jar from the local supermarket because it would keep longer. I favoured Pace brand salsa, which was slightly harder to find than the better publicised version made by Old El Paso, but actually tasted like salsa; and now here I am, roughly fifteen years later on the other side of the planet, arriving at the home of the Pace family because our kids go to the same school. This is one of these things I could never, ever have foreseen. Pace were bought out by Cambell Soup in 1995, but it's the same family, and that's why they live in such a huge house, and why their parties offer valet parking.

I know that America has a class system, contrary to the claims of the recklessly idealistic, but I was never convinced of it being a direct correlation to anything I remember from England. Alamo Heights is full of what I'm told are the American upper classes, but mostly they just seem to be regular yahoos with too much money. Take away the big house and the superfluous ceremony and you're still left with some grunting knacker stood in Walmart in his pyjamas stocking up on beer and Funyuns; but I now realise I have it wrong. It's Christmas, and the Pace house is decorated with the extravagance of a department store, but it's kind of tasteful with not a ho-ho-hoing animatronic Santa to be seen. Inside the house, the walls are covered with art, actual canvasses - mostly abstract expressionist - and the guests hail from some demographic other than the cigar and face lift set which doubtless still clog up PTA meetings at the San Antonio Academy.

Junior rushes off in search of other kids, and we say hi to Ava, the daughter who knows our boy from school. We always try to encourage their friendship because Ava is intelligent, a good influence, and she doesn't take shit from anyone. She's shot up this last year, tall, skinny and a little awkward, but she's a great kid. Everybody loves Ava.

Bess introduces me to Ava's mother. We've met before but it was brief and a long time ago. As we talk, my initial impressions are proven. These people may have a ton of money, but they read books and are able to converse on subjects other than ball games, taxes, or favourite Disney character. I present Mrs. Pace with a pork pie, introducing it as an English delicacy, which I suppose it is because you can't buy them here, at least not without having to spunk away seventy dollars on refrigerated postage from some artisan mail order operation. I only ever want one pork pie a year, usually around Christmas, but my craving has been such that I've ended up making them myself. This has been quite an undertaking given that the required hot water pastry can be a bugger to work with. As I present Mrs. Pace with the pie, it feels as though I have lapsed into a peculiar east-European accent.

I bring you a gift from my people.

'It's supposed to be eaten cold,' is what I actually say. 'Maybe with pickled onions and some cheese. It's a traditional Christmas morning thing.'

I get the feeling she's slightly bewildered by my offering, but nevertheless hurries off to place it in the fridge.

Bess and I mingle in search of food. There's a huge silver platter piled high with what turns out to be jam sandwiches - a surreal effort most likely aimed at the younger guests. An eccentric cubbyhole below the staircase has been converted into a bar, so I grab a glass of wine, and we head for what seems to be the dining room. Music is provided by professional carol singers in pseudo-Dickensian atire, three of them giving voice in the doorway of what is probably the living room. I suppose it's a little hokey, which is true of most things associated with this particular holiday, but at least its not some fucking soundbar belting out Jingle Bell Rock, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas or any of the usual festive atrocities.

'You remember, Ty?' Bess tells me, propelling me towards a tall, cheery man of a physical type resembling a classical Greek hero and with a proud head of curly locks.

'Of course,' I bellow happily as I shake his hand. 'You have a lot more hair these days!'

He's glad to renew our acquaintance but seems puzzled by my comment, and about ten minutes later I will come to a realisation that actually I don't remember having met him before, and I thought he was Mr. Bertha, our boy's similarly statuesque but shaven-headed teacher. Never mind. It's Christmas, and we've all had a few.

The buffet seems an odd selection, as though some crucial element is missing, but it's smoked salmon and caviar, amongst other things, so I'm not complaining. We fill our plates and head outside into the garden. Ava passes in the dark with an entourage of pouting girls, and the boys are similarly arranged in their own small groups, daring each other to perform retarded acts near the fountain.

We head for the garage and watch Santa doing his thing for a little while. A sequence of small children are ferried to his knee for photo opportunities, and I'm not even grimacing. Maybe it's the wine. I have another glass and we go back inside. We look at the art, and I try to explain abstract expressionism to my wife, about how the painting is a thing in itself rather than a representation of something else, about edge tension and surface and all that good stuff. It's been a while since I found myself having to think about any of that kind of thing, and Bess isn't convinced.

Eventually, we're partied out, and we find the boy wandering around on his own, which is more or less what we've been doing too. We leave and our car is driven around to the front gate for us. We've probably managed about an hour, but I didn't hate any of it, and that's good going for me.

Conversation in a Fast Food Establishment

I'm well aware of all of the many arguments against, both dietary and moral, but nevertheless every once in a while I get a craving for something from McDonald's, and it's usually breakfast. Living in Texas, I'm spoiled for burger joints, and most of them serve the real thing, but you don't always necessarily want the real thing. Sometimes you want a McDonald's.

The guy is young and white with a beard of the kind which is really just hair growing on his face, hair with which he might do something but he hasn't yet decided what.

'I'll have a sausage and egg McMuffin.'

'Okay.'

I don't recall seeing his name tag so let's call him Steve for the sake of argument. 'Actually I'll have the meal. That's with coffee and a hash brown, right?'

'Sure - medium coffee,' and Steve says something else I don't quite catch. I guess he's asking me whether I require milk.

'White,' I say, and feel immediately weird about it, like we're a couple of Klansmen exchanging secret signals. At the same time the other half of my brain unscrambles the original question, whether I want creamer and sugar. I take another fraction of a second arguing with myself over creamer, and how actually I'd like milk because nobody in the history of the world has ever genuinely wanted creamer, but I'm in McDonald's so it's not really worth arguing. You press the button, stuff comes out, and that's how it works.

'Two sugars,' I say.

'Creamer?'

'Two of those as well.' I notice how this transaction is going smoothly, or at least more so than what usually happens when I enter a fast food joint. I'm not certain it's that my accent sounds strange so much as that it's simply unfamiliar, so for some people it's as though Prince Charles just came in the door and they freak out accordingly. I had to ask for ketchup four fucking times at Barbecue Station, and yes, use of fucking as a quantifier is entirely justified in this instance. Each time I asked, I pronounced the word ketchup exactly as it is pronounced by everyone else in the universe.

Have you got any ketchup?

Say what?

Ketchup.

What was that again?

Ketchup.

You want some milk?

Ketchup.

At one point he held up a squeezy bottle of mustard and pointed like that might be what I was referring to with my free-form Dadaist parole in libertà. Anyway, right now it's going well for me in McDonald's, so I get adventurous.

'Can I have an extra hash brown with that?' Somehow this is traditionally the stage at which I come unstuck. I'm a pig and that's why I want twice the traditional quota which comes with the order, and usually this confuses people at least as much as when I ask for ketchup. 'So that's two hash browns.'

Steve presses buttons on the till, which seems promising. 'I guess you're from across the pond.'

'Yeah.'

'So what brings you here?'

'I live here. I mean, I got married and I live here. My wife is from San Antonio.'

He chuckles. 'How do you like the heat?'

'Well, you know, it's okay.'

'I'm from Seattle and I can't stand it. I'm used to rain.'

I tend to enjoy conversations with strangers, but sometimes the novelty can get in the way. I'm enjoying this one because it seems like no big deal. 'I guess England and Seattle have about the same climate,' I suggest.

He says something about London, something relating to weather, I guess.

'I was a mailman for twenty years so I don't mind it,' - I mean that I don't mind the heat here in Texas, but it probably doesn't matter whether I'm making sense. 'You know, starting every morning at six and it's freezing cold and like there's a whole six months where the sky is just grey all of the time, so I really don't mind the heat at all.'

I assume that made some kind of sense, and I've noticed that I used the term mailman in preference to postman. I consider the city of Seattle for a second, the home of Tad, Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Peter Bagge's Hate! comic. 'How come you ended up here?'

'My mom was in the military, Steve explains, 'so I came down here with her, but she moved to California.'

'You didn't want to move with her?'

'I'm twenty-five and I couldn't. It wouldn't have worked out. She bought me a house here so,' and he explains something I don't quite catch about paying rent. Whatever it is, it sounds positive.

'Nice!'

There doesn't seem to be anything more to say, so I pick a table by the window with a view of the Austin Highway. My order is numbered 103 on the receipt which Steve gave me. It feels strange to be sat at a table without food, so I return to the counter and wait.

Steve is now mopping the floor. 'You know, it's okay here but I could have lived without Harvey.'

Clearly he's referring to the hurricane. 'Yeah, but I guess we were lucky.'

He talks about Houston and the flooding.

'I know,' I say. 'My wife always tells me we're too far inland for any serious damage, and she's lived here her whole life. I mean I know there were tornadoes in the city last year. I try not to worry about it too much.' This was supposed to sound reassuring, but I somehow managed to get onto the occurrence of tornadoes in a city which traditionally doesn't suffer tornadoes.

Steve shakes his head. 'I tell you one thing, I thought Bush handled Katrina bad, but compared to this guy, Trump - I mean, Jesus - what a mess.'

'I hear you.'

I don't know if the sense of relief was tangible in my voice.

As a white man, I probably don't have a lot to worry about in the great scheme of things, at least nothing specific to my lack of pigmentation; but one minor hazard of being a white guy is when other white people assume that I share their shitheaded right-wing or even racist views. It's not a major problem, but it's enough of one for it to feel amazing when it doesn't happen.

I definitely approve of Steve.

'Wait until Hurricane Irma wipes out New York,' he mutters darkly, still mopping. 'We'll see how he likes that.'

Birthday Boy

It's taken a while, but I finally seem to have achieved some kind of communicative syncretism with the child, the fruit of my wife's previous marriage, my stepson. He was six and puzzling when I first showed up, although even then it was already clear that his sense of humour lay at a healthy tangent to that of everyone else in the universe. All that he lacked was the means by which to communicate it. Here's the first joke he ever told me, one of his own compositions:

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Cheese.
Cheese who?
Cheesy.

The joke had the cadence of something proposed by one who has not yet grasped what humour is or how a joke is supposed to work, but as time has passed I've come to realise that Junior knew exactly what he was doing. It's an unfunny joke, specifically a joke which relies upon defying audience expectation of the punchline making sense or being conventionally amusing. I too went through an unfunny joke phase, as did a number of my friends at school, the apotheosis of which would probably have been the block of wood joke cycle pioneered by Jason Roberts.

Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because he was glued to the block of wood.

You probably had to be there. We were about fourteen, so it could be argued that Junior has been ahead of the developmental curve in this respect.

The timeshare jokes started a couple of years ago, beginning with him asking friends, relatives, and occasionally random strangers whether they would like to buy a timeshare. None of us really found it particularly entertaining, which is probably what made it funny for him, so he continued. In fact he really hammered that thing into the ground, so much so that it eventually became funny. My wife paid for and built him a sarcastic website for his last birthday. Subsequent gift-giving occasions have further furnished him with timeshare-themed business cards and custom printed promotional pens which he gives out to other kids whilst savouring their utter confusion. My biggest fear was once that I might be stepfather to some drooling games-addict man-child who can name four-thousand different species of Pokémon but never quite got the hang of wiping his own arse; but happily it turns out that I'm stepfather to Chris Morris. My adopted child is a living Swiftian satire on late capitalism.

Now it's his fourteenth birthday. It's morning and my wife is headed off, first to collect the boy from his father's house and convey him to zoo camp, and then to work.

'Wait!' I say. I'm washing dishes. I pull the plastic lid of a Land O'Lakes butter carton from the water, swipe it clean, dry it off and hand it to her.

'Here. Give him this and tell him happy birthday from me.'

'He'll be thrilled,' my wife chuckles.

I haven't bought him anything because it's difficult to buy for him, so many of his interests being in non-corporeal things inhabiting screens of one kind or another; which leaves us just with the thoughts which supposedly count. The thoughts which count for me are that I've bought him nearly everything he's eaten under this roof for the last six years, and kept his room clean, and that he's surrounded by relatives forever throwing money at him, so he gets a butter lid and he'll be glad of it. I have a hunch that this kind of useless gift will appeal to his sense of humour, and it's given as an homage to the relatives of my friend Carl, specifically his grandfather and sister. The two of them never saw eye to eye and would present each other with cheap passive-aggressive gifts at Christmas, a newspaper one year, a packet of crisps the next.

We formally celebrate the boy's birthday in the evening with a meal at Magic Time Machine, a themed restaurant. The theme is vague, depending upon who the waiters and waitresses feel like impersonating from the worlds of film, television, comic books, showbusiness, or whatever else the dressing-up box has coughed up. They're mostly pretty good, staying in ludicrously exaggerated character as Jack Sparrow, Batman, or Lara Croft whilst taking our order; and best of all, it's mostly amateurish, enthusiastic, and aware of its own absurdity as opposed to slick and corporate, more Rocky Horror than Magic Kingdom. I guess the waiters and waitresses get to pick which character they play based on how well they feel able to pull off a convincing Spiderman or Marge Simpson or whoever. This means that our own table is attended by Miranda.

Miranda wears a striped shirt, too much lipstick, baggy pants with the message haters back off inscribed on the ass, and we haven't heard of her either.

'I have a series on Netflix,' she explains in a weird voice, patently an impersonation of someone none of us recognise. 'You should really watch it.'

I suppose this at least means that should I ever apply for work at Magic Time Machine, I'll be free to bypass Robocop or Shrek or whoever and just go with what I know best, waiting tables as a former ruler of Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico. The hardest thing to decide will be whether I'm Itzcoatl (1427-1440) or Ahuizotl (1486-1502). I never could decide which of those guys I liked the more. Anyway, it will be hilarious, I promise.

Junior, so it turns out, is very happy with the butter lid I gave him. He's been showing it to all the other kids at zoo camp, incurring their admiration and jealousy.

His father is with us, aided by a walking frame following major surgery just yesterday; and also Jay and Courtlandt, respectively our boy's uncle and cousin. Miranda crams us all into a corner where the edge of the table intrudes upon the bellies of at least four of us, this being Texas and all. I complain so she moves us to another table, still twittering away in bewildering fashion and delivering catchphrases none of us have heard before.

There's Byron, one day after surgery and all on the day of his own father passing; so two of our group have lost their dad, and two have lost their grandfather, and the occasion is strange and a little subdued.

Junior opens presents as we wait for drinks to arrive. As well as the butter lid, he also receives a Swiss army spade from his father, a high-tech shovel which can be disassembled and repurposed for all manner of esoteric survivalist requirements. He plays with the shovel for a while, taking it apart, showing us the blade, the components one might use to start a fire and so on.

We pass around his birthday cards and read them.

One is from his grandfather, no longer with us.

It tears my heart out, just for a moment, seeing the signature.

Happy birthday, kiddo - your Granddad's dead, I think.

Drinks come, iced tea, beer, and something green with waves of dry ice frothing over the brim for Junior, all part of the service at Magic Time Machine. A minute later, he accidentally knocks it over whilst demonstrating some function of the Swiss army spade.

Courtlandt grabs the butter lid and uses it to scoop frothing liquid across the table into the now empty glass.

'See! I told you it had a use!'

We all agree what a great present the butter lid has been as Miranda brings us another green drink with dry ice.

We eat. Jay and I discuss our favourite Police albums. He likes Synchronicity, but I prefer Zenyatta Mondatta.

Everyone is a little subdued. It's impossible to imagine what must be going through the heads of the two boys. I still remember how hard the death of my own grandfather hit me at roughly their age.

Miranda fetches a to go box so I can take the leftover fries and make chip butties with them. She draws a pair of pants with haters back off written across the seat on the polystyrene box, then a pair of lips and an arrow pointing to the name Netflix, so we'll be able to find out about the character she's been playing and decide whether it's funny or not.

Next morning, Junior screws his Swiss army spade together and announces that he'll be taking it with him to zoo camp.

'Are you sure?' I ask, sharing a quizzical glance with my wife. 'I mean with great power comes great responsibility, and you know that thing cost your father a lot...'

He whisks out the butter lid, flashing it at me like a cop showing his badge.

'Well, all right then,' I say. 'I guess you know what you're doing,' and I'm secretly impressed, perhaps even proud.

Schnitzel & Giggles

So far as I can remember, my first village fête was in Wimpstone, a row of houses in rural Warwickshire which I'm not even convinced was ever really long enough to be called a village, although it probably seemed like the big city when I was five. The River Stour runs along the back of Wimpstone, past the last house and under the main road, and I imagine the fête must have occupied the triangular patch of land framed by road, river, and the garden of whoever lived in that last house. That's how I remember it, although it was nearly half a century ago so I could be wrong. I recall attractions which didn't even do much for me at the age of five, if that's how old I was; and I remember old crap turfed out from attics and cupboards beneath stairs for sale upon tablecloths laid across the grass. I bought a book about Robin Hood, or at least I cadged pennies off my mother and bought a book about Robin Hood. It was an orange hardback, the kind which would once have been wrapped in a garish technicolour cover, and it was illustrated. It seemed like quite a find and left a bigger impression on me than anything else that day, or from any village fete since.

Just once, I would like to have been as excited about a village fête as Randy is about the Camden County Fair in My Name is Earl*. 

Hey, everybody! I'm Gus, the Camden County Fair bear, runs the commercial while Randy tries hard to keep from exploding with anticipation. Who's ready for some fun? Enjoy food, fun, prizes, an Osama bin Laden shooting gallery; And this year, get your picture taken inside the actual car from Smokey and the Bandit. It's gonna be bear-tastic!

Subsequent commercials additionally promise that the event will be not only bear-riffic, but fully bear-awesome. I know bear-awesome doesn't make any sense, and yet it sort of makes perfect sense; and one day I'll attend a village fête which will be genuinely bear-awesome. Maybe that day has come.

We're out driving. We don't know where we're going because we're having an adventure; or Bess may have some vague idea seeing as she has the wheel because I never learned to drive, but I suspect she's playing it by ear. It's June and we live in Texas, so needless to say it's fucking hot, somewhere up in the vicinity of 100° Fahrenheit; but our lower humidity makes the heat marginally more bearable than it would be in England, and in any case I don't know what that is in old money, so it's just something we deal with, even if it rules out long rural walks at noon.

As we approach Boerne, we see a sign for the Berges Fest, which isn't a village fête because we don't really have villages in Texas; but it sounds like it might be a county fair, and might therefore be bear-awesome. I guess Berges derives from berg, apparently meaning mountain in German; and Boerne is a culturally German town on the edge of the Texas hill country, which I suppose amounts to more sense than my assumption of this being the Berges County Fair, because there is no Berges County. Boerne is in Kendall County.

We park in a suspiciously empty lot, probably a field which has only just been opened up to handle the overspill from the existing lots. We walk amongst giant trucks and make appalling jokes about what we're going to find, because we don't yet know what we're getting into. Thankfully it isn't a Klan rally or an international swingers' expo. It's a fair, if not strictly speaking a county one. It's food, music, heat, and booze. Fest is probably as good a term as any.

First we have cups of corn, something my wife recalls as having been a treat when she was young, but of course a new one on me. We stand next to the fifteen foot inflatable cob and the guy fills polystyrene cups with bright yellow corn. We get plastic spoons and are invited to mix in our own butter - which is in liquid state at this point - mayonnaise, and paprika. Surprisingly, it's delicious.

We approach a covered marquee with open sides, one of two. There's a stage in the middle and an oompah band, all pigtails and lederhosen. The musicians are arranged upon the stage in a half-circle, three rows of them, all seated, because technically they are an oompah orchestra. Sadly there seem to be more people on stage than in the audience, but happily those on stage are having such a great time that they don't really care; and not once am I reminded of that scene in Cabaret.

Finishing our corn, we investigate the other marquee. Within, we find an array of craft stalls, but they seem to be of the kind we see everywhere selling the sort of stuff which fills the stores of Boerne and New Braunfels - pieces of wood embossed with motivational slogans, and the like. There are also stalls selling car insurance and double glazing.

Who the hell goes to the fair and buys double glazing?

There's an ice cream stand run by a likeable old coot with a moustache of the kind my English relatives probably imagine to be more common in Texas than is actually the case. Bess chooses coconut and I decide that I want the eggnog flavour, so our guy works his way around a succession of nine or ten freezers before locating our requested flavours. The ice cream is home made, frozen onto sticks, and delicious.

Beyond the marquee, we find a rodeo in progress, or at least we guess it's a rodeo because there's a rodeo clown stood in front of an audience. An absent minute passes before we see the cattle in a pen on the far side of the bleachers. There's also a distorted commentary coming through the tannoy, but we can't tell what he's commenting upon because nothing seems to be happening, and the commentary is delivered in that accent which sounds like someone playing with a selection of rubber bands. The rodeo clown is just standing there.

Another minute saunters by, and still nothing has happened so we walk in the direction of cheering and excitement. Here is another, smaller crowd, and they too are watching something narrated by a man with a microphone. We shuffle to the front of the crowd and see dachshund races in progress, a couple of little sausage dogs being petted and steadied at one end of a track with their people waiting at the other - doggy people, one of them a woman wearing a t-shirt upon which is written don't ever let go of your wiener in country and western lettering. Suddenly the dogs are off, tails wagging, some panting as they happily trot off in the vague direction of the finish line. They don't seem to be in particularly competitive spirit, but another minute passes and we have a winner. His name is Michael and his owner scoops him up and lavishes him with kisses.

The dachshund is a popular dog in our part of Texas, second only to the chihuahua; but it's hot, and it's difficult to imagine a full afternoon at the dachshund races; and already my wife has been distracted by a food truck, not because she's hungry, but because she's drawn to novelty. The truck has a name, as though it's just a restaurant on wheels. It's called Schnitzel & Giggles, so my wife takes a photograph and posts it on facebook.

It seems like we've had all the fun there is to be had, so we leave. It's been the kind of occasion which might have seemed more significant if we lived in Boerne, which we don't. It's been a great way to spend thirty minutes, but fell sadly short of bear-awesome.

*: Stole Beer from a Golfer, the seventh episode of the first series, in case anyone was wondering.