Flupocalypse

I have a sore throat and I'm short of breath for a couple of days, following which I spend a couple of weeks coughing up dockyard oysters. My wife gets it too, about a day behind me, and then the kid. I've noticed something or other called coronavirus bubbling away at the corners of the media but I haven't been paying it much attention.

Two weeks later, it's the only show in town. Social media is divided into panic stricken statistics about how this is the big one and we're all going to die; calmer statistics about how it's serious but it's simply that we need to be careful and no, we aren't all going to die; and then - riding in on the crest of a righteous wave surfed by those who just need to set the rest of us straight - crazed statistics about how it's true that we won't all die, but the hospitals will be full of corpses so actually we are definitely really going to die and should upscale our panic levels accordingly, but don't panic because that will make it worse, so actually do panic, but don't.

I don't panic. I just find it a bit depressing - apart from all sporting events being cancelled, which is quite cheering.

I phone my dad because I'm flying back to England to visit in April, and I really should have picked a better time to call. As usual, he's turned into a one man Daily Express opinion column. I need to cancel my flight because the airport will be full of dirty foreigners coughing and spluttering, and anyway, Donald Trump was on the telly and he said there won't be any flights to England because everything has been cancelled.

'He didn't say that,' I suggest.

'Yes, he did.'

'No, he didn't. He specified flights to mainland Europe, not flights to the United Kingdom.'

'No. He was on the telly and he said flights to the United Kingdom were suspended.'

'No. That wasn't what he said.'

'Yes, it was.'

My dad is not having anyone take his righteous terror away from him. I probably should have said something like, 'oh - so you've rejoined Europe, have you?' but you only ever think of these things afterwards. I try to explain how I'm kind of tired of scare stories, recalling him having warned me about all those Mexicans flooding north across the border, heading directly for my wife's underwear whilst drooling and making lustful grappling gestures with their hands; but it's difficult to convey my disappointment without actually calling him a twat, which I would prefer to avoid doing; and so frustration forces my voice to an incoherent upper register rant. Strangely, I find it reminds me of when my parents were still married, and I sound like my mother used to sound when arguing with him, usually with some justification as I recall.

I've had a moderately depressing couple of months in some respects, and it would be nice to at least be able to mention how I'm still a little devastated by the loss of Fluffy, our cat, but as ever, conversation with my father is on his terms, and will be about what he read in the newspaper this week, or what he saw on the television. If there's nothing proposed as the apocalypse in the newspapers this week, he'll simply give me a minute by minute account of a recently viewed episode of the Hairy Bikers. They visited Texas on one of their shows, and my dad spent the call describing the sort of thing that people who live in Texas like to eat.

I should have seen it, he suggested.

The call ends, and I wonder about cancelling my flight but assume it's most likely to be cancelled for me, or at least rescheduled. If I do fly in April, maybe I'll just see my mother and tell my dad it was cancelled.

Life continues, except the local supermarket runs out of bog roll, but our household collectively produces only an ordinary quantity of poo so it's difficult to regard our having only six rolls left as a problem. I see a few people wearing face masks, including one woman whose entire head is bandaged beneath her hat, complete with sunglasses in the style of the invisible man. I wash my hands and try not to touch my face, which is actually fairly easy. I think my capacity to panic has been broken at least since Brexit, so what will be will be.

Who fucking knows?

The Filth & the Furry

San Antonio is host to yet another furry convention. There was one a couple of years ago. Bess and I drove past the hotel playing host to the event a couple of times just for the sake of watching adults dressed as bright orange cartoon rodents wander back and forth in broad daylight. Despite some initial sneering, it was difficult to really settle on what we thought of these people, even whether we really thought anything at all.

For those of you who have been avoiding both the internet and popular culture for the best part of the last couple of decades, furries are persons - adults from all walks of life - who spend time dressed in anthropomorphic animal costumes. They communicate online or in person at dedicated conventions in the persona - or fursona, as they seem to prefer - of their chosen animal. I see it as essentially the same deal as dressing up as Batman and attending a comic book event, although many furries would probably insist that their calling is something which runs much deeper.

I have no horse in this particular race, although I know at least one furry, and he's a nice guy so I'm reluctant to pour scorn on something which he clearly enjoys. Bess and I watched Fursonas, a 2016 documentary examining the community dynamic, directed by Dominic Rodriguez, so most of what I know comes from that.

The documentary proposes, amongst other things, a community of people who identify with animal personas in some notionally spiritual sense, because naturally it has to be something deep. It can't be anything so simple as that you just like dressing up as a bright blue raccoon, because that would be weird. I don't buy the spirit animal angle, or that identifying as a googly-eyed panda is in any way comparable to having been born with a sexual orientation other than one of those sanctioned by fundamentalist religious fanatics. One reason for my inability to buy it is that the fursuits - for which furries pay one hell of a lot of money - aren't really meant to represent animals; they're cartoon animals or mascots, cutesy anthropomorphic descendants of Saturday morning children's television, Bugs Bunny, Top Cat, Sonic the Hedgehog and the rest. They're a child's eye view of the animal kingdom representing, as with much popular culture, a retreat into the secure, simplified realm of childhood - a tropism which is probably not in itself difficult to understand.

Is it harming anyone?

I'm not sure it's even a meaningful question given that nothing is entirely without the potential for harm under certain circumstances. The character I found most alarming whilst watching Fursonas was Boomer the Dog, an IT technician who strives to live his life as a dog, specifically as a Berger des Pyrénées dog. He has a fursuit he made himself from shredded newspaper, and wears twin ponytails on top of his head which he describes as his puppy ears. He comes across, at least to me, as someone who has retreated into a sedated Disney-inspired child state as a means of skating around a nervous breakdown of Biblical proportions. He's so far gone as to have repulsed others in the furry community, who have accordingly denounced him as just some nutcase whilst themselves dressed as bright pink chipmunks and prairie dogs. Personally, I found him creepy and slightly disturbing as I do almost anything with even the faintest whiff of Disney or its infantile aesthetic, and I really wonder if Boomer's private obsession is doing him any good; but on the other hand, he claims that it makes him happy, and he certainly seems happy, and he doesn't appear to give two shits what the rest of us may think. Additionally, I'm not sure Boomer's private obsession is necessarily any worse than those of your average truck-driving Coors-chugging shithead. When it comes to persons with whom I'd least like to find myself trapped in an elevator stuck between floors, I'm not sure Boomer even makes the list.

Bess and I turn up at the hotel. It's Saturday afternoon and we're going to hang out at the bar and watch convention attendees come and go. Hanging out at the bar is free.

There are a few of them in the lobby - some sort of reindeer, what is probably supposed to be a fox, a few people in regular clothes but wearing a tail or cat ears. We came out of curiosity, roughly expecting it to be sort of funny, but it isn't really anything. They seem idiotic, slightly pitiful, and just enough so as to suck the fun out of our nurturing such uncharitable thoughts; and then our guy turns up, the one we both know in real life. Today he's working security so he hasn't come as his fursona. He's glad to see us, but probably feels a little awkward. At least it seems so. I hope not because, after all, Bess and myself are the intruders in this situation.

A giant child arrives in the lobby - someone dressed in a suit resembling a little Japanese girl with purple hair tied in pigtails, not even an animal. It seems like a step too far in the wrong direction, and it definitely tips over into creepy.

'Is that Uncle Kage?' Bess asks me.

We gaze across the lobby to a middle-aged man in a white coat, like that of a pharmacist.

'I can't tell,' I say. 'It could be.'

Having watched Fursonas, Uncle Kage seems to us like the closest thing the furry world has to a celebrity, so naturally we're sceptical; but then again, why wouldn't it be Uncle Kage?

Pronounced ˈkɑːɡeɪ, the name is a contraction of his fursona, Kagemushi Goro. He seems to be the emperor of the furries, although opinion is divided. On the one hand he seems both eloquent and passionately vocal in defense of his chosen community and their right to exist without the rest of us pointing and laughing. On the other, some see him as a dictator, as someone who has overstepped certain boundaries; and his apparent public loathing of Boomer the Dog as someone giving the rest of us a bad name seems to reflect better on Boomer than it does on Uncle Kage.

I finish my drink and we take the escalator up to the next floor where stalls of traders line the concourse to the main entrance of the convention. We're not going in, but we want to have a look around. The stalls specialise in merchandise relating to cartoon animals with big dopey eyes. There's nothing we would want to buy, which is about what we expected. Some of it is truly horrible.

Going back down the escalator we pass the man in the white coat. He's stood chatting to a couple of attendees in fursuits, and it's definitely him. It's Uncle Kage in person. For reasons I don't fully understand, I am momentarily star struck.

We leave, having taken as much as we could from the experience. I still don't know what I think. Excepting adults dressed as little Japanese girls, it's difficult to feel anything strong about what these people are doing, because it's really their business. In certain respects it strikes me as idiotic, but then plenty of things strike me as idiotic to the point of being dangerous, which this probably isn't.

The only thought I can form is that I now have a sneaky sort of admiration for Boomer the Dog, because that guy really doesn't give a shit what the rest of us think.

But again, maybe what I think doesn't matter.

Don't Eat Here

On Saturday the 21st of September, 2002, I wrote the following in my diary.

I'm thinking of cashing in on this TV chef fad. I had an idea for my own show, all done on shaky camcorder with me in my own kitchen cooking up my version of Mexican food - lots of close ups of the bin as I mutter I don't believe in food hygiene - it's all bollocks in the background. It's all bollocks, would become my catchphrase just like Jamie Oliver's Dick Van Dykisms. My face would be on tins of Sainsbury's produce captioned go ahead, eat it; what's the fucking worst that could happen? A second idea along these lines would be my book Don't Eat Here, a guide to all the misleading eateries into which I have stumbled.

Seventeen years later, it seems like my cookery show isn't going to happen; and Don't Eat Here is probably a bit of a non-starter given that I try to avoid eating at crap restaurants and diners, so the list is thus far hardly of length sufficient to justify an entire book; nevertheless and for what it may be worth, should you, gentle reader, happen to find yourself in San Antonio, I'd recommend giving the following a wide berth. A couple of these have actually shut up shop, but the advice should still be heeded if you're a time traveller.

Chili's Grill & Bar. Someone described this sort of joint as Chuck-E-Cheese for adults, although it wasn't Wikipedia because they describe it as a casual dining restaurant chain. There are a fucking million of these places dotted along every single highway, each parking lot heaving with trucks spilling gurgling knuckleheads out across the asphalt. Once inside you will find a lively environment, as I'm sure they call it, with a thousand flat screens just above head height and every single one showing a ball game of some description. The deafening soundtrack will comprise either football commentary and associated amiable horseshit or hair metal hits of the eighties. The food is brightly coloured and highly reflective due to some weird glaze, even the burger buns. Everything drips with a bright yellow goop approximating cheese, and if you so choose, it's actually possible to order a side of fries with your burger and fries burger, which comes with fries; and coke; or children's fizzy beer if your name is Josh or Greg or Hunter or one of those.

There's a guy with a dog who lives in one of the houses at the back of our own. Every once in a while I hear him calling to the dog as I work in the back garden. The dog's name is Bear, and the man has a deep, slow voice. He enunciates each word as though someone has hit him around the side of the head with a baseball bat only a moment before. One evening I heard him calling to his dog, variations on the same sentence over and over. 'Come on, Bear… don't you be a coward now, Bear…'

I have no idea what was going on, but I'll bet he eats at Chili's.

Chili's proves that the free market economy does not work.

Flair. Everybody in Alamo Heights seemed to think Flair was amazing, but then I never cease to be amazed by what people in Alamo Heights consider amazing. Mexican street food, they screeched all across our local bit of internet. The term refers to what is simply known as food in Mexico itself and, practically speaking, means tacos but nothing else typically served on a Mexican street. We therefore ordered tacos. The waitress was of the kind who endeavours to involve herself in the diner's existence by commenting awesome in response to one's order, as though surprised and impressed by our choices, perhaps not having realised that tacos were on the menu at her place of work. There were ten or twelve other members of staff watching, having nothing else to do because we were the only customers. Our tacos came and they were nice enough - although pathetic compared to the standard of those served at the mighty Cocina el Jibarazo on Austin Highway - and they cost about three times what they should have cost, presumably because that's what the dingbats of Alamo Heights expect to pay. As we left, the waitress informed us that we might like to keep Sunday free because they would be having a DJ, meaning we could eat average but grossly overpriced tacos while a young man with a beard tickled the decks with a crucial selection of proper nang tunes. We didn't go back on Sunday, or indeed ever again.

The Granary. Admittedly this was a few years ago, and Bess had told me that lunchtime at the Granary was amazing. Unfortunately we went in the evening which is characterised by a different menu and, seemingly, a different approach to the dining experience. I don't remember what I had, and I don't remember it being bad, but I distinctly recall that the waiter spent at least five minutes telling me what the chef was going to do, and liquid nitrogen may have been involved. This delayed my waiter's return to the kitchen with my order by at least five minutes, which was annoying because I was hungry and didn't really give a shit how the chef was planning to prepare whatever it was that I'd ordered. For all I cared, he could have eaten the ingredients, shat them directly onto the street outside, and then driven a steam roller backwards and forwards over the resulting fecal patty, providing it tasted good. I suspect this gastronomic prologue formed part of an holistic dining experience, at least judging by the drinks being served in fucking jam jars.

J. Alexander's, which I can't quite keep myself from thinking of as J. Arthur's, is another of those casual dining things, but without the million flat screen tellies. The food seems initially promising, providing you're not put off by all the toadying, congratulations on your choice and so on. The main problem is that when the food arrives, it's not great, and worse is that it's almost great yet isn't, presenting a culinary analogy of that truism about androids and how the closer they come to appearing human without actually quite getting there, the weirder and more upsetting they seem. I ate at this place quite a few times due to the preference of a family member, and even food which tasted decent left me feeling as though I'd gorged a bucket of salted lard for the rest of the afternoon. The very last time I ate there I had some pasta thing which was so salty it made my mouth sore as I was trying to eat it.

Jack in the Box. My word probably isn't worth much here as I've only eaten at Jack in the Box once, and it was nearly a decade ago. Jack in the Box is a burger chain in the McDonald's mode distinguished mainly by a greater emphasis on irony in their advertising. I was in one of those moods where you just want to eat something cheap and crappy, and so I ordered what I believe may have been a burrito. I'm not wild about burritos anyway, so it wasn't a great choice, but I only discovered that I wasn't wild about burritos after I ate this one which was essentially a tube of dense, endless meat. It was wrapped in a tortilla and was hot and heavy. It felt like a cosh, something which could be used in a fight, and was additionally so salty that it made me cry. I doubt there's enough irony in the world to get me eating another one of those things, and if it helps illustrate my thesis, I might draw your attention to the fact of McDonald's having failed to make this list.

Lupe Tortilla. It seemed like a bit of an event when the Lupe Tortilla chain opened a restaurant in San Antonio, but as we realised once we ate there, whilst the place might seem a big deal in Houston, we have actual Mexican food in San Antonio and therefore no real reason to eat what is essentially Mexican food for white people. Fancifying and generally pissing about with what is on the plate doesn't fool anyone. Additionally irritating was being asked whether we had eaten at Lupe Tortilla before as we were shown a table, the implication being that we might need to prepare ourselves for having our collective and figurative gastronomic nuts blown off. This would have been fine had they served us something amazing, but instead we got Mexican food for white people and a waitress zipping back to ask how we were enjoying it every three fucking minutes. Admittedly, the second time we went - invited by a friend to celebrate her daughter's graduation - the food was significantly better but, you know, first impressions and everything...

Olive Garden. This is yet another chain, but a notionally Italian one, Italian here mostly translating into a large garden spade's worth of pasta dripping with cheese sauce; which presents a genuinely mouth-watering prospect when you're in one of those moods where you yearn to be pumped full of the saltiest carbohydrates money can buy, but every decision I've ever made at Olive Garden has inevitably turned to regret somewhere around the third or fourth mouthful. Further regret is encountered when the bill arrives, along with generous helpings of incredulity.

Southside Chinese. It wasn't called Southside Chinese, but it was on the southside and neither Bess nor myself can remember what the place was called. The one thing Bess does remember is being seated upon the lavatory when an elderly gentleman entered the cubicle and already had his pants down with the words, 'I really need to go,' before she was able to fully assess the situation, dress herself, or even finish her own business. It probably wouldn't have mattered quite so much had the food been great, but unfortunately it was mostly a sort of warm, faintly spicy grease to which soft, tasteless matter had been added apparently so we could tell that it wasn't soup. Amazingly, the place has since closed.

Alamo Fish 'n' Chips. There's another fish place more deserving of inclusion in this list, but they're supposedly something to do with the perfectly legitimate business operations of a local group of legitimate Mexican-American businessmen, if you know what I'm saying. The food was lousy, took ages to arrive, and the staff seemed puzzled by our order. Other customers seemed to pay much more for their own orders, and I'm guessing in used notes, but the packages they received in return didn't look a whole lot like anything they were likely to be tucking into once they got back to their trucks. However, I'm absolutely certain that these transactions were all entirely above board and legal, with no suspicious dimension whatsoever, and I don't want any trouble, so Alamo Fish 'n' Chips it is. There's a big old Union Jack painted on the sign outside, and although the crinkle cut chips served are just like those my grandmother used to bring back from Tesco and then fry in her chip pan, the fish is frozen and therefore not really anything special. Furthermore, the ceviche promised by the menu seems to be there only so as to lure my wife, who has thus far always arrived just as some other customer has allegedly scoffed the last dollop; and the guy kept asking me how it was every two bleeding minutes seeing as how I'm from England and all, which was annoying. The invitation on their facebook page reads Please come joy us many items on Specials, fresh & tasty Seafood, lightly on batter, home made tartar sauce and coleslaw you not going disappointed but I'm afraid I prefer Long John Silver's. 

Wing Zone. I still don't understand how it's possible to get fried chicken wrong, but America found a way. The best fried chicken seems to be the cheapest and crappiest, for some reason, usually the kind served with the faintest suggestion that whoever prepared it has spent the morning changing the oil in their car and hasn't bothered to wash their hands. Being situated at over five thousand miles distance from south-east London, amongst my less enticing options are Popeyes which specialises in gradually serving the dryest, least succulent, and most mouth-desiccating meals derived from an egg-laying bird; and Wing Zone which is similar but with a bright orange sauce which tastes like what happens when you hold the terminals of a nine volt battery against your tongue.

A Few Turds from Our Sponsor

Does advertising work? asks the billboard at the side of the highway, then answering its own question with it just did! To break this down, the billboard suggests that advertising works because you've just read the message stating that it works, and might therefore consider paying the owners of the billboard a load of money to slap up a few images promoting your suppository franchise, or whatever it is you do. Of course, although the billboard suggests that advertising works because you've just read the message stating that it works, the only people who will have read the message are those who read the message because anyone who didn't bother to read the message won't have read it, making this the advertising equivalent of the anthropic principle, namely the philosophical consideration that observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it. The message is additionally weakened by the presumption of its own cognitive impact, resting on the premise that mere awareness of a product or service is the same as paying for it; which it isn't, as the billboard itself demonstrates, because I've seen it fucking hundreds of times and I'm still not absolutely certain of the six words cited here being the right ones.

Likewise, the following television commercials have sent me flying across the room to hit the mute button on the remote probably hundreds of occasions in some cases, and yet I'm still unable to remember what half of the fuckers are advertising, because all I can see in my minds eye is a parade of gormless grinning faces suffused with halos of how much I loathe everyone involved, which if anything only ensures that I'll go out of my way to avoid purchase of whatever shit they're selling in the event of my ever needing it or even being able to remember what it is. Marketing departments might suggest otherwise, but marketing departments are explicitly in the business of just making shit up and so their testimony is worthless. The civilisation of ancient Egypt endured for around three-thousand years, give or take a few periods of unrest. Isn't it fucking funny how you never hear anything about their marketing department?

AARP. I think this stands for the American Association of Retired People, but I can't be bothered to check. I'm sure it's a worthy organisation, dedicated as it is to involving those over a certain age with theatre visits, wine tasting, salsa classes and so on, but publicising the organisation with weird wobbly-headed older people grinning in your face seems ill-advised. So far there have been two major advertising campaigns, both starring Hispanic oldsters, first a woman and then a man. Each has this weirdly over-familiar grin like they're trying to get you involved in something your parents don't need to know about, and they grin and they wobble their heads side to side as though either pissed or ripped to the tits on prescription painkillers, and they slur something like if you don' think real possibilities when you hear the name AARP, then you don' know AARP, which sounds almost as though it should have my frien' at the end as an unwelcome hand finds its way round to your ass. Considering it all happens on a telly screen, there's something weirdly intrusive about Señor and Señora Real Possibilities, as though television has now found a way to invade your personal space with what nevertheless remains a two-dimensional image.

Contemplative Hillbillies Impressed by Impact of Heavy Object. I can't remember if this is Ford, Chevrolet, or General Motors, but it probably doesn't matter. As our tableau commences we see a group of guys in stetsons and jeans stood around looking at massive trucks, the kind of trucks only ever driven by men with enormous penises, so it's a safe bet that all of these hillbillies probably have penises of at least a foot in length, possibly two foot in the case of a couple of the more stoically rugged ones. None of these men are strangers to big heavy tools, not just the kind presently at rest within their own trousers, but also wrenches and items with rubber-grip handles which they squeeze and twist when engaging in their manly labours, grunting and occasionally pausing to quaff a refreshing beer-style beverage. When these men have finished utilising their big heavy tools out in the wilderness at the mercy of lions, bears and probably Injuns, they toss their big heavy tools in the back of their trucks and head home, and of course being just regular guys, they toss their tools roughly rather than daintily, like some homosexual carefully arranging wildflowers upon a gingham cushion; but in tossing their tools, sometimes they damage their trucks. So here the hillbillies stand in contemplation as heavy metal boxes of tools are cast into the back of trucks with a thud thud thud. One brand of truck sustains denting, but the other doesn't because it is rugged like the men. This makes the men happy and so we see them smile and nod with approval.

Grandpa the Asthmatic Wolf. This commercial riffs - probably unintentionally - on a cartoon I once saw in Punch magazine wherein an old man, having just announced how delightful he finds the unalloyed directness of the young, is asked Grandpa, how come you're so fat, grey, bald, and wrinkled? Here he's reading them the story of the Three Little Pigs, and has just reached the point at which the wolf is huffing and puffing when one of his own grandchildren points out that he too does quite a lot of huffing and puffing . 'It's my asthma,' he explains, digressing off into a long and unnecessarily detailed account of his condition, apparently having missed the point that his girls were simply engaging in banter and hadn't actually requested for this droning summary of his medical history. The advert then enters an animated segment wherein a cartoon wolf consults the advice of his doctor regarding asthma, correct usage of inhalers and so on, prior to tackling those three pigs. One sequence shows the wolf, breathing quite easily whilst engaged in rigorous activity, dancing with his wolf granddaughters, here identified by dresses and tiaras, making it quite clear that the wolf is also Grandpa. Personally I think this sends out a slightly dubious message, and - as with all medical adverts - this one spends five inevitable minutes listing all of the potentially deadly side effects of using this particular form of relief for asthma symptoms, whatever it is. I know they probably have to do it for legal reasons, but when two of the potentially deadly side effects are an increase in severity of asthma symptoms and death by asthma, the whole enterprise is rendered seemingly ludicrous; and Grandpa waving a cuddly toy wolf at the girls and making them scream with delight at the end doesn't really help a whole lot.

Grinning Fool Plays Air Drums. This is a locally made advertisement, possibly filmed on some cunt's phone by the look of it and starring the actual people who own the car dealership and who will probably try to flog you a motor should you find that their advertising has worked for you. My guess would be that neither of them ever took any sort of acting course and are thus banking on the raw, unpolished honesty of their performance, such as it is, to win you over. She is small and Hispanic, and he physically suggests a scenario in which aliens discovered the ruined body of Hoss from NBC's Bonanza on some distant asteroid and attempted to surgically restore him but, lacking any understanding of human physiology, found themselves obliged to use an Alfred E. Neuman heavy issue of Mad magazine for reference. Released back into the wild in the general vicinity of San Antonio, he was cruelly incapacitated by a thorn which became embedded in his mighty paw, but luckily the Latina woman happened to be passing and they've been faithful friends ever since. The part which really gets me is where she prefixes the announcement of some boring special offer by asking for a drum roll, whereupon he hunkers down and does the honours upon an imaginary snare; and whilst it's impressive that he's managed to suspend that stupid grin for a whole two seconds, it's hard not to notice his tongue pop from the corner of his mouth with all the strain of concentration. The guy resembles Gary from the thick kids class at my school, itself not an institution which was ever going to give Oxford or Cambridge much competition. I'm sure Gary was lovely but - Lordy was he stupid! He once gave me the nickname of Funny Eater, inspired by the difficulty I experienced with a particular sandwich. He saw me in trouble, he pointed, he laughed, and his imagination suggested Funny Eater might be a fitting nickname by which to forever associate me with the incident - a nickname which actually leaves the one who came up with it seeming more fucking pitiful than the person to whom it is applied, regardless of how poorly it went for me and that sandwich.

Inexplicable Enthusiasm for Cardboard Chicken. Most of us know Popeye as a Sailor Man with a heavy spinach habit, but here in Americaland he's also a fried chicken franchise which attempts to make a virtue out of taking fucking ages to get your order together by means of the presumably ironic strapline Louisiana fast. I think the implication is that they're not actually a massive corporation, but they're just these guys, you know, and like, they care about nourishing your soul as well as your stomach, so maybe give them a fuckin' chance, yeah? I mean if you got some plane to catch maybe you should've gone to Wendy's instead. To be fair, it may just be my presumably understaffed local branch of Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen which takes forever, although it's not actually the leisurely pace of their service which bothers me. The advertising stars an enthusiastic matronly chef lady delivering a jovial testimony to the superiority of her wares invoking good N'awlins home cookin', fresh spices, and Mardi Gras, mon cher. Conversely, the food, when it eventually arrives, leaves you with the sensation of having consumed an entire loaf of bread in one sitting, albeit a vaguely chicken-flavoured loaf of bread. It's not a good feeling, and contrasts with the promise of the advertising in the same way that the Aryan mythology of white supremacy tends to contrast with the lumpy tattooed mutants who subscribe to that sort of drivel. Also, chef lady smiles so hard that it looks like she's doing it at gunpoint, which is troubling.

Lucky Buffoon Hits Jackpot. This is a commercial for the Lucky Eagle casino of Eagle Pass which is somewhere down near the Mexican border so far as I understand. It's part of the Kickapoo reservation and is probably therefore able to operate outside state laws regarding gambling, whatever they may be. I've never really given much of a shit about gambling and tend to regard those who do as losers and arseholes. Everett's dad was supposedly a professional gambler, and he was a fucking shocker. That said, I'm happy to see First Nations people making a living - taking our money back from white people one quarter at a time, as runs the motto of the Wamapoke Casino. The thing I have a problem with is the hair metal theme song with Grace Slick - or someone of her general type - bellowing out lu-huckee eeyooooooowaaaargh over fifty simultaneous guitar solos whilst a buffoon looks happy in slow motion, drunk with the euphoria of having pumped five bucks into the slots and landed himself a sweet, sweet pay out of four dollars and twenty-five cents, the knob.

The Misery of Dry Skin. This is an advert for either moisturiser or some kind of specifically medicinal moisturiser, in which a robust looking woman explains that the very worst aspect of diabetes is undoubtedly the dry skin. Wikipedia on the other hand lists heart disease, stroke, chronic kidney failure, foot ulcers, and damage to the eyes among those attendant complications one might reasonably regard as undesirable, and yet no mention of dry skin. Maybe the whole dry skin aspect is just too horrible to contemplate.

Pretzelphage Resumes Activity. This is a commercial for Aspen Dental, and I'm not sure why I should remember that detail when I remain in the dark about most of the rest discussed here. Anyway, all Aspen Dental commercials seem to be a variation on a theme in which persons with whom I suppose we are expected to identify realises that their teeth are shit and in need of work, and so they go to Aspen Dental, get those choppers sorted out, and behold their teeth are no longer shit because look - there's our man winning the taco eating competition, munching away like it ain't no thing; and in each case this narrative is delivered in the form of a song, complete with dental staff pulling wry faces to the camera as the patient yodels away in the chair. The thing which annoys me most about the worst of these adverts, the one sung by some woman working in a bakery, is the finale in which, still singing, she grins, snatches a large pretzel from the hand of her associate, and croons 'this pretzel's got nothing on me,' before taking a big old bite by way of demonstration. It's the actual phraseology which bothers me. The statement that something or other has nothing on the person making the statement is one of those things people tend to say because they've heard someone else say it and thought it sounded cool. In the case of our dentally enhanced vocalist, this pretzel's got nothing on me is like saying I am superior to this pretzel, or my victory over this pretzel is assured for I am better equipped to achieve victory than this inanimate baked item; which is a fucking stupid thing to say, because no-one is going to put money on the pretzel winning, and in any case it's a false dichotomy. The entire function of the pretzel is to be consumed and in doing so to provide sustenance. Therefore a victory for the pretzel constitutes its being consumed, which is what happens as a result of what the woman qualifies as her triumph, because she's a fucking idiot who tries too hard.

Purple Turd. Have you ever been bunged up, popped a laxative, and subsequently had yourself a really good shit? If so, did you enjoy it so much that you were barely able to contain yourself afterwards? Did you pull on a t-shirt bearing the slogan I ❤ my Lax? Did you rush down to the shore and write I ❤ my Lax in the sand in letters of a size sufficient as to allow the message to be read by the pilots of any aircraft which might be passing overhead? I've honestly never been that happy to have a shit, and I've spent time in Mexico, so to me it just looks like secret signalling for those who take pleasure in the production of fecal matter towards ends other than the purely alimentary, if you know what I'm saying. If you don't know what I'm saying you should probably consider yourself lucky. The animated segment of the advertisement - assuming it's the same one and I haven't just conflated two different laxative adverts - shows a purple turd set free and at last proceeding along a colon towards a bumhole like we're watching that episode of Barbapapa directed by Joan Miró.  I suppose it's purple so as to allow viewers to get to grips with the general concept of having a shit without directly invoking the act whilst we're trying to eat our fucking tea, thank you very much; either that or someone has been on a diet of nothing but sloes for the past week.

Zipline Bore. 'Now that I'm over fifty,' says our helmeted guy as he's about to slide down a zipline attached to the side of the Matterhorn, 'my friends ask me, aren't you scared?' He pushes away, sliding off into empty Alpine space, just a knot of toughened cord preventing him from plummeting thousands of feet to his death, and as he slips off he yelps the rest of the anecdote, such as it is. The only thing he's really scared of, so it transpires, is leaving himself vulnerable to something or other by failing to either renew his health insurance or get himself inoculated against something or other - I can never remember which it is. I've a feeling this may be one of those adverts in which I asked my doctor and he said blah blah blah followed by four minutes listing all the potentially deadly side effects, so it's probably the latter - the inoculation. Personally, I suspect that our boy is somewhat embellishing his story. I expect he was having a drink with what few friends he has left, or he was hanging out at the sauna or something when he happened to mention that he was planning to slide down a mountain on a bit of rope; and the response was probably 'sure thing, Ken - sounds real scary,' before they carried on with whatever they had been talking about. It seems significant that the guy appears to be having this adventure holiday on his own, apart from whoever is holding the camera allowing him to waffle on and on and on, explaining his wearisome home-brewed philosophy to fucking no-one.

I, Fatso

I experienced a medical condition during the winter of 2010, a certain itch brought on by a surfeit of the body's natural yeast. It was a condition I recognised as having affected at least two human females of my formerly close acquaintance, but no-one ever told me that a male might also suffer with the same embarrassing condition. I went to see the doctor, specifically asking to see a male doctor just as I would were I a character with a sensitive problem in a seventies situation comedy. He explained that it was common - much to my astonishment - probably resulting from either too much sugar in my system, or not enough exercise of a sort which would ordinarily convert that sugar into the energy by which I might open up a packet of crisps or wobble along to the chippy in Earlsdon High Street. He said that my condition was probably nothing, but recommended that I eat less shite, get more exercise, and have a blood test.

I wasn't aware of my diet being particularly poor, and ignored the associated segments of advice on the grounds of my having reached the age of forty-five without ever having eaten either a deep fried Mars Bar or anything purchased from Taco Bell; although I realised that he probably had a point about the exercise. When employed full-time by Royal Mail I'd never really had to think about exercise as an activity in its own right because the job was physically very demanding. Since leaving Royal Mail I had taken agency work with Parcel Force, but the work was intermittent - three days a week, sometimes two, and sometimes nothing at all. When there was no work to be had I spent my time engaged in selling off many years of accumulated crap on eBay, but would usually try to get in some cycling each morning for the sake of exercise and getting out of the house. Ordinarily I would follow a fifteen mile circuit of rural back roads through Kenilworth, the villages of Leek Wootton and Stoneleigh, and then back into Coventry; but this was winter.

I'd spent twenty years trudging around in the freezing cold and pouring rain of English winter, fingers numb to the bone, and with the midday sun barely risen above the rooftops of the houses on the other side of the street for most of November through to January. Just the thought of outside was bad enough, and with no wage-related incentive to propel me forward each morning, I had fallen to the habit of putting off the daily bike ride for later in the week when it might hopefully be a bit less miserable out there. Following the initial visit to the doctor, I coaxed myself back onto two wheels a couple of times, but it was hard to find the motivation.

I'd had a blood test and was called back to the medical centre now that the results had come though. This time I saw a female doctor but I didn't let it bother me seeing as this visit was not directly concerned with the previously mentioned sensitive problem and it therefore didn't seem likely that I would be required to slap it out on the table. She told me that I was overweight for my height and age, and that my blood pressure was through the roof, as was my cholesterol, and I would probably be dead before the end of the week. Okay, she didn't actually say that I would probably be dead before the end of the week, but given the severity of her report I expect she was thinking it.

'What can I do?' I asked, terrified.

She muttered something about reducing my daily quota of visits to McDonalds, something about exercise, and then wrote out a prescription for a course of simvastatins.

This seemed more shocking than any implied coronary resulting from my chip-scoffing ways. 'Is that really necessary?' I asked.

She seemed to think it was.

'Look,' I said. 'I've been sat on my arse eating crisps for most of the last six weeks, or may as well have been. How about if I get back to my daily routine of fifteen miles? I mean, that should make a difference, shouldn't it?'

'I'm more worried about getting those triglycerides down right now,' she said, whatever the hell that meant. Her face suggested this was a life or death situation.

I argued some more, then relented and picked up a box of the prescribed tablets from the chemist in Earlsdon High Street.

I started taking them, having read about the possible side effects on the side of the packet. As the warning predicted I was unable to sleep and began to feel somewhat depressed. By the third day I had been awake for seventy-two hours, and awake meaning wide awake, and I felt like killing myself. My existence had turned cold and grey and joyless. I hadn't seen the sun in weeks. There was nothing to look forward to. There was no good in the world. My life was pointless and a complete waste of time. I had never felt so profoundly bereft of hope as on that third day. I spoke to the woman at the chemists and she told me that it generally takes a couple of weeks before you get used to simvastatins. The urge to commit suicide would pass.

Fuck that, I said to myself, and stopped taking the things.

I returned to the medical centre. My doctor was seriously pissed off. 'You should have spoken to me. You don't just decide to withdraw from a prescribed course of medicine as you've done. You can't just stop like that. You're very lucky that nothing terrible happened.'

'Well it was either stop,' I explained, 'or hope I could make it another two weeks without slashing my wrists. I'm sure simvastatins are wonderful once they start working properly, but unless I'm actually at death's door, I'd really just like to see how I get on with a bit more regular exercise.'

She wasn't happy, which was too bad. I myself hadn't been particularly delighted by our initial encounter in which she had started on my prescription before I'd even finished speaking. It had felt somewhat as though she'd been considering what course of drugs would be best for me before I'd even walked through the door.

Anyway, as promised I'd been getting out on the bike every day, and accordingly when she took my blood pressure it was normal. Nevertheless she didn't seem convinced, but I refused to take any more drugs when the side effects seemed far worse than whatever good the stuff might be doing.

Six months later I visited a doctor in Knightsbridge for a medical assessment in accordance with the conditions of my applying for the K1 visa by which I would emigrate to the United States. My blood pressure was fine. My cholesterol was fine. I was in perfect health, despite the doom which had been foretold back in Coventry just before Christmas.

Five years later I am subject to another medical examination, this time at my wife's place of work conducted in accordance with the wishes of whoever it is that supplies our medical insurance. I take off my shoes and stand on the scales. I am fourteen stone, which is the heaviest I remember ever having been. A nurse takes blood from my fingertip, and then I sit and await the results. After about five minutes another nurse takes me to a different room. I sit in front of a laptop, and a young woman appears on the screen. She wears a headset and has the results of my blood test in front of her. I am mystified as to why this part of the consultation can't be done right here with another human present just like in the good old days.

The woman speaks. Her voice sounds autotuned, and the words suggest a script with the customary quota of phrases deemed conducive to customer satisfaction by some focus group. She smiles far too much and talks about the two of us like we're a partnership, how we might consider refraining from emptying an entire shaker of salt over our platter every time we sit down to our daily triple-cheese lardburger.

My cholesterol is high.

My blood pressure is high.

What a fat bastard I am, and so on and so forth.

I might like to consider engaging in daily exercise, which I suppose means that the fifteen miles I've been cycling more or less every day, five days a week for the last five or six years isn't actually exercise. I should also cut down on processed food, and I have trouble working out what she even means by this given that I haven't eaten a Dairylea cheese triangle since I lived in England. I need to stop eating all those naughty but nice things which I'm not actually eating anyway, unless you count chicken fried steak at Jim's diner once every couple of months.

Screw you, Lady, I think resentfully whilst smiling and thanking her for her competitively priced time. I'm already looking forward to the online customer satisfaction survey.

It's true that I'm fourteen stone, which is the heaviest I've been; but then I'm fifty and I no longer smoke. I'm no stranger to carbohydrates, it's true; but at the same time I exercise regularly and it's not like I'm chugging Big Macs all day long, or at all for that matter. This annoys me somewhat, although I suppose my own personal call centre healthcare professional failing to suggest a course of simvastatins must count for something. I suppose I could cut down on mashed potato and pasta, but I'm reminded of my mother being advised by her doctor to avoid cheese.

'Then what would be the point in being alive?' she asked.

I could cut down on mashed potato and pasta, but I'm not going to because that's why I cycle fifteen miles a day.

As a concession I've now upped my daily ride to twenty miles, mainly because it's weird being fourteen stone and I have trousers and shirts I would like to wear again before I die; but this is as much as I'm doing because if a daily twenty mile bike ride isn't enough, then maybe I'm simply destined to be fat and there's nothing I can do about it, short of switching to a diet of food I don't want to eat.

Somehow it transpires that fifteen miles a day wasn't exercise, and yet twenty is, because I've already lost a couple of pounds

I suppose that's a good thing.

Traditional English Teeth

A popular truism held by Americans regarding the English is that they - or rather we - have terrible teeth. Obviously it's a generalisation at best, approaching not entirely accurate providing you can afford to spend the whole day sat on your arse seeking out online articles to the contrary. I would say the truth is to be found in dividing the popularity of the Osmonds by how many American children end up wearing braces for most of their teenage years, and then adding the English love of sweets, cigarettes, and not getting too hung-up on appearance. I would say this, except I am myself English, and whilst I couldn't claim to have had the absolute worst teeth, I can think of only three individuals with marginally more disgusting oral furniture; and this is across the entire fifty year span of my life and is limited only to people I've actually known, so no Shane MacGowan or whoever. So even if it isn't strictly true that the English have terrible teeth, it feels true, as Spike Milligan acknowledged in his poem:

English Teeth, English Teeth!
Shining in the sun,
A part of British heritage,
Aye, each and every one.
English Teeth, Happy Teeth!
Always having fun,
Clamping down on bits of fish,
And sausages half done.
English Teeth! Heroes' Teeth!
Hear them click! and clack!
Let's sing a song of praise to them -
Three cheers for the Brown, Grey and Black.

My own engagement with this proud legacy began early, possibly through a combination of my grandmother filling me with sweets roughly every fourteen days and a suspicion that brushing didn't make much of a difference given that my teeth always looked exactly the same when I'd finished; so up until as late as my thirties, I was brushing once a day or not, depending on whether I could be bothered. Of my twice yearly childhood visits to the dentist, I can recall maybe two which didn't result in another filling, and yet somehow I never managed to quite make the connection between this and not brushing my teeth. My diary entry for Friday the 29th of April, 1983 accordingly observes:

Today I had five fillings done at the dentist, although to be fair I suppose three of them were minor.

My friend Andrew visited the dentist only twice in his life, once as a child, and then as he approached forty. He told me he'd made an appointment as we sat in the pub in Lewisham. I'd always found his teeth odd, fascinating even. They were small and peg-like - pale yellow, but a uniformly pale yellow like they were supposed to be that way. I said nothing because I had no positive forecast to share.

'They're all fine,' he told me next day, once again in the pub.

'What? Seriously?'

'Yup.'

'You haven't been to the dentist since you were a kid and you don't even need a filling?'

'He told me that I have naturally strong teeth.'

From this conversation I deduced that there might be such a thing as naturally weak teeth, and that this probably applied to me. Teenage periods of what I considered diligent brushing had been rewarded at six-monthly intervals with more fillings regardless, and so I had ceased caring because caring led to thoughts of dentists and injections and drills and pain. Besides, my teeth looked okay from the front and no-one had complained of my having bad breath, so it didn't seem like they could be that terrible. At least I didn't think so when I was a kid. Once at school I'd laughed out loud at some comment made by Juliet Prouse, and I'd laughed with such vigour that I threw my head back, mouth open.

'I don't know why you'd want to kiss him,' observed James Renton who was then busily waging some sort of weird hate campaign against me for reasons known only to himself. 'It would be like kissing a dustbin.'

I wasn't even sat next to him. If my breath had been that toxic there would have been other clues, so I assumed James had been referring to the quota of dental amalgam inside my mouth, the bilateral arcs of metallic grey exposed when I opened wide. More puzzling was the possibility that Juliet Prouse might have wanted to kiss me in the first place. Were it true, this would have been problematic because I found her slightly annoying but didn't feel myself in a position to be choosy. Given that she had exhibited more obvious and undisguised interest in at least three other boys, I assumed the romantic aspect of the jibe was simply what James had chosen as framework from which to launch his critique of my gob.

It probably didn't help that I enthusiastically took up smoking as soon as I left home, and that in leaving home I had removed myself from an environment containing anyone who might occasionally give a shit about my teeth or the wisdom of my going to see the dentist every once in a while. I still brushed at least some of the time, but my technique was closer to voodoo than actual brushing - movements to appease the spirits of the undertaking rather than specifically tailored towards the removal of plaque. It isn't that I was oblivious to the perils of poor dental hygiene so much as that I felt it was already a lost cause. I'd been having nightmares in which my teeth fell out one by one ever since I was a kid. The lore has it that such dreams tend to stem either from the subconscious fear that one may actually be a bit of a munter, or else anxiety regarding the security of one's living arrangements, but my theory is that these dreams were more to do with a fear of my fucking teeth falling out. Accordingly, a diary entry dated to Wednesday the 18th of May, 1988 states:

I've got a very strongly ingrained fear of dentists, but on the scale my fear of dentists has been balanced out by fear of my teeth falling out because the other day I was prodding about and there is a hole in one of them into which you can insert about three millimetres of fingernail and then waggle it about; and when you look at that tooth it looks like it has come out of a packet of Rolos. It's very worrying so I went along and made an appointment, and I have that at 2.30PM tomorrow. It's the first time I've been to a dentist in about five years, so it serves me right I suppose.

Then on Friday the 17th of June I report:

I went to the dentist as I said I would, and it was quite good. In fact I find it difficult to understand what I was so nervous about. I had to go back about four times and like I say there's that tooth which was really rotten - he put a completely new crown on it and it was all right; and this last time that I went he said right, that's your lot, which was good because I thought I would need about six months worth of treatment.

My next visit was in 1990 and I was living in Coventry with my dad. It was two years since the above cluster of appointments, from which I had somehow developed the idea that it will probably be all right might reasonably be adopted as a practical philosophy of dental hygiene. I think this degree of optimism sprang from the fact that he'd said right, that's your lot and that I still had teeth despite that which I had foreseen in my dreams. The Coventry dentist seemed to regard my optimism as premature, warning me, you really need to start looking after your teeth right now. You're going to have serious trouble with them by the time you're fifty if you're not careful. He also told me that I had gum disease, but I'd heard this one before. You have gum disease, without explanation of what it was or how it might be treated, and I was reluctant to ask because when sat in a dentist's chair I usually feel sufficiently well stocked for bad news and am reluctant to seek more. He may as well have said I see that you are wearing shoes for all the difference it made.

After Coventry, I moved to London, failed to make the effort to hook myself up with a new dentist, and then on Friday the 29th of November, 1991 I noted:

I've had a couple of shocks this week. The second was, you know how you probe around your mouth with the tip of your tongue after you've just eaten something? Well I've come across an enormous hole in one of my teeth - big enough to use as an echo chamber. I can only assume it's where a filling has come out because I looked in the mirror and it is a long way back and that tooth already has other fillings in it; and that size of hole, I'm sure I would have noticed before. It can't just have appeared out of nowhere. It looks like a visit to the dentist is in order at some point.

But I wasn't in any pain so I decided a period of adjustment might be okay, a month or so during which I could really dedicate myself towards working up the courage to think about making an appointment. Months inevitably became a year, and then disaster struck. Surprisingly the agony came from a wisdom tooth which had suddenly decided to act the cunt, although the tooth with the echo chamber was still fine - which I felt rather proved my point, whatever it had been. Equally surprising, this was the first time I'd experienced genuine dental pain of the kind which isn't induced by a dental practitioner using either a needle or a drill. Until that moment my understanding of toothache came mostly from the comics I'd read as a kid, Whoopee or Cheeky Weekly in which toothache necessitates a spotted handkerchief tied around one's swollen jaw with a knot the size of a tropical butterfly flapping around on top of your head, with treatment generally involving a door handle and a length of string. The reality of toothache turned out to be at least as agonising as Whoopee and Cheeky Weekly had promised. I dabbed the tooth with oil of cloves, a natural analgesic recommended by Peter Laycock from work, and while it took off the edge, it was obvious that I really did need to get myself to a dentist.

I found one on the Lee High Road, just across from the pub in which Andrew had told me of his own perfect free-range teeth. The dentist asked me whether I was aware of having gum disease, and then out came the needle like an old friend looking very much as I remembered, a huge silver assagai of the kind you would expect to see piercing Kenneth Williams' quivering buttock in a Carry On film.

'Are you numb?,' he asked after a minute or so.

'Not really.'

'Well, if you go and wait in reception, I'll call you back in when you are and we can take a look at that wisdom tooth.'

This was a new, slightly puzzling development, but there didn't seem to be much point in arguing. I shuffled out to the waiting room and sat down. Another patient was called in. Fifteen minutes passed and this second patient came back out, because it was now his turn to wait for the anaesthetic to take full effect.

'If we could have you back now, Mr. Burton...'

I resumed my position in the chair and he poked around. It was still painful. He gave me another injection and told me to return to the waiting room a second time whilst he continued treating the other patient. I suppose if the practice had been able to afford more chairs he could have had a whole line of us, five or six in a row all being worked on simultaneously.

Eventually the anaesthetic kicked in and he was able to yank my errant wisdom tooth using an instrument resembling the sort of pliers with which I might adjust the gears on a bicycle. There was no pain, but it felt as though I was wearing a motorcycle crash helmet and someone was attacking the side of my head with a hammer. Following this he turned his attention to the echo chambered tooth after another spell out in the waiting room as further patients were juggled. He ground the tooth down to a nub, glued a crown in place, and informed me that I had terrible gum disease and should therefore be sore afraid.

My mouth seemed to be back in some sort of working order, and I considered a vow of not bothering to go to see a dentist ever again if I could help it, without actually quite making that vow. An indeterminate count of years later I found myself once again obliged to see a dentist as the crowned molar flared up. I'd moved to East Dulwich and so signed myself on at the Townley Road dental practice, clutching my swollen gob and making muffled noises about how their earliest available appointment would be nice. The dentist to whom I was assigned seemed to take the state of my teeth personally, and may as well have suffixed most of what he told me with you piss-taking fuckface. It transpired that the Lee High Road dentist had done something of a rush job on that back tooth - which didn't come as much of a surprise given the multitasking which had characterised the appointment. The decay had continued beneath my hastily fitted crown and there was some infection involved. This newest practitioner did what he had to do, then asked 'did you know that you have gum disease, you piss-taking fuckface?'

I'm really never going to the dentist ever again, I told myself as I paid up and left, not out of choice, I'm not. I might be hit by a bus whilst crossing the road tomorrow, and then the future state of my gob won't matter one way or the other. Who can say what will happen?

I was back again six months later, same tooth but more agonising than ever. The dentist numbed me up, had a look, and deduced that the nerve within the same naughty molar was now at death's door and had hence begun to make a fuss. This was a detail which the previous dentist - the one who had taken the state of my teeth personally - would have been unable to detect as he capped my molar with the sort of care it should have received first time around.

'We'll need to extract the nerve.'

I didn't even know this was a thing. Unfortunately, once my latest dentist had drilled enough to get at the nerve to perform an extraction, her next action felt like several thousand volts of electricity passed through the tooth, regardless of anaesthetic.

'Oh dear,' she said, 'it seems the nerve is not quite dead.'

She told me she could cover the tooth with a temporary cap then try again in about a month, and at least I wouldn't be in any pain in the mean time. Under other circumstances my response probably would have been fuck off, but for the first time ever my dentist was female and - as I couldn't really fail to notice - gorgeous.

'Yes,' I said, adopting a serious expression to show that I understood, and that I really, really cared about my teeth, and that together, we could crack this thing. So I went back another four or five times at two week intervals, Dr. Patel attempting to extract the nerve on each occasion but having to admit defeat, still finding it was too sensitive. In the end she gave the tooth a semi-permanent cap and suggested I return when I experienced further discomfort. This seemed fair enough. Quite aside from the obvious appeal of my dentist being what might be described as a hottie, she was also a whizz with the anaesthetic. As she worked I had realised with considerable surprise that, aside from that electric jolt of decaying nerve, I'd otherwise felt nothing and that this was a first. There had always been some small degree of pain during the drilling or the chipping away or whatever else they got up to in there. Either anaesthetic practice had come some way since the late eighties, or Dr. Patel was just a better dentist than her predecessors.

Another decade passed, or something like a decade, although  I'm no longer certain quite when this particular divide occurred within the natural history of my teeth. It was almost certainly the frequently capped molar with its seemingly immortal nerve that sent me back, muttering a sheepish apology for having left it so long. The molar was at last dealt with by means of a root canal undertaken by Dr. Shane Curran. I'd initially resisted the notion of seeing a practitioner other than Dr. Patel on the grounds that I could tolerate some discomfort if I fancied the dentist a bit, but being in my forties I had at last begun to grasp that not having shit teeth should be considered sufficient inducement. I began to see the hygienist on a regular basis and agreed to twice yearly check ups from that point on - this more or less coinciding with a significant downward turn in the state of my teeth, even considering that they had never been great at the best of times. The Coventry dentist had warned me, you're going to have serious trouble with them by the time you're fifty if you're not careful, and my dental chickens were coming home to roost.

This was all due to a combination of gum disease, inexpert brushing, and smoking. I still had no idea what gum disease was beyond that I had it, and I was brushing morning and night more or less without fail, but without the sort of technique which would have made a difference. I had the vaguely expressed intention of giving up smoking at some point but found it difficult because life was otherwise just too depressing and miserable. Eventually and inevitably, some of my teeth had begun to feel loose.

Gum disease, as it was finally explained to me, is expressed as the gum receding from the tooth to expose the lower parts of the root which it would ordinarily protect, ultimately resulting in the decay of the bone surrounding which should support the tooth; which was why mine were beginning to rattle.

'What can I do?' I asked, uncomfortably aware of an irony black hole created in the wake of this newest display of concern. There didn't seem to be any single answer, possibly because you're probably fucked has never been considered a helpful expression in the context of medical diagnoses. 'Are you really sure this isn't just moving deck chairs around on the Titanic?' I asked Dr. Patel as she gave me yet another filling. 'I mean if I'm looking at false teeth, maybe it would just be easier to get it over and done with.'

She didn't really have an answer, but she chuckled at the joke about the Titanic which made me feel warm inside.

I was signed on for a course of deep cleaning at King's College Hospital, once a month, six sessions or something like that. The specific problem was that gum disease creates pockets down the side of the tooth wherein bacteria can collect and flourish, gradually destroying both the tooth and the bone in which it is set, and with all of this occurring below the gum line, brushing doesn't make much difference. My dental pockets were measured as being of about 5mm depth on average, but some were deeper and getting worse. The hygienist at King's College Hospital wrote me a prescription for Corsodyl, an antibacterial gel which I was to use in conjunction with interdental brushes referred to as tepes which could be inserted into the gaps between teeth; and I had to floss daily; and to brush properly, angling the bristles down towards the gum line. In addition to this I had an appointment roughly once a month during which the hygienist would manually scrape and chip away the plaque which had calcified around the roots of my teeth. It wasn't a huge amount of fun, but it seemed to be making some difference in that my pockets weren't getting any worse. Some were even beginning to close up and heal, although by now I had a few over one centimetre in depth - the point of no return, so I was told.

In 2009 I left London and returned to Coventry for a spell, living at my mother's house whilst preparing for my move to the States. Unfortunately this meant it became impractical for me to continue treatment at King's College Hospital in London. Simply I couldn't afford the train fare. I reasoned that with America being the land of Osmond brothers and perfect smiles, I would be living there soon enough providing everything worked out. I would worry about my gob once I'd moved because I had other seemingly more pressing concerns for the present; or so it appeared until I lost a filling whilst eating a cheese sandwich. I found a dental surgery in Coventry, but they were unable to continue my course of deep cleaning treatment owing to the convolutions of NHS funding and my no longer having an income, so it became a matter of damage limitation. I kept on with the Corsodyl and the tepes, and the dentist at the Balkrishna clinic pulled a couple of the really rotten ones which now, having lost all support, waggled freely from side to side in the back of my mouth. He never seemed particularly happy to see me, and even pulled one of the worst teeth without charge, having taken pity on me because the extraction had been performed with a simple tug, like removing a pebble from the tread of a bicycle tyre.

'Make sure you are seen as soon as you've moved,' he warned me darkly. 'You no longer have the luxury of sitting around and thinking about it for a while.'

I moved to America.

Prior to our marriage, I had warned my wife about my traditional English teeth and how they would almost certainly require work at some point, and that the work would doubtless be quite expensive; but having moved to the States, I was reluctant to bring the subject up again because I was fairly certain that the work would comprise someone pulling the lot and then measuring me for a pair of dentures. I presumed it had always been on the cards, yet despite everything I was still in part banking on my teeth eventually returning to full health of their own accord. I didn't want to commit myself to the idea that they definitely wouldn't return to full health of their own accord, and I was therefore naturally cautious of making any hasty decisions. I had given up smoking, and I knew at least some of my trouble had stemmed from the necrosis of the gums caused by tobacco smoke. My gums would probably grow back, and my teeth would begin to feel firm once more, I decided.

Typically, within a week of my arriving in America another filling popped out as I chewed on a soft, slightly crappy McDonald's cookie. Oh for fuck's sake, I thought.

I visited a dentist in Alamo Heights. He took an x-ray, then shrugged and delivered a verdict along the lines of how he wouldn't even know where to begin, and that the tooth from which I'd just lost a filling was probably a write off so there wasn't much point in him fixing it; for which he charged me eighty dollars.

Months passed, and then a year, and a second dentist told me the same as the first regarding the lost filling, specifically that he couldn't really commit to the idea that the tooth was worth saving in the first place. He proposed giving me a bridge - pulling a couple of teeth and attaching a sort of armature to those left standing, along which would be arranged a couple of false ones. He also recommended I seek a second opinion from one Dr. Stalker, apparently something of a whizz in this particular field. 'If anyone can help you, it's Stalker,' he told me, a slightly faraway look in his eyes as though he were referring to the last of the fabled Jedi Knights.

The proposed bridge sounded complicated and unpleasant, but my wife had been left sceptical of Dr. Stalker having been treated by him on a previous occasion. Nevertheless, a second opinion couldn't hurt and so I went to see Dr. Yarbrough who, rather conveniently, practiced just a block away from where my wife and myself were living. Dr. Yarbrough's second opinion was pretty much the same as the first had been, right down to the invocation of the mighty Dr. Stalker. He could deal with the lost filling, but it wasn't really even worth considering until Dr. Stalker had taken a look.

'Well, what do I know?' my wife sighed. 'They all seem to think he's the best. Maybe I was just unlucky.'

Dr. Stalker proved an amiable and knowledgeable practitioner, one of those people who immediately puts his patients at ease, or at least he put me at ease.

'Give it to me straight, doc,' I said, if not in those exact words, 'have you seen anyone with teeth worse than mine?'

'Well, they're not great,' he chuckled, not unkindly, 'but we're not without options.'

He took x-rays, prodded around for a while and then made his proposal. It wasn't going to be cheap, but it seemed worth a try. My wife's medical insurance covered some of the expense, and we borrowed the rest; and so Dr. Stalker went to work. I was unconscious under general anaesthetic for three hours as he pulled those teeth which were beyond repair, then opened up my gums and scraped the rest of the decaying matter from out of the bone support. Then he introduced some newly developed concoction utilising my own blood plasma which would, so he hoped, stimulate fresh bone growth around the roots of my remaining teeth, giving them greater stability; and then he sewed me back up.

I had a mouth full of stitches for a couple of weeks, and I was on a diet of pain killers and soup for about the same length of time, but when the stitches came out, Dr. Stalker seemed optimistic.

'It's looking good so far,' he told me, 'but I guess we'll know for sure in a couple of months. In the meantime you should get that rear molar capped.'

I returned to Dr. Yarbrough's office and was seen by a young Polish dentist. Without quite being able to say why, I found her abrasive, far from the reassuring presence which had been presented by Dr. Stalker, or even Dr. Yarbrough himself on my previous visit. She prodded and poked, drilled and filled some minor cavities I hadn't known about. She told me she had once been to London but couldn't remember much about it - which I presumed was her equivalent of bedside manner. Unfortunately any charm generated was quickly dispelled by her habit of discussing me and my terrible teeth with the dental assistant as though I were either deaf, stupid, or absent.

'Has Dr. Stalker treated him yet?' the assistant asked.

'No, I don't think he has.' The Polish women scowled into my mouth, apparently finding no evidence of several thousand dollars worth of surgery followed by a couple of weeks spent in serious pain.

She spoke directly to me. 'You have terrible gum disease, you know. It really is quite bad.'

'Still?'

'Yes.'

'I thought the surgery was supposed to deal with that.'

'You have already had the surgery with Dr. Stalker?'

'Yes I have, and apparently it hasn't made the slightest bit of difference.' I was almost in tears.

'You are going to have implants?'

This had been an earlier proposal, but a vague one depending on the success of Dr. Stalker's work. The gaps between my teeth left by those pulled might be filled with implants which could be screwed directly into the bone of my jaw, depending on how much bone was there. It sounded painful and expensive, and not entirely necessary given that I was getting on fine with the teeth I had left.

'No. I'm not going to have implants.'

The dentist returned to her conversation with the dental assistant, again discussing me as though I had left the room. 'Make a note, would you? When he comes back for his implants we shall—'

'I'm right here, you know.' This was too much. 'I can actually hear what you're saying; and I'm not having implants as I'm pretty sure I just said.'

She made some noise along the lines of well, just think about it, and then you can decide a bit later, and then ground my rear upper molar down to a nub and glued a temporary crown in place. This was the tooth from which Ronald McDonald had robbed me of a filling now over a year before.

'This is a temporary crown?'

'Yes,' she said. 'We need to order the permanent replacement, and then you will come back in again.' She showed me a catalogue offering a choice of different types of crown. I didn't have a fucking clue what I was looking at or why what seemed to me like a single job should require multiple appointments, and so got my wife on the phone and had her speak to the woman. After further discussion the dentist ordered the most expensive replacement crown, it being the best option, from what any of us could tell. I would need to return in another couple of weeks in order to have it fitted.

'Can you come with me?' I asked my wife. 'That dentist makes me nervous.'

Bess assumed I was probably freaking out over nothing, but nevertheless agreed to accompany me. The dentist fitted my new crown and we left.

'You were right.' Bess told me. 'I don't know what it was, but I didn't like her at all.'

A month or so later I returned to Dr. Stalker's office for the first of my regular deep cleaning appointments. The surgery had not been a success, I knew, so I was dreading it.

Dr. Stalker had a look around in my mouth and seemed quite pleased. I related what had happened at Dr. Yarbrough's office, and he responded with a slight frown. 'Trust me,' he said. 'It's early days, but there's already significant improvement here.' He didn't actually say, the woman doesn't know what she's talking about, of the dentist who had failed to recognise several thousand dollars worth of surgery, but I'd begun to suspect as much. I told him how keen she had been to sign me up for implants I didn't want, and he sighed. The impression I got was that things had been much better when Dr. Yarbrough himself had been running his own practice.

I've been back to Dr. Stalker's office every three or four months since, and on each occasion the cleaning has been less and less laborious as what teeth I have left have begun to recover from four decades of abuse. I have ten teeth less than most people, but the gaps are all at the rear of my mouth and I have no difficulty eating or chewing. I have a gap on each side of my upper jaw, same place each side, so where there were once three molars in a row behind each upper canine, there are now two with a space between them leaving those at the rear isolated, each stood alone at the back like the rock tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or the stumpy tusks of some weird Paleocene herbivore; it felt weird at first, but it's really no big deal.

My most recent appointment was distinguished by the announcement that the pockets which once ran so deep into my gum line are now entirely gone, fully healed despite my having once been told that I was stuck with those over a centimetre in depth. Dr. Stalker's verdict is that I will almost certainly be keeping those teeth I have left because my mouth is in good shape with no sign of gum disease for what is probably the first time in my life. Bess has concluded that her own initial scepticism regarding Dr. Stalker most likely came from frustration. He'd been unable to treat a fragment of shattered bone that had come loose in her jaw and had suggested that her only option was to grin and bear it, not through professional indifference so much as simple honesty. The fragment would work its way out and it would heal, but in the meantime there was nothing he could do. With hindsight she has concluded that this was at least preferable to snake oil, or to the practitioner who sees the patient only as a fountain of revenue.

On this latter note, the hygienist at Dr. Stalker's office recently noticed the beginnings of a cavity in one of the borderline teeth, one of those which almost got pulled but was left in the hope of it being worth saving. I was recommended to the excellent Dr. Woodbridge as a dentist who dedicates himself to the work which needs doing rather than what he can justify. Dr. Woodbridge filled the cavity and then asked about whether I'd intended to have implants. I said no, told him why, and asked what had prompted the question. He told me that my most recently and expensively capped molar had been fitted with a crown of a kind quite specifically tailored to accommodate neighbouring implants.

I suppose I might be justified in feeling slightly angry about some of this, as I was when I submitted an unfavourable account of my treatment at Dr. Yarbrough's clinic describing some of the above to Yelp, a website by which members of the general public share their experiences of medical centres, dental clinics, hospitals, restaurants, garages or anywhere else you might hope to avoid getting fucked over for the sake of a dollar. Curiously my review has been removed from the supposedly impartial site, leaving just the one which gushes with praise; but it no longer bothers me given that I no longer have to worry about my teeth falling out, or rotting into stumps, or the lottery involved in seeking further treatment should it be necessary. Given that I've spent my entire adult life having nightmares about the state of my teeth, I'm still not sure I've even quite taken any of this in.

Of course it also means that I am essentially the English male equivalent of a Thai bride as purchased from a catalogue; and that I no longer have quite such traditionally English teeth because Bess had me all fixed up just as soon as I came out of the packing crate, but I think I can live with that.

Intervention

Photograph courtesy of Michael Hall.

'What are you doing on Tuesday after work?' Marian asked.

'Nothing,' I said, hoping this was the right thing to say. 'Do you have something in mind?'

'My friend Richard needs a hand. We're taking a new fridge over to his house, and it would be great if you could help out. It wouldn't take very long.'

It was early on in my relationship with Marian, and her use of the term friend had not yet taken on the connotations it would later carry. With Marian, friends were not so much people with which you necessarily had anything in common as associates or colleagues, usually people she'd encountered on ISA self-improvement courses. She had friends outside of ISA she insisted, just friends she didn't see for years at a time and to whom she rarely spoke on the telephone.

She had tried to coax me into taking an ISA self-improvement course, but I resisted because I resented the implication that I required improvement by Marian's suspiciously ambiguous terms, and I was reluctant to shell out several hundred quid for something the nature of which Marian refused to describe because it would somehow destroy the magic. I had the impression that ISA was a cult, and this impression had been gleaned from, amongst other things, my phoning up the Cult Information Centre somewhere over in west London and asking them if they thought ISA were a cult.

'Yes,' the man said. 'ISA is a cult,' and he advised me to have as  little to do with them as possible. It struck me as good advice.

Tuesday came, as did Marian's friends in an estate car with a fridge in the back. It occurred to me that my assistance seemed not so crucial a detail as I had been led to believe given that there were three of them, including Marian, and they had already managed to get the fridge into the car so it probably wasn't going to be that big a deal at the other end; but I'd already said yes, and it wasn't going to take long.

True to form, Marian's friends were people she knew from numerous ISA courses. Nadia was a young black woman with a dry sense of humour. She was likeable and funny, and we got on fairly well; from which Marian presumably developed her theory that I have a thing for black women. My guess is that this is probably because I am able to talk to black women without first having to remind myself that they are just like you or I, but black, or whatever the hell it is that first goes through Marian's head when addressing those she would have regarded as inferiors until ISA taught her otherwise.

'I wouldn't have looked at you twice were it not for ISA,' she once told me in defence of the organisation. This was due to my being a mere postman, really no better than a common labourer. Apparently she was now able to see things differently, and it was all thanks to ISA. Had it not been for ISA, I would have been just some shit-thick manually labouring cunt so far as Marian was concerned.

'There are a lot of pictures of Karen here,' she scowled several years later, viewing the photographs I'd taken at the works Christmas drink. Only about six of us had turned up, Debbie, Geoff, Don, Karen, Rich, and myself. Karen was the black girl in the photographs.

'There are a lot more of Don,' I pointed out, 'and in case you're wondering, I don't fancy him either.'

Meanwhile back at Operation Fridge, we all piled into the car, Marian, Nadia, and myself. A person called Ian was driving, and I quickly realised that I hated this man almost more than anyone else I'd ever met in my life. He was a little older than me, past middle-aged and an ex-teacher. He had a broken, abrasive quality about him. He squinted from beneath failed Donald Trump hair with a wrinkled manatee face, and his lips were too large, pursed and acidic like those of an embittered old drag queen confronted with a poorly coordinated handbag. He punctuated his driving with occasional comic observations of a peculiarly joyless kind, like little cocktail sticks jabbed into your flesh. In conversation, his observations were made from the position of someone who knows something of which you yourself are clearly ignorant. It was not difficult to see how he had ended up on the self-help roundabout.

We drove through Brixton, and then Clapham, and then beyond. The three of them talked about ISA, but none of the good stuff forbidden to the ears of outsiders, nothing of what actually went on, just the sort of details I presume were calculated to draw me in.

'What is this again?' I would ask. 'I guess maybe I should give this workshop deal of yours a go.' Except I didn't, because they were children affecting nonchalance whilst discussing the new My Little Pony game, desperately hoping I'll ask them about it.

A new My Little Pony game you say? Tell me more!

The projected half hour was already forty-five minutes and we weren't even there. In fact an A-Z was being passed around, held at different angles in order that its secrets might be more easily divined. Being winter, it was already getting dark and the traffic was heavy. Richard, to whom we were taking the fridge, was their friend, but not so close that any of them actually knew where he lived. This enterprise was taking longer than promised, as tended to be the case when Marian was involved, this being Marian who would agree to meet you at two, turn up at four, and then tell you that you had meant four because when someone asks you to meet them at two, they really mean four. Everyone knows that.

Needless to say, there didn't seem to be much point in commenting upon this change to the terms and conditions, because she always had the small-print to hand.

She said this wasn't going to take very long.

But did I actually say we were going to be back home before nine in the evening, or did you just assume that, Lawrence, like you always do? or else it would be some testy remark about her inability to see into the future, which is why we didn't even have the conversation. It wasn't worth the trouble.

We arrived at Richard's place, evidently a bedsit in a much larger house, a great crumbling Edwardian mansion. It took a couple of minutes to get an answer. It seemed that Richard hadn't actually been expecting us and had been asleep. He emerged blinking like a sort of human mole, a slightly rounded head with hair cut short and a hunched figure. He seemed nervous, but glad to see us, or at least pleased to discover that the day held this particular element of the unexpected. He invited us in, albeit with some reluctance.

His room was at the top of a flight of steps, the way dimly lit by a light bulb somewhere way up near the cavernous ceiling. The place was quiet and damp. Year old newspapers, unpaid bills, and junk mail gathered dust on the lower steps of the staircase.

His rooms were small, just a bedroom with a kitchen at one end so far as I could see. It was stuffed full of books and CDs, and there was a computer and a bass guitar and musical equipment, but otherwise it was nightmarish, a nest made by somebody waiting for death. Newspapers, plastic carrier bags, anything that should have otherwise found its way to a dustbin was trodden flat into a grey carpet. Plates sat upon the floor, poking out from beneath the bed, the remains of whatever he'd been eating slowly calcifying like fossils. Only the computer looked clean.

In the kitchen, three or four inches of grey water sat in a sink which had apparently lost the will to drain, filthy plates lay within at hopeless angles. There was no smell, presumably because it was freezing cold and the only heat source I had noticed was a portable three bar electric fire.

I'd lived in some shitholes in my time, and visited much worse, but this was like nothing I had seen before. I was lost for words.

The three with which I had arrived were bustling around, inspecting the squalor, asking Richard if he thought it was okay to live this way. I felt suddenly uncomfortable, not least because I realised there was no point to our bringing a fridge up here into this room, so clearly something else was happening.

I was introduced to Richard as Marian and Nadia began to wrestle the shit from the floor into black plastic bags. So far as I knew I was just here to hump a large heavy object up a flight of stairs, but I'd noticed familiar titles on the bookcase and amongst those crumbling towers of media piled in the corners of the room, and so it seemed that Richard and I had something in common.

He told me a little about himself. He was about my age and had been in bands. He liked science-fiction. He reminded me of a few people I already knew, such were the common details, and we even seemed to have a couple of distant but nevertheless mutual friends. He wasn't quite a brother from another mother, but within minutes we found we got on so well that it seemed like I should already have known this guy in some capacity, or at least known of him.

It was difficult to square this slightly shy - although not cripplingly so - and undoubtedly amiable man with the conditions in which he'd been living, and the claim that he had not made exit from his own front door in about three weeks. He had problems, as I should have known, and he'd taken an ISA course in an attempt to address these problems. It didn't really look like a successful attempt from where I stood, but in any case this was how he knew Marian and the others. He told me a little of his problems, although I don't recall the details beyond divorce, estrangement from his own child, and a death somewhere in the equation. He was otherwise a regular, thoughtful guy who'd had a shitty break and was yet to fully come back from it.

This was an intervention.

'We look after each other in ISA,' Marian told me as she gathered chipped plates and cups from the floor. 'Isn't that the sort of thing you would be interested in?'

This was for my benefit as much as anything. We had come to bail Richard out, to wipe his arse for him, figuratively speaking. We were here to do that with which he no longer felt able to cope, because he was lost in his own behavioural spiral, sinking further and further into inertia. We were here on a mission.

Nevertheless I hadn't come to help, I had come to learn a lesson. This was so I could understand why Marian had been right all along.

I shuffled out into the kitchen and began to clear up, concentrating on the aspects of our visit which mattered, namely saving this poor fucker from himself. The rest I would worry about later. I managed to unblock the sink and then clean enough of the kitchen to begin washing the conveyor belt of plates and mugs and knives and forks coming from the other room. I gazed from the window as I washed, out across the damp squalor of ruined gardens and railway lines, but it was too dark to see anything.

Two or three hours passed, and the bedsit was ready to receive the new fridge. Whilst the place remained cramped and depressing, it was at least clean and fit for human habitation. Ian and myself humped the old fridge out into the overgrown garden ready for collection by the council, and then brought in the new one. Richard was close to tears. He seemed overwhelmed that anyone should have done this for him. It was getting on for seven in the evening, and this job of just half an hour had taken five. I had been lied to, and as a result I had spent nearly five hours in the company of one of the most acidic men I've ever met, and yet somehow none of it mattered because some good had come from the day.

Richard helped me move house a couple of years later - specifically helping me shift a couple of massive shelves - and although we never became close, it was good to hear about him from time to time, and to know that things seemed to be working out for him. I guess the intervention had occurred during one of his lowest periods. These days I see him on facebook as a remote presence. I avoid too much interaction because I don't know how he feels about his breakdown, or whatever it was, and I don't wish to stir things up. I don't know how he feels about ISA either. My take on them remains unchanged, regardless of good deeds done by their individual members, and I personally suspect that whatever strength brought Richard back from the edge was something he already had rather than something done for him by anyone else; and I could tell him all of this but I don't know if it would really help, or even that my views matter in this instance.

I still have nightmares involving Marian from time to time, and they really are nightmares - usually her passive-aggressiving me into some vaguely suicidal corner - so it's always nice to remind myself that some good came out of it, at least this one time.