Simon

It hasn't been a great week. It's been cold and I don't do well with the cold, which was one factor that eased my relocation to Texas. Christmas approaches with all the obligations of time spent in the company of persons whose company can be problematic. My wife is being messed about at her place of work. Carol died earlier in the week, and if I hadn't seen her in a couple of decades, it still felt rough even at such distance. Our neighbour has been whining about the cats again with his usual passive-aggressive charm, seemingly expecting me to tell him God knows what - maybe that I'd happily have them all put down rather than suffer another stray turd to be laid upon his beloved driveway; and Simon Morris is dead.

Simon was the vocalist and driving force of a group called the Ceramic Hobs. I first heard them at the tail end of the eighties, or possibly very early nineties - a couple of tracks someone had stuck on the end of a tape for me, and all I can remember was that they sounded like a bit of a racket. My initial impression wasn't great.

Around 1999, he sent a copy of Psychiatric Underground, the Ceramic Hobs first album, to the Sound Projector magazine with the words please feel free to give our CD a good slagging - we can handle it! I was writing reviews for the magazine at the time and Ed Pinsent, the editor, passed it on to me, suggesting that it seemed to be my sort of thing. I thought it sounded like a bit of a racket, but tried to write something positive:

It's certainly one of the more incoherent CDs I've come across. Tape collages are splattered across its twenty-eight tracks with all the ferocity of the pattern in the toilet bowl after a bout of swallie induced pebble-dashery. All mashed up with the tapes and a few techno inspired remixes is an assortment of occasionally tuneful punky numbers complete with gargled vocals, a drumkit being demolished, and a family of chimps at the mixing desk. They must've got through some PG Tips whilst this album was being made. Psychiatric Underground is like one of those kid's drawings of a circus where everything happens simultaneously, an interpretation which, if true to life, would mean that most circuses would last about five minutes.

Another stumbling block had been the association with Pumf Records, whom I recalled from the eighties back when I too had been involved in the whole DIY weirdy tapes by mail scene. To be fair, I hadn't actually heard any of their works, but had become jaded through a million flyers for Pumf products spilling from everything which came in the mail for a period of about a year. It had begun to feel like telemarketing; but then, I reasoned, there almost certainly would have been persons out there similarly weary of my own shittily photocopied self promotion. I swallowed my pride and struck up a correspondence with Stan of Pumf, and then also the Ceramic Hobs guitarist, reasoning that veterans of whatever it was that we both seemed to be veterans of should probably stick together.

Next came Straight Outta Rampton, the second Ceramic Hobs album, and the one where I finally felt I understood what the hell they were trying to do. The above description still applied, but somehow the random patterns had formed something weird and beautiful; and I suddenly felt guilty about having given Psychiatric Underground away and sent for a second copy; at which point Simon wrote to me to say thanks for the write up, but also:

It's weird to be writing to you really. In about 1983 when I was fourteen I used to correspond with Larry Peterson, and I distinctly remember a Do Easy flyer that he sent - that was you, wasn't it?

It was, and he told me that my writing was the best stuff in the Sound Projector - even though it clearly wasn't - which was nice, and we became pals. Musically speaking, I'd been working on the launch of my ill advised rap career, and it had occurred to me that it might be interesting were the impending CD to include a few voices other than my own. I'd heard Simon rap on tapes he'd recorded with Stan as Judge Mental and the Heavy Dread Beat - amongst other ludicrous names - and while his rapping was basic as fuck, it was also funny and made up for the shortfall with sheer anger. I sent him an instrumental and he sent me a vocal which I striped onto the four-track master without too much difficulty. Then I performed with the Ceramic Hobs when they played at the Garage in Islington, first time jumping on stage on the spur of the moment, and on the second occasion with more preparation. I think I may actually have thrown up on him on one of these two occasions, which is always a bonding experience. I doubt our collaboration made any difference to anyone's life, but they were fun, and we loosely kept in touch from that point on - despite my momentary emesis - through my moving to Texas, through the Ceramic Hobs splitting and then reforming in different configurations.

He suffered from schizophrenic episodes and mostly seemed to have it under control, but was mad by some definition - a term he embraced with punky enthusiasm - and was as such a square peg in a round hole world, as the best people tend to be. He was also fiercely intelligent and I found we agreed on most of the important stuff.

It's like he doesn't get the idea that all this arty music is just another form of showbiz, it's all product. I'm convinced of this so when people seem to swallow the false high/low culture divide it bugs me. The Ramones say more to me as art than Aphex Squarepusher laptop powerbook wank anyway.

As fellow graduates of a certain poorly defined thing, we knew a lot of the same people, same points of reference. When Robert Dellar, the Mad Pride activist who had arranged for the Ceramic Hobs to play at the Garage died at the end of 2016, I took it upon myself to produce some sort of anthology as either a tribute or an epitaph. The book was called Kiss of Life, and Simon's contribution was a letter explaining why he couldn't contribute.

My book from last year and the one out soon are full of death and obituaries. I feel like a fucking undertaker or something. I just can't face writing more stuff like that, not about Robert. Apologies again. You can use this paragraph if you like as an explanation of why I can't contribute - I am still much too upset basically.

I know the feeling.

More recently he urged me to get in touch with Philip Best of Consumer Electronics on the grounds of his having moved to Austin, just down the road from me, and arguably being another veteran of whatever the hell it had been when we were all much younger. Philip had been a member of Whitehouse so I was slightly terrified by the idea, but through Simon's persistent nagging I made the effort; and I'm glad I did because, as I now realise, Philip is one of the nicer - or at least less cunty - people I've met through association with noisy music, and he now runs Amphetamine Sulphate publishing which has been responsible for at least a couple of the greatest short novels I've ever read.

In addition to compiling the astonishing Black Pool Legacy, the double album which at last makes sense of the Ceramic Hobs sprawling body of work, Best also published three books by Simon, and I gather Simon had become a valued gate keeper and collaborator as editor of titles by Meg McCarville and others.

Then, just six months ago, while it would be absurd to suggest that we fell out, he pissed me off on facebook - although that hardly makes him unique. I made some comment about his beloved Electric Light Orchestra and he told me, get over yourself. I wouldn't have minded but the comment had been me taking the piss out of my own long-standing hatred of Jeff Lynne and all his infernal works, a joke amounting to here I am being a dick yet again; but he didn't seem to see the funny side and perhaps assumed I was simply being an actual dick. He suggested I would need to familiarise myself with one of their horrible songs in particular because I would be reading about it in Watching the Wheels, his forthcoming book from Amphetamine Sulphate.

That rather depends, I thought to myself, on whether I choose to buy your forthcoming book from Amphetamine Sulphate.

He'd also taken to posting status updates on what it's like to write books, what books should be, and so on, which I found a bit irritating. I unfollowed him and went off to think about that Nocturnal Emissions album I'd sent him as a freebie because I'd ended up with two copies. We hadn't fallen out, but it's always good to take a break, and I'd reconnect in a few months once he'd moved past delivering edicts and I'd grudgingly read Watching the Wheels, as we both knew I would. It was probably silly, but so is existence.

I vaguely followed his goings on through others. He came to read in Los Angeles at an Amphetamine Sulphate evening, and it was nice to know he was doing well and already had another book in the works.

Then about two weeks ago, all of those mutual friends were suddenly worried at his having gone missing from his home in Blackpool. He'd vanished below the radar on a couple of previous occasions, deactivating social media accounts whilst getting his head together, and I assumed this would be the same; although it was a little worrying that the police were now involved in looking for him.

He'd show up.

He'd turn up and there would be some new novel spun from this latest psychological turnpike.

Just this morning my wife came in from her morning run and told me his body had been found.

Simon is no longer with us.

Gone.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

I wonder at the folly of falling out - or at least going silent running - over Jeff bloody Lynne, but not for long. It wouldn't have made much difference to anything, I don't think.

I dig out his old letters and postcards. I listen to Black Pool Legacy and realise we really have lost one of the good 'uns, which likewise doesn't come as a surprise. I always knew it.

He was one of those people who made things interesting, who caused good things to happen, whose art - even with the bleakest and blackest of subjects under the microscope - could not help but sound optimistic, hopeful, even funny by some mechanism I couldn't even begin to understand. He struggled but he always seemed to come through. He made things better.

I will miss him.

Where I'm From

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Sorry, Ted. Not guilty.'

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

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

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

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

'Did you like it?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Yeah?'

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

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

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

'What? He drove off?'

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

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

'Lawrence,' Alan says.

'Huh?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Blimey, Sav,' I observe.

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

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

Enter Mel.

'What the fuck do you want?'

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

'I don't know whose it is.'

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

'Live & Kicking has changed a lot.'

A brief silence ensues as we all watch appreciatively.

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

Mel scowls. 'Say that again?'

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

Sav chuckles. 'What? Men as well?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting with Statues

Living in the south, and particularly Texas, it is recommended that one develops a thick skin, at least when engaging with social media. The south had slaves, invented the Klu Klux Klan, and it's mostly been downhill from there if social media is any indication. The civil war was fought because everyone living in the north hated slavery and loved freedom, and those were the only reasons. Dirty deeds done in the north are exceptions to the rule, and anyway there was usually some dude from Texas involved, but anything shitty occurring below the Mason-Dixon is probably occurring just because that's how we are down here. Facebook posts linking news items referring to the south, some retarded government official proposing regulations discriminating against a particular group of people for example, will inevitably be embellished with the comments of millions from somewhere up north who told us so. Can't we just get rid of Texas?, they'll whine, because Texas is the only place in all America where shitty officials get in power and make stupid decisions. Nothing bad ever happens anywhere else, and it's surely only a matter of time before we learn that Donald Trump is actually from Brownsville, because it sure would explain a lot.

This is why when a speaker from an organisation called Sons of Confederate Veterans was invited to talk on a local radio show, I listened to what he had to say. I had no strong opinion regarding the Confederacy, beyond some reservations about those who still wave its flag, but in any case this wasn't really what the guy wanted to talk about. Instead he discussed the north-south divide and the continued demonisation of the latter. He discussed the Civil War and the received wisdom of it being fought purely so as to free the slaves - which may have been an issue, but was at best a side issue. It was more to do with the south seceding from the Union, and this being a problem because the south was where all the money was made, doubtless thanks to slavery, which suddenly deprived the government of a significantly massive source of tax revenue.

This is roughly my understanding, namely that there was no great or noble cause on either side of the line, regardless of the possibility of there having been noble individuals; because that's how war is by definition, a last resort where reason and negotiation have failed. That slavery was ended is obviously a great thing, but we should probably keep in mind how well African-Americans have generally fared in this country since 1863 before anyone starts declaring it their victory.

This isn't to necessarily express either sympathy or solidarity with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, so much as to acknowledge that the existence of such an organisation is understandable in terms of regional identity without needing to be rude about it by suggesting anyone is necessarily a racist. Unfortunately though, the Confederate cause really does seem to attract shitheads. I've encountered one of them on a local bulletin board called Next Door, a forum to which one may sign up in order to converse with others in your neighbourhood. The city council had announced that it would be removing a statue commemorating the Confederate dead from Travis Park in downtown San Antonio, and Biffo the Bear quite naturally had plenty to say about it on Next Door.

Of course, this wasn't the same Biffo the Bear whose adventures endured for fifty-one years in the pages of the English children's comic, the Beano, but that's what I'm calling him in accordance with the level of respect which I feel is his due.

I signed up for Next Door more than a year ago, and became immediately aware of Biffo the Bear. He seemed to have a lot of time on his hands and would comment on almost every thread. Maybe you were moving house and had decided to give away a dresser to anyone able to collect the thing. Biffo the Bear might comment on how it was a nice piece of furniture and how he sure wished he had room for it, and then his attention would turn to the more pressing issues of no good punks, or lousy drivers, or shiftless repairmen. You'd lost your chihuahua and wondered if anyone had seen her, and there was Biffo once again grumbling about Obama coming to take our guns, and how we all needed to keep an eye open, and to keep our guns in good working order because you never know who might be out there, and hell - there could be an ISIS cell right here in our neighbourhood just waiting, waiting…

Biffo the Bear struck me as insane and stupid, and I found his testimony depressing, so I gave up on Next Door. I didn't want to have to think about the existence of people like Biffo the Bear, and how they get to vote and thus influence decisions which affect the rest of us, people with working brains. More recently I found myself drawn back in when another of our neighbours received a particularly vile piece of anonymous hate mail.

 

Attn. Lazy filthy Latin negros From Cuba. Take a little pride in yourselfs and clear up your unkempt dump of a yard. Start by storing that junk boat you smuggled your 'familia' in, in a storage, also chop shop are against the law. I understand stealing cars is the only thing your parents taught you. It's obvious you smoke crack or PCP, so get rid of those ghetto blinds and buy curtains. Fix up your 'casa'. My dog has a better house than you do, but then again my dog is an American, not a uneducated immigrant. If you need help join the neighborhood association, but you have to quit the Bloods or Crips first. If you can't read or write English and probably never will, look at all your 'Primos' in the 'Bronx'. Ask your Mexican neighbours if they could read it in Reggaeton. For your theirs like twenty of them that live next door. Or go library and check out Hooked on Phonics for the Spanish speaking Negroes from Cuba or Dominican Republic. But do something please, you pathetic peasants. Now I know why Trump wants to get rid of you. Better yet we should make you slaves like your cousins.

I've standardised the case - which randomly switches between upper and lower, sometimes half way through a sentence - and I've added punctuation, and anglicised and deleted a couple of words I didn't understand, but that's the general thrust of the argument as set forth by this anonymous individual who identifies only as your wonderful and caring Anglo-Saxon neighbours on Sumner Drive.

The subject of this missive was understandably upset, and so shared it on Next Door in hope of discerning some clue as to its origin. It seemed like the point of the letter was spite, plain and simple. Having walked past on many occasions, I would say that the man's house is fine, as are his blinds, as is his yard, as is the boat he keeps in his driveway. There is nothing to distinguish his house as any different to those of his neighbours, and it's situated at such a distance from Sumner Drive as to call into question why the author of the letter would even give a shit; but this is of course to credit the sender with both locative honestly and motives beyond just racist harassment undertaken for the sake of retarded chuckles.

We talked about it on Next Door, and everyone was horrified. I noticed, after the first hundred or so replies, that Biffo the Bear was yet to weigh in, Biffo who routinely shares his thoughts about the dangers of liberalism and the protection of our second amendment rights on every single thread, even if it's just some guy asking for the number of a decent plumber. It struck me as strange that Biffo, never usually so reticent on the subject of other people's business or how we need to act when we don't like what some neighbour is up to, should have no opinion. I said as much in the thread, which prompted a couple of others to agree that yes, it was fucking weird; which in turn prompted another couple of others to break their silence and point out that Biffo was a lovely Bear and would never have sent that terrible letter, and that we were sounding a little like a lynch mob and should therefore be ashamed of ourselves. More serious still, one of Biffo's defenders informed us that she had made a note of all our names and would be handing the note to her brother-in-law at the first sniff of pitchforks and burning torches.

Her brother-in-law was a cop, she told us. That's how most crimes are solved, see. Usually the officer in charge is handed a revealing note by some close friend or relative, and that's how he knows which heads to bust.

Biffo the Bear returned to the fray a couple of days later, just as I now return to the point. The city council had announced that it would be removing a statue commemorating the Confederate dead from Travis Park in downtown San Antonio, and Biffo the Bear quite naturally had plenty to say about it. His cousin had been down to Travis Park and had told him all about what was going on, and William B. Travis fought at the Battle of the Alamo and was nothing to do with the Civil War, which just goes to show how stupid these uneducated punks are, and it's exactly like when the Taliban blew up those Buddish*1 statues in Afghanistan. ISIS also want to rewrite history and that's why these damn liberals must be fought. Something about Sharia Law, Obama, blah blah blah...

Had Biffo gone down to Travis Park himself - and it's surprising that he didn't considering how much he cares - he would have seen that the statue earmarked for removal simply commemorates the Confederate dead, and was erected in the park named after William B. Travis without actually depicting the man; but never mind. His understanding of the situation at least doesn't seem to be any worse than that of anyone else on his side of the debate. Photos of protesters from both sides of the divide appeared on facebook, not really clashing because there probably weren't enough people there and the cops were present. One image showed kids in mostly black t-shirts, some black lives matter slogans, laid out on the ground in what was obviously a peaceful protest. One of them shows a raised clenched fist, a symbol of which the meaning is so fucking obvious as to require no further clarification.

That fist means Marxism, warned an octogenarian facebook dweller in the comments section next to the photograph, because the beauty of social media is that everyone gets a say, no matter how fucking stupid they are; and someone will read those words and somehow assume that the moron responsible is speaking from an informed position.

'Let's see what's happening down at Travis Park,' I said to my wife. It's Sunday and we have nothing else on, so we go.

The park is pretty small and has been populated by a substantial population of homeless people at intervals between vote-grabbing drives to move them to a place where they can no longer offend the eyes of responsible tax payers such as Biffo the Bear. It's about 98° Fahrenheit and there aren't many people around. We see a small group over near one of the fountains, mostly African-American, so we go over to talk with them. Unfortunately someone has beaten us to it, an older white guy pleading the case for keeping the statues.

We shuffle up behind him to listen in. I'm wearing my favourite shirt, one made from material patterned so as to resemble the state flag. It seemed like a good idea to appear vaguely patriotic, because I'm more worried about being shot by angry, uneducated crackers suffering from patriotism poisoning than I'm worried about being shot by anyone in a black lives matter t-shirt; but now I feel a little self-conscious as the old guy states his case. I hope no-one thinks I've come along to back him up.

There are a couple of white dudes sat at a table about ten foot away. They look like hillbillies. Their accents are impenetrable to me, just noises like someone playing with rubber bands; but they don't sound particularly happy and they glance over at us from time to time. A little further away there's a cop maintaining command presence.

Bess and I listen, and I am at least initially encouraged by the words of the white guy. For him it's about history and identity, and has nothing to do with racism. This much is obvious from the fact that he's talking to these seven young men and women. Finally he runs out of words, and his audience are better able to respond.

'Kanye was stupid for that,' one of them sighs, referring to Kanye West's attempt to take back the Confederate flag in some video or other.

'Same goes for Lil' Jon,' says another shaking his head.

I'm stood next to two young guys in shorts with black t-shirts and dreads. The larger one now dominates the conversation. He speaks well, genial and without any obvious anger, and I find myself chipping in. It's fun, and I'm actually learning something, coming down off that fence; not least because it's so rare that I ever have anything you would call a conversation, certainly not spoken with anyone to whom I'm not directly related in some way.

'This is a park,' he says, 'a public place where you bring your family, your children.' He gestures towards the statue somewhere behind him, and the case for the prosecution is shown to be solid.

The removal of Confederate statues isn't about rewriting history, because the statues weren't about history in the first place. Most of them were raised during a period of elevated white racial insecurity, expressed in reactionary terms such as the revival of the Klan in 1915, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and even chuckling Edgar Rice Burroughs referring to the KKK as freedom fighters in his pulpy little thrillers. If we're really that bothered about remembering history, statues don't seem to have been much help with this one; but in any case, it isn't about then, it's about right now, and whether we as a multiracial society can move forward if we're still doffing caps to a regime which has come to stand for white supremacy and the slightly sinister reduction of the practice of slavery to something which was simply of its time. It doesn't matter that something like 95% of the population of Texas at the time of the Civil War had no direct involvement in either owning slaves or the practice of slavery. It doesn't matter that there was more to the Civil War than just the issue of slavery, or that the north was hardly a model of progressive thought; because what matters is right now, and that the Confederacy has become a symbol for shitheads across the board.

'Even with all that you said there,' our man continues, 'whatever that flag meant back then, it ain't ever coming back. It ain't ever going to be good again; and we need to start thinking about moving on.'

He's right too.

We talk some more, at least enough to elicit a few smiles once they realise I'm not about to pull on a white hood. The shirt was probably a mistake.

'You from Australia?' asks the guy who reminds me of Idris Elba.

'That's what everyone says,' I sigh, and tell him I'm from London because he probably doesn't want my entire life story; and of course it turns out he has family somewhere in the south-east of England.

We all shake hands and fuck off, going our separate ways. Later I go online to look up soulhop_musik, having seen it written across their t-shirts. It turns out that a couple of the guys we spoke to were rappers, and pretty good ones too, and I'm sort of relieved I didn't know this at the time, thus sparing us all the embarrassment of the fat, old white dude in the Lone Star shirt trying to be down with the kids and talking about which is his favourite UGK album*2.

It can be a shitty old world, but the guys at the park give me hope, and some faith in the idea that the current resurgence of the shithead far-right is its death rattle, a croaking protest at the certainty of the knowledge that it no longer has a role in the world; but I suppose deep down I already knew this on some level. For one thing, the overwhelming response on Next Door was in support of the guy on the receiving end of the hate mail, and not just support but justified and righteous outrage that such a thing could have happened in our neighbourhood. Biffo the Bear was suddenly revealed as a cranky minority voice, just some lonely, paranoid twat making a lot of noise because there's nothing much else going on in his own life, and I suspect that's probably the reason why he chose to say nothing for the first time ever; because he saw himself as he really was, and he understood that maybe the shitheads aren't going to inherit the earth after all.

*1: No idea. Possibly some belief system derived from Buddhism.

*2: Probably either Too Hard to Swallow or Ridin' Dirty. It's hard to say.

DVDs, Novelties, Men's Underwear

All the time I lived in London I never attended Gay Pride. I had no objection to Gay Pride. I simply dislike public spectacle, the noise, the hullabaloo, the taking four hours to get anywhere. London is a lot of people crammed into a relatively small space, and I never saw the appeal of seeking out pockets of even stronger concentration, regardless of whose flag had been run up the pole this time.

My friend Rob and I both went along to a Latino festival in Burgess Park, Camberwell, drawn by our mutual interest in the culture. He'd lived in Cuba and I had visited Mexico a couple of times. Research undertaken by the University of London back in 2011 reported a figure of around 113,000 Latinos living in the capital, more than enough for a decent festival and the park was accordingly packed. We wandered around for a bit, drank beer, watched a few reggaeton acts, and ate bowls of what was probably sudado, a sort of fishy tomato soup thing Rob had enjoyed in Cuba and which was as delicious as he had promised. It was a nice afternoon, but as usual I always felt I should probably be having more fun than I actually was, and I found myself irritated by the presence of the ubiquitous Time Out subscribers whose presence would always turn any public event into a sea of yapping sandal-footed wankers in felt festival hats and ironic T-shirts.

The same people would have spent the week getting paid far too much, mooning around their absurdly priced glass dwelling boxes in Hoxton or wherever, and just thinking about website design for a living. In the evening they meet up to drink beer with wedges of lime plugging up the necks of their bottles, and they talk about how great it is to live in London, and the richness of their shared cultural experience, and then they all look in the latest issue of Time Out to see which fresh cultural experiences are to be had this coming weekend. I've never understood this need to find events with which to fill one's time. I've never had a problem working out what I want to do, because I'm already interested in things.

The Latino festival was okay, but as I say I've never been a fan of crowds gathered for public spectacle; and yet having said that, public spectacle is a different animal here in San Antonio, possibly because I'm older and less inherently cantankerous than was once the case, but also because Texan population density is a fraction of what it is in London. The crowds are less aggravating, happily bereft of Time Out subscribers, and for most of the year it's too hot for anyone to make a serious nuisance of themselves. It isn't that America doesn't have its own representatives of the annoying community, but thankfully most of them seem to be concentrated in New York.

Anyway, it was the 4th of July and we had already wandered around Alamo Heights waving flags, or else watching neighbours pushing flag waving children along in carts. I wore my Lone Star shirt, sewn from material patterned like the state flag, purchased second hand and almost certainly originating from either a gas station or some restaurant chain. We ate free tacos, petted baby goats, and it was fun. Afternoon rolled around and we decided to go and take a look at the Gay Pride event going on at Crockett Park down on Main.

Reading that paragraph back to myself, I wonder what differentiates me from the overmoneyed London culturevores taking holiday after holiday in other people's life experience, and I suppose nothing at all is the honest answer; but on the other hand I live here, so I have a vested interest in the general level of tolerance and diversity occurring in my adopted city. I like to believe that I live in a place where people are customarily good to each other, regardless of whatever factors may appear to divide them. So far I have found this to be generally true, with those persons to the contrary numbering amongst an unfortunately vocal but thankfully tiny minority. So, having moved to the sort of urban space in which public events aren't always a complete headache, and in some cases may even deliver the sort of fun promised on the flyers, Bess and myself decided to go and see what was happening with Gay Pride.

Just past Hogwild Records, Main Avenue seems to be the gay district - if that's quite the right term - at least in so much as it has a couple of gay clubs identified with rainbow decor. Also there is at least one adult entertainment store selling DVDs, novelties, and mens' underwear. It actually has the words mens' underwear painted on the side of the building, and each time we drive past I hear the words in my mind's ear as though read aloud with a certain lurid intonation by Vic Reeves; and I still can't help but think of novelties as hand-buzzers, whoopee cushions, squirt-flowers and the like. I suppose mens' underwear must refers to studded leather pants as probably sported by that cop from the Village People.

We drove down Main and two muscular young men waved at us from outside another store selling mens' underwear, which by coincidence is all that the young men were wearing. They seemed pretty happy, and so we waved back. Then we couldn't find a parking space and had to return the way we came and retrace our footsteps - or at least our tyre tracks - passing the waving underwear men a second time but now on foot. They still seemed happy, despite the heat, and it dawned on me that they were engaged in drumming up trade for the store. I hoped they were being paid well for it, given the intense heat.

The crowds became more fulsome and more flamboyant as we approached Crockett Park, though mostly sticking to the shade of the buildings on the west side of Main. The Supreme Court had ruled to legalise same-sex marriage across the entire country on Friday, June the 26th, just two weeks earlier. I hadn't really been following either the news or that specific aspect closely, but I had the impression it came somewhat out of the blue. When all you've heard on the subject is a few months of fuckwitted windbags weighing in on how something which affects them in no sense whatsoever is somehow a violation of their human rights, a government body actually doing the right thing can come as quite a shock. It felt like a victory for common sense, specifically a victory against the prevailing expectation of all future news following a downwards and increasingly conservative curve. So there seemed to be an elevated sense of excitement in the air, like we now knew that the fuckers could be beaten, and more importantly that we could once again be considered a valid collective term. We were maybe not so divided after all.

The park was cordoned off behind chain-link fencing with a long queue outside. There was an entrance fee. This initially struck me as surely contrary to the spirit of the enterprise, but we took our place in the line. An old guy in a Stetson stood on the opposite side of the road, squinting at us in the scorching sunlight and holding a placard informing us that homosexual marriage is evil. I looked around, realising I had been expecting worse, truckloads of Westboro Baptist level nutters with megaphones and buckets of human piss ferried in to fight the good fight against basic intelligence, but there was just the one guy. I hoped this was closer to the reality of the opposition than that which is regularly communicated by a hysterical media, but it's sometimes difficult to tell. Some people ducked out of the queue, crossing the street to engage with our token protester, either to see if they could talk some sense into him, or else to take a look at what happens when a person grows up unable to tell the difference between opinion and fact. He smiled and chatted but seemed a little ill at ease, which was nice.

Paying to get in struck me as odd, at least until we were inside and I realised that an entrance fee would at least serve to deter anyone turning up for the sake of causing trouble. The atmosphere in the park was happy and relaxed, with no-one really giving too much of a shit about guys kissing or the more extreme examples of wardrobe surrealism. Stalls were arranged all around the periphery, but most of them seemed to be dull financial concerns, insurance and the like. This is something I have come to expect here in America, where money is much more of a thing than it was on the other side of the Atlantic, at least in my experience. Food and drinks were to be had, both entailing a peculiar system of purchasing vouchers at one stall then exchanging these for beer or tacos at another. I have no idea how this worked or who was to benefit, but I suppose maybe it kept all of the festival cash in one place.

Anyway, not having any great need of specifically homosexual life insurance, we purchased refreshments and found some shade from which to watch what was going on with the stage. It wasn't really anything spectacular - a couple of drag acts lip syncing to hi-energy songs under the scorching midday heat. They weren't even pretending hard enough to come equipped with a fake microphone, and may as well have just been people in the crowd for all the difference it made. Call me conservative, but I tend to think a drag act really has to do something beyond just showing up in a dress, and I am disinclined to applaud anything quite so peripheral as skilled application of eyeliner.

The drag acts were followed by a rap duo - a man and a butch woman. Bass pounded across the stage, slow and low with skittery bounce hi-hats and the two of them prowling back and forth, trading lines, throwing up the signs, and generally they were pretty tight. Unfortunately the crowd didn't quite seem to know what to make of them, but I went to the front regardless and dutifully stood nodding my head like an indulgent uncle. I've been listening to southern rap for nearly two decades, but this was the first time I'd stood in front of it, and it did not disappoint. It was nice to see so many unfortunate stereotypes demolished in the space of a minute. The duo did a couple of numbers, and I failed to catch their names, and next thing they were off the stage.

Now there was to be a mass wedding with numerous couples filling the stage to be conjoined in holy matrimony, or just matrimony if you're either a pronounced atheist or a religious extremist. These were same-sex couples, in case that needs stating. It was a spectacle, and that was the point, to show that despite everything it was really happening. However, regardless of blows struck or flags waved, none of this felt like a deeply political act, at least not to me, which is probably a good thing. Of course, being heterosexual, it might be pointed out that I'd never really had a horse in this particular race, so whatever Gay Pride means to me will probably be negligible if not actually irrelevant. On the other hand, living my daily life in a largely heterosexual world, Gay Pride should seem weird and astonishing, and yet it doesn't because it's really just people, whichever way you look at it. It almost felt ordinary, just as it should.

I'm not sure whether this means I've personally got over some lurking nugget of inner prejudice, or whether society in general has finally grown up, at least in our corner of Texas.

As the wedding wrapped up, Bess and I decided we had seen as much as we needed given how hot the day was turning out, even in the shade. We left the site and walked back up Main with those others who had also had enough of the sun.

'Turn away from your sin,' suggested an old coot perched on a seat outside some eating place, although he suggested it quietly in case anyone heard. It was almost funny to realise that he was the weirdo now, this guy and his ideological ally with the placard. He was the one who had failed to understand the working of our world and human society. He was out of step with the rest of us.

It felt really good to know that.

Mental

In June, 2004, I finally went mad; not mad as in drinking quite a lot, having a curry, then climbing atop a bus shelter with my trousers worn upon my head, nor mad meaning I walked through the village one Sunday wearing a rather unusual hat like one of those tediously middle-class fuckers who used to write in to John Peel's Home Truths radio show; no - my madness took the form of serious clinical depression, according to my doctor. Work at Royal Mail, and by association my own life, had been getting steadily more difficult since at least the mid-nineties, contrary to the truism that a job will become easier as one accrues experience and seniority. Each year, the management made more cuts in the name of savings. Each year, we were asked to do more and to do it quicker until the demands of the job began to border on the impossible.

Then at some point around February 2004, the hearing went in my right ear, replaced at first by a jangling noise, next day becoming something sounding like one of the less tuneful Merzbow albums. I had experienced tinnitus before but only infrequently, usually after going to see a gig and having forgotten to take earplugs with which to deaden the sound; but this was different - just one ear and so loud that it prevented my sleeping for the first couple of nights. Worse still, I'd begun to suffer dizzy spells and had experienced trouble crossing the road, or indeed doing anything which required me to turn my head.

Something was very clearly wrong so I went to see the doctor. She shone lights into my ear and told me it looked fine. She brought in another doctor who told me that I should take care when listening to music with earbuds. The advice seemed useless, not least because it contained no actual diagnosis of my problem. I listened to music a lot whilst at work, and so accordingly took great care regarding volume and how many continuous hours I would spend listening to CDs of enthusiastically violent rap music. Working without music wasn't really an option, because it was the constant soundtrack of drive-by shootings and territorial violence which was keeping me sane. Months passed, and neither the work nor the ear were getting any better. Return visits to Crystal Palace Road Medical Centre brought no new understanding beyond the reality of lengthy NHS waiting lists for specialist treatment.

On Sunday the 4th of April 2004 I wrote in my diary:

I feel approaching normal for the first time in almost a week. I am able to string two thoughts together. I am not completely knackered. The ear infection has waned a little, the blockage and horribly jangling high frequency noise are mostly gone, although the tinnitus remains.

I rose at eleven after an enforced lay-in - I needed it, plus my enthusiasm for consciousness is not all it could be at the moment. I'd had a slightly restless night with dream after dream of work related horror without any actual symbolic content. I stayed up and watched Brassed Off last night, which seemed apt. The part where Stephen Tompkinson hangs himself from the colliery pit head may have been intended as humour, seeing as he was dressed as a clown - albeit very black humour - but it didn't make me laugh.

Work is unbearable - really, really, really unbearable. We are expected to do what is tantamount to ten hours work in an eight hour day, and it absolutely cannot be done. The carrot on the stick is a five rather than six day working week, but it isn't worth it; not when all the me time is spent in recovery; and why should this be exactly? Because Tom Willis - who has never actually done the job - believes the Royal Mail has to change, as he phrases it - another one of those meaningless mantras employed by corporate cock suckers in service of making themselves appear thrusting and businessy.

Why?

Why does it have to change?

It was working before, just about.

Now it's fucked.

Brilliant.

I once at least had the minor satisfaction of doing a pointless job well. Now I can't even say that much, and it's become a Kafkaesque exercise in moving bits of paper that no-one wants to read backwards and forwards between sorting frame and pouching box until someone finds time to deliver it to the house containing the dustbin into which it will inevitably fly unopened.

I cried my fucking eyes out on Monday when I was finished, having got a mere third of the shit delivered. I was crying yesterday too, stood before a sorting frame about twice the size of what I'm used to, just staring at those massive piles of shite knowing I had no chance of getting it done, and even with at least another four hours to go. It's killing me.

I described another minor breakdown similar to the above in greater detail in a letter sent to Allan Leighton, predatory corporate carnivore and then chairman of Royal Mail. The letter, dated Tuesday the 4th of May, attempts to explain at length why the changes to Royal Mail working practice which he had implemented were impractical from the perspective of us poor cunts trying to do the job.

Two weeks ago, after finishing (barely) at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, I went to the café as is my custom. I bought a newspaper, ordered a very late breakfast and sat down. First I found that I could not actually read the paper. I could not keep an entire sentence in mind for longer than it took to read. Then my food arrived but I found that I could not eat it. So I just sat there, staring into space, crying - a grown man of thirty-eight sat in a café crying without even knowing why.

Surprisingly he never replied. Maybe he wrote back but it was mislaid in the mail, the hopelessly inefficient mail.

I was beginning to lose it. My snapping point occurred on one particularly improbably heavy day as I opened up my pouching box. A pouching box is either free-standing or attached to an existing post box, a kind of safe in which a Royal Mail driver will deposit additional bags of sorted mail when the mail for a designated delivery route is of such volume as to exceed what the postman or postwoman is able to carry under their own steam. It was, as stated, an improbably heavy day, and so much so that I hadn't finished preparing my mail for delivery until just before noon - a task which would once have been done by eight in the morning at the latest. This left me two hours in which to deliver roughly four hours work, but I just had to get on with it and do what I could, and any mail left undelivered by the time I was due to finish my eight hour day was simply not my problem. I'd done all of those little closes off East Dulwich Grove - Steen Way, Deventer Crescent and the rest - and I was at the pouching box. I took out my key, unlocked the box, and wrestled the grey mailbag onto the ground. I took one corner and tipped everything out, then started picking up the individual bundles of mail, noting the addresses so as to stuff them into the front basket of my bike in the right order - Matham Grove, Tell Grove, the lower numbers of Glengarry Road...

I stared at the addresses unable to work out why none of them made sense. These were the wrong bundles of mail. These were bundles of mail which should have been in the bag dropped off at the pouching box outside the working man's club, half a mile down the road. This mail should be in the other box. My driver had mixed up the bags. There was more mail here than I could carry on my bike, and it would requite two or three trips to set it right, to take this mail down the road and fetch back the bundles I needed right now, but for some reason I couldn't seem to fit all of this information inside my head in one shot, and apparently I was talking to myself and had been doing so for a couple of minutes. The day had been kicking me in the arse since five that morning, and this was just one kick too many.

I couldn't think.

I stuffed the bundles of mail back into the bag, then the bag back into the box and locked up. I cycled back to the sorting office and went in. Something was wrong with me, but I couldn't quite tell what.

The sorting office was empty but for Lee, the manager, and some agency worker. The two of them were talking, and talking slowly, and I badly needed to say something, to explain what had happened but I couldn't interrupt, and I had a feeling that whatever I said would sound mad. I felt as though I was about to explode. All I could hear was this person I had never seen before in my life telling the manager about something which didn't matter, droning on and on and on, never ending, blah blah blah...

Feeling an upsurge of something unpleasant and unavoidable, I went to a different part of the office - a safe distance - and attacked one of the sorting frames, mainly headbutting, some kicks and a few thumps - really putting everything into driving my fucking skull through that stupid sheet of stupid fucking shitting fucking shitting pissing fucking metal. I screamed in pain but couldn't get it anything like as loud as it should be. I screamed so loud that my throat hurt but it wasn't enough. Hopefully I would be sacked, and would no longer have to deal with any of this stupid fucking shitting fucking shitting pissing fucking stupid shit. There was no conceivable future in which this situation was going to sort itself out.

To my astonishment, Lee understood completely. I tried to explain what had set me off, and how I had lost the ability to think straight, to hold more than a few basic thoughts in my head at the same time. I recall words interspersed with manic flourishes of laughter, just like when you see a crazy person in a film, and I was amused - maybe even a little pleased - to realise that it had come naturally and that clichéd mad laughter was really a thing. I may even have shared this observation with my manager. In any case, he seemed to get it and told me to go home and not come back until I'd sorted myself out.

'Your mental health is more important than this fucking job.'

I could tell that he meant it.

So I went home, then took another trip down to the medical centre and had myself signed off for a couple of weeks with stress, or serious clinical depression, as it was described to me. My panic response, the instinct which would have inspired fight or flight under other circumstances, had become jammed on eleven as a result of month after month after month of working under such back-breaking conditions whilst upper management told us that it wasn't enough. This explained the bursting into tears for no obvious reason apparently. This made me feel a little better, an authority figure telling me that my job was definitively shit, as opposed to scowling and asking if I couldn't just put a little more effort into it.

Every so often a missive would come down from on high, from Allan Leighton himself, stressing how we really needed to start pulling our fingers out so as to ensure the future success of Royal Mail as a business. We're all in this together, he would tell us, so let's crack on. I suppose he imagined us all stood around sneering in our respective sorting offices - huh, men in suits, what do they know?

'Hold up, lads,' one of us would cry like the first worker who really gets it in a 1930s Soviet propaganda film. 'This bloke's speaking our language!,' and thus would we crack on.

Working a back-breaking eight hour day and still having trouble paying the rent, or being paid a million pounds a minute to blow shareholders in some board room - we were a team, all cogs in the same machine, apparently.

I went home and spent a couple of weeks as a walk-on part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, making the most of the sick pay which I really felt I had earned; and I knew that I couldn't go back to Royal Mail. Before I'd signed up back in 1988, I'd had an interview with London Underground. Apparently I had done well on the interview, but I wasn't offered a job. It seems that this had been down to the answer I gave to one crucial question.

You're on your own on the platform late at night, just yourself and a gang of fifty rowdy skinheads, obviously pissed, all busily kicking someone's head in. What do you do?

'Well, I would advise them to behave and to conduct themselves in a more orderly fashion,' I squeaked, 'and then I would call for assistance.'

This was the wrong answer I was later told, because it means you're either an idiot or a liar, and London Transport are reluctant to employ people who are likely to get themselves kicked inside out by fifty rowdy skinheads. Now knowing that this was obviously the wrong answer, it seemed like I may as well try again, and so I applied and was interviewed, and was told I would be given a start date at some point soon; but the call never came. I went back to the doctor and was signed off as mad for another month without feeling even remotely guilty, and I continued to wait.

Eventually the word came back. The hold up was due to the fact of my having been to see a doctor about my ear during the previous six months, and that doctor had recommended me to a specialist, bringing about a Kafkaesque situation. We've written to your doctor asking for him to write to the specialist to write back to your doctor with the results of your consultation so he can send them to us, and that was the last I heard from them. I made phone calls back and forth, then eventually gave up and reluctantly shuffled back to the sorting office around September. I had been away for two glorious months and had even begun to remember what it was like to not feel knackered and pissed off all the time. Unfortunately things had changed since I had been away. Lee, our manager, had been pulled on the grounds of his inability to bully workers into delivering square pegs unto round holes. In his place was Audrey.

My doctor had told me I was to insist on light duties, not least because my ear was not significantly better, and I had experienced a resurgence of the problem with my balance.

Audrey was a slender, hawkish black woman with shoulder pads and a harsh, barking tone. I knocked and went into her office to introduce myself. 'I'm afraid you'll need to put me on something light for a week, or so, because the—'

'Let's just get this straight, Mr. Burton.' Her voice rose to  unnecessary volume, sharp stabbing words with the sort of emphasis you employ when setting a five-year old on the right path; and she was smiling, which seemed kind of weird. 'You do not come into my office and tell me what you are going to do or what you are not going to do. Do I make myself clear?'

I tried to remember the last time I had been spoken to in this way, but couldn't because I've never been in either the army or prison.

'If you have a problem then you come and tell me about it, and I make the decision about what you can or cannot do. Do you understand?'

I either nodded or grunted, some token acknowledging that I wasn't resisting arrest, and that there was no need for the taser.

She introduced herself as a sort of postal celebrity - although I hadn't asked - describing how she had come over from Camberwell sorting office, airdropped in on the strength of a solid reputation for getting problem offices working. Such was her popularity that she was known as the people's manager to some, so she claimed. She seemed to be working by the assumption that I could be restored to fully operational status through bullying alone, and seemed strangely crestfallen when I told her I had an appointment for an MRI scan in hope of discerning whatever the hell was wrong with my ear. I had denied her some small pleasure, because it might be something real. She was silent for a moment and then testily informed me that I would need to bring her a letter from my doctor confirming the appointment.

I was assigned to inside duties for a week which meant I saw a lot of Audrey, and heard a lot of her as she patrolled the office loudly explaining her own excellence to whichever subordinate happened to be available. Each time she passed my way she seemed to be in the middle of expanding upon her thoroughly Darwinian views of the sick, the lame, and the useless. I had the impression she didn't like me very much. The next week I went back out on a delivery regardless, because it was better than being stuck inside listening to Audrey with all her theories of success - every morning I like to begin the day with some uplifting Gospel music, and other soundbites which could easily have been quoted from The Silence of the Lambs or American Psycho.

In December I had the MRI scan but nothing was found, and eventually my ear set itself right of its own accord. Thankfully I managed to sign for one of the better walks in the office, and whilst Audrey remained an abrasive and often unpleasant personality, she seemed to thaw a little, at least towards me. I had stopped caring, and had adopted a policy of agreeing to whatever unrealistic demand she made, then just going ahead and doing whatever was practical in the time given. Weirdly, being white, I no longer seemed to be a target. For some reason she really seemed to have it in for young, black males. Had she herself been white, I suspect the issue may not have been quite so readily dismissed when formal complaints were made.

There is a theory presently finding increasing support in psychiatric circles that mental illness is, in a majority of cases, an inevitable by-product of capitalism. In the March 2015 issue of Southwark Mental Health News, Robert Dellar summarised the correlation quite succinctly:

People with diagnoses like depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the exponentially growing varieties of "personality disorder" of which there are currently about five-hundred, are affected by these states in ways which very often lead to withdrawal, isolation, hopelessness, confusion, chaos, inability to look after themselves, to distinguish fantasy from reality, and all too often, suicide. These situations can often be proven to be caused by concrete social factors. Their progression and the possibility of their alleviation, or at least their co-existence with a decent quality of life are influenced without exception by concrete social factors.

I've known some mad buggers in my time, and whilst a few were undoubtedly already playing with a stacked deck, the above seems to pretty much nail it, and certainly rings bells with me. Week after week, month after month, year after year I struggled with a job often so demanding as to mean that the remainder of my free time was mostly spent either asleep or recovering from the day's labour, because rampant capitalism given free-reign will tend to human centipede its workforce into disposable biological profit generators by whatever means it can get away with. In our case this included sending out an employee satisfaction survey every few months in the mistaken belief of our being so stupid as to believe it meant they gave a shit; and I suppose it helped shareholders sleep better at night, in the event of concerns of our well-being ever troubling them, which I find unlikely.

I always took great trouble over those surveys, ticking the boxes - strongly disagree in most cases - then giving reasons with assorted home truths in the space allowed for those who responded other. The surveys posed hypothetical statements such as I am very happy with my job and feel that I am adequately paid, or I am confident that as an employer Royal Mail has my best interests at heart. I don't know a single person who would have ticked strongly agree, agree, or even no opinion to any of that sort of thing, and yet a week or so later, the results always came back the same. The manager would gather us together and tell us that most Royal Mail employees were very happy in their work, but some were just a teensy weensy bit fretful over job security, although they didn't really like to mention it because they felt confident it would all be sorted out in the end.

Somehow we got the impression that the employee satisfaction survey was a waste of time. I regularly concluded mine with hyperbolic intimation of suicidal thoughts, made partially for the sake of indicating strength of feeling; and yet the one time I was called into the office to give account of my supposedly confidential answers was the time when I adopted a more sarcastic tone, ticking strongly agree to anything with which I strongly disagreed, and suggesting I would be happy to have half my wages cut if I could just be sure it guaranteed superior investment security for my superiors.

'You were joking, right?' the manager asked, regarding me with some caution, as though I had properly flipped. I don't think he'd had much experience of sarcasm at such levels of toxicity.

'Yes, I was joking.'

He seemed relieved, and most depressing of all, I could tell he understood. He probably felt the same.

Sausage, Egg and Chips

I am back in England, and specifically I am back in East Dulwich. It's a brief visit mainly for the purposes of catching up with old friends. I moved out of London in 2009, and haven't been back to England in the last two and a half years. Even more specifically it is Monday and I'm in the Dulwich Café on Lordship Lane, just next to the Lord Palmerston and I'm eating sausage, fried egg and chips in a fit of nostalgia, crossing another item from the list of things to eat whilst I'm back in the old country because it isn't quite the same as what you get in Texas. The Dulwich Café was my favourite café after Ken's place in Crystal Palace Road closed down. I would drop in every Saturday after work and read whatever rap magazine had hit the news-stand that week over a plate of sausage, egg, chips and beans. Today I've given the baked beans a miss because I'm jetlagged and am feeling a bit weird, but the rest tastes as good as ever.

I'm pretty sure the place used to be called Starburger, but Dulwich has changed since I've been away. The framed photos of boxers, James Dean, and various rat pack types have been replaced by tasteful aerial views of London, and the windows are now hand painted with images of healthy wholemeal rolls stuffed with rocket and falafel. Thankfully, inside it's still very much wipe-clean formica tables, ketchup, and actual working people, some of whom are still to be found in East Dulwich, still holding out against the encroachment of braying upwardly mobile tossers in red trousers.

I'd eaten sausage, egg and chips on Friday morning in another café, over in Bermondsey. The tables were Formica, each one of my fellow diners wore a high visibility tabard, and the radio blasted out that autotuned hybrid of grime and R&B which the English yoots dem seem so keen on these days innit. It was fucking beautiful.

Right now, eating my second plate of sausage, egg and chips of the trip, I realise I am sat at the table at which I last saw Nelly.

When I transferred to East Dulwich sorting office in 1993 or thereabouts, I was assigned to a walk in the corner of the building, working between Debbie and Graham, with Terry on the other side of Debbie, and Nelly at the back against the outer wall. These were the first people I came to know in the office because we were all huddled together as described for a couple of hours each morning. Graham was difficult to figure out, and seemed to spend most of his time chuckling at Ron's jokes - Ron being the postman working on the other side of him; but Debbie and Terry were funny, and I found it easy to get on with them, particularly once I began to pick up on the private jokes, most of which were based on imagined embarrassing or even pornographic situations encountered whilst delivering mail to easily offended members of the local clergy.

You probably had to be there.

Nelly, a Turkish woman with glasses and a severe haircut appeared initially less genial. She often seemed to take jokes the wrong way, or would attempt cracks of her own which didn't quite work. She was prone to angry or emotional outbursts, and struck me as somewhat intense.

'You know she's mad, yeah?' Debbie told me one day as Nelly went off to collect her registered items.

'Mad?'

'She's been in a mental home and everything. She's all right though. She's on some medication or summink.'

By this point I'd already accrued a couple of psychiatrically unorthodox friends, so I knew the form, and Nelly suddenly made a lot more sense.

'She's a lesbian too.'

'What? Really?'

Debbie nodded, and I squared this new information against Nelly's appearance, which made few concessions to conventional femininity. Strangely, I found I was impressed. Royal Mail could be a pretty tough place to work at times. You kept yourself to yourself, revealing nothing which could be weaponised against you as part of the ongoing war against all which might be deemed either a bit soft or a bit too fancy for its own good. Generally I didn't have much to say about the three years I'd spent at art college, so this open declaration of sexuality struck me as very brave. In Nelly's case, maybe it hadn't actually been an open declaration of sexuality so much as something which just got around, and which she had no interest in denying, but still it suggested a certain strength of character.

Gradually I got to know her better, at least enough to realise that she actually did have a sense of humour, but found little reason to engage it at work. On Saturday the 24th of September 1994, I wrote the following short autobiographical story, attempting to capture an incident which had occurred at the sorting office:

Nelly was swearing. The air was blue with fuck, shit, wank and others. She was often tense as a result of doing too much overtime. Still, not my fault, or anyone else's for that matter. Today she was swearing because she'd been doing too much overtime and because of her car. Some other road user had scratched past taking paint off the door. Was it Wednesday? Thursday? Well, today was Saturday and she was swearing a lot.

'What's wrong, Nelly dearest?' enquired the ever polite Terry Nevitt from beneath his bald patch.

'Fuck off!' she exploded without bothering to turn around. 'Don't call me fucking Nelly. Me name's Onel for the last bleeding time.'

She continued to sort mail into the Northcross Road frame, swearing quietly as she did so. Fuck. Shit. Wank. Each profanity was neatly punctuated by the dull thud of a gas bill striking home.

5, Archdale Road.

Thud.

'Bollocks.'

7, Archdale Road.

Thud.

'Bollocks.'

9, Archdale Road.

Thud.

'Bollocks.'

'Is it tea break yet?'

Onel spins around to glare at Debbie. 'If she asks is it fucking tea once more I'll... I'll fucking knock her out!'

'I didn't fucking say a word!' Debbie turns to me. 'Lawrence, did I say anything?'

'No,' I answer. 'It was Jen.'

Jenny mumbles something in fluent northern. We continue to sort in silence broken only by the steady drumming of letters going into frames.

Now Onel has gone outside. She rushes back in, muttering testily and then leaves again. Debbie tells me she's gone to the police station. She's seen a car in Pellat Road that may well have done the dirty deed. The dented bumper matches her scratch. She's very fond of that Mini is Nelly.

***

We're in the van - me, Ben, and Graham. Ben drives. We turn out of the bay, down Pellat Road passing Onel. She's stood by her car talking to a policeman.

'So what was all that about?' I ask.

'Nelly had a scratch on the door about the size of Graham's cock,' answers Ben indicating with his thumb and index finger the size in question. Very small.

Graham laughs and splutters in his usual undignified manner. He's holding his hands apart, his arms at as full a stretch as the confined space of the van will allow. He's trying to indicate something very large but nobody believes him and we don't understand what he's saying through the raucous farting guffaws that shower his spit onto the dashboard.

Her name was Onel and we became friends, partially because she was essentially a driven and fairly lonely individual reliant upon medication in order to keep her brain running along in a straight line, and partially because in the working environment of Royal Mail, you tend to value those of your colleagues whose brains work at all, those who are able to talk about something other than fucking football.

We went out for walks together on the occasional afternoon after work, just to the local park or whatever. Sometimes I invited her over for tea and would cook something or other, and sometimes she would return the compliment and cook for me. We were lonely people in a huge city with similar problems, and Nelly being a lesbian somehow made things easier for both of us, there being no awkwardly compatible interests to be avoided for the sake of decorum. One evening we went over to Juanita's house in Forest Hill, just for a drink and the purpose of generally talking shit. I only vaguely knew Juanita as a short, apparently surly woman from Catford sorting office, my previous place of employment, although we hadn't really had much to do with each other; but it was better than staying at home, and I was curious to hear how things had been going at Catford since I left.

It turned out that Juanita was also a lesbian, and this was how she and Nelly knew each other - specifically common interests in a predominantly male environment rather than anything more squelchy resulting from the sort of unlikely scenarios imagined by readers of Loaded and its like. The three of us drank tea, and talked about people we knew, who had been sacked and why, and watched television for a little while. The BBC crime drama Silent Witness came on, bringing with it the actress Amanda Burton in the role of Professor Sam Ryan.

'Fuck me,' Juanita growled happily. 'What I could do with that!'

Nelly chortled. 'Fuckin' fit, ain't she!'

I don't know why, but it had never occurred to me that lesbians might be just as prone to lurid drooling as heterosexual men, and there was something oddly comforting in the discovery. I realised that I understood Nelly better than I had thought.

More troubling, and even more troubling than her occasionally manic episodes, was her Christianity and tendency to introduce Jesus into the conversation more or less without warning. I could never work out whether faith really helped her get through the tough times, or whether in some ways it made them worse, keeping her distracted from whatever course of action might be more helpful given the sometimes precarious balance of her sanity.

One day she described the automotive accident she had narrowly avoided at the weekend. She was cut and bruised, and we were all trying to work out what the hell had happened. She had, she told us, woken up sat in her car in the wrong lane of the motorway. She had passed out. She had been about to crash into the metal barrier of the central reservation when Jesus had physically lifted her beloved mini up into the air, and set it down on the other side.

'You're really sure it was Jesus?' I asked.

'Of course it was.' She thought about it for a moment. 'If it weren't Jesus, then what was I doing on the other side of the motorway when I woke up. Explain that!'

I could think of a number of explanations, but I hadn't been there, and it seemed better to let her have this one, not least because she seemed to be in one of those manic phases usually foreshadowing a month off sick and then a few more assigned to the night shift up at Mandela Way pending psychiatric evaluation confirming her being fit enough to resume regular duties at the sorting office.

One evening as we sat watching television at her house, following her having served an excellent roast dinner. She told me a little of her upbringing in response to my enquiries about her family, with whom she had little contact. They had been of an unfortunately traditional disposition from somewhere in rural Turkey, where sons were an endless source of pride, and the birth of a daughter was announced with shame. Nelly's father had beaten her regularly with a belt, then left her locked inside a small cupboard for six hours at a time. I immediately understood why she had psychological issues.

Eventually those psychological issues got the better of her, and she became effectively full time up at Mandela Way on one of the duties set aside for the lame and the sick simply because the union would go apeshit if they were to be sacked. We ran into each other around Dulwich from time to time, and she seemed much the same as ever, doing her best to stay positive under miserable circumstances.

Finally our paths crossed in Starburger one afternoon. She was with an older, somewhat haggard looking woman who seemed to grin a lot, either a girlfriend or another lost soul.

'I've got cancer,' Nelly stated as though announcing she had just bought a new car. I suppose by that point one shitty deal was much the same as another.

Six months to a year later, she was dead. We had been friends, perhaps not great friends, but friends nevertheless; and for all that she was hopelessly neurotic, bonkers, and occasionally annoying, it seemed like a terrible loss even to those at work who had never particularly liked her. She lived; she received one shitty break after another, and then she was gone. It was a terrible waste.

I finished my sausage, egg, and chips, and thought about Nelly for a while as I drank my tea; but there was nothing positive that could be taken from the memory, nor any clear lesson to be learned.