Cat Homework

We are at the library on San Pedro, right next to the park. The park was famously the site of Yuanaguana, a Payaya village before the Europeans showed up, although being mostly nomadic, the Payaya didn't leave much behind in archaeological terms. This is possibly only the second time I've been to this park because the first visit was a bit weird due to the presence of numerous down-at-heel drag queens and the spectacle of the spring, or the fountain, or whatever the hell it's supposed to be. It's at the centre of the park and resembles a giant version of the candle made from Father Jack's earwax in the Passion of St. Tibulus episode of Father Ted.

We are at the library on San Pedro because we've been obliged to attend a class in much the same way as reformed jailbirds or recovering substance abusers. The comparison isn't entirely arbitrary because this is a class which Bess and myself have been obliged to attend so as to tick all the boxes on our having become a licensed cat colony, as recognised by the city council. Specifically it's a class for the TNR programme, TNR referring to the trap-neuter-return practice by which feral cats are allowed to remain at large without producing a ton of kittens. As joint CEOs of our own officially registered cat colony this sort of thing will soon be our responsibility.

'Let's hope they're not holding a T'n'A class at the same time,' I tell my wife as we enter the building. 'Can you imagine the confusion?'

Gratifyingly, she gets the joke and duly concedes a chortle.

'We're here for the TNR,' she says to the women at the front desk, who point us towards a side room.

We anticipated a class of three or maybe four weird old ladies bringing with them a certain aroma and probably talking to themselves, because the image is difficult to dispel even for crazy cat ladies such as ourselves. However to our surprise, the class is packed, twenty or thirty women and a few guys, mostly younger than us, clean, tidy, and not a tinfoil helmet to be seen. Three women are at the front with a table full of t-shirts and a humane trap. Behind them is a screen on which will be projected whatever is required to illustrate their testimony. Bess and I take seats at the back, there being only a few of the folding chairs still available. Our classroom seems to be the section next to the large print books. I can just see Michelle Obama's autobiography on the shelf to my left.

Our mistress of ceremonies is a regal older lady of distinctly Texan type - which I state as compliment in case there should be any ambiguity here - in so much as that a foreigner like myself is easily able to imagine her wrestling critters and ornery types and taking it all in her stride. Unfortunately this is the noisiest library I've ever been in and I have trouble hearing all that is said. Maybe the cat homework has coincided with an amateur wrestling class held elsewhere in the building.

We're there for about an hour, long enough to contract square-botty from the chairs - as the condition is understood by the medical profession. Mostly we're learning stuff we know, the wisdom of the TNR policy balanced against the usual clueless complaints traditionally made by people who simply don't like cats; but happily there's plenty of new information, not least being the operation of the humane traps which we loan from the city, where we take the cats to be fixed and so on. The hour is genuinely useful and informative, and it feels as though we've joined a secret society, which we sort of have.

The opportunity to ask questions comes at the end, and inevitably there are a few from those who just like to ask questions.

'I'd like to know, on the sheet of paper where you've given the number we need when we want to get in touch with you to ask a question, that number there, is that the one we need when we want to get in touch with you to ask a question?'

No-one actually asks that, but a few of them come close. I raise my hand and ask whether cats taken in to be fixed at the recommended clinics are checked to see whether they have an ID chip. I'm thinking about the wombat, one of our own feral regulars. He's a cat who resembles a wombat, albeit a ginger wombat. He has massive nuts and although we feed him, we otherwise can't get near him. Given his build and general disposition, I have a theory that he may have been an indoor cat who escaped and somehow ended up at our place, so we need to see whether he's been chipped.

I'm told this is a very good question, which is nice.

A bucket is passed around and we all chip in a few dollars towards cat food and similar supplies. Our own cats occasionally benefit from a free bag of the dry stuff which has been sent our way by the Feral Cat Coalition, the voluntary organisation which has arranged this meeting.

We seem to be done so I pop outside for a smoke, seeing as I'm back to smoking at the moment, because the year 2020 has thus far been a bit of a twat, even though it's still only January, and I only smoke in response to stress. Some young black dude approaches me and asks if I have a spare. I roll one for him. He has a strong African accent and seems a bit lost. He's trying to get somewhere, he tells me, but I can't work out why, so I say sorry because I'm not much help. He goes to sit on the bench outside the library to smoke his cigarette.

I look around for my wife but she's nowhere to be seen. I guess she's gone back into the library.

Back inside the library, she's talking to one of the Feral Cat Coalition people. We tell her about our neighbour who hates cats.

'I had one of those,' she tells us, and describes a scenario much worse than our own with a neighbour getting pissy over the slightest feline incursion into his precious yard which, according to our narrator, resembled a tip and was full of all sorts of junk he'd found at the side of the road.

'He was a pyschiatrist,' she tells us, rolling her eyes.

'It's always the way,' I say. 'How many cats do you have?'

'It was fifty at the time.'

I can actually hear Bess thinking holy shit! and that's what I'm thinking too. We don't have anything like as many. Our colony is pretty sane by comparison.

The woman describes how she was fined, and how she had the bad luck to be up before a judge who hates cats.

'You had a cat colony license and you were fined?' I'm trying not to panic. 'How can that happen?'

'It was a couple of hundred dollars, but that was before I had the license.'

Bess and I share a huge sigh of relief.

We go home, and it feels as though we're now part of some mysterious strike force.

Airport

Here's how a modern airport works. Far beyond the end of the runway, beyond all those fairy lights, off in the long grass stands a little man with a pair of binoculars and a notebook. He spends the day looking up into the sky, looking at all the planes that come and go and noting down their number plates. Sometimes there are too many planes, and in such cases he'll count them all a couple of times over just to be sure, then mount his bicycle and get back to the control tower as quick as he can.

'Too many planes,' he'll shout up at the window, and providing someone up there hears him, they'll talk to the men flying the planes by means of a special two-way radio, just to make sure they don't all try to land at the same time. Sometimes there are only a few planes, but on other days there might be a lot of planes, especially when one of those new countries has been discovered - like Valeria or Lexavia to name but two of the most recent; so that's a sudden increase in tourism and, by association, air traffic, and before you know it, there are just too many planes up there. Worse is that we have no way of telling just how many planes there might be. There is simply no way to be sure. It's something we shall never understand. It's a mystery.

I'd spent three weeks back in England. I'd had quite a time. I'd met up with family, friends, and old friends I hadn't expected to see. I'd packed a suitcase full of ancient cassette tapes - obscure and mostly noisy bands from the eighties and nineties whose work I intend to digitise and make available on the internet - and this time I took the trouble to check what luggage restrictions would apply.

Back in 2015, I turned up at Heathrow with as much crap as I could physically carry, materials which never made it into the shipping container when I first moved and which were subsequently marooned at my mother's house. I had an earlier suitcase full of ancient cassette tapes, an acoustic guitar, a large portable art portfolio, and three or four additional bags all bursting at the zippers. I knew there might be some kind of excess baggage fee, but I didn't mind paying another twenty quid or so. Unfortunately the anticipated twenty quid fee turned out to be closer to four-hundred, so I wasn't going to make that mistake again.

This time, I'd weighed the suitcase on my mother's bathroom scales, then taken out one cassette after another until the weight crept below the permitted limit. This left me with a surplus of twenty-six cassettes which I posted to myself. I spent about a hundred quid posting stuff to myself because it wouldn't fit in my luggage, and thankfully it all arrived at the other end in one piece.

My mother drops me off at the coach station in Coventry, and this time I manage not to cry. I give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek, which represents a gaudy demonstration of affection in our family because we're civilised and not inclined to ostentatious sentiment. The coach trip is boring, but it gets me there in plenty of time. I bum around Terminal Five looking for things to do, smoking my last ciggies for a while and eating bland sandwiches before getting into a fight with a machine. It's the check-in machine, one of those features installed for our increased comfort and convenience so as to dispense with human inefficiency.

I press an icon on the screen and it asks to see my passport, face down in the scanner.

It asks to see my green card.

This unit cannot process your request at this time, it tells me. Please seek assistance.

I get the same response from a second machine.

I find a human and she suggests that I simply go straight to the check-in desk, which I would have had to do anyway even if the machine had worked. I suppose it's okay for me to go straight to the check-in desk because at least I made the effort to use the machine. The human at the check-in desk tells me that my possession of both a passport and a green card probably confused his mechanical colleague. I hump my permitted twenty-three kilo suitcase of industrial noise onto the scales and begin to sweat, waiting to be told how many thousands of pounds I've just incurred in excess baggage charges.

'Is it okay? ' I ask after a silent minute. 'Not too heavy?'

'It's fine,' he tells me.

The flight is long, cramped, and boring, and I'm stuck right in the middle. I watch Rowan Atkinson in Maigret Sets a Trap, which I find soothing because I've spent the last three weeks watching relaxing crime dramas - Midsomer Murders, Lewis and the like, these constituting my mother's preferred viewing these days. Then I watch Doctor Strange - which is okay despite the presence of Cucumber, Arrival - which is excellent, and finally a sappy American made music documentary which compensates for minutes wasted on boring Fatboy Slim by showcasing the altogether more entertaining Virus Syndicate. Once I've watched all the in-flight telly I can stand to watch, I fill in a customs form, declaring that I'm not bringing anything naughty into the country. I value my precious suitcase of noisy tapes at five quid, because there's really no point in trying to work out what they're all worth. It's not like I'm going to sell my rare Opera for Infantry cassettes and use the money to fund the downfall of the dangerous orange shitgibbon.

Eight hours after take off, we land at Chicago. We land at Chicago later than anticipated because there were too many planes at Heathrow. Apparently they had all turned up at once, completely unexpected, not even a phone call or anything; and so we were unable to leave on schedule. As I shuffle from the plane, I consider asking a stewardess whether she thinks I'm really going to be able to make it across the airport in time to catch my connecting flight to San Antonio, but I already know the answer. I already know the answer because when travelling in the US, I always miss the connecting flight. Every single occasion of my coming back across the Atlantic, I've ended up stranded in Philadelphia or Charlotte or New York because they can't find the plane, or they've found the plane but some kids have drawn cocks on the side, or they've run out of fuel, or it might rain, or there's poo on the fucking runway. It has happened every single time, and tonight I get an unscheduled stay in the windy city. I've been in transit for thirteen hours and somehow I'm still thousands of miles away from home.

As I squirt from the connecting tunnel into the womb of O'Hare international, I raise a finger to catch the attention of a stewardess, but before I've even finished my question she directs my attention to the wall upon which an array of envelopes are affixed with tape. I see that my surname is written on one of the envelopes, but my thoughts are momentarily elsewhere, flustered by the blandly efficient tone of the stewardess telling me that I'm screwed, albeit not in those specific terms. I thought they had been trained to sound like they at least give a shit.

Amazingly, I don't lose it. I was expecting this eventuality. In fact, I would have been more surprised had I made my connecting flight without disruption. The envelope contains a letter telling me how deeply everyone regrets everything, along with tickets which will secure a room and breakfast at some local hotel.

I am swept through baggage claim by tidal crowds exiting the plane, then on through to customs and Homeland Security. Every few minutes I have another piece of paper shoved at me. They all go into different pockets as I try to concentrate on what the hell is going on and where I need to go. I ask directions of a woman who turns out to have a near impenetrable Swedish accent, and who helpfully barks at me whilst pointing at a line of machines, features installed for our increased comfort and convenience so as to dispense with human inefficiency. I can't even get to the machines because there are too many people and the crowd is chaotic, and I don't even know what the fuck I'm expected to do once I get there. After some wrestling, the robot asks for my passport and I answer a series of questions. It prints out my forty-seventh piece of paper to add to all the others I will eventually be expected to hand over to someone or other. Eventually I am through to passport control, or whatever it is. I am asked a couple of questions by a guy who doesn't care, and I'm subsequently waved through. My pockets are still very much stuffed with pointless forms, tickets, declarations, dockets and bits of paper. At no point has anyone asked to see any of them, and yet I've already entered the United States. Almost an hour has passed since I stepped from the plane.

I wait outside with other disgruntled passengers. It's dark and hot, a temperature differential which confirms that I'm back on American soil, accordingly bringing me the only twinge of pleasure I am able to experience under the circumstances. We wait forty minutes until a minibus bearing the name of our hotel appears. It fills to capacity before I can get a seat. The driver tells us that his colleague will be along in another half hour.

We continue to wait. I compare disgruntled notes with a fellow traveller, a German. He is unsure as to the departure time of our replacement San Antonio flight in the morning. I empty my pockets of all the slips of paper I've accrued, but somehow I've mislaid my boarding pass, the one piece of paper which actually does useful shit, the ticket which will eventually get me home.

Fanfuckingtastic.

A second minibus eventually shows. It's after nine. We landed a couple of hours ago. I talk to an old couple who take up the seat in front of me. They tell me that they very much enjoyed England. I tell them that I'm glad to be back in America, despite this evening.

I phone my wife once I'm at the hotel. She already knows what has happened, and knows not to wait for me at the airport. I think she's more distressed by it all than I am. I consider phoning Joe, my friend who lives in Chicago. About a month back I told him that my connection would occur in his city, and that it almost certainly wouldn't be happening given my previous experience of trying to catch a fucking plane in America. I may be giving you a call if I end up in some hotel, I told him, but now that I'm here I realise my mood is best kept in quarantine, and that I will make for terrible company this evening. I don't know Joe very well, but from what I do know, I already respect the guy too much to ask him to babysit some pissed off English dude.

Next morning, I have breakfast at the hotel. It's free, as it should be. I kill time, watch some television, then eventually make my way back to the airport. The missing boarding pass turns out to be no big deal after all.

Yesterday I wore my Lone Star shirt and stetson. I wear the stetson as a matter of course, but I figured that wearing it in combination with the shirt would give me a notionally patriotic appearance, reducing my potential significance to those factions within the Department of Homeland Security who now - so I am informed - make it their business to check your social media to see if you've referred to the current president as a dangerous orange shitgibbon, an identification you might imagine would be covered by that whole deal with freedom of speech, that thing which is supposed to make America great. I had already deleted all references to the dangerous orange shitgibbon from my facebook page, and also any links which might expose me as one of those bleeding heart liberal faggot types; but still, I'm reluctant to take chances, hence the shirt and the stetson. However, I'm now behind schedule and I'm not going to wear the Lone Star shirt a second day running because I have standards. Instead I opt for my Henry Rollins for President t-shirt because it at least suggests patriotism in some form.

I make it through customs and security just fine, aside from one officer having a rummage through my backpack, seemingly intrigued by all the funny looking shit which showed up on the x-ray machine. He scowls at my ancient tapes of industrial noise, but thankfully doesn't find my pornography - a 1993 issue of Knave which I own because I'm in it. Specifically the magazine features an article about A Reflection, an unpublished comic strip written by myself and drawn by Charlie Adlard way back at the beginning of his career. Ignoring the bongo periodical, the security officer finds a set square once owned by my grandfather. I guess maybe it looked like a weapon on the x-ray. Once it's obvious that I'm not about to blow anything up, I'm through. Weeks later I discover that my friend Jane, another English citizen living in the US on a green card, experienced just the sort of difficulties I had anticipated. She was detained at length, and interviewed twice before being allowed to re-enter the country. I'm inclined to wonder whether it was the stetson which helped, which eased the process for me.

I head for my departure gate and an old coot similarly kitted out with a stetson squints at my t-shirt. 'Who do you want for president?'

'Henry Rollins,' I tell him. 'It's a long story.'

My estimation of his voting habits thankfully turn out to be entirely wrong. 'Well, I ain't got no idea who that is,' he sighs, 'but he can't be no worse than that dang fool we got ourselves right now.'

My flight back to Texas runs without incident.

Finally I am back in San Antonio.

Heading for baggage claim I see Daisy Bee hamming it up on the concourse before a bunch of school kids. She is my first familiar face, our famous local clown. She is our equivalent of Krusty because, as I've noticed, there are certain peculiar parallels between life in San Antonio and what you see on a typical episode of The Simpsons. We have a clown. We almost certainly have a guy in a bee costume. We even have our own version of Kent Brockman. I've watched him on the news and I've shaken him by the hand.

Baggage claim echoes traditional song from a marginally less traditional trio of female Mariachi musicians - violin, guitar, and guitarrón. It feels like a personal welcome, as though they're playing just for me, and it makes me think of Michoacan, which makes me happy. The air is hot and the music is sweet.

I am home.

Children of Abraham I

Byron's invite stated quite clearly that he was expecting guests to make a bit of effort with their costumes this year, and he'd said more or less the same directly to Bess. Last year's Halloween party had been poorly attended due to torrential subtropical rain. I recall about eight of us showing up and I was wearing a sardonic t-shirt purchased from the local supermarket bearing the slogan this is my costume. I like to think that I was playfully questioning the medium of the Halloween party, obliging it to examine itself in a post-structuralist context, but I guess Byron didn't see it that way.

'Fuck it,' I said to myself whilst cycling to McAllister Park on the Wednesday morning. 'Why not?'

I don't really do fancy dress, or parties for that matter; and when I've made an exception I've historically regretted it, or at least spent most of the time wishing I were somewhere else. I once turned up to a costume party thrown by my friend Carl in work clothes. I was a postman at the time so I just wore the uniform, telling anyone who asked that I'd come as Sid James as seen in Carry On Postman, embellishing the conceit with an impersonation of Sid's distinctive laugh; and in case anyone feels inclined to check, no, regrettably there was never any such film as Carry On Postman.

On the other hand - so ran my train of thought on the aforementioned Wednesday morning - being fifty, I'd long since forgotten what the problem had been, so fuck it.

Cycling back from McAllister Park, I stopped to have a look around the local Goodwill, a charity shop large enough to house several fighter jets, should Randolph Air Force Base be having a spring clean. I figured I'd see something ridiculous which I could buy and wear, or which might at least provide inspiration. I saw a few decent looking suit jackets and a large cuddly tiger with such a winning smile that I found it really difficult to leave the store without buying him, but otherwise nothing seemed to suggest itself.

On the other side of the parking lot from HEB - the local supermarket to which I was ultimately headed - I noticed that an ordinarily vacant retail premises had once again been turned into a Halloween store. Once again because this is a yearly occurrence, the retail equivalent of tumbleweed or those fish suddenly born to puddles formed in the desert after rainfall, living just long enough to leave fertilised eggs drying in the mud, ready for next year's wet season. The Halloween store was full of costumes - Abraham Lincoln, Snooki from Jersey Shore, Spiderman; for just fifty dollars or thereabouts I might be instantly transformed into any of these through the magic of flimsy one-shot items of clothing and related accessories secured by elastic. I'd never been in this kind of store, so I found it weird and fascinating. I had no intention of purchasing one of these complete pre-packaged party identities. I was planning to improvise my costume, whatever it was. I just needed inspiration, some prop I could combine with whatever I already had at home.

The prop turned out to be a fake turban and a long grey false beard provided so as to effect transformation into a person of Indian or perhaps Arabic decent, a Muslim, you know - one of those people. Ignoring the obvious alarm bells, I decided I could combine these props with a kaftan and goatskin sandals brought back from Morocco and attend the party as Osama bin Laden. I made my purchase, then picked up a pack of party balloons in HEB along with the usual groceries.

Once home, I inflated one of the balloons and spent a day or two turning it into a bomb by means of papier mâché, acrylic paint, and a length of twine - specifically the kind of bomb wielded by villains in silent cinema or the Spy vs. Spy cartoons in Mad magazine, an ominous black sphere with a fuse and the word bomb painted across it in block capitals.

Next day I picked up an assault rifle from Walmart, a child's toy costing ten dollars. It was bright green and came as part of Kid Connection's Military Action Play Set recommended for ages five and upwards. I think it was supposed to light up and make a noise but the batteries were dead. I stood in the store reading the box.

Kid Connection toys are kid-approved and built for fun. Easy to understand with no complicated instructions, these durable toys keep you and your children happy. Day after day, smile after smile.

It's a fucking gun, I thought, which had obviously also occurred to the good people at Kid Connection:

Warning: This product may be mistaken for an actual firearm by law enforcement officers and others. Altering any state or federal required marking or coloration in order to make products appear more realistic and/or brandishing or displaying the product in public is dangerous and may be a crime.

To be honest, this bright green plastic toy was about as unrealistic a firearm as could be imagined without actually being the inflatable M16 I'd seen in the Halloween store marketed as Tony Montana's weapon of choice from Scarface; and in a country where Andre Burgess was shot by a federal agent whilst brandishing a gun which turned out to be the silver wrapper of a Three Musketeers candy bar, is it really going to make any difference?

The assault rifle came with a tiny plastic hand grenade and a similarly bright green handgun. It lacked any sort of carrying strap so I improvised one from velcro and the detachable strap of a holdall. Next day I noticed a far superior kiddie assault rifle in less lurid colours on sale in HEB for the same price. Aware of how seriously I was beginning to take this project, I didn't buy it.

I told my wife I was going to the party as Osama bin Laden, showing her the novelty turban and beard. She seemed initially shocked, then amused. 'Wouldn't you say that's a bit er...'

'I'm not going to black up, if that's where you think I'm headed.'

'Well, if you're sure.'

I'd considered all of this, wondering what distinguished me from minor royals dressed as Nazi stormtroopers on the cover of the Daily Mail. The point was shock and chuckles, I told myself just as Prince Gingerbollocks had doubtless told himself; but I've known many turbaned gentlemen, some of them Muslim, and I quite like Islam on the whole, in an admittedly wishy-washy liberal sense. I suppose I might potentially piss off the more redneck elements of the party, this being Texas and all - disgruntled fatties I imagined stumbling angrily towards me mumbling something about the twin towers and how I damn well better respect something or other. I suppose I liked this idea. Not to intellectualise a Halloween costume, but the problem with the political climate in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Centre as I see it is that Osama bin Laden is remembered as a cackling mediaeval demon, a silent cinema caricature clutching a comedy bomb and twirling his moustache. He hated us and that's all we need to know. God forbid that we should ever try to understand the situation, or what drives those we term terrorists to do what they do, or that we should recognise a political landscape of any complexity greater than what you'll find in a Batman comic.

So that's what I told myself.

'I wasn't going to bother,' Bess said, 'but now I feel I have to make the effort.'

Saturday arrives and we attend the party as Osama bin Laden with his bomb and his bright green assault rifle, and Mrs. bin Laden by virtue of a burqa my wife has improvised from various scarves. I have my bright green handgun in a shoulder bag along with four bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale.

Junior wears his gas mask, a hooded cloak, and a novelty AC/DC t-shirt featuring not images of the Australian heavy rock band but Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. He tells us that he is Timeshare Man, which is something derived from his own private mythology. About a year ago he took to asking people if they would like to buy a timeshare, because he finds it hilarious for reasons which probably make sense when you're twelve.

'Would you like to know where the timeshare came from?' he asked us one day in tones promising a rare glimpse into the mind of a comedy genius.

'Yes,' we said. 'Please tell us.'

He described his hiding behind some door at school, then asking the next person to open the door whether or not they would like to buy a timeshare. I started to explain that this was simply an account of the first instance of his cracking the supposed joke and as such provided little insight into either its origination or why he considered it funny, but I gave up, recognising my enquiry as pointless. Junior does what he does unburdened by either disingenuous humility or an excess of self-awareness, and it's just how he is. It's not uncommon for his jokes to be supplemented with spoken appendices regarding how funny they were and how well he told them.

I really liked it when I said that.
 
Byron has as usual gone to obsessional lengths to decorate his house with the trappings of Halloween, and no rubbish either. The front room is a clutter of animated skulls, tiny haunted houses dispensing ghoulish noises, portrait paintings which become skeletal at a specific angle. Junior's contribution is the question would you like to buy a timeshare? painted on the door to the bathroom, and now here he is to complete the picture in his gas mask and his cloak and his hood, making hilarious sense mainly to himself. I'd suggest he's come as the general concept of trying too hard, but I don't wish to seem uncharitable given how much pleasure this bewildering timeshare schtick obviously brings him.

It turns out that Roger has come as a pimp - purple suit with zebra pattern trimmings and a huge floppy hat. There's something which makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable about the only black man at the party having dressed as an ethnic stereotype, but maybe that's what he was going for. He mentions something about Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch but it's okay. I get it, and I appreciate that it somehow takes the heat off me. No-one is going to expect either of us to explain ourselves, because it's a Halloween party not a thread on a self-important internet bulletin board.

It's only just gone six, still light, and not many people here, so we make our way out onto the decking and talk to Byron's parents and his brother. Byron's parents, for the sake of reference, may represent the closest I've come to meeting real life Ewings - as seen on the television show Dallas during the days of Ron and Nancy. Their fortune is founded on oil somewhere back in the depths of time, but there the resemblance more or less ends. They're sharp, quick-witted but personable, and despite that they might legitimately regard me as some sort of cuckoo rather than a mere stepfather, they seem to think I'm great. Jay, the brother, has been living in Austin whilst studying for what I understand to be a position in the Episcopalian Church. I ask him how it's been going. His answer seems to take the form of a protest, although I'm not sure against what because I don't quite follow what he's telling me beyond that no, he's not yet doing whatever vicars do full-time.

Bruce and Lori turn up as respectively a demon and an angel, personifying a moral balance which Lori probably jeopardises whilst allowing me to cadge a ciggie. Time has passed and it's dark and we're all gathered under the trellises Byron has built in the rear part of the garden. He's growing grape vines up the supports. He's going to make wine, and in keeping with the ambience I'm on my second bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. It's going to my head because I don't ordinarily drink so much, or even at all. I don't smoke either, but I ask Lori if she can spare one because the moment seems right. I spend a second wondering what the acceptable American for gi's a fag might be, knowing it almost certainly won't be that. I'm unable to recall any scene of Humphrey Bogart helpfully scrounging snouts, so I try could you spare a cigarette, which is a bit like buddy, can you spare a dime?

It works, and thankfully I don't enjoy smoking it anything like as much as I thought I would, which at least means that this isn't me relapsing.

Bruce has turned himself into a demon simply by affixing two small horns to his forehead with adhesive. The horns really suit him, which is weird, although it's probably fitting that he's now telling us about some home brewed alcoholic concoction known by the delightful name of Thunderfuck.

'What's Everclear?' I ask, recognising the brand name from somewhere. 'Is that pure alcohol?'

Turner, who seems to know about these things, nods. My guess came from the context in that we seem to be talking about moonshine, or something like it, relating anecdotal instances of its distillation by agency of Everclear. I assume it's like the bottle of pure alcohol I nicked from the college chemistry department so I could clean the workings of my tape recorder, but it's alcohol brewed from corn and sold for human consumption in all but the nine states which have banned it.

Bruce made a batch of something called Thunderfuck at some point of his college years, and everyone else sat at the table beneath the trellis has a similar story.

I make it through a third Newcastle Brown and realise I'm drunk, or at least more light headed than I've been in years. It's quite a nice feeling, but it also means I'm done for the evening. Thankfully my wife is similarly partied out so we gather up Timeshare Man and head home. The hour, which we anticipate as being around ten or eleven in the evening, is half past eight. I've spent just two-and-a-half hours as Osama bin Laden, and it was a lot of fun.

Born in the USA

Bess and I are standing in line at Mi Casa Tamales. The tickets are already paid for but we need to get wrist bands. We also need to get cash, she tells me, so as to pay for food and drink.

'There's an ATM right there,' I say, indicating the line running adjacent to ours. The venue has anticipated our requirements.

Our eyes go the front of the line, expecting to see a free standing cash dispenser with persons tapping away at the keypad, but there's just the sign - ATM in magic marker on a square of cardboard stapled to a broom handle with a woman sat at the table right next to it. She resembles Dale Dickey who played Patty the Daytime Hooker in My Name is Earl. She is taking debit cards and swiping them through a reader plugged into a tablet, then dispensing dollar bills from a tin cash box at her side. I recall that ATM stands for Automated Teller Machine.

'I guess it's just a TM,' I tell my wife.

'Really it's just a T, when you think about it,' she corrects me.

The event is called Born in the USA, and those in front of us now receive the dayglo paper wristbands which grant admission.

'I wasn't born in the USA,' I say. 'Do you think they'll let me in?'

'Sure they will.'

'Maybe I should have brought my birth certificate,' I mumble, immediately realising that it would serve only to confirm my not having been born in the USA.

Mi Casa Tamales, which Google describes as a boisterous Mexican bar and grill, known for homemade tamales, plus regular live music performances, is three acres of woodland on the right as you head out of San Antonio towards Boerne. The first few times I passed the place I assumed it to be some kind of adventure playground, having noticed swings and slides amongst the trees behind the wood fence next to the highway; then one day we went there to eat. The food was decent, but the main attraction was it being a place in which the kid could run wild and hopefully wear himself out; otherwise it was just outdoor dining, and outdoor dining really isn't that much of a treat in Texas. There's the heat to consider, and the insects you tend to encounter in proximity to woodland, and so it lacks the novelty of English equivalents wherein cold and rain confine the al fresco diner to somewhere with a roof and heating for eleven months of the year. Anyway, tonight it's Born in the USA which is more than just outdoor dining, and we have our wristbands so in we go.

Jana bought the tickets and she will be at table fifty-one.

The place is filling up, and people in clothes resembling parts of the American flag wander amongst the trees and picnic tables. We find table fifty-one inhabited by some woman who patently isn't Jana. She seems embarrassed and duly moves to the next table along, so we take our seats.

I've joked about my social life being confined to either facebook, a telephone connection, or the local supermarket, but it isn't strictly true. I socialise with my wife on a regular basis. We get on quite well together, which is why we got married in the first place. Occasionally I also socialise with Andrea, whom my wife knows from work. Andrea has a wonderfully dry sense of humour, entertains no strange or esoteric beliefs that I'm aware of, and is always good company; and she is additionally friends with Jana, whom I don't really know at all, but who wields a slightly darker version of that same dry sense of humour.

These are the sort of people I tend to get on with - not so much those sat by the stage chuckling at the funny man in his big red shoes, but those stood at the back trying to work out whether or not this is really the worst thing we've ever seen. The four of us occasionally meet around Andrea's house to play cards whilst combining our respective children into a single gibbering, game-fixated organism fuelled on pizza and Big Red; and although I've never been a huge fan of card games, it's always fun with this group; and before we proceed any further, I feel I should stress that neither the term socialise nor card game serve as euphemisms for anything Joyce Grenfell would have categorised as beastly. I'm afraid none of us are that interesting.

Like I say, Born in the USA is not just outdoor dining. There is also a live band and food trucks have been brought in to accommodate the attendant increase in numbers. The band are called the Spazmatics. Jana wanted to see them, and has treated the rest of us to tickets because she didn't want to go on her own.

I look around, noticing a covered stage set up at the far side of the field. I can also see someone vaping - if that's what it's called - puffing big white clouds of smoke from something resembling a novelty ballpoint pen, but no-one is actually smoking proper fags even though we're outside. Either cigarettes really are on the way out, or smoking might be forbidden despite our being outside, although I can see no signs to this effect.

'So where's Jana?'

Bess inspects her phone. 'She's already here. Maybe she's getting something to eat.'

Jana appears with a marguerita in a plastic glass just as a group of teenage girls noisily occupy the next table, joining the woman we have just ousted from our own - presumably somebody's mother. The girls are seventeen or eighteen, nearly all of them wearing way too much make-up and denim dungarees cut short. They're all bare skin and smiles and they wear large badges identifying themselves as tasty tart or material girl or major tease. The noise is shrill and deafening, and the bridal veil worn by one of the group indicates that this is a hen night.

'Jesus Christ,' I say out loud, half hoping to cause offense. 'It's like twelve Miley Cyruses.'

I've been in a bit of a strange mood all day, unsettled or just plain shell-shocked or something. The first news I heard when I woke this morning was that my country of origin has decided it wants to be 1930 when it grows up, but without the part about growing up if at all possible. I've spent most of the day trying and failing to get my head around this and what it could mean. I've been living in Texas on a green card for the past five years, and now it's beginning to seem like going for full citizenship might not be such a terrible idea.

Also, I've been smoking. I gave up years ago, but have since found myself driven to smoke in times of unusual stress, then stopping once I'm done without experiencing any further cravings. I've smoked several times since giving up, with years passing between each pouch of hand-rolling tobacco, and here I am again. I had to buy the tobacco at a head shop, a place on Austin Highway which also sells bongs shaped like skulls as well as esoteric pornography, because rolling tobacco is not readily available here and I've never liked regular cigarettes. I'm not even sure that smoking helps, but it feels as though it does, somehow - and at least I no longer have the additional worry of ending up hooked once again; because I actually quite like the fact of my having stopped smoking, generally speaking.

Andrea has arrived and joins us at our table, but the twelve Miley Cyruses - possibly Miley Cyri in the plural form - all fiddling with their phones and screeching ohmahgeeerrrddd every few seconds are doing my cake in.

'I'm just nipping off for a fag,' I explain, understanding full well that the word has a different meaning here but not really feeling like making a concession to the regional variation. One of the Miley Cyruses is explaining what she was all like and how this resulted in her friend being all like something else. They resemble animated Bratz dolls. Not only do they make me feel old, but they make me feel glad to be old.

I wander off into the crowd, drifting towards the stage as I roll myself a cigarette. I notice security guards hanging around, chubby with the inevitable shades like we're at an Erik Estrada theme park. I'm aware that the practice of hand-rolling is probably more closely associated with marijuana than regular ciggies in these parts, so I maintain some distance whilst remaining purposefully conspicuous so they can tell that I'm not trying to hide anything.

Smoking allows you to see yourself in cinematic terms. There you are in the doorway. It's pissing with rain and you spark up as the music swells. Life may well have given you a short, sharp kick in the nadgers, but you're smoking a fag and everything will get better from this point on, just like in the films. It's a major reason why people smoke, but they never tell you that in the warnings on television, focusing instead on the cancer and all the money you've been flushing down the toilet  these past few years - even though it's unlikely that you would have otherwise spent that money on anything worth having.

I wander to the front of the stage and notice the instruments which have been set up - guitar, bass, drums, a bank of keyboards and several microphones. For a moment I actually wonder if the Spazmatics might be some kind of Plasmatics tribute act, maybe even a distant descendent. The Plasmatics had some great songs once you looked past the television sets being blown up or chainsawed in half on stage, and I remember there was that guy Spazz Attack, the one with the mohican; so given Wendy O. Williams having shuffled off this mortal coil, that must be it; and then I remember that Spazz Attack was some dancer who used to be in Toni Basil videos. I'm thinking of Richie Stotts, and the Plasmatics probably aren't going to sell out a field in south Texas thirty years down the line.

I've looked at the Spazmatics facebook page: four people, all of whom look like the same guy, all pulling the wacky face. They have goofy teeth and nerdy glasses. One wears a neck brace, and another keeps his mullet wig in check with a sweatband. They look like a comedy act, one of those trying-too-hard enterprises which has to tell you that it's funny just so you know.

If you liked The Big Bang Theory, you're gonna love these guys! They're called the Spazmatics, as in spastics! Ha ha!

But it's a night out and a new thing, and it's not pissy lager and turdy indie crap in some shitty south London toilet followed by a terrifying ride home on the night bus, and I'm here for the company rather than the music - whatever it is.

I rejoin the gals, and we play cards. Andrea happens to have a deck with her, one which I suspect she probably carries in case of emergencies. We play crazy eights, one of those games where the object is to get rid of all your cards, and if unable to go, you have to keep picking up more cards from the deck until you can. The band kick off just as we get going, four guys resembling characters from Revenge of the Nerds playing a faithful version of Kenny Loggins' Footloose. 'They play eighties songs,' Jana informs me, and they play them very well. The sound is great and the crowd are going nuts.

We keep on playing crazy eights as the Miley Cyruses get to twerking, or whatever that arse in the air dance is called. I suspect I will soon see one of the cowboys bellowing awesome as he pours beer over himself, or if not beer then Miller Lite or something of that type. The Spazmatics play Just Can't Get Enough, Take On Me, You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Summer of '69, I Love Rock 'n' Roll - all of the hits faithfully recreated before our very ears. At one stage they play a version of Whip It, and it really sounds like Devo, but still I find it difficult to lose myself in the moment.

Bess and I go to get margueritas, discovering that the bar does indeed accept payment by card after all, and as we return to our table, we pause for a photograph with our faces poking through the cut-out heads of Uncle and Auntie Sam because this is still Born in the USA. The name comes from a Bruce Springsteen album, and it seems to have been chosen for this event mainly because it has USA in the title - which is as good a theme as any - and they saved money in photoshopping the date and venue onto the existing record cover. Springsteen's Born in the USA isn't a particularly patriotic number, but I don't suppose it matters. Everyone is drunk and full of tacos, and we all know the words to all of the songs, and we've dressed in stars and stripes just because it makes us happy. There's no other reason. One guy is wearing a Trump t-shirt, but he seems a bit out of place.

We start up another game, and I admit to myself that I'm beginning to hate the music because I'm tired; but I get the impression that Jana and Andrea are enjoying it so I say nothing because I don't want to be the miserable fucker pissing on everyone's chips. It's loud enough to justify the earplugs I'm now really glad I slipped into my pocket before we left. It's competent and well done for what it is, but it still feels like we're at the wedding of somebody we don't like very much, or the world's most unnecessarily complicated karaoke evening. Gaps between songs are filled with lame banter and jokes playing on the nerdish appearance of the band, and audience members receive birthday dedications heralded by a sample from In Da Club by 50 Cent - go shortie, it's your birthday, with the offending fuck inanely bleeped out as though the censorship is itself worth a snigger. Then they play a terrifyingly convincing version of Led Zeppelin's Kashmir, and it begins to feel like something has gone wrong with the fundamental structure of reality.

We're on our fourth or fifth round of crazy eights. Thus far no-one has had to pick more than five or six cards from the deck before they're back in the game, but as the Spazmatics go into Bohemian Rhapsody, Jana just keeps taking those cards, a bitter smile on her face. 'I hereby rename this game Shitto,' she grimaces, and takes cards until the deck is gone. I laugh more than I've laughed all day, and realise that against all odds I've had a good evening. The music hasn't been entirely to my liking, but we've played some great Shitto.

Leave Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Well, I am now.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin grumbled some gruff parting shot and shuffled off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakfast in Catford

It was coming up to half past nine and I'd made it back to the sorting office in good time, these being the days of the reasonable workload, the two deliveries, back when Royal Mail gave a shit about its people. I pulled open my locker and stuffed my delivery bag and jacket inside.

'Ah - young Lawrence.'

I turned and saw that it was Ernie, one of the old boys tending to his own locker. I liked Ernie. He was a man of few words, and he always gave an impression of finding himself quietly amused by something.

'Hello, Ernie.'

'We'll have to stop meeting like this.' He forced something down inside his locker to make more room. As ever, it was not entirely clear who he was speaking to, whether these were just words he liked the sound of. 'People will start to talk.'

I twisted the key and pulled it from the lock. I went for the stairs as Ernie continued with his monologue.

'Lawrence and Ernie, they'll be saying. Lawrence and Ernie.'

The second door at the top of the stairs led into the canteen whilst the first led directly into the kitchen. When I transferred to Catford in September 1990, the kitchen had been off bounds, the exclusive domain of two cooks employed by an agency called Centra, or something like that.

Breakfast had been good, at least of the standard to which I had become accustomed from working at two previous sorting offices. Breakfast up until that point - and keeping in mind here this would be breakfast for someone who began work well before 6AM - had been two sausages, a fried egg, chips and baked beans, every day without fail, six days a week, forty-nine weeks a year. It wasn't exactly health food, but the work was such that it cancelled out the supposed drawbacks of what was basically a lard and salt regime.

Unfortunately Royal Mail had decided it could make savings by dispensing with Centra contract catering given that our office was supposedly too small to justify a full time canteen. Centra went, as did the chips of my traditional two sausages, fried egg, chips and baked beans, and staff canteen became a Royal Mail duty immediately bagged by Alan Durkin who was fed up of walking around in the pouring rain all morning and had the seniority necessary for the procurement of just such a cushy number. Alan's menu tended to focus more on the egg on toast aspect of breakfast catering, and whilst he made a reasonable job of it, no-one was too worried about him being headhunted by any of those expensive west end eateries.

Now the first door, the kitchen door, was left open so we could place orders as we went through to the canteen. Requests shouted through the hatch would usually be ignored or forgotten. There was only one of him, as Alan Durkin reminded his customers with some frequency, and he had only one pair of hands, one of which usually had a fag on the go.

Today the cigarette was cemented to his lower lip in the manner of Andy Capp in the newspaper cartoon by Reg Smythe. A grey cylinder of ash precariously held its shape at the end of the cigarette as sausages, mushrooms and bacon sizzled in the frying pan immediately below.

'What the fuck do you want?'

I always enjoyed the thrust with which he made the enquiry as though asking who you were and what business you might have in his kitchen.

'Just beans on toast and some bacon please, Alan.'

'Right. About five fucking minutes'

I tried not to think about the ash that could so easily join whatever ingredients he was presently bullying into resembling breakfast.

Alan had been nicknamed Teenage Mutant Ninja Durkin, although most people stuck with just Durkin, content that it already sounded vaguely insulting. He was of a certain type, probably not an alcoholic, but giving it his best shot most evenings and at least a few afternoons. He was loud and impressively offensive, and yet somehow difficult to dislike. The jokes weren't that funny, but you still had to give him credit for trying. Wherever you stood in the sorting office, you were never more than a minute away from Alan making some appalling observation far too loudly.

'We've had a great evening, I'm sure you'll agree, ladies and gentleman,' Billy Playle announced loudly in the wake of one particularly salty Durkin zinger. 'The strippers will be on later, but first I'd like you all to put your hands together for the comedy stylings of Mr. Alan Durkin!'

'Fuck off,' suggested the target of the satire.

'Take my wife,' Billy continued, effecting gruff Durkinesque tones. 'Please...'

I took a seat in the canteen. Micky Evans was setting some of the younger postmen right about the Kray twins, recently subject of a film starring those two blokes out of Spandau Ballet. We had all taken passing interest because some pub on Catford Hill had recently been host to a violent incident relating in some way to the Richardsons. I had never heard of the Richardsons before I came to London, but apparently they had been the south London rivals of the Krays back in the sixties - or something like that. The Krays were of course big names in organised crime, and specifically names which actually made them sound like supervillains.

Richardsons could have been a string of newsagents, so far as I was able to tell, which was possibly why no-one had made a film about them starring those two blokes out of Spandau Ballet.

Anyway, some of the younger postmen had an impression of the Kray twins as not having been much different to Robin Hood apart from there being two of them. They were the lovable rogues of murder. Micky Evans had worked in Deptford at the dockyard in the sixties and recalled in some detail how the management had called in the Krays to help break up a strike.

'They were cunts,' Micky explained. 'Don't let no-one tell you they was anything else. They were horrible cunts.'

Dudley the cleaner stood a little way away, wiping at a smudge on the window with a cloth.

'When I'm cleaning windows,' Tony sang, invoking George Formby and smiling innocently as Dudley turned to glare at him with those sunken Boris Karloff eyes.

Troy was meanwhile readjusting his worldview in accordance with the new information recently supplied by Micky Evans. His name was Mark, but everyone called him Troy following someone pointing out the resemblance to Troy Tempest, the submariner and puppet star of Gerry Anderson's Stingray. It was the eyes and the apparently permanent five o'clock shadow. Also he was quite short. The nickname had stuck with such tenacity that I'd spent my first six months at Catford actually believing it to be his real name.

'When I'm cleaning tables,' Tony sang, now adapting the words of the song to new domestic duties with a cheeky grin.

Dudley looked up from wiping some crap from one of the tables with his cloth. He stared at Tony. He said nothing, but you could tell he was thinking wanker. I could hear some chuckling under the general noise of conversation, a tinny radio, and Alan Durkin telling someone or other to go and fuck themselves.

'Uh oh! Here comes the fat kid!'

His name was Scott, but everyone knew him as Earthquake. He was young and massive with the voice of Bernard Bresslaw. He ran into the canteen and stage dived our group like an enormous happy dog. Chairs scraped quickly back across the floor and only Troy was caught beneath the guffawing mass of our very own delivery manatee.

'You stupid cunt!' Troy groaned, clutching his ribs.

Earthquake chortled and picked himself up, setting chairs straight. Order resumed. 'You still waiting?'

Troy nodded, glancing over towards the hatch.

Earthquake began telling us about the time he'd been taking a dump downstairs, listening to someone evacuate their bowels in the next cubicle along. He had emerged, washed his hands, and watched as a grunting Teenage Mutant Ninja Durkin emerged, returning immediately to the canteen without stopping to wash his own hands.

'That's why I don't bother.' Earthquake sent a distrusting glance towards the kitchen. 'I just have a sandwich or something instead, you know?'

'Troy!' Alan Durkin called out.

A plate was slapped down on the counter. Troy went over to fetch it, and as he sat we could see he now wore a sour expression. He was studying the bacon and eggs as though anticipating fag ends, fingernails, toilet paper, even fecal matter. 'I've gone right off it.'

'When I'm moving chairs...'

A few more people laughed this time.

Dudley stood glowering at his nemesis, hands upon the back of a chair he had been moving over to an empty table.

'Why don't you fuck off.'

Farewell to the Saxon Chief

Photograph: André Vocáse.

I started at Maidstone College of Art in September 1984, beginning a three year fine art course at the end of which I would, in theory, have letters after my name. I was eighteen years old, and it was the first time I'd lived away from home. On the Queen's Road at the back of the college was a pub called The Saxon Chief. I suspect it may have been one of the tutors from my course who first introduced me to the place, one lunchtime taking a few of us along so as to continue some rambling discussion about something or other. I'd only been drinking for about a year, having discovered the wonderfully redemptive effects of alcohol during my art foundation course back in Warwickshire, but now I began to appreciate booze in a new light. It wasn't just the drink, the mild euphoria, the feeling of finding oneself somehow living out the inner life of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting as the evening wore on; it was good conversation and company, the discussion of things which really seemed to matter at the time and then laughing until your guts hurt upon realising how idiotic you must sound. If not a way of life, it was at least as important as sleep and food, at least for the duration of those formative years. Happily, having a fairly low tolerance to alcohol, three pints was usually more than enough to see me staggering into oncoming traffic singing Sham 69's Who Gives A Damn...

Running for the bus in my flash blue suit,
Someone shouts out poof, so I put in the boot.
I don't wanna wear it, it's my boss that tells me to,
So when you laugh at me, you only laugh at you.
Anyway, who gives a damn,
I'm doing the best I can...

I would generally be sick halfway through the fourth pint, a sure sign of my being as refreshed as I was likely to get, and so thankfully I never evolved into one of those twelve-pints-a-night gentlemen, not least because I drank for pleasure more than habit, limiting my intake to maybe a couple of lunchtime sessions and weekends.

Naturally it was around this time that I also took up smoking. We were in the Ten Bells in Leeds, arguably my first true local. Jane Newland offered me a ciggie, not knowing me well enough to realise that I didn't smoke, and despite years of opposition to the habit, I immediately saw how a pint and a fag just seemed to go together.

Thirty years later, a friend from Maidstone posts a photograph of a rubble filled hole in the ground on a popular social networking website. He asks his virtual audience to take a guess as to the name of the drinking establishment to which these bricks once belonged. It is of course The Saxon Chief.

I recall the extended lunchtimes there, even drinking with David Hall, the head of our department and himself a minor legend in the history of video art but crucially a little more jovial in such surroundings. I hadn't been able to recall the actual name of the pub until someone correctly identified the bricks in the photograph, and yet I can still remember the face of the landlord who laughed and joked and didn't really seem bothered by the eccentricities of his art college clientèle. One lunchtime, Martin de Sey, Paul Mercer, and myself went around the pub collecting empty glasses, piling them on our table so as give the appearance of having necked the lot between the three of us, then spent the next hour talking complete bollocks as Jane Hanley caught the performance on video. At the time I hadn't heard Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's scatological improvisations as Derek and Clive, but as soon as I did, I immediately recognised the parallels.

'You know, one time I was so drunk,' Paul explained with gruff conviction, 'that I was sick in my own eyes, and I couldn't see.'

Martin and myself nodded sagely to show for the benefit of the camera that we understood exactly where he was coming from, to show that we all knew the inconvenience of throwing up in one's own eyes after a night on the sauce. We were trying not to laugh, although Martin managed better than I did, maintaining an authoritative poker face with his sharp tie and sunglasses.

'So, Martin,' Paul opened, introducing a relatively fresh plot twist after the camera had been running for at least half an hour, 'what's it like being blind?'

'It's not so bad really.' Martin sipped thoughtfully at his lager. 'You're spared a lot of the troubles of the world because of course you can't see them.'

I don't recall whether we laughed so much as we thought we would when we played back the recording, but maybe it doesn't really matter. It was of the moment, and I have no means by which to view the VHS tape even if I felt inclined to do so, and our pub is now a hole in the ground. Similarly the art college, or at least our corner of the art college was absorbed into the Kent Institute of Art and Design not too long after I left in 1987, and now, more recently, it is to become a sports and leisure centre. My past has been paved over and put to better, or at least more politically progressive use.

The institution of the English pub has been dying for years, at least since the terminal kick in the economic nadgers delivered by the smoking ban of 2007 which made it illegal to smoke in any enclosed workplace. The smoking ban was pretty much what finished off my own relationship with the pub, given that I lived in London at the time and it was already sufficiently difficult finding a pub that wasn't horrible without being obliged to go and stand out in the shitty English weather whenever you fancied a ciggie. The Camberwell Grove Tavern, for one example, a previously popular and homely establishment with proper red flock wallpaper became some sort of brushed steel pizza bar with slogans projected on the newly whitewashed walls and gumball dispensers for a dwindling clientèle of fedora wearing tosspots in skinny jeans.

I mentioned to Larry at work that I'd heard of yet another recently closed pub on Lordship Lane being about to reopen. 'I don't know what the deal is,' I said. 'I don't know if it's going to be another wine bar or what the theme will be.'

'They should theme it as a fucking pub,' he suggested.

There didn't seem to be a lot of point smoking outside any of these newer drinking establishments when there was no good reason for anyone to go inside in the first place.

I gave up smoking a long time ago, although I've resisted the slide into evangelical campaigning against the habit to which so many reformed tobacco addicts seem prone. I gave up because it had begun to affect my health, and regardless of whether or not the anti-smoking crusaders may be justified, the general thrust of their chosen cause drives me up the wall. It's the assumption that smokers really need to be told that their habit is bad for them, as though this might be a new discovery, a best kept secret. It is the assumption that the only factor informing a person's failure to quit tobacco will be a simple lack of willpower; and such feckless pronouncements are particularly galling when delivered by a person who has never smoked.

It is 2008 and I am shaking my head in disgust at a television news item describing the electronic retouching of black and white films so as to present new non-smoking versions of Humphrey Bogart and others.

'What's wrong with that?' asks Dora the Explorer, as ever keen to side with the winning team.

'It's ridiculous,' I tell her. 'It's rewriting the past. I mean what's James Dean without a fag hanging out of his mouth?' As ever I have failed to foresee that she won't understand my point at all.

'I think it's good. He'll be much cooler for a start.'

'So James Dean will be cool because he just says no to drugs?'

'Yes.'

I go outside for a smoke, standing in her doorway with light rain spitting against the right side of my face. There is nothing I can say to her. Somehow I am in a relationship with the head girl, an all-round jolly good egg; and standing outside in the rain is what makes it just about bearable.

Even now that I have given up, and now that I have given up without really suffering much in the way of cravings, I still miss those moments when all action stops and you take a break with a cigarette. The cigarette defines the moment as contemplative, like making up a rolly from the butts at six in the morning because you're all out of tobacco, and you've been up all night struggling with a painting or a piece of writing or whatever, and not even fifty cups of nocturnal coffee can disguise the foul ashtray bouquet of a mechanically reclaimed cigarette, a Frankenstein snout which nevertheless tastes amazing because it's the right moment; or when your boss has asked you to perform a task so unreasonable that the only proper response would be to punch him in the head, and so instead you step outside and really think about your life; or the cigarette that obliges you to stop and look at something instead of running past; or the cigarette that just about keeps you from whacking either yourself or that aforementioned boss or Dora the Explorer over the head with a length of lead pipe.

When you smoke a cigarette, you are momentarily in control of your own life, even if only in a very small way and for a short time, and for many people that's still better than nothing.

Dora the Explorer very much approves of the changes made to the pub at the end of her road. It was once called The Plough, and was notable for having stood on the corner of Barry Road for several hundred years during which time the highwayman Dick Turpin numbered amongst its clientèle. It was predominantly red inside, but it served beer thus providing all functions which might reasonably be expected of a pub. Every once in a while, delivering mail whilst somewhat inconvenienced by my having enjoyed a triumverate of cold, refreshing drinks the previous evening, I would stop in as The Plough opened for the day and I would have a Bloody Mary just to sort me out, which it always did.

Then one day something called the Just So Pub Company stepped in, transforming The Plough into something for all the family, rebranding the place with typically twee arrogance as The Goose & Granite, complete with a small plaque giving account of the history which had recently been bulldozed. Dora the Explorer considered the changes an improvement, explaining that the establishment as it was had not been women-friendly. However, having actually frequented the place prior to its transformation, I'd seen plenty of women, just none that belonged to an expressive dance workshop. What Dora the Explorer meant was that it had been a red, smoky hole full of working class people who read The Sun and probably used sexist language.

Anyway...

The hole in the ground that was once The Saxon Chief attracts comment though the social media channel upon which it is posted. We talk about the influence of the smoking ban on the decline of the English drinking establishment, and one particularly astute individual points out that the problem has been exacerbated by the unreasonable demands and costs brewery chains have imposed upon those who run their establishments. It was further suggested that the pub as an establishment needs to evolve, a sentiment which I have little doubt has informed those places now serving sausages with caramelised onion gravy or with their gumball machines newly installed next to the bogs. Personally I don't buy it, this supposed need to evolve, given that its results so closely resemble a need for pubs to appeal to people who never actually liked pubs in the first place, with changes implemented at the expense of the custom of those who did. It's empty management speak to which I object as a former employee of another business which worked just fine, but which needed to change with the times, and then ceased working just fine once it had done so.

There is hidden between the strata of upper and lower management across the broad span of commerce and industry an entire class of useless people who perform no actual function but to justify their own employment, and their rallying call is most often a call for change because this makes them appear progressive and forward thinking in the absence of their performing any task which actually means anything. It's like wearing an I Hate Bruce Springsteen T-shirt in the belief that it will make you appear critically sophisticated and therefore a person of discerning tastes, as opposed to merely weird and useless.

That said, pubs almost certainly need to evolve into places in which a pint doesn't cost so much as to drive all of their patrons off in the general direction of the nearest off license. A few stray housewives popping in for a bit of pie and a coffee aren't really going to solve this problem, and in any case might be better off sticking to their regular cafés and tea rooms. There needs to be an establishment in which we can drink so much that we can barely stand and still conclude the evening stood on top of a bus shelter wearing a traffic cone and swinging our trousers around our heads, because that's what you need to do when you're eighteen. There needs to be an establishment in which we can briefly drink away the crushing misery of forty years spent on the bins or sweeping the road. There needs to be an establishment in which we can drink without having to suffer the sight of the boss stuffing his face with artisan crisps at the next table. It's war on the working classes, just as it has always been - basic asset-stripping because the working classes are still an economic resource, and let's face it, they're not exactly generating much capitol sat at home watching Britain's Got Talent since the entirety of British industry was force-evolved into a single nineteen year old genius with a laptop.

It's the same basic process as that which has befallen the leisure centre formerly identified as Maidstone College of Art, a reduction of society to its most basic fat-free consumer functions, buy or die. I take a fairly dim view of the art establishment, and I have no means of gauging what my three years at art college have meant for me in the long term beyond that they meant something, and that my time in The Saxon Chief with two friends pretending to be significantly more drunk than we really were was undoubtedly better spent than it would have been in training to become an estate agent. I am not of the belief that everything in society must quantify its value or purpose in terms that can be understood by an economist, because a world in which everything must justify its function may as well be Stalinist Russia regardless of whether or not that function is justified by capitalist values. A world in which we can just try shit out for a while and not have to worry about picking up the tab will be a better, richer world than one without; which is why higher education is now reduced more or less to a means of generating debts which will keep our financial institutions running for years to come, because apparently we don't need thinkers, just people who will keep on buying stuff.

Every year that little group of refugees stood outside puffing away in the pouring rain gets smaller and smaller as they each decide they can no longer be bothered, and one day they will all be gone, and the wankers will have won.