Millennium

I spent the first thirty-five years of my life furtively sidling towards the year 2000, running from one bush to another with a bit of twig held above my head like an inept spy in a Spike Milligan drawing. It was difficult to deny the symbolism of the numbers, much as I knew it was ridiculous. Way back in 1977, during my final months of junior school, Paul Moorman had told me that the world would end in 1980. This, he explained, had been predicted by someone called Old Mother Shipton, and she was usually right about such things. I spent the next three years doing my best to not think about it, knowing that it was almost certainly going to happen exactly as predicted. The numbers alone seemed to support Paul's hypothesis - the eerily tidy 1980 rather than the somewhat messier 1979 or the incomprehensible 1981 on either side.

Ultimately, this has taught me to avoid placing too much stock in numbers or dates on the grounds of their appearing pleasantly or even uncannily rounded in the fairly arbitrary context of the decimal system. Even so, it was difficult to avoid feeling something about the approach of the year 2000. As a child I had regularly read a science-fiction comic called 2000AD, so named as to evoke what then seemed like a distant and culturally remote future. The same deadline had generally been recognised as signifying the point at which everything would be different to the present day, and this had been the standard in films, books, and television for a long time, most of the twentieth century, and certainly the years during which I grew up. Tomorrow's World would wheel an unconvincing and glacially slow domestic help robot around the television studio - always a disappointment after the robots of Star Wars or Doctor Who - and James Burke would look to the viewer and explain this is how we will live come the year 2000.

Even as we counted down, as the future approached and we began to realise that it would probably look at least a little like what had become the present, the numbers had taken on too much meaning to be ignored. Millenarian cults popped up left, right, and centre proclaiming that it would be the end of the world, civilisation, or both, or that the spaceship was coming to take us all to Heaven - all the usual bollocks which comes around whenever someone who isn't very bright starts taking their mathematics far too seriously. On a seemingly more tangible note there was the Millennium Bug by which everything containing a microchip would reset itself to the year 1900, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil would return to office as Prime Minister, and everyone would be thoroughly pissed off with nothing but coverage of the Boer War on telly. I asked my friend Andrew if it was serious. He worked in the city as a programmer for Cazenove, and he seemed to know about such things. He didn't really know about this one, he told me, but said it seemed significant just how much money his superiors were throwing at people brought in to solve millennial problems before they happened.

My friend Tim was meanwhile laying an egg, although thankfully he was laying an egg a hundred or so miles away, thus at least affording me the possibility of hanging up and blaming it on a bad line when I'd heard enough. He had a computer and as usual had imagined himself to number amongst an elite group of five or six individuals distinguished in this way; he became an expert, finding it difficult to conceive of anyone else having experience equal to or even greater than his own, because at the root of it all he really needed to feel important, to be someone other than the lonely boatsman with just one oar rowing himself around in a circle on his own social and cultural oxbow lake. He'd probably read an article about the Millennium Bug in the Daily Express, something which had impressed him at least as much as Paul Moorman's testimony had initially impressed me.

'Anything could happen, Lawrence. It will be a free for all for computer viruses and all the computers will think it's the year 1900. You should be careful what you download, you mark my words.'

I had been using a PC for about three years. At the time I had not yet found good reason to hook it up to the internet, and so I was using it purely as a word processor.

'I can't see it happening. I'm not actually online.'

'You don't know, Lawrence. Some of the viruses that are around these days are incredible.'

Maybe they were. Maybe they were so incredible that they could now build themselves physical bodies with which to perform home visits on people with isolated computers and no internet access. Tim seemed to know more about it than I did.

I thought about it and decided the worst that could probably happen would be a temporary loss of either gas or electricity, maybe some disruption to the phone system. In any case, there didn't seem to be a lot I could do, aside from follow Tim's expert advice and buy the most expensive antivirus software I could find for a computer with no actual internet connection. There didn't seem much point in worrying.

Since moving to Lordship Lane in 1995, I'd generally spent New Year's Eve with my friend Eddy. We often seemed to be the only two of our social group who never had anything planned, and so would generally end up in a pub on the south bank of the Thames, followed by watching the fireworks across the river as December switched over to January of the new year. Sometimes there would be a few more of us, Neil and Rachel or Carl and Christine; sometimes it would be fun, or sometimes it would be pissing with rain as we stood shivering amongst assorted Time Out readers trying their hardest to have an experience that would justify paying a million quid every three days to rent a glass cube just past the Victoria Bridge. I nearly always enjoyed the pub, but could never quite work out what I was supposed to get from the postscript with all the explosions and cheering. It being 1999, everyone I knew had planned in advance, Eddy included for once, paying tickets for ringside seats at this or that spectacle. Of course everyone knew that 2001 would be the first true year of the new millennium, but please...

It being 1999, I had at last found something resembling a calling, specifically something geographically orientated in the direction of central Mexico. I'd been gripped by Mexica and Pre-Colombian culture since just before I'd moved to Lordship Lane, and had spent five years reading up on the subject. In May, 1996 I'd dug out a bag of acrylic paints which had lain more or less untouched since the end of the eighties - when a really lousy portrait of the poet and author Bill Lewis had convinced me that painting just wasn't my medium - and I began painting images of Mexican Gods and Goddesses. I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing or why, but the composition of each painting gave me a point of focus around which to base my reading. I told myself I was putting a book together, twenty-six paintings of Mexican Gods with a lengthy written piece on each; but I couldn't quite condense the pantheon as I understood it into twenty-six individuals, so it became fifty-two, then finally 104 - these all being theologically significant numbers in the Mexican triskaidecimal system which uses thirteen rather than ten as a base. My painting ability was ropey, but I had decided I could teach myself and fake the rest, and never mind if one or two of them ended up looking a little like X-Men fan art. I was still technically a better painter than Rene Magritte, I told myself.

It seems an absurd undertaking given that some paintings took days or even weeks to complete, but by 31st December 1999 I was working on a representation of Ixpuztec, or Broken Face, a minor Death God. It was sequentially the ninety-eighth painting I had done in the series, and as part of a larger undertaking for which I still had only approximate plans.

As evening drew in on the very last day of what the great majority of people, rightly or wrongly, regarded as the twentieth century, I was perched on my couch with a board on my knee working at a painting. The television was on in the background, and the gas fire was almost certainly turned to its highest setting. My figure work had never been what you would call outstanding, but for once it was looking okay to me, shortfalls compensated by tricks picked up from all those years reading superhero comics. The sky was drawn from a painting by Czech artist Zdeněk Burian which I had known since childhood from a book called Life before Man. I suppose the composition was all a bit cobbled together, but it felt as though I was at least doing something vaguely meaningful, in the context of having spent most of my thirty-five years producing art which aspired only to the appearance of meaning.

It was five minutes to midnight. I set down my board, picked up my glass of tequila and orange, rolled myself a cigarette and went outside. Lordship Lane slopes downhill just past where I lived, meaning that I was stood upon a slight rise looking north towards the River Thames and the newly constructed London Eye, just visible and all lit up on the skyline. I recall the comet Hale-Boppe as a vivid splash of milk in the heavens to the north-east, but according to Wikipedia that would have been a couple of years earlier. I sipped my tequila and smoked my fag, and thought about the twentieth century as the sky filled with fireworks.

It felt as though I had come a long way.

A few months earlier, back in September, I had been to Mexico City. I went alone, and it was the first time I had ever been out of the country. The world had come to resemble something very different to the one in which I had grown up, something I could never have predicted. I had come to view the paintings as something akin to a ritual act, hence the culturally specific count towards which I was working. They were a catechism of sorts, an act of naming by which something was brought into being, specifically brought into being as living rather than dead ideas; and I never really cared whether that made sense to anyone else or not.

It was 2000. The future was here and everything was, as promised, different. Stood alone outside in the freezing cold, paint all over my hands and a ciggy on the go would have been a poor New Year's Eve by the standards of most people, but for me it was magical. We had escaped the twentieth century, and the future had become mutable once more. Almost anything could happen from this point onwards, as indeed it eventually did.

Tim's Last Moon

Tim's First Moon was a single page comic strip written and drawn by Simon Cox and myself in July, 1984. We'd come to the end of our one year art foundation course at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further Education and I suppose you could say that we were letting off steam. The Tim under discussion was a fellow student and the subject of some mockery. He seemed an oddly conservative figure on a course populated by colourful characters, teenagers making the most of having left school, of being able to dye their hair, wear outrageous clothes, smoke, drink, and do all that stuff you really need to do when you're a teenager. His conversation, which often seemed to be channelling an Alan Bennett monologue, was peppered with references to his mother and to a home life seemingly much like that of Ronnie Corbett's Timothy character in the sitcom Sorry! The issue was, I guess, not specifically that Tim was hilariously square, socially awkward, and conspicuously in the thrall of a seemingly domineering mother, but that he was all of these in conjunction with being loud and sometimes quite pushy. He was an abrasive personality and didn't seem to realise it. He had about him the quality of a manic schoolboy and people found it unsettling.

I liked Tim, or at least I didn't actively dislike him. His artworks were large and weird, huge canvasses covered in scribbled equations and navel-gazing essays on the subject of himself as artist, or his peculiar pastiche of the paintings of Julian Schnabel using paper plates. His work was about art as medium, the art industry, art as a commodity and so on; or so it seemed. Tim's explanations never really made any sense to me. At the time I assumed this to be because these explanations went over my head. I didn't understand his viewpoint although it seemed interesting, not least because it was completely unlike anything else being produced by anyone on the art foundation course. I imagined he stood a reasonable chance of becoming the next Gilbert & George if he could just manage to go five minutes without pissing someone off. The problem was that, I guess, he just wouldn't listen, which pretty much defeated the point of his taking the course. Whatever the tutors suggested apparently failed to get through, and his work remained incomprehensible to more or less everyone but himself.

Tim's First Moon was drawn, I suppose, in response to his manic exhibitionism, his inability to take a hint or to judge any given situation before steaming in, making a fool of himself, and giving everyone the hump. His interest in girls, for example, was expressed in comedic drooling and gurning as he rolled his tongue around in his mouth and made grabbing motions with his hands. My guess is that it was intended to be funny, even disarmingly ridiculous, but it just came off as peculiar. The story of the cartoon strip, such as it was, involved Tim's breakfast bowl of sugar puffs laced with hallucinogenic drugs by fellow students in the hope of broadening his horizons. It concludes with Tim revealed as having three buttocks as he moons the college Principal at a public function. Simon and myself made ourselves howl with laughter as we drew the thing, and then we screen printed a few hundred copies on cheap paper and gave them out to anyone who wanted one.

Tim should have been mortified, but it seemed he loved the attention, which is probably a clue as to whatever his problem was in the first place. We'd taken the piss out of him, gallon after gallon, and with such enthusiasm that I began to feel a great sense of guilt when we started printing off those first copies on the silk screens. Nevertheless Tim seemed to think it was great. I suppose he saw any publicity as good publicity.

As our year of art foundation drew to a close, some of us were preparing for degree courses elsewhere. I myself was headed for Maidstone College of Art in Kent. Tim hadn't been accepted anywhere, although it should be noted that he had applied only to colleges within travelling distance of home, and so he signed up for another year of the art foundation course. For some reason, we exchanged addresses and struck up a correspondence. With hindsight I still have no idea why this happened. It wasn't like we had a great deal in common, and we hadn't really been close friends at college. I felt a certain degree of guilt over Tim's First Moon, disliking the image of myself allied with all those legions arrayed against the poor fucker, hooting with laughter as we pointed at his spots and silly hair, daring him to say a rude word in front of mother almighty. The fact of his purporting to have enjoyed our cruel cartoon only seemed to make it worse.

On the other hand, having started a mail order DIY tape label in order to distribute my own home-made music, I'd passed Tim a couple of cassettes, and he had responded with enthusiasm, which was of course very flattering.

So we corresponded for a couple of years on the subject of something or other. For two years running he failed to be accepted for a fine art degree course at any college within travel distance of his home, and so changed direction, some secretarial course or whatever, business studies - that kind of thing. I regarded his reluctance to move away from home as a little odd, although having myself found the experience somewhat difficult, in some ways I understood, and it was clear that there was no joy to be had in telling him to move out, to get out from under that woman. He was unreceptive to such arguments, and besides it was the same song as had been sung by those who had spent the year taking the piss out of him with such enthusiasm.

Instead he seemed to be concentrating on something called Media Bunker, a name with a logo which appeared to be a huge paintbrush launched from an ICBM silo. He was making plans, writing manifestos, collating photocopied notes in presentation folders. He phoned me and spent an hour raving about a television commercial in which Victor Kiam reported liking Remington razors so much that he'd bought the company, and he raved as though it should be obvious what this had to do with anything.

The trouble was that in the three or four years of Media Bunker, as discussed in both letters and the occasional phone call, I never found out what Media Bunker was actually supposed to be. Was it a building, an art gallery? Was it an agency, as suggested by his contacting and in a few cases pissing off an assortment of local artists? Was it a magazine? What the fuck was it?

I never found out. Neither did I find out quite what the Rock Drill Rockers were supposed to be, beyond the scribbled drawings he sent in the mail - Epstein's Rock Drill, Brancusi's Mademoiselle Pogany and other iconic modernist sculptures playing instruments as backing band for the Art Assassin, which was Tim looking moody in a trench coat wielding a gun shaped like a paintbrush. I had seen a balsa wood maquette of the paintbrush gun, but that hadn't made a lot of sense either. It could have been a proposed installation or performance, a laboured metaphor for something or other, or a ponderous Saturday morning cartoon show.

'Tim was ever so disappointed,' his mother told me when finally I met her. 'He thought you would be moving back here and you could help him with his thing—'

'Media Bunker,' Tim interrupted, pulling a face - disappointment seasoned with acceptance of its inevitability. 'I thought after you finished college we could work on Media Bunker together.'

This was news to me. I was stood at the counter of an antiques stall in a covered market in Stratford-on-Avon. This was Tim's mother's stall and Tim himself now worked here. This was his job. He was, he told people, in the antiques trade. The antiques in question were antiques in the sense of being stuff he and his mother had found in the attic. There wasn't anything quite at the level of faded jigsaw puzzles or boardgames with missing pieces, but tat was nevertheless as good a description as any. To gaze through the glass top of that counter upon the treasures carefully arranged below, each with its own handwritten price tag, was to experience crushing sorrow on behalf of everyone involved. Tim had a job in so much as anyone who ever put on a yard sale has a job for just as long as they're trying to sell that massive telly with the picture showing in just cancer-blue down the left side of the screen.

I had read a lot about Tim's mother in the letters, the matriarch who refused to let him leave home or make his own way, the wicked old witch holding him back. This, he wrote, was the truth of the situation, contrary to the general thrust of the jokes we had told at college. I didn't know what to expect of her.

She was a short, unhappy looking women with long grey hair and a strong Midlands twang. Contrary to my expectations, she seemed sharp-witted, and I found that I quite liked her.

'I wish you'd have a word with this one, Lawrence.' She regarded her son with icy frustration. 'He's bloody never going to leave home at this rate. He'll still be there when I'm pushing up the daisies, mark my words.'

This was a different take on the story, and one that seemed more plausible to me. It had become obvious that Tim lacked natural curiosity, anything you could describe as a sense of adventure. He wasn't really interested in other people, places, or indeed anything much outside himself. The notion that he might have been somehow held back by this small, faintly acidic woman whilst straining at the bit to make that degree interview in Dundee did not ring true.

I'd visited the antique centre having moved from Kent back to Warwickshire, or specifically to Coventry, in 1989. After about a month I came to the realisation that this hadn't been the best idea I'd ever had, and so I put in for a transfer with my job and moved back down south, to London. I'd resisted the drive to move to London which seemed to have swept up so many of my contemporaries like eels to the Sargasso as we finished our degrees. I had told myself I would never live in London, but by 1989 it didn't seem like there was anywhere else left to go.

Tim and I maintained our correspondence on and off as I took to cartooning in earnest, mainly short absurdist efforts which were printed in an assortment of fanzines. He sent me a detailed plot outline in the post, written and drawn in his scrawled hand until the A4 sketchbook was full. It was, he explained, something he had been working on and perhaps I might like to use it in some capacity. The story opened at a graveside, the funeral of our hero's younger sister, killed by drugs. Our man reflects that he never really understood the acid house phenomena, for surely everything that could be said in that genre had already been done by Heaven 17 and the Human League. All he knows is that the drug dealers will pay for the death of his younger sister. Accordingly he refits his car with the best that British engineering has to offer, crafting a mighty chariot by which to hunt down the drug dealers...

I skipped to the end, to a car chase at Heathrow Airport, and struggled to understand why Tim had thought I would be interested in this crap. Even without the fumbling childlike narrative, his understanding of the cultural phenomena of acid house made your average cockwomble Daily Mail journalist seem like Timothy Leary; but sadly I knew that there was no point trying to communicate this

Over time we graduated to tape letters spoken onto cassette, which made for quite nice little art objects and saved the time spent writing out several pages of news and views which would probably be ignored, or else struggling to decipher Tim's handwriting. We spoke on the phone, and ultimately by email, although I had increasingly begun to wonder why I was friends with this person. We had nothing in common. These accounts of his plans and ambitions, such as they were, made no more sense to me than had Media Bunker or any of the other stuff. I felt some pity for him, this unloveable, awkward, eternal manchild, but no man was ever the better for being pitied, as D.H. Lawrence observed in The Plumed Serpent.

This time, he's not getting the new email address, I would tell myself, or the phone number, but somehow he always did, and I would resign myself to further incomprehensible nonsense.

He phoned me at work as I was busy and hardly in the mood for rambling crap. I'd just got my first mobile phone, a crappy but functional Nokia, and so he spent ten minutes telling me about his mobile phone, a BlackBerry or something of the kind with full QWERTY keyboard. 'Everyone calls it the beast,' he snorted down the line from Warwickshire. I tried to imagine a scenario in which passing strangers regarded Tim speaking on his mobile telephone with awe, never before having seen such a wonder. I tried to imagine what Tim would be talking about, or to whom he might be talking if not me. It was seven in the morning and I was pissed off and already knackered, and my imagination was not up to the task.

'Do they really call it the beast?'

'Yes!'

'Wow.'

Royal Mail had introduced changes to working conditions which had made the job extremely difficult, and all in the name of savings, regardless of the detrimental effect upon both quality of service and working conditions. I found this so stressful that I went briefly mad and was obliged to take time off work having been diagnosed with mild clinical depression. I felt, if not literally suicidal, then something in that direction. The one thing which had prevented my employer from forcing me to work in excess of eight hours weekly overtime on top of a back-breaking forty hour week was European Union employment law. Royal Mail wanted to be able to work us for as long as they liked, threatening anyone refusing the overtime with disciplinary action on the grounds of delaying the mail, but thankfully they couldn't because of EU employment law. I explained this to Tim on the phone one evening, having already endured fifty unbroken minutes of his thoughts on the British aerospace industry, then I listened as he delivered his verdict, a stream of aspirational management bullshit pretty much identical to the crap by which my employers had justified the changes. I had the actual experience of the matter, but he knew better because he always did. He effectively told me I had failed to understand that which I was directly experiencing on a daily basis.

When finally I got a word in edgeways, he cut me short.

'Mum's nagging me to get off the phone,' he chortled. 'She's just put out the sticky toffee pudding,' which was followed by ten minutes on the subject of sticky toffee pudding - yum yum yum. I had never heard of sticky toffee pudding, and looked around to see if Mike Leigh was crouched down behind the sofa directing a cameraman.

A couple more years up the line as he settled into another lengthy monologue on the subject of the aviation industry for no reason I fully understood, I set the telephone receiver down on the arm of the sofa and went to make myself a cup of tea. When I returned some ten minutes later, he was still talking, having failed to notice my absence. Eventually he swung around to asking how I had been, how my life was going.

'I have a girlfriend,' I reported. 'Her name is Marian.'

'That's great!,' he chirped in the voice of an overenthusiastic seventies disc jockey. 'Well done, mate!'

It actually wasn't that great, much as I wished it were. Following the initial few weeks of euphoria, Marian had invited me to an intimate gathering with just thirty or forty close friends and together they had attempted to passive-aggressive me into joining their brainwashing therapy cult, an organisation charging several hundred pounds a pop for courses I didn't need to take on account of already having a job and a functioning personality. The relationship had more or less been exposed as bullshit before it had really got started, and I was very upset about this. I spoke without interruption - which I found odd - telling Tim how distressing it was for about twenty minutes.

'She sounds a great little lass!' he chirped in response, sounding like Paul Daniels on speed, and I recalled that he'd never really been too interested in other people. When in dialogue with another person he seems to regard their contribution as time in which to compose whatever he'll say next so as to supplement whatever he said before.

I went to visit Tim for one last time just a few days before I moved to the United States. I hadn't seen him in a while and anticipated at least a couple of questions about the details of my move, some level of curiosity, but no; I sat and listened for more than thirty minutes as he explained his latest big idea, a new kind of science-fiction television show. It would be, he said, like a cross between Doctor Who and Star Trek. He described the build up to the big revelation for about ten minutes, at length coming to, 'and then we close in on the wreckage and we see that the sign reads,' - pause for dramatic effect as he licks his lips - 'United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.'

Why the fuck did I bother?, I wondered.

'I hope you let Lawrence get a word in edgeways,' his wife chided as she emerged from the kitchen twenty or so minutes later. 'Tell me you haven't been bending the poor boy's ear all this time?'

Tim laughed his loud, awkward laugh. 'We've just been having a bit of a natter!' Then he turned to me. 'She does love to make a fuss!'

I will never have to see this person again, I thought to myself.

I moved to the United States and got married, and Tim diminished further to an internet presence, the eternal Prince Philip of my facebook page, ever ready to step in and piss someone off with an ill-informed observation. It was almost a year before he ran out of things to say about the foreign policy of former president George W. Bush, apparently having assumed my Texan wife - who was also using facebook - would respond well to these ill-judged comments, and perhaps might even take the opportunity to personally apologise for her part in all that business with Afghanistan. I made a serious effort to impress upon him just why Bess was no more accountable for Bush's presidency than Tim himself was for Margaret Thatcher's tenure in office. This inspired him to share a lengthy anecdote about the time he met an American at the antiques centre, some fifteen years before. Apparently the tourist in question had been a really smashing chap. I think this anecdote was offered as some sort of testament to Tim being the last person who would make sweeping gestures regarding issues of nationality.

More recently on facebook I posted a link to an article about the criminalisation of persons attempting to feed the homeless here in America. This is typical Republican thinking is what I am thinking, was Tim's less than grammatical verdict on a law which might be characterised as the exact opposite of Republican thinking, the most basic Republican principle being that of less government interference in the lives of its citizenry. The criminalisation of persons attempting to feed the homeless was actually quite typical of the more state-orientated Democrat party, but either way, in lieu of bothering to consider any research beyond repeats of Dallas on UK Gold, Tim had effectively delivered the equivalent of thank God the English mineworkers' unions at least had Margaret Thatcher on their side. This pissed me off because I now have Republican supporting facebook using relatives who are actually very nice people regardless of their voting habits, and it pained me to see them so insulted because every time Tim opens his mouth or sets forefinger to keyboard it's like mad uncle George just stumbled in and - oh fuck - it looks like he's found the sherry again.

Following this, our social networking took a more depressing tone, with Tim still offering comment regardless of whether he actually knew what he's talking about, ever lengthier essays with the usual loose differentiation between their and there, accept and except, and punctuation dispensed more or less at random. His relationship to language and communication had always been at something of an angle in comparison to the rest of us, particularly where words of seven or more letters were involved. Following on from Do Easy, my DIY tape label, I had published comics and fanzines under the banner of Runciter Corporation, as borrowed from Philip K. Dick, or Russinter Corporation as Tim pronounced it. His first girlfriend, who arrived on the scene in 1994, suffered an eating disorder known as bulmia, he told me. This meant that she was bulmic. After a couple of times I stopped bothering to make the correction. Maybe he suffers from some sort of dysexlia, I figured. Now he was going off the deep end, always rhetorically asking so why else do you think that Gene Roddenberry would - then describing something the Star Trek producer had done which you'd never heard of, didn't care about, and couldn't see how the fuck it related to anything. He would make forceful points about things which didn't matter, often exposing his own bewildering cultural isolation in the process, falsely identifying long-running and fairly popular internet memes as jokes originated by The Big Bang Theory, a somewhat laboured American situation comedy. Communication was ever of the sort traditionally associated with ear-trumpets and shouting.

More annoying was his steady progress towards a vein of politics he bewilderingly regarded as centre left, as I first noticed with the sharing of one of those stories in which some hijab clad foreigner insults the Queen - as depicted on the coins comprising her change in a British supermarket - inspiring a passing retired Colonel to deliver the if you don't like it you can fuck off speech to much applause from the assembled own business minding shoppers.

So this really happened, did it? I asked.

Tim explained that even if it didn't happen, it was the principal of the story which mattered. Perhaps not surprisingly he is now an enthusiastic supporter of an English political party which by definition might be seen to epitomise fear of the unfamiliar. I would rather not grant them the oxygen of publicity - or the oxygen of oxygen for that matter - so let's identify them as the Party of Our Pound Sign, POOPS for short.

I have no idea what has made Tim as he is, what psychology informs his way of thinking. I suspect he may have had a difficult upbringing in many respects, or at least one which has left him insecure and perhaps lacking some degree of self-esteem. He has always seemed so fearful of change and unfamiliar circumstances as for this to border on a form of mania; and so he has done very little, so far as I am aware, to broaden either his experience or understanding of the world beyond his own postcode. It sometimes seems not so much as though he mistakes the map for territory, as that he lacks awareness of there being anything besides the map. Some of this would probably account for his forceful overstatements, offering that which he feels he has understood as proud symbols of achievement which define him as the person he feels he would very much like to be, namely a man who speaks with authority. It would probably also account for why he seems to be a sucker for a chap in a nice suit and tie, the uniform of those who embody the sort of success to which he aspires - the self-made man as defined by his financial acumen, the solid, happy guy untroubled by any of that Bohemian nonsense. I know doctors, dentists, and architects, Reeves; proper people, not like yourself, as one of Bob Mortimer's characters used to say.

He went back and forth with the POOPS, at one point horrified to discover what seemed to be their policy regarding disability benefit - for one example - then presumably reconciling himself to the leopard changing its spots, or that it wasn't so bad once you read the small print, or that it was one of many examples of fake POOPS websites set up so as to spread misinformation and make Poopers look like a bunch of raving Nazis. He tried to sell me on immigration reform by invoking my fear of all those Mexicans flooding across the border just south of where I live, having somehow missed the crucial point of being an immigrant myself and quite happily living in a city of 60% Hispanic constitution. He talked about something he termed political correctness taken out of context in relation to the 2012 sex trafficking convictions in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. He would emphasise the great numbers of Muslims, Jews, and other foreigners who had all become loyal Poopers, proving to me once and for all that he really had sat next to one on the bus and had been proud to do so.

His facebook posts and responses began to read like party political broadcasts rather than arguments, reiterations of what may as well have been what some bloke said in a pub for all I could tell. I asked that he desist, so he filed off the serial numbers, making vague but nevertheless unnecessarily lengthy references to fringe parties which had some really interesting things to say. Somehow such obvious hints failed to intrigue me as was presumably intended.

I began to take some pleasure in sharing blog posts and newspaper articles showing POOPS to be an opportunistic party, lacking coherent policies beyond whatever fed into voter insecurity that week. I hoped Tim might either wise up, or else unfollow my facebook feed, but sadly he rose to what he clearly took to be a challenge, composing longer, ever testier defences of the thing which seemed to have given his life some purpose, and as he did so he became ruder and less coherent. My facebook friends responded in kind and were usually met with something in the general vicinity of whatever had been said, rather than any specific dissection of points raised.

It was the same as it had ever been.

He never really understood the acid house phenomena, for surely everything that could be said in that genre had already been done by Heaven 17 and the Human League...

Sticky toffee pudding - yum yum yum.

She sounds a great little lass!

...and then we close in on the wreckage and we see that the sign reads United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.

So why else do you think that Gene Roddenberry would...

This is typical Republican thinking is what I am thinking.

Then on the seventh of January he invited himself to expound upon the POOPS view of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, following my linking to a Robert Reich article about something which wasn't the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and it all went pear-shaped. A number of my more eloquent and informed friends tackled his commentary admirably, and he took increasing quantities of umbrage at their failing to see his point despite all of the details having been explained. He began telling people to grow up, and to suggest that they lacked experience of the issues but rather were something called armchair jockeys. He asked me why I should even care given that I had run away from the nation in question, then suggested I get off my fat arse and return to England and get myself elected. I had a response, asking whether it was now official POOPS policy that those not actively standing for election were not entitled to form an opinion, then suggesting that I might defer to Tim's great wealth of worldly experience and knowledge, but it seemed like it would be better to simply block him from my facebook page. Funnily enough, he beat me to it and defriended me first.

It was for the best. The situation wasn't making either of us any happier, and nor were any lessons being learned beyond don't come between a man and that which gives his life purpose. I still wonder if Tim noticed the irony embedded within any of his protestations before hitting the unfriend button, although given his parting shot, I doubt it.

Firstly, even calling me xenophobic is me a clear disgusting and horrid insult that I cannot help but take personally. That is the problem that all the Far Left seem to suffer from, a love of throwing insults and then when someone throws them back most get all defensive.

It was just over thirty years since Tim's First Moon, and this was his last, or at least the last moon to shine that triumvirate of buttocks across my world, and the last moon to unleash that which squirts forth from those twinned stars of opprobrium and cross-purposes. I wish him the best, and hope he finds something which makes him happy - providing I don't have to hear about it. If not fun, then I suppose it's been interesting, but nothing lasts forever. All this time, I really should have known better. I tried to be the nice guy by crediting someone with more reasoning power than was ever within their grasp, and probably because I liked the idea of myself as the nice guy in contrast to the horrible cunt who drew that cruel cartoon with Simon Cox back in July, 1984; and so I'm pissed off when I realise that the cartoon, cruel as it was, was nevertheless pretty much on target. So I knew it all along, but simply didn't like to admit it. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I subconsciously nominated Tim to be some sort of marker post, a point by which I could measure how far I have travelled from my insular, small town teenage self. Maybe then I have only myself to blame.

Go Spurs Go

My wife had won tickets to watch the San Antonio Spurs playing the LA Lakers at the AT&T centre, our local sports and related entertainments arena in which one could fit the city of London several times over. The tickets were for seats costing over $300 a head and she had won them at her office, so this wasn't some old tat - the boss handing over a can of fizzy pop on Christmas Eve and telling you to keep up the good work. A few of her friends had offered to take the extra ticket. Resenting the implication that I myself might not wish to attend on the grounds of a lifelong hatred of organised sports in all of its forms, I accepted the invitation, reasoning that it would be something new and therefore interesting.

I considered the Spurs - the home team. I was already out of my depth. 'They're er— basketball, right?'

My wife nodded.

I had seen basketball on television a few times because my wife watches the occasional game if the Spurs are playing. It's the one I recall as having been called netball when I was at school in England. The girls played it, and we would sit and pretend not to watch from the English literature classroom. LeBron James plays basketball, and I know his name from when he featured on a massive poster which came free with an issue of Hip Hop Connection magazine a few years ago. I didn't hang it on my wall because I didn't know who the hell he was at the time, or why the poster should have been given away with an English music magazine. Charles Barkley also plays basketball, and I know him from the Godzilla vs. Barkley comic and because he hates San Antonio for reasons which aren't very interesting. Shaquille O'Neal used to play basketball and was apparently quite good at it, although I've heard of the guy mainly because my wife knew him from having attended the same classes at school. Finally, there's Kobe Bryant who plays basketball for the Lakers, although I'm not sure why I've heard of him; and that is the sum total of my basketball knowledge.

It transpires that our tickets also cover a parking spot, which is nice. We park and file into the arena with everyone else, finding our seats five or six rows from the front of the sloped terrace. I've been here before to watch the rodeo. From my point of view it's like Wembley Stadium were Wembley Stadium built around a small bowling green rather than a football pitch. There are screens everywhere, the largest being four of them set on each side of a huge central mount hanging down from the roof. We are sat amongst fans of both teams. I reflect that this would seem odd in England, comparing the arrangement to my admittedly limited experience of football.

'So you never get any trouble, fights breaking out between rival fans or anything?

My wife shakes her head, and I think about all of my friends who support Millwall back in London, and then the one guy who follows West Ham.

The noise is already deafening and we have thirty minutes to go. Players jump around on the court or the pitch or the trapezoid or whatever it's called, and voices blast from speakers all around as statistics appear on the screen, a featurette for each grinning player detailing height, performance, match statistics, superpowers, and which issue of The Avengers he first appeared in. Music blasts, familar songs but just ten second snatches of introduction, just long enough for one to recognise Thriller or Highway to Hell or The Final Countdown and cry out oh hell yeah or that shit's my jam right there, motherfucker! or something of the sort. It's all about the excitement of the thing without the substance of the thing itself.

The section in which we are seated apparently comes with its own team of waiters who will take our orders for burgers, fries, nachos, soda or whatever, but it's still too early for them so we make our way back up the stairs to the concession stands. My wife takes a tray of nachos and I have a burger. It is about as good as I expected it to be, better than McDonald's but nothing which would inspire a special trip. After I've eaten I am no longer hungry, so that's good.

A match or game or tournament of basketball divides into four quarters each of fifteen minutes duration. The rules are pretty much as they are with football, with nets representing goals, everything stopping for the equivalent of a penalty, and so on - football here meaning football as played with a spherical ball, not the game they call football in this country which looks to me like rugby played by Transformers.

The game begins before we've even realised, and it occurs to me that in its natural state this may be one of those games you're better off to be playing than watching. The action occurs within a very small area with players crowded together. It happens quickly and can be difficult to follow from a distance, unlike football in which events can be observed and appreciated as unfolding at a more reasonable pace from the other side of the stadium. Football has more of a narrative; and football has the additional dimension of all those wonderful songs - You're Going Home in a Fucking Ambulance, or Who Ate All the Pies?, or You Live in a Caravan - which city-dwelling Millwall fans sing to Gillingham's semi-rural supporters to the tune of Go West by the Village People, and You've Never Seen a Tree, which is the response sung to the tune of You'll Never Walk Alone. I guess that this sort of thing doesn't happen with basketball, at least not here or this evening. Audience creativity is firmly schooled by instructions and announcements from speaker and screen, efforts to hype us up into a screaming mass. High up in the rear of the stadium, someone called DJ Quake plays us the first ten seconds of every hair metal record to ever feature on the soundtrack of a Tom Cruise film, switching according to the demands of the game. The Spurs are on the attack, so he plays a looping bar of a drum break followed by three hard beats as everyone chants GO! SPURS! GO!; then the Lakers take the ball and everyone crowds around the Spurs net and we get a different beat - thump thump DE! FENCE! thump thump DE! FENCE! over and over. It's not like anyone really needs this sort of jollying along, or a Spurs fan would be unable to tell what his or her team were up to without musical cues, so I suppose it's simply that everyone likes a sing-song, that everyone likes to feel included.

Someone scores a goal - or whatever it's called in this game - and the screens flash further instructions make noise, get loud, or some other unnecessary exhortation to celebration.

ON, the screen flashes. YOUR it continues, then FEET! followed by a photograph of a heeled cowboy boot just in case anyone was left struggling with the general concept of feet. No supporter left behind.

The game appears to have stopped and some guy in a coyote costume runs about waving arms and encouraging us to make more noise. He holds up a sign which reads this is our house, which is probably the most stupid message of the evening. The coyote suit is peculiar, googly green eyes staring in different directions. I like coyotes as they are in the real world, and I like Wile E. Coyote the animated nemesis of the national bird of Texas, but this one resembles a cautionary lesson on the perils of substance abuse, or he would do were it not for the running around and the somersaults. I notice that he wears a Spurs shirt with coyote spelled out on the back, which I suppose at least reduces any possible ambiguity.

Play resumes without warning. It may have resumed a few minutes ago but we were busy making noise, getting loud, rocking out to DJ Quake up there on his wheels of steel, this time playing an entire song all the way through, which is unfortunately by the Electric Light Orchestra, the worst band of all time.

Make some noise.

Yes, we know.

This must be what it's like inside the head of a hyperactive child on a Sunny Delight and candy binge. It reminds me of Crackerjack, an English children's show from my childhood which seemed to involve a lot of screaming. Even at the age of seven I considered it headachey. Saddest of all, I would suggest that all this spectacle does the game and its players a disservice. It suggests a lack of confidence in our being sufficiently entertained by ten men bouncing a ball around for an hour. Ignore the flashing lights and distractions, and although basketball happens quickly and in a small area, watch for long enough and you begin to see the skill involved and to appreciate the game. I suppose DJ Quake and the flashing lights are here to keep it interesting to those for whom basketball is not enough in and of itself, for whom it needs to be an enveloping experience. I recall certain footballing authorities aspiring to turn the beautiful game into something for all the family, which never struck me as a necessarily worthy intention so much as an exercise in raking in more money. All football ever needed to do was appeal to those who enjoy football. It never really needed to cater to anyone who doesn't enjoy football, just as there's no need for such a thing as a vegetarian beef steak; and the same surely applies to basketball, although I'm not sure where this leaves me given that I'm sat here watching the Lakers take the lead over the Spurs. It isn't that I'm not enjoying it, but it's odd, and I might enjoy it more were I not being asked to get loud every fifteen seconds. The game seems like the least important detail of the whole.

At the end of an hour padded out to three with generic entertainment-style spectacle, the Spurs lose by 110 goals to the Lakers' 112 - or points or scores or tries or whatever it is with this game. We all leave, either happy, or happy to at least have been here, which I suppose ticks all the boxes that needed ticking. It really wouldn't have taken much to convert me, to switch my generally tepid allegiance from football as my default sport of choice, but the Spurs just couldn't manage it. To be fair, it probably wasn't their fault.

Frank's Chicken

The car was maroon, an estate, possibly a Volvo or a Vauxhall or something of the sort. I've never really taken much interest in the minutiae of the automotive realm. It was parked on the grass at the side of the driveway which ran past the School of Art. Wells and myself had only come in to college for the sake of signing the register, and this one last job before we broke up for the Christmas holiday. We had eggs, bags of flour, and shaving foam. We were all ready to go.

We had both been in the year below Frank at school, and I'd only really known him through reputation. I'd had friends who disliked him to varying degrees of disdain, and he in turn hadn't thought much of them. He was an unusual combination of swot and bully, doing well in almost every class whilst having a pathological need to belittle others, particularly those he considered enemies. These were generally people who had noticed his absolute lack of a sense of humour and who made sport of this failing because it was funny. The more agricultural pupils would mock his regimentally neat appearance and hold impromptu darts tournaments during the technical drawing lesson utilising Frank's expensive fine-nibbed Rotring pens as darts. Mr. Stanier, the technical drawing teacher, had been carbon dated to no later than 1650 and was ill-equipped to restrain rebellious pupils, or pupils of almost any other description, and so Frank was left to fend for himself, and then to vent his frustration on whoever else was available and conspicuously lacking in reinforcements.

Frank reserved a particular venom for my friend Pete who was in his class and physically smaller, thus presenting a convenient and legitimate target. Pete however had the sharper wit. His retorts were quick, perceptive, and very funny, and he could shoot you down before you were even finished saying whatever crap it was you had thought so funny when you first thought of it. This didn't sit well with Frank whose wit was by contrast blunt and overly reliant upon terms such as pouf, bender and bumboy. He compensated by delivering these descriptors with force sufficient to quell any further insurrection; and his laughter was stupid and cruel, the amusement of a brute. Hur hur hur hur hur hur hur hur...

Pete and I had formed a group with two others, Graham and Eggy. We called ourselves the Pre-War Busconductors and we made most of the songs up as we recorded them, improvised direct onto cassette as we bashed away on cardboard box drums and an acoustic guitar amplified through Graham's Action Man radio. Naturally Frank was eulogised on more than one occasion.

He's saving up to buy a jeep.
He does his homework in his sleep.
He's got a massive square head,
And we all hope he'll soon be dead.

On more ambitious scale was (He's Called) Frank, a home-made cassette single we mastered directly onto TDK DC90 as Eddie & the Ogdens, this being the name under which we recorded as a trio when Eggy was otherwise indisposed. We termed it a cassette single because the A-side was one song forty-five minutes in duration, a happy clappy gospel number singing toxically sarcastic praises of Frank which mutated into other musical styles as it went on. There being one particular rude word which rhymed with Frank, we just kept going until we felt the theme had been explored to full extent.

I had no direct contact with the subject of these songs whilst we were still at school, the single exception to this being a snowball fight with our bunch against Frank's team, Anders Longthorne and Mark Lewis, both of whom seemed to have sided with him out of anthropological curiosity and were waiting to see what the hell he would do next. Frank rolled his snowballs with joyless rage, going after Pete with obsessive fury that bordered on weird. It wasn't about taking part, or even about winning for Frank. It was about the utter destruction and humiliation of his opponent.

In September 1982, I found myself embroiled in further education, taking art 'A' level in the same class as Frank. It was the first time we had sat at the same table, or probably even spoke to each other. He had no idea I'd played on Pre-War Busconductors songs concerned specifically with detailing his numerous character flaws as we saw them, or even that such songs existed. He seemed amiable, and so we got on reasonably well, or at least as well as one can with a person with whom you share no mutual interests. Frank was not lacking in talent, artistically speaking, at least in so much as his craftsmanship was exceptional. His imagination on the other hand seemed to operate at the same level as his wit. I recall one laboriously executed painting presented as a stern warning against the perils of drugs - a subject of which Frank had, to the best of my knowledge, neither experience nor understanding. The painting showed a beautifully detailed human brain rendered in ink and gouache, a syringe full of that heroin protruding from its rear, sinister looking tablets and packets of ciggies strewn all around.

Hey kids, don't do drugs, it sort of said.

We both passed art 'A' level, and in September 1983 started on the art foundation course at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further Education in Leamington Spa, a course designed to get us ready for our degrees the following year. Frank kindly offered to give me a lift each day, Leamington being some twenty miles distant from Shipston. In return I stumped up petrol money and spent an hour or so of daily travel time listening to him talking what was mostly complete shite about which was the best Star Wars film or who amongst our fellow students was probably one of those bent homosexual bumboys. He seemed either uninformed or unconcerned regarding my position on Pete, his old enemy from school, and would retell lumbering tales of hostile encounters which had given him pause to consider anew what a loser and a complete bender my friend had been. I already knew the tales well from Pete's telling. Some of them had already inspired songs, but Frank clearly took pleasure from the retelling and would bring forth the hur hur hur hur hur hur. Day after day I listened to him declaring his superiority over our fellow students, people we both knew from school, women and members of ethnic minorities. He would explain that he wasn't being racist or nothing but that Pakis really do stink.

'It's probably all that curry,' he opined thoughtfully.

I managed about two weeks of this before I switched my allegiance to Wells, another kid I'd known from school who drove through Shipston each morning to attend the same art foundation course. Wells was the sort of kid who would spend the summer holidays blowing things up with home-made fertiliser bombs, but I had more in common with him than with Frank. The first few trips in his bright yellow Ford Escort were justified by my explaining that I needed to be home by a certain time, and Wells always slipped away early, unlike Frank who dutifully stayed on to polish apples until college closed at five. After a couple of weeks, the new arrangement had become habitual and required no further explanation.

The weeks went by and Frank came to seem increasingly incongruous in the environment of an art foundation course. We were trying to expand ourselves, generally and artistically speaking, and Frank was Jeremy Clarkson in a vegetarian café. His craftsmanship remained phenomenal as he began to build articulated model dragons, meticulously crafting latex flesh upon skeletons of hinged plastic ligatures. He was heading for the film industry, for special effects, and so far as I am aware he got there and has been doing very well for himself in that field ever since; but in the winter of 1983 his abrasive personality was really beginning to get on our tits, these being the tits of myself and Wells, hence the eggs, the bags of flour, and a spray can of shaving foam.

It was the end of term, and such high jinx were to be expected. We had left school but could only be deemed adult by the most generous of definitions. We were agents of karma redressing the balance of Frank boring us shitless, driving like a lunatic, and that stuff about Pakis. We covered the car in eggs and flour and then, in a moment of inspiration, I sprayed a cartoon chicken across the bonnet in shaving foam turning the vandalism into a philosophical question of first cause. It was art.

We returned about an hour later. The car had been cleaned, and there was Frank hunched over the bonnet, his elbow working away like a piston on the flank of an old-time steam engine. His face was crimson, his teeth gritted, and his blood red eyes appeared distended upon veined stalks. He looked like something you would see on the cover of a Meteors album.

'When I find out who did this—' His vow became an angry incoherent salad of legal proceedings seasoned with promises of physical violence and even torture. It seemed safe to assume that he was yet to appreciate the true levity of the situation.

'Oh no,' Wells and I chimed innocently. 'What's happened, Frank?' We moved in closer, thankful at least of Frank being so blinded with rage that he wasn't going to notice our stifled hysterics. 'Did someone do something to your car?'

Still scrubbing, he spluttered and raged without making any real sense. There was no longer so much as a single grain of flour or a smear of albumen to be seen, but then we noticed how some chemical component of the shaving foam had left a permanent stain upon the paintwork. My cartoon chicken had become a burnt umber silhouette at the centre of the maroon bonnet. Had I spent another minute on the drawing, it might now have resembled a custom job, the deliberate choice of someone who really liked chickens and wished to express this in an automotive medium.

Frank scrubbed and glowered but the stain was going nowhere. He appeared to be coming close to foaming at the mouth, and apparently lacked the imagination to suspect Wells or myself. He had probably made more significant enemies on the course. It would be a disgruntled bumboy, or perhaps even a bender of some description. The thought of my having done permanent and legally actionable damage to his paintwork sobered me towards levels of guilt sufficient to at least mute the hysterical laughter that might have otherwise risen to the surface at any moment.

'I'll ask around,' Wells offered like a true mate. 'See if maybe anyone saw anything.'

We wandered off in the direction of his yellow Ford Escort, hunched shoulders and looking left to right like the beginnings of the posse which would deliver justice once it had gained momentum. We waited until we were on the Warwick New Road, heading home and out of sight of the monster we had helped create, then we began to chortle, describing the scenario to each other, and then to howl with laughter. Try as I might, I really could not quite bring myself to feel sorry for Frank.

He wasn't a terrible person. He had helped me out on a few occasions, one time driving the ten miles to Stratford-upon-Avon to pick me up when a missed bus had left me stranded; but he could be such an insufferable cunt at times, and Wells and I really felt he had earned that chicken. When we returned to college in the new year, the chicken was gone, although I can barely guess at how many hours of scrubbing and polishing it had taken to effect its removal. Frank continued to be Frank because as lessons go, it had been pretty vague even without accounting for his reluctance to learn anything he didn't already know; but thirty years later I think of that chicken and it still gives me pleasure, so maybe that is enough.

Drawings of Buildings

I'm not sure what first compelled me to draw a building, although my current theory is that I required a wider variety of artwork which I could take to my interview for the Art Foundation course at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further Education, not least because whilst my silk screen work and painting was all very imaginative and colourful, I didn't have very much which demonstrated that I could actually draw. Another possibility is that my mother had given me a gentle nudge in that direction in the hope that I would begin to spontaneously generate money and accordingly develop something resembling a work ethic.

Whatever the case, I stretched a sheet of decent quality paper on a large board - a process which I had been taught would keep the paper absolutely flat and free of warping in the event of my adding watercolours - and spent the best part of a relatively sunny day occupying a section of pavement on Church Street, Shipston-on-Stour, just opposite Saint Edmund's Church. I mapped out the block of shops and houses next to the church in pencil, then rendered the detail in black ink with the Rotring pen I'd received a few Christmases before. Finally I added thin washes of colour with gouache paints, defining sky, clouds, brick, tarmac and so on. The result seemed decent, an exercise in perspective if nothing else. It closely resembled that which it depicted, which was the point. It was in part an exercise to see if I could do this sort of thing, and it turned out that I could.

Personally I felt it lacked imagination and was somewhat laborious in that the creative process required me to sit on my arse for four or five hours, but it was nice to know that I was heir to at least some conventional artistic ability; and of course it was all very nice to have pedestrians and other complete strangers pausing to take a look before commenting upon my brilliance every five or ten minutes.

Regrettably one of these pedestrians was Michael Harvey, owner of a local tea room and Shipston's most famous homosexual. Whilst I doubt he could have had much interest in me - an awkwardly hairy teenager half-heartedly shambling towards a sort of industrial jumble sale look - he very much liked my drawing.

'That's really very good, you know,' he drawled, burping and swaying slightly.

'Thank you,' I said, fervently hoping that he would continue on his way before we were seen by anyone I knew.

Being quite clearly full of gin, Michael Harvey seemed to be having some difficulty remaining vertical, and so in brutal contrast to my wishes, sank to his feet, sliding down the wall to take his place at my side. He leaned over a little closer than I liked. 'Just one problem...'

I made a non-committal noise that could stand for curiosity.

'Those ghastly television aerials ...'

I considered my drawing and saw his point. The row of buildings I'd drawn were nineteenth century or possibly earlier, the kind with sash windows, and very typical of the Cotswolds. I had considered omitting all modern features from my drawing, but it felt as though it would be in some way dishonest, and the purpose of the exercise had been technical rather than aesthetic in the strictest sense. Furthermore, given that my favourite aspect of the drawing had been the perspective of a street plunging away towards its vanishing point somewhere over near where Jason Roberts lived, I had quite enjoyed drawing those television aerials.

I muttered something about honesty and realism and painting that which is seen by the human eye, but it probably didn't sound very convincing. In any case, Michael Harvey had fallen asleep, his head lolling onto my shoulder in boozy slumber as he began to gently snore. This was more physical contact than I had enjoyed with another human being in living memory, and I cursed my luck that the other party should be a slightly chunky and very drunk male in his late forties.

Michael Harvey was a local celebrity, or at least the local celebrity who didn't play Frank Spencer's long-suffering wife in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. Michele Dotrice had achieved fame through a phenomenally popular television sitcom, and her dad lived on the Stratford Road. Michael Harvey had achieved fame of a sort through being openly homosexual in a rural Warwickshire town in the early 1980s, or at least he had achieved fame amongst those of us who found his very existence hilarious because we were teenagers and we didn't know any better. Actually we did know better, or we should have done. My favourite band at the time was Soft Cell, and my favourite writer was William Burroughs. This distinguished me from most of the other kids in the town who preferred Queen and Judas Priest, and who generally seemed to regard not being one of those bumboys as a sort of achievement. I always had the impression that my failure to adopt a denim jacket with Status Quo written on the back in biro marked me out as gay and by definition an outsider. Despite being securely heterosexual and entirely aware of the contradictions, my friends and I embraced and repeated the jokes told about Michael Harvey because to do otherwise would be to take his side and share his supposed disgrace. If we were outsiders, we were at least not so far outside as the owner of the local tea rooms whom we impersonated as a limp-wristed hybrid of Larry Grayson and Mr. Humphries from Are You Being Served? without stretching anyone's imagination to breaking point.

One morning, as legend had it, some enormous hairy biker had materialised in the tea rooms demanding cash from the till. Michael Harvey emerged to calm the situation, but only made matters worse.

'I was good enough for you last night,' the hairy and apparently not-actually-heterosexual-like-ourselves biker bellowed with resentful fury, inadvertently supplying the entire town with enough scandal to keep us yapping for a good seven or eight years. We liked the story because it confirmed that Michael Harvey was very, very gay indeed, which for some reason made us all feel better about our small world.

Meanwhile back in Church Street, I coughed and accidentally-on-purpose jabbed Michael Harvey in the side with an elbow, but he was too drunk to be woken. Inevitably, after about five minutes, every knuckle-dragging shithead biker enemy I had ever made at school passed by on the other side of the road in a single group which seemed almost to have been assembled especially for the purpose. As one they regarded me and my new gay friend, then chuckled because it meant that they had been right about me all along. I tried a desperate sheepish smile as though this was something that happened to all of us from time to time - just minding your own business and wham there's a drunken homosexual asleep on top of you.

We've all been there, right guys?

Apparently we hadn't, and I experienced a sudden upsurge of self-loathing. I had seen myself and I hadn't liked it. I couldn't have cared less what Michael Harvey chose to do with either his own penis or those belonging to his close friends, and if anything I kind of admired the fact that he quite clearly didn't give a shit who knew about it. That took some guts in such a small town, the potential Wicker Man theme park in which my family had resided for six or seven years and yet were still regarded as outsiders. Screw these people, I decided. I'd take a thousand Michael Harveys over any one of those inbred Def Leppard-album-owning fucknuts any day of the week.

After another half an hour or so, he woke with a grunt and stumbled wordlessly away to sleep off the rest of the hangover at home. I finished my drawing with a scowl, resenting both the town in which I lived and at least some of its population.

By the summer of 1985 I was far away from Shipston, living at one-hundred and twenty miles distance in the village of Leeds, near Maidstone in Kent. I had just finished the first of three years of a degree course at the local art college, so I suppose you might say my drawing the houses of Church Street had paid off by some tenuous definition. Just before that first year of art college, the most money I'd ever had in either my hand or my junior savings account would have been the fifty pounds I saved with which to buy my sixty watt guitar amplifier - and this figure included a tenner on loan from my mother. Then all at once in September 1984 as I moved away from home, began my course, and discovered both alcohol and cigarettes, Warwickshire County Council and the hardworking taxpayers of the British Isles blessed my bank account with a full grant of at least a thousand pounds. This was more money than I was even able to imagine, and there were a lot of records and albums that I really, really needed, and the train fare back home every other weekend wasn't cheap...

Somehow by the time summer came around I was enormously overdrawn, and I knew that I needed to do something about this before it got out of hand. The job centre offered me a position in a biscuit packing factory, which I turned down on the grounds that it didn't actually seem like it would pay better than the dole which I could claim without really having to do anything. I took a summer job with a furniture restoration business run by one of the local farms, but the pay wasn't great and the work was tough, which in turn drove me back to the drawing board.

People liked drawings of old buildings, I decided, particularly drawings tastefully denuded of their television aerials such as one might see framed and on sale in the windows of twee art galleries in rustic villages. People would pay for that sort of thing, I concluded.

I began with a drawing of the local pub, The Ten Bells, just something to revive whatever skills I had brought to the fore a few years earlier with Michael Harvey burping appreciatively into my ear. The Ten Bells represented a focal point in the village of Leeds - not to be confused with the city of the same name, obviously - and was chosen for both architectural interest and in the hope that I would be observed by as many people as possible. The plan worked in so much as Terry, a regular at the pub, commissioned me to draw a house in the village of Chart Sutton, although I'm not sure whether it was his own house or that of a friend. For this I was paid thirty pounds - a figure I had produced off the top of my head - which seemed decent for a day's work even taking into account the sore arse incurred whilst sat on the ground for five or six hours.

I stepped my operation up a gear, each day setting off by nine to draw a building, weather permitting, wobbling along on my bicycle with a bag full of paints, brushes, water, a thermos flask of coffee,  and with a drawing board tied onto my back with washing line. Each day - I reasoned - I could produce something theoretically picturesque for eventual sale in some small gallery, hopefully bag a few commissions in the process, and then be home by six to stretch a fresh sheet of paper ready for the next morning. It worked in so much as I began to line up commissions here and there, and branched out to draw in the villages of Langley and East Farleigh, but it was also a little repetitive, sometimes frustrating, and harder work than I had anticipated. More frustrating was that I found each village I visited tended to have a saturation point beyond which new commissions became scarce. In East Farleigh I drew a caravan site by the river, then the house of the owner of the caravan site, then the local pub for a mere twenty because I didn't want to say no to the work, and then a moderately stately home inhabited by a reasonably glamorous women of upper class stock. The landlord of The Bull in East Farleigh had brought me a can of lager as I worked, and the upper class woman brought me a glass of wine, kissed me on the cheek and told me that I was wonderful, which was all very exciting; but the commissions had dried up, and I could no longer face starting over again, spending an entire unpaid day developing a sore arse on the chance of some passing stranger liking my work. So I briefly became my own door-to-door salesman, knocking at large old houses which looked as though they might contain the sort of people who would be likely to procure my services. I secured a couple of commissions by this method, but as many people telling me to piss off rendered it a chore, not least because I knew I would have told myself to piss off had I been in their shoes.

Nevertheless I managed to pay off the majority of my overdraft that summer, and college resumed in September bringing with it a new grant cheque which happily swallowed the rest. I ceased with my drawings of buildings, glad to be freed of both the obligation and the risk of haemorrhoids. I briefly returned to the house of the upper class woman with a camera borrowed from college on the flimsy pretext of needing to keep a record of my drawing work, but she was hungover, still married, and therefore unavailable.

I returned to the drawing board a third time following the end of my college degree. I was living in Chatham, unemployed and more overdrawn than ever with a frankly astonishing record collection to show for it, and it seemed there might be some milk left in the cow given my proximity to historic Rochester, arguably the Stratford-on-Avon of the south thanks to Charles Dickens having once stopped off for egg and chips at the Happy Eater on the M2 just outside Walderslade.

I painted the castle, and as I did so, I realised that Rochester was the sort of place which attracted artists like meth addicts to transvestite brothels, so my display of plein air draftsmanship hardly seemed worth a second glance. I returned to appearing pitiful upon the doorsteps of confused strangers, humbly beseeching that they might patronise the trade of a travelling artisan so badly in need of a haircut. The owner of The Gordon hotel viewed me with suspicion, but decided that the reception desk really did need a fancily framed portrait of his establishment, and so I had the job.

This commission was in a sense easier than usual in that Rochester High Street, being pedestrianised, provided seating on which I could sit whilst working on my masterpiece, yet ultimately proving to be as much a pain in the arse as before.

The hotel owner disliked my first drawing and asked that I try again, this time giving greater focus to his establishment, excluding those neighbouring architectural features which I felt had made the picture a little more interesting for the viewer. I began again, and as I came to finish the work with the customary watercolour wash, I found I had once again drawn an audience. There were two of them, and if they weren't quite so drunk as Michael Harvey had been, neither were they anywhere near as attractive as the upper class woman of East Farleigh. They were full of booze, slightly friendlier than I liked, and shared their cans of special brew with the sort of aggressive bonhomie that proved difficult to refuse. They praised my talent, and seemed to be asking questions about where I lived and whether I had any money; but their efforts - whatever it was they were after - seemed obviously devious and feeble, and were easily deflected; although getting them to piss off and leave me alone wasn't quite within my power.

At length I was done and ready to cut the drawing from the board. With relief I realised that my companions would almost certainly be unable to follow me into the hotel given the state they were in. I would be rid of them. I took out my craft knife as they swore and went on and on about how much fucking talent I had, man. I began to cut the picture from the board but, being full of diplomatically consumed special brew, my hand slipped and I sliced diagonally across the paper.

'Oh fuck!'

My companions laughed with the conspiratorial glee of naughty schoolboys who knew for sure that only I would suffer the consequences of their actions.

'You're fucked now, mate! Your beautiful picture and all!'

I ignored them, gathered up the tools of my trade, and went into the hotel with a massive sigh of relief at having escaped their company. I tried my best to appear sober.

'I've done it.' I readied myself for the explanation of how the cut would be invisible once the picture was framed.

'Just leave it.' The owner didn't even look up. He waved a hand, preoccupied with hotel business. I already had the money seeing as he'd paid me the thirty on completion of the earlier, unsatisfactory version. He'd given me the money then because he'd had it to hand and it seemed convenient to do so.

I looked out of the door. The two pissheads were nowhere to be seen. I left, quickly unchained my bike and cycled away.

I have drawn just one more building since then, or more accurately, I painted it. It was October 2007 and I'd moved on from the ink drawings. I had a full time job as a postman with Royal Mail and no longer needed to pay off any overdraft, but it was a full time job that had become increasingly unpleasant over the previous decade, and now we were on strike and I had been looking for a way out. I wanted to see if I could still do it, if I was still able to generate money by my own hand, and so I sat and painted Edward Alleyn House in West Dulwich. In six hours I attracted the interest of one passer-by, a woman to whom I delivered mail who kindly took the time to explain my own strike action to me.

'Of course,' she smiled with obnoxious conviction, 'the postmen only have themselves to blame.'

Friends have told me that the painting is very good, although my stylised rendition of the sky as it appeared has given the composition a Lovecraftian quality, as though something horrible is about to happen within the building.

I guess I took that as a sign.

It was nice to know that I could still turn out a picture if the worst came to the worst, but it was nicer to know that I didn't really have to.

The Really Massive Corner Shop

Dan Patrick, Houston Republican candidate for lieutenant governor recently induced an outbreak of frowning upon the brow of Congressman Joaquin Castro - identical twin brother to Julian Castro, Mayor of San Antonio. I say recently, but I don't actually care enough to find specific dates, so let's take it as read that the following events occurred at some juncture later than Achitometl's ascension to the throne of Culhuacan in the Valley of Mexico in 1388, but not later than the present. Anyway, Dan Patrick had apparently posted a picture of himself stood next to a man dressed as a beaver on his facebook page, dignifying the image by stating to my great delight after our (primary election) win Tuesday, I got a call from the owners of Buc-cee's who said they wanted to meet and support me, thus accounting for the beaver, this being the mascot of Buc-ee's, which Wikipedia identifies as a chain of convenience stores located in the Central and Gulf Coast region of Texas. Like so many Texans, I love Buc-ee's, Patrick added. The service is great, the food is great, especially my favorite, the pastrami sandwich, and of course my wife loves the clean bathrooms.

Well of course she does.

Buc-ee's owners Don Wasek and Arch Aplin have contributed over sixty-thousand dollars to campaigning Republican candidates over the last few decades, so it probably isn't such a big surprise that they should back Patrick; although some guy called Jeff Nalado, acting as general counsel for Buc-ee's has publicly stressed that the owners of the chain are the ones supporting Patrick, not the corporation itself, and that as a company, Buc-ee's does not support political candidates.

Nevertheless, Congressman Joaquin Castro was sufficiently disgruntled to state that he would not patronise Buc-ee's, objecting to their support of what he called a fearmongering immigrant basher.

I am disappointed to learn that a popular and well-respected retailer would lend its corporate brand to a candidate for state-wide office who has built his career around dividing Texans and bashing immigrants, solely for his own political gain, he further explained in a written statement; and so arose a number of online campaigns in support, all calling for a boycott of Buc-ee's, and in turn the inevitable responses from those vowing to make an extra effort to shop at Buc-ee's on the grounds that anything which pisses off a few liberals must be worthwhile, responses such as this from some guy on facebook, a Libertarian both politically and grammatically, although I've helped him out some and fixed up the punctuation here and there:

For those of you who attempt to hurt a business based on its political affiliation, you are practising the same discrimination you rail against. You may as well hang a black man for being black or refuse service to an atheist. I am a Libertarian, but I have seen this too many times from the democrats' side. They accuse Republicans of fighting dirty while pulling crap like this. This man is proudly standing up for what he believes is best for Texas, and you go after his family by trying to take food off his table.

How dare you?

How dare any of you?

You are committing the most cowardly version of assault there is. You would be committing less of a sin if you simply kicked his ass. At least that would not steal from his family. You claim to want what's best for Texas. What happened to us being the friendly state?

If you were born here and are acting like this, I will be happy to escort you to California where you will be welcomed with open socialist arms. Chances are, though, that California is where you originate from because they have invaded Austin and brought with them this type of bullshit. Look around Texas. You won't find this crap anywhere but Austin. Texas has conceded that city to the liberals who believe government can run our lives better than we can. Personally, I have rarely had the opportunity to shop at a Buc-ee's, but because of this, I will stop in every time I see one from now on to help counteract the loss of income from you ill-informed tyrants. And, it will make me feel good knowing that I've helped to punch a bully in the mouth.

You hypocrites! You demand freedom from government oppression while dishing out your own version of capitalistic oppression. I would like to personally dress up in a beaver outfit and beat the shit out of each one of you liberal oppressive if you're successful we'll bring you down so we can give your money to who we want pieces of crap, just so you could get your picture in the paper getting your ass kicked by a theme park icon.

It could of course be a parody, but how does one even tell? It is an argument I have encountered on a few occasions, all of them through a computer and not one in real life thankfully, an argument amounting to will no-one think of the poor starving millionaires asking only to make for themselves an honest gold-plated crust? It is the argument of someone who has thrown themselves wholeheartedly into helping out with their own exploitation, pulling the wool down over their own eyes and paying for the privilege, secure in the knowledge of having done the right thing.

The conscious choice to not buy a sodding Three Musketeers bar at a Buc-ee's outlet, or even to suggest that others might refrain from purchase of sweeties at the same, is not simply akin to invasion by dangerous totalitarian Communists, it is the exact same thing; and even more exhausting is that it is telling people what is best for them, and what is best for them would be their cutting out all of this telling people what is best for them.

I generally dislike politicians regardless of their hue, but I like Castro on the grounds that he and his identical twin brother have occasionally got into trouble for pretending to be each other at important functions - which at least suggests personality - and because he's pro-Mexican. Furthermore, I would suggest that political office is one that in an ideal world requires intellect, and that intellect tends not to be found in the man or woman who spends too much time blaming local problems on all those brown people coming over here taking our jobs and eating their funny food and that. Someone once attempted to explain the somewhat right-leaning immigration policy of UKIP - an unpleasant English fringe party - to me by means of an example so simple that even I would understand it. You know that Mexican border about a hundred miles south of you, he began, presumably failing to realise that I live in a city with a 63% Hispanic or Latino population, and that I would be a fucking idiot to live here if I didn't like Mexicans. The argument was unconvincing.

This war of words between Patrick and Castro served to elevate the Buc-ee's phenomena a little further within my consciousness, it being something which had nagged at me for a time without my quite knowing why. How had this debate become so heated? Why would anyone care so much as to wish to dress up as a beaver prior to the dispensation of rough street justice? I had a faint impression of a world divided into two, those who had been to Buc-ee's, and those who were yet to have the opportunity to visit the store in question, like it could be considered an experience. I knew that I myself had been to Buc-ee's, and furthermore I'd been to the most amazing Buc-ee's in the known galaxy, the one situated just past New Braunfels as you head out towards the People's Republic of Austin, about which Wikipedia states:

The New Braunfels travel center is the largest convenience store in the world at 68,000 square feet. The store features 120 fuel pumps, 31 cash registers, 4 Icee machines, 80 fountain dispensers, tubing and water gear for the Guadalupe River, and a farmer's market that features Grade 1 fruit and produce.

The New Braunfels, Texas store was named the 2012 Best Restroom in America by Cintas.

Isn't it just a really big motorway service station?, I wondered to myself, barely able to recall anything of my visit, or visits as I had a feeling my wife and I may have stopped there several times.

If it was really so amazing, why couldn't I remember?

The first expression of this corporate entity I'd noticed when I came to live in Texas was its mascot, a cartoon beaver wearing a baseball cap drawn as though by an enthusiastic ten-year old who had learned how to copy the Disney characters, but still didn't quite understand what made them tick. Buc-ee, who is depicted from the shoulders up on the signs at an uncomfortable angle, like he's broken his neck but has learned to live with it, was inspired by the better drawn and significantly cuter Bucky Beaver who advertised Ipana toothpaste back in the 1960s, and even had his own spaceship. I'm not sure whether the name was revised so as to avoid any perceived breach of copyright, but it seems an ill-considered change to me. The hyphen, the phonetic ee, the possessive apostrophe - as a name it's a mess, something that might work sprayed wildstyle on the side of a New York tube train, but awful as a molded plastic logo beneath that funny looking beaver. It aspires to be cute but, to paraphrase Bill Griffiths, ends up exuding a kind of desperation that cuteness only accentuates. Poor Buc-ee - he makes even Chuck E. Cheese seem like he knows what he's doing.

Determined to penetrate the mystery of the world's biggest corner shop, to quantify the appeal that had apparently thus far eluded me, I had to ask myself what is the magic of this thing we call Buc-ee's?, and so a visit took place. My wife and I were going to Austin anyway, so it wasn't like it was out of our way. We passed the billboards announcing that we were approaching Buc-ee's with merely five miles to go, then only two more miles, then the mystifying and faintly sinister the eyes of Buc-ee's are upon you, which delivers no real information and is probably funnier if you follow their semi-regular series of purportedly humorous billboards carrying messages like don't stay thirsty, my friends, and ice, beer, jerky: the three food groups.

Ha ha.

The store when we came to it was indeed basically the world's largest gas station - or petrol station, as my English upbringing still compels me to term it, albeit to a lesser extent. We parked and entered a vast room in which one could have concealed a couple of jumbo jets had the ceiling been a little higher. We were in the company of what seemed like thousands of people, all browsing aisles of beef jerky, fruit, pickles, sweets, cakes, nuts, corn chips, and chocolate bars, with chiller cabinets full of ice, beer, sandwiches, and food in the shape of Texas. My wife went to use the rest room and I looked around for a dining area, a restaurant or café or something that would distinguish the place as being at least on the same level as a Happy Eater. The closest was the food bar specialising in pulled pork which I suppose once it had been pulled by one of the attendant pork pullers could be consumed off the premises, perhaps as one drove away, cheerfully washed down with the first of many beers. I didn't make too close an inspection, as I am yet to discover just what pulled pork is, and am at present still making the most of this state of innocence. My wife came back and we went further into the store, inspecting the aisles of clothing, T-shirts, barbecue aprons, and baseball caps with amusing slogans relating either to the excessive consumption of beer, shopping at Buc-ee's or amusing marital dysfunction. The clothing department was decorated, as are a surprising number of things in Texas, with barbed wire motifs and the skulls of longhorn cattle. For a moment I considered the possibility of whether the skulls might themselves be on sale, even if there might be one with the Buc-ee's logo painted at the centre of the forehead; but I knew I was letting my imagination run away with me, although such a thing would certainly have brought the store a little closer to the nirvana promised by its reputation. We went ahead, leaving the clothing department behind, passing rack upon rack of country music CDs in search of further material at which to scoff.

For those who like myself have never seen the show, I understand Duck Dynasty to be a documentary series about the lives of amusing rural folk typical of the poke them with sticks and watch them jump freak show that is disingenuously referred to as reality television. Duck Dynasty merchandise is everywhere at present, and Buc-ee's hasn't been left out of the loop in this respect. Camouflage tins of beans sporting pictures of bearded men seemed incongruous near the entrance, but deeper into the store such material blends in with the rest. At the far end, in amongst bags of animal feed, fishing equipment, and everything a hunter might require aside from an actual firearm, the Duck Dynasty promotional products become as one with everything else in a vague sea of green and black. The absence of guns came as no surprise given that they're really not quite so ubiquitous here as everyone seems to believe, but much of the other stuff was astonishing, mainly because I had no idea what any of it was for. I took a photograph of something called a Redneck Timer because its purpose seemed unusually ambiguous, but I left it at that because there didn't seem much point in filling up my camera with endless images of the incomprehensible.

More surprising was how I found that as we left I had experienced a reversal of opinion regarding Buc-ee's. The light hearted slogans of the T-shirts hung upon the wall had somehow got to me, or at least the spirit in which they were presented as something you might want to wear had done its work. Buc-ee's was really just a big, stupid gas station selling meaningless crap to numbskulls, but it didn't know that it was just a big, stupid gas station selling meaningless crap to numbskulls. It believed itself to be something else, and stupid though it certainly was, pointing this out felt akin to kicking a child, or at least kicking somebody with the mind of one. Buc-ee's didn't really care that I had come with the intention of disproving the existence of God, it just hoped I had enjoyed myself and thanked me for my visit.

Outside I posed for photographs next to the bronze sculpture of Buc-ee the beaver. It wasn't a great sculpture, bearing no resemblance to the poorly executed cartoon mascot, and my wife and I agreed that the big beaver teeth were really the only feature that distinguished the sculpture from one of Popeye or any other cartoon character. Nevertheless, we still had to wait for the three families in front of us to have their pictures taken with the unconvincing statue. My photographs show a fat English guy stood next to a brown blob of bronze. Neither of us came out of it looking good.

In conclusion, whilst Buc-ee's may indeed stock some half-decent things to eat, drink, listen to, wear, or fire at ducks, and is very probably good of its kind, aside from maybe a choccy bar, there wasn't much I would have wished to buy anyway, so I guess that would be me also filling up on the bread stolen from the mouths of an innocent millionaire's children.

If people wish to give their money to possibly horrible politicians then that's what they should do, and hopefully the rest of us will have more sense than to vote them into office. If you dislike the way someone is spending their money, then there's no reason why you should be required to give them any of yours. Neither is there any reason why you should be prevented from telling anyone about it. It's not that complicated, and it really is just a very big corner shop, and nothing more.