How Shipston Has Changed

My family moved to Shipston-on-Stour in 1977, the year I turned twelve. Shipston is a small market town in Warwickshire roughly equidistant between Oxford and Coventry, and it felt like a small market town. I left in 1984 with memories of having grown up there, not terrible memories, but not particularly rosy either. It felt like a place from which you escape.

I'm not sure how often I've been back since, but it may not yet be into double figures. My parents separated around the time that I moved away, and both ended up living elsewhere so I never had much reason to go back beyond simple curiosity.

This time, it's because my dad and I were going to have a couple of days in his caravan up near Skegness, but the plan fell through, so instead we've chosen to visit his sister, my Aunt Pat, in the village of Ilmington. With Shipston being just down the road, it seemed like we should at least stop by and have a look.

Prior to moving to Shipston in 1977, I attended the junior school in Ilmington, so I have a lot of history spattered around this whole area even if it isn't anything I'm able to recall in detail. Aunt Pat is lovely, one of those people who somehow twinkles, and it's always a pleasure visiting her. She is married to Steve, who - by funny coincidence - is the older brother of Neil, one of the few kids I can remember from the class above mine at Ilmington Juniors. I remember Neil because I didn't like many of the kids in the class above mine, but Neil was okay and he was funny.

One day I took a couple of passenger carriages from my train set into school to show around. Neil picked up the OO/HO gauge Pullman buffet car and grinned. 'This is the best one.'

'Why?' I asked.

'It's got all the nosh in it.'

This made me laugh a lot, but perhaps you had to be there.

Several decades later, I tell Steve the story, such as it is. His younger brother now runs the Eight Bells, Chipping Campden's oldest pub, and has built up something of a reputation for the food served therein. I like to think that it was my OO/HO gauge Pullman buffet car which first set him on that course. I ask Steve to pass my regards on to Neil, adding that I realise he probably won't remember me. Weirdly it turns out that Neil does remember me, or he did the last time Steve passed on my regards, which is impressive.

Around noon, my dad and I head off for Shipston. We park in the West Street car park, adjacent to the police station, which is itself adjacent to number fourteen - which was our house. It's changed a lot. Somebody has added an extension since we lived there. Also, the police station is no longer a police station, although it's hard to tell what it has become.

'It's still a police station,' my dad insists.

We stand and look at the row of houses on the opposite side of West Street. It was an orchard when we first moved in, and we both remember the new houses being built. One of them was occupied by Pete Emberer, a typically flared seventies character halfway between George Best and the Yorkshire Ripper. He was friends with my dad up to a point. They bought each other pints in the George or helped start each other's cars on frosty mornings in this very same car park - or at least they did until someone borrowed the battery from my dad's vehicle without even leaving a note. A few months later, our other neighbours - the cops - invited my dad to have a look at some of the things they'd found in Pete Emberer's garden, and there was the missing car battery. Pete Emberer therefore ended up in the cells at the rear of the police station, prior to trial at Sheep Street magistrate's court, just over the back. Everything pertaining to the crime - scene, victim, perpetrator, arrest, detention, and sentencing - was therefore to be found within a single area of about fifty square yards.

My dad and I take the alley to Sheep Street, noting that the bread shop has vanished. We wander down to the town square in search of refreshment. The choices are the George or the White Bear, but the George looks as though their food will be served on square plates or even lumps of slate. The White Bear doesn't appear to serve food, but on the other hand you can still tell that it's a pub so in we go. I was last in this pub for a school reunion about ten years ago, and it's changed a lot since then.

Talking of school, I'm pretty sure the bloke sat at the bar right in front of me is Paul Boulton. I've spent the last half hour staring at every passing stranger and wondering whether they might be the old and fat version of someone I knew; but when you actually see someone you did know, you can tell immediately, no matter how much they've changed.

Paul and I were sort of friends, or at least sufficiently close for me to have taped a couple of singles from him - Bowie's Ashes to Ashes and This World of Water by New Musik - and we almost started a band. He had a guitar and was definitely going to learn how to play it, but more importantly he had a name and we were going to be called the Suburbans.

Then thirty years later, he completely ignored me at the school reunion, looked right through me when I said hello Paul, remember me? Perhaps he blamed me for the Suburbans having failed to take off as he'd hoped, or even to exist in any form.

Anyway, I'm not going to bother this time. He's seen me, and once again there's that uncomfortable flicker of recognition followed by nothing. In any case, he's in a conversation with the bloke at the next stool, who looks similarly familiar but it may just be that everyone seems familiar if you look hard enough. He has the demeanour of a fifties rockabilly who smokes too much, slightly gaunt in the face, but wearing an immaculate white suit, shirt, tie, trousers, jacket - all white, like a band leader.

All the service seems to be in the saloon bar, so my dad and I go out into the street then return through the other door, and thus we too are served. We have pints and a table from which I can no longer watch Paul Boulton looking uncomfortable at the public bar. The barmaid seems familiar, but she only moved to Shipston in the nineties, so she can't be. The other couple also seem familiar. In fact I'd swear the guy is Richard Benfield. I ask, and he tells me that his name is Trevor in a Birmingham accent, although his wife is from Shipston. Typically, I don't recognise her at all.

My dad is the gregarious type and we all get to talking - where we live, where we used to live, how it's all changed and so on. The police station - which is adjacent to where we used to live - is no longer a police station because they're cutting back. Crime is therefore a growth industry in Shipston, not that the place was ever what you would call crime free. We all share happy memories - albeit some more recent than others - of local cops dedicated mainly to tackling the scourge of after hours drinking, occasionally being so dedicated as to investigate scenes of the crime in an undercover capacity, even getting too pissed to stand so as to avert suspicion.

Trevor shares a vivid memory of Constable Beard and a colleague attempting to find their way back to the station through fog at two in the morning by following the line in the middle of the road with a flashlight subsequent to a particularly heavy bout of investigation.

'I never liked him,' my dad says. 'He had it in for me.'

'Wasn't he the one who found your car battery in wossisname's garden?' I ask.

'That's true,' my dad admits. 'He always had some problem though, whenever I came home on me motorbike. There was always summat. He didn't like my bike being up on the pavement.'

'Maybe he wanted you to lift it up and carry it into our front yard.'

I remember Constable Beard mainly because he rather helpfully had a beard, and I knew his daughter, Janice. She and a couple of her friends had showbiz aspirations and had written songs, vocal arrangements for which they invited me to score music. Their influences seemed to be mostly Andrew Lloyd Weber, Abba, and show tunes, where mine were Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle, so the results were a bit cranky; but the undertaking meant that girls spoke to me, so I couldn't really say no, and Rebecca Jacques was sort of foxy.

We talk about all the famous people now flooding to Shipston. It used to be just Roy Dotrice, father to Betty from Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, but now there are apparently all sorts knocking around, Tim Henman, sporty types, actors... I wonder if the man in the white suit is somebody famous.

Eventually my dad and I reach saturation point. We purchase sandwiches from the Co-Op and walk down to the river to eat them. Then we come back through the square. My dad goes into a junk shop to have a look around, and I head for the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park because I need to take a leak. As I pass, there's a girl stood on the corner of Sheep Street with an iguana at rest on her forearm. I take a piss, and she's still there as I come back the other way. She's no-one I recognise. She wears black clothes with bare arms revealing elaborate tattoos and she has the iguana - a bearded dragon, I realise.

'Hello,' I say because I'm too pissed to care. 'Is that a bearded dragon?'

'Yes.' She smiles. 'I just bought him out for a bit of sun. He likes the sun.'

'He's great.' I can't take my eyes off the lizard. 'My wife used to have one, so I thought it was probably a bearded dragon.'

There's nothing more to be said beyond the grinning, so I go off to find my dad. Between the man in white and the lizard lady, it's all gone a bit David Lynch.

Shipston has changed a lot since my day. For one thing, it's a lot fucking weirder.

London Calling

I'm never sure what to say when people ask me where I'm from. Generally, I tell them England, but if they're after anything more specific - usually on the off chance of their having spent a holiday there - it's tricky. I grew up in Warwickshire, specifically on the farm which eventually became home to the Teletubbies, which sounds a bit insane when offered as a response to enquiries regarding my origin; so more often than not I'll say London. I'm not from London, but I lived there from 1990 to 2009, nineteen uninterrupted years, which is the longest I've lived anywhere. My personality was probably in flux for most of the years prior to my moving to London, so I'm not convinced I was properly myself when living in Shipston, Maidstone, Chatham, or Coventry, at least not by any terms I still recognise; so it feels as though I'm from London.

London was the first place I felt I belonged, and is therefore high on the list of places I need to visit whenever I return to England to stay with my mother in Coventry. Unfortunately though, it can be difficult. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, it's easy to fire off emails announcing my proposed arrival and reiterating the awful hey, we really must meet up for a drink - awful because it's usually the mantra of people I haven't seen in decades, despite my best efforts to prise open a window in their busy schedules, which always seem to be at least as dense as the crust of stuff you find stuck to the event horizon of a black hole.

Then when I arrive in England, I remember that the train fare from London to Coventry is usually about a million pounds return, and we're talking off-peak; and that I can't afford hotels or bed and breakfast and that I'm far too old to sleep on the floor; and that I haven't actually told anyone I'm coming because I didn't want to be pinned down to an itinerary I might not be able to keep, or in which I might feel trapped; and that I've just spent eighteen hours on planes so I don't feel well disposed towards further travel; and that I hate crowds; and that I hate having to squeeze onto public transport, and how long it takes to even get anywhere in the city; and that I fucking hate London…

I don't hate London, but the circumstances of my last couple of years in the capital were somewhat shitty, which has left a lasting and unfavourable impression; but the bottom line is that I actually have mentioned my being back in the country to a couple of people, so I'll look like a twat if I fail to make the effort.

I've already reeled in my travel plans. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, I had all sorts of grand ideas about taking a bike on the train, then having a couple of days in London, cycling down to the Medway towns and Maidstone, seeing all those people I've been meaning to see for years and years. It would have taken up most of the second of my three weeks in England, and I've now whittled it down to a single afternoon in London, conditional to the existence of a train ticket costing less than a million pounds, and I might stay overnight on someone's floor or sofa, but probably not as I'm already depressed by the idea.

Amazingly, there's a return ticket costing just thirty quid, travelling at specific times with a rail operator no-one has heard of, and stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way. The comparative cheapness of the ticket means I'll probably be sharing a carriage with people who've been on the Jeremy Kyle Show, but the price is right.

I arrive at Euston around noon. The promised stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way has turned out to be just Watford Junction, Rugby, and the usual places, just like in the good old days when I could afford any old train fare. Not being a regular on the railways, I forget that those ordinary extortionate fares tend to be for journeys at the speed of light stopping at no stations other than the one at the end of the line.

Euston isn't too bad in terms of crowds, and I seem to be on a roll, so I think fuck it, I'll get the tube. I have an Oyster card from the last time I was here, and amazingly it still works and even has a couple of quid on it, so I top up at a newsagent and head for the underground. My memory of travel in London is mostly buses, because I dislike crowds and ended up with a hatred of tube trains. I've been left with a falsely distended impression of how easy it is to get anywhere, and find it weird that I'm stood on Tottenham Court Road in just a couple of minutes. I can't work out if the crowds are less congested than once they were, or whether it's all been so long that it seems like a new thing and I haven't had time to get sick of it.

I head to Forbidden Planet because I'm after the latest issue of Interzone magazine, and Forbidden Planet seems like the sort of place which might stock it. The latest issue of Interzone features a story by Erica Satifka, author of the novel Stay Crazy; and Stay Crazy is wonderful, so I'm trying to support both a new writer and the general concept of visiting shops in order to buy things which have been printed. Amazingly, they actually have the copy of Interzone I'm after, which is probably a first, and so I read it on the train to Greenwich - a trip of about ten minutes.

I left London in 2009, at which point I vaguely recall the first of the new, funny-shaped skyscrapers going up somewhere in the vicinity of Elephant & Castle. At the time I was spunking away three-quarters of my weekly wage on renting a rabbit hutch in Camberwell, despite holding down a reasonably paid, if back-breaking, full-time job; so I felt more than a little resentful as my city went all Blade Runner whilst overmoneyed tosspots banged on about posterity and capital and investment and growth and ways forward. Returning as a foreigner of sorts, carnivorous progress no longer directly affects me beyond that I can't afford to stay in a hotel, so it no longer feels personal; and I sort of enjoy the spectacle of what is to be seen from the window of the train. They're everywhere now, gleaming prongs thrust miles into the sky above London like the city seen on the cover of David Louis Edelman's Infoquake, and not a single one of them is regular skyscraper shape. It's as though the architects have been in competition with each other to come up with the strangest, most ostentatiously surprising design. There's the Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheese, the Sex Aid, the Pokémon…

'Computers,' Carl tells me. It's due to the development of certain architectural software that we are now able to throw up any shape of building we fancy.

I'm at Carl's house in Greenwich.

I arrived twenty minutes ago.

He lives in a square with a small central garden, or at least a barbecue pit and a bench surrounded by bushes. Upon arrival, I sat on the bench and had a fag in preparation for ringing the doorbell of my friend whom I'd not seen in at least a year. As I sat smoking, I heard the sound of a door, then approaching footsteps, then an indistinct verbal address which sounded like Carl's voice. In my mind, it already was Carl, and I imagined him calling out Loz in the usual way, so I went to reply even though I was replying to a call I had only anticipated, and somehow I myself called out, 'Loz!', having mixed up the two components of the predicted exchange.

It wasn't Carl. It was some elderly woman who regarded me suspiciously, possibly because I had just emerged from behind a bush to yell my own nickname at a stranger.

Now I'm within Carl's house watching him finish up and save what he was doing on the computer, specifically retouching photographs of REM for some book or other. He's a designer, and he's also working on a book about Japan.

We discuss this for three or four minutes before I realise he's referring to the band rather than the country. I forget that he knows a couple of them, and he tells me they were originally from Catford - which is one of the places I worked for a couple of years. It feels as though Carl and I have been transported into a weird future, a world we never made - whatever the hell that means.

He places the cherry boldly on the futurity cake by informing me that another mutual acquaintance is now working as a prostitute, specifically a BBW prostitute specialising in bondage, domination and the like. This is another eventuality I could never have foreseen, but apparently she makes eight-hundred quid a session and enjoys the work, so why not? I'm somewhat out of my depth with the profession, but I always imagined that dominating people for money would probably be one of the better sex work options providing one could find the right clientele - for example, a frustrated bank manager who would happily clean your toilet and then pay for the privilege, thus avoiding the necessity of finding oneself penetrated by anything too ghastly.

The subject resumes later as we approach Herne Hill station. We've had a wander around Greenwich park, a bit of lunch and then caught a series of trains to Herne Hill. The conversation resumes because I'm reminded that I've recently read Stupid Baby by New Juche, an autobiographical account of life amongst prostitutes in one of the rougher bits of Thailand. It's one of the best books I've read in a while and is written with a refreshing honesty and none of the hysteria one might expect, given the subject. The funny thing is that it's published by Philip Best, formerly of Whitehouse, who now lives in Austin and is therefore almost a neighbour. I consider this funny because Carl and I are on our way to visit Pete.

I was at school with Pete many years ago, back in Shipston, and we were both friends with Graham, who may or may not be turning up tonight. Graham and I saw Whitehouse live in Birmingham back in the eighties, during which Graham was injured by an object casually launched from the stage by Philip Best, who was probably the most hated man in underground music for much of that year.

I've been wondering how to broach the subject.

You remember that time we saw Whitehouse, and you remember the bloke who was chucking stuff into the audience, and how you got hit? Well, he lives down the road from me and we seem to be pals these days, sort of. I think he's calmed down a bit in recent years. Anyway, he seems like a decent guy.

I tell all of this to Carl, and so we talk about Glenn, because somehow we'd both forgotten that Glenn was also in Whitehouse. Carl and I recorded music with Glenn at one point. Glenn left a keyboard at Carl's flat for a couple of months, apparently on loan from William Bennett - also of Whitehouse - who was living in Spain at the time. When you switched the keyboard on, the name Susan Lawly would scroll across the LCD display in greeting, that being the name of Bennett's record label. The connections form a peculiar imaginary cat's cradle in my thoughts. I'm beginning to think that current estimates regarding human population are grossly exaggerated, and that there are actually only about twenty of us.

We arrive at Herne Hill and walk to Pete's house.

I'm hoping Carl and Pete will get on okay, given that neither of them have been in the same room since about 1987, and were never conspicuously close in the first place.

Here's how it works: I was at school in Shipston, Warwickshire, with Pete and Graham back in the eighties. Pete's family had moved to Shipston from somewhere down south a couple of years before, and once Pete left school, they moved again, to Eastbourne down on the south coast. I left school and did an art foundation course, at the end of which I was told I should have a look at Maidstone College of Art if I wanted to take it further. I didn't actually have the faintest idea of what I wanted to do, but it seemed like as good a plan as any, so I went for an interview at Maidstone and was accepted, thus dispensing with the need to bother looking around any other colleges. By sheer coincidence, it turned out that Pete had already been at Maidstone a year, studying graphic design. Carl was also at Maidstone, a former graphics student by that point serving as president of the Student Union, so that's how I met him, and how he and Pete came to know each other.

Back at school, Pete, Graham, and myself had been in a band, calling ourselves the Pre-War Busconductors amongst a variety of other interchangable, wilfully ludicrous names. We barely had any instruments, couldn't really play, but nevertheless churned out tape after tape of scatological songs about people at school whom we regarded as twats. Having spent the last couple of years digitising these tapes, I now have our entire body of work saved on memory sticks, one for Pete and one for Graham. This is partially the purpose of our meeting tonight, so I can hand over the sound files and we'll all have copies.

Carl, Pete and myself walk to the Half Moon. Pete tells me it seems unlikely that Graham will be along after all, presently being in Devon with his girlfriend. We buy drinks and sit outside. Most of the talk is between Pete and Carl, because they're simply chattier individuals than I am, and somehow we get onto the subject of how Pete came to move to Shipston in the first place. I recall that he had lived somewhere down south prior to Shipston, and that somewhere turns out to have been the Medway towns - which is where Carl grew up. Furthermore it turns out that Carl and Pete both attended the same junior school, the Hundred of Hoo as it was known, without having been aware of each other at the time, or having been aware of this fact until right now in the year 2018; and I've a feeling this may also be the school attended by Jayne, Glenn's first wife.

The cat's cradle seems to be approaching critical mass.

Eddy and Neil turn up, which is wonderful as I haven't seen either of them in years. It's also wonderful because I have to ask Eddy whether it will be okay for me to kip on his floor. The latest specific time I can return to Coventry on the ticket purchased from a rail operator no-one has heard of is nine this evening, which would leave thirty minutes in which to have a drink with my old pals. The thing is that I feel awkward asking Eddy because I haven't actually spoken to him since his mother passed away. He's one of my favourite people in the universe, but somehow he only makes sense in person. We've communicated on facebook, but you're either hanging out with him, or arranging to hang out with him which, combined with my not being much of a fan of the telephone, means we haven't spoken for a while and it will feel a bit fucking cheeky when I ask if I can kip on his floor for the night; but like a true friend, he doesn't give a shit and is simply glad to see me, and of course I can sleep on his floor.

So we all catch up, getting cautiously drunk in the way middle-aged men get cautiously drunk. Everyone gets on fine, even though Pete is from a different shard of my existence to the others. Neil is, as ever, darkly entertaining with his tales of dealings with showbiz types, recent clients including Helen Mirren and Idris Elba. He doesn't seem to have a particularly high opinion of Idris Elba.

Eventually it's time to go and Eddy drives, being the one of us with a car and sobriety. His flat, which I've never seen before as he moved in just over a year ago, is small but functional. Money is tight, but he's getting by. Money is tight for everyone I know still living in London. I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Eddy assembles a camp bed purchased from some hardware place. It comprises canvas stretched across tubes of steel and works like a hammock. Two of the steel tubes are missing, but it doesn't matter because I'm not seven foot tall. We have a cup of tea, watch an episode of Urban Myths - which dramatises the true story of a regular dude giving Public Enemy a lift to one of their shows in his Ford Focus - and then go to sleep; and against my expectations, I sleep well because the camp bed is very comfortable.

Next morning we have a walk to the caff along by the Thames. Eddy points to a house over on the other side of the river.

'That's where Helen Mirren lives.'

I have two sausages, egg, and chips in the caff and it tastes fucking amazing. I realise how much I've missed this place and its people. I can still feel my roots here, reaching down into the tarmac and cracked paving, in the newsagents and pound shops and the bite of cold far too early in the morning. I'm quite happy to live a long way away, but I'm glad I came back, just for a day.

The Quiet and Pleasant Man

Robert James Shepherd - my grandfather on my mother's side - was born on the 8th of March, 1910 somewhere in Liverpool, England for the sake of argument. He was one of a fairly large working-class family tracing its ancestry back to Northern Ireland, and possibly to Scotland before that. I almost certainly have some of the details wrong, but this is as much as I can recall from my mother's genealogical research which takes our family tree back to the late 1600s. Somewhere in there lurks a member of the Orange Lodge, but we don't like to talk about him too much, not least because we don't really know enough about him for anything more than a short sentence.

My grandfather's parents were Joseph and Emmeline Shepherd, and his military documentation gives his home address as 17, Hotspur Road in Bootle, which is technically Merseyside rather than Liverpool depending on who you ask and when; and providing you ask someone other than my grandmother who would customarily adopt a face of stony and silent disgust in the event of anyone mistaking her for a Scouser, which occurred with some frequency due to her fairly distinct Liverpudlian accent.

What I have left of my grandfather's story is cobbled together from fading childhood memories; a couple of hundred black and white photographs which, if numerous, remain nevertheless mysterious; and a lever arch file containing military documentation, certificates of training, pay book, and all sorts. From these I know that he was a joiner by trade - following in his father's footsteps so I believe - who enlisted with the Royal Artillery on the 1st of April 1933. The next few sequential documents I have are third and then second class certificates of military education passed in English, mathematics, map reading, and a subject termed army and empire. He is identified as a Driver on these certificates, ascending to the rank of Gunner on his first class certificate of military education dated to the 16th of October 1935. He transferred to the Army Reserves at the rank of Bombardier on the 29th of January, 1939. Notes made in his Certificate of Service booklet dated to the 28th of September, 1938 describe his conduct as exemplary, with some officer whose signature I am unable to decipher describing my grandfather as follows:

A first class surveyor and a reliable and trustworthy NCO. He is very intelligent and is methodical and painstaking. He has a quiet and pleasant manner.

England went to war with Germany on 3rd of September, 1939, from which point my grandfather's story is told mainly in photographs as he sits atop a camel before the Great Pyramid in Egypt, along with other scenes of his life in India or the North African desert. Two formal uniformed portrait photographs delineate his promotion from Corporal to Staff Sergeant, and then there are the medals - notably the Africa Star - and what little I am able to remember him telling me of his time with Montgomery's Eighth Army when I was a kid.

My mother was born just after war ended, and a receipt for the payment of an examination fee dated to the 3rd of November, 1948 testifies to my grandfather's return to civilian life as a structural engineer - or an architect if the more specific term seems a little obtuse. He may not quite have designed the buildings, but he made sure they didn't fall down. This trade was much in demand in the city of Coventry in the West Midlands, much of which had been flattened by the Luftwaffe during the war, although it could probably be argued that Coventry City Council spent the next two decades bulldozing the bits which Hitler's finest had missed. Anyway, the point is that my grandparents moved to Kenilworth, Warwickshire, just down the road from Coventry, which is how my mother ended up in that part of the country, and ultimately how I came to be born. Kenilworth had become aspirational in the years following the second world war. You were someone if you lived in Kenilworth, which pleased my grandmother as much as anything pleased her. My grandfather, who had never suffered any particular shame in acknowledging his Merseyside roots, may have felt differently, but work was work and I suppose he tended to keep his thoughts to himself.

My mother has described her home life as pleasant up until the age of twelve or so, at which point my grandfather apparently found himself bewildered as to how to cope with teenage girls. Where he would once play with my mother and her younger sister, read to them and tell them stories, he became a distant and apparently humourless authority figure inspiring my mother to rebel further when charged with inconsequential accusations made purely for the sake of authority.

He seemed to do well as an architect working for Coventry City Council, and he had his friends and his fishing at the weekend, but the war had stayed with him in certain respects, unfortunately leading to a spell in the nuthouse during which he was subject to electroconvulsive therapy. It probably didn't help that my grandmother had never quite been the sharpest tool in the box, and had always been a somewhat self-absorbed individual. Whilst she doted upon me as a child, and I in turn thought she was wonderful, even at that age I could see she had something of a martyr complex. Nothing my grandfather did for her was ever quite good enough, and he did plenty.

'Never mind,' she would say with a laboured sigh. 'I suppose at least you tried.' She herself had been the least favoured of three children, the one with neither the beauty nor any particular talent to speak of, and so she grew up with a vague sense of being owed something which she could not quite articulate. She apparently fell some way short of being the world's greatest mother, and I always wondered if she saw my arrival in terms of atonement, as a way of making up for lost time. I was indulged as her own children had never been.

The happiest days of her life had been as a land girl on the farm of Sammy Shellew in Cornwall, and memories of the same were frequently invoked for the sake of contrast with an endlessly disappointing present. If only she had married Sammy, or if only she had not moved so far from the wonderful Thelma, her greatest friend in the whole world. She met with Thelma a few times in the seventies, but eventually fell out with her; and then the venerable Sammy Shellew came to stay, which didn't work out so well due to his having interpreted my grandmother's gushing praise as a sexual overture, which probably wasn't entirely his fault.

For most of the 1970s I would be taken to stay with my grandparents every other weekend, arriving Friday evening and coming back Sunday afternoon. It was a regular thing, a routine, and like many children, I loved routine and found it comforting, something upon which one might rely in a world which appeared chaotic through not yet being fully understood. One of my earliest coherent memories is of watching Neil Armstrong landing on the moon as viewed on my grandparents' black and white television on Sunday the 20th of July, 1969. I would have been three years old, two months short of four. My grandfather was ten years older than I am right now.

Weekends generally began with breakfast, usually my grandfather making buttered toast - your bog standard Mother's Pride white sliced bread and probably Stork margarine, but somehow I've never been able to make toast quite so good as he did. Tea was stewed until bright orange - or at least the complexion of Judith Chalmers from that holiday show. The cocktail cabinet built into the sideboard was well stocked with kid drinks, Cresta or else bottles of Nesquik syrup for milkshakes and a selection of drinking straws, but they got me onto tea quite early on, always served from a pot into a cup with a saucer, one of those matching sets invoking some level of sophistication.

'He's been a proper little tea urn this weekend,' my grandmother reported one Sunday as my parents arrived to take me home, and it was true that I had been guzzling one cup after another. I can still recall my overpowering thirst of that particular weekend.

Some Saturdays I'd awake before my grandparents and would go downstairs and find something amazing in being the first to rise, in being the one to draw back the curtains upon a new day. On one such occasion I switched the radio on just as Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty was playing, and right in the middle of that Bob Holness saxophone break which I have ever since associated with an early Saturday morning at my grandparents' house; and the thing is, I'm not even sure of this being a real memory as opposed to some sort of association made after the fact.

My grandparents didn't seem to like anything racier than Jim Reeves so far as I could tell, so modern pop music was absolutely out of the question. My grandfather had apparently taken some delight in mocking his youngest daughter's love of Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders by referring to them as the Bananabenders, and I don't recall the radio ever having been tuned to anything that would have featured Baker Street. My parents took me to see Grease at the cinema in Stratford-upon-Avon when it came out, and the next Friday as they ferried me over to Kenilworth, I begged them not to tell Grandma we'd been to see the film. I somehow felt that such an admission would bring disgrace upon us, but I still have no idea how I thought this would work or what would happen if our terrible secret should be revealed.

Breakfast was usually prefaced by my grandfather walking up Caesar Road to the newsagent for a newspaper. I would tag along and he would buy me one of the small, brightly-coloured plastic dinosaurs from the display on the counter, or in later years the new issue of 2000AD comic; and I have a very specific memory of reading issue sixty-eight with the gruesome cyborg Artie Gruber on the cover at the breakfast table with my hot margarined toast and orange tea. My grandfather quite possibly passed some faintly disparaging comment on my reading material, thus cementing the memory in place. 2000AD comic was one of the first things I understood as belonging to my generation and thus beyond the scope of adults. Six weeks later as our family headed off for a week's holiday in Delabole, Cornwall, my mother frowned at the cover of issue seventy-four upon which Judge Dredd is seen on the verge of being devoured by a tyrannosaurus.

'It's very violent,' she observed in disapproving fashion.

'It's violence in the cause of good,' I explained somewhat ineptly.

After Baker Street, the orange tea, toast, and my weekly dose of violence in the cause of good, my grandparents and I would bundle into the navy blue Morris Minor and drive to Leamington Spa. My grandfather drove cautiously, perched forward in his seat, gripping the wheel and generally refusing to talk. Often he would whistle Bizet's March of the Toreadors from Carmen, and he would whistle it with such enthusiasm and frequency that I came to regard it as his signature tune; although specifically I have a better memory of him whistling it when it was just the two of us. He seemed less given to flourishes of carefree cheer in my grandmother's company, and my mother tells me that he was once in the habit of singing to himself, Pennies from Heaven and other songs of the time. I suppose by the seventies he generally felt less moved to song.

By the eighties, having invented experimental music, I produced a track attempting to invoke his memory by recording the running of a friend's Morris Minor whilst whistling March of the Toreadors. It seemed like an important thing to do, but the recording was disappointing.

Once in Leamington Spa I would be unleashed in a labyrinthine Regent Street toy shop called Toy Town, there to blow what feeble sum of pocket money I'd managed to save on model railway accessories, Ellisdon's jokes and novelties, Micronauts, Dinky's die-cast Gerry Anderson vehicles, model kits of dinosaurs, Shogun Warriors, or Faller alpine houses earmarked for the aforementioned model railway. I was good at spending money but not at saving it, so my model railway comprised mainly accessories and scenery with very little actual railway. With hindsight it strikes me as a little weird how I would buy and build bungalows, houses and shops past which no miniature electric locomotive would ever trundle on OO gauge tracks, and I can't help wonder if my granddad ever noticed this and imagined I might have some subconscious drive to one day follow him into the architectural trade. Having been a joiner, he still had all of his carpentry tools and so jollied me along by making a couple of wooden tunnel entrances which might eventually parenthesise the locomotive passage through a hillside of papier maché and chicken wire.

I repaid him by never getting around to constructing my hypothetical layout, and by nominating him test subject for all the Ellisdon's jokes and novelties I bought once I gave up on the model railway idea. Whilst he never struck me as particularly lacking a sense of humour, he tired of the job fairly rapidly then resigned during breakfast one Sunday. He'd responded to the loud farting rasp of the whoopee cushion on his chair with an indulgent smile. He'd found the plastic fried egg on his plate considerably less amusing, and the novelty double-sided suction cup by which I had attached his cup of tea securely to its saucer was the last straw.

'Your mother shall hear of this,' he muttered darkly, carrying the still full cup and firmly attached saucer to the kitchen. It had been a long weekend for him. The day before, my grandmother had only just talked me out of trying my joke sweets on him by suggesting there was a possibility that I might kill him. I'd made the sweets myself from everything I could find in the kitchen cupboard. To my grandfather's credit, he made no attempt to throttle me, despite probably knowing that no court in the land would have found him guilty. He never raised his voice to me, because I suppose he understood that, being a child, I was essentially psychotic and that it was therefore nothing personal. He was nevertheless able to induce me to behave with just a few words. It was probably the military training.

My grandmother's approach to child care was based on flattery, giving me stuff, and assuming it would be appreciated. It generally was appreciated, although I nevertheless got out of hand from time to time. Standard child psychology would have termed it a testing of limits, which I could have told you even back then. I had become irritable at being addressed as sweetheart or similar endearments with such frequency, and so I began to experiment with basic rudeness, making strident demands, complaints about the quality of service, and on one occasion directly calling her an old bat. I was probably about six or seven and I thought it was funny because I knew she would let me get away with it.

'Don't speak to your grandma like that,' my grandfather suggested, momentarily fixing me with the mildest of glances; and in that moment I saw myself as the repulsive brat I had become. It felt awful and I learned my lesson immediately. It was as though I'd been punched in the stomach.

On Saturday afternoons I would play with whatever I'd bought back from Leamington Spa, or sometimes we drove to Coventry to visit the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, and my grandfather would point out which buildings he'd helped design as we drove through the city. The swimming pool was one of his, as were parts of the university, so I believe, and it had been his job to make an assessment of the extent of the coal mining beneath the city and whether or not the ground would be able to support the weight of St. Michael's Cathedral.

Some Saturday afternoons, he would take me down to Abbey Fields in Kenilworth to catch fish from the stream, or around Kenilworth Castle; and I have no idea what we talked about during those walks, but I recall that we talked at length. As my mother has observed more recently, whilst some of his views were staunchly conservative and typical of his background and times, he was essentially a decent and intelligent man who was interested in things. He had seen some of the world and had come back the better for it in most respects but for those more directly related to the war. He would take me to Leamington Spa and have me splash around in a kayak for an hour or so at a small boating lake near Jephson Gardens, and I would notice the Indian women in their saris and remark on how strange they looked.

'I think they look very pretty,' he observed somewhat forcefully, possibly even wistfully given the time he'd spent in India, belying the generalisation of his generation's supposedly inherent xenophobia.

His creative energies went into plays and letters hammered out on a typewriter which he would sometimes encourage me to use. He wrote a play called One Bad Apple or something similar, a heavy-handed cautionary tale of a hearty and generally conservative workplace ruined by one of those shifty labour union type fellows, and there was another play about a wayward and rebellious daughter coming to no good. He didn't really seem to get much interest in this material, but it was significant that he at least tried.

He encouraged me in my formative attempts at storytelling, listening patiently as I read him by Bod fan fiction. The opening scenario in which Bod had a beautiful dream about a bowl of strawberries and cream was a direct lift from the barely animated children's television cartoon, but the conclusion - the world ends and in the next world Bod is a gorilla - was all my own work. There were also many, many episodes of Doctor Stew, a sequence of single page cartoon strips drawn on a long, long roll of rough hand tissue which had never made it to the dispenser of the cattle shed in which my dad worked.

'There's an awful lot of burping in these,' my grandfather observed reading through my scrawled efforts. It didn't seem like he disapproved exactly, but I got the impression he was concerned. Each episode - and there were at least a hundred of them - usually ended with Doctor Stew eaten alive in time for his devourer to emit a satisfied burp in the last panel, which was also the punchline.

Concerned or otherwise, it impressed me that my grandfather had taken the trouble to at least read my incoherent and extraordinarily repetitive attempts at humour. My grandmother would customarily have sung my praises more or less irrespective of what I had done, which was nice but ultimately didn't count for much.

Saturday evenings were television - The Pink Panther, Doctor Who, Basil Brush, The Generation Game, Starsky & Hutch - all of those shows which have since become tarnished by the overwhelming and disproportionate sentiment of their own nostalgia; or my grandfather would turn off the television and tell me about his time in the war, which was always something of a treat. Perhaps it was because I could tell how much he enjoyed reliving it with me, drawing maps of Tobruk and North Africa with arrows to illustrate movements of troops and tanks, and himself in there somewhere.

Sundays were different, at least following breakfast. Sometimes he would take me fishing, the one activity in which he still took real pleasure, so it seemed. He had made me a kid-sized fishing box in his workshop in the garage, and off we would go with flasks and sandwiches to some point along the River Leam or the Avon or the Sowe. He was keen on outdoor activities, and the boot of the Morris Minor was always well stocked with camping equipment, a kettle, tin mugs, a tiny Primus stove and so on. Alternately we would just go for another walk to Abbey Fields or one of the usual places.

'I've been feeling a bit depressed,' I told him in response to some question or other as we headed out of the door one morning, our breath misting the crisp air. I don't recall how old I was, younger than thirteen, and young enough for it to seem strange that I would articulate such a thing.

I got the impression that he was quietly horrified. 'You shouldn't be depressed at your age,' he said, a trace of pain in his voice.

At the time I had no idea of his own history of depression, the hours sat silently rocking back and forth before the fire described by my mother, nor any really developed idea of what the term even meant. I was trying to articulate a vague feeling of insecurity based on the knowledge that I was getting older and one day the fortnightly visits would cease. I recall this as a fairly specific fear I had voiced in relation to my grandmother's stated ambition to run a tea shop. She had predicted a peculiar future in which I would be riding around with my followers as part of some biker gang. Everyone would draw to a halt behind me as we approached the crossroads.

'Come on, lads,' I would say, 'my grandma's always good for a cup of tea and a bun,' and off we would all ride. The image amused me, but was followed by the altogether more apocalyptic, 'of course one day you'll stop coming to see us altogether.'

I was briefly inconsolable.

Sure enough, my visits became less frequent as I got older, and as my grandfather contracted bowel cancer some time in 1979. We visited him in the hospital in Warwick, and it terrified me to see him frail as a bird in his huge bed, happy to see us but barely enough of him there to fill the pyjamas. I'd always suspected that some elements of the world were subject to change and would ultimately become different, and now it was happening. I didn't cry when I heard he had died because it didn't make sense, but I was distraught at the funeral.

Denied the supposed source of all her woes, my grandmother became a quite different figure, certainly more tragic, but not so tragic as to excuse her increasingly eccentric passive-aggressive behaviour. The jokes she told about her terrible husband lost their jovial tone to become a spiteful, insecure whine about how she could have wasted her best years on such a useless man; but the complaints served only to underscore her own failings, her sense of having been owed something she could never quite articulate. What photos remain of my grandfather are those she somehow missed when she was throwing it all away, and from amongst what little is left of him I have a letter that was never posted, typed on a sheet of lined foolscap and addressed to John Newbury of the BBC. It is dated to the 15th of June, 1979:

I listened with interest to your programme on depression on Wednesday last, and as one who suffered from this complaint over a long period in the past, and having been cured I feel I should inform you of some of my experiences in the hope that you will pass on any relevant information to others who are suffering.

I suffered this sickness from 1944, on my return from five years continuous service in the Middle East and India until about five years ago when I learned about and obtained acupuncture treatment; and apart from one brief spell I have not experienced any depression since. The one instance occurred about four years ago during the transition from a busy working life to one of retirement.

Concerning the discussion on your programme I believe that any lowering of morale for which the causes are known - external conditions such as bereavement, domestic conflict etc. - is really only a sadness which, generally, time will heal. In my opinion, depression is a complaint which has no known cause and exists only within the patient, and can occur at any time regardless of circumstances. In my experience, lonely people are not more prone to this sickness than others. During my last period in hospital I found the other patients to be a typical cross-section of people including a works manager, school teacher, miner, and a policeman. One particular character was a hearty, boisterous person, apparently happily married with children, liked his job and was financially secure, circumstances which should promote contentment; but he suffered and frequently cried for no apparent reason. This was real depression.

I have found that these attacks can occur in different ways, one being like a huge mass of black fluid flowing into one's mind and another like a thousand different thoughts racing through the mind without pause until I feared for my sanity.

I felt a deep sympathy for the people who took part in your programme and I hope that you will tell them that they have no need to continue to suffer, that there is a cure and that I sincerely hope they can avail themselves of it and obtain relief.

Thirty-five years later, there may be days which pass without my thinking about him, but I am not directly aware of them. I often wish I could go back and talk to him as I am now, or at least take back some of the utter crap I almost certainly came out with, although there's probably no need. I'm fairly sure he understood that I was just a kid, and talking rubbish was my job.

As the years pass, I come to see myself in what I am able to recall of him all the more, and this impression has been cemented by a couple of photographs taken in the early 1950s which may as well be photographs of myself; and it occurs to me that there's probably no need to invent time travel just for the sake of apologising for my having been ten and slightly gormless, because he never entirely went away and, as I have said, I'm sure he would understand.

 

 

 

The Mission is Terminated

Excerpt from A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to That
William Burrough's House... the autobiography of Porridge:

It was the beginning of the end when Throbbing Gristle did a pop concert in San Francisco and we were singing An Old Man Smiled which is one of the ones what I wrote although Peter come up with some of it too, mainly that sort of twangy bit that sounds like how you used to make a farting noise with a ruler on the edge of the desk at school. We was doing An Old Man Smiled and I could hear Cosey Fanny picking out the notes of Popeye the Sailor Man on her guitar and I looked at her and she pretended not to know why I was looking at her because she is sneaky like that, the cow.

'Very funny,' I said but I was being sarcastic because I didn't think it was funny at all and it was not fair of Cosey to make fun of my sticky out eyes like that because it's my glands and I can't help it and anyway once I saw her put her hand in her drawers and scratch a bit when we was around at Cabaret Voltaire's house because they was borrowing our lawnmower and she took her hand out and sniffed it and then looked around because she thought no-one was looking but I saw it. Anyway she didn't hear me say nothing because we was doing our songs so loud so whatever. I wasn't bothered anyway.

When we had done the concert I was talking to some bloke from Research which is a magazine about murderers and lots of scary things and doing drawings of men's cocks on government buildings and stuff like that. It is a very good magazine but not a lot of people read it because they are scared of the truth about stuff and things. Anyway I was telling this bloke about how I was going to invent acid house but I was going to wait a bit because no-one was ready for it and I had only just invented punk rock a few years before and I wanted to pace myself a bit. That was when I spoke to that Malcolm MacLaren who is the ginger bloke out of the Sex Pistols. He came up to me when we was backstage with the famous Lou Reed.

'What am I going to do, Porridge?' he asked me. 'No one is interested in my band! They are not even as famous as the Rubettes!'

I couldn't think of nothing so I showed him my tattoo of Aleister Crowley sticking up the Vs to the Pope because I had just had it done and that's how he had the idea for Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols because there was a bit of space between Aleister Crowley's fingers and the Pope and I said, 'Oh Mr. Sebastian left that bit vacant,' and it was because I said it that he got the idea for it and that's why they got banned off the telly and became famous and all because I done it!

Anyway I was talking to this bloke from Research and he had said to me where do you get your ideas? so I was telling him and I was also telling him about the new song we were going to do which was about poo and it was a really playful and subversive song.

I see you,
I see you on the loo,
I see you doing a poo,
You are very nice and I am too.

Anyway there was a knock on the door. It was none other than that Ian Curtis from Joy Division. He had been following me around ever since we played in Liverpool where they are from and he came to see us and he came up to me after the gig and said he liked all of the songs what I wrote but the ones that Cosey Fanny did and that other bloke with the train set did weren't much good. His band were called Sad Sector but I had said to him that name is rubbish, Ian - you should change it is what you should do, and I told him Joy Division would be a good name because it was like the opposite of Sad Sector and I had playfully turned it upside down and inside out and stuff so it was subversive because it meant like those prozzies what the Nazis used to go and see behind the back of the van when they was feeling a bit randy and wanted to have it off and that. Ian said it was a dead clever name and he couldn't wait to see the faces of the fans when they heard it, and then they became famous, and that was sort of because of me when you really think about it.

'Come in, Ian Curtis my famous friend,' I told him, and he did and I could see Chris Carter looking over all envious and that because all he had was his blumming train set and I was the one who had all the fans asking me what's this song about, Porridge? and all the lady fans always wanted to have it off and that and no-one even knew about smelly knickers at the back fiddling with his knobs and switches. What a sad case! Ha ha ha! Once he kept pestering me because I had some toffos and I wouldn't give him none and he wanted a toffo and he kept saying pleeeaaase give us a toffo, Porridge and I said UFO to him which is the letters for you you-know-what off but I didn't want to say the middle word out loud because his mum was in the kitchen making us some chips, but I reckon that was how he got the idea for the X-Files and he never said thanks or nothing. Typical.

'What can I do you for?' I asked Ian Curtis.

'I'm fed up of Joy Division,' he said. 'I want to form a band with you, Porridge. I've even done a drawing of what it would look like,' and he showed me a drawing he had done of a gig and all the crowd were cheering and holding me up because I had jumped into the crowd like Iggy Pop or something. It was a really good drawing.

'This could be our album cover, Ian Curtis!' I said, excited.

Just then the one with the glasses out of the Shadows came by and he was looking for his friend Burt Weedon because he wanted to learn a really complicated guitar bit, and he said, 'does anyone know where Burt is?'

I didn't but I'd had another great idea.

What can I do you for, Ian Curtis?
Does anyone know where Burt is?

Tim Westwood was there because him and Chris Farter knew each other from being in the scouts and Chris had forgotten his sandwiches because he was too busy thinking about switches and knobs and the difference between OO gauge model railways and N gauge model railways and so his mum had got Tim to bring them. That's what I called him sometimes by the way - Chris Farter - hur hur hur. Once I even called him Piss Farter, which was dead funny. Everyone said so. Even Peter was laughing and he never laughs at anything because he is always serious. Anyway, Tim said 'Man, you're on fire tonight, Porridge! Lay that science on me one more time,' and he said some of the words in a funny voice like he was having a seizure or something, but anyway I said it all again once I had worked out what he was asking for and I thought up some more and sort of carried it on.

Chris is sitting on the chair.
He is sitting over there.

I just made it up like that, just saying it as soon as I thought of it. I didn't have it written down or nothing. I just made it up and said it. While I was saying it Tim was making funny shapes with his fingers and kept saying things like yeah boy, Porridge is keeping it hot to death for the UK, and he said UK like yooooo kaaay which was a bit weird, but I wasn't really paying him too much attention because of course I had just invented rapper's music.

'That was right good that was,' said the man who had bought Cosey Fanny a basket of complementary muffins from the man who had organised our pop concert.

'Yes,' I said. 'What be your name, my good man?'

'Afrika Bambaataa,' he smiled.

And that was how I done it. Even though Throbbing Gristle was splitting up but I knew I would always be able to think of something new to keep myself busy.

Red Christmas

I sometimes wonder whether it's really fair to preserve the anonymity of a former partner specifically by referring to her as either Dora the Explorer or Edna Mode from The Incredibles, cover identities chosen because she resembled both and I take cathartic pleasure from the admittedly venomous intent of such references. Perhaps, on consideration it is both childish and unfair, and after all, neither Nickelodeon nor Pixar have ever said a bad word about me, at least not so far as I know. Perhaps I need to take a different approach to this...

I met Dora Mode from The Explorables during the summer of 2005 as I was delivering her mail. By October we were romantically involved, and by November I'd been asked if I would like to spend Christmas with her at her mother's house in Richmond, Surrey. I was overjoyed and I said yes, taking the invitation as an indication that this relationship would be going somewhere, or at least that it would probably stop being quite so shit at some point in the near future.

The mother in question was old, frail, and in her nineties. She came from a wealthy upper class family, and had once worked as secretary to someone significantly ministerial in France. I had the impression she may once have been the just sort of girl to catch the eye of Cary Grant as he played the fruit machines of Monte Carlo, a giggling débutante who could probably knock back her own weight in cocktail olives on one bar tab - for all of her possible failings, an ultimately good natured soul. Unfortunately she was also the cause of everything bad that had ever happened to Dora Mode of The Explorables, at least according to the whining testimony of the endlessly wronged child.

We stood on the doorstep late Christmas Eve. The door opened. The old woman was clearly delighted to see her only daughter, but the feeling was less than mutual.

'Hello Mum,' Dora Mode of The Explorables chirped with the weary resignation of an Ealing comedy policeman catching a serial safe-cracker once again up to his old tricks. She breezed through to the kitchen and began removing things from the fridge, checking the sell-by date on each and registering trace elements of disgust with tutting noises. 'Oh Muuuum,' she whined, barely able to conceal either her revulsion, or the pleasure she took in her revulsion.

Christmas morning came as a welcome distraction from Dora Mode of The Explorables' seemingly endless round of complaints and observations regarding the myriad ways in which the frail old woman had let everyone down - the numerous criteria by which she had apparently failed as both a mother and a human being. Of the many criticisms expressed, there were few I could really see as being either justified or worth worrying over, or as necessarily having any bearing on anyone other than the old woman herself. My girlfriend ground her teeth with unalloyed rage over the state of the vast mansion which was her mother's home. The place could have been in better shape: a cracked window pane here, maybe a careless splash of paint intruding upon a skirting board there or a washer requiring replacement. I had the impression that Dora Mode of The Explorables was mainly concerned about how much work would need to be done before she could sell the house once she had inherited it, and the rest of her testimony was just the usual passive-aggressive coercion by which she interacted with people, that being her principal means of communication; but as I say, Christmas morning had come.

Dora's mother beamed and clapped her hands softly together like a charming Victorian child. 'Oh goody!'

I opened one present. Dora Mode of The Explorables had bought me a green and black knitted woollen sweater with matching gloves and hat. I liked the sweater but the gloves and hat seemed weird, something that would be worn by a website designer named Toby as he dropped Jessica off for her violin lesson, a man who was like really into Dylan at the moment, yeah?

A few weeks after the relationship had been declared official, Dora Mode of The Explorables had told me that she was not going to try to change me because - in her own words - she had learned from past experience that it never worked. I had foolishly said that I didn't really mind, and so she took this as an enthusiastic invitation, and I became her project.

At the time I favoured plain white shirts with a suit, a little worn but not actually scruffy - dark jacket and trousers and occasionally with a tie if I was feeling a bit snazzy. I never felt comfortable with any sort of affected Bohemian look, and still believe that a person who is truly able to express their personality through the way they dress probably doesn't have much of a personality to express. Additionally, the suit had worked well for me in Mexico. I guess I didn't look so smart as to suggest I was worth robbing, but neither did I seem like a tourist - smart but not officiously so. This was what a couple of people told me in any case. Dora Mode of The Explorables said that I dressed like an old man and that I needed to get with it, and it didn't seem worth arguing because I was usually either wrong or just plain stubborn.

I liked the sweater, but at the same time it made me feel sad. My one true love had given me a present which could quite easily have come from one of those aunts seen only every few years, usually at either a wedding or a funeral. It didn't say much for our relationship.

The other present was a box about the size of a packet of Jacob's cream crackers. This seemed more promising, more suggestive of possibilities. The present turned out to be four short lengths of curved track for a Hornby clockwork model railway of the 1920s, still in the original slightly dusty box. The track was, so far as I could tell, made of tin and was a little rusted. At some point during the previous three months I'd told Dora Mode of The Explorables how I had loved model railways as a child.

'I hope it didn't set you back too much.' I was trying to work out why someone would shell out what I presumed would have been steep collectors' prices for something of such esoteric interest, something which made no sense in isolation.

'I found it in the store cupboard at the back of the toy shop. It seemed a shame to throw it out, but I could never quite work out who to give it to.'

Merry Christmas. Here's something I stole from work.

She elaborated, returning with relish to the recurring theme of how she felt she had deserved a little payback from that place. She often spoke of the one previous job I recall her mentioning in such terms as the sort of grinding shit we all have to put up with from time to time as we work the post, the buses, security guard, canning factory, on the bins, street sweeper, or a couple of months behind the till of a toy shop in West Dulwich. We've all been there. We've all had to carry that weight.

Christmas dinner came and went, most of it taken up with Dora Mode of The Explorables' commentary regarding how her mother had ruined Christmas dinner in addition to everything else.

'I would have enjoyed some bread sauce,' the old woman sighed quietly to herself as her only child launched into further critical discourse punctuated with resentful mouthfuls of turkey.

Christmas came and went, and then came and went again. The second year was at Dora Mode of The Explorables' home, with her mother being delivered by taxi on the morning itself. The day was about as festive as its predecessor and by this time I realised that the old lady and myself would have enjoyed it more without the presence of the one person we had in common.

The last Christmas was preceded by my announcing that I was looking for a flat of my own. I had moved in with Dora Mode of The Explorables because there didn't seem to be any other option, and I hoped it might be the detail our relationship had been missing, the element which finally got everything working. Nevertheless I had also feared it would prove to be a mistake, and sure enough it was. After about six months I felt like killing myself, by which I don't mean that I was having me a big ol' sad, but that some days I would lay in my hot bath after work and consider all that I had heard about its benefits as a crucible in which one might open up a major artery or two. Life with Dora Mode of The Explorables was dark and joyless beyond anything I had been able to imagine, and I knew that escape could only be affected by means of gargantuan effort. I wasn't sure if I had the willpower left to do so.

It turned out that I did. I reasoned that a leap in the dark would land me in a better place, because nothing could be as terrible as the present; and so I began looking at horrible flats the size of rabbit hutches for which I could barely afford rent. I told Dora Mode of The Explorables that this would be the best thing for our relationship, because we would no longer be living on top of one another. We would have room to breath.

The first few places I saw were unbelievably bad, but I kept on looking because I knew that once I was gone, I would never have to see Dora Mode of The Explorables or deal with her aggressive and psychotic insecurity ever again. All I had to do was keep her happy for another couple of weeks, or if not happy, at least disinclined to hump all my shit out onto the street and set fire to it.

I had already ruined the last Christmas with my stated desire to move out, but regardless of this, I bought her a tin opener and a stuffed owl. I had, against all expectations, found a flat in Camberwell which if extortionately priced and tiny, was at least clean and had not recently been used as a shooting gallery. I was on the home stretch, just a few weeks left in which to sit and wait for the end of my sentence.

Dora Mode of The Explorables had once phoned me at work, asking me to come home and open a tin of cat food. For some reason she was unable to open this particular tin of cat food under her own steam, so I had to suspend everything and cycle back because this was the sort of thing a truly loving boyfriend would do for his sweetie, and because I had no choice, and my obstinacy and selfishness had been noted.

'Pringle is meowing,' she informed me testily, apparently adding animal cruelty to the list of my crimes.

So I bought her a tin opener for that last Christmas, an expensive model from a pretentious kitchenware boutique that had recently appeared at the lower end of Lordship Lane. It was well made, an ostentatious precision tool by which even Dora Mode of The Explorables' feeble hands would be able to open the toughest, craggiest tin of Whiskas. It was to be my replacement.

The stuffed owl was something to which she had specifically directed me with the words I'm going to tell you what I want for Christmas this year so that you don't mess it up again. We had seen the owls in one of Dulwich's many gift shops, suppliers of pretentious knick-knackery to the overmoneyed and vacuous. They were hand sewn from recycled materials, and each one sold funded the travel expenses of either Sting or Bono visiting a deprived village in Africa, or something of the sort. Dora Mode of The Explorables resembled an owl in a certain light, and seemed to have a thing about the creatures. I suspect she regarded an owl of some description as her spirit animal, but had probably decided I wouldn't understand and so had never deigned to discuss it.

Her world was informed by all manner of personal esoteric beliefs, mostly derived from wishy-washy new-age sources and self help literature - feng shui, the power of positive thinking, whatever drippy motivational crap was filling column inches that week - which could be adopted without having to think too hard about any of it. Anything which provided an explanation for why her life hadn't turned out quite how she wanted besides that which involved her own agency was always welcome. If she appeared unemployable, it might be a misaligned chair blocking the flow of ley lines emanating from the front room. She once took all the doors in the house off their hinges so as to allow for the free passage of positive energy, then had to put most of them back on when winter turned the place into an icebox. One element of this custom mythology was the colour red. Its apparent significance explained a home-made motivational message handwritten on a piece of paper and blutacked to the wall behind the telephone:

I am the red light that calls people to stop what they are doing, to come out to play and have fun.

Dora Mode of The Explorables' life coach had probably drawn this one up for her, or out of her or whatever. Unfortunately, Dora Mode of The Explorables' presence was not something which caused people to have fun in my experience, quite the opposite in fact; and no amount of motivational mantras were going to change that. I often wondered if it ever occurred to her that the associations of red lights were generally quite different, mostly serving as a warning or else prohibiting some action, both of which struck me as greatly more suited to her personality. Anyway, the point is that she liked red so I coughed up the twenty quid, bought the owl, and wrapped it in red paper.

The last Christmas came.

She opened the package containing the tin opener, and regarded it as though I'd bought her a butt plug for Christmas. She had taken it as a token of my sarcasm, which surprisingly it wasn't.

'That isn't your main present,' I squeaked, trying hard to appear confident, or at least to avoid sounding like I was delivering the apology she would almost certainly soon demand.

She opened the second box, carefully so as to avoid tearing the precious magic red paper. The stuffed owl sat inside its clear plastic packaging. Dora Mode of The Explorables stared at it for a moment before speaking. 'Did you keep the receipt?'

I tried to work out what could be wrong, given that she had specifically asked for this one. I felt a surge of panic bordering on terror. 'Yes. Do you not like it?'

'I wanted the red one.'

There had been a number of owls in the shop, all different colours, and I recalled that she had been looking at a red variant when we were there on the browse. The one I had bought was the last owl left, and was pale blue in colour.

I handed over the receipt and we didn't discuss it again. The next day I noticed that the red wrapping paper had been carefully flattened out and pinned on the wall as though it were a poster.

Months later, once we had separated following one of the most enjoyable rows I've ever had the pleasure to inspire, she admitted that the tin opener had come in very useful. She had grown determined to view our split as a trial separation at the end of which we would surely be reunited, all the stronger for the experience. She may simply have been scratching around for whatever she thought would make me happy, or she could have been telling the truth.

Years later, once the nightmare was finally over, I sold the vintage model railway track on eBay. It turned out that it wasn't in great condition, despite having the original box, and two lengths of the track that would have originally been included were absent.

Some bloke gave me a fiver for it.

Maybe I should have bought her a butt plug.

The Lennytown Express

It strikes me as peculiar that I live in a world in which the complete works of Led Zeppelin can be stored on an After Eight mint, Louis Armstrong has set foot on the moon, and yet the span of my own life has encompassed a not quite industrial age during which one man was once required to milk a hundred or so dairy cattle by means of bucket and stool. I don't actually recall my father milking all of those cows by hand, and in any case I doubt it would have been just him on the job, but I vividly remember the day when trucks arrived at the farm bringing with them the new mechanised milking machinery; and I recall being aware of this representing a significant change to the way things had been done before. The waste ground at the side of our tenant housing was briefly occupied by huge metallic structures, great angular beams of sculpted aluminium or steel shining in the sun and awaiting installation in the milking parlour. It was impossible for me to even guess at what function these things would soon perform, and it seemed as though they could have been deposited in our midst by a spaceship from a futuristic civilisation.

The building work began, and one by one the silver machines went into the building, leaving in their wake great mounds of sand at the back of the landing site, near the workshop. Being about five years old, I began to carve out channels in an effort to control water I had bought from the standpipe in a bucket. The gutting and refurbishment of the milking parlour yielded lengths of old piping, possibly lead, which I would bury in my mountain of sand, pushing the end of one limescaled length up against another in an effort to carve out my own private sewer system through which water would course according to my will alone.

Inevitably the fun was not to last as Alan, who was probably about ten and who lived in one of the other tenant houses, saw me building my kingdom of sand and irrigation, and decided I could use a little help. I disliked his plans for my water system, none of which seemed to represent an improvement so far as I could see, and I had been doing just fine without his advice. Worse was that he somehow managed to get out of me that I had recently inherited a Mamod steam engine.

Mamod of Birmingham began making their tiny replica steam engines in 1937, and the toys had been popular ever since. My father had been given one of their stationary engines, a boiler of either tin or copper mounted on a metal base, heated by a small fire lit beneath, and driving a wheel which could be used to provide motive power for the similarly popular Meccano construction sets to which most male children aspired during the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, one could simply fire the thing up and watch the wheel spinning around for the sheer thrill of it. Steam had mostly been replaced by electricity or diesel as the driving force of industry by the time I was born. A few steam engines were supposedly still in operation, working out their last few years prior to retirement, but we all knew what a steam engine looked like, what it could do, and even how it worked. It made for a great toy. My father's steam engine was red and black, the paint slightly chipped, but otherwise beautifully hand-crafted and very robust. Alan took it to pieces, and then explained which parts of the gutted engine I would be allowed to keep. The shinier parts were to remain in his hands, payment for his sterling work in destroying the steam engine. With hindsight it seems almost like some genetic imperative to strip the copper piping out of abandoned buildings for sale as scrap had driven his hand even before he fully understood what he was doing, although an equally valid explanation is that he was simply an evil little tosser.

When my father got wind of the enforced privatisation of the steam engine which had brought him such pleasure as a child, he said nothing, but then he didn't need to as his brow darkened to an Old Testament hue of righteous fury. We got on with Alan's family, but mainly because there were only four families living on the farm - including that of Mr. Harding, the owner - so we were obliged to get on whether we really liked them or not, and so far as I am able to recall, we sort of didn't. I don't know whether Alan was punished, although even if he was, he was a repeat offender so I'm not sure it would have made much difference.

A couple of years later - I would guess around 1974 or maybe 1975 - I was bought a brand new Mamod steam engine for Christmas, and even better, this was a steamroller, the mobile kind which I knew a few of the kids at school in Ilmington also owned, although most of them seemed to have the traction engine variant. It was wonderful. One filled the tray with methylated spirit - or wood alcohol as it is known here in the US - set it to burning beneath the cylindrical boiler, and as soon as you had steam you were away. It almost seems strange to refer to it as a toy steam engine given its operating on the same principle as the real thing. It was simply a scaled down steam engine and was therefore quite different to toy cars of the day, none of which ran on a tiny internal combustion engine. By this point I was either wise to Alan or he'd been sent to borstal or something, so his help was no longer a problem.

The first public event to which I took my engine for the appreciation of other kids was at our school. Mr. Davies our teacher had told us we could bring in our steam engines if we so wished, and we would get them all going in the playground. Apparently being the last steam generation, we made quite a show of it with fifteen or so different engines brought along by various kids, mostly traction engines, my steamroller, and a few of the older stationary versions similar to that which had been asset-stripped by Alan the tosser. My best friend at the time was Matthew Beecham, a boy from the year above my own with an unusually dry sense of humour.

We stood looking at the miniature engines lined up on the tarmac. The presence of wheeled variations seemed to suggest the possibility of a race, which had apparently dictated the arrangement despite that half of the kids were bent over stationary boilers fiddling with their matches and cigarette lighters.

Matthew pulled his characteristic face of incredulity and drew my attention to Len's steam engine. Len was one of those kids whom we knew with some certainty would never get the call from NASA, but he had a rounded, likeable quality that inspired empathy. Oddly, his short blonde hair and squinty face made me think of those kids who apparently did so well selling American Seeds that they just had to tell us all about it on the back covers of imported Marvel Comics. Len made me think of potatoes and 1955 and The Waltons, and in a good way. He did not quite belong to our modern world, and neither did his red and black steam engine. It was a stationary model, and one that had lost its shine some years before. It seemed possible given that Len's family weren't millionaires, that it had been put to actual work for most of its life, perhaps sharpening knives with the Mamod grinding wheel in the name of supplementing whatever bacon Len's dad was able to bring home. Len's engine, in comparison to our cleaner, newer, better-oiled models, was identified by Matthew as an old banger, and was accordingly already belching out smoke of an entirely more ominous caste than that of the other engines.

Gradually the trill of tiny whistles sounded across the playground as our boilers built up motive force. We engaged the gears and a few of the traction engines began to trundle off in the general direction of the monkey bars.

I'm not sure if either Matthew or myself had yet learned to say fucking hell, but if we had, then one of us probably did.

Len's engine popped and spat angrily, its chipped red base plate vibrating on the ground as it began to surge forward like a drunk relative at a Christmas party, overtaking at least one of the traction engines. Matthew describes himself crying with laughter, which I don't recall, but probably because I was stood watching with my mouth hanging open as Len's stationary engine somehow overtook its wheeled brethren.

We all felt a bit sorry for Len, although I don't remember him being particularly ashamed of the performance put on by his engine, or even particularly traumatised by the pleasure that his old banger had brought us. We recreated the incident in conversation over and over.

'Here comes the Lennytown train.' Matthew would furrow his brow into grim resolve, then piston his hands to invoke the mighty power of steam before stalking angrily forward with onomatopoeic determination. 'Lenny-puff-puff, Lenny-puff-puff, Lenny puff-puff—' He reached up a hand to pull the chord, letting out a blast of an imaginary whistle, an elongated falsetto Le-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-n! Le-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-n!

The story still brings us pleasure even now, or did when we met up around 2007 or thereabouts. Len should be proud to have given us such a lasting and happy memory.

In 2011, I moved to Texas, bringing my Mamod steamroller, and still with its box too. Having acquired a stepson I liked the image of my passing it on to him, just as my father had attempted to pass his own Mamod steam engine on to me. The problem is that I'm not sure Junior would really appreciate it, which isn't necessarily to cast aspersions on him so much as to acknowledge the fact of a working die-cast metal steam engine being so far outside the realm of his experience that I don't think he would know what to make of it, and so it would join that legion of more contemporary physical and technological novelties which hold his attention for a half day before he returns to the games on his iPad. He has grown up under circumstances bearing little common ground with my own, just as the world I entered was at least a little different to that from which my father sprang forth; and yet those worlds were perhaps not so distant from one another, for technological progress had none of the breakneck momentum it has acquired in recent times. Even if my world had moved on from steam, I understood the principle just as I got the jokes in the comics I once read, written by people referencing their own austere childhood years immediately following the second world war.

This is a different world, and I live in a very different part of the world, which is to acknowledge nothing more qualitative than the influence of change. Sometimes it is simply enough to be able to look back and see how far we have come, and that is probably more important than who gets it and who doesn't.