The Walk

A couple of years ago my wife and I went to a talk given by Danny Trejo. Amongst that which he shared with us was a piece of advice - if you have children, make the effort to peel the tablets, laptops and smartphones from their faces and go walking with them, just once a week. Make it a regular thing, a local park or out in the country or wherever so they will at least have something to look back on which didn't require an internet connection, now that the family evening meal is apparently a thing of the past.

It seemed like good advice. We tried it once or twice and then fell out of the habit, which was a shame because it had been fun.

We're now almost a year into the pandemic, which hasn't made a lot of difference to me, but working from home has made a big difference to my wife - specifically that she's not keen on it; and a huge difference to my stepson who, to put it diplomatically, is now a different shape to what he was this time last year due to his schooling having occured under the exact same conditions as everything else he does, and almost everything else he does is game related, punctuated with two or three daily trips to the kitchen for hot dogs, noodles or diet soda. Therefore, during one of my infrequent - or what I hope are infrequent - non-specific meltdowns brought on by the general crapness of whatever was bothering me that month - my customary and another thing coda focused on Junior, specifically on his recent Cyril Smithification, as I believe is the recognised medical term. I don't care what the weather is like, I probably fumed, every fucking Sunday like we said we'd do whether we feel like it or not, and no exceptions to the rule. This ends here.

I didn't actually say this ends here because it's something generic action heroes in shit films tend to say when their dialogue is written by someone with no actual talent, but had I done so, this would have referred to the kid's lack of exercise; and the maddening fact that he's clearly well aware of needing more exercise, or at least some exercise, or at least that his Cyril Smithification can hardly be viewed as a positive development, and yet he does nothing about it of his own volition; although to be fair that's probably because he's a kid and that's how they work. Anyway, the point is that it was clearly down to us to get things moving.

Our first few outings were to Salado Creek, and the very first one was to the wild stretch between Nacogdoches and Wetmore. The boy was taking part in some birdwatching exercise organised online by the local zoo, at which he volunteered back before the pandemic. Kids all over the city would be spending the day outside, then checking back with lists of all the birds they'd spotted, and our boy is particularly fond of lists and nature, so any chance to combine the two and he's first in the queue. We stopped off at Walmart to buy wellington boots so as to reduce the possibility of being killed by poisonous snakes while crashing around in the wilderness, then headed off for Ladybird Johnson trailhead. From there we walked the length of Morningstar Boardwalk - which is about a mile - then went off road, so to speak. Being a creek, the land is prone to intermittent flooding punctuated by spells sufficiently dry as to allow for everything to turn into meadows and woodland, albeit meadows and woodland of a wild and uneven composition. We spent about thirty minutes making slow progress through the long grass, doing our best to avoid potholes while spotting birds, by which point the kid said he was exhausted, with some justification, and so we came home.

More recently, now that it's become a regular feature of our Sunday afternoon, we've stuck to the boardwalk, adding a couple of hundred yards each time before we turn back, so we're nearly at Wetmore where the trail dips under both the highway and the railroad. I can write railroad without it being an affectation because I live in America. The boy has theorised that we'll eventually make it to the Canadian border before we turn back, although hopefully he'll have moved out by that point, even if only to a retirement home.

After a couple of trips to the boardwalk, working up to a distance of about three miles, we switched to the land bridge at Phil Hardberger Park, mainly because they'd just finished building the thing and we wanted to see what it was like. It's essentially a field built across the top of a highway so as to allow deer and other critters to cross from one bit of park to another. Unfortunately, half of San Antonio had the same idea so it felt a bit like a cinematic exodus of some description, as though we were all going to see where the saucer had landed. Our first expedition to Phil Hardberger Park, some years before, was distinguished by our progress being momentarily halted by a massive snake crossing the path. It was about ten foot long, or something in the vicinity, and was taking its time. My wife still swears that it looked thoroughly inconvenienced by us, and I provisionally gave the snake the name of Snakey, for the sake of argument. Our first expedition to Phil Hardberger Park is therefore remembered as the time we met Snakey the snake, so this latest occasion was a bit underwhelming.

Last weekend we switched to Holbrook Road, which actual runs parallel to Salado Creek for a couple of miles. We parked by the Thai place on Rittiman, then walked down the feed road to Holbrook, mainly so we could look at the goats in the adjacent field. The male may be the biggest goat I've ever seen, and they were hanging out with a donkey on this occasion. Naturally this inspired the kid to one of his monologues - fun facts relating to goats, each one interspersed with a pause then let me see, what else is there? Most of it is stuff my wife and I already know on account of the fact that we both went to school, but occasionally he'll throw up something we hadn't heard before; plus it's nice that he's actually interested in something.

We pass the Black Swan Inn. 'Can you guess what happened there?' my wife asks.

I assume she's referring to the battle of Salado Creek which is commemorated and described by a stone memorial just on the other side of the inn's driveway, but I say nothing.

The kid doesn't know.

'That's where your dad and I got married.'

She means her first husband, obviously. I've seen the photos of the wedding, which occurred even before I owned a passport, let alone had any idea that I would end up living in Texas.

The kid mentions something about how swans are able to break a human arm.

'Here come the swan facts,' I say, but no-one hears me.

The boy tells us about swans for the next fifteen minutes. I don't really mind because the dispensation of information is what he enjoys most, even when we already knew what he's just told us; and I know he's begun to look forward to these Sunday outings, just as Danny Trejo promised; and because we know that one day we'll all be glad we did this, because we're glad that we're doing it right now.

Tony

Maisie, our second rabbit, died on Friday, roughly two months after Charlie, our first rabbit. We both felt terrible beyond my ability to describe how we felt. On Saturday we went to a plant nursery. I bought a small pot of rosemary and an esperanza plant with which to mark Maisie's grave. I'd marked the place where I buried Charlie with a chrysanthemum and one of the small wild petunias which grow hereabouts and which he liked to eat - something for him to munch on in the bunny afterlife, I told myself.

I buried Maisie on the north side of our garden because there wasn't much room near Charlie. Taking her little body from the carrier in which she'd come back from the vet and placing it in the ground nearly killed me. As with Charlie, I covered her grave with small stones, like a tiny cairn, so as to discourage anything which might try to dig her up but also to channel water to the roots of the rosemary and the esperanza to some extent. Maisie had liked rosemary when we gave it to her.

This left us with an empty hutch sat in the front room, lifeless and silently reminding us of death. Could we not have done something more for our rabbit? it seemed to ask. We could move the hutch out onto the back porch, but it would still pose the same horrible question; as I had built the thing myself, we weren't chucking it away; but it wasn't going to be a problem.

Someone on facebook had sent Bess a message. The woman had found a baby rabbit and was unable to look after him. She had two large dogs and desperately need to find a home for Tony. We already liked the name she'd given him, so on Sunday we drove out to Westover Hills. The woman came to the door with the bunny in her hands. He was tiny, about three months old and mostly white with black spots, a hotot like Charlie had been; and the patch on his nose resembles the silhouette of a bunny. She had found him at some fast food joint, presumably dumped as they always seem to be.

We could hear a little boy crying elsewhere in the house along with dogs barking.

'He doesn't want to let Tony go,' the woman said as I took this tiny bundle of fluff from her and held him to me. He looked a little bewildered, but not unhappy.

A small tearful boy came to the door, red-faced.

'You can come and visit whenever you like,' I said.

'Mom, can we go and see Tony?' the child pleaded.

'Sure, we can.'

'We like the name too,' I added. 'So he's still going to be Tony.'

'That was his idea,' the woman said smiling at her child. 'It's short for Antonio.'

'Antonio,' I laughed. 'I like it.'

'As in San Antonio,' she explained with a roll of her eyes.

We'd bought a pet carrier but Tony sat on my chest for the entire journey home, seeming neither skittish nor particularly spooked by this whole experience. He settled in fine, and learned to ascend the stepped ramp in his hutch within about four hours where it took Charlie about a week. He learned how to hop up onto the couch almost straight away and has already made friends with most of the cats. Junior sent photos of Tony to all of his friends, one of whom commented that Tony's bunny-shaped nose patch is sort of like me getting a picture of myself tattooed on my face.

We'll never forget Charlie or Maisie and we still miss them every day, but Tony is helping.

Maisie

Maisie was our second rabbit. She turned up in the garden of some friend of my wife. They weren't able to catch her so they called us, because apparently we're bunny experts now. The thing was, they were moving and the new occupants were bringing a couple of large dogs with them. Bess went over and said that Maisie hopped right up to her.

We already had one rabbit, namely Charlie, so we kept Maisie in the growing frame in which we'd kept Charlie while I was building him a hutch. Charlie had been named Maisie until we realised he was a boy, and Bess had liked the name. I'd made the growing frame of wood and chicken wire so it was fairly hutch-like anyway. Charlie was male and hadn't been fixed, and Maisie was female so we had to keep them separate. Occasionally they would snoof each other through the chicken wire, and I imagined a happy future for the two of them playing together outside, hopping about in the run and doing bunny stuff once they had been fixed; but as I wrote in Farewell to Charlie, it wasn't to be.

Charlie's death was devastating, but Maisie helped us through the worst of it. That said, we were worried about her. She had pasteurella, a respiratory condition in rabbits which can either be fatal or never really amount to anything, but is something they're stuck with and which can be passed on if they have it. She suffered sneezing fits and seemed to be putting on weight only very slowly. She was about eight months old when we got her, so the vet had reckoned. Her fur was a testimony to her time spent living rough and the individual vertebrae of her spine could be felt in her back.

A month or so passed and it seemed like she was sneezing less and less, and she started to fill out and seemed happier until, one day I noticed I could no longer feel the knobbly bits of her spine, and her fur was softer, and she seemed livelier and would tear around like crazy in the run outside, sometimes so fast she'd popcorn up into the air, as it's termed. She had about two good weeks, then we heard a sneeze. Her appetite went right down and she seemed listless.

Bess took her to the emergency vet and came back with a course of antibiotics. It was an infection of some description. Another couple of days passed and we found blood in her urine. Bess found another vet specialising in bunnies, because we weren't going back to the fuckers who had killed Charlie.

The vet said it was her heart. It stopped and started, which was unknown. They x-rayed her and found her insides were all messed up, congenital deformities of such severity that it seemed incredible that she could have lasted so long as she did. She was probably never destined to have a long or happy life.

Two months after Charlie, at the close of an unusally shitty year, this really stuck it in and twisted it around.

She helped us though the death of Charlie. She was a delight and had a completely different personality to him, more gentle and she liked to run up my chest and lick my nose with her tongue, which was weird but adorable.

She was our chocolate bunny and she was beautiful.

Brad and Tabitha

Every Tuesday evening we feed feral cat colonies in our part of San Antonio. It's a voluntary thing on behalf of our local Feral Cat Coalition, which is an official body recognised by the city. It has been established that it's better to stabilise feral cat colonies than to just round them up and gas them, as certain joyless cunts seem to think would be preferable. Stable colonies are easier to neuter and prevent incursion by wilder, un-neutered cats. Our local colonies are mostly tended by Susan and Randy, who do a lot for the local feral cats and deserve at least one night off a week, so that's where we come in.

We have seven colonies we visit, leaving food and water at each. It takes about half an hour at most. There's a colony on our route at an apartment complex which we don't touch because a local cat-hating nutcase has occasionally threatened Randy and Susan with a firearm. They didn't feel comfortable about asking us to cover that spot.

Nevertheless, we've had a similar flare up elsewhere, albeit one without any firearms. The colony is usually referred to as the double gates. It's waste ground behind a chain link fence with locked gates. The owner let us have a key so we could get in and feed the cats - one of the larger colonies, ten cats or maybe more. Unfortunately the land has been sold, so now we have to feed the cats on the verge in front of the fence because no-one seems to know what the new owner is doing; but it's a quiet street so it isn't a problem, or it wasn't.

We park on the verge and get out. Bess has milk containers filled with water. I have a bucket of dry cat food and a scoop. We stumble into the bushes to find the usual spot as black cats emerge from all around. We stumble because it's seven in the evening in November and is dark, and America doesn't seem to have gone for street lighting with quite the same enthusiasm as my country of origin.

'You shun't be feeding those cats,' we hear yelled from a house across the road, and yelled loud because he wants us to hear. He sounds drunk. 'Y'all are idiots.'

Bess and I are both shocked. We didn't expect this. I experience a sudden adrenaline rush, getting ready for a fight. 'Oh fuck off,' I call back, because it's cold, dark, and I'm not shouting the entire first paragraph across a street at someone I don't know.

'Y'all are encouraging wild animals and vermin,' he bellows with more feeling. I guess he didn't expect to be told to fuck off. Over the months, we've worked out how much food to dish out so that the cats get fed without leaving any surplus, but it hardly seems worth arguing the point.

Now his wife joins in. 'Y'all should be getting them neutered not feeding them. Y'alls are idiots!'

I can see where the house is but I'm concentrating on dishing out the food and getting out of there. Bess later tells me the two of them are hanging out of a window as they shout at us.

'We do get them neutered!' I call back.

We don't personally, but Randy and Susan handle that side of things fairly regularly. The problem at the moment is the coronavirus outbreak has limited the availability of spaces at animal clinics for those participating in the trap-neuter-return program. Anyway, the point is that the cats are neutered, even if it's not all of them or straight away.

'We do get them neutered!' I called back, in case you had forgotten.

'No y'alls don't!' bellows the male voice. It's hardly what you'd call a coherent refutation.

'Okay,' I say.

Stupidity makes me angry, because there's been too much of it on display this year, and often somehow presented as a mark of character. I shout back. My voice probably wavers and cracks but I'm past caring. 'We feed the cats. We trap then when we're able. We neuter them but it doesn't happen all at once,' I yell, or something to that effect, then add, 'it's not that fucking hard to understand, you stupid wanker.'

This is how I remember the exchange, but the moment was heated. In any case, by this point we're done. We get back into the car and head for the next colony. Later we pass the house and take their license plate. Bess engages in her usual detective work.

Their names are Brad and Tabitha. They're renting. One of them was born in 1985 but I can't remember which one. They're both sort of young, or younger than we are. Cops were recently called to a disturbance. They were both drunk, Brad sat on the porch, Tabitha out in the yard yelling about how she has the best vagina in all San Antonio - or words to that effect - and somebody had better come and get some of it, an address delivered as the kid, or possibly kids, looked on with their father. They've been yelling at Randy and Susan too, it turns out.

I'm dreading our next encounter, but the house is dark and silent the following Tuesday, and the same the one after that. They've also left Randy and Susan alone.

Maybe it's not that fucking hard to understand shamed them into behaving themselves, although it seems unlikely.

Peter Roger's Alien

'What? You want me to go in there?' Albert Twiddle's nostrils flared behind his visor as he pointed ahead with a gloved hand. 'You must be joking!' Beyond the alien arch lay a murky interior, fog shrouding a floor space covered in something fungal, something grown - row upon row of fleshy spheres looming up from the mist in neatly ordered lines.

Sergeant Rumpo rolled his eyes and took another puff on his fag. 'Oh for Pete's sake,' he expectorated as his domed helmet once again filled with a pearl grey cloud, obscuring his vision. There was a whir of servomotors as the suits systems sucked out the smoke, revealing him now blinking and red-eyed. 'I don't know what you think we're paying you for, Twiddle, because it certainly ain't your sunny disposition. Now do your job and get in there and have a butcher's for us like a good boy.' He grinned a wrinkled grin and patted Twiddle on the head.

'I'll thank you to keep your filthy hands off my helmet. I shall be speaking to my union rep about this.'

'Oh blimey.' The Sergeant shook his head, and pressed the stud upon his chest unit which redirected his radio communications. 'Bernard, I believe one of your colleagues would like a word, if you can spare a moment.'

A third man trudged up from behind, from where the rest of the team were milling around the loading ramp of the drop ship. He stood almost seven feet tall, dark piercing eyes in a great bald dome of a head glaring down from behind his visor. 'What?'

Twiddle pulled himself up to his full height, which failed to make much of a difference. 'He wants me to go traipsing around in that, that,' - he flapped his hands towards the arch - 'whatever that is.'

'So?'

'There might be something horrible lurking in there. I don't like the look of it. Something might get hold of me.'

'You should be so flipping lucky!' The Sergeant dispensed laughter, hyak hyak hyak, which seemed to hang in the air - or at least the ambient methane-hydrogen mix - like an expensive cheese.

The seven-foot man turned to Rumpo. 'I thought you was going to tell me he had a complaint about the tea in the canteen.' He went back to Twiddle, his giant face suddenly taling on the appearance of an anxious child. 'Here - you ain't got a problem with the tea, have you?'

'The tea is perfectly adequate,' Twiddle reported with a trace of acid. 'What concerns me more is the possibility of extraterrestrial ghoulies.'

'Don't they like the tea in the canteen?' Bernard turned as though to address those behind him, although they were all still back at the ship, several hundred yards away. 'Brothers, it is with great regret—'

'Oh put a sock in it!' The Sergeant pressed another stud on his chest unit, this time cutting radio communications to the taller man, whose mouth now opened and closed in silence as he continued to hector an oblivious audience like a huge pink goldfish in a bowl he'd long since outgrown.

Rumpo rounded on Twiddle once again, the face behind the visor wrinkling with resolve. 'Now you get in there and do your job like you're paid to do, or it won't be the extraterrestrial ghoulies you have to worry about.'

'No need to be like that.' Twiddle stepped back a few paces, shocked by the vehemence of the command.

'And tie your blooming laces,' Rumpo added. 'If there's ghoulies, you might at least try to make a good impression!'

Twiddle turned and stood staring at the arch, then stepped forward with a shrug. He'd been down the Bayswater Road on a Saturday evening, and whatever lay ahead could hardly be worse. As he walked beneath the arch, his booted feet entered the low level mist into which he began to sink as he went down a slight incline towards the rows of spherical growths. Another step and his foot caught on something. He stumbled then quickly righted himself.

'Oh fiddlesticks!'

Remembering his untied lace, he gazed down into the mist now swirling about his knees. Just behind, one of the fleshy orbs projected its wrinkled peak. There was something horribly familiar about the folded skin - and Twiddle realised he was now thinking of it as skin, or at least something akin to a reptilian hide. It seemed almost to glow and pulse from within, but it was difficult to be sure, peering through the visor with one's own fizzog reflected back like in the hall of mirrors at a funfair.

He shrugged, sat down, and sank his gloved hands into the mist, feeling for the errant lace. He could hear voices raised in the communications relay within his helmet, something about readings, signs of life, and Lieutenant Dimple complaining about his blooming waterworks as usual. The man really was dreadful. Heaven knows what use they thought he'd be out here so far from Earth.

As Twiddle felt the lace through the tech-sensitised fingers of his space gloves, he failed to notice tremors running through that upon which he was sat, mainly due to the thick padding in the rear of his space suit. Then suddenly, all within the margin of a split second, he found himself unseated and propelled violently forward as something horribly biological resembling a crab forcibly set up shop inside his bottom.

'Oh my word!' he expectorated violently, mouth twisting and eyes bulging as though trying to escape the confines of his head.

***

Bernard looked up from his spotted dick as applause rippled around the canteen. Twiddle came in, helped by Nurse Jeffries. He was walking a bit funny, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances, but he seemed to be wearing a faint smile.

'Blimey! We all thought you was a goner!' Bernard hooted, getting up to pull back a chair so that his colleague could sit. 'You should have seen that thing, it was right up—'

'It wouldn't be the first time, believe me.' Twiddle batted the air with a dismissive hand. He sat, still evidently fragile. 'What a palaver. I could eat a horse!'

'I think it's sausage and chips today.'

'How are you, boy?' Sergeant Rumpo came up behind to deliver a hearty slap on the back. 'All ship shape, I hope?'

'Please,' said Twiddle. 'I'd rather not think about anything nautical just now if it's all the same.'

'Here you are, love.' Nurse Jeffries set a tray down before her patient. 'Eat it all now, got to keep your strength up.'

'I'd rather not think about anything being kept up, either,' Twiddle groaned. 'Thank you, Joan. Very kind, I'm sure.'

Bernard watched his colleague tucking in. 'The grub's very good today,' he said happily. 'Miss Rhubarb certainly knows her way around a sausage.'

'That's what I've heard too,' Sergeant Rumpo added with a chuckle, sending a wrinkled wink across the room to where the Chef was clearing away a serving tray of toad in the hole.

Twiddle submitted a demure belch to the conversation, such as it was, with a slightly pained look upon his face. 'Oh dear. I don't like the sound of that.'

'Manners,' said Rumpo.

Twiddle clutched his stomach with a look of horror. 'Oh my goodness. It must be something I've eaten.'

'Well, you been in bed with a space lobster stuck to your harris since Tuesday,' explained Bernard helpfully, although not so helpful as he clearly imagined. 'Nurse Jeffries brought you stew and dumplings last night but I don't fink you had none of it.'

'Nothing wrong with Miss Rhubarb's dumplings,' added Rumpo.

'What's that about my dumplings?' called the Chef from across the canteen, a frown having made its way onto her brow.

'Nothing,' the Sergeant called back. 'We was just saying how nice they are.'

'Oh crikey,' wailed Twiddle as an extraterrestrial ghoulie effected its entrance by means of his exit.

World of Carp

I'm working in the garage when a man comes in. He has a goatee beard and little round glasses. He reminds me a bit of Ben Elton or something. Do you remember Ben Elton? He was very right on and into political correctness, wasn't he? Always going on about political correctness, he was. Ha ha! Anyway, the man is driving a Ford Mondeo and he's just filled it up with petrol. I'm surprised because you would think it might be against his principals or something.

'Pump six and this,' he says, or something, and he picks a packet of Toffos from the rack and hands them over for me to price them. Do you remember Toffos? A man's gotta chew what a man's gotta chew! Ha ha! Do you remember Brucie's Generation Game?

I scan the Toffos and the machine makes a bleeping noise like a robot - like Metal Mickey in fact, or something. Do you remember Metal Mickey? I'm surprised the man wanted Toffos. He looks like he'd rather have picked a packet of tofu! Lefties like that, don't they? They eat tofu and veggie burgers, and they have leather patches sewn onto the elbows of their jumpers. Their kids always have names like Jocasta or Xerxes or something. Ha ha!

It's terrible how they've treated Tommy Robinson, isn't it? He was only saying what the rest of us were thinking. Do you remember thinking? That's what we used to do in the old days before the internet and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, or something. Thinking was like our version of television, and we used to think all sorts of things, but of course you're not allowed to do that these days in case you think something that the liberal media elite don't like, such as how the US election was obviously rigged - a man on YouTube said so, or something.

'That will be £5.64,' I say to Mondeo man.

He gives me a tenner and I give him his change. There's a picture of the Queen on the tenner. Good thing there aren't any illegal Muslims here. They wouldn't like that - a picture of the Queen. They wouldn't like that at all, but you can't say anything about them because you're not allowed. Do you remember the Queen? We Are the Champions was their best one, I think.

I'm waiting for the man to leave but instead of going back to his car he goes to look at the mucky magazines. Meanwhile a lorry pulls in at the diesel pump, or something.

 

It didn't look much like this because this is a toy truck which I bought at the corner shop, for some reason. It's really small. A real lorry driver wouldn't be able to fit in the cab, and also it doesn't have an engine. You wouldn't be able to transport much gravel in the back of this lorry, because it's so small, or something. Who remembers Larry the Lorry on the telly when you were a kid? Always getting into trouble, wasn't he?

If Mondeo man was driving this lorry he would fill it full of tofu or kale then drive it to a lesbian women's workshop or something, but they wouldn't let him shag them because they're lezzers. Ha ha!

After a while the man decided he didn't want to buy a magazine after all so he left the garage. I don't know why he didn't just go back to his car and drive off after he'd paid. Maybe he wasn't in a hurry. There must have been some explanation, something light-hearted and partially reliant upon the audience's collective recall of some humourously substandard juvenalia from the seventies described in a tone amounting to the written equivalent of a sort of half-hearted semi-ironic shrug or something, but I can't think what it was.

 

Look! It's Malcolm Muggeridge! He used to be on the telly all the time when I was little, and if that isn't fucking funny then I don't know what is.

Who remembers John Tyndall? I know they say he stole some women's knickers from Woolies but I don't think he did it, personally. It might have been the other one. I think he was supposed to be a bit of a whoopsie, although we're not supposed to call them that any more, or something. Anyway, there's nothing about it on Wikipedia.

Do you remember Get Up and Go with Mooncat? He was a green cat from the moon. What was that all about? You're probably not even allowed to say he was green any more, or something.

Please buy my book.

Thanks a Bunch, 2020

I've seen it suggested that David Bowie was the glue which held the universe together. He died in January, 2016 and we had an extreme right wing game show host running the country by the end of the year so it feels as though there is at least a grain of poetic truth to the claim. From where I've been stood, most of this year has felt very much like the grand finale to that ball of dung we got rolling four years back, with everything having been tainted by association.

Simon Morris died at the end of 2019, as did Carol Childs. Their deaths felt like part of the same shitty process and as such seem to belong to this year in so much as that that's where the shadow has been cast. I loosely knew Simon for two decades on and off. We wrote to each other. I contributed to a few bits of music he did and he contributed to things I'd done. We had a ton of mutual friends. He was found in the River Wyre and it was almost certainly suicide. He was a couple of years younger than I am.

I knew Carol from Maidstone College of Art back in the eighties. We hadn't really kept in touch but then she turned up on facebook as everyone does sooner or later. We'd been good friends at one point. It was cancer.

My wife's grandmother died on January the first. She was in her nineties so it was hardly unexpected, which didn't really make it any easier.

Simon Morgan was killed in a road accident in April, 2020. He worked at Discovery Records in Stratford-upon-Avon when I was a teenager and as such sold me my copy of Never Mind the Bollocks. He was one of the good guys.

Another one of the good guys was Tim Webster who died in July. It was cancer. I'd known him when I lived in Medway and he's present in my best memories of the couple of years I lived there. I still can't quite believe I'm living in a world with no Tim Webster.

Jim Peet died a little after that. I knew him briefly in Maidstone and he was romantically involved with Carol Childs for a while. I'd actually forgotten he'd died but came across mention of him when looking up the timing of Tim Webster's passing on facebook; because the year has been such that it's been possible to forget the deaths of people I didn't know quite so well as I knew others.

The New Year's death of my wife's grandmother coincided with Squidward, our neighbour to the south, upping his campaign against us and our cats. He's an elderly, orange man with too much time on his hands and who regards himself as the sort of person who should probably be living in a better neighbourhood. He knows doctors and dentists, proper people, and he doesn't like cats. This is unfortunate because we run an actual cat colony from our home and are officially licensed to do so by the City of San Antonio. Our cats very occasionally poo in his garden, as do raccoons, opossums, and other neighbourhood critters for which we aren't directly responsible. He tried to take us to court for damage done to one of his beloved automobiles - of which he has three - claiming cats had scratched the paintwork of the car in question and so reduced its value, despite that a cat's claws aren't any more capable of inflicting damage on the paintwork of a car than are my own fingernails. Anyway, we had a fence built between our two houses, not so much to keep the cats on our side as to facilitate our being able to spend time in our garden without having to look at his wrinkled orange carcass or the ludicrous pony tail into which he ties what little hair he has left.

The death of my wife's grandmother and the commencement of hostilities with Squidward additionally coincided with the company changing my wife's conditions of employment, obliging her to work from home. It had seemed like the office petitioned its employees every six months or so, asking who wanted to work from home because it was the way forward and they could make great savings on the office space. Some liked the idea but most didn't. Eventually the company got tired of waiting for everyone to change their minds and told them they would be working from home. My wife wasn't happy about it. In fact, it would be fair to say that she was extremely unhappy about it.

Of course, it also meant she was a couple of months ahead of the curve when the global pandemic hit and we all had to work from home. It's a year later, and she's acclimated to working from home, but I wouldn't say she's changed her mind about the idea. Unlike myself, she's very much a social animal and doesn't do well during long periods of either isolation or solitude.

Fluff died in February. He was our oldest cat and was about ten. He had cancer and had been in decline for a couple of months. We had to have him put down and it tore my fucking heart out.

Charlie, our rabbit died in October. We'd taken him to be neutered because we'd been given a female rabbit, rescued from someone's garden. Three days later, it seemed like he wasn't doing so well. My wife took him to the emergency vet in the middle of the night and he was dead by the morning. Maisie, the female rabbit, passed about a week ago. She was about eight months old and had evidently been having a rough time when someone found her in their garden, and then gave her to us. It took her about a month to recover, to begin to seem healthy. She had a couple of good weeks, then went into decline again. The vet took an x-ray and suggested that it was a miracle she had survived so long. She hadn't been born right. Her insides were all wrong and she was never going to have a long life to any sort of standard, which is probably why she'd been dumped and ended up in someone's garden. She was beautiful.

I have no fucking words for any of this shit.

Justin, our neighbour two houses to the north, got out of prison in June. He'd done five years, or possibly four, for abuse of a senior, whatever that means. I date his return to the time when I began to notice stray dogs in our street, because Justin likes dogs. From what I can tell, Justin's animal care entails feeding table scraps to dogs he either obtains or steals from somewhere, then letting them roam the street at all other times. Justin suffers from schizophrenia and learning difficulties. Also, he's a fucking arsehole, a judgement I quantify by adding that I've known plenty of schizophrenics in my time and plenty of people with learning difficulties, and there aren't many of them whom I feel I could justifiably call fucking arseholes.

Justin's mania manifests as voices in his head, or occasionally as hallucinations. He terrorises the neighbourhood, breaking into people's yards, spending an hour sat on our porch at 2AM, attempting to kick our front door in one Sunday afternoon, smashing bottles in the road outside our house causing me to puncture the tires of my bike. The cops main concern seems to be that we don't do anything to upset him. His mother refers to him as a sweet boy after telling us about long telephone conversations when Justin was in prison during which he made repeated threats to kill her, over and over and over.

I also date the disappearance of three of our cats to around the same time that Justin came home - Grace, Holly, and Bean. Grace and Holly had been with us for at least five years. Bean was a baby, about a year old. They were generally settled and we loved them, although Holly seemed to have found a second home somewhere else and would occasionally stay away for several days at a time. Grace, by way of contrast, didn't seem to spend much time outside, preferring either the cat tree in the corner of the living room or my sock drawer.

Bean was one of four kittens rescued from a different crazy neighbour with a cat who had never been spayed. He was the smallest, the runt, all black and half the size of the others when we took them all in. Bess was terrified that he wouldn't make it, but he seemed pretty feisty to me and we made sure he got plenty of cat milk. He came to regard me as daddy and provided much comfort after Fluff died. Even at a year old, he was a small cat, and he spent almost every evening sat on my chest, obliging me to slouch back into the couch. He even smelled amazing. My wife has told me about that baby smell thing which some mothers experience with their newborn children, and somehow I had something similar with Bean. I loved that cat more than anything.

Then, one Monday about a week since I'd noticed Justin's latest doomed pair of stray dogs hanging around the street, Grace, Holly and Bean all failed to show up for breakfast on the same day, and haven't been seen since - now six months ago. We've had cats go off the radar before, but not usually our cats - those who live with us in the house - and never three of them all at the same time. We had yet another new kitten turn up at the beginning of the year, so it's possible they may have been disgruntled by her arrival, and there are all sorts of potential explanations which aren't horrible and which don't involve dogs, traffic, our cat-hating neighbour to the south, or our schizophrenic one to the north, but it's hard to get past the statistic of all three vanishing at the same time. I tell myself they probably found good homes, somehow, or at least that I don't know for absolutely certain that anything horrible came of them.

The new kitten who turned up at the beginning of the year was small and grey. We'd seen her in the street and mistaken her for Grace, who was likewise small and grey. It was obvious she'd been abandoned but we couldn't get near her. We left food out but watched her getting skinnier and skinnier as the weeks went by. Then one Saturday she ran up to us, meowing her head off as we stood in the front yard. She was skin and bone. We took her in and fed her, and she improved but slowly. We named her Professor Jiggly after a cat in a popular meme which had been doing the rounds on social media, or Jiggly for short. Then after about a month she dramatically coughed up what looked like a chicken's shoulder blade. We suddenly understood her failure to thrive and she at last developed an appetite, growing into a big, beautifully rounded, grey cat with the loudest, most persistent meow you've ever heard.

Another month after Grace, Holly and Bean disappeared, Jiggly also failed to show up at feeding time and hasn't been seen since.

All through this, all the while we were running up to a presidential election which really felt as though it was going to be the last. Those claiming to be in the know suggested that there was no way Trump could win a second term, but they had said the same thing first time around and I wasn't going to get my hopes up. We'd had a year of bullshit and a killer disease running riot with a president who believed it was all a hoax because someone had told him so and that was the version of the story he preferred; and George Floyd was murdered by those sworn to protect and serve, with all the usual Trumpanzees parroting how cops have such a hard job and need our support and anyway maybe George Floyd had kinda sorta deserved it as you would realise if you were prepared to do your research. I watched half the country reveal themselves to be bitter, mean-spirited, selfish, barely literate, racist children crawling over one another for the privilege of being first to polish master's apple while claiming these flaws as somehow representing strength of character, a form of courage even; and I say that as someone who understands why people might despise the left, because I too occasionally despise elements of the left for the exact same reason, but I'm not so fucking stupid as to mistake passing resentments for a pseudo-spiritual calling.

I've lost track of what Trump actually did this year, or what he failed to do, because there was some fresh example of his failure as a human being occurring about three or four times a week. He identified people who don't like fascism as the enemy at some point, which you would think might be a bit of a giveaway. I'm sure I remember him jovially calling for acts of physical violence against his liberal opponents, just like with Mussolini and the castor oil. I know it wasn't this year, but he never did get around to openly condemning the Ku Klux Klan - all of which cult members will denounce as either fake news, or a courageous example of free speech, or a side issue and a distraction because just look at how great the economy is doing, providing you don't take too much notice of anyone who actually understands the economy.

I spent most of the year expecting the worst, and that the worst would be followed by an indefinite suspension of the democratic process in order to somehow secure freedom by preventing the election of anyone politically to the left of Adolf Hitler. Suddenly there would be more Proud Boys on the streets of our cities, possibly working in conjunction with the cops. I didn't really expect the knock in the middle of the night, just looking for dangerous liberals, communists, or anyone who ever read a book, but then I didn't really expect the repulsive orange fascist to be elected president in the first place. About a month ago, I learned how to handle and fire a handgun. Biden had already won the election, but the fact remains that half the country voted for Dorito Benito, having lived through the first four years of his presidency and apparently thought it was just fine. I've really come to dislike the human race this year.

I'm still alive at the end of 2020, and I don't have cancer to the best of my knowledge. Others have had it much worse, but it has nevertheless been an unusually shitty year.

Hopefully, the only way left is up.