Alun Jones

It was 1985 and I was happily burning taxpayers money at Maidstone College of Art, cackling as all those tenners went up in smoke in the name of long, dull video pieces about what it was like being me. I had a friend in the neighbouring town of Chatham, a fellow student who happened to be singer and guitarist in a band called Apricot Brigade. The Medway towns, of which Chatham was but one, had quite a lively music scene which had produced, most famously, The Milkshakes, The Mighty Caesars, and The Dentists. Apricot Brigade never put out a record or achieved the fame of those aforementioned, but they played a lot of gigs and were relatively popular on the local circuit for a time. I saw them enough to be able to hum at least a few of the songs even now, thirty years later; and with hindsight, I'd say they sounded oddly like Suede, or at least Suede trying hard to be the Swans; maybe...

Alun Jones was their drummer, and the member of the band whom I initially found the most intimidating. He was taller than me, and his face seemed suited to brooding disapproval, and he said very little. I eventually got to know him moderately better and to appreciate that his face had simply formed that way; and also that he was a man of few words not because, as it sometimes appeared, they'd all become lodged in his throat like a thousand furiously red-faced colonels all attempting to exit the drawing room at the same time, but simply due to his being a quiet, reflective soul - someone not given to speech when he had nothing he wanted to say. Nevertheless, initially I didn't quite know what to make of him.

This ceased to be an issue when he left the band and joined The Dentists, at first filling in on the recording of their Down and Out in Paris and Chatham EP before signing up full time, as I remember. I liked The Dentists, but I was never much of a gig goer, and what few gigs I attended were usually snivelling nobodies playing to an audience of three in some pub toilet, so I didn't really see Alun around for a while. Furthermore, I'd ended up as his replacement when Apricot Brigade rebranded themselves as Envy, and I was brought in to play keyboard and press the go button on a TR606 drum machine. I also repeatedly hit a car door with a hammer during one song performed before a paying audience in a pathetic attempt to hitch the Envy caravan to the then lucrative Test Department bandwagon, but the less said about that the better. I think Alun may have been in the audience during one of these gigs, assuming I recall correctly that we played live more than once, but I had the impression that I was resented, that I had somehow ousted him from the group, despite the obvious fact that he was now pounding the triangle for an altogether more listenable combo who actually put out records every once in a while, and which people wanted to hear.

Alun and Mick of The Dentists.

The three years of my degree course at Maidstone College of Art came to an end in 1987, and so I moved to Chatham because the town had a less depressing dole office. As a man of leisure, freed from the rigorous demands of turning up to mumble something into a video camera every few weeks, I signed on and discovered Gruts, a café situated on the border of Chatham and Rochester run by a bloke named Gerald and his girlfriend, who I'm fairly certain was called Caroline. I took to spending long afternoons in Gruts, drinking tea, eating toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, contemplating things which no longer matter and talking rubbish with other regulars. The roster of visitors included Billy Childish, Bill Lewis, Tim Webster, and an assortment of other Medway musicians and artists, so the standard of rubbish was high; and amongst this group was Alun Jones.

He would turn up in his old man's flat cap, buy a tea, and settle in for a couple of hours, and I soon came to realise that his fearsome demeanour had happened mainly in my imagination, wrongly interpreted from the previously mentioned habit of keeping his mouth shut when he had nothing to say in conjunction with the eyebrows of a more stern personality. Whilst we didn't exactly become close friends, I certainly grew to appreciate both his presence and his sharp sense of humour. I also liked that he was not well-disposed towards the dispensation of bullshit and was accordingly and refreshingly honest.

'What I'm trying to say with my paintings,' I probably tried to explain at some point before being cut off with a withering glare.

'What I'm trying to explain with my paintings, Sergeant Major,' he would parrot with acid sarcasm before abruptly transforming into the Windsor Davies character from It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. 'Shut up!!!'

There's probably not much joy to be had from explaining the hilarity which dare speak its name only providing you were actually there, but that is - for better or worse - mainly what I remember about Alun, that he was quiet without seeming necessarily retiring, and very, very funny.

As the collected taxpayers of the British Isles drafted me into something called Job Club, a joyless institution inspired by the idea that I shouldn't stay on the dole indefinitely, I would spend each morning half-heartedly scouring classified adverts in the company of fellow scroungers and then, having fired off my daily quota of ten job applications to companies I knew would never hire me in a million years, I would head for Gruts. Alun seemed to be there most afternoons, and there was always something pleasurable about filling him in on the details of that morning's session.

He would politely enquire as to whether I had managed to secure a place to play in the sandpit that day, or he would envision new back to work campaigns to which we might soon be subjected by the DHSS.

'Job Bus™ is coming to your area,' he once chirped with a faraway look in his eyes, 'bringing jobs to suit young and old alike.'

I would relate the latest news of a fellow Job Club attendee who resembled Ronnie Corbett and was almost certainly called Dave. Dave had told me of a book purchased for his young child in which conflicted groups of black elephants and white elephants were somehow blended to become grey elephants as a result of getting all mixed up during either a fight or the spin cycle, thus presenting a portentous if slightly useless lesson about racism. This sort of ethical overcompensation would usually prompt Alun to channel either Windsor Davies or Sexton Ming's version of Olly Reed, not so much in response to political correctness gone mad, but in response to something that was quite obviously just bollocks.

Gruts closed in 1989 or thereabouts, and I moved away from Chatham, and that was the last I saw of Alun Jones. It was also the last I heard of him until a few days ago when the following appeared on facebook from Dentists guitarist Bob Collins:

I'm really sorry to post this but we've had the tragic news that Alun Jones died on Thursday night after a fire in his flat in Gillingham. Alun was our drummer from 1986 to 1991 and we lost contact with him for many years after he left the band, although we saw him fleetingly in more recent times. But he was a big part of our lives back then and will always be in our thoughts. Our heads are just spinning at the moment.

It's strange, how death works. Off the top of my head I could name ten people with whom I've shared much closer friendship than with Alun Jones, and yet whose passing wouldn't merit more than a shrug and oh well. It's been nearly a quarter of a century since we spoke and yet I always liked to think that he was out there somewhere, still chuckling quietly to himself and pulling those incredulous faces whenever voices were raised in the general spirit of ludicrous bullshit. Now that his name has been unfortunately thrust to the forefront of my thoughts, I realise what a strong impression he left for someone I knew so briefly. Every time I hear The Smiths, even if just for a second, I tend to think of Alun; and I'm still tempted on an almost daily basis to counter preposterous claims by repeating them back to their couriers whilst addressing them as Mr. La-di-da Gunner Graham, but my Windsor Davies was never so good as Alun's rendition, and I now live in Texas where no-one would get the reference. I'd probably even forgotten where that came from until news of Alun's passing obliged me to think about such things. He cast a very long shadow for someone who said so little, if you'll pardon the slightly mismatched allusions.

With all the miserable buggers still walking around droning on an on about nothing at all and who will probably live forever, it seems particularly unfair when we lose one of the good ones.

Are Cats Better Than People?

We took Nibbler to the vet. Nibbler is one of our five cats, specifically the one the vet had erroneously registered as being called Burton, and just Burton - as in Burton the Cat. This was because nine months earlier my young stepson, when asked by the same vet as to the name of the mangy looking kitten he'd just brought in for his jabs, said it was Brave Burton Buzzini, giving the cat both our surnames; so they had assumed the first part was purely adjectival, like saying he was cute or inquisitive.

Junior found the cat known to our vet as Burton beneath a car in the parking lot near San Antonio zoo last summer. He was with his grandmother who, having at least twenty cats of her own, was hardly disposed towards discouraging the kid from crawling under the vehicle to rescue yet another pitiful ball of mewling fluff, this one distinguished by black fur and a bald patch on his head. Junior, having found the cat, named him Brave - purportedly in reference to the courage the kitten had demonstrated in being motherless in a San Antonio parking lot, although it seemed something of a coincidence given how much Junior had recently enjoyed the similarly named animated film about a mediaeval ginger girl triumphing against Celtic adversity. I never warmed to Brave as a name, uncharitable though that may seem - it struck me as pretentious, and reminded me of my former neighbour Gary who would make announcements regarding the proposed titles of pets he was yet to acquire.

'I'm gonna buy a husky,' he once told me wearing the grin of a man with enormous plans. 'I'm gonna call her Snow!'

Brave was small and energetic, spending much of the day launching himself claws out at my trouser leg, then hanging there meowing like something from one of those games where you hurl a ball of velcro at a wall of felt - assuming such a game exists and I didn't just imagine it. Aside from the lack of an antenna, he resembled Nibbler, the diminutive alien from the Futurama cartoon series, and the nickname stuck because it was funny and seemed to fit. He grew up to be large and muscular whilst retaining the personality of one of the Bash Street Kids, and a patch of white grown to the shape of a skull and crossbones would not have looked out of place in the black fur of his underside.

I tend to think pets find their own names by virtue of what ends up as most popular amongst those present with the vocal apparatus required to form the necessary syllables. Certainly this had been the case with the two senior members of our cat family. My wife had lived with Gus for more than a decade before we met - a stately grey tabby named Asparagus after a cat in a T.S. Eliot poem, shortened to Gus like the crystal meth tzar from Breaking Bad because it seemed to suit her character, the name rather than the profession.

Next came a Maine Coon kitten whom Junior named Scarface after a Native American culture hero he'd been studying at school. The choice startled me as I had quite independently written a novel in which a boy names his Chihuahua Scarface after the Houston rapper and former member of the Geto Boys. I was glad that neither of our Scarfaces were directly inspired by Als Pacino or Capone because I'd always hated the film and it seemed like a terrible name for a cat. As Scarface grew, briefly suffering an unfortunate bowel problem which caused him to fart out huge eye-stinging clouds of bum gas at regular intervals, he picked up the nickname Little Fluff, which abbreviated itself to just Fluff or Fluffy for use on less formal occasions. We'd worked with the idea that he was just a regular hairy cat until someone noticed that he hadn't stopped growing at the usual age and has since come to resemble cats pictured on the internet and identified as Maine Coons - named because early and presumably simple Europeans settling in Maine believed these huge moggies had resulted from the improbable union of raccoons and domestic felines. He's now three years old and, just as the internet promised, is still growing.

Maine Coons are described - rather sappily in my opinion - as gentle giants on at least a couple of websites. Sure enough Fluffy is big, and it's difficult not to feel sorry for him when he's bullied by pushy kittens at feeding time. We'd initially kept Nibbler in isolation when he first arrived, fearing that the mighty Fluff would smite him with a single blow of one huge oven-glove sized paw; but it turned out that Fluff was more scared of Nibbler than the other way around despite being about ten times his size; which also served to cast doubt on the other truism, that these cats are exceptionally intelligent. Bess scoffs at this claim and points to Fluff as he sits facing a door left only a little way open, patiently swishing his raccoon tail. She tells me that, unlike every other cat in the world, Fluff hasn't yet grasped the mechanics of pushing a door that's already a little way open when he wants to go through. I tell myself he could open the door if he wanted to; he just doesn't see it as his job.

With the arrival of Nibbler, we drew a line. Three cats were enough for anyone, and we didn't want to end up on one of those TV shows. Inevitably, mere weeks later at Brackenridge Park as we were about to climb in the car and return home from watching Sid on his weekly run, a tiny grey kitten emerged from the bushes. She was skinny but like Siamese cats often appear skinny, and certainly older than Nibbler had been when we found him; and friendly with a glossy coat, so we told ourselves through gritted teeth that she seemed healthy and happy and almost certainly lived in the park, and in any case we really didn't need another cat. Neither of us slept very well that night, and my wife announced having something to confess as she arrived home from work the next day. She'd been back to Brackenridge to see if the kitten was still there, reasoning that if not, then she really did live in the park and could look after herself.

'Thank God for that,' I said. 'I've been worried too. So did you see her?'

Bess opened the passenger door of the car and the kitten emerged from beneath the seat blinking huge golden eyes.

'How do you feel about Grace as a name?'

I liked it, not least because it was a real name and it meant Junior couldn't barge in and formally christen the kitten after some horrible Pokémon or Skylanders character; and yet even Grace didn't stick. Being roughly the same age, she and Nibbler took to each other immediately, playing with such vigour that there were times when we wondered whether we shouldn't separate them. Nibbler didn't seem to know when to stop, and Grace had effectively become his squeak toy right down to the bat-like noise she made when they were wrestling; and so she became known as Squeak Toy, Squeaky, or occasionally Bunnymouse after Bess addressed her as a bunny-mouse-bushbaby-fennec-fox-thing or whatever the hell you are, these all being creatures to which she bears passing resemblance with her soft grey fur, big eyes, and large rounded ears.

We told ourselves four was more than enough, but then came Flappy the bird who, as the name implies, wasn't actually a cat

Recently I've come to notice much lip service paid to the received wisdom that selfish Nazis with domestic cats are responsible for the destruction of all birds on planet Earth; and so the internet is frequently ablaze with keyboard politicians reminding us that Adolf Hitler also preferred animals to humans, and that anyone who donates money to a cats home whilst there remains one starving orphan in the world should immediately be put to death.

Firstly, call me a dangerous anarchist if you will, but I'd politely point out that the idea that a person who likes cats - or indeed any other animal - must necessarily prefer them to humans, having presumably worked out some sort of comparative ratings system, is crazy. There may well be one or two people out there who prefer cats to representatives of their own species, but as a general statement it's like saying there are people who prefer lasagne to Poland, or magnesium to the Dave Clark Five. In the event of your framing my person within some comically improbable scenario requiring a choice made between the life of a cat and the life of a human I would have to ask what the hell is wrong with you? If you believe the dominant moral concern of such a situation to be which of the two I would save, then frankly you should seek psychiatric advice.

Secondly, hunting is a skill which cats are taught by their mothers, and those separated from parents as kittens simply don't acquire that skill. Birds caught by such cats are the exception rather than the rule, and are more often than not fledglings just out of the nest and at a major disadvantage. This doesn't in itself reduce gratuitous bird murder to a matter of no consequence, but it's hardly the avian apocalypse imagined by at least one finger-wagging old tosspot who, upon learning of a feline presence in my home, suggested and you wonder why there are no song birds in your garden.

I hadn't wondered, because actually there are a ton of songbirds in my garden, which hopefully serves to illustrate how one should take care when dishing out condescending platitudes based on what some bloke said on the internet.

But of course, there are always exceptions and Flappy was a fledgling sparrow caught by Nibbler. We managed to rescue him before any lasting damage could be done, or so it seemed. He was just one small bird, but it was still quite upsetting. We duly fitted the cats with collars, but they chewed through them, so we do our best to keep them in during days when fledglings are about. This generally works, although if Jurassic Park has taught us anything it is that nature is unpredictable.

Bess cleaned up the baby sparrow, disinfecting where Nibbler had drawn blood being as infection from bacteria in cat saliva is supposedly the most common cause of death in such rescued birds. We kept him in a large cage in our bedroom, regularly feeding him the recommended mixture of mashed up cat food and ReptoCal nutritional supplement on the tip of a drinking straw every hour. He did well, and began to sing and chirp, hopping about in the cage or on the bed when we let him out, learning to fly and flapping his wings with what looked like excitement each time we came to feed him. Junior named him Hawkeye because the Avengers movie had just come out, which we ignored, calling him Flappy, which is probably ironic in some sense, being inspired by when a much younger and less portentous Junior would name animals after their most obvious characteristic, Wriggly the snake, Swimmy the fish, Fuzzy Larry the caterpillar and so on.

After a couple of weeks it got to the stage where we were watching for the tell-tale signs of Flappy being ready for release back into the wild; and he was almost there until one Saturday we came home to find him dead at the bottom of the cage. There'd been nothing to indicate he was anything other than fully recovered and bursting with health, but mortality is apparently high amongst rescued birds because even temporary captivity is in itself simply too stressful for them. We felt terrible. I burst into big manly tears on several occasions. That was a horrible weekend.

On the Sunday afternoon, Bess and Junior went out for a drive so as to allow me to listen to my Joy Division album in peace, returning with a solace kitten. This was also how Fluffy first came into the picture - as a response to the sort of intense personal pain which drives some of us to self-medicate with cats. The kitten was tiny, grey and stripy, rescued by a friend of my wife from a psychotic neighbour who had taken the litter of three from a local feral cat and was keeping them in a bucket of excrement prior to throwing them over a drop of fifty or so feet at the back of her house.

Junior had already named the kitten Kirby after a character in a computer game, but for once it seemed to fit, and it was at least an improvement on Mario, his first suggestion.

So we now have five cats, and I probably do like them more than I like a great many people I've never met, and at least a few people I have met, or whose moronic utterances I've found myself reading on facebook. I live with these five cats, so if I didn't like them more than I like a complete stranger, there would be something wrong with me, something fundamentally lacking in my character.

What is the point of a cat?, one particularly toxic facebook twat asked, enraged presumably by the idea that other people might hold different views to her own, where are all the sensible people who know that the right place for a cat is in a sack at the bottom of the river Thames?

I suggested that as a joke, this one wasn't particularly funny, and she told me that she wasn't joking.

See, that just makes you a cunt so far as I'm concerned.

It's not even specifically about cats, as I see it, and certainly not about giving money to stupid moggies when there are kids starving innit; it's about the basic ability to empathise, and to be able to take care of something less able to defend itself regardless of personal investment. It's about not being a cunt, and not burning ants with a magnifying glass because you think it's funny. It's a fairly basic human quality, but one that is easily swept aside by even low-level bullshit like the drive to gain moral ascendancy over one's peers, the sort of thinking by which a deluded individual claims to know what is best for everyone else; people who ironically would seem in some small way to justify the choices of those who really do like cats better than humans as a general principal.

That said, five is definitely enough.

The Pound Shop Andrew Eldritch

'Andy Martin needs to grow up a bit.' Nicholas regarded me from his bar stool, apparently waiting to see how I would react to this statement. He identified our singer by his full name, as do many; Andy Martin as though referring to a minor celebrity or perhaps a politician upon whom one might habitually offer scathing commentary. This had happened before with an individual whom I knew as Squid who stood in the canteen of Maidstone College of Art scowling over my copy of Smash the Spectacle by The Apostles.

'That Andy Martin has really pissed me off,' he told me in reference to something written on the cover of the record, referring to the author as a remote and reviled dispenser of reprehensible information. Citizen Robespierre has really gone too far this time...

It was Friday evening, the 10th of February, 1995. Nicholas and I were sat in the public bar of Churchill's, a pub in Chatham, Kent which hosted regular gigs by local bands. The other four members of Academy 23, with which I was then guitarist, were presently somewhere beneath our feet in the cellar of the establishment, the part which had been converted into a venue. We were a band, but we weren't local, and maybe that was part of the problem.

Andy Martin was the singer and guitarist of Academy 23, the guiding force by virtue of the fact that for every single musical idea developed by any other member, Andy came up with fifteen. I had first encountered Andy - along with Dave, our bass player - ten or more years earlier when both were members of The Apostles, the previously mentioned semi-legendary post-punk group. The Apostles often found themselves lumped in with anarchopunk outfits such as Crass and The Mob, although they had little in common with many of these bands either musically or ideologically; and although it would be an exaggeration to say they were like no other group around at the time, they were nevertheless one of a kind. I bought their demo tapes from a bedroom based mail order operation called Cause for Concern; and then their records when they graduated to vinyl releases; and for anyone who cares, the Smash the Spectacle EP is still one of the greatest things ever to be pressed onto plastic so far as I'm concerned.

Eventually I met The Apostles just as Andy and Dave were having a rethink, evolving into Academy 23 in the latest of a long line of moves guaranteed to alienate their fans, or at least those fans who needed alienating. Academy 23 were, as I saw it, The Apostles but more so. I still believe Andy Martin to be one of the most original songwriters of recent times, so we had the benefit of his distinctive and evocative use of melody and powerfully erudite lyrics added to what was roughly speaking Mark Perry's Alternative TV if they'd been formed in tribute to King Crimson with a bit of that ninety mile an hour hardcore thrown in just to keep Pete, our drummer, from exploding through dangerous accumulation of red-faced punky anger.

'Andy Martin needs to grow up a bit?' I repeated the question because it sounded so peculiar. It had come completely out of the blue, and I had no idea what it meant. Nicholas might just as well have said Andy Martin needs to splice the mainbrace.

I met Nicholas back in September 1985 when I showed up for instruction at Maidstone College of Art. We were both taking degrees in fine art, specialising in film, video and sound, and he immediately impressed me as one of the most interesting people I had ever met, although it should probably be noted that I was eighteen, had never before lived away from home, and really hadn't met many people at that point. He resembled Nick Cave with pink hair, but original and quite stylish in his own presciently crusty way. Everything he said was funny and insightful and I idolised him without reservation. For the next couple of years he was my best friend even though I'm not sure I was ever really his best friend. I let him stay in our house when he briefly became homeless. I took care of his pets during the same period. I lent a sympathetic and slightly envious ear as girlfriends came and went, each letting him down in one way or another and so leaving him no choice but to play the field. I helped in whatever way I could when he became addicted to smack, having had the brown stuff cut in with the speed he took so as to work a night shift and continue his art degree whilst in a state of extreme poverty - deep breath - due to some clerical error whereby he received only a minimal grant from the local council despite not having a rich mummy and daddy like everyone else at Maidstone, as he put it. I briefly played in his band, and moved to the Medway towns when the degree came to an end because that was where he lived. This relationship was, at least from my side of the fence, absolutely a bromance or a man-crush or whatever you want to call it. I loved the guy and it was almost annoying that I wasn't actually homosexual. I'm not sure it would have made things any easier, but I would have found it less confusing.

After I moved to Chatham, I saw significantly less of Nicholas than I had anticipated, but I reasoned that we were both older, and we had both done a lot of growing up. Six or seven years passed with only sporadic contact. I ended up in London living with a girl called Mandy, and in Spring 1994 we took a day trip down to Medway and stayed at Nicholas' place for the evening. He appeared subdued and was having girlfriend problems, but seemed glad to see me. He was no longer playing in any particular band, but was now performing his own material solo in local venues with just the accompaniment of a backing tape. I recalled some of the songs from our college days - Iron People, Hang Myself, something or other with Killing in the title. They were darkly brilliant, although it should probably be remembered that I regarded everything Nicholas did as a work of genius, somehow managing to ignore that it was mostly pound shop Andrew Eldritch essays on the theme of woe is me with far too much echo on everything. Anyway, this seemed like a good thing at the time. My old friend still had it, whatever it was.

A year later, Academy 23 had rehearsed enough for me to be able to play most of the custom jazz chords in the required 9/13 time signature without giving myself either double hernias or a headache which, I should probably add, wasn't easy given that my default setting fell somewhere between the Ramones and the New York Dolls. I spoke to Nicholas on the phone, and he told me he was now running a band night every Friday at Churchill's. We could play for forty minutes if we could get there.

In a hitherto unprecedented burst of organisation, we hired a minibus and transported equipment, band members, and paying fans down to provide moral support. We arrived at a venue for the first time ever feeling like a proper rock band; and Nathan, one of our other guitarists, quite probably repeated his joke about being in it mainly for buckets of cocaine and a guitar-shaped swimming pool. I was playing in a group I actually would have paid to see were I not already a member, so my confidence had soared to a possibly quite sickening level, and we were all in exceptionally high spirits. We quickly set up, ran through half a song as our sound check, and then tried to relax as we were to be on first, followed by some group called the Happy Shoppers, with Nicholas' solo set as the main act. Andy never really liked noisy, crowded places full of booze, so he and Pete retired to a booth with their algebra textbooks to bone up on sums and stuff. At the time Pete was studying astronomy amongst other subjects, and he now works for NASA, and that's just the kind of group we were.

I staggered upstairs, pausing only to say hello to a few others who had now turned up to see us, Simon Baker and fellow editors of the Gillingham fanzine Brian Moore's Head, and then at last I caught up with my old friend at the bar. I bought him a drink thinking, it doesn't get any better than this.

He told me he had a lot on his plate, and that his girlfriend was expecting a child and he didn't know what to do; and then 'Andy Martin needs to grow up a bit.'

I asked what he meant, but the answer was cryptic.

'I'm just saying because we're mates.' He sipped his pint. 'That bloke has pissed off a lot of people.'

We'd been there for less than thirty minutes, and whilst I know Andy to be a man of strong and sometimes hilarious opinions, it seemed that even he would have been hard pressed to enrage a plurality of locals in the given time, not least because he'd spent most of it either playing guitar or discussing the declension of Aldebaran with Pete. Then I recalled a few looks that had come our way as we were setting up. Andy was wearing a shell suit and an Adidas baseball cap, and was later seen reading a book without pictures in it, and not a biography of some guy in a rock band. He also sported a large moustache of the kind associated with both Lemmy from Motorhead and members of the Village People. He was someone who effectively had does not fit in inscribed above his head in invisible letters and we were in Chatham about to play to an audience of lager enthusiasts with an overdeveloped sense of territory.

'So who has he pissed off?'

I wasn't even remotely bothered who Andy had pissed off or why, but I wanted to see what Nicholas would say. I had the feeling he had a need to be seen as the big fish in a small pond, the mover, the shaker, the anointed one who knows people who know people and who stands frowning upon the frozen wastes of eternity like that stupid great cock from Fields of Nephlegm. I had the impression that he resented my presence and the fact that I was a slightly different and hopefully less stupid person than I had been when we last met. This evening had not been presented as an opportunity for us to play live, or for Churchill's punters to see some band from out of town. It had been a chance for me to admire the mighty regional empire of suffering artistry that Nicholas had built for himself, the greatness that outsiders like ourselves would never comprehend.

He then told me that we could play for twenty minutes so as to allow the Happy Shoppers to perform a full set of what I remember as being covers of punk hits from the early eighties. Academy 23, who had hired a van and driven all the way down from London, who had released a CD and brought fifteen or so paying guests to a club which was still conspicuously much less than full - we were to be allowed twenty minutes contrary to what had been promised. I knew this was bullshit, just some weird little power game, because it was given as an instruction without apology.

I thought of my former friend, still wheeling out the same miserable songs from years gone by to a diminishing audience, no longer able to keep a band together without alienating every other member, still with the new girlfriend every six months, the endless cycle of supposed castrating harpies who could never truly know the tortured man-poet inside. I thought of all those years of whining and wearing self-pity as a virtue, as some sort of badge of courage; still in Chatham, the Medway delta Jim Morrison show now in its second decade. Everything that ever made the list of slings and arrows had always been something done to him: he'd been made homeless; he'd been made a junkie by some external force; he'd been made to drink himself senseless and cheat on whichever women currently just didn't understand because that was how it all worked. He'd probably wanted to slip on a condom but I'm sure she told him no, it'll be fine, trying to trap and control him just like they all did.

It was weak and a little disgusting, and I remembered that I had once been a hayseed, wide-eyed exclaiming goll-ee! at the lights of the big city. We all make mistakes.

He still spelled his name Nikki in the spirit of an eight-year old girl doodling felt tip hearts and flowers on her school book, and yet here he was dishing out wearyingly mysterious advice on who should grow up, a man in his early thirties going on fifteen.

'Twenty minutes.'

I nodded to show that I had heard and understood the command, finished my drink and went downstairs.

We played the set we'd intended to play, the full forty ending with twelve-minutes of the progressive instrumental At The Academy, all the while ignoring glares from our host. The people we'd brought along seemed to enjoy it. Others didn't presumably on account of the fact that we weren't from Chatham, so they stood about giggling into their pints because we were a bit weird, not a single leather jacket or facial tattoo between us. The Happy Shoppers ran through Teenage Kicks and a number of other standards, finishing off with Nicholas mumbling his grim, windy songs about no-one understanding and how his heart has turned to stone as a result.

I don't think he ever realised, but the problem was that most people understood him only too well. It had just taken me a little longer to catch up.

Texercise

Since jacking in my Royal Mail job in 2009 I've taken to cycling in an effort to avoid turning into a massive sedentary blob sat all day at the computer, scoffing mini-pizzas and burping out incomprehensible stories that no-one will ever read. In Texas, despite all the wide open spaces, this is not so easily done as it was in Coventry. Whilst the roads are wider, and drivers seem generally a little better behaved, their vehicles are often of absurd dimensions in compensation for something or other at which one can only guess. If you run a lawn care business or you work on a ranch and are occasionally required to go after a buffalo that's made its bid for freedom, I can see how you would have use for an enormous truck. If you're just some guy who works in the city and likes barbecue, then the only justification I can see for why you might need one of those General Motors leviathans would be as compensation for a deficit in some other, more trousery department. Whatever the reason, it means that cycling on Texas highways is not so relaxing a pastime as it could be.

The other factor is the sun, because Texas is somewhat more equatorial than the land of my birth. Cycling in England became problematic during those winters when I would throw open the front door to be confronted with a sheer wall of ice, sometimes containing deep frozen cavemen like in a Charles Addams cartoon; plus the four grudging hours of mid-grey daylight during December tended to swivel one's thoughts in the direction of either hibernation or ending it all there and then rather than getting in a few miles on the old penny farthing. Winter in Texas is distinguished as the three days when you turn off the air conditioning and wear a jumper, the unfortunate pay off being that summer is hot; as in really hot. Summer in Texas is not about popping into Currys to buy a fan, or mopping your brow and taking consolation from the knowledge that at least your tomatoes will do well; summer in Texas means staying inside during the day so as to avoid radiation sickness, water catching fire as soon as it comes out of the tap, and rivers of sweat still sluicing down your face at two in the morning. It is fucking hot, which is why we have all those snakes and lizards and cacti. Some days, opening the front door at ten in the morning can be like walking into a pizza oven. I've spent time baking in Mexico City, at one stage even having my entire face peel off more or less as a single sheet in unintentional homage to Xipe Totec, the Corn God who manifests in a mask of human skin; but Mexico City is up in the clouds where the air is noticeably sparse, so the heat is more manageable. The kindest thing one can say of San Antonio in terms of its summertime climate - which in case I didn't quite make it clear may be likened to that of the sunny side of the planet Mercury - is that at least it's not Houston.

Houston gets really hot

To return to the main point, the one thing stood between myself and my ultimate fate as a burger-chugging human sofa cosy grunting my way through all five-hundred plus adventurtastic episodes of Stargate SG1 is probably my bike, which I purchased at Walmart, and which I try to ride every day.

Happily, it seems that San Antonio had anticipated my arrival by  opening up the Tobin Trail, a surfaced greenway following creek, shaded woodland and flood plain by which I can avoid both highways and at least some of the sun. It's an urban work in progress which, once complete will form a continuous loop around the city limits; and so long as I can get going early enough to avoid the heat - which really becomes unbearable around eleven - I'm all set. Weekends excepted, I ride just over thirteen miles a day, always the same thirteen miles - from Eisenhauer Road to the top of the hill just past Wetmore then back again. It's a little repetitive, and will continue to be so at least until the city connects my regular stretch to the southern part of the trail beyond Binz-Engleman. The country lanes around Coventry were perhaps superior in terms of choice, but even with the same daily route, it's difficult to get bored in a land which dishes up something new and unexpected to an almost daily schedule. Herons, eagles, turtles, snakes, vultures, deer, lizards, and an entirely unfamiliar pantheon of colourful songbirds have yet to lose their appeal despite having become familiar, even commonplace.

I've learned that certain turtles, when picked up from the track so as to prevent their getting run over, will empty their bladders as a defence mechanism - and you'd be surprised how much liquid those things contain. I've also learned, thankfully not from experience, that alligator turtles will bite off your fingers given the chance and so are best left to their own devices. The biggest alligator turtle I've encountered was roughly the size of a respectable bull terrier, and I wasn't in any great hurry to airlift him to safety, particularly as I'm fairly sure I actually heard him telling me to piss off. Coral snakes on the other hand are smaller and prettier, with their red and yellow bands, and even knowing that their bite can kill, it's hard to think ill of something with such a cute widdle face and such a retiring disposition; in respect of which, I have come to truly appreciate the homily of terrifying creatures being more scared of you than you are of them. This was impressed upon me once as I skidded around both a corner and the interior surface of my pants coming face to face with a steep grassy bank of twenty or thirty black vultures, a hillside of Uncle Fester size carnivores all considering me with beady black eyes. I just had time to form the understanding that I was about to die when they apparently concluded as one that I was the scariest thing they had ever seen and swept up into the sky. Meeting them up close, and seeing those confused little faces on their disproportionately tiny heads, the experience taught me that even the traditionally unlovable vulture is not lacking a charm of its own.

It isn't even just the spectacular wildlife - there are the plants, also the entire ecosystem of dry limestone riverbeds which vanish beneath eight or nine feet of water after a good afternoon's rainfall, draining over the next few days to leave mud flats popping with millions of tiny frogs.

Since jacking in my Royal Mail job in 2009 and taking up cycling, I've kept track of the full tally of the distance I've travelled. I've just recently gone over 9,000 miles, more than half of those here in the US, back and forth between Rittiman and Wetmore, day after day, month after month.

Texas is hot and often weird, but it's never dull.

'You heard me,' said the turtle. 'Piss off.'

Not Particularly Gorgeous George

As the twentieth century became the twenty-first, I was living in the basement flat of a house in Lordship Lane in East Dulwich. The house was owned by Bill, my landlord, an amiable octogenarian  residing in the two upper storeys to whom I had become if not quite a substitute grandson, then possibly an ageing sidekick. The first floor, immediately above my residence but still a sort of underworld to the realm of Bill, was another flat, one which had remained empty ever since the mysterious Miss Tibbs went to live with her brother a couple of years earlier. Bill, having become accustomed to a quiet life, hadn't put much effort into advertising the place, possibly fearful of taking on a tenant who would turn out to be a serial murderer or who might fail to pay rent on time. In any case, the flat, the result of a slightly half-hearted conversion carried out many years before, was probably something of a hard sell. Essentially it was a front room, bedroom, bathroom and tiny kitchen all off a single hallway, specifically the single hallway leading to Bill's part of the house. In architectural terms it was an appendix, and the bath itself was of a peculiar truncated kind I've never seen before or since, room to sit with knees tucked up under one's chin, but that was all.

Unfortunately, as the millennium drew near, Bill learned that he would be required to pay additional council tax on the unlovable and still vacant flat and so stepped up his advertising campaign, such as it was. A young woman came to take a look around, but she had a child, and it really wasn't that sort of flat. I coaxed my friend Paul into giving it a look seeing as he was due to be turfed out of his own place, but I think it freaked him out a bit. The front room and bedroom were both pretty large, but the latter was almost completely taken up by the biggest bed in the universe, so it seemed.

The months passed into September so I went to stay in Mexico City as briefly became my annual habit up until about 2005, and I came back to the news that Bill had at last found another tenant, George Ramshall, a chef working at St. Christopher's Hospice where Flo - Bill's wife - had spent her final Christmas a few years before.

'He was in the army,' Bill told me with visible enthusiasm, 'and he's a chef, so I suppose he must be all right.'

We were both stood on the doorstep having one of those conversations we would get into on Mondays when I went up to pay that week's rent. I glanced at the bay window immediately to my right, that being the one behind which the mysterious George now lurked. The curtains were drawn, and it was two in the afternoon. I realised I had not seen them undrawn since the arrival of my new neighbour.

'He keeps himself to himself. That's the main thing.'

Bill's first impression, whatever it may have been, was clearly and understandably overridden by the relief of having the flat occupied by someone who, so far as he could tell, wasn't going to turn it into either a crack den or a brothel.

Myself, I was just curious, even a little enthused, spending the next few days in waiting for the right moment to swap introductions with this person. Whoever he was, the assessment of him keeping himself to himself had been accurate. I never saw him either coming in or going out, and his presence could be determined only by a shifting of the floorboards as heard through my ceiling, or occasionally the sound of a television tuned in to Coronation Street. Gradually I began to notice a pattern, the ordinary sounds of a person moving around usually building up to an evening of energetic creaking. It would begin about seven in the evening and carry on until after I'd gone to bed. Initially it sounded like rusty bedsprings under the influence of someone who just couldn't get comfortable, but someone who just couldn't get comfortable for three or four hours with occasional breaks as he went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea; and yet I knew the room above was not the bedroom, and anyway it didn't even sound like that, not exactly. On bad nights it worked up to something resembling someone prising apart floorboards with a screwdriver. It wasn't loud, but it was constant and defied explanation, and that was annoying.

Still, I tried to not let it get to me. I've always considered myself reasonably sensitive in terms of actions which may aggravate one's neighbours, mainly because I don't like things which aggravate me. I've never enjoyed overly loud music being as I find the prospect of someone smashing in the front door and then attempting to insert a vinyl album or even an entire turntable into my colon tends to spoil one's listening pleasure; and I'm pretty sure this preference for low volume isn't just me playing the innocent as my friend Carl once regularly took the piss out of my quiet music, describing improbable scenarios in which I would have my amplifier wired up to two tiny Walkman earphones, each mounted on a mahogany stand at either side of the room.

Hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss...

Because of this I gave George's creakery the benefit of the doubt, reasoning that whatever he was doing was probably something he needed to do, and accordingly I had kept my music particularly low ever since I returned from Mexico. Then one evening, listening to the quietest Jay-Z album ever recorded, I was startled by three robustly expressive stamps upon my ceiling - Bang! Bang! Bang! - George's foot, possibly booted and pounding the floorboards. I was shocked, but I knew there would be a logical explanation for how someone could have inadvertently transmitted the universal morse for turn that shit down, you fucker. He had fallen over rhythmically, or was perhaps attempting to stamp upon a fast moving insect, or maybe even the mouse from the Tom & Jerry cartoons.

A minute later it came again.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

I looked to the volume control on my amplifier and saw that it was down low at around the second notch, noting how the music was not so loud as to cover either the noise of cars passing along Lordship Lane or the sound of a tap dripping in the kitchen at the other end of my flat. I was not, by any definition, playing loud music.

I turned off the stereo system, went outside, climbed the steps and rang the bell. The curtain to my right twitched ever so slightly. I took a breath and made ready to be entirely reasonable.

The door flew open, the mysterious and presently wrathful George bursting forth to jab his extended finger hard in my chest whilst bellowing, 'I'll tell you what it is, Pal,' - I didn't hear the rest. I was too shocked.

He was in his fifties and resembled comedian Sid Little after five wilderness years as a meths drinking park tramp. His lower jaw protruded like in a child's drawing of a particularly stupid caveman and was covered in grey stubble. The engorged pupils of his eyes swam left to right behind Coke bottle lenses like angry fish looking for something with which to pick a fight. He smelled like a betting shop and had a strong Manchester accent. I understood immediately that this was a man with whom I would not be able to reason, someone who would not respond to logic.

He worked shifts and slept during the afternoon, he told me, and every day I would deafen him with my music. He had a hard job and he needed his sleep. This was the essence of his argument.

The Jay-Z album had been the first thing I'd played on my stereo in over a week, and it could only have been deemed loud by someone with enhanced hearing as their mutant superpower. I was reluctant to point out that it looked a lot like he was imagining things from where I stood, but reasoned that maybe the deaf Jamaican guy who lived next door had been blasting out his own music, and this was what had deprived George of his sorely needed beauty sleep. I personally hadn't heard a peep out of the deaf Jamaican guy in a while, but who was I to tell someone else what they could hear? I may have mumbled something in this general direction, but already knowing I would not be able to reason with this man, I'd resigned myself to future music appreciation being conducted by means of headphones.

All went quiet, excepting the routine four hours of rattling and creaking during the evening which inevitably became a source of unspoken resentment. Bill was glad of the additional rent coming in, and the fact that George kept himself to himself, whilst admitting that he was a queer sort of feller, using the term in its older context.

'Still, so long as he behaves, that's all I ask.'

I said nothing.

Well, I said nothing to Bill. I certainly vented a quota of spleenage to friends on more than one occasion, at least once attributing the nightly four hour creakathon to a hypothetical scenario in which George spent evenings strapped into a home-built autotorture machine, a Professor Branestawm style system of levers and pulleys designed to repeatedly tantalise George's sensitive bits whilst delighting him with a mechanical carousel of images of small boys' bottoms revealed in close-up. It was an admittedly hysterical assumption, but I still had no idea what that noise could be, and there was something unusually unsavoury about the man. He'd been in the flat a year, the curtains kept drawn with the lights turned off even after dark for all of that time. He received no visitors. He paid his rent by direct debit so Bill never saw him, and on the occasions when my landlord knocked on the door in order to communicate some minor detail concerning the gas or electricity, George would refuse to answer, even pretending he wasn't at home. His occasional and irrational complaints, as I later discovered, placed obsessive emphasis on security issues and matters to which he referred only in terms of their being nobody's business but his own. He was secretive to the point of pantomime. Bill began to find this behaviour increasingly odd, not least when entering the shared hallway just to catch a door snapping shut, George retreating into his dark, smelly sanctuary like a trapdoor spider.

I would pass him in the street, or even in the betting shop at the end of the block which I entered when delivering mail, but we never acknowledged each other, partially because I'd seen the guy so infrequently that I was never entirely sure of it being him; excepting the one occasion when he hid around the corner of the dry cleaner's as I approached. I saw him catch sight of me, then duck back and flatten himself against the plate glass window like a character in an animated cartoon, apparently not understanding that he could be seen from the other side.

'Hello George,' I said as I passed, only later realising I should have offered some comment about how his powers of stealth were a testament to forty years well-spent in Her Majesty's forces.

Aside from the regular rattling and creaking, another year went by without incident when I noticed loud music emanating from somewhere above my bedroom, loud enough at least to distort the speaker from which it came. It was obviously a radio left playing in a large empty space, and I assumed that the deaf Jamaican had bought in someone to decorate his flat. The music blasted on through the night just as it would have done had hypothetical painters or decorators simply forgotten to turn off their radio as they finished for the day. By this time I'd taken to wearing earplugs at night so as to prevent being woken by the cries of urban foxes, so it didn't bother me significantly.

The next evening the radio was still on, which was just too much of a coincidence. It was George, and I had no idea what could have pissed him off this time. Based on the rage inspired by a Jay-Z CD played so quietly that I'd been unable to hear it once I stepped out of the room, I knew it could be anything, and it took me another day before I plucked up the courage to confront him.

'Listen, George—,'

'I'll tell you what it is, Pal,' - he was almost screaming this time and I thought he was going to hit me. He worked hard, he told me, and he needed his sleep, and he had a hard job that was hard. Every day he endured my constantly slamming of doors. Every day he was woken by my alarm clock going off, which was no bloody good for someone working hard at such a hard job that required him to work so hard.

This was bullshit and I knew it, and I found myself  laughing.

'I also have a hard job,' I told him. 'I don't particularly like having to start at six but there it is. I need to get up in the mornings, and so I have an alarm clock. What else am I supposed to do?'

Amazingly, he had no answer. He hadn't really thought beyond his own righteous fury and had assumed that a radio left on at sonic warfare volume as a taste of my own medicine would speak for itself. I didn't even bother to comment on the suggestion that I spent the best part of my afternoon slamming doors just to see how loud I could go. I walked away and the lesson-teaching radio fell silent.

I saw nothing more of George until spring when he volunteered to look after Bill's garden. Bill had been a keen gardener for the first fifty years of his life at the house and was particularly proud of his roses, but now in his mid-eighties he was no longer up to anything more demanding than the occasional bit of pruning; and although his friend Jim mowed the lawn every month or so, the beds were returning to jungle. George offered his horticultural services mainly, he claimed, for the sake of something to do. Unfortunately he had no experience with either plants or gardening, but having spent forty years in the army had assumed that there was no obstacle which could not be overcome by simple application of military efficiency, and so he approached the garden methodically as he might an unfamiliar piece of hardware.

He spent the first six months digging up the flower beds and sifting every last ounce of soil so as to filter out all but the tiniest stones, building a mountain of pebbles at the far end which, so he instructed Bill, would require collection by the council. In other words he rationalised the soil, but lacking an understanding of how stones are essential for drainage in heavy clay, the plants under George's care were rotting away at the root. His work succeeded only in creating something resembling the trenches of the first world war, and with a soft litter-like consistency which drew cats from miles around. Occasionally he would take a break from ethnically cleansing the earth and mow the lawn instead, down on all fours with a pair of scissors, back and forth working methodically for a full three days until the job was done. Bill had an entirely serviceable lawn mower, but George preferred his own method.

Other times he would just rest, bringing out a deckchair to sunbathe with a copy of the Daily Mirror.

'Nice weather,' I observed on one occasion as our paths crossed in the alley at the side of the house. Somehow neither of us had seen the other coming, so we hadn't been able to take evasive action.

'It's glorious.' George had been sunbathing, and although he didn't smile, for once he didn't sound angry.

That was the only real conversation we ever had.

Another year passed and the sight of a ruined expanse of soft clay seen each day from my kitchen window had become too depressing. George had lost interest, which was probably for the best, and those plants remaining were beginning to die in the sodden deoxygenated ground. I suggested to Bill that maybe I should take over care of the garden, and he almost seemed to gain an inch as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. It took a while to get it all back into shape, and the first month was spent mostly turning the cat litter back into soil by reuniting it with all those naughty stones. By summer it had begun to resemble a garden once again, and more significantly I'd reclaimed territory from the nutcase. I had seen him watching from his kitchen window when I first got started with the spade. He'd pulled back the curtain, gawping in disbelief like an enraged chimpanzee bewildered by visitors in gorilla suits.

The final confrontation came another few months down the line, and this time it wasn't directed at me. I heard Bill rattling the front door as he did each evening, testing to make sure he'd locked it properly before retiring for the night. This was followed by shouting, obviously George. Bill was old and small so this worried me, and I went upstairs to provide either moral support or a witness.

Outnumbered, George calmed a little and explained that he worked hard at a hard job that was hard work, especially for such a hard job; and after a hard day's work at his hard job he resented having to listen to Bill rattling the key in the lock for two solid hours every evening. Then he turned to me for support, but I'd honestly never before noticed the offending rattling.

There were two doors, the inner door to the upstairs hall, and the outer door which was left unlocked during the day so as to allow parcels and milk to be left in the porch. This, Bill explained, was why the outer door was left open during the day, and would then be locked at night.

George suggested that it was a security issue affecting his right to privacy, and that both doors needed to remain locked at all times. This was clearly something he thought about at great length, judging by the selotape with which he sealed up his doors on rare weekends away. He liked the phrase security issue, using it often as though the door in question was all that stood between him and the forces of anarchy. It reminded me oddly of a documentary I had seen in which a convicted and unrepentant paedophile had avoided answering questions posed - despite presumably having agreed to appear on said programme - instead preferring to rant about what he saw as the real issue, namely the brutal circumcision of very young girls in African villages. Gutless moral cowardice, I call it, he blustered over and over as the interviewer failed to engage him in discussion of his own repulsive convictions, gutless moral cowardice!

George's security issue was that the unlocked door might be breached not by the forces of anarchy but by coloureds. He described an incident in which he'd woken during the middle of the night and found one of them in his hall, presumably having just wandered in to take a look around. 'Black as the ace of spades, he was.'

Quite aside from the whole point that both doors would have been locked at that hour - which was in any case what George wanted - this was getting ridiculous. He invoked the image of this mysterious black man as his winning hand, clearly believing Bill and myself would recognise the scale of the problem now that coloureds were involved. How can we fix this, George? we would ask. What do you think we should do?

He didn't seem to realise that we now understood him to be a small child telling us he'd seen a dinosaur with lasers on its head and it had eaten a man and the man's head had come off and the dinosaur had looked at him. Bill was of the generation in which casual racism had been commonplace, but if he himself ever held such views, I never heard him express them.

George moved on to raise an additional complaint about the noise made by Bill's television set. To be fair, Bill was almost deaf and would watch football with the volume so loud as to be heard at the end of the street, but it had never even occurred to me to be bothered by this.

Exhausted and with no new understanding beyond the extent to which George valued his privacy, we left it at that.

Next day, Bill and I compared notes. We'd never really spoken frankly about the other lodger. I had no wish to seem like I was whining, and I think he felt reluctant to admit that he'd leased the first floor flat to someone who was obviously mad.

'I don't know what's wrong with the bloke,' he sighed. 'It's not like I'm having bleedin' orgies up there or nuffin'. I can't make it out!'

I told him about my earlier confrontations, the alarm clock and my supposedly slamming a door every three minutes for the best part of the afternoon.

'Don't you worry, mate.' Bill slapped me on the shoulder. 'Good as gold, you are. I've no complaints about you.' He thought some more. 'Problem is, he's not in the army now, you see. He still thinks he can order everyone around, but it's not like that. When you're sharing a house you have to expect a bit of noise.'

I agreed, and now that we'd broached the subject, it turned out that Bill had a lot to get off his chest regarding George. 'Always going on about his bleedin' hard job up at the hospice - heating up a tin of beans for people who ain't got no appetite 'cause they're all on chemo and about to kick the bucket - how bleedin' hard can it be?'

I shrugged. It was good to hear this. I wanted to ask if Bill had considered telling George to piss off, but it seemed pushy, although he was already some way ahead of me.

'I wish he'd move out. Might get a bit of piece and quiet then.'

George did move out, or specifically he went to visit some relative in Oldham and never came back. Being secretive and tending to creep around, neither Bill nor I realised he was gone for about six weeks, by which time a few months of unpaid rent and a few years of unpaid council tax had become overdue. Bill opened up the flat and found it empty but for a box of old seven inch vinyl singles. These were mostly eighties hits by Erasure, Culture Club, Bronski Beat, Gloria Gaynor, Divine, the Weather Girls, the Village People and others; and further to the obvious realisation suggested by this selection, Alan who moved into the same flat a little later described how he'd found a number of photographs of men dressed as ladies beneath the bed. This had been George's big secret, it seemed, but it made no difference to me. It inspired no outpouring of sympathy nor excused the fact of the guy being roughly the most massive cunt I've ever met. He'd spent forty years in the army and had clearly never been what you would describe as bright; so it was a shame in some respects and, I suppose, a sad story; but then the world is full of sad stories, and there are very few of us who get an easy ride. He was gone, and I understood at least part of why he'd always been so angry, and that seemed like enough.

AT&T's Inebriate Revelry in Brewery Failure

Dark forces caused our internet to go away on Wednesday the 15th of August as I was having a bath. I went into the bedroom and stood looking at the modem supplied by AT&T for which my wife had paid $150. I'm not even sure what a modem is, but in any case the red light was flashing and I instinctively knew this to be bad mojo. AT&T are some sort of telecommunications company to whom we submitted $100 a month for internet access and a phone by which I might call England from time to time without any of the usual problems that come with international calls made on bad lines.

I went out to the garden and looked up to the trees at the side of the house. In Texas the water and gas pipes are underground, but everything else arrives by means of an overhead cable suspended from a series of telegraph poles. We therefore live our lives beneath a heavenly spider web of cables running to junction boxes up near the awnings of our home: electricity, telephone, and television - which we don't really use because now that I live here, Wheel of Fortune has lost much of the  mystery it seemed to promise back in the days when I sat in cafés in Catford reading Exchange & Mart and dreaming of a better, more colourful world.

Texas is home to numerous species of quick growing trees which tend to dry out in the heat and drop branches like nobody's business, specifically the kind of branches which snap those cables over which they have grown, thus depriving you of electricity or whatever else was inside the wires. This set-up seems crazy to me, and I don't know why Texas doesn't just go the whole way and have its water piped in along a series of overhead hoses, but then I've only been here two years so it's probably a little early to start laying down the law, even given that I'm English.

I stood in the garden and squinted up at the cables running through the greenery. One of these appeared to be hanging suspiciously low, but then I don't pay much attention to the power lines - or whatever they are - so I had no idea whether it was normally at that elevation. However, we've had lines sundered by falling branches before, so I knew what a knackered internet should look like, and guessed that nothing of this sort had occurred; although maybe the cable had suffered from a bit of a sharp tug or summink. Nevertheless, it was obvious that we would need someone to come out and have a look.

The red light of terror was still flashing when my wife returned home. She called AT&T and was almost immediately through to Foreigner's I Want to Know What Love Is piped directly from a competitively priced call centre on the Indian subcontinent where companies don't have to pay their staff quite so much as they do here. Eventually, after an hour spent confirming herself to be who she claimed to be, and that we lived at the address at which we purported to live, my wife described the problem.

'You have informed me of your name and confirmed that you are who you say you are and you have then additionally confirmed that you are resident at the address you have given me and you have now described the problem which is the subject of your call. Is this correct?'

'Yes,' said my wife with the patience of a thousand saints, including even some of those invented by Mexicans and about which no-one has yet informed Rome.

The person in India performed a mystic test using special internet magic, then explained that our modem was bust and we would need to buy a replacement; so my wife paid another $150 over the phone, because the $1,200 a year that AT&T makes out of me calling my mum or posting pictures of cats on facebook just wouldn't cover it, and we were informed that the new modem would be with us by the following Wednesday.

Happily the bandits who ordinarily terrorise the badlands outside San Antonio had been knocked out by the August heat, so our modem arrived a mere five days later on the Tuesday. My wife, who tends to be quite good with such things, plugged it in and turned it on, but still we had no internet and still we were getting the red light of doom.

After another hour on the phone spent in preface to asking the crucial question about stuff not working, it was explained to us by someone employed in a call centre on the moon that our modem had not yet received its activation signal. This would occur at 8PM, Wednesday evening, because it's important not to rush these things.

Another day passed, the moment of destiny arrived, and nothing happened. Another hour on the telephone, most of which was spent establishing that this really was my wife talking, and confirming that she had an issue and that she wished to stay on the line in order to resolve this issue with a hominid operator rather than going to www.att.com/irony, and we were told it might be a problem with the connection, just as we'd suspected in the first place. The person tried and failed to sell my wife a third replacement modem, then said they would install a patch, a sort of electronic magic spell, chirpily adding that she just knew this would sort it out.

It didn't.

This scenario, I believe, may be likened to a complaint registered with the local council. 'There is a pothole in the road directly outside my house,' you tell them. 'It is six feet wide, and four deep, and there is a previously undiscovered prehistoric civilisation down there. I am thus unable to exit my drive.' You are then told to buy a new car and see if the problem is resolved, because God forbid that a call to technical support should ever result in the wasteful and deeply predictable extravagance of sending some bloke around to have a fucking look.

Having now understood - based upon that which my wife and I have experienced - that AT&T seems principally interested in taking as much of our money as possible whilst making every effort to get away with doing as little as they can to honour their part of the contract, we decided to take our custom elsewhere.

My wife phoned AT&T and was informed that there would be no refund for the cost of the new modem, despite being instructed to make the purchase without any concrete evidence of the first modem necessarily being at fault. It took her an hour to get through to the person who would register our taking our account elsewhere, an hour of confirming that she was who she said she was and did indeed live at the address at which she claimed to live and confirm that no, a ten percent discount on the next six months of internet was not sufficient inducement to remain loyal to a company which gives all the appearance of being unable to organise a piss-up in a brewery and yet nevertheless still expects to be paid handsomely for the invitations it's had printed, even though they've accidentally left off both the date and the address of the venue.

Still, you live and learn.

Morocco

Growing up in England with an amorphous circle of friends intersecting at one time or another with aspirant Bohemians - roughly speaking the sort of people I knew at art college - I've encountered a very specific kind of female on several occasions, at least often enough to recognise her as a type. She is generally well-educated, vaguely middle-class, and a committed Islamophile. On balance, she means well and should probably be applauded for at least pissing off Islamophobes, but I find myself uneasy in her presence, as I tend to find myself uneasy in the presence of anyone whose enthusiasm has run away with them.

In two instances which spring immediately to mind, she has been a vocal advocate of feminist principles whilst going weak at the knees over some dreamy eyed young stallion of middle-eastern heritage. 'They're so different to western men,' she tells me, unwittingly suggesting an entire group might share a single personality, and with some hesitation as she reroutes white men to western, but still using the term to mean all you lot. 'They're so much more sensitive.'

Sadly the eulogies turn to complaints once realisation dawns that the sensitive men in question have been raised to regard women as  housekeeping donkeys with whom one may have sex without the need to spend a fortune on carrots - nice to have around, but incapable of conversation and you wouldn't let one run your business.

In case this revelation inspires anyone to bang their souvenir Enoch Powell tin mug on the table or to type out a rousing response of here here, I should perhaps stress that I refer here to very specific individuals, and mainly in respect to the naivety of their female admirers. I've never held to the belief that all of Islam can be summarised as a basic personality type, and certainly not as those two specific mummy's boys to whom I was briefly introduced. I don't believe that everyone within any particular demographic can ever be characterised as being any single thing, this being the error made by my two guileless female acquaintances, mistaking one individual for some exaggerated or even idealised image of that person's entire culture on the grounds that he's got a nice bum.

In Mexico the term is Malinchism, named after La Malinche, the indigenous woman who became both mistress and interpreter to Hernán Cortés during the conquest. It refers to a preference for the foreign over the things of one's own culture or country. Whilst I'm in no position to start pelting the walls of this particular glass house with stones, I like to think I appreciate the new and unfamiliar for reasons other than that it's foreign.

Marian, my girlfriend a few years back, was something of an Islamophile. She liked the art, and would drape her home with rugs and cloths of Islamic design. She seemed to identify with Islamic culture, although the terms of that identification were never entirely clear to me. Certainly her interest was not overtly religious, and I'm not sure Marian herself had really worked it out. She acquired Islamic looking ornaments for the house; she read the occasional book set in the middle-east; she attended belly dancing classes; and we would sometimes watch films like Marzieh Meshkini's excellent The Day I Became A Woman. Still it struck me as a vague engagement, an aesthetic followed at about the level of an article in Time Out magazine, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Marian had been hinting that we might go to Mexico together at least since we first met in the Autumn of 2005, just as I returned from my fifth visit to the country with my friend Rob. Initially it was exciting that someone should apparently be so keen on me as to make such a proposal, but as the relationship developed, I came to realise that it was a bad idea. By 2007, Marian and I had accrued the experience of several holidays spent in each other's company - excursions made not so much because we always had such jolly larks together as we licked ice creams on foreign shores, more due to threats delivered by Marian during those first formative weeks of our union. 'I'll be expecting you to take me to interesting places,' she said. 'I grow easily bored with relationships quite quickly, so you will need to make the effort to keep me interested.'

With these parameters established, we went where Marian decreed. My suggestions were never to her liking, which provided further annoyance in addition to her being burdened with always having to come up with ideas for where we could go next - one of those heads you lose, tails I win dialogues I suppose you would say. We'd been to Oxford, to the village of Théza in the south of France, to Machynlleth on the Welsh coast; each excursion distinguished by Marian generally failing to rise before noon, then spending the rest of the day blaming me for everything that had gone wrong with the holiday, on top of which I generally ended up carrying her bags as well as my own. So as she reminded me that I'd promised to take her to Mexico, I knew by then that I would rather dine from my own lavatory bowl. Mexico was one place she wasn't going to ruin.

We'd been together nearly two years and it had become increasingly difficult to dodge certain bullets, to avoid certain undertakings despite the sure knowledge of a disastrous outcome. Denied my services as Mexican bag carrier, she revived an older threat. 'I may go and spend some time in India, maybe six months or a year,' she offered with studied defiance. 'What will you do then?'

I didn't have an answer that I could give without repercussions, and I had no inclination to visit India. I lived in a world wherein people were required to work for a living, and extravagant experiments with global travel were dependent on not pissing off for an indeterminate amount of time and coming back to find out you've been sacked. This whole deal about being able to afford to eat and have a roof over one's head was apparently one of those things that made me something of a bore.

'What do you mean you've never wanted to go to India?' It was a fairly typical question for Marian, an inquiry presupposing that views other than her own are by definition aberrant. We were once watching a television programme called Grand Designs which each week would follow the progress of someone building their own home from scratch, usually someone with a ton of money, and the more eccentric their ideas the better. This week some guy was working on his own self-sustaining environmentally neutral home, a variation on the thing in which the Teletubbies live but with more solar panelling.

'Oh for God's sake,' I muttered under my breath.

Marian turned to me, more confrontational than surprised. 'Haven't you ever dreamed of building your own self-sustaining environmentally neutral home?'

I hadn't, and she asked the question as though the premise were  self-evident and I was the weirdo here, just like haven't you ever considered that smoking eighty cigarettes a day might be bad for you?

What do you mean you've never wanted to go to India? was the same deal, a question framed with disbelief that an intelligent person could entertain any desire divergent from her own. I had nothing against India, but neither did I find it so fascinating either as a country or culture as to necessitate my going there; and I was painfully familiar with the sort of homeopathy-addled dimwits who visit India in order to find themselves, returning six months later talking the same bollocks as always and telling you that it was amaaaaaaazing. Whilst it may be true that travel broadens the mind, I generally believe it helps if you have something to work with in the first place.

'Let's go to Morocco,' I said.

She had been pushing Morocco for as long as she'd been waving the flag for India. To my way of thinking, the flight would be cheaper, the country was nearer, and it therefore didn't seem like such a massive investment in something I wasn't really sure I wanted to do in the first place. It was a strategic suggestion, a grand gesture intended to at least give me breathing space before either Mexico or India were wheeled out yet again.

'Morocco?' She regarded me with a look I hadn't anticipated. I wondered if she had ever really considered the journey as something that might happen, something other than an ideal, a goal for which one could aim without fear of ever having to worry about what you would do once you got there.

Later that summer, we landed at Fes-Saïss airport serving the city of Fez in northern Morocco, just south of the Atlas Mountains - and whilst you might point out that it's actually Fes with an S, I could never unlearn all those years of Tommy Cooper or Laurel and Hardy even if I wanted to, and if you're going to be pedantic, then actually it should be rendered فاس . This was my first visit to the African continent, and it felt like stepping off the edge of the map to some degree. I had been to Mexico, and by Mexico I don't mean the parts where English people will be served egg and chips if they just shout loud enough; but Mexico seems distantly related to the US, which has always presented itself as a known quantity. Morocco on the other hand is at the edge of the Arab world. I knew it was there, but that was about all.

The first problem introduced itself when Marian attempted to extract dirhams from the airport ATM, and found that her card was blocked from further use. The Moroccan dirham was at the time in quarantine from the European wongaverse by means I don't fully understand, and for this reason the Lonely Planet guide had advised taking either dollars or traveller's cheques and converting to local currency on arrival, all the while keeping in mind that someone in a uniform would laugh in your face if you tried to convert it all back on the way home. Luckily one of us had remembered to do this, specifically the one who didn't trust the supposedly international language of the credit card. The other one hadn't seen the need to inform the bank of her travel plans, deciding they would probably realise she was on holiday as soon as she started making massive withdrawals of funds in a foreign country.

You just never think! she would rant and rave at me on a more or less daily basis before bemoaning having to do everything for herself, but there was never any benefit to be had from pointing out that this simply wasn't true, so I didn't. Instead I sighed, cashing in a lot more traveller's cheques than I'd bargained for, and resigning myself to being Marian's piggy bank in addition to bag carrier and scratching post. We would have enough to get by for the time we were there, but would have to be considerably more careful with our spending.

For once, Marian couldn't quite work herself up to the full proposition of this all being my fault, and for a second I wondered if she was broken; but I could sense her going over the psychological small print as she made a testy promise to pay me back. She resented that I had known she would dump us both in the shit before we were even out of the the airport, and resented that I'd been right.

'Well, I didn't do it on purpose,' was her best shot, and I thought better of offering comments which would only be weaponised and thrown back regardless of original function. All the same, I hadn't anticipated the change that had come over Marian. She was in a genuinely foreign country full of unfamiliar and troubling smells, somewhere that bore only fleeting resemblance to the beautifully patterned realm of sand, spirit, and Fry's Turkish Delight she probably imagined as she browsed Persian ceramics in East Dulwich. I too was bricking my pants as I tend to do when first arriving in profoundly unfamiliar places, but I'd done this before and had learned how to fake it, how to act like I'm just passing through and it's really no big deal. Additionally, I have a theory that most places to which one may travel will be socially similar once you get beyond the window dressing, so I was pretending that Morocco was Catford with warmer weather and more prayer just as some pretend that every member of the audience is in just their underwear.

Having Marian follow my lead, looking to me to see if whatever we were about to do seemed like a good idea, was peculiar but not unpleasant. The root of her problem had always been gross-overcompensation for an absence of self-esteem, a slipped cognitive disc by which she conflated assertiveness with basic bullying; and at times it was exhausting. Bizarrely, this newly developed humility seemed like a good start to the holiday, and it also seemed like a good idea that she had taken to wearing her headscarf as a hijab in so much as it suggested a willingness to engage with others on their terms. It transpired that Morocco is generally a tolerant and cosmopolitan country, the hijab worn mostly as a matter of preference, and eschewed by many; but I think it made Marian feel a little more secure, which had to be better for everyone.

It was now midday, so we took a taxi into Fez and began to look for a hotel. The first place didn't seem too promising as the proprietor took us up a flight of stairs past workmen taking a break, to a very nearly bare room with just an iron frame bed and a dressing table. I imagined people being electrocuted in this place, and it seems Marian agreed with me. We went elsewhere, at last booking into a much larger hotel, fairly luxurious with rooms big enough to host drag racing events; but the air conditioning was deafening, and it was prohibitively expensive so we vowed to stay for one night and then find somewhere cheaper.

Morocco, or specifically the Ville Nouvelle quarter of Fez reminded me of Mexico City. The general populace appeared roughly similar bar a few regional quirks of dress, and even the architecture and economy seemed really not so different. The weather was warm and people were generally friendly. Truthfully I hadn't known what to expect. I hadn't exactly anticipated the oppressive religious austerity which certain people seem to believe constitutes the entire Islamic world, although I'd wondered if Fez might be something like Marrakesh. Naturally I had never been to Marrakesh but by repute I imagined Islam wrestling with the overbearing presence of the sort of people I generally cross oceans to avoid, new-age tourists boring everyone shitless with weed anecdotes, painted toenails lazily dipped in someone else's culture, probably even fucking jugglers in those novelty felt hats worn by the terminally cretinous at the drippier rock festivals. People who feel the need to find themselves are rarely worth finding, and the suspicion that I would encounter a great many of them in Marrakesh ruled it out as being somewhere I would ever want to go; of course it had been Marian's first choice for the very same reasons, but with much lesser tourist traffic increasing the likelihood of our finding anywhere to stay, Fez became the more practical choice, and to my astonishment, I found I'd already begun to like the place. In fact I think I liked it more than Marian did.

Being as this was 2007 and I didn't keep a diary, much of the detail is now sketchy. Marian took her camera so I left mine at home, reasoning that Morocco was really more her field and whatever photographs she took would logically be superior. Unfortunately, as we later realised, her camera was fucked and had exposed the entire film but for eight photographs carrying a thin strip of detail down one edge.

The second day we booked into Hotel Dar Ziryab on the Rue Lalla Nezha, or at least I believe we did. I'm retracing footsteps using Googlemap which doesn't seem inclined to risk a street level view of Fez, so it's really just an educated guess. The price was better, and the room less like a warehouse and more ornate as I recall, and there was a beautifully decorated communal salon at the top of the building. I seem to remember only being able to stay until the weekend due to prior bookings, and for whatever reason, we later transferred to Wassim Hotel Fez on Rue de Liban, then spent our last day in the youth hostel on Rue Abdeslam Seghrini. When away from home Marian had a habit of changing hotel every forty-eight hours having decided she didn't like the curtains or something, although on this occasion I don't recall our failing to settle as entirely her fault.

Wassim Hotel Fez was distinguished by elevators and a television in the room. In the evening, still reeling from the spectacle of hearing the call to prayer sound across the roofs and towers seen from our hotel window, then the subsequent hush as streets emptied and the entire city fell silent, we sat glued to Moroccan television. We found a channel called Melody and watched a powerfully atmospheric black and white Saudi feature film from the 1950s, although programming otherwise resembled Mexican television so far as I was able to tell - broadcasts in the universal language of Benny Hill and people falling over to a soundtrack of uproarious hysterics.

Our ultimate move to the youth hostel was due either to prior bookings at the Wassim or simply because that was where Marian wanted to be. It was absurdly cheap and accordingly basic, a gated square of tiny rooms arranged around two conjoined courtyards and sharing a communal shower. The upside of this was that the courtyard was full of tortoises, all shapes and sizes, and I sat watching them for hours which was actually more fun than it may sound.

We kept to no strict daily routine, although I usually started off with mint tea which was incredibly sweet and for which I acquired quite a taste. Some days we would begin at a particular outdoor café which served a breakfast of khlea - eggs fried with meat and cumin - also the place at which some enterprising Moroccan tried to persuade me that my girlfriend and I could have an exciting time with him and his wife at their pool. I still wonder if he would have asked had Marian been with me. I expect she was either still asleep or shopping at the time, the latter having turned out to be her main reason for coming. I recall her asking how much available space remained in my bag. She'd already filled a couple of suitcases and needed to assess how much more I would be able to carry. That's just the way it was.

Our first major excursion was to the Medina, Fes el Bali, the mediaeval part of the city which had remained more or less unchanged at least since times when Arabic civilisation made that of Europe seem like a bunch of cavemen playing with their own poo. My first impression as I climbed out of the taxi - impacting upon at least three major senses, not least that of smell - was that we had arrived in Star Wars and would soon encounter Jawas, Sand People and Alec Guinness. It was quietly terrifying, but nevertheless we dutifully went forth because the taxi already had another fare and wasn't going to take us back. We stumbled towards the gates to the old quarter, trying desperately to appear as though we did this sort of thing every day. As it turned out, we weren't the first Europeans the locals had ever seen, and everyone was too busy shouting or arguing or just telling jokes to care about two more. Within the walls we found a labyrinth of streets, very few of them wide enough for more than two people walking side by side. High above us the sun was kept at bay with sheets stretched across the gap between the rooftops; and every ten yards we would acquire a new one-hundred and fifty year old Sid James-faced best friend hopeful that we would be interested in buying his rugs, jewellery, socks, spices, shoes, pens, watches, or possibly even his sister. Marian spoke French much better than I and so was better equipped to judge which were the good deals, but we adopted the habit of politely shooing traders away, something at which I had become reasonably adept in Mexico.

The Chouwara tannery, around which Fes el Bali seems to be built was a great area of ground covered in neat circular vats full of dye, pigeon dung, and possibly urine. Animal hides are dipped and then left out to bake dry in the sun on adjacent roofing and other available surfaces; and the smell is amazing, so powerfully repulsive that it somehow comes out the other side and becomes an almost artistic experience - a Maurizio Bianchi album for the nose.

Having survived the tannery, we took mint tea in some restaurant buried so deep inside the Medina that it felt like we'd entered an underground kingdom made entirely of ornately patterned carpets; we bought spices, and Marian haggled with a rug seller principally for the purpose of seeing what he had on offer. This was the sort of behaviour which made me uneasy. Whilst haggling may or may not be a way of life in the middle-east depending on which story you hear, I suspect people who sell rugs tend to haggle as a means of earning a living rather than providing exotic local flavour for visiting Europeans, so haggling purely for chuckles struck me as rude.

I wasn't the only one to hold this view. We had taken a train the forty mile distance to the neighbouring city of Meknes, through countryside bearing a peculiar resemblance to England but for being thoroughly bleached of all colour. This also afforded a good view of the Atlas Mountains, the domain of Berber and Tuareg tribes, so we had been told. Once in Meknes our first port of call was the market, larger than those we had seen in Fez, and more like the sort of thing we knew from back in England. I don't recall what Marian was trying to buy - although I have a feeling it may have been something prosaic like shampoo, the sort of item someone would sell in order to make a living rather than because they love haggling. She argued with the seller for a minute before storming off, barking away in fluent matron which, hajib or not, probably would have worked better for someone a bit taller.

'What is wrong with your wife?' the trader asked me in English, both aghast and bewildered. 'She is crazy!'

I smiled and shrugged because he was right.

The main reason for our visiting Meknes was the architecture and the presence of one of the few Mosques to allow limited access to non-Muslims, so we briefly got to watch people talking directly to Allah within a building of such sophisticated and elegant design as to make all those European cathedrals seem fussy and hysterical, like the work of talented children who just didn't know when to stop. Meknes in particular underscored that the Muslim world does not suffer a lack of either civilisation or culture, which is something that perhaps a few more people really need to appreciate. No good can come of viewing entire countries as essentially alien, populated by those with whom we have nothing in common, not least because it's a wrong view. As though to illustrate this realisation in microcosm, some young Moroccan struck up a conversation with us on the train as we returned to Fez. Bizarrely, Marian said very little and later told me she had found his behaviour suspicious, but he was really just a young guy genuinely fascinated by the presence of strangers, telling us about his country and wanting to know all about ours. Sometimes there is no hidden agenda, just people very much like ourselves.

It wasn't a perfect holiday, but Marian had for the most part managed to behave like a human being, humbled into shutting up at least some of the time by something too big to be bullied into submission. I think she found the culture shock exhausting, even to the point that we ended up spending an evening at the Fez branch of McDonalds eating McKebabs - or whatever local variant they were serving - just like going out to a bar, except we sat out on the terrace drinking shakes and gazing across the darkened hillside beyond a road which Googlemap identifies as being called McDrive. At around eight or nine a band turned up and started playing. Marian, being environmentally minded, had always frowned upon the burger chain and would cheerfully berate anyone who so much as walked past a branch without spitting.

Don't you care what happens to the rain forest?

'Don't tell Penny about this,' she chuckled, in reference to one of her friends from the belly dancing class.

I never did, and back in England, our relationship resumed its traditional downhill trajectory, we returned to our previous roles, and it took me about eighteen months to claw back the two-hundred pounds she'd borrowed, a sum returned grudgingly in dribs and drabs and by terms suggesting that I was the selfish one; but if nothing else it is at least nice to be able to recall a holiday that wasn't a complete waste of time, a couple of weeks during which we almost managed to pass as a regular couple. I gained first hand experience of a world I might never have visited under my own steam, and it is an experience I will not forget.