China Grove

It's Saturday night and we're going to eat out while we still can, before the lockdown resumes, as it surely will.

'Let's go to China Grove,' I suggest.

We discovered the place just last week on the way to Victoria. We saw much Trump campaign material that day, big signs and flags secured to the gates of ranches as we headed for the coast. Keep America Great, they proposed. It was depressing, but seems significant that Trump's support is at its most visible way beyond the city limits, and that it's nearly always ranches - people with money rather than the trailer parks, contrary to some of the mythology.

China Grove has a few trailer parks, probably more than average, and has the reputation of being the place where all the crackers live. This makes it sort of exotic from where we're sat, so that's where we're going, knowing full well that we'll almost certainly end up listening to stadium country as we eat our barbecue. Without wishing to seem too anthropological, we just want to see what the place has to offer. Bess finds a list of the top ten places to eat in China Grove on her smartphone and we hit the road. Top of the list is something called the Den, with second, third, and fourth places all occupied by different outlets of Dee Willie's BBQ Smokehouse. The rest are mostly Mexican diners.

We follow directions for the Den, and end up exploring more of China Grove than we expected. We go through a neighbourhood which is clearly better off than where we live, so that's interesting, and the map is once again proven to be distinct from the territory. We drive on and realise that we're leaving China Grove. The Den is in fact in La Vernia, some seventeen miles east of China Grove. This seems to represent a derailment of our expedition, but never mind. It makes us feel a bit sorry for China Grove given that the best place to eat in China Grove isn't actually in China Grove.

La Vernia is outside the city. It's of a decent size but is spread out, as towns in Texas tend to be. It looks clean and modern and well maintained for the most part. The cremains of Bess's father were interred at a church here for reasons no-one quite remembers in the absence of any particularly obvious familial association with the town. As we approach, her phone goes - a text message from the city warning us to stay in our homes so as to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It feels a bit apocalyptic, but we're already here so we may as well eat.

We were doing so well. We had chalked up about sixty total deaths among the two million inhabitants of Bexar county, with fewer and fewer new cases coming in each day. Mayor Nirenberg was on top of it, but found himself overruled by Greg Abbott, the state governor, who seemed particularly bothered that anyone might have to pay a fine for exercising their freedom to not wear a mask, and seemed sympathetic to those who claimed that the way forward would be to pack as many of us into the churches as possible so as to deliver a prayer for the end of the pandemic of such force that God would have no choice but to do the right thing. So this seems to be why the numbers are back in upwards freefall and we're once again in the shit. The masks have been demonstrably shown to slow the spread, but no-one is wearing them if they don't have to. No-one has been wearing a face mask on the Tobin Trail or in McAllister park because that's exercise, and walking a chihuahua at two miles per hour apparently counts as exercise.

Arseholes are quite naturally blaming the Black Lives Matter march attended by a fraction of the city's population, and every single one of them masked, because it's always the fault of those who have the most to lose. That's how it works, I guess.

We approach the Den and I can already hear the country music. Trucks are lined up outside and the place looks like a gymnasium. Bears abound in La Vernia, and I presume some local sports team will be known as the La Vernia Bears or similar, hence the Den. I assume bears have dens. It seems like a quiet town. I find it impossible to imagine what it must be like to grow up here. I have no frame of reference.

Masks, on the other hand, don't abound in La Vernia, at least not here, even if the Den is otherwise observing all of the other social distancing procedures. We find a table in what really, really looks like a gymnasium and order iced tea and beer from a waitress with false eyelashes like a couple of spiders. Five or six flatscreen televisions are mounted high up on the walls around the room, three of them tuned to Fox News, currently in the middle of an opinion piece which actually seems to be criticising Trump.

'Maybe the tables are turning,' I say to my wife.

We order food and are given an electronic buzzer which will go off when its ready, letting us know we can go to collect it from the serving hatch.

A man named Bubba now appears on Fox News, a NASCAR driver. NASCAR is some sort of motor racing event associated with economically impoverished white people. Bubba seems to be mixed race and the news item concerns what seemed to be a hangman's noose left in his dressing room. We're trying to work out if it was racially motivated, just a joke, or merely a bit of rope coincidentally resembling a noose which happened to be there and we're all way too sensitive these days. The feature which follows is some woman explaining what great jobs our cops do, so I guess the tables, if they have turned at all, haven't actually turned that much.

The buzzer goes off. I collect our food, and it is genuinely excellent, way above what we had begun to anticipate. It has been worth the expedition. The coronavirus has returned worse than before, and the Texas sky is presently full of Saharan dust, but we're glad we got out, just for this one evening.

Victoria

My wife has taken a week off work. It's Thursday and we still haven't really been anywhere, and I can tell she's already having pensive thoughts about the coming Monday. So we're having a day trip, but somehow we're having trouble working up our customary enthusiasm. We always seem to go to the same places, New Braunfels or Boerne or Corpus Christi or Austin. I have a look at the map, realising we've never been south-east. Corpus Christi is on the Texas coast almost directly south from San Antonio, while New Braunfels and Austin are approximately east, leaving a massive quarter cheese slice of terra incognito of which I know little and Bess has only passing knowledge. The largest town is called Victoria as one heads south-east for the coast from San Antonio and it has a zoo, so fuck it - that's what we're doing today. It's an adventure.

Leaving the city, we pass through China Grove which constitutes another first. Apparently it's our white trash neighbourhood, which is interesting. My understanding of San Antonio is that the eastside is mostly African-American, and everywhere else is Hispanic, with white people scattered here and there according to economic circumstances; but it turns out that us crackers actually have our own 'hood and wow we sure do seem to pass a whole lot of trailer homes and RV parking facilities as we head south-east on Rigsby, with plenty of dollar stores and hardly a taquería to be seen. Amazingly there's a garbage collection facility actually called White Trash Services, suggesting someone has a sense of humour. Checking on the internet, I find this was in Victoria rather than China Grove, but it's probably not hard to see how my memory could have misfiled the information.

The two hours to Victoria - maybe under two hours - are uneventful but interesting because I've never seen this part of Texas and it's been a while since Bess passed through. The landscape is different to what we usually see on the other side of the city, very green, almost English in appearance and with a lot of cows. Also, its coastal lowland so the air is thicker, more humid, and we begin to notice great drapes of Spanish moss trailing from the trees. We pass through La Vernia, where the remains of Bess's father were interred for reasons none of us can work out given the lack of any obvious familial connection to the place; then the towns of Pandora, Nixon, and Smiley, which I mention because I'm still entertained by the names which have been given to towns in America. I say towns, but some of them are technically cities, and I still have no idea how the classification works.

I grew up in an English town, a conurbation of several thousand people living in houses built next to each other, a place one could expect to cross on foot from one side to the other in less than an hour. English cities are similar, except bigger and with more people, and it might take a day or longer to walk from one side to the other. However, here in Texas, one may pass three homes on the highway, each separated by about a mile of open land, then find out that the place somehow counts as a town, implying the presence of at least a general store, or something a bit more suggestive of town life behind some patch of trees which you may or may not have noticed; or the same intermittent string of dwellings will suddenly coalesce into what anyone who ever saw a western movie will recognise as Main Street with a town hall and maybe even a square; and sometimes such places are referred to as cities for what I presume to be legislative reasons.

Anyway, Nixon is named after one of the town's founders, in case anyone was wondering.

Arriving in Victoria, we decide to eat, so we pick Casa Jalisco because for some reason it's hard to go wrong with a Mexican diner named after the state of Jalisco. As we enter, I tell Bess that Jalisco gets its name from xalli- the Nahuatl word for sand, Hispanicised with a j after the conquest. I probably tell her this every time we enter a diner bearing a variation on the name, but she doesn't seem to mind. I've never been to Jalisco in Mexico but I assume it's sandy.

The diner is operating at 50% capacity, so we're some distance from the nearest table, six people and a kid, none of them wearing masks. Bess overhears one of them explaining how she ain't gon' wear no dang mask 'cause ain't no sayin' that it matters none nor makes no difference nohow. It's hard to tell whether or not this is directed at us, but it's also getting hard to care. Idiots have become very much a public phenomenon of late, so there's not much point in worrying about one or two poorly informed individuals.

The food is great but there's too much of it.

The zoo, which we gather hasn't been open long, bills itself as the Texas Zoo. The reason for the seemingly unimaginative title turns out to be that the majority of the animals are indigenous - black vultures, turkey vultures, white tailed deer, and others. They're creatures I encounter on a near daily basis in some cases, but it's still a pleasure to see them up close. Critters remind us that life isn't all plague and Guantanamo Bay and Adolf Hitler abruptly downgraded to a man who had some very interesting ideas but went about it all wrong. Sometimes we need that reminder.

The highlight is the bunnies, a whole colony of Flemish Giants, about twenty or thirty of them all sat around their enclosure twitching their noses, with the only activity coming from a group of babies all bouncing around in an adjacent pen. We watch them for about thirty minutes then leave with a warm feeling.

The drive home is uneventful, as was the drive out, which is fine. Not every day has to be life-changing, just something to hit the reset button is usually enough.

Pearsall

The United States Postal Service now, for reasons best known to itself, automatically photographs your mail prior to delivery, allowing my wife to go online and take a quick look at what the mailman will  bring later on. Unfortunately we see that one of our letters will be a citation for something or other from the city and a case number is just visible through the thin paper of the envelope. We were driving to Pearsall today, but now we're waiting in for the mail, trying to work out what our stupid neighbour has found to complain about this time. We guess it must be something to do with our trees, but mainly because we can't think of anything else; unless he's completely lost it and now suspects that we're collaborating with an underground race of mole people and have built a structurally illegal staircase within our own home so as to facilitate their proposed war against the surface dwellers. The mail usually arrives by eleven on Saturday, but there's been nothing. Eventually we leave anyway, assuming it to be one of those occasional Saturdays when the mail doesn't show up until late afternoon; so we drive over to Target and buy ourselves a little American flag for a couple of dollars.

To start at the beginning, I never met my wife's grandfather. He was gone before I could get here, but he's one person I wish I could have met because I think I would have liked him. His name was Harlan and he was nicknamed Fuzz, originally in reference to his copious blonde hair, but retained with an ironic twist once he went bald on top. As soon as my wife told me this I thought of the old boys I knew at work, the generation who lived through the second world war and whose sense of humour was apparently an international phenomenon. Asked about his nationality when crossing back over into the States from Mexico, Fuzz would say Texan with what I imagine to have been a wry but resolute smile. He was quiet and not given to ostentatious displays of emotion, yet when his favourite chicken went missing - whom he'd named Miss Chicken - the depth of his affection was exposed in his smile when she came back, despite previous protestations that she was only a chicken and sometimes they wander off.

He's buried in the cemetery in Pearsall, a small town surrounded by a lot of wide open space some fifty miles south of San Antonio. My wife grew up there, and that's where her family are from. Its main industry seems to have been either oil or peanuts, depending on which bit of the internet you're looking at. There's a monumental peanut on the side of the highway as you leave town bearing the legend, world's largest peanut, 55.000.000 lbs marketed annually; but the peanut has clearly seen better days, and its claim seems to raise more questions than it answers. The town had a population of around ten-thousand last time anyone counted, but I get the feeling the figure may since have reduced somewhat. The house in which so many of my wife's family were born was once in an orchard but is now surrounded by trailer homes. We went to have a look. There was a wild pig kept inside a tiny cage outside one of them so we didn't stick around.

Each Memorial Day, Fuzz used to visit the cemetery to embellish the headstones of his fellow veterans with small flags, just as a gesture of respect and camaraderie. Edi - his daughter and my wife's aunt - had been to Pearsall to visit the family plot and noticed that someone had continued this practice, although the spot where Fuzz's remains are now buried had been missed; so that's why we're driving to Pearsall. I've already pointed out that Edi could surely have popped into the local Walmart, picked up one of those little flags for a dollar or two and addressed the oversight rather than just telling the rest of us about it; but Bess has taken it upon herself to plant a flag on her grandfather's grave simply because it's something she wants to do, because that's what Fuzz did for others.

Besides, it's a day out when we've hardly been anywhere for the last two months due to the lockdown. Our part of Texas hasn't been hit too bad by COVID-19, possibly because everything is kind of spread out and we have a decent mayor who does his job properly and listens to epidemiologists rather than angry fucknuggets who regard being required to wear a face mask and skip church for a week or two as a violation of their civil rights. A few places are starting to open up at reduced capacity, but both Bess and myself are still wearing masks in public, and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future. I still don't understand why anyone would consider it an inconvenience, given the reason for wearing them.

Pearsall is as I remember it from a couple of previous visits, hot, quiet, and spread out with not many people around during the day. There seem to be a lot of high street stores now closed down, even boarded up - sometimes three in a row, one after the other. I have an unfortunate feeling this may simply be a sign of the times for Pearsall rather than anyone's business specifically going under as a result of the lockdown.

We drive to the cemetery, plant our little flag, then stand around and think about the dead for a while. Most of the names in the Arnold plot are familiar to me by now, although there are still a few empty plots where blank stones await carving in honour of those presumably still living. I may even be one of them. I don't know.

Job done, we head back onto the highway, then stop off at Triple C being as it's past lunchtime. Triple C is a diner which you could probably justifiably call a restaurant, a steak place. I never really saw what the fuss was with steak until I ate at Triple C, yet the last time we came it wasn't that great - which was weird and unexpected and hopefully a one-off dip in the graph. The waitress points a gun which reads temperature at my forehead so as to ascertain whether or not I have the coronavirus, and we are shown to a table. We order salad and steak.

The walls are covered in square panels of wood bearing the brands of different ranchers, some of whom have presumably supplied Triple C with its meat. Each brand is embellished with the name of the rancher and the location of the ranch, mostly Texas, but a few further afield, Kentucky and the like. I study the designs and realise that they are burned into the wood, and were therefore most likely made with an actual brand, which is probably about as far as I need to go with that train of thought. Most of them are identifiable as letters, the initials of the rancher - JR, TJ and the like; but some comprise more esoteric symbols, stars, squiggles, heavily stylised versions of the initials and so on. A couple of them remind me of symbols reputedly seen on the side of flying saucers, notably one famously reported by Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, New Mexico, 1964. I'm able to recall the name Lonnie Zamora without having to look it up, and I don't know whether I should be proud of this fact or slightly saddened.

The salad is amazing. The steak is okay, but nothing special compared to what is served at either Charlie's or the Hungry Farmer in San Antonio. Oh well...

We arrive home and the mail has been. The citation turns out to be a routine thing which comes around every year. Our trees and bushes are obstructing the alley at the back, so it's thankfully nothing to do with our stupid neighbour. It will take about an hour to trim it all back, just as it did last time and the time before, and so it's really nothing to worry about.

It's difficult to say quite what connects all of the above beyond belonging to the same day, but I'm sure there's something.

Drive-By Graduation

Although America was designed as an alternative to the stuffy hierarchical bureaucracies from which its inventors originally set sail, it has spent the last two centuries rendering every last deed and word as the most important and stately thing ever. For something which regards itself as better than monarchy, we sure seem to spend a lot of time and energy on approximating all the trappings right down to the last, most pointlessly baroque detail. There's a ceremony for everything, because everyone gets to be king for a day, or so the promise would have it. The main features of my own departure from my English secondary school were, for example, that I was present at the school for a period of time, and then I was absent from the school for the period which followed, and I never went back and that was that. Here there's a ceremony involving caps, gowns, awards, speeches and so on. I've been to one American high school graduation ceremony. It lasted about three hours, comprising a line of kids in gowns marching across a stage punctuated by the worst motivational speeches you've ever heard, material which could have been written for William Shatner at the height of his gestural powers.

As these young people go boldly into the future whence destiny shalt be their red carpet and the fame we see snatched from the jaws of failure here today in this most hallowed space blah blah blah...

Thankfully, every cloud has a silver lining and it seems that the global pandemic is no exception, and so are we invited to a drive-by graduation. Our boy's cousin has finished school this year. We'll put on our masks, drive past his house, wave, call out well done, and his mother will hand us cup cakes through the car window.

That's the plan.

We pull up to the house and notice the personalised license plate of the vehicle in front. 'That's Byron,' I say, surprised. 'I didn't think he would come. In fact I guess he's leaving already.'

We watch the truck drive away as we park in the space it has vacated. Byron underwent serious eye-surgery this weekend, and Bess suggests he was probably driven here by one of his friends. She glances across to the lawn of the house upon which twenty or thirty unmasked persons are gathered. 'I don't think he was too happy about this gathering. He's been pretty keen about sticking to the lockdown.'

This doesn't sound like Byron, a man rarely seen without an entourage of fellow barbecue enthusiasts, but then he's full of surprises and I'm sure the surgery will have had a sobering effect.

'I thought this was a drive-by.'

'Me too,' says Bess, and we get out of the car, donning our masks.

The graduate is with his friends in a group. I still think of him as a little ginger kid with piercing eyes, but he's taller than I am and has somehow come to resemble a young, muscular Alan Partridge. His friends look as though they should be fooling around on yachts. His mother comes over and herds us towards the table with the cupcakes. I take one with soft green icing tasting like nothing found in nature, the sort which is actually quite nice every once in a while.

No-one is wearing a mask.

We do the elbow bump greeting with the graduate's older brother, who now resembles Rick Moranis. Bess jokes that I'm enjoying the pandemic because it means I'm no longer obliged to hug complete strangers, which is true. I still don't like the elbow bump though. It replaces handshakes and other forms of physical contact which I never saw as necessary in the first place.

We congratulate the graduate for having lived to the age at which he's no longer required to attend high school. He seems happy. He has plans to become a veterinarian, or something in that direction.

'You remember Jeff?' my wife suggests.

I sort of do, and Jeff grins, and his great big hand sails towards mine like a side of ham. Contact is made and we shake unnecessarily.

I hear myself observing that the term drive-by made me think of Boyz n the Hood, but it's the wrong crowd for such references. 'We're the only people wearing masks,' I say to Bess.

'I know. We'll go in a minute.'

I meet a few more people I've met before but don't remember, and then we shuffle back to the car and head home. As we leave, I gaze at them all stood around on the lawn and wonder if this has been some kind of low-level protest at having to wear a mask, inspired by those fucknuggets in the news who've decided that it somehow violates their constitutional rights. None of them exactly look like Trumpanzees, but then they're all white Caucasian, all wealthy, all well-dressed in a city with a 62% Latin or Hispanic populace.

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell.

I try not to think about it.

Let's Think About Living

I first saw Tim Webster perform at Maidstone Art College, probably late 1984 or thereabouts, most likely with the Sputniks. It would have been a college party organised by my friend Carl, who was president of the student union at the time. He'd known Tim since they were kids due to their dads having been good friends. I don't remember the music because I'd only just discovered drinking and was trying to do a lot of it so as to effect my transformation into someone more interesting, or at least more shaggable.

My usual drinking assistant was a fellow student who lived in Chatham, and whom I won't name because he was a massive twat. He shared a house with Tim's girlfriend, about whom he whinged and whined at length because complaining about that which didst emburden his Bohemian soul was his thing, and he'd given me a long list of Chatham persons whom I should consider enemies. Tim was one of them. I don't remember the details, but one of his supposed sins was the noisy and enthusiastic sexual intercourse in which Tim allegedly engaged when visiting his girlfriend. Also, Tim was in one of those fifties revival bands, and they were the enemy too. Having a general suspicion of nostalgia, it sort of made sense to me at the time.

A couple of years passed and I ended up living in Chatham, and because I was unemployed and therefore a gentleman of leisure, I spent most days hanging around a café called Gruts on the high street, near the Nag's Head. I met a lot of people who had been classified as the enemy by my former drinking assistant, and I had realised that actually I liked them more than I liked him because, as stated above, he was a massive twat. Tim's girlfriend - by this point ex-girlfriend - was funny and lovely, for one example; and Tim himself had a workshop just across the road from Gruts, so he spent a lot of time in the café and that's how I got to know him.

On the surface of it, it might seem like that mid-eighties rockabilly revival - the thing which brought us the Polecats and their like - had been a big deal in the Medway towns of Chatham, Rochester and others, but really it felt like something different, as I slowly came to appreciate. Billy Childish, the Milkshakes, the Sputniks, and others - and we may as well include the Prisoners, the Dentists, and the Daggermen while we're here - seemed to be responding to something inherent to their locality, something ingrained within those streets. It wasn't really a revival so much as something which still sounded good, which still worked now reclaimed from the soap powder salesmen who had tried to turn it into Seaside Special. Even understanding this, I was initially wary of Tim because he seemed like a big shot on the local stage, one of the cool kids, or at least someone too cool to bother talking to the likes of me - given my then representing an evolutionary intermediary between Worzel Gummidge and Roy Wood.

Happily I was wrong. Tim was fucking great, one of the best. Now passing fifty, looking back at the list of those I've known - and I'm assuming this will be true for many of us - it's depressing how many people turned out to be nothing like so wonderful as you thought they were at the time, notably my former drinking assistant; but Tim is one of the exceptions, someone you can genuinely say you were lucky to have known, possibly even a living legend by some definition.

He usually spent a couple of hours a day in Gruts, and it turned out that he was interesting, very, very funny, and an Olympic level spinner of yarns, many with shagging as the punchline, and many giving account of his frequent accidents and injuries, and the most viscerally memorable relating his employment at the local crematorium, the only detail of which I recall being a treatise on the art of disposing of ashes around the grounds without leaving them in big grisly piles, and the use of a shovel to smash up any bones which had survived the furnace.

He repaired guitars, amplifiers, motorbikes, scooters, pretty much whatever you had that was broken in his workshop, and in the evenings he was usually playing in some pub or other in one of his bands, the Sputniks, Timmy Tremolo & the Tremolons, Johnny Gash & the Sweet Smell of Success, Dean & the Hammonds, and I've no doubt there were others I never even heard about. I'm sure there were nights when he played twice at different venues with different groups, doubtless tearing across town on foot, somehow changing shirts as he went still with a guitar slung over one shoulder. He was always into something; he was one of those people who kept things interesting and he was great live, always tearing the proverbial roof of wherever the band found themselves that evening.

He taught me how to play chess, possibly so he'd have someone to play against as we sat around in Gruts. He referred to the pieces as prawns, horsies and so on, and I assumed he was some kind of undiscovered grandmaster because he always beat me. I eventually noticed that I seemed to be the only person Tim could actually beat; and Billy Childish routinely thrashed Tim, even if the games seemed to go on for a long time.

At one point, Tim had me draw a strip cartoon - which was sort of a commission - based on Johnny Gash, one of his bands. The idea came from a running joke about all four members combining like Voltron to become the Gashman, a weird, pulpy supernatural figure with a shitload of country and western in the mix. I don't think he knew what to make of what I came up with, but he was polite about it. I don't think I'd quite grasped what he was after, and in any case my efforts weren't really the sort of thing which would have made sense as a poster for a gig.

Eventually I left Medway and lost touch with Tim, but ran into him from time to time during occasional return visits. He always seemed overjoyed to see me while I was sort of surprised he'd even remembered who I was. He always seemed to have some new distracting injury - cast, neck brace or crutches - incurred during the most recent road accident, and his life still seemingly bore resemblance to that of the character played by Robin Askwith in the Confessions films. Tim had always been unusually popular with the ladies, or so it seemed to me, and his testimony often left me imagining him shinning down drainpipes at 3AM or in trouserless flight from enraged shotgun wielding fathers; but it was thirty years ago, and my memory may have exaggerated some of the details, hopefully.

Then he turned up on facebook, as we all do eventually, but hadn't effected the usual transformation into the Duke of Wellington, as tends to have happened with everyone you knew from school. I made the mistake of pointing out a spelling error he'd made during some exchange or other, to which he replied I'm dyslexic, you cunt, or words to that effect, then elaborating by explaining that he'd been expelled from school at fourteen or thereabouts, still unable to properly read or write. I hadn't known or even suspected this, but have to assume it to be true, or roughly truthful, which still surprises me even if it probably shouldn't. The man was a force of nature, like nothing could stop him. He could do anything, and often did. On some level I always knew I'd run into him again at some point, and we'd have a drink and a chuckle over his latest ill-advised escapades, and it would be like no time had passed. There was something fundamental about him and he would always be there doing his thing.

He was living on a boat, possibly on the Medway, or else somewhere up north - I never quite worked out where he'd ended up. I gather he had health problems, but I'm not entirely sure about that either. One evening he went out on the deck of his boat for a fag, then was found dead in his deck chair next morning. I can hear a little voice muttering that it's how he would have wanted to go, although I doubt that it was. He taught me how to play chess and got me through a shitty couple of years, and my life is better than it would have been for having known the man. I'm sure others will say the same. He was the heart of the music scene in Medway for a long time, yet is mentioned only once in Stephen H. Morris's Do It Yourself: A History of Music in Medway, and then for guesting on someone else's album. He taught Billy Childish how to make woodcuts. Traci Emin painted a portrait of him before reinventing herself as whatever she is now, then flatly denied it was her work when he tried to sell the piece. The Sputnik's released one great 10" album, and aside from a few tracks on compilations, that was the full extent of Tim's vinyl footprint.

He seems like someone who should be better remembered.

He seems like someone who should still be here.

Even during this last year, having come to resemble something in the general vicinity of old man Steptoe, it took only one glance to see that here was a man with character, a man of genuine substance; and he would have read this, rolled his eyes, and barked oh fuck off with that Sid James laugh of his.

Today Was a Good Day

I don't really have dentist appointments, but every three or four months I go in for deep cleaning. This is because there was a point at which it looked as though my teeth were about to fall out. They were saved by an American dentist named Dr. Stalker whom I consequently regard as a minor deity. I lost about six, or maybe eight, but he was able to save the rest by means of expensive and then semi-experimental dental surgery of such complexity as to necessitate my being knocked out for three hours. Providing I keep them clean, particularly right down below the gum line, it seems like I shouldn't have any more problems, and so I go in to Dr. Stalker's surgery for an hour of chipping and scraping three or four times a year.

A couple of years ago, my regular hygienist retired. Her successor got the job done, but I found her abrasive and annoying, and worst of all, she insisted that it was only possible to deep clean my teeth using a sonic device which caused me some pain. She described herself, somewhat inanely, as a cheerleader for my teeth, despite which, the thrust of her counsel mostly resembled that of a south-east London garage mechanic who starts shaking his head and sighing even before he's taken a look under the bonnet - or hood if you're American. I began to dread these appointments and considered going elsewhere but felt committed to Dr. Stalker's surgery, possibly much like that fabled lion with the thorn in his paw.

Then after yet another miserable appointment following which I'd vowed never again, I discovered that the surgery additionally employed another hygienist, a woman named Dolores. She was an unknown quantity, and it was difficult getting an appointment, and her hours were unorthodox; but it seemed worth a punt, and she was great. So that's where I'm heading this morning. It's a beautiful sunny day made all the sweeter for my not having spent the last two weeks in a gloom of anticipation. Eight in the morning still seems a bit of an odd time for a dental appointment, but anything is better than another agonising hour spent in the company of the cheerleader.

I cycle through Alamo Heights, and for once the roads are fairly clear due to it being the end of the world. As I enter the more conspicuously wealthy neighbourhood, I pass a house on Cloverleaf with a Trump 2020 campaign sign stuck in the lawn. It's depressing because I only saw two of the things back in 2016, but I guess his acolytes are more emboldened this time around, no longer feeling there's anything shameful about supporting a man who can't actually bring himself to say an unkind word about white supremacists - for just one example. The lawn of the next house supports a sign reading something like, whoever you are, we're glad to be your neighbour, with the message rendered above and below in Spanish and Arabic. Regardless of how sappy one might deem such a sentiment, if fills my heart with joy to consider how the adjacent Trumpanzees must feel about those liberals next door.

I cycle up the hill, zig-zag through the neighbourhood to Olmos Park, then along Stanford to the surgery - forty minutes in all. At the surgery I'm required to fill in a form which could probably be simplified to do you have coronavirus? with yes and no boxes provided, and then Dolores summons me to the chair. This time she's dressed as though for major surgery, facemask, cap, surgical gloves, everything.

'How long have you been back at work?' I ask.

'Today is the first day,' she says. 'I've been off since March.'

'Oh,' I say. 'So I'm your first patient since everything shut down?'

'Yes.'

'How is it? Being back after the pandemic, I mean.'

'Ask me again at the end of the day.'

She settles down to work, chipping away at calcified plaque particles, the stuff I can never quite keep at bay through brushing. She works with a manual pick, which has made me wonder somewhat about the cheerleader's insistence on using the more painful alternative. The pick doesn't bother me at all. It barely even ranks as discomfort.

I rinse with the traditional plastic cup, another thing the cheerleader did away with on the grounds of it being supposedly unhygienic. As she works, Dolores occasionally describes what she's doing, or offers advice, but there's none of the abrasive banter or prophecies of imminent dental doom in which her predecessor traded.

Dr. Stalker comes in for a quick look, as he usually does. He prods at a few points around my gums muttering adjectives such as amazing and incredible. 'You know,' he says to Dolores, 'I really wish I'd taken pictures of Lawrence's teeth before I worked on them. The change is just astounding. You really wouldn't believe how they were when he came in from seeing them now.'

He slaps me on the shoulder and smiles. 'You're doing a great job there, Lawrence. Just keep it up.'

Dolores resumes her work, now chipping away around my upper jaw. I can hear the cheerleader in the background, filling the building with her voice, her aggressively cheery observations, her thoughts on this and that. I hear her enter the surgery somewhere behind, needing to borrow something. I wonder if she realises it's me, or whether she wonders why I might have changed hygienist. Now she's whooping and hollering, entertained by something or other.

'You're sooo small,' she laughs for some reason I don't catch, which strikes me as kind of rude. Dolores is Hispanic and could hardly be described as a giant, but her height seems fairly average. It's a peculiar observation to make, even in the context of whatever it was they were talking about; but thankfully the cheerleader now has whatever she came in for and accordingly fucks off.

Dolores finishes. 'I hope that wasn't too bad.'

'Not at all. No discomfort whatsoever.'

She seems pleased and makes me another appointment for August. As I leave, I sidle up to the receptionist at the main desk. I think her name is Sarah. She's the one who pleaded for me not to go elsewhere when I started having trouble with the cheerleader, or maybe not pleaded but she was obviously concerned.

'Just wanted to say, thanks for sorting me out with Dolores,' I mutter in sotto voice in case the cheerleader should overhear, wherever she is. 'She's very good.'

I cycle off to engage with the rest of the day. It's still only nine in the morning and I can tell it's going to be a great day.

Food to Go During a Global Pandemic

We'd accepted that some things were going to have to be done differently - no more French kissing complete strangers in the local park for example. My wife and I are creatures of habit and tend to dine out twice a week, Thursday and Saturday because it gives me a break from cooking and it's easy to do in America, or at least in Texas where it's not hard to find a decent place to eat and usually pretty cheap; but we accepted that if we were going to continue with date night, it was going to have to be takeaways for the foreseeable future, at least until the end of either the coronavirus or civilisation, whichever came first. So here's what we ate, or at least what I ate.

Jim's Diner: burger, fries, onion rings, apple pie. We reasoned that it's hard to go wrong with Jim's, conveniently forgetting a recent unfortunate trend towards a slightly chewier chicken fried steak brought to your table by someone with distracting personality flaws - such as that weird little guy who kept trying to engage us in conversation about how much he enjoyed watching vehicular collisions occurring opposite the diner along Broadway. Anyway, my wife ordered a chicken salad which looked as though it had been thrown together first thing that morning, perhaps even the previous evening, and both my order of fries and apple pie were absent, which we didn't discover until we got home. The burger was kind of sad too. Jim's is a great place to eat, but I guess takeaway was never really their thing. The entire chain went into suspended animation about a week later - no take out or anything - so I guess at least someone realised Jim's wasn't playing to its strengths. There was a time when I came fairly close to having the Jim's logo tattooed upon my person, so it causes me great pain to admit that this may well have been the worst take out food I've ever begrudgingly stuffed into my face.

LA Crawfish: shrimp po boy, fries, chicken nuggets. The LA prefix refers to the state of Louisiana, and this is a chain which serves Louisiana style stuff, of which the po boy is one example. It's actually just a baguette filled with, in this case, shrimp, but somebody apparently decided to call it a po boy so as to reduce Louisiana's surfeit of things which sound a bit French. I don't really get it. I assume the rebranding refers to the sort of person who might eat a shrimp baguette, specifically a young economically impoverished gentleman. What annoys me about the name is that it obliges me to either assume the identity of a comedy English person by asking for a poor boy, or to impersonate a black man from New Orleans simply by pronouncing it correctly. Anyway, the last shrimp po boy I had from LA Crawfish was pretty good. This one was probably the same, but it turned out that I wasn't so hungry as I'd thought, and I struggled with what is essentially a loaf of bread cut in half length-ways and filled with shrimp, lettuce, mayonnaise, and peppers. It's the sort of thing you would more logically eat with a knife and fork, but no-one does, so it feels weird even to attempt to do so. Also, being a fucking idiot, I forgot just how massive the LA Crawfish po boy tends to be and ordered chicken nuggets as well as fries; so there was way too much of it and it was all too dry.

Hung Fong: sweet and sour chicken, spring roll. The problem with committing oneself to a course of takeaway food is that something which might be enjoyed in a diner or eating place doesn't always work as takeaway - as I learned the hard way with Jim's, or, I suppose, the slightly soggy way. That said, I've regarded Chinese food as primarily takeaway for a long time, at least since I was a teenager, even if I'm sat eating it at a table inside a restaurant. Happily this means that Hung Fong's fare translates to styrofoam conveyance without so much as a hiccup, and makes just as much sense consumed at home while watching Wheel of Fortune. This is nice because, perhaps ironically, Hung Fong's fare tastes like proper food more than it tastes like what I've traditionally come to think of as Chinese takeaway, which is probably the difference between English and American variations upon what Chinese people actually eat. Hung Fong is the oldest Chinese restaurant in San Antonio, having been established back in 1939, and they're friends of the family - or at least Jeff is - so we feel it's sort of our duty to keep the place going until normal service is resumed.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. My wife and myself have regarded Los Dos Laredos as more or less the greatest Mexican diner in the universe for at least the last couple of years. It's one of those little orange buildings you might not immediately notice on the Austin Highway, one of many, a happy cartoon chili pepper wearing a sombrero enthusiastically hand-painted on the window and at least one waitresses with a reassuringly slender grasp of English, and the food is wonderful. Amazingly, it works just as well in takeaway form - which has come as a massive relief - and such is the culinary excellence of the establishment that I even ordered a takeaway coffee where I wouldn't ordinarily bother, because even their coffee is amazing and somehow unlike that served by anyone else. The migas plate, for those unfamiliar with the term, is essentially an omelet made with crushed up corn chips, salsa, and a ton of cheese, so it's basically a crunchy omelet and is absurdly fortifying; and happily it works just as well at home following conveyance by means of styrofoam container.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, salted caramel shake. We were heading for Good Time Charlie's but became fearful that their ordinary fare was of such excellence that the mobile version could only come as a disappointment, so instead we went across the road to Shake Shack, which is part of a chain, and about which we'd been wondering ever since they set up shop on that corner where the Kiddie Park used to be. The chicken was crispy and delicious, and the shake may actually have been the greatest thing I've ever sucked through a straw, not least because I actually could suck it through a straw unlike the usual multicoloured nightmares in flavoured sugar with the consistency of peanut butter. We ate in the car, in the parking lot of Half Price Books so as to watch all the pussy cats which congregate in the area, so it felt like a bit of an occasion.

Popeye's: chicken burger. Having once ordered a Popeye's poor boy, or rather a po boy, at least as cumbersome as the thing I had from LA Crawfish, I wisely limited myself to just the chicken burger, which was actually decent. As the restaurant - if we're now going to call fast food joints restaurants - was fully closed (rather than open but with the seating area cordoned off), I was obliged to sit in the drive-through lane on my bike behind a massive truck like some kind of lunatic. Thankfully my order came through pretty quickly. I think the last time I went inside a branch of Popeye's it took about twenty minutes, which I assumed to be a deliberate delay intended to reinforce the illusion of our being in Louisiana where sitting around on your arse and not giving a fuck actively counts as an undertaking.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, cheese burger, fries, salted caramel shake. We went back but somehow it wasn't as good. I had an extra burger in the belief that just one wouldn't be enough, but it was too much and the chicken wasn't as crispy, plus it was pissing down with rain and I realised I needed new shoes as I crossed the forecourt to place the order. I realised this because my feet were damp.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, salted caramel shake. Yet the third time was just as good as the first, so I have no idea what happened there given that it was still pissing with rain. Perhaps a pall was cast across the previous occasion by the passing of Eddie from Little & Large.

El Jibarazo: carne asada tacos. El Jibarazo is a semi-stationary taco truck parked next to a raised porch built on the side an automotive place owned by the same people. I seem to recall Trump warning us about taco trucks, which really says more about him than anything else. El Jibarazo's food is kind of basic, I suppose, but pisses over pretty much everything else in San Antonio. Their carne asada tacos - or Mexican street tacos if you live in Portland, tend to screech a lot and your fave band is Ha Ha Tonka - may conceivably be the greatest tacos on the planet and are no less amazing eaten at home given that they're already takeaway.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. Still good during the second weekend of the lockdown and made us both feel better after another encounter with a certain passive-aggressive relative who should really have been staying the fuck home rather than worrying about hire cars given that she doesn't actually have any friends to visit.

Guajillo's: mole poblano. Guajillo's was the last place we ate before everything shut down, and their mole poblano is amazing and the best version of this dish I've eaten outside Mexico. It's that chocolate and chilli thing everyone's heard about, and I've tried to cook it myself but have never got the balance right. The key seems to be that it should be just a little more spicy than you like, which is something I find difficult to judge, but whoever rules the frying pan at Guajillo's is clearly a master of the art. Anyway, we didn't even realise Guajillo's was doing take out during the shut down, and hadn't even wondered, assuming their food to be one of those things which wouldn't really work in mobile form. Happily we were wrong and being able to eat Guajillo's mole poblano at home came fairly close to a religious experience.

McDonalds: cheeseburgers, fries, soda. I was ill, but thankfully with diverticulitis rather than coronavirus. This is an occasionally recurring condition which manifests as stomach cramps and an inability to poo, which I usually get around with Milk of Magnesia and a liquid only diet for as long as it takes - usually just a day; and at the end of this particular day I began to experience hunger and so opted for something fairly bland just to be on the safe side. I only seem to eat at McDonald's when I'm ill, and on this occasion it was nevertheless welcome

Sabor Cocinabar: enchiladas Aztecas. Along with Good Time Charlie's, Guajillo's, Los Dos Laredos, and El Jibarazo, Sabor Cocinabar is one of those places which I'd consider top shelf - Mexican food with an unusual gourmet angle, but gourmet Mexican rather than the usual Mexican food for people who don't actually like Mexican food thing which one encounters around this parish from time to time. I'm not even sure what the hell enchiladas Aztecas actually is, but it's gorgeous, seemingly a relative of mole poblano but as an enchilada and involving fried potatoes amongst other things, and with a bewildering suggestion of caramel, or something like caramel. I had doubts it would translate into a takeaway version, and regrettably it kind of didn't, although I couldn't really work out why. There was nothing obviously wrong or lacking except that somehow it lacked spirit, so maybe the ingredient I've yet to identify is witchcraft.

Good Time Charlie's: cilantro jack steak, fries, house salad. We put off the inevitable sampling of Charlie's takeaway service for fear of it failing to live up to the standard of their food as served in house. Charlie's probably qualifies as our all-time favourite diner. We chalked up thirty-one separate visits in 2019, beating Los Dos Laredos by two; of course we should have known better and trusted in Charlie's where even the fucking salad is amazing; and the aforementioned fucking salad was, against all reason, still amazing as takeaway in a styrofoam punnet, contrary to expectations lowered by that weird limp thing we brought home from Jim's the other week. Jim's, to briefly backtrack, is usually great but has been occasionally prone to lackluster intervals depending, I suppose, on who they have working for them at the time, and whilst an actual poor meal at Jim's is a truly rare thing, when they screw up, the food tends to remind you that you're eating at a chain restaurant. Charlie's by comparison is like the very best of Jim's done right to the point of tasting like home cooking, so it's probably significant that they're not a chain. Cilantro jack steak, in case you were wondering, is a hamburger steak grilled with fresh cilantro - or coriander if you prefer - inside, topped with cheese, and I could die happy eating it. It's the sort of food you anticipate eating at the end of a tough day. You can actually feel your soul healing as you dine. The cheese was a little dryer than usual as takeaway, but it was still lush.

Los Dos Laredos: migas plate, coffee. Third visit and still delivering the goods.

Shake Shack: chicken burger, fries, cookies and cream shake. I was going to cook that evening but a power outtage curtailed my plans, obliging us all - even the kid - to go out for a drive because the car has air conditioning, what with this being Texas and all. They were out of salted caramel shake, but the cookies and cream was good. Once again we ate in the car in the parking lot at Half Price, and this time we saw more of the local cats, including the black fluffy one, due to the weather being warm and sunny.

There followed further visits to Los Dos Laredos, Good Time Charlie's and El Jibarazo for the same orders as listed above for a further couple of weeks until the restaurants opened up again, albeit at 25% seating capacity; but writing about every last meal gets repetitive, and I'm sure you get the general idea.