Bishop Street, 1990

The Royal Mail sorting office on Bishop Street in Coventry is the largest building in which I've ever been employed, three or four floors above a huge loading bay full of eighteen-wheelers, expansive canteen up at the top. The blend of exhaust and inner city fog as one enters through the loading bay at 5.30AM, still cold and dark, has an inexplicable tang of diarrhoea. I can never work that one out given that the recipe is logically mostly gases produced by machines and related industrial processes.

The sorting frames are on the first floor, a single vast space occupying the entire length and breadth of the building, with a ceiling so high as to accommodate turbines. It's hard to keep from thinking of it as a factory what with the scale and the rafters, and then the tall expanse of glass at the end, rows of window panes stretching up into the roof like in a place of worship. If architecture has DNA, then there is a lot of Coventry in Bishop Street - that distinctive blend of automotive assembly line and modern cathedral. I first walked in on Monday the 22nd of May, 1989, and immediately knew I'd made a mistake.

The entire city is divided into eight sections, all side by side on the shop floor, like eight individual sorting offices set up inside the same warehouse. My first walk was South-West 10 encompassing Hearsall Lane in Earlsdon up so far as Sovereign Road, amounting to about eight-hundred addresses. The upper limit in Chatham was around five-hundred. After a month or so I've been moved to the North-West at the other end of the shop floor, and kept here just long enough to make a couple of friends, or at least long enough for a few of the postmen in residence to take the piss out of me.

I haven't had my hair cut in over a year, so it's getting quite long. I usually tie it in a pony tail because it gets in the way and I don't want it cut, and because it's the eighties. This means that, so far as my colleagues are concerned, I'm a hippy because it's as easy a way to identify me as any. Adrian Hollands has accordingly given me the nickname Mellow, an acknowledgment of generic hippy demeanour to ironically offset my actual mood and personality, which is anything but mellow and is usually severely pissed off and angry at the unreasonable quota of work piled upon my shoulders on a daily basis. Once I realised there wasn't much point in being additionally pissed off by the nickname, they seemed to accept me and so I've settled in.

Adrian, known as Ade - obviously - is part of a double act with Ian. They're a couple of years older than I am, so mid-twenties, abrim with confidence and funny, but not to the point of being arseholes.

Dennis and Phil are working on the frames behind mine. Dennis is abrasive and best ignored - probably mid-fifties, red-faced and with huge pupils swimming around behind spectacles cut from the bottom of Coke bottles. He always looks outraged about something or other, even when he smiles, which is presumably difficult given that his mouth is naturally down-turned like that of a glum cartoon toad. Aside from the delivery of mail, his main job seems to be laughing at Phil's jokes. I can't really hold it against him because Phil's jokes are usually very funny.

Phil is fat, blonde, red-faced - an example of a type which will eventually be identified as a Gammon. He's abusive, but his abuse is dispensed more or less regardless of whoever is at the receiving end and is simply an extreme method of letting off steam; and we tend to generate a lot of steam in this job. His jokes, to be fair, aren't really jokes as such, but rather are expletives and insults delivered with such shocking force and conviction that amusement seems the only fitting reaction.

'Hot today innit, Phil?' Dennis suggests in conversational spirit. 'I'm sweating here.'

'It's too hot for a WANK!' Phil reports, and you can actually hear the upper case letters of the last word, bold and underlined for emphasis. 'Don't you bristle your moustache at me, Mr. Bhatt!'

This last instruction has the defensive attitude of chair legs abruptly screeching backwards across the floor of a bar. Had there been a piano player, he would have stopped. Mr. Bhatt is our driver, a large pacific man of Indian heritage with a proud moustache. Each morning he silently cruises the aisles between the sorting frames looking for parcels he might take out on the van. This isn't so much altruism as that he doesn't want us chasing him down the road with our larger parcels later on once he's already got started.

'You are agitated, Mr. McCrystal,' Mr. Bhatt observes. 'I think you are unhappy about something.'

'I'm unhappy because I'm doing the work of two fucking blokes, Mr. Bhatt.'

'But you are normally doing the work of two, Mr. McCrystal,' the driver adds thoughtfully. 'That must mean that today you are doing the work of four men!'

This is an example of Mr. Bhatt's sense of humour. It's mostly in the delivery, and he smiles a little as he silently heads off towards the end of the aisle to speak with Guy, our supervisor.

Guy has a fire engine which he fixes up in his spare time and takes to fairs and the like. I guess we all need something.

Ade can be heard delivering comic threats to Tony. He could quite easily have Tony beaten up, or done over, or something. He doesn't care how ridiculous it sounds.

'How are you going to go about that then?' Tony enquires, dismissive and slightly camp, like a fatter Kenneth Williams - forever disappointed and underwhelmed by everything.

'I have my contacts,' Ade reports, matter of fact.

A moment goes by, just a little too long for the baton of repartee to be passed along.

'Yeah!' Mouse blusters in the usual spray of saliva. 'Contact lenses!'

Mouse is younger than I am but looks about forty, balding, a bit greasy with rodent qualities, hence the nickname. Everyone pauses to look at mouse.

'Good 'un, Mouse,' says Ade with a fake grin. 'Good 'un!'

Ian meanwhile effects staccato bursts of insincere laughter. 'Contact lenses - brilliant!'

Mouse goes back to sorting letters while silently working on his material.

'Small business? Small business???!!!' Phil explodes with what sounds like genuine outrage. 'One fucking bloke and a ladder! Small business??? Cunts!'

He's just got to the Enterprise Allowance mail, of which a great quantity has been sent out this morning. He speaks for all of us. He compares notes with Dennis, both muttering, now providing critical commentary on those who dare to receive mail on Phil's route, and what sort of fucking cunts are sending it to them. One particular diatribe gains volume, concluding with fucking pony-tail cunt from fucking London!

'I heard that!' I swivel around to face him.

'Oh - he heard that!' He's already looking at me, right in the eye and laughing, but cruel laughter which somehow makes it funnier. 'You were fucking supposed to hear it!'

I started with Royal Mail in Chatham then transferred, which in Coventry terms broadly makes me some cunt from London. I knew the move back to the Midlands was a mistake even at the time, but felt I was otherwise out of options. I've therefore put in for another transfer. I will start work at Catford sorting office in south-east London on Monday the 6th of August, 1990.

I've already told Phil.

He said, 'I'll give it about three weeks before you end up selling your arse around Piccadilly Circus.'

Be that as it may, I'm going to miss the horrible cunt.

The Cheese Cave

We passed through Waco, Texas on the way to Dallas some time last year. We'd been through Waco before without having any reason for stopping, but this time we saw billboards for something called the Cheese Cave. The distance from San Antonio to Dallas is such as to render minor excursions from the main part of the journey impractical, but we made a mental note because in our heads we imagined vast underground caverns full of cheese, and who wouldn't want to see that?

So now that we have the time, we're going to have a proper look at the Waco Cheese Cave. Furthermore, we're peeling the kid's face from whichever screen it has become affixed to and we're taking him along for the ride so that it will be an experience, so that one day he'll be able to look back and remember that time when he was in a moving vehicle, far, far away from his laptop. Ordinarily he would have been at summer camp but it was called off due to coronavirus. He's still a bit pissed off about this but we're doing what we can.

I'm still cycling twenty miles a day, five days a week, but I've switched my schedule so that I get out on the bike at around 7AM, then arrive back a little after nine to throw myself into the daily round of cleaning up and emptying litter trays - chores undertaken prior to going out on the bike up until a few weeks ago. This is because we're having one of those hot summers and it's hit 100° some mornings, which is 37° in old money in case anyone was wondering - a little too hot for riding a bike across the prairie. Anyway, this change of schedule means I can get in my daily twenty miles before we drive to Waco, which is nice, because I'm not crazy about long car journeys, particularly if I haven't had any exercise that day.

We get going at around ten in the morning. It's a fairly straightforward haul, two-hundred miles or about three hours depending on how you look at it, up I-35 passing through San Marcos, Austin, and Temple. Luckily my wife enjoys driving.

The boy sits quietly in the back. After a while I realise he actually isn't absorbed in playing a game on his phone and is instead taking in the scenery. He turned seventeen about a week ago and I'm not yet accustomed to this newly contemplative version of my stepson. Even without the distraction of pixelated elves, he might ordinarily have spent the journey delivering a long, long list of snakes of Texas, famous medical miracles, or the unsung achievements of Nikolai Tesla. His chatty periods can be quite entertaining, but the quiet nevertheless makes for a pleasant change.

Three hours later we locate the Cheese Cave off a small road just the other side of Waco. It's actually an eighteenth century agricultural building converted into a store, a former shed or workshop or something. We go in. They have yoghurt, toffee, and other things handmade on site. They have cheese, but in nothing like the quantity I would have anticipated given the promise of the name. I've actually seen more cheese in my local supermarket. Also, it's hard to get a good look at the cheese as there are two other customers in the store, two older women stood in front of the refrigerated cabinets talking loudly about favourite cheeses they have eaten. It doesn't seem to occur to them to move, and they don't even seem to be buying. They are cheese enthusiasts.

'Just trying to buy some cheese here,' I say between politely gritted teeth as I forcibly interpolate myself between them and the cabinets. 'Thank you so much.'

The cheeses on offer are mostly cheddar with a few of the mouldy varieties, all wrapped in wax paper. I pick out a block of ghost pepper cheddar and read the label which lists four types of chilli among its ingredients. It sounds interesting so I head for the counter, passing the boy who is picking toffees out of a jar.

'You know what a ghost pepper is?' my wife asks, concerned.

'It's the hottest one, right?'

She nods, still evidently concerned, and now the boy has taken an interest. This is because every six months he tells us about the YouTube video featuring an idiot eating a raw ghost pepper as part of some challenge. I've seen the video, most of which shows the idiot groaning and clutching his stomach before being taken to hospital, which didn't really impress me. I like chilli peppers, but once you're past being able to taste the food, I can't see the point; however, I tell myself, this is obviously some fancy cheese place, as proven by the cheese vats - or whatever they are - which we are able to view through a window at one side of the store. If they've made cheese using ghost peppers, then flavour is almost certainly a priority, with hopefully few concessions to the sort of persons who might engage in competitive endurance eating.

'So where's the actual cave?' I ask the woman at the till.

Once outside we follow her directions to what may have been an outhouse. There are stone steps within, leading down to a window behind which is some large subterranean space with shelf after shelf of cheeses maturing down in the cool beneath the baking soil of Texas. The aroma of cheese is overpowering.

'So that was the Cheese Cave,' I observe once we're back in the car, back with gloriously cold air blasting from the AC. 'I must admit I expected more, but I'm glad we came.'

Three hours drive for five minutes spent buying cheese seems eccentric, but my wife points out that Waco also has something called the Mammoth Monument and the Dr. Pepper Museum.

The Mammoth Monument is in a national park, and as we pull up to the gate we realise there's an admission fee, which we weigh against how much we want to walk around a park at midday in 100° heat. It turns out that none of us are keen on the idea, at least in the absence of further information regarding what we're likely to see. We presume the remains of a mammoth were once found somewhere in the vicinity, and our projected worst case scenario is that the discovery may now be acknowledged by a monument in honour of the mammoth; so we probably aren't likely to see anything which actually was a mammoth at any point of its previous existence.

We head back into the city, which is bigger than any of us recall, and more picturesque with a lot of nineteenth century buildings around the centre. We pass the Dr. Pepper Museum commemorating the history of said fizzy drink, which was apparently invented right here in Waco. Dr. Pepper is one of those flavours resembling nothing found in nature and I'm not really a fan. I try to imagine what we might see were we to enter the museum. I imagine a diorama with a manikin of Dr. Pepper himself, sat in his dentist's chair, invited to rinse and suddenly realising he could turn that flavour into a drink and sell it to people.

The boy is quite keen on Dr. Pepper but even he's less than stoked about the prospect of the museum, and so we head back to I-35 secure in the knowledge that at the end of the day we will have clocked up four-hundred miles in the name of buying cheese.

Back on I-35, it begins to dawn on me just how stupid are most of the billboards we've seen today. I suppose they were always stupid, but it's not often that I spend six hours having them flash past, one after another. I've become accustomed to advertising which aspires to sophistication in its own gormless way, which regards itself as slick or even witty, but out here on the highway we're back to lowest common denominators and no-one going broke through underestimating the stupidity of the general public.

The first I notice are billboards promoting the idea of not being a massive dick when one's journey is delayed by roadworks. The billboards show smiling roadworks people in hard hats and hi-vis clothing. Do I speed in your place of work? one of them asks in friendly rhetorical spirit.

Well, no, I suppose some PR person imagines us sheepishly admitting, no, you don't, as we ease off the gas, settling down to a more leisurely eighty. The other variants are even more conceptually basic. Along similar lines, we pass a billboard reading, when the push comes to the shove, don't, then, please be civil. It seems to suggest that we, as a people, are getting angrier - not just those temporarily inconvenienced by roadworks along I-35; and I suppose we are.

There are Buc-ee's billboards every five or six miles advertising what is essentially the motorway service station equivalent of underwhelming relatives who were never quite so funny or popular as they believed themselves to be. Buc-ee's billboards are mostly all the same thing, their badly drawn cartoon beaver logo with text. The slogans were never anything side-splitting, and were usually slightly bewildering - THE EYES OF BUC-EE'S ARE UPON YOU, being one example; but just recently they may as well be speaking in tongues. There's STOP - NUGGET TIME!, which I assume alludes to MC Hammer's allegedly classic U Can't Touch This without bothering to include an actual joke; BEAVER FREEZER which helpfully includes an image of some ice lollies and presumably appeals to those reduced to hysterics by combinations of words which sort of rhyme but don't; and BRISKET NOW, JERKY LATER for which I can't even be bothered to compose facetious commentary.

Given recent events, it's beginning to feel as though America is  becoming progressively more stupid, and this time next year Buc-ee's billboards will feature suggestions along the lines of EAT CANDY BAR - MAKE HUNGER STOP!

We pass an eighteen-wheeler which seems to underscore my train of thought. The rear door features a bumper sticker of text written above and below the stars and stripes. The text above speaks of supporting our troops, while the text below concludes with, give comfort and aid to the enemy? No way!, which is possibly the most retarded sentence I've encountered this year, despite heavy competition. The arbitrary nationalism might not be quite so objectionable were it not phrased in the language of an NFL-addled jock teenager whose sexual preferences have been called into question.

No way, dude! No way!

Eventually, half an hour from home, some idle comment passed around as part of the journey unexpectedly blossoms into a conversation, specifically one which yields the information that my stepson considers Bram Stoker's The Snake's Pass to be one of the most boring things he's ever read. He elaborates, describing what happens in the book, what he liked and what he didn't like, and all the while my head is spinning. I know he reads but have never truly worked out at what level, assuming most of his reading to be undertaken because he can't get out of it - an assumption supported by my never actually having seen him with a book.

The thing is, I haven't even heard of The Snake's Pass. I tell him it sounds as though it suffers from the same problems as Stoker's massively overrated Dracula; and suddenly, for the first time ever, I'm having a conversation with my stepson about books, and books other than Harry fucking Potter. We talk about Dickens, Catch-22, and others, and most of it is what we don't like about this, that or the other; but it's a conversation I never thought I would ever have, and it's obvious that he's considered what he's saying at some length; and somehow it's all thanks to the Cheese Cave, kind of.

Where They Are All Coming From

My wife has been working from home since before it became fashionable. Her company decided it could use the office space for some other more lucrative undertaking, and so she has her PC, screens and everything set up in our front room, all chained to the internet through a link provided by the company which seems depressingly less prone to failure than the service through which we try to watch television or make phone calls. By the time coronavirus drove everyone else away from their respective workplaces, Bess had already built up a substantial head of cabin fever. She hadn't actually wanted to work from home at all, much preferring to keep her job as something separate, something from which she could leave behind and forget about at the end of each day, but general corporate policy now knows what we want better than we do, just like in the old Soviet Union where citizens were regarded as proud extensions of their work; except apparently it was bad in the former Soviet Union, but now it's good due to freedom of choice 'n' stuff.

This is why we like to get out and do something at weekends, specifically because Bess has been cooped up inside for most of the week and is usually gagging to get out, even if only for the sake of a drive. Today we're heading for Bandera, a fairly small town in the hill country, and mainly just for the sake of getting out and because we haven't been to Bandera in a while. Actually, I've only ever been through Bandera because there doesn't seem to be a whole lot there which isn't directly catering to inhabitants of ranches, but as I say, it's just something to aim for, something to do.

Bandera is in the general vicinity of Mico, which is even smaller, and we have vague memories of there being stuff to look at in and around Mico.

First there are the camels in a field at the side of the highway. The field isn't where I remember it being, but we chance upon it eventually, and accordingly stop and get out to look at the camels. They share a field with longhorn cattle and a donkey. I seem to remember seeing elephants and a giraffe when we were here last, whenever that was, but it's probably been five years or more so I could be mistaken. Temperature-wise, it's way up in the nineties, so we don't actually spend much time looking at the camels.

Medina lake is interesting, not least because I thought it was somewhere else. It's surrounded by a sprawl of dwellings, a town in itself built up steeply sloping hillsides and which cuts off all access to the lake. You actually have to live here if you want to swim or paddle or just stand at the edge. We drive around the terrifying single lane roads which wind up and down the hillside for a while, then head for Mico.

Mico seems to be built along the length of a winding rural road, and for us the main attraction is a particular house occupied by someone who makes sculptures out of trash, anything they've found laying around by the look of it. A wooden sea serpent snakes across the raggedy lawn towards a wheeled animal made from a vacuum cleaner, amongst other things. Last time we visited there was a plastic baby doll hung from one of the trees smoking a cigarette. Now she has a home and watches us from the balcony of something like a bandstand made out of twigs and crap. It's funny, inventive, and also slightly disturbing, the work of someone who would doubtless have been canonised by the Surrealists had they been born a century earlier.

Bandera itself has a natural history museum, a place we visited on the day it opened, back when they had just one fibre glass dinosaur to their name. Now a whole load of them have taken up residence in the grounds around the building. They seem crudely detailed and maybe a little hokey, but are good for providing a sense of scale and it's hard to fault the enthusiasm of the enterprise as a whole. The velociraptor is small, about the size of a labrador, and I recall the boy explaining during one of his many, many paleontology lectures how the beasts in Jurassic Park were actually specimens of the less easily pronounced deinonychus upon which the producers bestowed the cooler sounding name.

Finally we make it to Bandera itself, although we may actually have been through Bandera prior to Medina Lake, Mico and so on. It's too hot to keep track.

There's a stall at the side of the road selling MAGA caps. MAGA, as you probably know, is a slogan associated with President Trump standing for make America great again, something which presupposes it wasn't already great - which seems a little unpatriotic if you ask me - and which additionally strikes me as running contrary to the actions of his time in office.

'I didn't realise anyone actually sold those things,' Bess observes. 'I assumed they were just handed out or something.'

We stop at the gas station and go inside to get something to drink. There are more MAGA hats on sale just inside the door along with related Trump campaign paraphernalia, mostly taking the form of slogans printed on baseball caps, the usual shit about saying what you think and how political correctness is ruining everything.

I don't normally see this sort of shit due to living in a city, but I guess this is where it has its foothold, out here in the middle of nowhere where folks ain't ashamed to live up to the stereotype of the shithead from the south. Somehow I experience a sudden and profound understanding. I suppose I kind of knew on some level, but this is like a giant pair of celestial buttocks have parted to poo the effluence of enlightenment unto me on this day.

You don't actually have to be stupid, just maybe not the sharpest tool in the box. One day someone who reads books looks down upon you, perhaps pointing out the idiocy of something you've said, and you simply don't have the wit or literacy to form a truly satisfying comeback, because go screw yourself, college boy only seems to prove their point. But now there's a man who understands you, and who speaks to you, and he makes a lot of sense. At least what he says sounds like the real world, the one you know about; maybe he's a bit rough around the edges, but you shouldn't believe everything you hear; and even better, every long-haired book learnin' freak who ever sneered down a nose at you hates the guy. Just the mention of his name makes them squirm, and it feels good at last having something that hurts those snooty fuckers! So hell yes, you're voting come November.

Damn straight.

SMH

We're back at Jim's diner, the second time in a couple of weeks and once again the car is there. I'm no good with automotive brands and think of it as a Lincoln, which it probably isn't. It's new but is styled more like something from the seventies, clean and brilliant white with a scatter of political stickers across the trunk and rear window - proud supporter of President Trump, amongst others, most of which propose that the driver is additionally a proud supporter of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't understand why anyone would want to advertise their personal preferences on their means of transport, but this sort of thing particularly gets on my nerves because it also seems to advertise their stupidity as though it's a boldly chosen stance - I done a smelly poo right in me knickers, laughed in your face with a big happy smile.

The car is parked right in front of the entrance and, as I say, this isn't the first time we've seen it. The glass door of Jim's is decorated with the usual array of literature concerning coronavirus and the requirement of masks to be worn within, but there's other stuff too and it takes me a second to decode what I'm looking at: colour images on paper, presumably printed off on a home computer. There's a photograph of Hillary Clinton with a caption referring to the supposed suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. I can't even tell what is implied here, which I guess means I don't spend enough time on the internet, but the political angle is implicit in the other images, each pasted on the door with a single strip of tape. The other two are too bland to stick in my memory, but something rhetorical along the lines of what those liberals will come up with next. It's the cosy syntax of persons who have learned all they needed to know at the university of life, and are not only secure in their ignorance but feel it represents an achievement, the sanctity of a mental virginity kept pure from anything with too many long words. I've encountered these people online, usually in response to some not unreasonable proposition - cops probably shouldn't shoot innocent people, for example - and their stock response will be SMH, which stands for shaking my head, or something borrowed from someone else about the sad effects of a mind destroyed by liberalism. It's not really an argument. It's barely even coherent as a sneer.

'You know, I think I've changed my mind,' I say. I've deduced that this material probably doesn't actually represent views endorsed by either Jim's management or staff, but it bothers me.

'I know, but I'm hungry.' Bess goes in and I follow.

'Take a seat,' the waitress suggests, pausing on the way to someone's table.

I wait for her to deliver the tray then catch her attention. 'I don't know if you realise, but someone has pasted a load of right-wing crap on your door over there, and it's kind of annoying.'

She sighs in a long-suffering way and mumbles something about dealing with it, and I immediately realise who is behind this. I said right-wing crap quite loud and he's staring at me from a few tables away. He's a little old man, maybe in his eighties, wearing a cap identifying him as a Korean war veteran. His jacket is similarly adorned with badges. He likes to advertise. He was in here last time with a friend of similar vintage and the same cap. He's small and the lower half of his face protrudes like that of a monkey or someone in a thirties Popeye cartoon. He's Cotton from King of the Hill.

I'm kind of tired of the fetishisation of the military in this country. I have no problem with anyone signing up with the military, but would hope they do so for reasons besides the eternal gratitude of complete strangers who bark thank you for your service at the first whiff of khaki. Military service does not mean you're a sentinel of freedom, and I'm suspicious of anyone who advertises having been in the military regardless of whether it's on a hat, a car sticker, or tattooed on one of their mighty biceps. Merely walking around with a gun on foreign soil does not make you a hero; and if your actions have been genuinely heroic in the service of your country or some cause you consider noble, you shouldn't need your ass kissed by the rest of us on a daily basis. I find it difficult to truly respect those who advertise their having served in the military, because it feels a little as though they have something to prove; and had they seen the sort of action which might be discussed in terms of heroism or courage, my guess is that they wouldn't feel the need to prove anything, much less by means of something so trite as a bumper sticker. I've met one veteran of the Korean war, my wife's uncle Elton. He told us all about it, particularly about the mass graves filled with the bodies of Chinese people, and it sounded nightmarish. For some reason he chooses not to advertise his military experience with slogans displayed upon either his person or vehicle.

Monkey Man regards us with fearful piercing eyes as we take a seat in the booth adjacent to his. He knows he is old and feeble, and he knows that I don't like him very much and could crush him, and he knows that it will take more than his veteran status to get me swooning like a seventies schoolgirl at a David Cassidy performance. I'm one of those people he's been warned about, here to ban everything reasonable with my mighty powers of political correctness, here to force your children into gender reassignment surgery regardless of their own personal feelings on the matter, and I do this because I'm following orders passed onto me from the mighty Antifa world headquarters inside a hollowed out mountain of the Sierra Madre. Ordinarily he might only frown to himself, then an uncharitable chuckle as he types a damning SMH before moving on to the next thread; but this isn't that kind of situation.

The waitress comes to take our order.

'Sorry to be that customer,' I say, waving my hand in the general direction of the door, 'but we just came out to eat and I don't want to see that sort of stuff. It's like having the worst of facebook following you out into the real world.'

She understands. She explains that the person who decorated the door is a regular diner of many years, leaving her in an uncomfortable position, but the memes are coming down just as soon as he's paid up and left. She speaks quietly. Although we're in the booth next to Monkey Man, a glass partition divides us at head height, and my guess is that his hearing may not be the greatest. The waitress is evidently smiling behind her face mask, but it's clear that she's on our side and that this is some bullshit she really could have lived without.

Our food arrives and we eat.

Monkey Man begins his long, slow pilgrimage towards the cash register with waiting staff as he goes. Eventually he makes it outside to the car driven by a proud supporter of President Trump, obviously himself. We hear the waitress agonising with the guy in the kitchen, just wishing this sweet old guy wouldn't be such a dick, then she goes to the door and removes the liberal-baiting crap.

One day he'll be dead.

They will all be dead, and the world will be a nicer place to live at least in that respect. I think of the people I've known who managed to make it into their eighties without turning into Enoch Powell, or at least a massive pain in the arse. Thankfully they outnumber Monkey Man and his kind by a significant margin.

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.