Ode to a Cardboard Box

There's a poem - either ode to or reflections on - where some floppy haired type looks at a flower and is inspired to a number of observations, possibly regarding some woman or other. I'm unable to be more specific than that but it sprung to mind - albeit without anything you could call clarity - upon the occasion of my discovering a cardboard box in the garage.

Having passed the age of fifty, I am now a person who cleans out the garage every once in a while, which itself constitutes a revelation of a sort. I also mow the lawn. I never really expected to become this person, although frankly it's a massive relief to me that I have.

It was becoming increasingly difficult finding anything in the garage. The garage contains washing machine, dryer, three bikes, an assortment of lawnmowers of which one is functional, and a workbench with associated tools by which I occasionally nail bits of wood together. It also contains everything else, but objects coming under the heading of everything else are usually stored using a methodology amounting to just chucking it in there. Inevitably we have now reached the point at which the flaws inherent to this methodology have at last revealed themselves, and so I'm sorting out the garage. I've been doing a bit each day, just five minutes of moving one object to a different place or picking something up and wondering why it hasn't been chucked. This way the job gets done without ever becoming some exhausting mammoth undertaking crammed into a single afternoon which probably won't get finished because by eleven in the evening I will have had enough.

Over the last couple of weeks I've reclaimed about seven or eight feet of territory east of the door, rationalised some shelving, thrown out garbage, and built a rack by which to organise an assortment of garden tools meaning they no longer resemble the throne of King's Landing.

Today I encounter a cardboard box. The box itself was originally supplied by Britannia Movers International back in November 2012, and it's been in my garage since February, 2013, one of forty boxes containing whatever I'd had shipped over from England when I first came to Texas. Once unpacked, I reused this particular box. It has therefore spent almost all of its life here - eight years so far - as a container for my wife's running trophies and a selection of her grandfather's pipes. Now, with just this one last hunk of cardboard remaining, it somehow feels as though we've been through a lot together, obliging me to at least take a photograph before I fold it up and chuck it. The memories and associations it provokes are numerous and often incongruous in combination with one another.

The dominant association is the most annoying - which is probably just how my brain works - dating from before I'd even had the boxes. The deal was that Britannia delivered a stack of cardboard which, once assembled, would amount to forty largish boxes such as are recommended for international shipping. Then I'd fill these boxes with all my shit, pay the money, and a bloke in a van would turn up to take them away. In the days following my having signed up with Britannia, still waiting for those boxes to arrive so I could get on with the packing, I floated some abstract question relating to the same on facebook. Timothy responded because I hadn't got around to blocking him. His wife's nephew worked at some shipping company other than Britannia, and he'd be happy to pass my phone number onto young Darren if I wanted to ask about their rates - a smashing lad, he was, young Darren. I felt I could see inside Timothy's head as I read these words, and I could see his conception of the two of us enjoying a glass of port after a jolly good game of golf, having a bit of a natter like the grown men we were, grown men of the world, grown mature men helping each other out, as one does. You scratch my back, and so on and so forth.

Yet I already had it all worked out and paid for. I didn't actually require the services of a completely different shipping company, much less one whose business was apparently conducted by a random phone call to some bloke who drives one of their trucks, and much much less as an imagined favour from some fucking pillock manchild with whom I should have severed all ties at least two decades before and who hadn't even bothered to take in the details of my original question.

Back in the present day, the box is kind of knackered and we have others, so I transfer the contents to something in better condition. The contents are mostly trophies my wife won back when she was a runner. They're mostly slightly crappy plastic figurines on wooden bases, but my wife was apparently pretty amazing as a runner so there are a lot of them - actually too many to store in a single box, and I eventually fill three others as more and more of her trophies emerge from the depths of the garage. There are too many of them to display, practically speaking, but they represent a considerable achievement, so I carefully swathe them in bubble wrap and store them back in the new box in more orderly fashion.

Most of them were won from the mid to late eighties, back when I first knew Timothy on a different continent five-thousand miles away, and probably back when I first read some of the books or listened to the records which ended up in the Britannia box. All of these imaginary strands somehow came together as this moment, a future which would have seemed inconceivable back as the various dominoes were first tipped over.

I'm married to a former runner whose favourite band is Queen, and living in Texas with a stepson whose principal means of communication seems to be long, long lists of statistics concerning marine life. I've released records and CDs which no-one seems to have heard, and I've written books which have been published and sold to people I don't actually know, and whose enthusiasm I have failed to understand for the most part.

It was never anything I could have predicted and it seems incredible that I should have ended up here, but I'm glad that I did.

Vampire of the Daleks

 

They ran up the rocky incline, scrambling breathless across the boulders until they came to the castle. Baz had been to many alien worlds with the Doctor, but this seemed like something new, and he could tell that Kaz shared his feeling.

'Doctor,' cried Daz between deep gulps for air. 'What is it?'

'Well, it's a stronghold innit,' she explained, eyes boggling, pulling a face as though someone had just asked her what Blackpool Tower was supposed to be. 'What are you like?'

Raz shared a look with the other twenty companions. 'But it looks like a castle,' he said in the tone of a confused pipe fitter from Burnley who felt he might be missing something. It was a very down to earth tone. There was nothing stuck up or fancy about our Raz.

'It's like a castle,' Shaz observed in the reassuring tone of a cashier working at a Huddersfield bakery, 'only a castle built by - I dunno - robots or summat.'

'I know,' boggled the Doctor intriguingly. 'Interesting innit! 'Appen this is a game changer 'n' ting.'

'Zut-zo,' said Xoob-E Xoo, the robodog with a fearful gulp of his transistors as they entered the castle. He crept forward on his servomotors, olfactory sensor pressed firmly to the cold, grey flagstones. Looking up, he noticed that the others had run on ahead. they never seemed to stand still. They ran everywhere and were always breathless as they paused to bark at each other, or pleading you don't have to do this at a variety of alien menaces.

He caught up and found himself in a dark chamber.

'Racism is bad,' said Praz meaningfully in the forlorn tone of a waitress working in a transport cafe on the M65 heading west out of Blackburn.

'Yes, it is, Praz.' Maz placed a hand on her shoulder and tilted his head to one side sympathetically because he'd been thinking about the adventure they had all just had with Nelson Mandela. 'Yes, it is.'

'You know what that is,' said Faz with the casual yet confident tone of a night-time cleaner working in a Scunthorpe based call centre. There was a moment's pause as everyone waited for the answer. They knew it would be dramatic because they could hear the music. They also knew they would be able to understand the answer because Faz was a plain speaker and the salt of the earth. You could tell from his amiable nature and down to earth accent that he'd never be caught winning the Turner Prize with a painting of his own knob rendered in artificially tinted semen. Oh no. Not our Faz.

'Its a coffin, fam,' said the Doctor coolly as a bass drum hit took a full six seconds to die away, because the revelation of an object being a coffin is not inherently dramatic, thus requiring sound effects to help you decide how you feel about it.

'I am Dalekula,' said Dalekula helpfully in a grating metallic voice as he issued forth from the coffin by ostensibly supernatural means. 'My plan is to conquer the entire universe and to drink its blood.' His grating metallic voice rose a little at the end which made him sound like a bit of a nutter, as though he was actually trying to be evil.

I'll tell you one thing. It was flipping working!

'By 'eck!' exclaimed the Doctor inclusively. 'What for think you be playing at, ya pussyclart,' she added, having been raised on the north Peckham council estate where lots of working class people like to live. Then some other stuff happened for forty three minutes and twenty seconds.

It were brilliant!

Once Were Mouthy Little Gits

 

I've just finished delivering mail to Mount Adon Park. I'm walking down the slope towards the bus-stop on Lordship Lane.

'Oi, postman.'

I turn and see a couple of school boys, one tall and one short. The tall one is Asian and he wears a patka, the trainee version of the traditional turban worn by Sikh men. His voice is high pitched and I guess the two of them are ten, maybe eleven. I'm confused, racking my brain to recall any Sikh families living in Mount Adon Park. I'm not sure there are any.

'Postman!'

'What?'

'You're a wanker innit!'

I look at him. He's not even remotely intimidated by me, and he's getting closer. I can't think of a response.

'You're a pedo innit, postman!'

'Wanker!' the other one joins in.

'Piss off,' I mutter, looking at the ground and walking hurriedly away, heading in the direction of Friern Road. My heart is beating fast and I'm scared, despite knowing that sheer attitude is their only advantage.

'That's right, postman. Fuck off, you racist pedo wanker!'

I duly fuck off, not looking back and thankfully they're climbing onto the 176 bus which has just pulled up. I'm fairly sure that I'm none of those things, but I'm not convinced this is a debate I could have won. I suspect I've been targetted at random because it's funny to them. I thought Sikhs were supposed to be reserved and dignified.

The only one I talk to regularly is Mr. Singh who runs the corner shop up the other end of Lordship Lane. I talk to his wife too, but she doesn't seem to speak much English and always looks pissed off. I found this out when I bought one of those small cartons of mint Aero flavoured milk from the chiller cabinet on a hot day and discovered that it had gone off and was a month past the sell by date. She wasn't very happy about that and seemed to think I'd done it on purpose.

A couple of days later, I see them again. I expect they will be embarrassed about their previous performance and will be unable to meet my gaze.

'You're a fucking tosser, postman. You're a big fat nonce and a pedo, yeah?'

This time I ignore them, which doesn't feel any better. I don't really understand why this is happening. More annoying is that my route obliges me to deliver to Mount Adon Park at roughly the same time each morning, just as the little fuckers are catching their bus. Is this how it's going to be from now on?

There are a couple of further encounters during which I'm accused of being a kiddy-fiddler on the flimsiest of evidence, but they eventually get bored, or their families move away, or they switch schools or buses or something. I don't know. I don't really care.

A decade crawls past. Mr. Singh's corner shop closes down, which isn't too surprising. It was a weird little place, no newspapers or magazines, no produce or anything you might have for tea, just crisps and sweets for the most part. I seemed to be the only person who ever went in there and I had to because I was delivering their mail, aside from the occasion of my procuring a drink which was busily reincarnating itself as cheese.

Mr. Singh resurfaces at the corner shop further down, the much bigger place near where I live with a post office in the back. It seems he's just working there, so maybe the guy who actually owns the place is a relative.

'It's good to see you again,' I tell him. 'What happened?'

'No good,' he shakes his head then laughs. 'This is better for me.' He seems happier, possibly because he's no longer running a doomed shop and this one is a little busier. We even have conversations, and I somehow learn that his son is at the university in Coventry, where my parents live and where I myself lived for a short time; so he asks me about Coventry.

One day, I go in the shop and realise that Mr. Singh's son is behind the counter, and that he's the little kid who used to yell at me and call me a paedophile at the bus-stop, as of about ten years ago. He's now six foot tall with a proper turban and a moustache.

I stand in the queue with my pint of milk feeling extremely uneasy about the upcoming transaction, although logically I know he's older, presumably wiser, gainfully employed and is unlikely to resume the smear campaign of his youth.

'Forty pence,' he says without a flicker of recognition.

'Thanks,' I say, and am surprised that it should feel good to say it. I don't know what he's doing at university, but I don't imagine working behind the counter in a corner shop was ever his dream job, and accordingly he doesn't look particularly thrilled to be there. I'm additionally aware, that being the customer, I could now make his life hell should I choose to do so, accuse him of short changing me or something; but more than anything, the realisation, makes me somehow uncomfortable.

Weeks pass and I forget the kid was ever my juvenile nemesis. We're probably never going to be buddies, but the air has cleared. I still don't know if he remembers me, although I'd be surprised if he didn't given that I'm still a postman. Maybe he's embarrassed.

One Sunday I return a VHS video rented from the video rental carousel they've shoehorned into the gap between the post office counter and stationary supplies. The kid pulls a face, a sort of reassessment with a hint of the pleasantly surprised.

'This is a good film innit,' he says. 'What did you fink?'

It's Walter Hill's The Warriors, and I tell him, 'Yeah, it was great. I've been wanting to see it for a long time.' I put my tub of ice cream on the counter for him to scan with the price gun, but he's still doing something with the till.

'I tell you what you might like - Once Were Warriors. Have you seen it?'

I realise he may simply be a fan of films with the word warriors in the title, but okay - I'll bite. 'No. What's it about?'

'It's in Australia innit, or maybe, no—I mean New Zealand. It's a good film, trust me. We got one back there if you're interested.'

I look to the back of the shop.

'Fuck it,' I say. I go and take the case from the carousel. It's immediately familiar because I've noticed it in the other two video rental places. Everyone has a copy but, knowing nothing about the film, it's never really occurred to me to wonder whether it might be any good.

I bring the case back to the counter and the kid already has the VHS tape in a rental box for me.

'It's a really good film. You'll love it, I fink.'

'Okay.'

He scans the tub of ice cream - Baileys Irish cream flavour from Häagen Dazs. I'm a single man renting a video and buying a tub of ice cream on Sunday evening.

'You know what goes well with this?' The kid holds up the tub before bagging it. He has a strange glint in his eye.

'Go on,' I say.

'Baileys.'

'What? You mean Baileys over Baileys flavoured ice cream? That's what you're saying?'

'You've got to try it, man. It's amazing, yeah?'

'Might be a bit too much, you know?'

We both laugh.

It feels as though I've learned something today, but it's hard to say what it could be; and, as promised, Once Were Warriors is indeed amazing.

The Last Days of Lone Hollow

I never really saw the appeal of summer camp. Contrary to consensus opinion, we have summer camps in England. When I moved to Maidstone, Kent to take a degree course in fine art, one of my fellow students was a sporty girl named Jane who always spent the duration of the summer holidays working at something called a PGL adventure camp. This involved kids in canoes or on zip lines and seems to have been more or less the same sort of deal as the transatlantic variants. I had no idea such a thing existed when I'd actually been a kid, and it wouldn't have appealed to me anyway, so my understanding of summer camp has been mostly based on barely watchable cornball movies wherein yelping American juveniles burn Rick Moranis at the stake.

Since he was old enough, my stepson has been to a summer camp every year up until 2020, during which Camp Lone Hollow was unable to open for the usual business due to the pandemic. He obviously loved the place, and this was upsetting because it would have been his last year as a kid. Had he been able to go back this coming summer, it would have been as an instructor or an orderly or a trustee or something, but that isn't happening either. The camp has been sold to a Christian organisation ominously named Young Life who will reopen, possibly this summer, with a slightly different emphasis, one which I personally find faintly sinister. This being America, most summer camps work some theological angle, usually amounting to not much more than a few out of tune hymns on Sunday morning, and yet they don't feel the need to identify themselves as specifically Christian.

Anyway, we've just heard that Lone Hollow is having an open day in case anyone wants to take one last look around the place before Young Life come in to formally inspect the land for signs of devilry and the like; so that's where we're heading.

Lone Hollow is on the other side of the town of Bandera, a drive of ninety miles or so. Last time we came through Bandera, we passed a stall at the side of the highway selling MAGA hats, and the gas station was full of novelty stickers and shirts taking a wry sideways glance at hatred of foreigners, liberals, and anyone able to tie their own shoelaces without having to watch a YouTube video. This left us reluctant to hang around in Bandera any longer than we needed to, but thankfully all traces of the orange calf are gone this time around, hopefully swept away in the gentle wind of not being a reactionary fucking tool.

All the same, we had somewhere to be so we didn't hang around, and the road became spectacularly rugged on the other side of Bandera, taking us deep into the hill country and reminding me of Wales, as it always does.

We passed the ranch owned by the kid's dad's side of the family, at which our boy occasionally gets to spend a week. We passed through the amusingly named town of Utopia, according to the map, although apparently I was looking in the wrong direction because I missed it. Finally we were at Lone Hollow, and the boy took to one of the things he loves most, namely explaining things to a captive audience. Usually it's long, long lists of animal facts which take nothing for granted, not even that you might already know what a bird is and some of how it works. Today he's pointing out buildings around the camp ground and telling us what happened there, and it's hard to miss that all of this really meant something to him.

Camp Lone Hollow comprises around three-thousand acres of hill country and semi-wilderness with a river, glorious lakes of crystal clear water, woodland and trails. The buildings are cabins of logs and stone which appear handmade and beautifully crafted with nothing corporate about them. The setting is idyllic, and I begin to realise that I sort of envy the kid having spent five summers here, and I can see how it came to mean so much to him. A few other kids have turned up, but none he knew particularly well, or with whom he's since kept in touch; and it seems this last day hasn't been too well publicised given that the people who used to run Lone Hollow have been winding things down.

The boy takes us all over, showing us where he went kayaking, where he engaged in archery - which was one of his favourite things - and even the firing range, which I probably shouldn't have found as amusing as I did. We walk up past the stables and he tells us about riding a horse, which he'd found difficult, then up a hill to the treehouses because he stayed in one of them for a month. We get to go up in the treehouses and look around, and again I'm impressed at how everything is sturdy and well crafted. Having grown up in England, I associate anything laid on for large numbers of children with crappy molded plastic, walls painted hospital green, unpleasant lime cordial drinks, and the cheapest toilet paper money can buy. This place, on the other hand, has been built with care and attention to detail. For the first time ever, I envy my stepson's childhood.

Next we walk to where the girls stayed - over on the other side of the central complex for obvious reasons. The boy already pointed them out when we arrived - a cluster of buildings behind a rise which were quite obviously grain silos repurposed as dwellings. Shove the chicks over there, out of harm's way, seemed to be the thought process. Now as we see the buildings up close, I realise how wrong my first impression had been, with the converted silos comprising only the upper part, sitting on open stone bases, giving the dwellings the appearance of architecture from ponderous utopian science-fiction movies of the seventies. Everything here is on a grand scale. Both my wife and I agree that we could probably live here.

Lunch involves standing in line with a paper plate, but the food has been provided by the Luby's restaurant chain and is better than I've actually had in the restaurant. The boy, normally a phenomenally picky eater, has spoken highly of the food at Lone Hollow.

We leave after a couple of hours, and as we go, my stepson has his head at that angle suggesting a tear in his eye, a flood which he has under control; and the thing is I know exactly how he feels, because I'm upset that this should all be coming to an end, that this is an experience he'll be unable to revisit, and I was only dimly aware of the place up until a couple of hours ago. It's not always possible to tell when our boy is happy, but it was obvious today.

We leave, and this time we take a look at signs along the highway, tied to fences in protest of something or other to do with the coming of Young Life. According to the Uvalde Leader-News they've filed a request for a permit to discharge 60,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day into a tributary of the Sabinal River. The editorial further opines:

One has to wonder why camp management feels compelled to seek the discharge permit when, if those in opposition are correct, a septic system is already in place. And if the current system is no longer viable, why not install a zero-discharge system similar to the ones being used by the majority of other camps - as many as eighty-one - already operating in the area?

These are questions being posed by Utopia land owner Greg Walton, other community members and a long list of stakeholders that includes the Nueces River Authority, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the Friends of Lost Maples, the Bandera Canyonlands Alliance, Keep Utopia Beautiful and Hill Country Alliance, per Save our Sabinal.

Anne Rogers Harrison, Water Quality Program leader with TPWD, detailed in a letter to TCEQ last month reasons to reject the discharge permit. She included the fact that rapid development of the Hill Country requires increased vigilance of the region's rivers to avoid polluting them.

Also, the Nueces River Authority maintains there were five wastewater permits in the Upper Nueces River, of which Lone Hollow and the Sabinal are part of, none of which allowed for the discharge of wastewater into the streams of the Nueces headwaters. Instead the entities are using wastewater effluent for irrigation.

We saw a lot of the Sabinal river during our visit to Lone Hollow. The water is crystal clear and looks clean enough to drink.

I really don't know what else I can say.