Where I'm From

People notice the accent and ask where I'm from. Some assume I'm Australian. I've never quite settled on an answer, but have recently taken to saying Stratford-upon-Avon. Everyone's heard of Stratford-upon-Avon because of Shakespeare, and that was the nearest large town when I was growing up. Since then I've spent five years in Kent, about three in Coventry, and nearly twenty in south-east London - pacing around the country like I was trying to get out. 

I'm no longer certain of the dates - late nineties and maybe some small change, but no later than 2002. It's seven in the morning at Royal Mail. Some days I'll take the unofficial ten minute grace break, but not today. I have too much work. We have a workload amounting to about nine hours of work which we have to fit into an eight hour day, so breaks tend to go out the window. If this week's acting governor is an arsehole and any mail is left undelivered because someone bothered to take the break to which they're entitled, it could mean an entirely unethical first stage warning for delaying the mail. No-one has the time or energy to argue.

I usually spend the grace break - if I take it - talking to Carmen. She's the woman who runs our canteen. She works for a catering contractor rather than Royal Mail, and has been assigned to our place. We're about the same age, but she's from a Caribbean background. She's coffee coloured with a smile that warms my heart, and - to commit what may well be racial stereotyping - a soft, lilting voice which sounds almost as though she's singing. We are both lost souls of some description. She asks about my possibly ludicrous attempts to write a novel, and I tell her about Lawrence Miles, my favourite author. She says that he sounds interesting. She lives in Plaistow, miles away in East London, and attends a reading group once a week. She's even read some Philip K. Dick. I like her because she seems to like me, and because she's interested in things. There's more to her than tea and toast.

'It's not Philip K. Dick, but it's probably better than Jeffrey Archer,' I joke, having lumbered her with a stack of pages from my cranky novel, printed from my PC last night.

'You shouldn't laugh at him,' she says, not unkindly. 'He's sold a lot of books.'

But today I work through the break to a soundtrack of Jackie swearing in the next bay along from mine, mostly cursing those to whom she delivers mail for either getting too much of it, or for it being mostly junk. I can never tell whether she's genuinely outraged or just passing time. She seems neither happy nor unhappy, just world weary.

Ted passes and jokes, 'Do you know who the father is yet, Jack? Must be one of this lot innit?' He grins and casts his gaze around the sorting office so as to imply that any one of the thirty or so males present could be the father of Jackie's impending child.

'Yeah,' she sighs, playing along. 'I'll probably just name him SE22.' This is the postcode covered by our sorting office.

'Wasn't you was it, Oscar?' Ted now asks me. 'You didn't get our Jack up the duff, did you?'

'Sorry, Ted. Not guilty.'

'It weren't Lawrence,' Jackie confirms. 'I'm sure I would have remembered.'

On the subject of mysteries, I still haven't pinned down why Ted took to calling me Oscar. Some days it seems to be a reference to Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, others it's after Oscar Wilde - which may be an obscure play on words referencing how wild I apparently seem when I'm pissed off.

'I'll have something for you later,' Ted tells me in a more furtive tone, which reminds me that I have Sue's record. I have it in my bag. I take it out and go around to the next aisle of sorting frames.

'Here you go,' I hand it over. It's Blade's The Lion Goes From Strength To Strength, double white vinyl, very rare these days.

'Did you like it?'

'Fantastic - reminds me a bit of Public Enemy. You know, that kind of full on sound, very dense.'

'Yeah - it's good. Did you make a copy?'

'Yes. I'll burn you the CDR tonight if that's all right. It came out really well.'

It was quite a surprise when I found out Sue was into rap in a big way. She used to be one of those teenagers with a hoodie and a spray can forever breaking into train yards, or whatever it is they do. She's tall and skinny, kind of smiley. But for a slight Kentish twang she seems more like someone who has adventures in a children's book than a reformed b-girl.

Eventually I have all of the mail in the sorting frame, so I'm working my way through the redirections. The information is printed on a series of yellow cards kept in clear plastic wallets, one for each address. I work through the cards, pulling mail from the frame to check it isn't addressed to whoever has moved away. In instances where it is addressed to someone who has moved away and has accordingly paid for the service, I take a sticker for the new address from the rear of the plastic wallet and slap it on the envelope, covering the old address. After about twenty minutes I have a stack of thirty or so letters and magazines destined to be forwarded to other parts of the country. I head for the other side of the office, to the outward sorting frame to which we sort mail headed for Scotland, the Midlands, Cornwall and so on.

I encounter Alan, the fake Rasta, as I turn the corner of the frame. He's our acting governor this week and he's an arsehole. I think of him as the fake Rasta after Nadim gave him the name.

'I saw that fake Rasta last week,' Nadim told me. 'I was just walking along, you know.'

'Yeah?'

'He slowed down like he was going to chat shit. He had this big fuckin' smile, man.' Nadim made the noise, sucking air between his two front teeth. 'I looked down and there was this brick just on the road, so I picked it up and looked right at him, like weighing it up in my hand, yeah?'

'Seriously?' I began to laugh, relishing the thought of Alan terrorised by a former employee.

'Yeah, man. He didn't look too happy about that. He wasn't smiling no more, you know what I'm sayin'?'

'What? He drove off?'

'Yeah. He put his foot down, man. I'm tellin' you.'

Anyway, right now I'm headed directly for the outward sorting. There's no other place I could possibly be going given that I'm on this side of the office. I'm holding a big stack of mail in front of me, redirection stickers plainly visible. My purpose is fucking obvious.

'Lawrence,' Alan says.

'Huh?'

He wags a finger as he strides past. 'Don't let me find any redirections on your frame. Take them to the outward sorting otherwise I'll be giving you a first stage warning.'

'Okay.' I think of Nadim stood at the side of the road, screw faced with a brick in his hand. I liked Nadim, but he was given the heave ho, for reasons which seemed unconvincing to just about everyone. Black guys seem to have a tough time in this job, particularly if there's a black manager who feels he needs to prove something. They actively look for failings, pouncing on minor irregularities about which no-one gives a shit if you're white. The white supremacist contingent always chuckle to themselves about the bad attitude of black workers, but it's bullshit. Mostly the supposed bad attitude seems more like a justifiable reluctance to lay back and take it whilst being fucked over by upper management, which is unfortunately how the job works.

Call me Ben Elton, but this is why I generally prefer working with black people. They know when to tell the governor to fuck off. They're attuned to detecting when they're being diddled from above.

I'm on the sorting with Jimmy Axton - whom Carmen calls Jimmy Ackleston, unless I'm thinking of Lucy. It's just the two of us because it's Saturday and we're on late duties. Jim fancies a fag but doesn't want to light up in case Frank, the acting governor, is still hanging around. I first met Frank when he was acting governor at Catford, and vividly recall him locking himself inside his office as Robbie Finley tried to smash the glass with a broom, bellowing, 'Come out and face me, you cunt!' Robbie lost his job but was later briefly eulogised in song, something adapted from a number which had become popular at football matches.

Robbie Finley, he's our mate.
He's our mate. He's our mate.
Robbie Finley, he's our mate.
He smacks governors!

The song transposes both the name and the violent action of the original - smacks governors for kills coppers - and isn't strictly accurate in so much as that Frank remained safe in his office, which I suppose was for the best given that Robbie's objection was not entirely without foundation.

I walk up to the hatch of the PHG cage to see if Frank is hanging around within, as is sometimes the case. He isn't, but Sav is in there with the others. They're watching porn. The woman on the screen wears stockings and is on her back. She has quite a nice arse, and I don't think I've seen this one. I'm sure I would have remembered.

'Blimey, Sav,' I observe.

'Lawrie,' he exclaims, and we both make the established noise of greeting - uuuuuuuh, like a moose.

'Whose video is this?,' I ask. 'Is this one of Ted's?'

Enter Mel.

'What the fuck do you want?'

'Is this your video?, I ask. 'Can I borrow it?'

'I don't know whose it is.'

'Video?' Sav snorts derision. 'This is on the telly!'

'Live & Kicking has changed a lot.'

A brief silence ensues as we all watch appreciatively.

'If I was in charge,' I propose, 'I would make it illegal for women to be not wearing suspenders at all times.'

Mel scowls. 'Say that again?'

'I said it wrong. What I meant was that if I was in charge I would pass a law requiring that they wear stockings and suspenders at all times.'

Sav chuckles. 'What? Men as well?'

'No. For men it would be on a purely voluntary basis.'

'Oh yes?' Sue asks, coming in from the other room, amused by our sudden discomfort. 'What's all this?'

'No, honestly,' I stutter in response to the accusation I've imagined. 'I was looking for Frank and I got distracted.'

I flash a glance at the television set. Someone with lightning reflexes has turned it off. Sav stares from the window as though he has something on his mind. Mel leaves the room shaking his head.

It's Saturday evening, September 2002 but probably not the same Saturday. We're meeting at the Crystal Palace Tavern, but I'm the only one who has turned up. I have a drink with Snowy who is sat in the saloon bar, as is probably usual. He's bigger than ever. He's put on a lot of weight since taking extended leave, and it doesn't look like he's  coming back. It's wonderful to see him and it's been a while. He's one of the funniest people I've met but has had a few setbacks of late what with the death of his dad and his own declining health. He's still a handsome bastard though, even with all those chins which somehow give him an aristocratic appearance, and the full head of snow white hair swept back with a bit of a duck's arse at the front.

We chat shit for a while, how are things back at the sorting office and which useless arseholes have been left in charge, how bad it's getting; but his breathing seems laboured and there's no longer quite such a twinkle in his eye. I get the feeling that this will be the last time I see him, which will eventually turn out to have been unfortunately prescient of me. He's a survivor of better days in the job, of life in general. He will be missed when he's gone.

Paul turns up, and it's just the two of us, which is unfortunate because he can be hard work. He got the boot a few months ago, and now he's full of conspiracy theories about why he was sacked and how he's going to blow the roof off that place using secret cameras and exposés, the results of which will be broadcast on Channel 4. He has delusions of cinematic aptitude, and has been pushing his autobiographical motion picture which is named My Heart is Broken. He talks it well, but only two of us have seen the single videotape which is slowly making its way around the office. Terry's verdict, for one example, was that it was very good, very professional, but he'd expected it to be longer than fifteen minutes. The story of the film is based on Paul's own childhood, which sounds less than idyllic. We all have the promotional postcards he's been giving out featuring a still of the boy who plays Paul as a kid.

'I used to smear myself with my own shit and hide in the cupboard,' he tells me. 'That was so he wouldn't hit me any more.'

'I know,' I say, having heard the story many times. The thing with Paul is that it's impossible to tell how much is made up, and it's frustrating because there's clearly some awful truth in there; plus he's not a bad bloke, just a bit manic.

Carmen arrives at eight, all the way from Plaistow, which is a massive relief. I wonder what it says about her personal life that she's chosen to hang out with us sad sacks on this warm September evening. Unfortunately our combined presence is not enough to get Paul off the subject of himself and how a lot of people are going to be very sorry.

Sue arrives half an hour later with some friend from outside work. The drink was Sue's idea, but never mind. Her friend seems okay, bit shrill, nothing much to say of any great interest seeing as she doesn't know us or any of our colleagues whom we're now busily slagging off behind their backs, but her presence is at least sufficient to dilute Paul's mania.

Kingsley arrives after nine, and that's it. There are just six of us out of the whole office, three of whom either no longer work there or never worked there. Kingsley takes a shine to Sue's friend and somehow transforms into a more slimline Barry White. I hear him asking about her star sign with a big smile, and he's lost to us for the rest of the evening.

We drink, and Paul resumes his ranting and raving, and I think about how Carmen has travelled across London for this.

'I must go,' she sighs, and no-one questions because we all appreciate she has a long trip back. It still seems early.

'I'll walk you to the bus-stop,' I say.

We talk as we stroll down Whateley Road towards Lordship Lane, nothing amazing, just writing and the stuff we talk about on the rare occasions when I take a grace break. She tells me in passing that she once went to North Africa on a roots thing and was surprised to find that Africans came in all shapes, shades, and sizes. She's always interesting.

I know it wouldn't ever work between us, but sometimes it's nice to pretend that it would; and it's nice just to enjoy her company without feeling any sort of pressure to impress or perform.

There's almost a moment when the bus comes. I kiss her on the cheek, and that's that.

I walk up the hill, back to my flat in the basement of a four story house. There doesn't seem to be much point in going back to the pub. I'm lonely, but I'm used to it. I don't recall any other state of being. The financial powers which rule the city are doing their best to gouge me out of my present security, to oblige me to pay more for less, even though I'm already pretty much reduced to a utility because they haven't yet invented a robot which will do it cheaper.

I have my doner kebab and something disgusting borrowed from Ted, and I'm under no illusions about anything.

On the other hand, I'm cautiously settled. If I can just hang on until I eventually die, I'll be happy. I have no-one, and probably never will for reasons I don't yet understand, but that's okay. I no longer have the desire to move on because I'm not sure there's anywhere left to go. One day I'll look back on all of this and see things in a very different light, but for now this is where I am, so this is where I'm from; and it's the closest I will ever come to a definitive answer.

Wah! Wah! It's So Unfair!

I was an awkward teenager, or at least I felt awkward. Whether my awkwardness was apparent to those around me was something I never discovered, and I lacked the apparatus to deduce what anyone thought of me at any given time; so mostly I assumed they regarded me as idiotic just to be on the safe side. I was occasionally clumsy, both physically and mentally. I often found myself lacking the words with which to express myself, which was probably for the best. Had I greater intellectual agility, I probably would have realised that I didn't actually have anything much worth expressing.

Myself and a few others formed a band when we were at school. We had a couple of instruments which we couldn't play very well, and we used cardboard boxes for drums. Every weekend we'd convene around a tape recorder to improvise scatological interpretations of children's television theme songs. I still have all of the tapes. Unsurprisingly they're not quite so funny as we thought them at the time, although some are funny for reasons other than those intended. Here's myself telling a joke at the end of one of these tapes, specifically Nine Inch Turd in the Cassette, my debut solo album recorded as the Post-War Busconductors;

There's this pig and er - hold on. Oh yeah. There's this pig- this farmer buys this pig and erm... at market one day, and he takes it home, and he's very proud of this pig and erm... gives it a bit of food and er... he's okay and then one day he catches this sort of disease and he's walking along eating this apple, and he walks past the pig sty, this farmer... and he's just finished it and he's got the core and he thinks ah the pig can have the core, I mean they eat anything don't they? So he throws it in and erm... you know the pig up until then, it hasn't had anything to eat because it hasn't been his feeding time yet and so erm... anyway he gives it this apple core and er... you know - later on he feeds it, and er... That night he goes to sleep. He has this funny dream. Then when he wakes up in the morning he thinks hey, that's funny - my alarm clock can't be right. It's still dark. And so he er... well, you know looks around, opens the window. Well he just manages to... press it open, and this smell of shit comes in. Oh God - it's horrible; and er... and he realises that all this is shit because incidentally this farm is in a valley - a really bad place for a farm, all the same and erm... so er... luckily the telephone is upstairs because you know the shit just comes up to the top of the stairs; and he phones up all these people and eventually they dig him out, and after a few months he slowly works out where all this shit is coming from. It's the pig, you see. It's caught this disease, and even if you give it a tiny little something - you know like erm... give it an orange slice or something. it does a massive great pile of shit - an average of one inch of food - one square inch of food to about ten square yards of shit, so you can imagine it's pretty bad...

To cut to the chase, the agriculturalist stops up the pig's anus with a cork and sells him to three African gentleman of differing heights - the traditional big one, normal-sized one, and little one of so many children's racist jokes - crucially neglecting to mention the creature's digestive issues. The three African gentlemen return to the jungle with their newly acquired pig, and to a sadly inevitable encounter with a representative of a species of Cork Pulling Monkey. The punchline, for what it may be worth, is you should have seen the monkey trying to put the cork back in.

It takes me over six minutes to tell the joke, and it just isn't that funny. The most depressing aspect of this is that, without access to either my diaries or the cassette tapes recorded by me and my friends, I would date this to when I was twelve or maybe thirteen, because that feels about right. The material transcribed above was recorded on Thursday the 1st of January, 1981, so I was fifteen, two thirds of a year short of turning sixteen. I'm not sure if it's simply that I was a late developer, or that I now have a disproportionate quantity of friends who had already read Plato's Republic by that age, but the fact stands that at the age of fifteen, I probably didn't have much going for me beyond some rudimentary aptitude for drawing pictures.

More recently, roughly half way through the nineties, I couldn't help but notice that as I approached thirty, I still suffered from a certain social ineptitude. I felt awkward around people almost regardless of whether they were friends or complete strangers. I was prone to stupid, melodramatic utterances, things which I thought might impress my peers yet which I would later recognise as idiotic; and I was hardly what you would describe as a hit with the chicks. I lacked confidence in some respects, and I suspect this was because on some level I was at least sufficiently intelligent as to have recognised my own limitations.

I experimented with blaming my parents, as I expect most people do at one point or another. They hadn't loved me, or had never said so out loud. Neither of them had ever hugged me, I reminded myself whilst ignoring the obvious point that we simply hadn't been that kind of family and we found such ostentatious demonstrations of affection awkward. They had separated and divorced when I was seventeen, leaving me traumatised, which was proven by my being unable to remember anything much of that year. It had been so horrible that I had forgotten all about it, just like all those guys who fought in 'Nam.

I told myself this stuff because it was as good an explanation as any, and it seemed in tune with the zeitgeist, Kurt Cobain and others issuing forth with primal screams lamenting that day the school bully had taken his milk and called him a gaylord. The problem was that it didn't ring true. I knew I'd had an average but generally decent childhood, perhaps not one speckled with gold stars of well done, Lawrence, but no-one had ever beaten me, and I never went hungry, and the old pee and em hadn't driven me over to Banbury and left me with Gary Glitter when they fancied a night out; and I knew that in the unlikely event of my ever becoming a father, my parenting would probably be of about the same standard as their's had been.

I have seen a psychotherapist, or at least a person with psychiatric training of some description, on three separate occasions. Each time the spectre of the dramatically bifurcating family life of my teenage years has been brought back as a possible source of delayed trauma. On one of these occasions I was invited to hug a massive Teddy whilst crying in order to let it all out, or something. I complied, miming the release of repressed emotions because I'd realised it would be easier than explaining that I really didn't feel anything about it, and all of this delving around in the supposed depths of my allegedly tortured subconscious was getting boring, even annoying.

Here's what I remember.

My parents were married. Occasionally they would have rows, but nothing overly dramatic or involving broken crockery. My mother didn't seem particularly happy, but there were things that made her happy. My father was the same, although I don't remember a whole lot of traditional father-son stuff because I don't think we really knew what to say to each other. I suspect he regarded me as being a bit weird, which is probably fair. I vaguely recall one incident of my going out to the garden to fetch something or other, slipping my feet into my mother's platform heeled sandals just for the sake of having something on my feet. I was wearing brass curtain rings on the fingers of one hand, four in all - one for each Beatle.

'Do you think he's all right?' I heard my father ask a few minutes later, clearly bewildered and probably envisioning my future life of casual homosexual encounters in an assortment of opium dens; and I remember this when I find myself inspired to ask similar questions of my stepson, who is presently twelve.

My mother took a degree in English literature, and then a job. I have the impression that something of an extra-marital nature may have occurred between herself and someone at her workplace during this time, an impression formed mainly from the contents of rows which began to flare up with unusual frequency as I was turning sixteen. One row seemed to refer directly to me, and I heard my mother lamenting that he just goes on and on and on all day and he won't shut up, which I found upsetting because I had assumed that she found our apparently-not-so-little talks fascinating. It upset me so much that my cries of anguish were heard from downstairs, and so my father came up to console me.

He talked about your mother and I, and I knew then that there was something seriously wrong because he was addressing me as though I were an adult, and that whatever was wrong wasn't just about me.

Then they separated, or specifically my mother vanished, and a couple of weeks later it turned out that she was renting a flat in Stratford-upon-Avon. She'd been unhappy for some time, and it was just one of those things. I lived alone in the house with my father for six months, and then moved away to live in a student house in Kent as I took a degree. He had seemed like a broken man, going to work, coming home, not saying much but just trying to get through to whatever came next.

More recently I discovered the diaries I kept at the time, but details referring to my parents' imploding marital situation are limited to occasional references to them rowing yet again, then the faintly acidic acknowledgment of occasions of my mother deigning to grace us with her presence in the immediate wake of the separation. Considering the reams of shitty portentous poetry I was inspired to write at that age, you might imagine some of it would refer to betrayal, generational disillusionment and so on, but no - it's mostly the torment of some girl at school failing to notice me, which was usually because I was still working up the courage to speak to her.

Contrary to my later yearning for something to blame, my parents' separation left little impression because it had occurred just as my small world was already experiencing upheaval, and because most of it had occurred off camera, expressing in details discovered after the fact. It left me with little reason to apportion blame because it really was just one of those things, a situation which became shitty simply because we aren't living in a perfect world, and a situation which resolved itself in a particular way because it had no other option; with the bottom line being that I probably would have done the same in any of the available roles.

We're all still alive, and all still talking to each other, and with no-one under any illusion regarding what actually happened, what hadn't been working right and so on; and so I suppose this means that for all of my incoherently idiotic qualities, for all of my development seemingly having been scheduled about five years short of my physical age, I was at least sharp in some respects, specifically in being unable to endure so much of my own bullshit as to rewrite circumstances and misfortune as unrequited trauma. If I was kind of slow, at least I understood some things, and knew uncomfortable truths to be preferable to appealing lies, if that doesn't sound too pompous.

So here, against all expectations and contrary to anything I could have predicted, here I am married and living in Texas with a stepson who is probably more or less as I was at the same age, give or take some small change. The more I dig into my own childhood, the better I seem to understand him, and the more I'm inclined to let it go when he talks rubbish or appears to behave in a selfish way.

I'm just making this stuff up as I go along, but it turns out that this is all any of us are doing, or have ever done. It's the best we can do, and usually it's enough.

Rodeo

My wife and myself drive to the AT&T Centre for the annual San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo. I think we've been each year, more or less, although generally at different times of day and on different days taking in different aspects of the full three weeks. The first year we went along one evening and watched the rodeo itself, as staged in the main arena - a venue which has also played host to the San Antonio Spurs and Joan Jett. It seemed to be mostly about cows, lasso displays, horse-riding, cattle-rustling, competition events, and assorted demonstrations of this and that with plenty of noise. We were sat at the back, way up near the roof, and felt somewhat removed from the action, and I can't really remember much else about it. Having established the general thrust of the spectacle, since then we've turned up mainly just to look at cows. Last year we unfortunately turned up too late to look at cows and were left with food stalls and our fellow Texans. The stock show was over and the cows had all gone home.

Looking at cows may not sound like much, but it really is. These are show cows, all kinds of variant breeds, very few of which I'd ever seen before I moved here. Of course there are the Holstein cattle I know as Fresians and there are Herefords - both of which I recall from having grown up on a farm; and then there are Texas Longhorns, and even some exotic looking kind with camelesque humps and floppy ears which I vaguely recognise from television shows or films set in India and Africa. Because these are show cows, they are pampered. They are looked after and washed, even shampooed. They lounge around in their stalls chewing cud, hay, or cattle feed in the great hall where the show is judged, and most stalls have a family in attendance all lovingly brushing their contestants, even blow-drying them with what I presume must be the dairy equivalent of hairdressing equipment. It's odd to see an animal of such size with the soft, fluffy coat of a kitten, not least when the animal is patently a cow, but there's something life-affirming about it too.

This year we make sure that we get to see more than just food stalls and our fellow Texans by turning up on Saturday morning. I wear my Stetson because the sun is strong and I burn easily - although this is not in itself unusual being as I wear it most days. I also wear my Lone Star shirt, material patterned after the state flag. I found the shirt in a second hand place on the Blanco Road. They had a whole rack of the garments which I assume may originally have been part of the uniform for either a diner or a garage or something of the sort - picked up presumably as a job lot by the guy running the store. I justify the shirt as part of my effort to blend in, but truthfully I just think it's a nice shirt.

We park and head for the main entrance. There are many Stetsons worn, which I find comforting. As I say, I wear mine most of the time and yet somehow still manage to stand out as anomalous. Strangers will call out some hypothetically amusing cowboy-related remark from passing vehicles, which would probably be funnier if we weren't in fucking Texas in a city which holds an annual rodeo. The jokes, if no more amusing, at least made sense when I was living in Coventry back in England. Today however, under the circumstances I anticipate a low mockery quotient.

We enter the first large shed and look at sheep, stall after stall, some with lambs. The sheep enclosure segues into row after row of happy looking pigs. Then we are outside again, taking the main thoroughfare down to where all the food stalls are set up. We're hungry so we both have what I roughly recognise as a doner kebab but which is here termed a gyro - pronounced more like hero, which makes no sense to me.

One of the few things I miss about England is kebab shops.

We eat up and then investigate a tent full of Lego. The stock show attracts all manner of associated business, although mostly it's either rural crafts, crafts which aspire to rurality, or agricultural machinery. Lego seems some way outside the parameters of the occasion as I understand them, but I'm not complaining. My wife and myself marvel at a human-sized Woody from Toy Story made entirely out of the plastic bricks, and then we each take a seat at one of the trestle tables. Each table has plastic containers full of bricks and members of the general public are invited to work on square base plates, then add whatever they have produced to the mural to one side. At the moment the mural is mostly smiley faces and names spelled out in blocky, uneven lettering. Bess takes a handful of white and orange bricks and forms a picture of a bunny rabbit with a carrot. I assemble a rough representation of El Castillo, the main pyramid of Chichén Itzá in Mexico. I use red bricks to suggest blood on the steps leading up to the temple platform, and yellow for the sun.

Next we see the horses, and most importantly the mini-horses. Two weeks ago we drove thirty miles just to spend ten minutes hanging around a field of mini-horses and it was wonderful. There is something about the company of creatures which has a beneficial, even mildly euphoric influence. In internet terms it is generally signified by the vaguely onomatopoeic squee. I'm sure there have been scientific studies. Anyway, the point is that we both think mini-horses are wonderful, as do all the little girls who have been drawn to the equine enclosure as though subject to an actual magnetic influence. One of the mini-horses is named Zephyr, as we learn from a board affixed to his pen. His favourite film is Frozen, according to the board, although I suspect this is more to do with marketing and understanding your target audience than actual cinematic preference.

Finally we get to the cows, taking a route through a crafts market notable for oil likenesses of Ronald Reagan and others, and the cows are wonderful.

I grew up around cows, although I retain a certain respectful fear of them on account of their being so big. I was never really on friendly terms with the cows of the farm on which my dad worked, excepting Mona, who was grey and white rather than black and white, and so friendly that I was able to ride around on her back. I always assumed her colouration indicated great age, but it seems equally possible that she was simply of a different, conspicuously more sociable breed than the rest. More recently I showed my dad an old photograph, himself as a young farmhand from before I was born, stood in a field with fifteen or so Jersey cows around him. Forty years after the photograph was taken, he was still able to name every single cow in the picture. I suppose then it's in my blood, whatever it is.

It hasn't escaped me that I have come full circle by some definition. Agricultural shows were a big deal when I was a child, and I am once again a regular even if the country is different.

I'm not sure if it means anything, but the pattern is pleasing.

The Quiet and Pleasant Man

Robert James Shepherd - my grandfather on my mother's side - was born on the 8th of March, 1910 somewhere in Liverpool, England for the sake of argument. He was one of a fairly large working-class family tracing its ancestry back to Northern Ireland, and possibly to Scotland before that. I almost certainly have some of the details wrong, but this is as much as I can recall from my mother's genealogical research which takes our family tree back to the late 1600s. Somewhere in there lurks a member of the Orange Lodge, but we don't like to talk about him too much, not least because we don't really know enough about him for anything more than a short sentence.

My grandfather's parents were Joseph and Emmeline Shepherd, and his military documentation gives his home address as 17, Hotspur Road in Bootle, which is technically Merseyside rather than Liverpool depending on who you ask and when; and providing you ask someone other than my grandmother who would customarily adopt a face of stony and silent disgust in the event of anyone mistaking her for a Scouser, which occurred with some frequency due to her fairly distinct Liverpudlian accent.

What I have left of my grandfather's story is cobbled together from fading childhood memories; a couple of hundred black and white photographs which, if numerous, remain nevertheless mysterious; and a lever arch file containing military documentation, certificates of training, pay book, and all sorts. From these I know that he was a joiner by trade - following in his father's footsteps so I believe - who enlisted with the Royal Artillery on the 1st of April 1933. The next few sequential documents I have are third and then second class certificates of military education passed in English, mathematics, map reading, and a subject termed army and empire. He is identified as a Driver on these certificates, ascending to the rank of Gunner on his first class certificate of military education dated to the 16th of October 1935. He transferred to the Army Reserves at the rank of Bombardier on the 29th of January, 1939. Notes made in his Certificate of Service booklet dated to the 28th of September, 1938 describe his conduct as exemplary, with some officer whose signature I am unable to decipher describing my grandfather as follows:

A first class surveyor and a reliable and trustworthy NCO. He is very intelligent and is methodical and painstaking. He has a quiet and pleasant manner.

England went to war with Germany on 3rd of September, 1939, from which point my grandfather's story is told mainly in photographs as he sits atop a camel before the Great Pyramid in Egypt, along with other scenes of his life in India or the North African desert. Two formal uniformed portrait photographs delineate his promotion from Corporal to Staff Sergeant, and then there are the medals - notably the Africa Star - and what little I am able to remember him telling me of his time with Montgomery's Eighth Army when I was a kid.

My mother was born just after war ended, and a receipt for the payment of an examination fee dated to the 3rd of November, 1948 testifies to my grandfather's return to civilian life as a structural engineer - or an architect if the more specific term seems a little obtuse. He may not quite have designed the buildings, but he made sure they didn't fall down. This trade was much in demand in the city of Coventry in the West Midlands, much of which had been flattened by the Luftwaffe during the war, although it could probably be argued that Coventry City Council spent the next two decades bulldozing the bits which Hitler's finest had missed. Anyway, the point is that my grandparents moved to Kenilworth, Warwickshire, just down the road from Coventry, which is how my mother ended up in that part of the country, and ultimately how I came to be born. Kenilworth had become aspirational in the years following the second world war. You were someone if you lived in Kenilworth, which pleased my grandmother as much as anything pleased her. My grandfather, who had never suffered any particular shame in acknowledging his Merseyside roots, may have felt differently, but work was work and I suppose he tended to keep his thoughts to himself.

My mother has described her home life as pleasant up until the age of twelve or so, at which point my grandfather apparently found himself bewildered as to how to cope with teenage girls. Where he would once play with my mother and her younger sister, read to them and tell them stories, he became a distant and apparently humourless authority figure inspiring my mother to rebel further when charged with inconsequential accusations made purely for the sake of authority.

He seemed to do well as an architect working for Coventry City Council, and he had his friends and his fishing at the weekend, but the war had stayed with him in certain respects, unfortunately leading to a spell in the nuthouse during which he was subject to electroconvulsive therapy. It probably didn't help that my grandmother had never quite been the sharpest tool in the box, and had always been a somewhat self-absorbed individual. Whilst she doted upon me as a child, and I in turn thought she was wonderful, even at that age I could see she had something of a martyr complex. Nothing my grandfather did for her was ever quite good enough, and he did plenty.

'Never mind,' she would say with a laboured sigh. 'I suppose at least you tried.' She herself had been the least favoured of three children, the one with neither the beauty nor any particular talent to speak of, and so she grew up with a vague sense of being owed something which she could not quite articulate. She apparently fell some way short of being the world's greatest mother, and I always wondered if she saw my arrival in terms of atonement, as a way of making up for lost time. I was indulged as her own children had never been.

The happiest days of her life had been as a land girl on the farm of Sammy Shellew in Cornwall, and memories of the same were frequently invoked for the sake of contrast with an endlessly disappointing present. If only she had married Sammy, or if only she had not moved so far from the wonderful Thelma, her greatest friend in the whole world. She met with Thelma a few times in the seventies, but eventually fell out with her; and then the venerable Sammy Shellew came to stay, which didn't work out so well due to his having interpreted my grandmother's gushing praise as a sexual overture, which probably wasn't entirely his fault.

For most of the 1970s I would be taken to stay with my grandparents every other weekend, arriving Friday evening and coming back Sunday afternoon. It was a regular thing, a routine, and like many children, I loved routine and found it comforting, something upon which one might rely in a world which appeared chaotic through not yet being fully understood. One of my earliest coherent memories is of watching Neil Armstrong landing on the moon as viewed on my grandparents' black and white television on Sunday the 20th of July, 1969. I would have been three years old, two months short of four. My grandfather was ten years older than I am right now.

Weekends generally began with breakfast, usually my grandfather making buttered toast - your bog standard Mother's Pride white sliced bread and probably Stork margarine, but somehow I've never been able to make toast quite so good as he did. Tea was stewed until bright orange - or at least the complexion of Judith Chalmers from that holiday show. The cocktail cabinet built into the sideboard was well stocked with kid drinks, Cresta or else bottles of Nesquik syrup for milkshakes and a selection of drinking straws, but they got me onto tea quite early on, always served from a pot into a cup with a saucer, one of those matching sets invoking some level of sophistication.

'He's been a proper little tea urn this weekend,' my grandmother reported one Sunday as my parents arrived to take me home, and it was true that I had been guzzling one cup after another. I can still recall my overpowering thirst of that particular weekend.

Some Saturdays I'd awake before my grandparents and would go downstairs and find something amazing in being the first to rise, in being the one to draw back the curtains upon a new day. On one such occasion I switched the radio on just as Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty was playing, and right in the middle of that Bob Holness saxophone break which I have ever since associated with an early Saturday morning at my grandparents' house; and the thing is, I'm not even sure of this being a real memory as opposed to some sort of association made after the fact.

My grandparents didn't seem to like anything racier than Jim Reeves so far as I could tell, so modern pop music was absolutely out of the question. My grandfather had apparently taken some delight in mocking his youngest daughter's love of Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders by referring to them as the Bananabenders, and I don't recall the radio ever having been tuned to anything that would have featured Baker Street. My parents took me to see Grease at the cinema in Stratford-upon-Avon when it came out, and the next Friday as they ferried me over to Kenilworth, I begged them not to tell Grandma we'd been to see the film. I somehow felt that such an admission would bring disgrace upon us, but I still have no idea how I thought this would work or what would happen if our terrible secret should be revealed.

Breakfast was usually prefaced by my grandfather walking up Caesar Road to the newsagent for a newspaper. I would tag along and he would buy me one of the small, brightly-coloured plastic dinosaurs from the display on the counter, or in later years the new issue of 2000AD comic; and I have a very specific memory of reading issue sixty-eight with the gruesome cyborg Artie Gruber on the cover at the breakfast table with my hot margarined toast and orange tea. My grandfather quite possibly passed some faintly disparaging comment on my reading material, thus cementing the memory in place. 2000AD comic was one of the first things I understood as belonging to my generation and thus beyond the scope of adults. Six weeks later as our family headed off for a week's holiday in Delabole, Cornwall, my mother frowned at the cover of issue seventy-four upon which Judge Dredd is seen on the verge of being devoured by a tyrannosaurus.

'It's very violent,' she observed in disapproving fashion.

'It's violence in the cause of good,' I explained somewhat ineptly.

After Baker Street, the orange tea, toast, and my weekly dose of violence in the cause of good, my grandparents and I would bundle into the navy blue Morris Minor and drive to Leamington Spa. My grandfather drove cautiously, perched forward in his seat, gripping the wheel and generally refusing to talk. Often he would whistle Bizet's March of the Toreadors from Carmen, and he would whistle it with such enthusiasm and frequency that I came to regard it as his signature tune; although specifically I have a better memory of him whistling it when it was just the two of us. He seemed less given to flourishes of carefree cheer in my grandmother's company, and my mother tells me that he was once in the habit of singing to himself, Pennies from Heaven and other songs of the time. I suppose by the seventies he generally felt less moved to song.

By the eighties, having invented experimental music, I produced a track attempting to invoke his memory by recording the running of a friend's Morris Minor whilst whistling March of the Toreadors. It seemed like an important thing to do, but the recording was disappointing.

Once in Leamington Spa I would be unleashed in a labyrinthine Regent Street toy shop called Toy Town, there to blow what feeble sum of pocket money I'd managed to save on model railway accessories, Ellisdon's jokes and novelties, Micronauts, Dinky's die-cast Gerry Anderson vehicles, model kits of dinosaurs, Shogun Warriors, or Faller alpine houses earmarked for the aforementioned model railway. I was good at spending money but not at saving it, so my model railway comprised mainly accessories and scenery with very little actual railway. With hindsight it strikes me as a little weird how I would buy and build bungalows, houses and shops past which no miniature electric locomotive would ever trundle on OO gauge tracks, and I can't help wonder if my granddad ever noticed this and imagined I might have some subconscious drive to one day follow him into the architectural trade. Having been a joiner, he still had all of his carpentry tools and so jollied me along by making a couple of wooden tunnel entrances which might eventually parenthesise the locomotive passage through a hillside of papier maché and chicken wire.

I repaid him by never getting around to constructing my hypothetical layout, and by nominating him test subject for all the Ellisdon's jokes and novelties I bought once I gave up on the model railway idea. Whilst he never struck me as particularly lacking a sense of humour, he tired of the job fairly rapidly then resigned during breakfast one Sunday. He'd responded to the loud farting rasp of the whoopee cushion on his chair with an indulgent smile. He'd found the plastic fried egg on his plate considerably less amusing, and the novelty double-sided suction cup by which I had attached his cup of tea securely to its saucer was the last straw.

'Your mother shall hear of this,' he muttered darkly, carrying the still full cup and firmly attached saucer to the kitchen. It had been a long weekend for him. The day before, my grandmother had only just talked me out of trying my joke sweets on him by suggesting there was a possibility that I might kill him. I'd made the sweets myself from everything I could find in the kitchen cupboard. To my grandfather's credit, he made no attempt to throttle me, despite probably knowing that no court in the land would have found him guilty. He never raised his voice to me, because I suppose he understood that, being a child, I was essentially psychotic and that it was therefore nothing personal. He was nevertheless able to induce me to behave with just a few words. It was probably the military training.

My grandmother's approach to child care was based on flattery, giving me stuff, and assuming it would be appreciated. It generally was appreciated, although I nevertheless got out of hand from time to time. Standard child psychology would have termed it a testing of limits, which I could have told you even back then. I had become irritable at being addressed as sweetheart or similar endearments with such frequency, and so I began to experiment with basic rudeness, making strident demands, complaints about the quality of service, and on one occasion directly calling her an old bat. I was probably about six or seven and I thought it was funny because I knew she would let me get away with it.

'Don't speak to your grandma like that,' my grandfather suggested, momentarily fixing me with the mildest of glances; and in that moment I saw myself as the repulsive brat I had become. It felt awful and I learned my lesson immediately. It was as though I'd been punched in the stomach.

On Saturday afternoons I would play with whatever I'd bought back from Leamington Spa, or sometimes we drove to Coventry to visit the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, and my grandfather would point out which buildings he'd helped design as we drove through the city. The swimming pool was one of his, as were parts of the university, so I believe, and it had been his job to make an assessment of the extent of the coal mining beneath the city and whether or not the ground would be able to support the weight of St. Michael's Cathedral.

Some Saturday afternoons, he would take me down to Abbey Fields in Kenilworth to catch fish from the stream, or around Kenilworth Castle; and I have no idea what we talked about during those walks, but I recall that we talked at length. As my mother has observed more recently, whilst some of his views were staunchly conservative and typical of his background and times, he was essentially a decent and intelligent man who was interested in things. He had seen some of the world and had come back the better for it in most respects but for those more directly related to the war. He would take me to Leamington Spa and have me splash around in a kayak for an hour or so at a small boating lake near Jephson Gardens, and I would notice the Indian women in their saris and remark on how strange they looked.

'I think they look very pretty,' he observed somewhat forcefully, possibly even wistfully given the time he'd spent in India, belying the generalisation of his generation's supposedly inherent xenophobia.

His creative energies went into plays and letters hammered out on a typewriter which he would sometimes encourage me to use. He wrote a play called One Bad Apple or something similar, a heavy-handed cautionary tale of a hearty and generally conservative workplace ruined by one of those shifty labour union type fellows, and there was another play about a wayward and rebellious daughter coming to no good. He didn't really seem to get much interest in this material, but it was significant that he at least tried.

He encouraged me in my formative attempts at storytelling, listening patiently as I read him by Bod fan fiction. The opening scenario in which Bod had a beautiful dream about a bowl of strawberries and cream was a direct lift from the barely animated children's television cartoon, but the conclusion - the world ends and in the next world Bod is a gorilla - was all my own work. There were also many, many episodes of Doctor Stew, a sequence of single page cartoon strips drawn on a long, long roll of rough hand tissue which had never made it to the dispenser of the cattle shed in which my dad worked.

'There's an awful lot of burping in these,' my grandfather observed reading through my scrawled efforts. It didn't seem like he disapproved exactly, but I got the impression he was concerned. Each episode - and there were at least a hundred of them - usually ended with Doctor Stew eaten alive in time for his devourer to emit a satisfied burp in the last panel, which was also the punchline.

Concerned or otherwise, it impressed me that my grandfather had taken the trouble to at least read my incoherent and extraordinarily repetitive attempts at humour. My grandmother would customarily have sung my praises more or less irrespective of what I had done, which was nice but ultimately didn't count for much.

Saturday evenings were television - The Pink Panther, Doctor Who, Basil Brush, The Generation Game, Starsky & Hutch - all of those shows which have since become tarnished by the overwhelming and disproportionate sentiment of their own nostalgia; or my grandfather would turn off the television and tell me about his time in the war, which was always something of a treat. Perhaps it was because I could tell how much he enjoyed reliving it with me, drawing maps of Tobruk and North Africa with arrows to illustrate movements of troops and tanks, and himself in there somewhere.

Sundays were different, at least following breakfast. Sometimes he would take me fishing, the one activity in which he still took real pleasure, so it seemed. He had made me a kid-sized fishing box in his workshop in the garage, and off we would go with flasks and sandwiches to some point along the River Leam or the Avon or the Sowe. He was keen on outdoor activities, and the boot of the Morris Minor was always well stocked with camping equipment, a kettle, tin mugs, a tiny Primus stove and so on. Alternately we would just go for another walk to Abbey Fields or one of the usual places.

'I've been feeling a bit depressed,' I told him in response to some question or other as we headed out of the door one morning, our breath misting the crisp air. I don't recall how old I was, younger than thirteen, and young enough for it to seem strange that I would articulate such a thing.

I got the impression that he was quietly horrified. 'You shouldn't be depressed at your age,' he said, a trace of pain in his voice.

At the time I had no idea of his own history of depression, the hours sat silently rocking back and forth before the fire described by my mother, nor any really developed idea of what the term even meant. I was trying to articulate a vague feeling of insecurity based on the knowledge that I was getting older and one day the fortnightly visits would cease. I recall this as a fairly specific fear I had voiced in relation to my grandmother's stated ambition to run a tea shop. She had predicted a peculiar future in which I would be riding around with my followers as part of some biker gang. Everyone would draw to a halt behind me as we approached the crossroads.

'Come on, lads,' I would say, 'my grandma's always good for a cup of tea and a bun,' and off we would all ride. The image amused me, but was followed by the altogether more apocalyptic, 'of course one day you'll stop coming to see us altogether.'

I was briefly inconsolable.

Sure enough, my visits became less frequent as I got older, and as my grandfather contracted bowel cancer some time in 1979. We visited him in the hospital in Warwick, and it terrified me to see him frail as a bird in his huge bed, happy to see us but barely enough of him there to fill the pyjamas. I'd always suspected that some elements of the world were subject to change and would ultimately become different, and now it was happening. I didn't cry when I heard he had died because it didn't make sense, but I was distraught at the funeral.

Denied the supposed source of all her woes, my grandmother became a quite different figure, certainly more tragic, but not so tragic as to excuse her increasingly eccentric passive-aggressive behaviour. The jokes she told about her terrible husband lost their jovial tone to become a spiteful, insecure whine about how she could have wasted her best years on such a useless man; but the complaints served only to underscore her own failings, her sense of having been owed something she could never quite articulate. What photos remain of my grandfather are those she somehow missed when she was throwing it all away, and from amongst what little is left of him I have a letter that was never posted, typed on a sheet of lined foolscap and addressed to John Newbury of the BBC. It is dated to the 15th of June, 1979:

I listened with interest to your programme on depression on Wednesday last, and as one who suffered from this complaint over a long period in the past, and having been cured I feel I should inform you of some of my experiences in the hope that you will pass on any relevant information to others who are suffering.

I suffered this sickness from 1944, on my return from five years continuous service in the Middle East and India until about five years ago when I learned about and obtained acupuncture treatment; and apart from one brief spell I have not experienced any depression since. The one instance occurred about four years ago during the transition from a busy working life to one of retirement.

Concerning the discussion on your programme I believe that any lowering of morale for which the causes are known - external conditions such as bereavement, domestic conflict etc. - is really only a sadness which, generally, time will heal. In my opinion, depression is a complaint which has no known cause and exists only within the patient, and can occur at any time regardless of circumstances. In my experience, lonely people are not more prone to this sickness than others. During my last period in hospital I found the other patients to be a typical cross-section of people including a works manager, school teacher, miner, and a policeman. One particular character was a hearty, boisterous person, apparently happily married with children, liked his job and was financially secure, circumstances which should promote contentment; but he suffered and frequently cried for no apparent reason. This was real depression.

I have found that these attacks can occur in different ways, one being like a huge mass of black fluid flowing into one's mind and another like a thousand different thoughts racing through the mind without pause until I feared for my sanity.

I felt a deep sympathy for the people who took part in your programme and I hope that you will tell them that they have no need to continue to suffer, that there is a cure and that I sincerely hope they can avail themselves of it and obtain relief.

Thirty-five years later, there may be days which pass without my thinking about him, but I am not directly aware of them. I often wish I could go back and talk to him as I am now, or at least take back some of the utter crap I almost certainly came out with, although there's probably no need. I'm fairly sure he understood that I was just a kid, and talking rubbish was my job.

As the years pass, I come to see myself in what I am able to recall of him all the more, and this impression has been cemented by a couple of photographs taken in the early 1950s which may as well be photographs of myself; and it occurs to me that there's probably no need to invent time travel just for the sake of apologising for my having been ten and slightly gormless, because he never entirely went away and, as I have said, I'm sure he would understand.

 

 

 

Last of the Sumer Wine

The Goddess Ishtar did one day come out from the wood crafted door of the ziggurat and began to wash the step, cleaning desert sand and mud from the brick with a pale of water. Hidden near to the ziggurat within a mulberry bush were Enkidu, Gilgamesh, and Utnapishtim. As ever, Utnapishtim wore upon his face a faraway look as though lost in thought. Enkidu on the other hand jostled forth, regarding the Goddess with lascivious intent. He licked his lips and rearranged his crude woollen headpiece saying, 'By heck, Gilgamesh, were it not for the dampness of my sandals, I would believe that we were in heaven.'

'Well, she certainly is a vision,' conceded Gilgamesh. 'I'll give you that much.'

Ishtar, sensing the consideration of unseen eyes, paused in her work and looked out from the balcony, her gaze ranging across the great city of Uruk from one doorway to the next. 'Who speaks? Who is here that dare not show themselves?' She raised up the wooden handle of the implement with which she had been making her work. Her lips pursed together as though she had eaten of some bitter fruit.

The mulberry bush sneezed, rattling its leaves and boughs before coming to bloom with conversation.

'You stupid great lump!'

The thin, high voice of Utnapishtim came forth like a timid bird, halting but not quite apologetic. 'Well perhaps if we had not taken such a route through the marshes. It plays havoc with my sinuses.'

'I'll play havoc with your sinuses in a minute!'

A third voice offered amused commentary. 'I think he means to punch you on the nose, Utnapishtim.'

'Yes, well that's his answer to everything.'

'Well, he is a wild man, after all. Pinched from clay of the stuff of the firmament by Aruru, unless I'm very much mistaken.'

'I'll pinch you in a minute!'

Ishtar's brow turned dark and she called out, 'All right you three idiots, I know you're there. You may as well show yourselves before I set the temple guards on you.'

Enkidu emerged, turning back to his two companions as they followed, and yet keeping both twinkling eyes and an unseemly smile trained upon the enraged Goddess. 'My lady beckons! Methinks the time has come when my rustic charms have at last worked their magic, as unto the shepherd's crook upon his wandering flock.'

The lady Ishtar stepped back a little way, fearful of the trio and yet reluctant to reveal that fear. 'Yes, it's the wandering that bothers me - the wandering hands!'

Now Enkidu ran forward to the base of the temple, gazing up with eyes made heavy by devotion, and by the strong desire that he might plant his wild, manly seed within the fundament of the Goddess. 'You know you're gorgeous when you're angry.'

Gilgamesh, now fully emerged from the bush and stood alongside the taller third of their group, showed a face of great wryness. 'Not just when she's angry either, but most other times as well. That's our Enkidu for you. He's nothing if not consistent in his affections.'

Utnapishtim effected to shudder as though stricken with thoughts of death. 'Please - I'd rather not give too much consideration to his consistency. I'm sure the bit about the clay was a euphemism.'

Ishtar was again at the edge of the overhang raining blow after blow down upon the hapless and yet happy wild man. 'You're disgusting, you are! Get away from here!'

Enkidu's great hair-covered paws reached upwards to the heavens, his fingers opening and closing like grapples. 'You know that wrinkled flax robe drives me wild.'

'You're already wild, you fool!'

Red Christmas

I sometimes wonder whether it's really fair to preserve the anonymity of a former partner specifically by referring to her as either Dora the Explorer or Edna Mode from The Incredibles, cover identities chosen because she resembled both and I take cathartic pleasure from the admittedly venomous intent of such references. Perhaps, on consideration it is both childish and unfair, and after all, neither Nickelodeon nor Pixar have ever said a bad word about me, at least not so far as I know. Perhaps I need to take a different approach to this...

I met Dora Mode from The Explorables during the summer of 2005 as I was delivering her mail. By October we were romantically involved, and by November I'd been asked if I would like to spend Christmas with her at her mother's house in Richmond, Surrey. I was overjoyed and I said yes, taking the invitation as an indication that this relationship would be going somewhere, or at least that it would probably stop being quite so shit at some point in the near future.

The mother in question was old, frail, and in her nineties. She came from a wealthy upper class family, and had once worked as secretary to someone significantly ministerial in France. I had the impression she may once have been the just sort of girl to catch the eye of Cary Grant as he played the fruit machines of Monte Carlo, a giggling débutante who could probably knock back her own weight in cocktail olives on one bar tab - for all of her possible failings, an ultimately good natured soul. Unfortunately she was also the cause of everything bad that had ever happened to Dora Mode of The Explorables, at least according to the whining testimony of the endlessly wronged child.

We stood on the doorstep late Christmas Eve. The door opened. The old woman was clearly delighted to see her only daughter, but the feeling was less than mutual.

'Hello Mum,' Dora Mode of The Explorables chirped with the weary resignation of an Ealing comedy policeman catching a serial safe-cracker once again up to his old tricks. She breezed through to the kitchen and began removing things from the fridge, checking the sell-by date on each and registering trace elements of disgust with tutting noises. 'Oh Muuuum,' she whined, barely able to conceal either her revulsion, or the pleasure she took in her revulsion.

Christmas morning came as a welcome distraction from Dora Mode of The Explorables' seemingly endless round of complaints and observations regarding the myriad ways in which the frail old woman had let everyone down - the numerous criteria by which she had apparently failed as both a mother and a human being. Of the many criticisms expressed, there were few I could really see as being either justified or worth worrying over, or as necessarily having any bearing on anyone other than the old woman herself. My girlfriend ground her teeth with unalloyed rage over the state of the vast mansion which was her mother's home. The place could have been in better shape: a cracked window pane here, maybe a careless splash of paint intruding upon a skirting board there or a washer requiring replacement. I had the impression that Dora Mode of The Explorables was mainly concerned about how much work would need to be done before she could sell the house once she had inherited it, and the rest of her testimony was just the usual passive-aggressive coercion by which she interacted with people, that being her principal means of communication; but as I say, Christmas morning had come.

Dora's mother beamed and clapped her hands softly together like a charming Victorian child. 'Oh goody!'

I opened one present. Dora Mode of The Explorables had bought me a green and black knitted woollen sweater with matching gloves and hat. I liked the sweater but the gloves and hat seemed weird, something that would be worn by a website designer named Toby as he dropped Jessica off for her violin lesson, a man who was like really into Dylan at the moment, yeah?

A few weeks after the relationship had been declared official, Dora Mode of The Explorables had told me that she was not going to try to change me because - in her own words - she had learned from past experience that it never worked. I had foolishly said that I didn't really mind, and so she took this as an enthusiastic invitation, and I became her project.

At the time I favoured plain white shirts with a suit, a little worn but not actually scruffy - dark jacket and trousers and occasionally with a tie if I was feeling a bit snazzy. I never felt comfortable with any sort of affected Bohemian look, and still believe that a person who is truly able to express their personality through the way they dress probably doesn't have much of a personality to express. Additionally, the suit had worked well for me in Mexico. I guess I didn't look so smart as to suggest I was worth robbing, but neither did I seem like a tourist - smart but not officiously so. This was what a couple of people told me in any case. Dora Mode of The Explorables said that I dressed like an old man and that I needed to get with it, and it didn't seem worth arguing because I was usually either wrong or just plain stubborn.

I liked the sweater, but at the same time it made me feel sad. My one true love had given me a present which could quite easily have come from one of those aunts seen only every few years, usually at either a wedding or a funeral. It didn't say much for our relationship.

The other present was a box about the size of a packet of Jacob's cream crackers. This seemed more promising, more suggestive of possibilities. The present turned out to be four short lengths of curved track for a Hornby clockwork model railway of the 1920s, still in the original slightly dusty box. The track was, so far as I could tell, made of tin and was a little rusted. At some point during the previous three months I'd told Dora Mode of The Explorables how I had loved model railways as a child.

'I hope it didn't set you back too much.' I was trying to work out why someone would shell out what I presumed would have been steep collectors' prices for something of such esoteric interest, something which made no sense in isolation.

'I found it in the store cupboard at the back of the toy shop. It seemed a shame to throw it out, but I could never quite work out who to give it to.'

Merry Christmas. Here's something I stole from work.

She elaborated, returning with relish to the recurring theme of how she felt she had deserved a little payback from that place. She often spoke of the one previous job I recall her mentioning in such terms as the sort of grinding shit we all have to put up with from time to time as we work the post, the buses, security guard, canning factory, on the bins, street sweeper, or a couple of months behind the till of a toy shop in West Dulwich. We've all been there. We've all had to carry that weight.

Christmas dinner came and went, most of it taken up with Dora Mode of The Explorables' commentary regarding how her mother had ruined Christmas dinner in addition to everything else.

'I would have enjoyed some bread sauce,' the old woman sighed quietly to herself as her only child launched into further critical discourse punctuated with resentful mouthfuls of turkey.

Christmas came and went, and then came and went again. The second year was at Dora Mode of The Explorables' home, with her mother being delivered by taxi on the morning itself. The day was about as festive as its predecessor and by this time I realised that the old lady and myself would have enjoyed it more without the presence of the one person we had in common.

The last Christmas was preceded by my announcing that I was looking for a flat of my own. I had moved in with Dora Mode of The Explorables because there didn't seem to be any other option, and I hoped it might be the detail our relationship had been missing, the element which finally got everything working. Nevertheless I had also feared it would prove to be a mistake, and sure enough it was. After about six months I felt like killing myself, by which I don't mean that I was having me a big ol' sad, but that some days I would lay in my hot bath after work and consider all that I had heard about its benefits as a crucible in which one might open up a major artery or two. Life with Dora Mode of The Explorables was dark and joyless beyond anything I had been able to imagine, and I knew that escape could only be affected by means of gargantuan effort. I wasn't sure if I had the willpower left to do so.

It turned out that I did. I reasoned that a leap in the dark would land me in a better place, because nothing could be as terrible as the present; and so I began looking at horrible flats the size of rabbit hutches for which I could barely afford rent. I told Dora Mode of The Explorables that this would be the best thing for our relationship, because we would no longer be living on top of one another. We would have room to breath.

The first few places I saw were unbelievably bad, but I kept on looking because I knew that once I was gone, I would never have to see Dora Mode of The Explorables or deal with her aggressive and psychotic insecurity ever again. All I had to do was keep her happy for another couple of weeks, or if not happy, at least disinclined to hump all my shit out onto the street and set fire to it.

I had already ruined the last Christmas with my stated desire to move out, but regardless of this, I bought her a tin opener and a stuffed owl. I had, against all expectations, found a flat in Camberwell which if extortionately priced and tiny, was at least clean and had not recently been used as a shooting gallery. I was on the home stretch, just a few weeks left in which to sit and wait for the end of my sentence.

Dora Mode of The Explorables had once phoned me at work, asking me to come home and open a tin of cat food. For some reason she was unable to open this particular tin of cat food under her own steam, so I had to suspend everything and cycle back because this was the sort of thing a truly loving boyfriend would do for his sweetie, and because I had no choice, and my obstinacy and selfishness had been noted.

'Pringle is meowing,' she informed me testily, apparently adding animal cruelty to the list of my crimes.

So I bought her a tin opener for that last Christmas, an expensive model from a pretentious kitchenware boutique that had recently appeared at the lower end of Lordship Lane. It was well made, an ostentatious precision tool by which even Dora Mode of The Explorables' feeble hands would be able to open the toughest, craggiest tin of Whiskas. It was to be my replacement.

The stuffed owl was something to which she had specifically directed me with the words I'm going to tell you what I want for Christmas this year so that you don't mess it up again. We had seen the owls in one of Dulwich's many gift shops, suppliers of pretentious knick-knackery to the overmoneyed and vacuous. They were hand sewn from recycled materials, and each one sold funded the travel expenses of either Sting or Bono visiting a deprived village in Africa, or something of the sort. Dora Mode of The Explorables resembled an owl in a certain light, and seemed to have a thing about the creatures. I suspect she regarded an owl of some description as her spirit animal, but had probably decided I wouldn't understand and so had never deigned to discuss it.

Her world was informed by all manner of personal esoteric beliefs, mostly derived from wishy-washy new-age sources and self help literature - feng shui, the power of positive thinking, whatever drippy motivational crap was filling column inches that week - which could be adopted without having to think too hard about any of it. Anything which provided an explanation for why her life hadn't turned out quite how she wanted besides that which involved her own agency was always welcome. If she appeared unemployable, it might be a misaligned chair blocking the flow of ley lines emanating from the front room. She once took all the doors in the house off their hinges so as to allow for the free passage of positive energy, then had to put most of them back on when winter turned the place into an icebox. One element of this custom mythology was the colour red. Its apparent significance explained a home-made motivational message handwritten on a piece of paper and blutacked to the wall behind the telephone:

I am the red light that calls people to stop what they are doing, to come out to play and have fun.

Dora Mode of The Explorables' life coach had probably drawn this one up for her, or out of her or whatever. Unfortunately, Dora Mode of The Explorables' presence was not something which caused people to have fun in my experience, quite the opposite in fact; and no amount of motivational mantras were going to change that. I often wondered if it ever occurred to her that the associations of red lights were generally quite different, mostly serving as a warning or else prohibiting some action, both of which struck me as greatly more suited to her personality. Anyway, the point is that she liked red so I coughed up the twenty quid, bought the owl, and wrapped it in red paper.

The last Christmas came.

She opened the package containing the tin opener, and regarded it as though I'd bought her a butt plug for Christmas. She had taken it as a token of my sarcasm, which surprisingly it wasn't.

'That isn't your main present,' I squeaked, trying hard to appear confident, or at least to avoid sounding like I was delivering the apology she would almost certainly soon demand.

She opened the second box, carefully so as to avoid tearing the precious magic red paper. The stuffed owl sat inside its clear plastic packaging. Dora Mode of The Explorables stared at it for a moment before speaking. 'Did you keep the receipt?'

I tried to work out what could be wrong, given that she had specifically asked for this one. I felt a surge of panic bordering on terror. 'Yes. Do you not like it?'

'I wanted the red one.'

There had been a number of owls in the shop, all different colours, and I recalled that she had been looking at a red variant when we were there on the browse. The one I had bought was the last owl left, and was pale blue in colour.

I handed over the receipt and we didn't discuss it again. The next day I noticed that the red wrapping paper had been carefully flattened out and pinned on the wall as though it were a poster.

Months later, once we had separated following one of the most enjoyable rows I've ever had the pleasure to inspire, she admitted that the tin opener had come in very useful. She had grown determined to view our split as a trial separation at the end of which we would surely be reunited, all the stronger for the experience. She may simply have been scratching around for whatever she thought would make me happy, or she could have been telling the truth.

Years later, once the nightmare was finally over, I sold the vintage model railway track on eBay. It turned out that it wasn't in great condition, despite having the original box, and two lengths of the track that would have originally been included were absent.

Some bloke gave me a fiver for it.

Maybe I should have bought her a butt plug.