Beano

There were eleven of us, myself included, and we met up at the Crystal Palace Tavern - Kingsley, Andre, Don, Sav, Big Dan, Rodney, Tuns, Steve Mozzella, Alan the manager, and some bloke seemingly known to everyone except myself. He was some mate of Alan the manager, probably a postman from up Mandela Way and unknown to me because I tended to avoid overtime where possible. Eight hours of that shit each day, plus four at weekends was in itself quite sufficient.

It was Saturday afternoon, just enough time for everyone to have had a quick shower and a change of clothes after work. A van had been hired and we were going on a beano to Southend-on-Sea.

I'd customarily avoided this sort of thing in the past, but I was approaching forty and I'd begun to ask myself what was the worst that could happen. I liked a drink and I liked to get drunk, and I'd even begun to enjoy the company of other postmen. Even Tuns, my former enemy, seemed to have got over whatever problem he'd had with me when I started at East Dulwich. We weren't buddies, but at least he was no longer sneering at me from the other side of the sorting office whilst rhetorically asking who the fuck I thought I was because I'd just chuckled at a joke cracked by someone from one of his other inordinately complex mental lists.

On the other hand, Alan the manager was an unalloyed tosser, and unfortunately the reason that Nadim had decided against joining us; although Nadim also had some problem with Rodney, something about the changing rooms after some football match and how Rodney had sprayed Ralgex on his finger and then stuck it up some young kid's arse. It sounded a bit unlikely to me, but it also sounded like the sort of disagreement for which there wouldn't be much to gain from taking sides; and personally I liked Rodney. He was one of the funniest people I'd ever met and had at least never tried to stick a  Ralgexy finger up my arse.

Steve was a bit of a wild card and was usually to be found at the centre of an actual shop floor fist fight at least once a week. I never really understood why as he seemed fairly amiable whenever I spoke to him. My guess is that he lacked the ability to rise above the sort of shite people habitually come out with at work.

I used to drink with the Catford postmen, not all the time because that bunch would drink until they couldn't stand, but mostly they were fun. The Dulwich bunch didn't really socialise in the same way, probably because so few of them actually lived in Dulwich, so the beano seemed to be a means of redressing the balance, or something along those lines, but with the disadvantage of it being fairly difficult to stagger home from Southend-on-Sea once I'd had enough.

Wikipedia thus describes the etymology of the term beano:

A bean-feast was an informal term for a celebratory meal or party, especially an annual summer dinner given by an employer to his or her employees, probably derived from a tradition in the Low Countries at Twelfth Night. By extension, colloquially, it describes any festive occasion with a meal and perhaps an outing. The word, and its shorter form beano, are fairly common in Britain, less known in the United States.

So the comic which brought us Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids is therefore named after a works piss-up.

We piled into the van and set off. I managed to seat myself amongst Kingsley, Don, and Andre, and significantly as far as possible from Alan the manager, but not so far as to be unable to hear him trying hard to balance his efforts to be one of the lads whilst maintaining command presence. Curiously for a black man, he didn't seem to particularly like black people, which looked one hell of a lot as though he was trying to prove something to white managers - see, I don't play favourites, I'm not like them, I'm like you. He routinely pulled Kingsley up about stuff he probably wouldn't have noticed had it been some white dude.

Yet even here, as just a bunch of cunts in a van with not a uniform in sight, the hierarchy remained. Alan haw haw hawed with the overtime boys, the docket bashers, those for whom getting off your tits with the boss was apparently strategic; and the rest of us - the losers and tag-alongs - kept to the back of the van.

It was a couple of hours to Southend, going via the Blackwall Tunnel, with just one stop at an industrial estate somewhere in Essex so that Don and Andre could urinate in broad daylight against a chain link fence.

We hit Southend, the seafront, and straight into a pub, and I immediately realised that this had been a fucking terrible idea. I'd imagined all eleven of us, maybe even Alan, quietly sinking into pleasant alcoholic haze over the next nine or ten hours, sinking into our chairs, talking shite, and all differences reduced to raw material for jokes and comic digs. Instead, Southend was swarming with arseholes all looking to get pissed and laid, or looking for something which might at least be obtained by exerting downward force upon everyone else. It was loud and chaotic, and the reason we had all gone into the pub was for as quick a pint as possible while getting our bearings and working out which arcade we were going to hit first. It was going to be an afternoon of pings and flashing lights, and even the act of getting drunk seemed to have taken lesser priority.

'What the hell are we doing?' I asked in rhetorical spirit.

'I really don't know.' Andre's answer seemed similarly dour, much to my surprise. Everyone else was getting into the swing of it, off to some pub, agreeing to meet later, announcing preferences for such and such an arcade game. Even Kingsley had been absorbed into the beano gestalt, contrary to his ordinarily temperate disposition.

I suddenly knew I absolutely could not spend the next eight or nine hours in the company of these people. It was nothing personal but the fact of being stranded here and obligated to engage in someone else's idea of fun until the van took us back to south-east London around nine in the evening was like some massive concrete block I simply couldn't get around. I'd anticipated some social event, but these people didn't want to talk. They wanted to get pissed and play arcade games. They wanted fun activities.

'Fuck this,' I said, seizing the moment. 'I'm going home.'

Only Don, Kingsley and Andre had heard me. The rest were in different bars or battling illuminated aliens or stuffing burgers into their faces.

'I'll come too,' said Andre, looking slightly ill.

We followed signs for the railway station, making our way against the tide of people piling onto the seafront in search of fun. We passed some goths, not the sort I'd grown up with, but the new generation, the ones who were into Marilyn Manson. They were the first of this batch I'd seen, and this was the first time I felt old.

They looked like children. They wore black clothes so clean and tailored as to seem fresh from the box, ridiculous flared trousers and silver spikes in stupid places. They looked like products, like things which came in sets, as though they had all been designed and marketed according to specific guidelines.

Andre and I took the train back to Liverpool Street, sharing a compartment in silence because he was genuinely ill - something he had eaten before setting off that morning.

I, on the other hand, had no such excuse, just the usual error of judgement.

Chance Meeting at an Elephant Sanctuary

We're stood in a gift shop full of elephant themed merchandise. The gift shop is formed from walls of canvas beneath a canopy in the middle of a field, so it's an outdoor gift shop. We are a little way outside Stonewall, Texas at the Hill Country Elephant Preserve. We've already had the conversation about the name and established that it's up to them, even if it suggests that someone is making jam from innocent pachyderms; and now I say to my wife, 'Those people are from England!'

There's an elderly couple stood near and I've been listening in. I wouldn't ordinarily be quite so surprised but the accent sounds like south-east London, and it's beautiful to my ears.

'You should talk to them,' Bess suggests.

'I will when I get the chance.'

I look at the paintings, all done by elephants. Naturally they're abstract but I quite like them. I'd buy one but it seems the elephants charge more for their work than I do for mine. My work is figurative and I'm a human, but there doesn't seem to be much point getting angry about it.

The elephants aren't here yet. We're waiting for them, which is why we're milling around in the gift shop.

'If you'd all like to take a seat,' one of the staff calls out, ushering us towards the trees beneath which picnic tables are huddled.

I watch the elderly couple. They are with a group of five or six others, all younger and American. The woman seems to be hanging a little way behind so I take my opportunity. 'Excuse me - hope you don't mind me asking. You're from England, aren't you?'

'I am.' She seems a little dazed and beckons her husband over.

'I knew it. 'I heard you talking. Are you from London, by any chance?'

'Yes, we are,' the man says, 'Bellingham.'

I somehow manage to keep from yelling holy shit!

Bellingham is part of Catford, which is where I worked as a postman for a couple of years back in the nineties. I know the area well and still retain some knowledge of the layout from an hour or so of sorting its mail every day, six days a week, August 1990 to February 1994. The first name which comes to mind is King Alfred Avenue, which was one of the first street names to imprint itself upon me. The postmen of Catford frequently referred to one of their number as King Alfred, and it was a full week before I realised that this was the main road of the man's delivery rather than a nickname based on his having burnt some cakes, or similar.

'I was a postman over that way,' I tell the couple. 'I don't suppose you're from King Alfred Avenue are you?'

That is honestly what I've just asked them, trying not to laugh because I know the chances are a bit fucking unlikely.

'Well no,' he says. 'We been here since '74, but yeah, we lived up King Alfred as it happens.'

I still manage to keep from yelling holy shit!

'King Alfred?'

'That's right. Where you from then? You must know the area.'

'I was living in Lewisham, but I got married and moved here in 2011. I was a postman in Catford, though I suppose you must have left by then. I'll bet I would have known your postman though, like maybe Ray Lester or one of the old boys. He used to do Randlesdown Road.'

'It's all gone now, you know?' He pronounces gone as gawn.

'Really? That's a shame. I suppose I haven't been back there in a while.' I realise it may even be decades. I've passed through Catford but it's been some time since I had reason to get off the bus and wander around.

'Small world innit.'

'I'll say.'

'Funny though, we was talking to another feller from England a couple of weeks back. Said we're from Bellingham and he said oh you won't know my bit of London then, you won't really know where I'm from.'

There's a comic pause. He grins and gives me a playful punt on the arm. 'He come from Southend Lane!'

We all laugh because we're probably the only three people in the world qualified to find this joke funny. Southend Lane runs from the Bromley Road down to Sydenham and is to be found at the end of King Alfred Avenue.

We briefly exchange life stories and the details of what brought us all to this place, here and now.

The sound of collective astonishment rises up from those around us, and we all look up to see five elephants coming over the hill, each holding onto the tail of the one in front with her trunk. It's such a sight that it even displaces thoughts of Catford.

We are introduced to the elephants. Their names are Tai, Dixie, Kitty, Rosie and Becky. They are Indian elephants and they stand in a line facing us as one of the keepers tells us about them. They seem happy, although I'm not sure quite how I'm able to tell this. As they stand and wait for whatever comes next, their heads gently wobble from side to side in the manner of Indian shopkeepers on racially insensitive situation comedies, and I realise I'm not sure if I've known an Asian person to demonstrate this affectation in real life. Is it a real thing? I wonder, and if so, did they pick it up from hanging around with elephants?

I have never been this close to a living creature of this size, and it's a peculiar feeling. I can see how their skulls must be enormous, and their eyes suggest intelligence, and they are very unlike the rest of us. I've a feeling that if ever we encounter creatures from another planet, the meeting will probably feel a little like this.

Having met the elephants, we get to feed and wash them, even trim their toenails. They seem gentle, sociable creatures who enjoy the attention and have a well developed sense of humour. I ask one of the keepers about African elephants, specifically whether they get on with Indian elephants, and whether they all recognise each other as essentially the same thing. She tells me that Indian elephants are more closely related to the extinct mammoth than to African elephants, and that African elephants are themselves more closely related to the mastodon. I find this amazing.

As we move to another part of the pasture, I notice the woman from King Alfred Avenue hanging back. She doesn't seem to have spent any time with her husband. I give her my address and say that the two of them should get in touch and we'll go out for something to eat, but even as I do so, I wonder at the wisdom of it. I don't know anything about these people beyond where they came from. Deep down, I know I'm never going to see them again.

Maybe it's best to enjoy these miracles for what they are.

London Calling

I'm never sure what to say when people ask me where I'm from. Generally, I tell them England, but if they're after anything more specific - usually on the off chance of their having spent a holiday there - it's tricky. I grew up in Warwickshire, specifically on the farm which eventually became home to the Teletubbies, which sounds a bit insane when offered as a response to enquiries regarding my origin; so more often than not I'll say London. I'm not from London, but I lived there from 1990 to 2009, nineteen uninterrupted years, which is the longest I've lived anywhere. My personality was probably in flux for most of the years prior to my moving to London, so I'm not convinced I was properly myself when living in Shipston, Maidstone, Chatham, or Coventry, at least not by any terms I still recognise; so it feels as though I'm from London.

London was the first place I felt I belonged, and is therefore high on the list of places I need to visit whenever I return to England to stay with my mother in Coventry. Unfortunately though, it can be difficult. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, it's easy to fire off emails announcing my proposed arrival and reiterating the awful hey, we really must meet up for a drink - awful because it's usually the mantra of people I haven't seen in decades, despite my best efforts to prise open a window in their busy schedules, which always seem to be at least as dense as the crust of stuff you find stuck to the event horizon of a black hole.

Then when I arrive in England, I remember that the train fare from London to Coventry is usually about a million pounds return, and we're talking off-peak; and that I can't afford hotels or bed and breakfast and that I'm far too old to sleep on the floor; and that I haven't actually told anyone I'm coming because I didn't want to be pinned down to an itinerary I might not be able to keep, or in which I might feel trapped; and that I've just spent eighteen hours on planes so I don't feel well disposed towards further travel; and that I hate crowds; and that I hate having to squeeze onto public transport, and how long it takes to even get anywhere in the city; and that I fucking hate London…

I don't hate London, but the circumstances of my last couple of years in the capital were somewhat shitty, which has left a lasting and unfavourable impression; but the bottom line is that I actually have mentioned my being back in the country to a couple of people, so I'll look like a twat if I fail to make the effort.

I've already reeled in my travel plans. Sat at the PC in San Antonio, I had all sorts of grand ideas about taking a bike on the train, then having a couple of days in London, cycling down to the Medway towns and Maidstone, seeing all those people I've been meaning to see for years and years. It would have taken up most of the second of my three weeks in England, and I've now whittled it down to a single afternoon in London, conditional to the existence of a train ticket costing less than a million pounds, and I might stay overnight on someone's floor or sofa, but probably not as I'm already depressed by the idea.

Amazingly, there's a return ticket costing just thirty quid, travelling at specific times with a rail operator no-one has heard of, and stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way. The comparative cheapness of the ticket means I'll probably be sharing a carriage with people who've been on the Jeremy Kyle Show, but the price is right.

I arrive at Euston around noon. The promised stopping at every station, siding, and signal box on the way has turned out to be just Watford Junction, Rugby, and the usual places, just like in the good old days when I could afford any old train fare. Not being a regular on the railways, I forget that those ordinary extortionate fares tend to be for journeys at the speed of light stopping at no stations other than the one at the end of the line.

Euston isn't too bad in terms of crowds, and I seem to be on a roll, so I think fuck it, I'll get the tube. I have an Oyster card from the last time I was here, and amazingly it still works and even has a couple of quid on it, so I top up at a newsagent and head for the underground. My memory of travel in London is mostly buses, because I dislike crowds and ended up with a hatred of tube trains. I've been left with a falsely distended impression of how easy it is to get anywhere, and find it weird that I'm stood on Tottenham Court Road in just a couple of minutes. I can't work out if the crowds are less congested than once they were, or whether it's all been so long that it seems like a new thing and I haven't had time to get sick of it.

I head to Forbidden Planet because I'm after the latest issue of Interzone magazine, and Forbidden Planet seems like the sort of place which might stock it. The latest issue of Interzone features a story by Erica Satifka, author of the novel Stay Crazy; and Stay Crazy is wonderful, so I'm trying to support both a new writer and the general concept of visiting shops in order to buy things which have been printed. Amazingly, they actually have the copy of Interzone I'm after, which is probably a first, and so I read it on the train to Greenwich - a trip of about ten minutes.

I left London in 2009, at which point I vaguely recall the first of the new, funny-shaped skyscrapers going up somewhere in the vicinity of Elephant & Castle. At the time I was spunking away three-quarters of my weekly wage on renting a rabbit hutch in Camberwell, despite holding down a reasonably paid, if back-breaking, full-time job; so I felt more than a little resentful as my city went all Blade Runner whilst overmoneyed tosspots banged on about posterity and capital and investment and growth and ways forward. Returning as a foreigner of sorts, carnivorous progress no longer directly affects me beyond that I can't afford to stay in a hotel, so it no longer feels personal; and I sort of enjoy the spectacle of what is to be seen from the window of the train. They're everywhere now, gleaming prongs thrust miles into the sky above London like the city seen on the cover of David Louis Edelman's Infoquake, and not a single one of them is regular skyscraper shape. It's as though the architects have been in competition with each other to come up with the strangest, most ostentatiously surprising design. There's the Gherkin, the Shard, the Cheese, the Sex Aid, the Pokémon…

'Computers,' Carl tells me. It's due to the development of certain architectural software that we are now able to throw up any shape of building we fancy.

I'm at Carl's house in Greenwich.

I arrived twenty minutes ago.

He lives in a square with a small central garden, or at least a barbecue pit and a bench surrounded by bushes. Upon arrival, I sat on the bench and had a fag in preparation for ringing the doorbell of my friend whom I'd not seen in at least a year. As I sat smoking, I heard the sound of a door, then approaching footsteps, then an indistinct verbal address which sounded like Carl's voice. In my mind, it already was Carl, and I imagined him calling out Loz in the usual way, so I went to reply even though I was replying to a call I had only anticipated, and somehow I myself called out, 'Loz!', having mixed up the two components of the predicted exchange.

It wasn't Carl. It was some elderly woman who regarded me suspiciously, possibly because I had just emerged from behind a bush to yell my own nickname at a stranger.

Now I'm within Carl's house watching him finish up and save what he was doing on the computer, specifically retouching photographs of REM for some book or other. He's a designer, and he's also working on a book about Japan.

We discuss this for three or four minutes before I realise he's referring to the band rather than the country. I forget that he knows a couple of them, and he tells me they were originally from Catford - which is one of the places I worked for a couple of years. It feels as though Carl and I have been transported into a weird future, a world we never made - whatever the hell that means.

He places the cherry boldly on the futurity cake by informing me that another mutual acquaintance is now working as a prostitute, specifically a BBW prostitute specialising in bondage, domination and the like. This is another eventuality I could never have foreseen, but apparently she makes eight-hundred quid a session and enjoys the work, so why not? I'm somewhat out of my depth with the profession, but I always imagined that dominating people for money would probably be one of the better sex work options providing one could find the right clientele - for example, a frustrated bank manager who would happily clean your toilet and then pay for the privilege, thus avoiding the necessity of finding oneself penetrated by anything too ghastly.

The subject resumes later as we approach Herne Hill station. We've had a wander around Greenwich park, a bit of lunch and then caught a series of trains to Herne Hill. The conversation resumes because I'm reminded that I've recently read Stupid Baby by New Juche, an autobiographical account of life amongst prostitutes in one of the rougher bits of Thailand. It's one of the best books I've read in a while and is written with a refreshing honesty and none of the hysteria one might expect, given the subject. The funny thing is that it's published by Philip Best, formerly of Whitehouse, who now lives in Austin and is therefore almost a neighbour. I consider this funny because Carl and I are on our way to visit Pete.

I was at school with Pete many years ago, back in Shipston, and we were both friends with Graham, who may or may not be turning up tonight. Graham and I saw Whitehouse live in Birmingham back in the eighties, during which Graham was injured by an object casually launched from the stage by Philip Best, who was probably the most hated man in underground music for much of that year.

I've been wondering how to broach the subject.

You remember that time we saw Whitehouse, and you remember the bloke who was chucking stuff into the audience, and how you got hit? Well, he lives down the road from me and we seem to be pals these days, sort of. I think he's calmed down a bit in recent years. Anyway, he seems like a decent guy.

I tell all of this to Carl, and so we talk about Glenn, because somehow we'd both forgotten that Glenn was also in Whitehouse. Carl and I recorded music with Glenn at one point. Glenn left a keyboard at Carl's flat for a couple of months, apparently on loan from William Bennett - also of Whitehouse - who was living in Spain at the time. When you switched the keyboard on, the name Susan Lawly would scroll across the LCD display in greeting, that being the name of Bennett's record label. The connections form a peculiar imaginary cat's cradle in my thoughts. I'm beginning to think that current estimates regarding human population are grossly exaggerated, and that there are actually only about twenty of us.

We arrive at Herne Hill and walk to Pete's house.

I'm hoping Carl and Pete will get on okay, given that neither of them have been in the same room since about 1987, and were never conspicuously close in the first place.

Here's how it works: I was at school in Shipston, Warwickshire, with Pete and Graham back in the eighties. Pete's family had moved to Shipston from somewhere down south a couple of years before, and once Pete left school, they moved again, to Eastbourne down on the south coast. I left school and did an art foundation course, at the end of which I was told I should have a look at Maidstone College of Art if I wanted to take it further. I didn't actually have the faintest idea of what I wanted to do, but it seemed like as good a plan as any, so I went for an interview at Maidstone and was accepted, thus dispensing with the need to bother looking around any other colleges. By sheer coincidence, it turned out that Pete had already been at Maidstone a year, studying graphic design. Carl was also at Maidstone, a former graphics student by that point serving as president of the Student Union, so that's how I met him, and how he and Pete came to know each other.

Back at school, Pete, Graham, and myself had been in a band, calling ourselves the Pre-War Busconductors amongst a variety of other interchangable, wilfully ludicrous names. We barely had any instruments, couldn't really play, but nevertheless churned out tape after tape of scatological songs about people at school whom we regarded as twats. Having spent the last couple of years digitising these tapes, I now have our entire body of work saved on memory sticks, one for Pete and one for Graham. This is partially the purpose of our meeting tonight, so I can hand over the sound files and we'll all have copies.

Carl, Pete and myself walk to the Half Moon. Pete tells me it seems unlikely that Graham will be along after all, presently being in Devon with his girlfriend. We buy drinks and sit outside. Most of the talk is between Pete and Carl, because they're simply chattier individuals than I am, and somehow we get onto the subject of how Pete came to move to Shipston in the first place. I recall that he had lived somewhere down south prior to Shipston, and that somewhere turns out to have been the Medway towns - which is where Carl grew up. Furthermore it turns out that Carl and Pete both attended the same junior school, the Hundred of Hoo as it was known, without having been aware of each other at the time, or having been aware of this fact until right now in the year 2018; and I've a feeling this may also be the school attended by Jayne, Glenn's first wife.

The cat's cradle seems to be approaching critical mass.

Eddy and Neil turn up, which is wonderful as I haven't seen either of them in years. It's also wonderful because I have to ask Eddy whether it will be okay for me to kip on his floor. The latest specific time I can return to Coventry on the ticket purchased from a rail operator no-one has heard of is nine this evening, which would leave thirty minutes in which to have a drink with my old pals. The thing is that I feel awkward asking Eddy because I haven't actually spoken to him since his mother passed away. He's one of my favourite people in the universe, but somehow he only makes sense in person. We've communicated on facebook, but you're either hanging out with him, or arranging to hang out with him which, combined with my not being much of a fan of the telephone, means we haven't spoken for a while and it will feel a bit fucking cheeky when I ask if I can kip on his floor for the night; but like a true friend, he doesn't give a shit and is simply glad to see me, and of course I can sleep on his floor.

So we all catch up, getting cautiously drunk in the way middle-aged men get cautiously drunk. Everyone gets on fine, even though Pete is from a different shard of my existence to the others. Neil is, as ever, darkly entertaining with his tales of dealings with showbiz types, recent clients including Helen Mirren and Idris Elba. He doesn't seem to have a particularly high opinion of Idris Elba.

Eventually it's time to go and Eddy drives, being the one of us with a car and sobriety. His flat, which I've never seen before as he moved in just over a year ago, is small but functional. Money is tight, but he's getting by. Money is tight for everyone I know still living in London. I wouldn't have stood a chance.

Eddy assembles a camp bed purchased from some hardware place. It comprises canvas stretched across tubes of steel and works like a hammock. Two of the steel tubes are missing, but it doesn't matter because I'm not seven foot tall. We have a cup of tea, watch an episode of Urban Myths - which dramatises the true story of a regular dude giving Public Enemy a lift to one of their shows in his Ford Focus - and then go to sleep; and against my expectations, I sleep well because the camp bed is very comfortable.

Next morning we have a walk to the caff along by the Thames. Eddy points to a house over on the other side of the river.

'That's where Helen Mirren lives.'

I have two sausages, egg, and chips in the caff and it tastes fucking amazing. I realise how much I've missed this place and its people. I can still feel my roots here, reaching down into the tarmac and cracked paving, in the newsagents and pound shops and the bite of cold far too early in the morning. I'm quite happy to live a long way away, but I'm glad I came back, just for a day.

Enter Catman

We're driving around the neighbourhood as usual. Sometimes we come straight home, and sometimes we cruise, circling this block, that block, doubling back and driving in what is almost a spiral pattern, and all because we like to see cats. We live in a web of suburban sprawl strung between a couple of highways, Harry Wurzbach and Rittiman - single story homes with massive yards and a lot of trees like much of San Antonio. It's a good place for cats, our little corner, because there isn't much traffic and the roads are mostly crappy so no-one races out onto the highway at unreasonable speed. There are a few regular places which we like to drive past so as to admire the cats - the little calico and ginger colony down on the corner, then a couple of snowshoe cats who are usually sat upon the immobilised car at the house opposite; or we'll cross Rittiman into the Heights, the wealthy part, and drive past the house of Kitler, so named because black patches of fur on his otherwise white face give him a passing resemblance to Adolf Hitler. There's the sea of tails house, identified as such because my wife passed it one morning as she was out running just as the door opened and the yard briefly swam with happy tails aloft as everyone went in for breakfast. Bess says she couldn't actually see the person stood in the shadows holding the door open, but something about the scenario suggested the phrase fuck my life.

We have seven cats, or twelve if you count the strays which I feed and which don't really belong to anyone but tend to spend a lot of time hanging around our yard. Personally, I don't officially count the strays due to a city ordnance preventing us from having more than eight cats, which is probably for the best.

Our cats, in order of age, are Fluffy, Nibbler, Grace, Snowy, Kirby, Holly and Jello; and for the sake of convenience I address the outside cats - in order of size - as Gary, Mr. Kirby, Gus III, Charlotte, and Gus II. Gus was our senior indoor cat before she passed on to the great couch in the sky. Two of the strays approximately resemble her, and are hence titled as her successors. Gary isn't technically a stray because he belongs to a neighbour, but they don't appreciate him so he spends all of his time at our house. His actual name, as heard screeched by a mad, old German woman, is Fat Cat, which seems undignified so we call him Gary instead, after a former neighbour of mine with whom he shared certain characteristics, namely that he's massive, pushy, and always hanging around whenever you go out into the garden.

Suffice to say, we like cats.

We like cats so much that we drive around looking at other people's cats; and one of the places past which we drive on a regular basis is the home of Catman.

He lives on a corner a few blocks from us, a distance of maybe a mile. He probably has more cats than even we do. His yard is heavily shaded and always full of them. Sometimes he too is there, sat in a wicker chair with his cats, so we wave as we drive past and say, 'Hey, Catman!' in the general amiable spirit of Earl Hickey greeting the Crabman on an episode of My Name is Earl. Catman can't hear us but he usually waves back.

Sometimes I encounter him in the local supermarket. He's difficult to miss because he has long straggly hair and a huge white beard of Gandalf proportions. He looks a little like a crazy person, and his shopping trolley is always piled high with cat food and cans of twisted tea - an alcoholic variant on iced tea which is popular hereabouts for obvious reasons. Sometimes he's talking to somebody, because I guess everyone knows Catman; and sometimes he's just talking to himself so I'll say hi, and he'll smile and return the greeting because I guess he says hi to everyone. Sometimes he is accompanied by a certain aroma, but nothing so strong as the bouquet of the eye-watering park tramps I recall clearing the upper decks of Lewisham bound buses in south-east London. Texas is fucking hot, a place where you can work up a real world class stench if you really put your mind to it, and possibly also your arse; so I guess our boy at least makes some concessions to personal hygiene.

A few nights ago we drove past Catman's place and saw kittens, only a few weeks old by the look of them, three or four little black ones with the spike of fluff tails and all jumping around, pulling air-ninja moves on each other. Naturally, we're back for more.

'Hey, Catman,' we call in unison as we notice him sat over by the tree. He waves back, puts down his twisted tea, and comes over to us. I realise that this is in response to my wife having slowed the car and wound down her window.

'We saw you had some kittens,' she says.

'You want a kitten?'

'Oh no - no!' We wave our hands with some urgency, sign language approximating no thank you, we already have twelve and that's more than enough.

Catman extends his hand into the car and we all shake.

'Mark,' he tells us.

I can see four or five cats behind him, lounging around in different parts of his yard. I don't see the kittens. Maybe they're inside.

'How many cats do you have?' my wife asks.

He doesn't answer directly, or indeed at all, instead telling us about his cat colony permit. It sounds like something he's made up, although I later discover that there really is such a thing and that they cost only ten dollars. Anyway, he talks and I immediately recognise a cadence consistent with someone living at a tangent to what the rest of us generally agree to be reality; it's kind of as I suspected, and why a small part of me wanted to scream what the hell are you doing? when my wife slowed the car.

Then again, I've known my share of nutcases over the years, and statistically speaking most of them are a lot more sane, or at least a lot more fun, than the regular boring arseholes and shitbags one is obliged to deal with as part and parcel of daily existence. Mad isn't necessarily a problem, although what kind of mad can be a concern, partially because we've now been here five minutes and Mark hasn't stopped talking, or even given indication that he might pause for breath any time soon. He tells us about the neighbour shooting at his cats with a BB gun and we're duly horrified.

'She doesn't like cats,' he sighs. 'I went round there and you know she has all these hummingbird feeders all in the trees in her garden, everywhere you look, and she loves her hummingbirds. She has names for them, and so I guess I can see why she wouldn't like cats, but I tried to talk to her. I told her when she shoots at a cat, can't she see how that's like someone shooting at one of her birds? She just couldn't seem to see it. So where do you live?'

Bess tells him. I tell myself that he probably won't remember the address.

'I had this beautiful Siamese cat and you know this guy wanted to buy her. I said, I told him, she ain't even mine. I have a permit, you know. I went to the city and got me a permit for a cat colony. He lives over that way.'

Mark gestures towards Rittiman, beyond which are the Heights and the home of Kitler.

'I was at his house and you know it has these big metal gates and all of the security alarms. He wanted to buy my cat but I wasn't going to sell her.'

I study his face. It's been hard to keep from noticing the little cuts and scrapes. They show because he's the palest man I think I've seen in a long time, which must take some doing in Texas. He doesn't look unwell, despite reddish rings beneath his eyes, but he looks as though he's had a bad fall, or he's recovering from something; and yet his eyes are clear. He looks at you and understands. He is intelligent.

Nevertheless here it comes, just as I knew it would.

'You see I was dead and they brought me back to life.' He lifts his shirt to reveal pale green scabbing on a couple of burnt patches around his ribs. The injuries look painful. He's telling us something about being revived with electricity, like you see on the television with the doctor yelling clear, but the account is becoming confused and his testimony leaves no room in which to refer to that which we've already been told. This is one jigsaw puzzle we won't be piecing together any time soon. He was in the house in the rich neighbourhood, or else he was in the pharmacy on Broadway, just across the road from the old Methodist place. My wife later tells me that the wandering spirit was supposedly that of the dead guy to whom the funeral service was dedicated, but somehow I recall a different version. Possibly the confusion comes from Mark's telling.

'The pastor - I mean the preacher - he came in through the door and I could hear him speaking to me, but not with my ears. It was like telepathy in my head. I knew then that he wasn't a good man. He was fallen - you know like the yogis in the Himalala - Himalya - the Himmo—'

'The Himalayas,' Bess suggests.

'That's the place. He was talking to me but there was no sound, and I was just in the pharmacy.' He pauses, maybe realising what he's just said. 'Doesn't that sound crazy? I mean, I ain't saying that was what really happened, but that was how it seemed to me.'

The story continues, branching further. He was in the pharmacy and he was dead, or he was somewhere else, maybe the rich neighbourhood. He was in space looking back at the Earth from a great distance, and there was that light we always hear about, but he wasn't going to go towards it. Jesus Christ was there with a censer like the kind used in a church, swung back and forth on a chain, but there was blood in the censer.

As he relates the tale, he pauses to remind us that he isn't suggesting that any of this is literally what happened, only that it constitutes his experience of something. I recall reading of a similar defence made by Philip K. Dick, the science-fiction writer who famously experienced all manner of visions and delusions whilst remaining otherwise lucid and aware that what he experienced might not be entirely real by any accepted definition of the term. I have also read of some condition whereby the two halves of the human brain fail to communicate with each other as they should, meaning that thoughts crossing the divide will sometimes appear to have originated from somewhere beyond the self - hence those voices in the head we've all heard about. It strikes me that some of this may apply to Mark.

He doesn't know when to shut up, but otherwise he's polite and he's amiable and intelligent. His madness doesn't express itself as anything malign or necessarily likely to endanger anyone excepting possibly himself. Clearly he is able to function as well as any of us. He has a place to live and he takes good care of his cats and he gets by; and as he talks I can't help but notice how it's difficult to truly dislike him. He's weird and eccentric but he's kind of a regular guy too, in all ways that count.

'Where did you say you live again?'

This time my wife amends the address given so freely earlier, subtracting five from the house number. He probably won't remember, but it seems a little early in the relationship to be inviting him in for iced tea and further discussion of psychic forces he has known. I breathe an inward sigh of relief and hear myself saying, 'Listen, Mark - it's been nice to meet you but we really have to get going.'

We've been here thirty minutes, just sat in the car listening. Notice of our impending departure caused a brief stalling as he acknowledged that maybe we had other stuff to be getting on with, but he somehow manages to keep us there another ten minutes, and the narrative begins to eat its own tail: died, met Jesus, brought back to life, there was a light, planet Earth seen from a distance way out beyond the moon, brought back to life again, the censer full of blood, the pharmacy over on Broadway...

We leave, and he doesn't seem to mind. He's just happy to have met us, and we're happy to have met him. He goes on a bit, but I'd still rather listen to some guy tell me about mysterious lights and astral travel than how much he earns or how to get ahead in business.

Crazy probably depends on where you're standing.

Code

The letters are in white envelopes, obviously something personal and handwritten with some strange code on the reverse. The letters are also fairly frequent, and yet on the few occasions I've met Theresa - to whom they are addressed - she doesn't seem like the sort of person who would spend a lot of time engaged in correspondence. She's young, white, blonde hair in a scrunchy to effect what will eventually be known as a Croydon facelift, and she usually wears trackie bottoms. She has a malnourished face, slight but hard.

The flats along Thurbarn Road, Catford will eventually be described as apartments on the websites of certain estate agents, but right now it's 1991 and they're just flats - probably just fucking flats, if you want to get technical; Theresa might be imagined at her writing desk, pausing for thought as she gazes from the window then dipping that quill in the ink pot as inspiration strikes, but anyone who met her  would have found the image unconvincing.

She is a friend of Princess. Princess - or Emma as she's named on her giro - is a big girl, mixed race with hair in dreads. She has a kid called Shane and she's loud and overpowering, but not confrontational. She just lacks either understanding or two shits which might be given regarding her own volume, and so she booms, and it's always a relief when she laughs because it's with you rather than at you - which is good to know because otherwise she'd sound like she was picking a fight all the time. She's married to Irish Barry who is Jean's boy, or one of them - there's a big one as well, built like a brick shithouse, as the saying goes. Irish Barry is the little one. It's the brick shithouse who usually comes down three floors to meet me at the door asking for his mum's giro. It's kind of terrifying at first. I just hand it over and remind myself that stuff gets lost in the post all the time and it's not like anyone can really prove anything. Also, the residents of Thurbarn Road habitually expect the dole to have withheld their money this week, so it will be a few days before anyone might consider accusing me, probably. It will sort itself out.

After the third or fourth giro handed over to the brick shithouse without ensuing complaints, I meet him in the company of Jean, his mum, and understand that he really is coming down all those stairs to save her the trouble. Thurbarn Road is on the southernmost edge of Catford in south-east London, a couple of hundred yards from roads listed as being in the county of Kent. It's a council estate, or was a council estate before market forces embarked upon the gradual reclassification of its brick and concrete boxes as apartments. I'm in my twenties and haven't been at the job very long, and of all the places to which I've delivered, it's thus far the one with the greatest potential for being a no go area for cops and certain emergency services, depending on which way the wind's blowing. It's not that there's a lot of graffiti or a significant quota of boarded up dwellings or broken windows, but it's a bit rough around the edges. Theresa seems very much at home here.

The letters Theresa gets are often embellished with acronyms, as I realise when I notice SWALK among them - sealed with a loving kiss. They must be from her boyfriend. I guess he lives a long way away or something.

'Do you ever see SWALK written on the back of envelopes?' I ask Micky Evans, an older postman who seems to know most things.

'Sealed with a loving kiss,' he confirms as we eat egg on toast in the canteen. 'Probably someone in the nick, I should think.'

'Really?'

'It usually is, yeah.'

'So what about NORWICH?'

'Nickers off ready when I come home. He might be in the army, I s'pose - posted overseas or summink, but it's usually jail birds write all that.'

Mick seems to know everything. There doesn't seem to be a question you can't ask him. He became a postman after being made redundant. He used to work at the docks up near Deptford and remembers the strikes back in the sixties being broken up by the Kray twins. 'Horrible pair of cunts they were,' he tells me. 'Fucking scum of the earth, and everyone idolises them like they're heroes.'

I ask him about HOLLAND, which Theresa's jail bird also writes on the back of the envelopes, but Mick doesn't know that one.

'How is she?' he asks, because he did Thurbarn Road before me for a couple of months. 'She never looks well, does she?'

'I think she's okay,' I say. 'Hard to tell, really.'

Theresa joins the list of names of those I recognise on Thurbarn Road and the surrounding streets. It's important that I recognise them because they follow me around on giro day, so I need to keep track of who is who. Obviously I'm not allowed to hand mail out to people in the street, but I do it anyway once I know who they are because it isn't hurting anyone and I remember what it's like waiting for your giro to turn up. The pay off, I suppose, is that I get to know the people to whom I deliver a little better which makes the job more pleasant.

Also pleasant is that Jean now invites me in for a cup of tea every once in a while. She's an Irish woman, in her fifties with long dark hair suggesting former if admittedly distant associations with swinging London, and I have the strangest feeling she fancies me a bit - which I don't mind because she's nice and very funny, even if it would never work due to the age difference. We drink tea, and talk about our lives and slag off her neighbours. She has a fluffy cat called Libby who also seems to like me, and sometimes Princess passes through with Shane and I remember that Jean is a grandmother, which is a peculiar thought.

Months pass, skies turn grey, and I notice clumsily rendered repairs to Theresa's front door up on the top floor of her block. There's a crescent of splinters around the lock where I suppose someone must have tried to kick it in. A couple of days later I see her from a distance. She no longer chases me down on giro day, so I deliver the thing along with all of her junk mail. I don't get close but it looks as though she has a black eye.

'I used to hear some terrific fucking rows up her place,' Micky Evans tells me, shaking his head in despair at the mess of some people's lives. 'What a terrible thing.'

A week later there is a note taped to the main door of the block just below the security buzzers.

the Lady in number 37 is very upset as her boyfriend passed away on 22/3/91 so plese be considorate because she is upset

Her mail begins to come back to me marked deceased and not known at this address. There doesn't even seem to be a pattern. Some of the mail is addressed to a name I don't recognise; and some of it is addressed to her, but she isn't dead, just upset - at least so far as I know. I collect the pile of mail on my bay, take a roll of the red stickers which will return it all to the various senders, and wonder whether there's really much point in my trying to understand any of this.

Ripper

On Sunday the 8th of May, 2016, Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs left the following inspirational post on facebook:

Blackpool was worryingly quiet last Monday for bank holiday and a good table at Harry Ramsden's was too easy to get at teatime. But this weekend things have perked up - the most badly behaved conference attendees ever, the Young Farmers are in town. In my youth before cheap foreign travel became a reality the rampages of 'Scots Fortnight' were a thing feared by locals. Going back almost a century, the Wakes Weeks had whole mill towns like Wigan visiting en masse and hospitalising, infecting and impregnating each other under the piers. Not quite the sanitised version as portrayed by dear old Gracie Fields, there are remarkable stories in local history books surrounding the 1930s Blackpool Carnivals and why they were abandoned - too much carnival.

My first sight of the farmers tonight was a man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier. Magnificent. The bars, drug dealers, brothels, police cells and A&E cubicles will be doing a roaring trade tonight and glad of the farmers' custom. These people are very dangerous and absolute scumbags, the men and women both. I walk through it all unscathed always, I dress in a nondescript style and don't catch anyone's eyes and don't feel fear. I love bad behaviour from humans very much. The hell with laws and sense. The hell with morals and art and politics. Drink, Fight and Fuck!

As a sensitive child, I would have found such sentiments appalling, but at the age of fifty, the words just made me think of Ripper, a person with whom I never really had anything in common beyond a job, and whom I probably haven't even set eyes on this century, but who nevertheless made a huge impression; and he made a huge impression because he was terrifying, and could quite easily have been that magnificent man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier.

Ripper wasn't actually his name, but that's what everyone called him. I never found out why. I always assumed it to be because he was, as I said, terrifying, just as Peter Sutcliffe was terrifying. Having a nickname which attempts to make jovial association with dismembered prostitutes will strike many as extreme and possibly disgusting, but I'm setting the story down from memory rather than making it up, and that's just how it was.

Ripper was a couple of years older than me as I was in my twenties when I started work as a postman at Catford delivery office. He was tall, a little skinny, and with a ratty sort of face - which isn't supposed to be an insult. He wore his hair tied back in a ponytail, but otherwise bore a strong resemblance to the Nick Cotton character from EastEnders, in terms of both personality and appearance; or at least his face always seemed to be twisted into the devious leer of Nick Cotton cheerily asking cup o' tea, ma?, having just raided his long-suffering mother's savings account and spent the lot on nose candy. Maybe it's just me, but Nick Cotton was the only reason I ever watched EastEnders. He was great.

I started work at Catford delivery office in August 1990 and immediately understood Ripper to be my natural enemy. I was trying to grow a moustache and beard at the time, but my efforts were straggling and pitiful, and Ripper gave me the nickname Catweazle based on my resemblance to a similarly unkempt character from a children's television show of that name. The problem wasn't just that he only ever referred to me as Catweazle, or that it annoyed me; it was the raw delight he took from my displeasure, and his peculiarly creative use of the nickname. He was a van driver, whilst I was a postman, and our duties were such that we had no real reason to interact; so to circumnavigate this obstacle he'd stand behind me and just repeat it in a peculiarly squeaky voice.

Catweazle. Catweazle.

This meant that the nickname never lay fallow or neglected, and he applied the same delivery system to other victims, Ralph being one. Ralph had picked up Big Bag as a nickname owing to how much mail he'd managed to stuff into a single delivery sack on one particular morning.

Big Bag, Big Bag, Big Bag, in that weird squeaky voice like an obsessive-compulsive chaffinch or someone operating the Pop-O-Matic dice bubble from a seventies board game; and then somebody else would usually chip in with the inevitable variation on Burt Bacharach and Hal David's song, what's it all about... Ralphie?

Ralph always looked ready to kill someone.

Being a bit of a knob, I attempted to engage with Ripper, to decommission his campaign against me with both logic and an appeal to his better nature, but he wasn't interested in the first and didn't possess the second; although my efforts weren't entirely wasted in that they clearly brought him further satisfaction, sometimes inspiring him to elaborate on the theme by asking me questions, whether I had a toad called Touchwood, or when I called in sick if I did so by means of a telling bone.

My role was as a source of amusement by which he might tolerate the indignity of being at work. In fact that's how he saw most of us. He didn't really do communication in any conventional sense.

Being a van driver, it was his role to deliver packets which were too big for the postmen to carry; so if anything too humongous erroneously found its way into your packet bag, you just took it over to your driver - Joe or Robby or whoever it was that week.

Unfortunately Carl's driver was Ripper. He shuffled over, politely setting forth the proposal in his nasal John Major voice. 'Here - are you doing Boundfield Road this week because—'

'Fuck off,' Ripper suggested, kicking the parcel out of Carl's hand so that it sailed upwards in an arc to the far side of the sorting office. He had a bit of a hangover that morning, and was in no mood for idiocy, or people asking him to do things.

I worked at Catford for two or three years, eventually getting to know everyone fairly well, as well as you can know anyone at work, eventually fitting in as much as any of us ever fit in. Ripper would still take time out of his busy schedule to taunt me by meaninglessly repeating my nickname in a high voice, but was no longer quite the enemy, if he had ever been. I was invited to the fairly regular piss-ups down the pub, and outside of work I got to see a different side of Ripper, although it was actually more or less identical to the first side. I was still Catweazle, but the difference was that we were now buying each other drinks; and only drinks. I took Zammo's advice and just said no when it came to the nose candy. It wasn't just me who said no.

'Have it your way,' Ripper growled bitterly at the other one who had declined the offer, 'but don't come crying to me at two in the morning when I'm sat there with a big red hooter!'

When I announced that I had put in for a transfer to another sorting office, I was surprised at Ripper's response. It actually seemed like he was going to miss me, as though we were friends by some definition.

'What you want to go there for?' he asked philosophically. 'That's a fucking rent boy's office, that place.'

Nevertheless I transferred, and the last I'd heard of Ripper was that he'd got married, and the presiding vicar had supposedly asked are you really sure about this? during the ceremony.

I've no idea where Ripper is now. He might be dead or in prison for all I know; and this isn't really a story with any sort of moral or point, just an assemblage of stupid annoying shit which passed the time, and which had nothing to do with art, or a better world, or people being nice to each other. The point of this - if we're going to pretend that there is one for the sake of closure - is that sometimes it's healthy to find oneself surrounded by dangerous arseholes, or failing that, people who aren't necessarily going to agree with everything you say, or even care whether you say anything. The contrast is good for the development of a healthy sense of perspective. Like Simon Morris, I too love bad behaviour from humans very much - which on closer inspection probably isn't strictly true; which therefore conversely proves it to be a wonderful thing specifically because it makes my inner Lord Longford squirm with horror.

Ripper was a monster, but just like that man urinating in broad daylight in full public view by North Pier, he was also magnificent - maybe still is, for all I know - and not least because he was right about me. That beard I tried to grow really was ridiculous.

I suspect this is one of the things we, as a society, often dislike about bullies, or a certain kind of bully: sometimes they're right.

Activity Tracker

I was a postman for two decades and have therefore done a lot of walking over the years. On average the job entailed somewhere between three or four solid daily hours pounding pavements, garden paths, hallways, steps, stairwells and so on - six days a week for most of the last century, then reduced to a five day week since the millennium. That's a lot of ground covered. I once read an article comparing the distances covered by members of professions who walk for a living. We came in second, just behind policemen on the beat but ahead of traffic wardens. I think our average distance was supposed to be something like eight miles a day, although at the time it was hard to judge the accuracy of this figure what with all of the stopping and starting, standing around rummaging in the pouch for a parcel or whatever.

Whilst delivering to the flats along Lushington Road in Catford I climbed one hell of a lot of steps. Most blocks had three floors with two flats to a floor, and there were at least twelve blocks to a street, and there were four of these streets lined with blocks of flats. One day I took a ruler and a notebook and measured the height of the steps, then multiplied the figure by how many of those steps I had to climb each day. It worked out that I scaled a height equivalent to that of Mount Everest roughly every nine months, assuming I've remembered correctly.

Exercise has never been something with which I have consciously engaged up until recently. Dora the Explorer tried to motivate me in that direction, apparently missing the significance of my usually being so knackered that I could barely stand after work. She required that exercise be specifically framed as active self-improvement, an undertaking which transmitted a message reading look at me engaged in the effort of making myself a better person whilst asking why not be more like me? She was not naturally disposed towards the expenditure of energy so far as I could see and her enthusiasm felt like overcompensation, attempted self-hypnosis, and some showboating - forever banging on about going out for a walk, getting some fresh air, getting out of the house and so on. I guess she liked how these proclamations sounded, because it was difficult to square them with the reality of her daily routine. She was seldom out of bed before eleven in the morning, and was never ready to leave the house earlier than four in the afternoon. We would go out for a walk, and she'd spend some of the time telling me I needed to make the effort to eat healthier, to take more exercise, and was I drinking enough water? We would walk up to the shop at the end of the road, a distance of about a hundred yards, and then we would walk back, myself carrying a bag of cat litter or tins of cat food because they were too heavy.

She acquired a pedometer, an unconvincing plastic dingus containing a ball bearing which rattled around and in doing so measured how far you had walked in a day and how many steps you had taken. It clipped onto a sock, shoe, or the hem of a trouser, and Dora the Explorer spent an evening walking up and down the front room, acclimating the thing to her gait. She took to reporting the statistics of how much walking she had done, generally prefacing a sneering dismissal of my own inferior efforts, which were inferior principally because they were mine and I had no understanding of self-improvement. Her routine had not changed. She was still rising at eleven and leaving the house only on alternate days or when I had failed to anticipate what she needed from the shop, but now her infrequent and unhurried movements were measured by the pedometer and redefined as exercise.

I bought one too from the sports place in Peckham, mainly because I wanted to find out just how far I was walking each day. Unfortunately the thing didn't seem to work all of the time, and each morning would end with a completely different reading.

These days, I am no longer a postman. Nor do I have a pedometer, although I have acquired what is called a Fitbit. No longer being a postman I cycle fifteen miles each day in the hope of staying relatively fit, although of course it isn't simply a matter of exercise. My diet is different, I no longer smoke, and I have succumbed to the inevitability of middle-aged spread.

'Cor!' my friend and former fellow postman Terry Wooster exclaimed with characteristic directness when I last saw him, 'you ain't half got fucking fat!'

My wife was a dedicated runner for much of her life, prior to the birth of her son - my stepson - at which point life became generally more complicated and she found it difficult to keep the running going. She bought a Fitbit, a sort of charm bracelet which tracks how much you have walked each day, how many steps, distance covered, calories burned and so on. The Fitbit seems a little more reliable than the thing with the ball bearing I once bought from a shop in Peckham. It has internet presence so at the end of the day you can go to a website and see how well you've done, and how much better you've done than your friends, the lazy fuckers. It seems to work for Bess in that it at least provides an incentive to engage in a certain amount of exercise each day - which can be difficult when working in an office; and because it's Bess, her motives are honest and refer to no weird social agenda.

She liked the Fitbit so much that she bought a new improved model and gave the old one to the boy, presently twelve, and seemingly inclined to stationary activities in which he shouts to himself whilst tapping the screen of his iPad with a finger, often for hours at a time. Sometimes I like to tell myself that he is playing a game called Outside World™ which involves liberating virtual kids from within a pixellated house, bringing them outside to climb CGI trees and do all the stuff I instinctively feel Junior should be doing. Happily he really took to the Fitbit, contrary to my generally pessimistic expectations. His behaviour at home doesn't seem significantly changed, but I guess the Fitbit appeals to his inherent love of boasting.

'How many steps did you do today?' we ask.

He will tell us, then ask how many steps my wife has done.

If he has done more, he will point out that he has done more just in case we hadn't realised. If he has done less, he'll take the stepmill to his room and just keep going until he's the bestest.

My wife was going to give him a new Fitbit at Christmas, the latest model which is worn like a wristwatch, but he lost the old one, and said he was unable to find it. We decided he would get the new one when he had found the old one on the grounds that his method of looking for things leaves room for improvement.

'Look for it,' one of us will suggest, and so he'll check to see if the mislaid object is directly within his field of vision at that moment. It usually isn't so he goes back to his game of Outside World™, possibly calling out 'I still can't find it,' as the game switches up to the level where you have the kid ride a bike up and down the road.

Nevertheless he eventually found the Fitbit and so now has the new one; and I got the old one because it seemed a shame that it should not enjoy continued use. I wear it around my neck like a pendant.

The first day it recorded that I had walked a little over five-thousand steps. I have recently discovered this to be an average number of steps for someone just doing housework and moving around their own home during the course of a day, so I'm not impressed. I'm even less impressed that my little electronic friend is disinclined to recognise the fifteen mile daily cycle as exercise or even travel. Well done, it tells me, you have walked a mile and a half today. It seems almost like sarcasm, but it's still significantly less annoying than look at me engaged in the effort of making myself a better person and all that went with it, so I shut up and get on with it.

Everything is Now

Texas is like heaven so far as I'm concerned, or at least an afterlife. This strikes even me as a peculiar claim, but it's the best, most succinct way I have of describing my daily existence since I moved here in relation to the previous years. Everything has worked out. Everything is different and still seems fresh in comparison to what I have been used to, and this impression is reinforced even by details so small as the weeds in my garden being plants I would not have recognised before 2011. I'm no longer moving forward with the certainty of a dark future which will inevitably become more difficult than the present, as was once the case. Additionally - present company excepted - everyone I have known with any degree of intimacy over the course of my first five decades now lives in a different country - all simplified to telephone numbers, facebook accounts or email addresses - communications across a great divide; and thanks to the advent of the internet, it almost is everyone I have known because these days they're all out there somewhere - people from school or work, remote family members, those I haven't seen in thirty years, persons with whom I never had any real reason to keep in touch, much as I would have liked.

Whilst I haven't always kept a diary, I've tried from time to time, and even when there's been no regular nightly scribbling to give account of the day, I've been in the habit of documentation, keeping notes of dates which seemed significant, holding onto letters and so on, because I like to see where I've been and because it helps me to better understand the present. Once I had learned to write well enough to compose a paragraph without wincing at it the next morning, I began to maintain a weekly blog, part of which incorporated my setting down events of previous years, childhood and so on, partially for the sake of preserving what memories I have retained before my brain deteriorates, partially for chuckles, and partially because I am unusually fascinating by my own progress from birth to the present day. The great majority of these memoirs - as I'm reluctant to term them - now seem like things which happened to someone else, so I'm not sure whether that makes me particularly vain or simply ordinary. Since 2011, I've been composing my autobiography right here, albeit in no particular order and without quite having set out to do so.

Further to this endeavour, in 2013 I dug out the diaries written between 1977 and 1986 and began transcribing the material into a single document on my word processor, initially for the sake of clarifying a few ambiguous dates but also in order to excavate further material upon which to expand in one of these essays. The diaries are patchy and only a few of them keep going right to the end of the year, but I've supplemented this material with more recent autobiographical notes and general whining recorded in sketchbooks or as part of emails, and with transcriptions of tape letters spoken onto cassette and sent to my friend Tim Griffiths throughout the nineties; because, suspecting I might one day wish to hear my droning twenty-five-year old self going on about fave bands and how depressed I've been, I of course made copies of these tape letters for my own archive. So I now have a year by year electronic document amounting to my life story since the age of eleven - albeit with a few gaps - which has taken me two years to compile and which concludes in postmodern fashion with emails describing my intent to compile said document - like a life flashing before my eyes, albeit slowly.

At this juncture I should probably point out that none of the above constitutes satire, although I won't be offended if you can't be arsed to read on.

Anyway, I'm now approaching the end of what I've termed my diary project, which is something of a relief. It's been a mammoth undertaking in certain respects, and undoubtedly a vain one, but I've found it interesting, and surprising and depressing, and comforting in so much as it allows me to state with some confidence that I'm no longer an arsehole, or no longer quite such an arsehole, or at the very least I am a different kind of arsehole to the person whose over-extended obituary I appear to have been writing. Whilst it's nice to have accessed my own past, I'm happy that I no longer live there as protracted exposure gets a bit much after a while. This undertaking has additionally reinforced the notion that I am in heaven, because everything is now and the past has been reduced to a different region of the present.

Over the course of transcribing diary material, I've inevitably come across the names of many people I had forgotten, and in most cases I've had a look on the internet to see if they can still be found, where they are and what they're doing now. It's not exactly nostalgia, but sometimes it's just nice to know that a certain person is still alive or even that they haven't turned into a complete wanker. Inevitably I've shared facebook gigabytes - or whatever the thing is made of - with almost everyone I knew at school as well as some I didn't know thanks to Friends Reunited; and most of them have turned out pretty decent, and there are a good few with whom I'm very glad to be back in touch after all this time.

Then there are the more intriguing names from the diaries - Penny White for one. I have no memory of her, nor even what she looked like, and yet I fancied her something rotten for at least six months of my school days according to what I wrote at the time. When finally I located a blurred photograph of her on a friend's facebook page, a photograph taken back when I knew her, the face rang not a solitary bell. This amnesia struck me as slightly alarming and strengthened my resolve to complete the diary project in as much detail as could be mustered.

Sometimes the retrieval operation has bitten me in the ass. Hampton Cockwomble* didn't remember me at all but accepted my friend request on facebook regardless. I remembered him fairly well as a funny kid from college in Stratford specialising in an hilarious impersonation of the crap robot from Buck Rogers culminating with Bedeep bedeep bedeep! Get your kecks off, Wilma. You probably had to be there, and I was. Sadly in 2015 his facebook page proved less amusing, being concerned mostly with Lads vs. Dads golf tournaments, whatever the hell those might be, and lazy memes promoting casual racism - Oi, Cameron! Give money to our starving OAPS not illegal Muzzies and related toss. I did my best to ignore it until he shared a scan of an official government document showing how your average illegal immigrant receives ₤32,000 per annum in free benefits from the English government whilst your average English pensioner can expect less than half that figure even if they fought in three world wars. The fact that it had official British government document written across the top failed to convince me that it hadn't just been knocked up by some wanker who'd recently learned how to make tables on his word processor. Additionally, I suspected that these statistics had probably been made up because they presented such a stark contrast to the actual direct experience I'd had of the immigrant community when I was a postman delivering mail to a refugee centre in Dulwich. I pointed this out and received a fairly predictable response from one of Hampton's buddies about how I must be an unusually well informed postman - which I expect was sarcasm of a sort - and how she'd prefer to trust the evidence of her own eyes, eyes which were looking directly at an official British government document posted on the facebook page of a man who competes in  Lads vs. Dads golf tournaments, thank you very much.

It was a waste of time, I realised. I defriended Hampton, preferring to remember him as an amusing impersonation of the crap robot from Buck Rogers. Sometimes there are good reasons why you lose touch with people.

Naturally I failed to learn anything from this encounter, and found myself similarly bewildered and intrigued by my own lost past when transcribing passages of an audio letter dated to Sunday the 28th of April, 1991 on which I told Tim Griffiths:

Things on the women front haven't really changed a lot in, well - the last seven years if I'm to be honest. I don't know. I feel like I should make an effort, but I'm beginning to not care about it really. Sometimes I feel a bit sad. I find I can't make a great deal of effort. I get too embarrassed. I tell you what, there's a really nice woman on my walk in Catford at the moment. Her name is Hillsborough Oxycodone*. She's tiny and possibly Indian, and it's terrible because I just keep running into her all over the place, and she says oooh you only bring me nice letters, you're my favourite postman and so on.  As soon as I see her at the other end of the road I get this uncontrollable grin on my face. I'm going to have to have lead weights sewn into the corners of my mouth or something, which would probably be very dangerous now that I think about it; but it's this uncontrollable grin and it's dead embarrassing.

At the time I was a generally lonely individual. It was my first disorientating year living in London, and anyone who said so much as hello to me made a significant impression. I had signed for the postal route around Lushington Road in Catford, so I became a familiar face to many of the people to whom I delivered mail, and I would speak to anyone who stopped to talk because it made the job less miserable. On Sunday the 10th of November, I told Tim:

Hillsborough Oxycodone who lives on my walk kissed me recently, which was quite exciting. It wasn't that recent, come to think of it. It was some time ago. I saw her walking along so I told her that her giro had come, and asked if she wanted it because I knew where it was in the bundle of mail I was carrying.

She said, 'Oooh all right then.'

I looked through my bundles and found her giro and got it out, and she kissed me. I thought yes!!! I went bright red as well, naturally.

'Oooh, you really enjoyed that, didn't you?'

I said 'yes, I did!'

I saw her again a couple of days later and I said, 'Do you want me to have a look for your post?'

'She said, 'Oooh you're only doing it so I'll kiss you.'

I said, 'You're right there!'

Judging by my having no memory of anything else, and barely being able to remember Hillsborough herself - it having been twenty-five years ago - I assume our vague association went no further. Naturally I just had to look on facebook, and I found a woman of that name although the profile picture rang no bells. I sent a friend request and heard nothing back. Then after six months I discovered that the facebook messaging system has a spam folder into which certain messages vanish without explanation or notification as to the fact of someone having attempted to communicate with you. Hillsborough had replied way back in August:

Who are you???? You sent me a friend request yesterday you didnt reply when i asked you who you were

It was now December, so I tried to explain:

Just found your reply went into my spam folder - didn't even know there was such a thing, hence no reply. The quickest answer is that I was your postman twenty-five years ago, back when you lived in Catford. I've always kept diaries, and recently I've been going through them, and whenever I come across a name I've forgotten or someone I lost touch with, I look them up on Google or facebook just out of curiosity, so really I'm just saying hi. I don't actually remember you well, but it seems you made an impression on me at the time. You almost certainly don't remember me, but for what it's worth I'm no longer a postman, now happily married and living in Texas. Don't worry about accepting the friend request as I know it seems a bit weird, really just wanted to say hi!

She responded:

I aint never lived in catford so really dont know what your talking about

Why would you keep a diary?? Weird...... and scarey at ths same time

I should have read the warning signs but didn't:

Well then I guess I have the wrong person so just ignore me. It's not a problem. Keeping a diary really isn't that weird. Loads of people do it. Sheesh. Sorry to have bothered you.

...and so it continued in increasingly pointless circles:

You said youve always kept a diary and recently youve been going throug it if my name was in the diary then you would of rembered more about me thats what i meant

Which was followed by a friend request, which I accepted and then recognised as almost certainly having been a mistake when I found her posting rants about all you fucken white girls need to get yor won ting n fukk off you aint got no batty bitches LOOOOOOOL and a string of crying with laughter at having delivered such a crushing testimonial emoticons. There was also a photograph of an actual crucifixion in Africa supported by an incoherent denouncement of someone or other; and regardless of how worthwhile the cause may be, I dislike the gratuitous posting of anything or anyone being maimed, tortured or killed as inducement to why the rest of us should care. On a more positive note, she at least seemed to spend some time railing against the demonisation of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom, and Muslims in particular; although this was counterbalanced by remarks regarding Winston McKenzie, a black former UKIP politician making homophobic remarks on Celebrity Big Brother on the telly. They was all just picking on him, Hillsborough posited, because hes black but he got a right to say what he believes in and it says in the bibel that a man shall not lie with an other man coz that is just SICK SICK SICK and aint no1 can silence me form speakign trooth LLLLLLLOOOOOLLLL and shitloads more of those gleeful emoticons.

Oh fuck, I said to myself.

A few days later I shared a photograph of baby snakes taken in our garden. I like snakes, I like reptiles, and I like animals in general. I don't generally understand anyone who would regard an animal as disgusting. I'm not a big fan of maggots, but neither do I think my opinion of them means anything useful or interesting in the great scheme of things. Hillsborough on the other hand took a quite different view:

I hate those slimey nasty things Yuck I duno how ANY1 could like them or keep them as pets

The comment annoyed me for a couple of reasons. Firstly it seems poor form to respond to a facebook status message amounting to I think this is great with well, I think it's shit or equivalent, at least in cases like this where its hardly a political issue and anyone with the emotional development of at least a twelve-year old should be able to accept it as a matter of personal taste. My own facebook friends list includes a great many fans of Doctor Who in its present incarnation, and yet somehow I manage to keep myself from butting in to point out Dr Who is 4 kids and is shit LOL, because there really would be no point. Secondly, snakes aren't even remotely slimy so the observation struck me as akin to something an unusually stupid five-year old might say, the sort of thing which could only be expressed by a person with no actual experience of serpents nor any real justification for assuming their own opinion to be worth even the slightest fraction of an airborn fuck. I said as much, without the more obviously insulting details, which then prompted:

When god cast out satan he cast IT into a snake to "slither on its belly all his days" how could Any1 have them in there house fkn awful did u read on here about the woman pet snake who used to sleep in her bed ? (Probley fucking her too lol) she took it to the vet cos it didnt eat for 3 weeks and do u wana no wot the vet told her.....? He told her the snake was "starving itself" getting ready to eat her... GOOD!! it should of yam her up stupid bitch how can u lye with a snake in yr bed?? Jokers

I'd heard this story before, an urban legend which tends to get repeated because it appeals to idiots who assume that because some bloke said it, then it's probably true, just like that official British government document. Typing with gritted teeth, I pointed this out in the politest terms I could muster and provided a link to an article debunking the myth. Hillsborough still wasn't buying it:

im refering to a woman who posted her story herself about taking the snake to the vet, she posttd it herself as it was HER own story not "made up" and if any 1 makes up stories like that then they are sick in the head.... why would she of made up a story like that???? Snakes are DEMONIC+ UGLY i hate them

This was immediately followed by the bewildering the link you just posted claiming it was "made up" is of a snake and lion not a snake and human followed by a string of crying with laughter emoticons, the implication being u dont no nuffink LOL. The link I'd posted was to an article illustrated with a photograph of a lion engaging with a huge python, a photograph which showed up on my facebook page as part of the link. I couldn't tell if she disagreed with the article, or just didn't understand how a hyperlink works. Perhaps she believed I had simply posted a picture of a lion and told her the story was made up, because that's how it happens: somebody tells you something, and if you like what they say then it's probably true. I began a reply, but realised what I actually wanted to say was go fuck yourself, you thick cunt. Instead I defriended and then blocked her.

Whilst I'm happy to entertain a circle of virtual acquaintances who might not necessarily hold the same views as myself on every last subject, persons who regard homosexuality as evil in capital letters fall on the wrong side of the perimeter fence for me. Serpentgate therefore seemed as good an opportunity as any to correct the historical wrong of my buddying up to someone with whom I clearly lost touch for good reasons. It was depressing because I like to think the best of people, even thick cunts. I might have attempted to change her mind, but while there may be some moral credit to be gained in attempts to enlighten the bigoted or otherwise terminally ignorant, sometimes it's just pissing into the wind and a waste of everyone's time. This seemed like it would have been one of those cases.

Whilst the advent of the internet potentially brings us back into the orbit of everyone we've ever known, it equally serves to reduce much of its social interaction to angry sludge. Those with unpleasantly retarded views who might once have considered themselves isolated voices of reason are united as great virtual nations of foulness and horseshit spouting dangerous, hateful crap grounded only in it being what some bloke said which just happened to reinforce their existing prejudices because it's easier than thinking, and because it's more comforting than accepting that maybe you don't know everything after all. This, it seems to me, accounts for at least some of the popularity of Donald Trump in America and UKIP in England.

Living as I do at something of a remove from my own previous life, accessing it only through the narrow focus of a telephone line, I find it necessary to constantly remind myself that the image is distorted and that the general mass of humanity living just beyond the range of my experience really can't be quite so vile as they so often appear. Whilst the internet may well be reducing us all to angry sludge, I remind myself that I can now access books which once required that I schlep along to the British Library and fill in an application form; and I remind myself of all the people out there who I actually like, whom I never would have known were it not for the internet, whose online presence I find a daily source of delight; and it seems I'm not alone in this respect. I know of at least three other Englishmen who married American women in conclusion to transatlantic relationships which couldn't really have happened prior to the advent of the internet. One of them is my own cousin. With the other two, the three of us might almost be versions of the same individual from some alternate universe, such is the apparent concordance of our tastes and personalities, at least as they are expressed online. Against all odds, we are now a demographic, with the biggest difference between us being that I've moved to America whereas the other three couples have ended up in England.

So life is generally quiet, and not without trivial inconveniences and irritations, but there is no Damoclean grand piano hung over my head, suspended by a fraying length of twine as it would be in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. I get to write and paint and to just about get paid for it. I gave up smoking with no trouble worth mentioning. I get to keep my teeth. I don't yet have cancer, so far as I'm aware. I no longer fear being turfed out onto the street by a slum landlord who takes two thirds of my wages in rent. I no longer suffer loneliness or, generally speaking, the presence of idiots. The night sky in Texas is huge and full of many more stars than I was ever able to see in England, and the sun is so bright by day that the grass in my garden is the colour of the grass of childhood. If this isn't heaven, it's close enough for my purposes; and if the noise generated by idiots is occasionally annoying, I can at least tell by the hoarse clamour of their stupidity that they are far, far away.

*: Not actual names.