A Gastropsychogeography of England

Philip Best of notorious room clearance outfit Consumer Electronics observed that I was a food pusher. I was visiting him in Austin and making delivery of some of my home made pork pies - because it's easier to make too many than it is to make too few and we can't get them in Texas - and the comment came as I was describing a brief period of the nineties during which Jim Macdougall stayed over at my place every other weekend and I'd make us a chili in the hope of keeping him alive - his strict diet of beer, fags, bar snacks and Temazepam being nutritionally questionable; so Best's observation seemed fair. Thus deciding to embrace the role, I hereby declare my invention of gastropsychgeography, a philosophical discourse in which one gives account of what is eaten, where, and what it means. This follows on from psychogeography, a practice devised by Ivan Chtcheglov which seeks to map the meaning of a place in terms of its history, and psychochronography in which Sandifer ingeniously lists what was at the top of the hit parade when certain episodes of Doctor Who went to air. Gastropsychgeography is therefore, in essence, a travelogue of meals consumed by an author except much more important; and this is where it begins. This time next year you'll be reading Alan Moore's brooding testimony of Northampton's finest chip shops and Sandifer will be self-publishing tallies of previously obscure forms of iconic artisan bread consumed whilst binge watching Who, but it was all my idea. You're welcome.

Fish and chips, Earlsdon.
My mum gave me a tenner and sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. Being fifty-four years of age, I was conscious of this being one of those grand English traditions once immortalised in the likes of Beano and Dandy, so grand in fact that I'm surprised some red-faced gammon has yet to fume over imagined EU rulings preventing English mothers sending their offspring up the chippie with a tenner. We had two portions of battered cod and a single helping of chips between the two of us, because Gabriel's single helping is a shitload of chips in itself. It was pretty great, and we ate while watching Downton Abbey, an episode in which one of the butlers gives in his notice and the other one gets a bit sniffy about it.

Doner kebab, Earlsdon.
This time my mother sent me in the other direction, down the road for doner kebabs which I didn't enjoy quite so much as I thought I would. They were okay but not amazing, the main selling point simply being the pleasure of a doner kebab served in pita bread with chilli sauce, like nature intended - as distinct from a puffy flatbread with no sauce of any description, which seems to be a Greco-Texan thing. We watched The Curse of the Were-Rabbit whilst dining, which I hadn't seen before, so that was nice. Less entertaining was that Motecuhzoma took a small measure of his revenge on the both of us the following morning, so that's a lesson learned until next time.

 

Battered sausage with chips, Foleshill.
I was out with the intention of catching performances by Cristiana Ilie and Hainbach at the Tin, a venue situated in Coventry's new fangled Canal Basin, but I hadn't eaten. I'd called at the City Arms, a Weatherspoon pub, about an hour previous in the hope of ordering their Full English breakfast, discovering that it is only served until noon. With my gastronomic plans having been thus foiled, I therefore had to ask around and was directed to the Sandy Fish Bar in Sandy Lane, which was just around the corner. The expedition impressed upon me how the Tin is but five minutes walk from the home of Martin of Attrition, and I'm surprised he doesn't have some kind of residency there, knocking out a set of handbag house standards every Sunday evening or whatever. He literally lives so close that there wouldn't even be much point getting a taxi for the sake of a cumbersome tuba. Anyway, I ate my sausage in batter and chips on the seating provided at the aforementioned Canal Basin, all the while monitoring the venue for signs of activity seeing as I'd arrived about an hour before even the bar staff. The sausage was, in particular, pretty good.

Sausage sandwich, Coombe Abbey.
I asked for a sausage roll and this was the closest they could manage, although it was decent so I'm not complaining. I was at the Café in the Park with my dad. We were up that way having gone out for a stroll during which he hardly mentioned Brexit at all, although there were several ominous remarks hinting at a sceptical view taken regarding climate science. It didn't seem like there was anything to be gained in rising to the bait, so I didn't. I was a bit surprised by the general youthful bewilderment which greeted my attempts to describe a sausage roll to the café staff, but never mind.

Dinner, Binley.
This was prepared by my dad some hours after the above, and comprised steak pie, roast potatoes, runner beans, carrots and squash. The pie was hand crafted and amazing, and the vegetables were all from his allotment. The squash seemed an initially incongruous addition, but was slightly sweet and went very well with everything else. We manged to avoid talking about Brexit, although on a related note, my dad's wife - or at least the woman who would have been his third wife had they bothered to get married, which they didn't - opined that the good thing about Donald Trump is that he's not afraid to say what he's thinking. I couldn't be bothered to argue. Whatever gets you through the night.

Persian takeaway, Earlsdon.
Grilled lamb, rice, and houmous delivered by the Cyrus Restaurant once the guy on the other end of the phone line grudgingly conceded that yes, they did deliver if we really weren't able to get down there to pick it up. The food was at least as good as anticipated, and the rice in particular was delicious, light and fragrant. We ate while watching an episode of Midsomer Murders during which I realised that I sort of fancy Camille Coduri. I knew I'd seen her on telly somewhere before, but couldn't remember where. Later I looked it up and found out that she once played the mother of Bingo from the Banana Splits in Eccleston era Who, which was a bit disappointing.

 

Cream tea, Coventry Cathedral.
Part of the reason for my visiting England, aside from seeing my parents and other people, was because Lynda would be there. Lynda is my mother's younger sister - my aunt. She moved to Australia in 1973 and none of us had heard from her since. Thankfully the reunion was a delight and not at all awkward as a few of us had feared it might be. Part of Lynda's visit entailed wandering around Coventry like tourists with myself and my dad - who likewise knew her back in the sixties due to his having married my mother. There was a lot to look at in Coventry, and certainly one fuck of a lot more than there had been when I lived there. Our particular favourites were the Doom Painting in the Holy Trinity Church - a recently restored fifteenth century mural depicting what happens to sinners in enthusiastic detail - and the Cathedral. My grandfather - Lynda's dad - was a structural engineer whom they consulted when they were building the thing so as to ensure that it wouldn't simply collapse into the tunnels dug by coalminers from Keresley colliery, so it's all connected somehow. Anyway, we had cream teas in the Rising Café in the basement of the modern cathedral, which was nice. The central axis of a cream tea is a scone, which is like the thing which an American would call a biscuit for no obvious reason, but better. A biscuit in the American sense is usually too salty to be considered a scone and is therefore thematically equivalent to a gammon flavoured ice lolly, at least from where I'm stood.

Pizza, Earlsdon.
My mother and I stayed home and had a Waitrose pizza, which was probably a bit scant between the two of us but then she doesn't eat a whole lot and I was probably still full of scones. Midsomer Murders had inexplicably vanished from the television schedule so we watched Have I Got News for You? because I hadn't seen it in fucking years, and it's one of the few English shows I miss. I had no idea who at least three of those involved were, but Paul Merton is still funny. One of the most amusing exchanges concerned an elephant dentist from Peppa Pig. Sarah Kennedy - whom I know from my art foundation course in Leamington Spa back in the eighties - provides the voice of Nanny Plum from Peppa Pig. I think Sarah also had something to do with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, so like I said, it's all connected. Alan Moore probably hasn't even heard of Peppa Pig.

Full English breakfast, Earlsdon.
I was vaguely inclined to give Weatherspoon a miss, my enthusiasm for cheap beer past its sell by date having waned since the homeless Thundercat who owns the chain started banging on about Brexit; and my friend Carl pointed out that most Weatherspoon pubs have the atmosphere of a cross-channel ferry due to the surfeit of red-faced gammons on a quest for cheap booze; but a full English breakfast is a full English breakfast. I had mine with a couple of slices of black pudding and it tasted fucking fantastic, just as it always does. I had no reading matter to hand and was dining alone, so reluctantly browsed the Weatherspoon corporate magazine. Naturally there was a special feature on Brexit, lifting opinion columns from publications on both sides of the political divide, because that's how much the homeless Thundercat - whose name is Tim Martin, by the way - loves democracy. Each piece was supplemented with commentary from himself under the byline of Tim Says which, in the case of those pieces in support of the remain argument, tended to kick off with what the author fails to realise is that blah blah blah, reducing the enterprise as a whole to something of a stacked deck. The rest of the magazine was mostly interviews with bar staff, so I watched the telly instead, sound down but with captions. They were showing live footage from the Supreme Court legally proving that Boris Johnson is a massive cunt, which was more interesting than the Weatherspoon corporate magazine.

More fish and chips, Earlsdon.
Once again my mum gave me a tenner and sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. The queue wasn't quite so enormous this time, comprising just three people. As usual, there was some fish left over, so that was saved for next door's cats, Geoff and Pig who are brothers and both ginger with white bits. By the end of my stay in Coventry, Pig had taken to meowing his head off every time I went into the garden in presumed anticipation of my handing a tupperware box of cod over the fence. I think that's how he got the name.

Bread and cheese, Earlsdon.
My aunt Lynda told us that her favourite food is bread and cheese, and specifically sourdough bread because other types of bread tend to give her digestive trouble. My mum therefore gave me a fifteener and sent me up the road for sourdough bread and an assortment of cheeses from the Co-op in Earlsdon, Coventry. I came back with edam, brie, one of the blue mouldy ones, and a fourth cheese I can't remember. Lynda was delighted beyond expectation. It turns out that this love of cheese is apparently a familial trait. Some doctor once told my mum that she might like to think about cutting down on the cheese. She told him that it wasn't going to happen because were she to make such a dietary adjustment there would be no point in being alive.

Curry, Greenwich.
Back when I lived in London, I often went for a curry with my friends Carl and Eddy, their choice because whilst I enjoyed Indian food, there were other things I preferred. We usually went to the Mogul in Greenwich. Since moving to America, my love of curry has increased for reasons I don't fully understand, so I was fairly keen to revisit the Mogul and give it another go. Unfortunately the Mogul experienced some kind of civil war in my absence, resulting in a diaspora which led to the establishment of the Mountain View on the Trafalgar Road, so that's where we went. I recognised the staff, and even shook the hand of Ron, who I believe runs the place and for whom Carl and Eddy seem to be the equivalent of season ticket holders. I had chicken korma with saag paneer, which was gorgeous.

Tunnock's tea cakes, Solihull.
I went to visit my friend Martin who lives in Solihull. I know Martin from the art foundation course we took with the woman who went on to become the voice of Nanny Plum. Martin was in the very first line up of the Cravats, and later played in different bands with both Carl and myself. As we'd scheduled an afternoon of just hanging out rather than alcoholic abandon, we started with a trip to the corner shop for Mr. Kipling's cherry bakewells and Tunnock's tea cakes, following which we drank tea and listened to the Shameful Ca$hin album. Shameful Ca$hin is Martin's current band and they've recorded an album at Woodbine Street Studios in Leamington Spa, soon to be issued on vinyl, all going well. The album reminded me a little of the punkier incarnations of the Cravats with a touch of the Stranglers and a bit of a rockabilly undercurrent. It's possibly the greatest thing Martin has ever recorded. I opted for Tunnock's tea cakes out of curiosity, having no real memory of them whilst being aware of a wave of nostalgia having spread their legend across certain stretches of social media. They're essentially chocolate covered marshmallows, arguably the English equivalent of American snack foods such as Hostess Twinkies and the like. I thought they were okay but nothing special, and Martin didn't seem to like them at all. Also worth noting is that Martin has a ginger cat called Jeff. He really loves that cat.

Thai curry, Earlsdon.
My mother and I stayed home and had a Waitrose Thai curry, which came in a natty little wooden box, and was excellent. Midsomer Murders had once again inexplicably vanished from the television schedule so we watched three episodes of Upstart Crow on DVD as I'd never seen it before. Having grown up in close proximity to Stratford-upon-Avon, I'd pretty much had enough of Shakespeare by the time I was seven, so I didn't know what to expect but nevertheless found it very watchable. I don't actually have anything against either Shakespeare or his works, unlike Martin who is of the considerably stronger opinion that it's all bollocks, but Upstart Crow almost made me wish I'd developed more of an appreciation. My mum on the other hand thinks Shakespeare is the shit, to phrase it in terms with which she is most likely unfamiliar.

Melted cheese sandwich, Shrewsbury.
I went to visit my friend Charlie who lives in Shrewsbury. I know Charlie from the fine art degree we took with Martin who was in the very first line up of the Cravats. Charlie is best known as artist of the Walking Dead comic book and is accordingly now a local celebrity, which was impressed upon me when I noticed that the local art gallery was advertising an exhibition of his work with his name in massive letters. We went for a bite to eat at a small café called, I believe, Ginger & Co. We talked mostly about comic books, superhero movies, comic book publishers assuming that, having finished with the Walking Dead, what Charlie really, really, really wants to draw next is even more zombies, and we talked about Comicsalopia, a comic art convention which was held in Shrewsbury a few months ago. Apparently it hadn't gone so well as hoped due to organisational complications arisen from one of the major sponsors screwing up with the wonga whilst failing to fully understand the genre, expressed as an unusual fixation with Peppa Pig. The sandwich was fancy and involved spinach and possibly mozzarella. It was very tasty.

Another full English breakfast, Coventry.
I had this one at Café 37, Earlsdon, which seems almost like it's just some bloke's front room. I've been there a few times over the years and don't ever recall any other customers, so I'm glad it's somehow managed to stay open. The food was good, sort of like the Weatherspoon version but with a bit more soul. Options for reading material were Coventry Evening Telegraph, Daily Mail, and the Sun. I tried with the Coventry Evening Telegraph but it mostly seemed to be articles on the level of how some local sports club had purchased a new tennis racket. The only piece I read in full was something about the council intending to pull down the swimming baths, which makes me a little sad as they were structurally engineered by my grandfather. I reluctantly switched to the Sun and was pleased to notice that whilst the right-wing bias was such that it actually came off on my fingers, the paper generally wasn't quite so rabid as I remembered, its mania being concentrated in small, evenly distributed flare ups within the wider context of a generally gormless whole. The only article which really caught my attention was an argument against the closing of private schools, at least partially predicated on the notion that if Jeremy Corbyn thinks it's bad then it's actually good. I don't know where the readership stand on the matter, but it's always entertaining to see members of the working class moved to fuming indignation over threats to the well-being of chinless Etonian twits who regard them as, at the very best, a slightly smelly economic resource.

Yet more fish and chips, Earlsdon.

It was my last evening in England, at least for a while, so my mum gave me a tenner and once again sent me up the road for fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. This time was a bit later than usual. My mother is an independent benefits advisor, meaning she gives advice to, or even represents in court, those who have been wrongfully denied benefits, which is pretty much everyone who has been denied benefits due to government policies which hold that numismatic hand-outs are the only thing preventing most claimants from becoming high paid executives. Anyway she had two such persons turn up at six in the evening seeking her advice, one of whom had no head and only one leg but had nevertheless been declared fit for work and denied disability benefit. My mother had anticipated that their case would take about fifteen minutes to sort out, so I should go up the road for fish and chips once they were done. Unfortunately their case took about an hour to sort out, and in the meantime Sue from next door, patron of Geoff and Pig, came round. She was trying to separate the two sections of the tubing of a vacuum cleaner which had become stuck. I was unable to pull the two lengths of tubing apart. One of the people who had come to see my mother gave it a go, but he couldn't do it either. Anyway, it was close to seven before everyone left and I was able to go up the road for my final fish and chips from Gabriel's Fish & Chips in Earlsdon, Coventry. Now as I compose this account in a house built on a different continent, I know that even as I write, Geoff and Pig are probably finishing off the bit of cod that we couldn't manage. It's a circle, my friend.

Full English breakfast with Japanese influence, Heathrow.
I'd got up at ten to five in the morning so as to catch the flight back to lovely, lovely Texas, and yet somehow I'd managed to end up with hours to burn, just bumming around the airport; so I figured I may as well eat to pass time. Wagamama caught my eye because I recall having loved their food back in the nineties, and there was a full English on the menu which struck me as weird. I went in thinking about bowls of big fat noodles with crunchy ginger stuff, but somehow just couldn't not order the full English because it would be my last one in a while and its presence at Wagamama, which let us not forget serves primarily Japanese and Asiatic cuisine, seemed improbably incongruous. It came in a bowl and incorporated spinach and shitake mushrooms, but was otherwise the genuine article - sausages, bacon, couple of fried eggs and so on - and yet it had some Japanese quality which seemed to justify its place on the menu and yet was difficult to pinpoint, something in the subtle flavours department stemming from how it was cooked; or it could just be that I was prevented from blobbing the customary dollop of tomato ketchup on the side. Naturally I asked for ketchup, even qualifying the request with sorry to sound like a caveman, but… - but they didn't have it, and I was therefore forced to tackle the flavours unalloyed, which was okay because it was delicious. I read some more of The Face in the Abyss by Abraham Merritt as I ate. It's about four hard boiled blokes who go off in search of lost gold, and who keep having arguments about which one of their party might be considered the dirty double-crossing rat. They talk like James Cagney in a gangster movie, often finishing sentences with an interrogative see. So far I'm enjoying it. I picked the book up at the Oxfam shop on Broadgate in Coventry, which is a fucking great shop and seemingly the closest England comes to having a branch of Half Price Books, albeit a somewhat compact one. I also picked up a Rupert Bear annual and two Hornby Railways catalogues which I had as a kid - which is apparently what my midlife crisis looks like. I only mention these details because I haven't found a way to shoehorn Peppa Pig, Shakespeare, or anyone named Geoff into the account.

Art School Re-onion

The first one had been great against all expectation, but then it was all last moment with phone calls and people who also just happened to be in the vicinity. We met in some pub in Forest Hill - Adam, Gail, Mark, and two Carls respectively spelled with a K and a C. The pub was loud and brash as pubs tend to be, full of the traditional braying Saturday night wankers, but adversity sometimes forges magic of a kind. We all got hilariously pissed. I realised that I'd barely exchanged a word with Adam during the entire three years of the course we both attended at Maidstone College of Art, and thirty years later it proved impossible to work out why - just another one of those stupid things. Similarly it turned out that Carl and Mark had never actually had a conversation prior to that evening. Gail was still funny with a pleasingly dry wit but a different accent to the one I recall, and the other Karl was still massively entertaining. He didn't seem to remember having once made a codpiece of a red plastic utensil drainer nabbed from the kitchen sink for a performance of Cameo's Word Up, but never mind. We ended the evening stood outside freezing our bits off, swaying gently from side to side. It was a great night, and it really didn't seem like it had all been so long ago.

The second one results from a more intensive application of choreography, and my name has been announced on a facebook page as having come all the way from Texas, which I have. It's at some place called the Harp in Covent Garden, or roughly around that way. Central London wouldn't have been my choice, but it's easily accessible to all of the people who have said they will be coming. Carl and I walk across the city because one of the stations is out, although it feels a little like one of Carl's long walks, cheerily innocuous proposals which end up being thirty fucking miles. It feels like one of Carl's long walks most likely because I'm still limping. I arrived in London yesterday, walking from Victoria Station to my friend Rob's place at the rear of New Oxford Street because I'd reasoned that it probably wasn't that far on foot.

I turned up at Carl's place around midday and by six I have begun to suffer from conversational overload, being an otherwise fairly solitary sort of person. We walk across London - or limp in my case - and I feel pissy, whilst simultaneously resenting my own lack of endurance because how often do I actually see any of these people these days? How often do I see anyone?

They aren't upstairs at the Harp, whoever they are or will be. We check downstairs and they aren't there either. Carl and I buy beer and wait upstairs having found a table in a room with a bunch of rugby enthusiasts busily honking and hooting at each other as they do. Happily it's the room in which we are destined to meet the others. Upstairs at the Harp were the actual directions, and there's only this one room. We wait until nine and decide no-one is coming - two hours. On the way out, we find them crowded around the door, out on the pavement. Someone looked upstairs, poked their head into the room in which we'd agreed to meet and failed to recognise either Carl or myself. I'm wearing a stetson and a shirt of material in the pattern of the Lone Star flag, which you would think might have helped identify a person who had come all the way from Texas, as advertised on facebook.

We buy more drinks and go back upstairs, all seven of us this time. There's Sue and Kirsten, then three blokes I don't know. They look familiar in the same way as someone on a TV show can occasionally look familiar, but that's it.

I sit next to Sue. 'So how have you been?'

'Fine.' She regards me as a complete stranger; or worse than a complete stranger. It's that look of fear or even distrust in anticipation of the next question making everything horrible and awkward. Had I asked hey baby, what star-sign are you? her reaction probably wouldn't have been much different.

'You don't remember me, do you?'

'I'm afraid I don't.'

'I don't even look a little familiar?'

'Sorry.'

Sue is the person whom I was looking forward to seeing, knowing she would almost certainly be in attendance. We had been friends, and if not actually buddy-buddy, certainly more than merely acquainted.

'I used to live at the Square in Leeds village.'

'Right.'

'You remember Jane, your best friend for at least a year?'

'I remember Jane.'

'You used to come over to see us. I cooked a couple of times, or tried to cook. You sent me postcards from the Lake District that one summer.'

'I remember the Square in Leeds, but I don't remember you living there.' She pauses, uncomfortable. 'So what are you doing these days?'

Like you give a shit, I think, you don't even fucking know who I am. I mumble something which is reciprocated with a brief summary of her own life as a vaguely successful printmaker, and I am reminded of how little I ever had in common with most of those people at art college, people who stand in one room high street art galleries describing something or other as very interesting, people who go all misty-eyed over the shipping forecast on Radio 4, people who met this really amazing old guy on the side of a mountain in Baja California…

By the same token, I have no memory of the three middle-aged blokes on the other side of me. It turns out they were in the year below me and the painting department. I never really had much to do with anyone in the painting department.

Then there's Kirsten who remembers me well, which is gratifying because I remember her well. She's very funny, very dry, and a couple of the more sarcastic one liners and zingers in my arsenal probably came from her. It's a joy to see her again, as I suspected it would be. It doesn't really seem like a whole lot of time has passed. Inevitably we talk about Charlie, because he and Kirsten shared a house, and I seem to be the only one of us who kept in touch with him.

'He was the only student I ever met who turned up on the day he moved in with an ironing board - bless him.' She's laughing but it's an affectionate laugh.

'Who was this?' Sue asks.

'Charlie Adlard,' three of us chorus.

The name rings no bell, and of course she hasn't heard of the Walking Dead. Someone explains it to her, and why Charlie is now more famous than the rest of us put together, including Traci Emin, another Maidstone graduate.

Sue zips off to catch a train back to the south coast, and I begin to feel less irritable. The rest of us talk and drink for another hour, mostly like strangers who've only just met because that's mostly what we are. I manage to squeeze out another hour of conversation about our having shared the same geographical coordinates some three decades ago, and then I limp back to the tube station with Carl. The past couple of hours seem to have reproduced my experience of art college in microcosm with surprising fidelity.

Airport

Here's how a modern airport works. Far beyond the end of the runway, beyond all those fairy lights, off in the long grass stands a little man with a pair of binoculars and a notebook. He spends the day looking up into the sky, looking at all the planes that come and go and noting down their number plates. Sometimes there are too many planes, and in such cases he'll count them all a couple of times over just to be sure, then mount his bicycle and get back to the control tower as quick as he can.

'Too many planes,' he'll shout up at the window, and providing someone up there hears him, they'll talk to the men flying the planes by means of a special two-way radio, just to make sure they don't all try to land at the same time. Sometimes there are only a few planes, but on other days there might be a lot of planes, especially when one of those new countries has been discovered - like Valeria or Lexavia to name but two of the most recent; so that's a sudden increase in tourism and, by association, air traffic, and before you know it, there are just too many planes up there. Worse is that we have no way of telling just how many planes there might be. There is simply no way to be sure. It's something we shall never understand. It's a mystery.

I'd spent three weeks back in England. I'd had quite a time. I'd met up with family, friends, and old friends I hadn't expected to see. I'd packed a suitcase full of ancient cassette tapes - obscure and mostly noisy bands from the eighties and nineties whose work I intend to digitise and make available on the internet - and this time I took the trouble to check what luggage restrictions would apply.

Back in 2015, I turned up at Heathrow with as much crap as I could physically carry, materials which never made it into the shipping container when I first moved and which were subsequently marooned at my mother's house. I had an earlier suitcase full of ancient cassette tapes, an acoustic guitar, a large portable art portfolio, and three or four additional bags all bursting at the zippers. I knew there might be some kind of excess baggage fee, but I didn't mind paying another twenty quid or so. Unfortunately the anticipated twenty quid fee turned out to be closer to four-hundred, so I wasn't going to make that mistake again.

This time, I'd weighed the suitcase on my mother's bathroom scales, then taken out one cassette after another until the weight crept below the permitted limit. This left me with a surplus of twenty-six cassettes which I posted to myself. I spent about a hundred quid posting stuff to myself because it wouldn't fit in my luggage, and thankfully it all arrived at the other end in one piece.

My mother drops me off at the coach station in Coventry, and this time I manage not to cry. I give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek, which represents a gaudy demonstration of affection in our family because we're civilised and not inclined to ostentatious sentiment. The coach trip is boring, but it gets me there in plenty of time. I bum around Terminal Five looking for things to do, smoking my last ciggies for a while and eating bland sandwiches before getting into a fight with a machine. It's the check-in machine, one of those features installed for our increased comfort and convenience so as to dispense with human inefficiency.

I press an icon on the screen and it asks to see my passport, face down in the scanner.

It asks to see my green card.

This unit cannot process your request at this time, it tells me. Please seek assistance.

I get the same response from a second machine.

I find a human and she suggests that I simply go straight to the check-in desk, which I would have had to do anyway even if the machine had worked. I suppose it's okay for me to go straight to the check-in desk because at least I made the effort to use the machine. The human at the check-in desk tells me that my possession of both a passport and a green card probably confused his mechanical colleague. I hump my permitted twenty-three kilo suitcase of industrial noise onto the scales and begin to sweat, waiting to be told how many thousands of pounds I've just incurred in excess baggage charges.

'Is it okay? ' I ask after a silent minute. 'Not too heavy?'

'It's fine,' he tells me.

The flight is long, cramped, and boring, and I'm stuck right in the middle. I watch Rowan Atkinson in Maigret Sets a Trap, which I find soothing because I've spent the last three weeks watching relaxing crime dramas - Midsomer Murders, Lewis and the like, these constituting my mother's preferred viewing these days. Then I watch Doctor Strange - which is okay despite the presence of Cucumber, Arrival - which is excellent, and finally a sappy American made music documentary which compensates for minutes wasted on boring Fatboy Slim by showcasing the altogether more entertaining Virus Syndicate. Once I've watched all the in-flight telly I can stand to watch, I fill in a customs form, declaring that I'm not bringing anything naughty into the country. I value my precious suitcase of noisy tapes at five quid, because there's really no point in trying to work out what they're all worth. It's not like I'm going to sell my rare Opera for Infantry cassettes and use the money to fund the downfall of the dangerous orange shitgibbon.

Eight hours after take off, we land at Chicago. We land at Chicago later than anticipated because there were too many planes at Heathrow. Apparently they had all turned up at once, completely unexpected, not even a phone call or anything; and so we were unable to leave on schedule. As I shuffle from the plane, I consider asking a stewardess whether she thinks I'm really going to be able to make it across the airport in time to catch my connecting flight to San Antonio, but I already know the answer. I already know the answer because when travelling in the US, I always miss the connecting flight. Every single occasion of my coming back across the Atlantic, I've ended up stranded in Philadelphia or Charlotte or New York because they can't find the plane, or they've found the plane but some kids have drawn cocks on the side, or they've run out of fuel, or it might rain, or there's poo on the fucking runway. It has happened every single time, and tonight I get an unscheduled stay in the windy city. I've been in transit for thirteen hours and somehow I'm still thousands of miles away from home.

As I squirt from the connecting tunnel into the womb of O'Hare international, I raise a finger to catch the attention of a stewardess, but before I've even finished my question she directs my attention to the wall upon which an array of envelopes are affixed with tape. I see that my surname is written on one of the envelopes, but my thoughts are momentarily elsewhere, flustered by the blandly efficient tone of the stewardess telling me that I'm screwed, albeit not in those specific terms. I thought they had been trained to sound like they at least give a shit.

Amazingly, I don't lose it. I was expecting this eventuality. In fact, I would have been more surprised had I made my connecting flight without disruption. The envelope contains a letter telling me how deeply everyone regrets everything, along with tickets which will secure a room and breakfast at some local hotel.

I am swept through baggage claim by tidal crowds exiting the plane, then on through to customs and Homeland Security. Every few minutes I have another piece of paper shoved at me. They all go into different pockets as I try to concentrate on what the hell is going on and where I need to go. I ask directions of a woman who turns out to have a near impenetrable Swedish accent, and who helpfully barks at me whilst pointing at a line of machines, features installed for our increased comfort and convenience so as to dispense with human inefficiency. I can't even get to the machines because there are too many people and the crowd is chaotic, and I don't even know what the fuck I'm expected to do once I get there. After some wrestling, the robot asks for my passport and I answer a series of questions. It prints out my forty-seventh piece of paper to add to all the others I will eventually be expected to hand over to someone or other. Eventually I am through to passport control, or whatever it is. I am asked a couple of questions by a guy who doesn't care, and I'm subsequently waved through. My pockets are still very much stuffed with pointless forms, tickets, declarations, dockets and bits of paper. At no point has anyone asked to see any of them, and yet I've already entered the United States. Almost an hour has passed since I stepped from the plane.

I wait outside with other disgruntled passengers. It's dark and hot, a temperature differential which confirms that I'm back on American soil, accordingly bringing me the only twinge of pleasure I am able to experience under the circumstances. We wait forty minutes until a minibus bearing the name of our hotel appears. It fills to capacity before I can get a seat. The driver tells us that his colleague will be along in another half hour.

We continue to wait. I compare disgruntled notes with a fellow traveller, a German. He is unsure as to the departure time of our replacement San Antonio flight in the morning. I empty my pockets of all the slips of paper I've accrued, but somehow I've mislaid my boarding pass, the one piece of paper which actually does useful shit, the ticket which will eventually get me home.

Fanfuckingtastic.

A second minibus eventually shows. It's after nine. We landed a couple of hours ago. I talk to an old couple who take up the seat in front of me. They tell me that they very much enjoyed England. I tell them that I'm glad to be back in America, despite this evening.

I phone my wife once I'm at the hotel. She already knows what has happened, and knows not to wait for me at the airport. I think she's more distressed by it all than I am. I consider phoning Joe, my friend who lives in Chicago. About a month back I told him that my connection would occur in his city, and that it almost certainly wouldn't be happening given my previous experience of trying to catch a fucking plane in America. I may be giving you a call if I end up in some hotel, I told him, but now that I'm here I realise my mood is best kept in quarantine, and that I will make for terrible company this evening. I don't know Joe very well, but from what I do know, I already respect the guy too much to ask him to babysit some pissed off English dude.

Next morning, I have breakfast at the hotel. It's free, as it should be. I kill time, watch some television, then eventually make my way back to the airport. The missing boarding pass turns out to be no big deal after all.

Yesterday I wore my Lone Star shirt and stetson. I wear the stetson as a matter of course, but I figured that wearing it in combination with the shirt would give me a notionally patriotic appearance, reducing my potential significance to those factions within the Department of Homeland Security who now - so I am informed - make it their business to check your social media to see if you've referred to the current president as a dangerous orange shitgibbon, an identification you might imagine would be covered by that whole deal with freedom of speech, that thing which is supposed to make America great. I had already deleted all references to the dangerous orange shitgibbon from my facebook page, and also any links which might expose me as one of those bleeding heart liberal faggot types; but still, I'm reluctant to take chances, hence the shirt and the stetson. However, I'm now behind schedule and I'm not going to wear the Lone Star shirt a second day running because I have standards. Instead I opt for my Henry Rollins for President t-shirt because it at least suggests patriotism in some form.

I make it through customs and security just fine, aside from one officer having a rummage through my backpack, seemingly intrigued by all the funny looking shit which showed up on the x-ray machine. He scowls at my ancient tapes of industrial noise, but thankfully doesn't find my pornography - a 1993 issue of Knave which I own because I'm in it. Specifically the magazine features an article about A Reflection, an unpublished comic strip written by myself and drawn by Charlie Adlard way back at the beginning of his career. Ignoring the bongo periodical, the security officer finds a set square once owned by my grandfather. I guess maybe it looked like a weapon on the x-ray. Once it's obvious that I'm not about to blow anything up, I'm through. Weeks later I discover that my friend Jane, another English citizen living in the US on a green card, experienced just the sort of difficulties I had anticipated. She was detained at length, and interviewed twice before being allowed to re-enter the country. I'm inclined to wonder whether it was the stetson which helped, which eased the process for me.

I head for my departure gate and an old coot similarly kitted out with a stetson squints at my t-shirt. 'Who do you want for president?'

'Henry Rollins,' I tell him. 'It's a long story.'

My estimation of his voting habits thankfully turn out to be entirely wrong. 'Well, I ain't got no idea who that is,' he sighs, 'but he can't be no worse than that dang fool we got ourselves right now.'

My flight back to Texas runs without incident.

Finally I am back in San Antonio.

Heading for baggage claim I see Daisy Bee hamming it up on the concourse before a bunch of school kids. She is my first familiar face, our famous local clown. She is our equivalent of Krusty because, as I've noticed, there are certain peculiar parallels between life in San Antonio and what you see on a typical episode of The Simpsons. We have a clown. We almost certainly have a guy in a bee costume. We even have our own version of Kent Brockman. I've watched him on the news and I've shaken him by the hand.

Baggage claim echoes traditional song from a marginally less traditional trio of female Mariachi musicians - violin, guitar, and guitarrón. It feels like a personal welcome, as though they're playing just for me, and it makes me think of Michoacan, which makes me happy. The air is hot and the music is sweet.

I am home.

Durham, NC

'Don't you just love fandom?' the fanzine editor asked me. We'd met for a drink and there had been a peculiar lull in the conversation, at which point he just came right out with it. It was as much a statement as a question, and to my ears it had the cadence of isn't life so much better with the love of our Lord Jesus? The problem was that I didn't love fandom and I didn't know how to answer. I felt bad for the fanzine editor, and then bad for myself because he was the nice guy whilst I was the cynical gremlin of judgement, not even true to myself, choking back my own poison lest it reveal me as such and ruin the mood. I had once enjoyed the thing enough to have bought a ton of tie-in novels and to be able to hold a conversation with the fanzine editor, but my interest had dwindled when the television company resumed making the series; and my interest had further curdled to a faintly carcinogenic slurry as the show began to engender a new, more toxic species of fan, and as their numbers began to multiply.

My problem stems principally from the fan aspect, at least as I understand its contemporary meaning. There are plenty of things which I like but for which I'm reluctant to call myself a fan. There are probably entire episodes of The Sopranos which I can recite line by line from memory, but that's because I like The Sopranos. I have no need to belong to a greater whole of anything, or to define myself as such for the benefit of my peers. I see fandom as being about branding - dedication to a commercial franchise signified by a set group of ideas and images. Whatever may be done or said by those ideas and images is usually of importance secondary to their repetition; and when I say branding I specifically mean brand loyalty of the kind which either excludes everything external to the franchise, or which at the very least favours mainly that which echoes some aspect of the franchise, not least the fact of it being a franchise as distinct from any more organic expression of culture.

I hadn't been to a comic book convention since the early nineties. I no longer really draw comics as I once did, and as for reading the things, I've had an on-off relationship with the medium for the last two decades. There are comics I still enjoy, but nothing I enjoy so much that I need to pay fifty quid or equivalent for the privilege of dressing up as one of the characters whilst hanging out with others similarly costumed as what may as well be corporate mascots. I've never wanted to belong to any club which would have me as a member because if they want my membership then it's unlikely that they really know anything about me, or that they care to know anything about me.

Besides, in my day - seeing as I'm now of an age which allows for use of such a preamble - it was the fancy dress parade. I refuse to acknowledge the term cosplay - a clumsy conflation of costume and play by which participants distance themselves from an activity traditionally associated with very small children. It isn't the activity which particularly bothers me so much as the implicit anticipation of not only my approval, but my hearty endorsement of persons who feel best able to express their inner selves by dressing as Batman, or River Song, or Pinkie Pie. It isn't that I disapprove so much as that if you reduce yourself to a dull, juvenile symbol by your own free will, if you identify so heavily with what is essentially just merchandise, then I simply don't think that you and I will ever have much to say to each other because I suspect that behind the glitter and the cape, you probably won't have much to say about anything; and this makes me feel sorry for you, and disappointed. I don't want you banned, stamped out, or subjected to scorn, but neither do I want to have to think about you for any length of time, and you don't get a cookie just for being you. You shouldn't need my approval.

I hadn't been to a comic book convention since the early nineties, but Charlie said he'd been invited to one in Durham, North Carolina - right here in America. I told him, 'great - maybe me and Bess can fly up there and meet you or something.' This had been suggested in England back in June - one of those commitments you make as a sort of place-holder whilst knowing it will cost and therefore probably won't happen. I mentioned it to my wife as soon as I was home in Texas, and she provided the motive force which would ordinarily have faltered as I faced up to the reality of travel plans and plane tickets and places to stay. I'm glad she did, because Charlie is one of those people I should have seen with a little more frequency over the past couple of decades. We were at art college together, we attended comic book conventions together, and so much as any of us ever had a little gang, we were in the same one. Then our lives flew off in different directions and everything became complicated; but once a couple of decades have passed, life becomes too short to let the complications get in the way.

Charlie draws a hugely successful comic book called The Walking Dead, itself the inspiration for a hugely successful television show, and he is as such probably the closest I come to knowing a celebrity. My comic habit is severely reduced compared to what it was, and I haven't really enjoyed what few episodes of The Walking Dead I've seen. I can see that it's a quality product but it probably just isn't for me, which isn't unusual given there being very little television I like at all these days. Charlie, being both a fully grown man and a nice guy, doesn't seem to mind.

Because I don't just love fandom, I suppose I have a few reservations about the event, but the point is getting to hang out with my old pal, and getting on a plane and having an adventure, and the sort of adventure which Junior might hopefully appreciate despite it occurring in the real world rather than on a screen. It's the sort of thing which we, as a family, probably need to do more often.

We fly on Friday the 13th, changing at Atlanta then arriving at the airport in Durham after dark. We haven't spent long in the air when you add it up, although with all of the waiting around, it feels as though we have. Happily I have not been driven to silently grinding my teeth whilst assembling a series of barbed comments, as occasionally transpires when we spend time as a family. It's not that I don't get on with Junior but that his behaviour can sometimes be quite demanding. On bad days he may come across as rude, needy, and entitled, although in all fairness this could be partially because I have become actively attuned to notice such behaviour - feeding the irritation like you scratch at an itch. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and rests significantly on the fact of his being a twelve-year old boy, and things tend to go better when I'm able to keep this in mind. The prospect of the three of us up in the sky squashed into economy seats for a couple of hours was one I had been trying not to think about, but once it happens it's fine.

We land at Durham and take a taxi to the Marriott Hotel, the one in which the comic book convention is to be held. The trip seems to take some time and I guess that the airport is some way out of town. I find it frustrating that it's already dark because even just the bushes and trees at the side of the highway - what I can see of them in the glare of sodium lamps - are a testament to our being somewhere other than Texas. I've been to North Carolina before but just passing through, changing flights or a night at some anonymous hotel when a flight has been cancelled. I want to get a look at the state to see how well it compares with my mental image, cohered during many hours of listening to David Sedaris describe his formative years growing up in Raleigh. I want to be able to see if the place is anything like I imagined, but it's dark and all I can do is boggle at trees with tall, thin trunks and the unsettling absence of cacti. We come to Durham and I try to recall the name of the flooring company run by Paul Sedaris, younger brother of David, but I know it's unlikely that he would have an office or an outlet in Durham, or that we might just happen to drive right past it, or that it will mean anything if we do.

The hotel is huge and ornate, tall ceilings with gold fittings and many reflective services. We sign in, and the receptionist chuckles as she notes that we are from Texas. 'Like I couldn't tell.'

I'm wearing my Stetson and one of my favourite shirts, one that makes it look as though I'm wearing the state flag, most likely originated with either a garage or some fried chicken concession.

'He's not even American,' my wife chuckles, and we all laugh. The joke should be old by now but it still contains some magic.

We find the room and realise there's been a misunderstanding. We have two single beds. This means the boy will have a bed of his own as requested, but Bess and I will have to sleep whilst balanced side by side on a mattress with the dimensions of a long thin sofa cushion, and neither of us are what you'd call petite. Otherwise, the room seems fine. We return to reception and explain that one bed fails to meet out requirements as Texans. Unsurprisingly there's nothing they can do. Everything is fully booked due to the convention.

There seems to be a dining area, a raised enclosure at the heart of the lobby in which persons dressed as characters from The Legend of Zelda pick at plates of hotel food. We're all hungry, not having eaten fried chicken for a number of hours, and so we pick a table and direct meaningful glances at staff whom we hope are passing waiters but who may simply be porters. We watch entire teams of Avengers and other characters I don't recognise pass by and at least know that we are in the right place.

I've sent Charlie a text message to explain that we are here but I haven't heard back.

'He's probably busy,' Bess suggests.

Having myself been let down by mobile phones failing to work in foreign countries, contrary to the claims of the network provider, I'm not so sure; and I'm almost at the point of scarfing leftover fries from the abandoned plates at the table recently vacated by girls dressed as Japanese cartoon characters. I go for a walk to find a waiter or someone, just so far as the end of the lobby, although it should probably be noted that you could almost certainly park a Boeing 747 in this particularly lobby. I follow Spiderman, Deadpool, and a couple of Klingons past the bar to the glass double doors beyond which are the convention halls. I can see security guards and swarms of people dressed as cartoon characters on the other side of the glass. Stranger still is the promotional poster pasted to a board: NC Comicon and just one name in huge letters, Charlie Adlard.

'Fuck,' I say to myself, quite loudly.

I've understood my friend's fame at least since the days when he briefly considered changing his name to Charlie X-Files Adlard because that was how it was written by everyone else. He's now Charlie Walking Dead Adlard and it has only just sunk in. I have an urge to grab complete strangers by the sleeve and tug and point and yelp, 'that's my mate!'

I return to the wife and kid, and miraculously we attract the attention of a waiter who delivers conflicting statements: the kitchen is now closed but yes, he will be happy to take our order. We've been waiting forty minutes and are grateful just for the attention, even if we can't quite tell whether we've just ordered food or not. It eventually turns out that we have, and that with which we are served probably isn't great but nevertheless tastes amazing to us; and in any case Junior is past caring, being at the point of kid-overload having spotted the millionth person dressed as a ninja from some game or other. I wonder to myself whether he knows these are simply regular people dressed up, or whether he thinks those three stood over by the elevator are actual Mario brothers. It probably doesn't matter.

By the time we've eaten, it's late so we go to bed. Bess and I do our best, balanced on our thin strip of mattress. Junior snuggles under the sheet of his bed to yelp and hoot to himself for another couple of hours whilst playing games on his iPad, at least until I let fly with some of the barbed comments I'd set aside for just such an eventuality as this. Part of the problem is that he requires no more than about ten minutes of sleep a week, and short of gagging and locking him in a trunk, he can on occasion be slow to respond to suggestions such as shut up and go to sleep. I'm not even convinced he quite understands it as an instruction. If he considers his room-mates at all, I expect it's only in terms of what he will tell us about the game over which he's been yelping and hooting next morning, because we'll be dying to know.

Parenting is more difficult than it looks, although not necessarily more difficult than I thought it would be.

We don't sleep well, but we do sleep and are awake at eight. I have a bath and we return to the lobby for breakfast, which is when I notice that I've had a message from Charlie. Still jetlagged, he hadn't received my text until after we were all asleep. So we have breakfast and I give him a call. We arrange to meet at one of the dealers' tables within the convention, a retailer of signed Charlie Adlard originals.

We enter the convention and wander around for a little while. I don't see anything I understand well enough to want to buy, but probably about half of the attendees have come in some sort of costume and it's entertaining by itself just watching them. I stand by everything I said in the first couple of paragraphs, but find there is nevertheless something oddly life-affirming about this peculiar situation. Everyone seems to have made a significantly greater effort than they ever did in my day, and regardless of which corporate mascot is represented, I cannot help but appreciate how much fun they all seem to be having, and the fact that no-one really seems to give a shit what anyone thinks.

Why are they doing this?

For FUN, man! Pure fuckin' FUN!, I think, recalling the line from one of my favourite Baby Sue comic strips. I dislike fandom and cosplay and the obsessing over details which only matter because it's either that or recognise that one's entire life has been a waste of time, and I dislike these things particularly when they are pursued to the exclusion of every other potential cultural experience; but when you glance across a crowded room to see some guy dressed as Groot, the tree person from Guardians of the Galaxy - presumably on stilts inside a papier mache construction resembling a tree trunk, those objections are reduced as unto a fart in a thunderstorm whipped up by Thor himself.

My wife and I are speechless - awestruck, and Junior is close to exploding with kid-excitement.

Somehow even more impressive is a distinctly well fed Ghost Rider - a kind of supernatural biker with a flaming skull for a head, in case you've made better use of your life than I have. Our boy simulates flames with a day-glo orange wig over a rubber skull mask, and if any of his friends have pointed out that he's a little on the chunky side compared to the comic book character, then I guess he must have told them to piss off. I'm so impressed that I take his photograph.

When we encounter Charlie he is with a young woman whom he introduces as his personal assistant. Her name is Nicole, and by absurd coincidence it turns out that she once lived in San Antonio, and she lived in a place just off Eisenhauer, a road I cross on an almost daily basis. I briefly wrestle with the coincidence, and also the realisation that Charlie has a handler these days. He submits a fake growl and paws the air with imagined claws like an enraged bear, and I fail to notice that as we discuss hotels and schedules, Nicola is batting away autograph hunters so we can talk in relative peace. Bess fetches out a stack of issues of The Walking Dead because there are a load of folks back home in San Antonio all lined up for autographed copies. They can scarcely believe I'm friends with a genuine star, and Charlie doesn't seem to mind because he's a nice guy and I guess he's used to it. He whips out a magic marker and scrolls an elegant signature across the covers of copies for the kid, his dad, and Duncan, our boy's best friend at school whose entire family identify as Walking Dead obsessives. Charlie has a mammoth signing session this afternoon but will be free to talk under less hectic circumstances for a while after that, so we arrange to meet again around six.

We look around the dealers' room.

'Nice costume,' some guy tells me, because I still have my Stetson on. I was going to tell anyone who asked that I'd come as Hank from King of the Hill, but I suppose I could just as easily be that Walking Dead guy; you know - the one with the hat.

Image Comics have just published a hardback called The Art of Charlie Adlard, and I leaf through a copy at one of the stalls. It's strange to see some of the older material in this historical context, and I can remember him spreading pages of The Tar Baby across the dining table at my dad's house in Coventry. His figures had an initially exaggerated, cartoony quality, but have since tightened up, and his use of shadow has always been astonishing. It feels amazing to see someone I know personally having done this good, having gone so far in his chosen field without either compromise or turning into a dick. It's the kind of success story which sod's law generally prevents, but just this one time it has all worked out just right. I've known this for a while obviously, but now that I've seen the evidence I feel so proud of my old friend that it's embarrassing.

The guy running the stall comes over and tells me he can probably get hold of a signed copy if I'm interested. I buy Mark Millar's 1985 instead.

We have a look at the Lego exhibition, and then Junior stops at a stall selling wooden props, an actual size recreation of Thor's hammer or a replica of the gun with which Bloodstab shot Facepuncher in that issue of Foe Destroyer. He examines a selection of fake swords, then picks an angular wooden shield with a black squiggle on the front, which is handy because it's the only item airport security are likely to allow on the plane. It's from The Legend of Zelda, Junior explains to us in greater detail than we really need.

'Shield bash!' he keeps exclaiming, pulling a melodramatic expression and thrusting the wooden plaque at an imaginary enemy. 'Shield bash!,' he tells us over and over.

The thing looks kind of underwhelming, pretty much an irregular offcut of wood to which someone has added a fabric handle and varnish; but Junior thinks it's great and that's what matters. Even as I write, six months after the fact, I notice that he still sleeps with the thing in his bed from time to time.

Eventually we get tired and return to our room to rest, passing an impressive Asian incarnation of Patrick Troughton's Doctor Who as we do; and then we share an elevator with an individual who I'm fairly certain is the real Captain America.

I only rest for a little while, and then go out for a walk around Durham just to get the lay of the land. Strangely it feels like England to me, or at least more like England than Texas ever has. The trees are all different but they're more or less the same shape, and whilst curbstones and buildings are definitively American, the air tastes similar, or maybe it's some chemical on the breeze, or just the fact of it being so cold as to warrant layered clothing. I experience no nostalgia because I am reminded of those freezing days when the sun barely rose above the level of the rooftops on the other side of the street, which is something I know I will never miss. I walk so far as something called the Old Five Points. It seems to be a run down neighbourhood suffering the first incursion of gentrification so far as I am able to tell. There's a parking lot full of people with some kind of makeshift stage being set up, and some guy asks if I would like to be included in their prayers.

'I'm good,' I tell him as though I've just been offered a cigarette, smiling like we both know how hard it is to give them up.

After an hour I make my way back to the hotel. My wife is awake and is watching the news which is now full of explosions in Paris but with not very much in the way of actual information. Everyone interviewed says that they think what has happened is terrible, which doesn't really need stating. I guess we must be gearing up for another war.

At 4.30PM we return to the lobby as arranged and meet Charlie for a beer. He's been signing autographs for most of the afternoon, both him and Gerard Way, the former singer of My Chemical Romance. It turns out Gerard Way is here because he's written a comic book called The Umbrella Academy which has proven popular, winning awards and everything. I try to remember what I know of My Chemical Romance, which isn't much but I have an impression of them sounding like the Bay City Rollers with black eyeliner. Charlie doesn't seem to have any strong opinion of the music, but he regards Gerard Way himself as a decent guy. Typically we spend most of the time talking about bands, one of the threads of our shared narrative being the band for which I once played guitar supporting the one for which he once played drums. Charlie has recently been in the studio with the Cosmic Rays for whom he presently plays drums. We talk about the album they've had pressed, and the new guitarist, and the old guitarist, and absent friends, and America. Junior has his picture taken with Charlie, but is otherwise suffering from stage fright. Bess later observes that for her the best part of the entire weekend was seeing the smile on my face as Charlie and I caught up.

He has to return to signing duties around six so the rest of the evening is mostly just bumming around and filling time for Bess and myself. Junior plays games on his iPad. At one point I step outside for a walk and buy an issue of NC Slammer from a gas station.

NC Slammer is a local newspaper comprising the mugshots of everyone arrested in the Wake County area presumably since the previous issue, giving names and reason for arrest - overdue library book to kiddie fiddling to mass murder and all points in between. The paper is divided into sections, grouping certain kinds of perp together. The Love Birds - Jail Birds section, for example, lists married couples who have been arrested together. This pair of doozies, reads one typical and dubiously grammatical entry, was arrested in Auburndale, FL for stalking and harassing their neighbors. And their neighbors' elderly parents. Tearing down their fence, putting up surveillance cameras, hollering out obscene insults, shining high intensity lights through their windows all night long. Threatening to kill their dog! and mug shots of the unhappy couple are inset into a pink love heart. A disclaimer runs along the foot of the page reading all suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty, just in case you had forgotten. I suppose if nothing else it brings comfort to angry shut-ins, at least confirming that the rest of us really are out to get them.

Who's paranoid now?

I take my copy of NC Slammer back to the hotel and show it to Bess.

'This is what your friends and relatives think America is like,' she sighs.

We begin the next morning with another walk. I've spoken to Charlie and it doesn't seem like we're going to get another chance to see him, as we suspected would probably be the case. He's committed to another day of dishing out autographs. He's now at the stage where certain fans even have his autograph tattooed onto their flesh. We step outside the hotel and see a sandwich board pertaining to this morning's signing session. Charlie and the bloke out of My Chemical Romance will be signing your shit at ten in such and such a building, it says. The building in question is across the other side of the square. Fans clutching copies of Walking Dead and Umbrella Academy are already lined up in their Frankenstein boots and black eyeliner. The queue is about three wide and maybe two-hundred feet long, and it is eight in the morning - two hours to go before the doors open.

'I guess Charlie's going to be busy today,' my wife observes.

We have a stroll in the crisp morning air - something we don't really get in Texas - and then we gather up the kid and get a taxi to the airport. The taxi driver is from Somalia and he spends the journey telling us about his country, which I find fascinating because he's giving us a positive spin in telling us about his family and so on, reminding me that the qualities of a person or a place are rarely the same as what we Americans have heard about them on the news - using we Americans here for the sake of argument.

We fly back to San Antonio.

I have seen my old friend, and I have seen how well he's done for himself. I have seen a different state of the country in which I now live. Junior has his shield and is still proclaiming 'shield bash!' every thirty minutes, throwing dramatic shapes for the benefit of an imaginary audience; and he has his signed copies of comics for himself, his dad, and his friend Duncan. In my diary I have noted:

These conventions seem significantly less macho than the ones I used to go to, and there are more little kids so the atmosphere seems less oppressively spotty and teenaged.

I still don't love fandom, and I still think adults who dedicate their entire existence to what is in essence escapist children's entertainment to the exclusion of everything else are fucking idiotic, and I still have nothing to say to the person whom comedian Louis CK described as a non-contributing product-sponge cunt; but the weekend has nevertheless opened my eyes. I shared an elevator with Captain America, and it's an encounter I will never forget.

Songs About Sandwiches

I knew Carl well enough to laugh at his jokes, and for him to occasionally laugh at mine, but we weren't close. I didn't know Chris at all. He was just Carl's friend from outside the art college, out there in the real world. They knew each other from school, and Chris would turn up at college parties, his yachting-casual attire presenting an almost surreal contrast with the Oxfam gothic favoured by almost everyone else, this being 1985. He would grin like the silent Marx brother and point at the ceiling and then at the centre of the dance floor - college refectory by day - making moves straight out of Saturday Night Fever regardless of what was playing. Der Mussolini by DAF or Heaven 17, it was all the same to Chris, so it seemed. Whatever you might have said of the man, he knew how to have fun.

They were both in a band called To The Max, Chris playing a tiny synthesiser and Carl singing, with Adam and Martin on drums and guitar respectively - or at least that's how I remember it. To The Max played at college parties. They reminded me a little of the Stooges, maybe with some Clash thrown in. They scored well on energy, but were often a bit of a racket, and now it seemed that they had broken up and this was why Carl and Chris were at my place - Hollytree House, the cottage in the village of Otham in which I rented a room for about a tenner a week.

I still didn't really understand.

'You play guitar,' Carl suggested. 'I've seen you!'

Despite playing guitar, I hadn't really considered the option of being in a band. Most of the music I produced at the time came from me playing all of the instruments, or at least hitting all of the objects from which I derived sound. I had seen To The Max play live and not once considered what it would be like to be involved with that sort of thing. Carl and Chris on the other hand very much enjoyed being in a band and wished to continue, and so they had thought of me. They knew I had a guitar, but had never heard me play. Carl reasoned that even if I was only able to make a noise with one string occasionally held down to produce a second note, thus forming a tune, it might still be worth doing. After all, the Cramps did well enough with a fairly basic sound.

My musical abilities actually went a little further than tunes plucked out on one string, if admittedly not much further; but I could manage just enough of a bar chord to chug out something roughly equidistant between the New York Dolls and the Ramones, so on Saturday the 9th of November, 1985 we formally agreed that we were a band. We called ourselves Total Big, a dubiously translated phrase apparently seen on the packaging of a toy robot of Japanese manufacture promising the consumer that, amongst the toy robot's numerous admirable qualities, he is total big.

On Sunday the 17th of November, 1985 we set up what instruments we could muster in the garage of Chris's dad's house in Sittingbourne and made a racket for the best part of the afternoon. It was cold, and I think I was a little bewildered by Chris's dad's extensive collection of Lledo die-cast toy cars ranging along the shelves of the garage, all still in their boxes; and it was noisy, but it was fun. Afterwards we sat listening to the tape of what was essentially just improvisation, picking out two or three segments which sounded good enough to have been deliberate. These became Rock Sandwich and I Write the Songs, later changed to He Writes the Songs when Carl went through our growing body of work changing personal pronouns so as to reduce the quota of seemingly egotistical first person narratives. He wrote the songs, but these weren't the songs that made the whole world sing, it should probably be pointed out, more in the line of free-form mating calls occasionally appropriating whatever lyric was at hand and seemed to fit the occasion.

Never mind the whole world, we barely made a half-empty college canteen sing on Wednesday the 27th of November, our first live performance offered as part of an all-night occupation of the building mounted in protest against cuts to education funding. Jude Hibbert back-combed my hair for the occasion, and we played Rock Sandwich, He Writes the Songs, and Ouch! which wasn't exactly a new number so much as thirty seconds of the maximum volume of noise we could muster through banging, screaming, and shredding an open chord all at the same time, the sort of thing for which Skullflower accrued much droning acclaim a few years later.

A couple of people submitted bewildered applause, which mainly served to emphasise how many had either failed to applaud or who had even left the room, but Carl, Chris, and myself had enjoyed it, and that was the main thing. It had worked, more or less. My guitar sounded good and crunchy, distorted through Carl's small but formidable Roland Cube amplifier. Despite the songs comprising just rudimentary riffs blasted out over and over, I'd still managed to forget how to play some of it, but had apparently appeared unflustered by my own rock and roll incompetence. Chris had played the drums as ever like he was nailing down the floorboards, as Martin de Sey later described it; and Carl was solidly entertaining, as always.

Carl represented a not-particularly-secret weapon in our line up in so much that even if we sounded terrible, people tended not to notice because they would usually be watching Carl and wondering what the hell he was going to do next. It wasn't really just that he jumped about a bit so much as that he performed every act possible on stage given whatever props were available, and barring those acts which were either illegal or at least required a permit. Regrettably my musicianship was of such rudimentary standard as to require me to keep my own fingers under constant observation whilst playing, so I experienced most of Carl's acrobatics as anecdotes related after the event by members of the audience. On one occasion I briefly looked up to see him stood on two chairs, one per foot, holding the backs of each chair with his hands and walking around the room as though on stilts. On another occasion, we played in a pub in Worthing as support to Soul, the group for which Charlie Adlard was then drummer. I stole upwards glances on four separate occasions during the gig, achieving four brief impressions of the event at roughly ten minute intervals - Carl singing to a full room whilst upside down on the pool table, then singing to fewer people whilst hanging from the back of the door like an Orang-outang, then a microphone lead trailing up behind the drawn curtain of a small window into which Carl had presumably squeezed himself, and finally Carl singing on all fours with his head inside the bass drum. The room was empty by this point, excepting bar staff and members of the band we were supporting.

'Wow! We cleared the room,' I observed as the last song died away in our ears.

'Fuck 'em!' said Karl with a K, the singer in Charlie's group. 'That was amazing!'

I wasn't always convinced of this. I liked playing the stuff we did, but I was never sure I would have listened to it had I not actually been responsible for its creation. I enjoyed the freedom of playing without obligation to acknowledge whatever some bass player or second guitarist might be doing, but on some level it also felt kind of like cheating, or maybe too easy. I yearned to be in some group of portentous vessels of glacial doom, the sort of thing eschewing any on-stage smiling and definitely no bum jokes, and which would result in strangers congratulating me on my profound solemnity and a long line of knockery girls patiently waiting for access to the contents of my trousers. I muttered words to this effect on a few occasions, and Carl would quite rightly point out that I was the one with the guitar, and it wasn't like anyone was telling me what to play, which was true.

We continued to rehearse, or at least to get together and make stuff up, and to go over those arbitrary combinations of riffs which had begun to sound like songs; or sometimes we'd just piss off to the seaside in Chris's car and eat ice creams instead. Fun was the point, and it remained so, and by Thursday the 6th of March, 1986 we played a second gig, once again at the art college, but this time with an expanded half-hour set including Are You My Mother?, He Believes, Armchair Maniac, the inevitable cover of Louie Louie and probably some others. The event carried a glam rock theme and my diary of the time notes:

People danced! People even cheered! We were followed by the Hubcap Diamond Star Halo Band who mimed to cover versions. We were not as popular but we were at least musically and ideologically superior.

Our third performance was on Saturday the 12th of April, 1986 at a student house in Woodville Road, Maidstone. I have a feeling I may have worn a lady's dress for the occasion, a fetching floor-length Prussian blue number picked up in a charity shop because that's rock 'n' roll. We played at a couple of parties after this, it being easy to do because everything could be fitted into the boot of Chris's car, and we took about five minutes to set up and sound check. Chris's kit was pretty minimal, and then there was just the guitar, an amplifier, and a microphone. We managed to play at a party in Bearsted from the staircase, Chris banging away on the upper landing, myself halfway down much like Kermit's nephew, and Carl doing his thing at the foot of the stairs. I'm fairly sure we also played at a few parties uninvited just by turning up and getting on with it, much to the bewilderment of whoever was living there. Carl was keen on the idea that we might inspire a mixture of awe, surprise and horror, sort of like finding your mum in a readers' wives magazine, he explained.

Even without a pensive bass player, or brooding synth effects, or the sort of mournful dirges guaranteed to get the chicks beating a path to my bedroom door, it was fun to be part of Total Big, and I grew to enjoy it more and more - as I noted in my diary apparently with some surprise on a few occasions. This was doubtless because the three of us enjoyed hanging out together anyway, regardless of all being in the same band. If we weren't rehearsing, or at least making a noise, we would watch Black Adder or old monster movies at Chris's dad's house, or make stupid films or videos to accompany our songs, mostly sped up affairs in which we all jumped up and down pulling faces as soon as the camera was rolling. The Tube on Channel 4 ran a competition, asking aspiring rock bands to send in their own videos, and so we availed ourselves of the thousands of pounds of state of the art video effects and equipment to which I had access as part of my degree course and made a video for the song Armchair Maniac - which if technically advanced, nevertheless still managed to communicate that quality of having been made by chimpanzees. We didn't win, but never mind.

On Tuesday the 9th of December, 1986 my diary records:

Total Big played at the all night work-in event staged in protest against proposed cuts to arts education funding at Maidstone College of Art. Carl, Chris and myself were joined by Mark Smith on saxophone and our set comprised He Believes, Are You My Mother (Or Just A Hole In The Ground?), Rock Sandwich, Louie Sister Joe, You're Okay, Keep Your Dreams A'Burning, Do The Frug, and All Day And All Of The Night.

Mark Smith was a first year time-based media student and saxophone player who had pretty much told us he was joining the band, having seen us play at some party or other. His enthusiastic honking matched our music well, but his forceful introduction came in peculiar contrast to a stage performance during which he continued to drift ever further from his microphone until he was stood hooting and honking away more or less inaudibly on the other side of the refectory, at a greater distance from the rest of the band than most of the audience.

Soon after this, Chris found a job, but it was in Dover on the south coast and so he bought a house down there and moved. It was more than forty miles away, which no longer strikes me as a significant distance, but was at the time enough to preclude the possibility of regular weekend rehearsals.

Carl and I resolved to continue in some form, although it took us a while to work out quite what that was going to be. We had a rehearsal with a first year time based media student succinctly named Mac on drums. It sounded great, so Carl and I thought. Mac was a serious little guy with a permanent five o'clock shadow and a massive drum kit. He was technically very accomplished and probably would have been more at home in some stadium rock outfit. Whether Mac felt the same was unclear beyond that he didn't feel at home in Total Big, and the next few rehearsals were open invitations extended to whoever the hell felt like showing up.

I had a couple of guitars, and three keyboards of varying musicality including both Casio VL Tone and Casio SK1, an early cheap polyphonic sampler. The next few rehearsals or jam sessions or whatever you could call them were chaotic, just groups of people crammed into my bedroom making a noise, all playing something different, songs defined only by the gaps during which no-one was playing. At one point we vaguely decided we would be called the Flaps, possibly due to one number having been distinguished by someone speaking the word flaps into my sampler, then playing it back to apparently hilarious effect because it was, you know, rude and stuff. Then Gareth Roberts, who had turned up for most of these exercises in free jazz, suggested Spinning Pygmies as a name, which at least seemed to relate to the noise we were making in some obscure way, but it was clear that it wasn't really going anywhere.

'We've got two whole songs now,' Gareth notes happily on one of the recordings.

'Yes,' I reply, 'but they're both the same one.'

The tapes sound like what happens when you give a room full of children musical instruments and shout go!, and yet we were actually trying to squeeze out something resembling songs, or at least not specifically resembling industrial noise. The chaos was such that I can no longer even recall who turned up to those sessions aside from Carl, myself, Gareth, and Paul Fallon, although I think the record was seven people on one particularly noisy weekend.

Following the December performance with Mark Smith, I became too lazy to maintain a regular diary, and the next pertinent entry dates from Friday the 19th of June, 1987 reading:

The Dovers play at a party at 5, Terrace Road, Maidstone. Also showing are film and video works by Peter Jones, Gareth Roberts, and Mark Orphan.

We had settled on the Dovers in reference to that being where our former drummer now lived. It seemed a straightforward, direct sort of name, mercifully lacking the wheezing novelty of Spinning Pygmies and the rest. Carl had picked up a small hand held Boss DR220E drum machine from somewhere, and so we became a duo.

In the mean time I still had a burning need to appear on stage in a long coat with my cheeks sucked-in whilst top-heavy female audience members screamed and threw their underwear at me. Somehow the Dovers still wasn't getting me there, and the only interest I had drawn at our 5, Terrace Road performance was from an intense young man with piercing eyes who followed me around after the gig attempting to engage me in conversation about William Blake, and his advances were weird and not entirely welcome. I therefore said yes when asked to join Envy, a Medway group serving as vehicle for the important songs of Paul Mercer, a former fellow student who really knew how to work a frown. I stood at the back playing a Roland SH09 keyboard, pressing the start button on the drum machine, and occasionally hitting an old car door rescued from the side of the road with a baseball bat in an unconvincing but undoubtedly topical dalliance with metal percussion, which was all the rage at the time.

I suspect Carl may have been a little pissed off by this development, and eventually so were the members of Envy, even including myself - just as soon as we realised that the one part of the equation which didn't really work was me. Envy replaced me with a proper drummer, and Carl and I thankfully went back to being full-time Dovers, and full-time gigging Dovers now that I had moved to the Medway towns, having finished college, and found myself on the periphery of a fairly lively music scene. In my brief absence, or at least my brief period of reduced dependability, Carl had been mucking about with a neighbour, a guitarist called Alan Mason; and so as we once again cohered we became a trio comprising singer, two guitars, and a drum machine. We had a few rehearsals and played live a couple of times, but my memory of this period is patchy. I recall that Alan was somewhat more accomplished than myself, and seemed to be playing all sorts of weird chords of his own invention. Additionally he worked out what I was to play when we performed what were effectively his songs, which somewhat threw me as I was more accustomed and much happier to work out my own accompaniment, such as it was; but I guess we achieved some sort of chemistry, as we began to perform fairly regularly in Chatham, mostly at the Sunset Strip, a venue in the basement of a burger joint run by Mr. and Mrs. Amin, parents of Rajun who had been the guitarist in Envy. We supported Sexton Ming's Mind Readers, Johnny Gash, Infinity Corporation, Envy, the Uninvited Guests, Near-Death Experience, Rocking Richard & Whistling Vic Templar, and All Flags Burn. Alan brought a new lease of life to the group, and also a fez for each of us back from his excursion to Morocco, and we wore these on stage but only once in my case because I have a massive head and it kept falling off. Sadly, due to most of our gigs being in Chatham, and Alan being committed to working unorthodox hours in London, he was reduced to an occasional presence as we began to play live with more frequency. It sort of worked due to our being pretty much the opposite of a thirteen-piece orchestra in organisational terms, and on Wednesday the 27th of January, 1988 we played the Sunset Strip backed by Chris from Total Big on drums and Martin, formerly of To The Max playing a second guitar. Occasionally we would invite members of the audience to join in, so we had guest vocals from Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists and Andy Fraser more recently of Unlucky Fried Kitten, to name but two.

Somehow we even began to acquire fans, or at least people who turned up to a succession of gigs and usually looked like they were enjoying it. Judith Mullarkey writing for her music column in the Chatham Standard also seemed to appreciate us, so that was something.

'Who's your favourite band?,' Carl would call out unto the back-combed crowd crammed into the sweaty basement of the Sunset Strip.

'The Dovers!' Sarah and Lynne screamed back in response as everyone else talked amongst themselves and wondered what time Johnny Gash were coming on. I'm pretty sure it was Lynne who won the Tiffany album when Carl offered it as a prize for whoever could applaud the loudest halfway through our set one evening. It was ludicrous, but at least somewhat less ludicrous then setting one's innermost anxieties to a tune and expecting to be congratulated for it; and the possibility now existed of there being people who enjoyed watching the Dovers more than I enjoyed being one, which actually felt quite good.

Then on Saturday the 16th of April 1988, Envy had to pull out of a performance at Chatham Town Hall, apparently part of some broader arts event. They asked us to take their place for some reason, and so suddenly we were on a proper stage and getting paid fifty quid to play our yappy novelty songs. Friends of Jeremy, Planet Mushroom, and ourselves were all to play as support to a group called the Claim. Planet Mushroom included various school kids we vaguely knew from hanging out at Gruts café on the High Street. They played vaguely psychedelic garagey music and were fucking great. They were almost worth seeing just for sheer enthusiasm alone. The Claim had records out and a following, and were thus a big deal. They seemed to regard their support bands as amateurs, which we were, and therefore saw no reason to allow us any time to sound check. They were a proper band, and they apparently found it insulting that their self-important constipated power pop should be prefixed by schoolkids and then a man singing about sandwiches. As we ended our set, I took the microphone and told everyone that Johnny Gash were playing at Churchills next door, adding 'I don't know about you lot, but that's where we're all going, so hopefully we'll see you there.'

We had been busy in 1988, but in 1989 I moved to Coventry and the Dovers went into suspended animation for a little while, re-emerging at the end of 1990 when I moved back down south, to London, and Carl acquired a four-track portastudio. We ceased playing live, mainly through having lost touch with anyone who might hook us up, but we started to record our songs, and even to compose new material of a less blunt disposition, the sort of thing which probably wouldn't have worked so well in a live setting. These songs revealed the more subtle aspects of Carl's voice, which actually proved surprisingly emotive and versatile once released from its obligation to foghorn out rock mating calls expressed as songs about sandwiches. Our work drew closer to the sort of thing I would listen to through choice even were I not somewhere on the recording, but for some reason it never really occurred to us to do anything with this music, or if it did and I've forgotten, we never got around to it.

However, Carl still longed to perform live, that being the area in which he excelled, and which he seemed to enjoy the most; and then bewilderingly, at some point in 1992, we were offered a gig, at some sort of community centre in Amersham. It was something to do with Carl's girlfriend - her sister was a member of one of the bands we were supporting or something along those lines. I don't recall much about these bands other than that they seemed like they might have one or two Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts amongst their number, and they didn't seem to like us much presumably for the same reasons that the Claim hadn't liked us.

I was excited to be playing again, but after all the new music we had recorded - none of which would really lend itself to live performance by just two people - I didn't want to go back to what we had done before, having developed a fear of turning into a variant on Carter the Unlistenable Sex Machine, or anything which could be confused with the same. Carl and I worked out an entirely new set based on drum machine, vocals, and my keyboard through a distortion pedal. It sounded great in rehearsal, sort of like Suicide fronted by Bugs Bunny, and it might have sounded great live but for the fact that I drank so as to overcome my nerves, and inadvertently also overcame my memory of everything I was expected to play live on stage before a paying audience. I did the best I could, blasting out a vaguely tuneful drone whilst Carl did his thing, but it wasn't going down well, and the band we were supporting stood to one side of the stage, apparently hating us even more than the crowd and dooming us to invisibility within great sarcastic clouds of dry ice. There was so much of it that I could barely see my keyboard, although moving to one side I experienced just enough visibility to appreciate the sight of Carl retaliating, still singing whilst jumping up and down on the main band's carefully arranged and sound-checked array of effects pedals, reducing them to chip and transistor pizzas.

We finished, and before the dry ice could clear to reveal our destruction, we were in the van and driving hastily back to London. The sense of relief was incredible, and I was just happy that it was over. We didn't even talk about the gig, and I'm not sure we have ever discussed it to this day. It was horrible, and particularly because I'd had such high hopes of having at last escaped from my own chugging guitar riffs. I'd pushed the whole thing just a little bit closer to that band I'd always wanted to be in, and realised it had been a fucking terrible idea all along; and regrettably, that somehow became the end of the Dovers.

Carl and I recorded together again, and we remained bestest friends regardless, but musically it was over, and for no good or clear reason I can really remember. Carl sang in other groups, at least one with Alan Mason on guitar, and I saw them live on a couple of occasions. As with the Dovers, I'm not sure I would have played the records had there been any, but live they were fucking fantastic, and left me wondering if Total Big or the Dovers had ever been that good from the perspective of someone stood in the audience. I will never know, but I suppose the main thing was that it was fun, and as such it always did more or less what it had promised on the tin.