Truck Pictures

The diner is called Bar-B-Cutie, which makes me wince somewhat. Barbecue is okay but it's way down my list, contrary to current geographical determinist thought or at least to Mary, my dad's partner who asked what sort of thing I eat in Texas, then declared but it's all barbecue innit. This will be my third top convention, an event hosted for the benefit of collectors of high-end hand-tooled metal spinning tops.

Me neither, but Andrea does, and Andrea is my wife's best friend. The person who agreed to organise the convention raffle has gone AWOL, so Bess is helping out. The convention is tomorrow but we're meeting tonight for the sake of having a look at the venue.

Bar-B-Cutie seems to be the McDonald's of barbecue - the cheap and cheerful version. I order decimated brisket in a burger bun with sides of mashed potato and coleslaw, plus a beer - obviously. The two previous top conventions were similarly held at barbecue joints, the towns of Mansfield and Spring respectively. Collectors of high-end hand-tooled metal spinning tops enjoy barbecue.

We find a seat and wait for the food. I haven't eaten all day so I'm very hungry. Other spinning top people mill around, and Andrea points out Robyn and Lawerence. I recognise Robyn from one of the two previous events.

The brisket is delicious, once it arrives. The mashed potato is decent. The coleslaw is unpleasant, with a faint tang of waste disposal or a sink which fails to drain. After two forkfuls I decide against it.

Robyn turns up at our table. She remembers Bess and she shows us photographs of her resin creations. They're purely decorative but are quite nice. She explains that Lawerence's name is spelled that way because his father didn't make it through high school, so the misspelling is legal. Funnily enough, when banks and shitbrained employers misspell my name, that's how they misspell it.

'Also, he's Lawrence with a w,' Robyn adds. 'I know back in your country it's mostly Laurence with a u.'

I try, but am unable to recall ever having met a Laurence. I can't think of many Lawrences either, excepting Lawrence Miles.

I'm still hungry so I order another burger, this time with Polish sausage. It comes with fries and tastes good, although the fries are a bit dry.

Robyn shows me a photograph on her smartphone - a truck with horns attached to the front bumper.

'We knew we were in Texas just as soon as we saw this.'

I don't know if she expects us to be flattered, impressed, amazed or what. I think about my dad showing Lynda around Coventry Cathedral, telling her all about Australia and what it's like to live there based on the month he spent visiting Frank, his younger brother. Lynda moved to Australia in 1973. I expect she knows a fair bit about what it's like to live there but is too polite to say anything.

Meanwhile, back in the present, back at Bar-B-Cutie, Robyn is showing me a picture of vehicles driven by herself and misspelled Lawerence, both dayglo lime, a truck and a Dodge of some description, therefore ticking another couple of boxes.

The air conditioning is such that I'm cold enough to wish I'd brought a jumper. I can't really hear what anyone is saying because we're in a room full of people, specifically top enthusiasts; and when I can hear them, I don't always understand because they speak with that wide-ass Texan cracker accent which I don't actually hear on a daily basis; and when I do understand them, I can't work out why they're telling me. Someone is showing me a picture of their fucking truck and I feel a powerful need to be elsewhere before anyone asks what I thought of the last Spurs game.

Bess, as usual, is able to read my mind. 'We'll leave before nine,' she reassures me, except it doesn't because it's only just gone seven. I don't say anything but my face says it for me. I've always found it difficult to conceal expressions of despair and horror.

Ten minutes later we're in the car heading home.

'Maybe you should just do a half day tomorrow,' Bess suggests. 'I could come back and pick you up around lunch.'

I agree to this, then realise I simply can't.

'Do you really need me to be there, I mean at all?'

'Well, I don't like to leave you on your own.'

'I'll be fine,' I say.

'Honest.'

Ten Things Which America Doesn't Really Get

Bacon. It's all streaky. I once encountered proper bacon in an establishment describing itself as an English style pub, and was so surprised I had to get the waitress to ask the chef where he bought it. Apparently he had it flown in from North Carolina.

On a similarly carnivorous theme, lamb isn't particularly popular over here either, meaning kebab shops are sadly few and far between. There are a couple of Mediterranean places which do a decent doner kebab, but they never quite get the pita bread right, or the chili sauce, or the fat, grumpy bloke who calls you my friend but otherwise refuses to speak English following a long, long evening of being addressed as Stavros by horizontally-inclined beer enthusiasts.

Beer. Sadly no-one in America ever just nipped down the road for a pint, so it has come to be regarded as an exotic practice. Beer tends to come in bottles, either your regular swill or artisan beverages with knowingly stupid names like Burst Radiator or Enraged Skinhead, most of which taste like what you get when touching the two terminals of a standard nine volt battery to your tongue. Bars - which are what we have instead of pubs - tend to serve either Miller Lite or Budweiser, neither of which really count as beer; excepting the fancier places serving Burst Radiator, Enraged Skinhead and others on tap to men who spend the evening talking about different kinds of shit beer. In England I generally encountered unorthodox beers in a pub, usually by means of a decision-making process concluding with the words, fuck it - I may as well have a pint of that, I suppose, whereas here the activity seems spiritually closer to stamp collecting. This is why I stick to Mexican beer, and because it actually is beer.

Civilisation. This entry was going to be Government, but then I'm not sure any country really has the hang of that one, and the broader heading allows for discussion of contributing factors. Colonial America was founded seemingly with the intention of getting around the problems of what happens when you have hereditary leadership, meaning no Kings or Queens and that the job of President should go to whoever the people generally feel is best suited. Unfortunately this now amounts to who can afford the most effective advertising campaign, meaning it's usually the upper classes, in turn meaning that we're slipping back towards a dynastic model of leadership. This is justified by the erroneous notion of how those with the most money must be really amazing to have earned their fortune and are therefore well-suited to telling the rest of us what to do. All sorts of factors have contributed to the evolution of the English upper classes, and not all of them necessarily meaning we get terrible people at the end of the process. Some may be arseholes, but I've met a fair few who aren't, and who are very much aware of the mechanism of their privilege and who tend to have genuinely benefited from an expensive education - as you would hope. Here, on the other hand, being upper class is just a case of having a shitload of money, regardless of how it was obtained, and the American upper classes are pretty much just Terry and June from the English sitcom of the same name but with a mammoth bank balance. I know this, having stood behind them in queues and listened to their gormless conversations about Bon Jovi and alt-country and the Obama dictatorship and a better standard of person in their shitty golfing slacks. This is why socialism has become a bad word amongst those who have no actual experience of it and don't really quite understand what it means, namely because our upper classes are people who genuinely believe that money makes everything right, and that the best deal is the most popular, simplest, and therefore the cheapest - which as anyone who ever shopped at the Dollar Store will tell you is not necessarily the case.

Here's the thing with socialism: if you want to be a part of civilisation, then you are obliged to pay taxes as a contribution to that civilisation, given that the civilisation in question is about more than just you. Taxes pay for roads, emergency services, and general infrastructure, and it really isn't down to you to decide who deserves what, and it is about the whole rather than what's directly in it for any one person. If you don't wish to pay taxes or be part of civilisation, that's fine. You have the option of fucking off to the forest or the mountains or else discovering your own country using a road you've laid yourself rather than one of the ones we paid to have built for you, and you should be ready to generate your own electricity when you get there.

Any civilisation worthy of the term tends to be comprised of people who make things and do stuff rather than spending their time asking what do I get out of this? or whining about how political correctness is destroying their lives.

Law Enforcement. My experience with the police force in England has generally been consistent with the idea that whilst there are doubtless a few bad 'uns, these are persons who have somehow eluded rigorous checks in what is otherwise a fairly extensive training program. I could be wrong about this, but I sometimes get the impression that the training procedure of our police force is a guy who asks would you like a gun? Hopefully I'm very much mistaken.

North-East. England has Newcastle-upon-Tyne, home of the greatest accent known to man, and we get fucking New York. You'll know if you've ever met someone from New York because they will have told you about a million times and will have pronounced it Noo Yawk Cidee in an attempt to be cute. Additionally they will probably have described the place as some sort of free-thinking utopia in a land otherwise dominated by record-burning Ku Klux Klansmen who hate black people, improvised jazz, and anything resembling Communism. The only New Yorkers I like tend to be rap artists, persons such as MOP, current title holders of the world's greatest improvised exhortation to party heard on a rap record, which was bang your head against the wall, come on! during some song on the Warriorz album. Those guys can do no wrong so far as I'm concerned.

Pork Pies. I only get the craving once a year, and I could possibly purchase one from a certain mail order outfit specialising in fancy foreign foods, but the $70 refrigerated shipping cost is prohibitive considering that I'd probably eat half of the thing and then go off the idea, as I have done in the past. My dad always used to have a pork pie for Christmas morning which was apparently part of some tradition, although I don't know if it was just him or whether it's some more widespread observance. Here in San Antonio we traditionally have pork tamales on Christmas morning. A tamale is made from maize flour - and pork in this case - steamed in a corn husk. They're from Mexico and of pre-Colombian origin; and they're okay, but it just isn't the same.

Come to think of it, the cakes are all a bit weird too - kind of dry and far too sweet and always with that cream from a fucking spray can. Greggs should seriously think about opening up over here. They'd make a killing.

Rebellion. This is something with which American teenagers - or sometimes older people - engage between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. The epitomy of American teenage revolution is Michael J. Fox dancing to Depeche Mode on the hood of a car stalled in gridlocked traffic and in doing so teaching the grown-ups a thing or two about what it means to be young. Rebellion generally occurs once you're done with the scouts and before you get a job selling car insurance to those seduced by advertising for Dodge vehicles. Sometimes it's difficult to believe that this is the same country which came up with Elvis, the Ramones, and MOP.

Ska. As Wikipedia is my witness, Ska is a musical genre that originated in Jamaica in the late fifties and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae, combining elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. It is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off-beat. It isn't, and nor will it ever be, twelve white dudes from Vermont in pork pie hats playing a song with a chorus sounding more like U2 than Prince Buster. Sorry. I don't make the rules.

Sweets. Candy always sounds like a euphemism for something illegal, and in a few cases it actually is. Our chocolate bars mostly taste like the supermarket's own brand products, and I'm talking Wavy Line or Happy Shopper rather than Waitrose. We have Cadbury's, but mostly sold only in stores frequented by a better standard of person and accessible only by means of vehicular transport.

Vehicular Transport. If you don't drive in America you're pretty much screwed unless you're conveniently married to someone who does, as I am. It's easy enough to walk around the centre of whichever town or city you may be in, but I would guess there are not many people living in the centre of their town or city. Most of us are in the suburbs where there's no nipping down to the shop on the corner for a can of pop and a pork pie, or even a tamale. Given this heavy emphasis on automotive travel, you might think this would be an area in which America excels, but sadly no. The extent and scale of our roads and highways combined with a population density much lower than that of the United Kingdom means that a traffic jam is something to be endured for slow moving minutes rather than stationary hours, but America has chosen to compensate for this relative freedom by having everyone drive trucks the size of your average fishing trawler. The fucking things are enormous, resembling giant Tonka toys, and whilst I can see one might justify such gargantuan vessels on a ranch, or if engaged in a business requiring that one travel with a fleet of lawnmowers in the back, otherwise there's really no excuse. Dental assistants are rarely required to convey injured bison back from the creek so far as I am aware, so they most likely choose enormous trucks as compensation for some deficiency, although obviously I have no idea what that could be.

A recent television commercial for the Dodge motor company shows actors portraying the Dodge brothers - Horace and John - magically transported from 1914, newsboy caps and all, leering with joy at their legacy of giant-sized Hot Wheels cars pulling wheelies and revving engines. Their joy is clear from lurid smiles comparable to those of fetishists who take sexual pleasure from pooing in their own pants and who have presently done just that. The commercial is hard to watch, and it's annoying, and I guess the assumption is that rest of us are expected to want to share in this sort of excitement.

Obama

It is August 2011 and I've been in the United States a couple of months; and I've also got married and become stepfather to a nine-year old boy in that time. Everything is different to anything to which I am accustomed, and on occasion it feels like I'm living on a different planet. At this precise moment, having only just woken up, my most immediate concern is that the bedside table is just a little too far away from the bed. This concerns me because it means that nothing on the bedside table - alarm clock, reading glasses, earplugs, glass of tea, crappy science-fiction novel - is quite within comfortable reach, and it also concerns me because whilst I know this to be a problem which would take less than a minute to solve, I know this to be precisely the sort of problem I will never get around to addressing. My personality has doomed me to suffer the yawning gulf between bed and bedside table for at least as long as my wife and I remain in this house.

I reach out and miss, as usual, and there follows the sound of something hard hitting the floor. Cursing, I rise from the bed and pick up my wristwatch. I look at the time. The watch has stopped.

Shit.

The watch was a present from my mother, something connecting me to the world as it was before K1 visas and wild leaps in the dark. There is something horribly symbolic about this, and from this point on each time I think about my watch falling to the hard wooden floor, I will think of it in unnecessarily dramatic terms borrowed from the fourth volume of Watchmen by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore - swarms of tiny broken cogs and springs cast cinematically to the floor; and the djinn refusing to return to its oil lamp, Pandora's futile efforts to cram all that crap back into the box, or the man in the child's joke crying with laughter as he tells me I should have seen the monkey trying to put the cork back in.

I feel terrible.

'Take it to Walmart,' my wife tells me. 'It's probably just the battery.'

I consider asking how likely it would be that the battery just happened to run out of juice as I dropped the thing, but I say nothing because it's hardly her fault; and I suppose it might be worth a try.

A few hours later I am in Walmart at the jewellery counter. I have explained to the girl what happened, although she doesn't seem that interested. Either she is confused by my accent, or I've given her  more information than she needed. She pops off the back and prises the battery free from its housing, and meanwhile there is now someone here who isn't at all confused by my accent.

'Why you must be from England!'

A jovial older woman who walks as though there's something wrong with her leg grins at me. It is the grin of someone generally addressed as Mawmaw as she calls ranch hands in for their supper, a nourishing stew with chitlins and grits and vittles, whatever those may be.

I smile an encouraging smile, because although I have a feeling I'm about to experience that conversation yet again, it's difficult to take ill against someone who seems so clearly delighted by one's presence.

'Yes, I am from England.'

She asks which part. I tell her Stratford-upon-Avon because she will almost certainly have heard of the place and it seems more likely to facilitate conversation. I spent the first two decades of my life within ten miles of Shakespeare's birthplace, but lived in London longer, and concluded with a couple of years in Coventry before moving to the United States. I think of myself as being from London, but it seems best to give a simple, populist answer.

She asks how I like Texas, clearly expecting cute complaints about being unable to find a pub that serves Marmite or uncertainty as to whether my prayer mat is correctly orientated towards Buckingham Palace. I tell her that I like Texas very much, because I do. I find the people generally a little more pleasant than the English, and the weather is less depressing.

'Well,' she chortles, apparently taken aback, 'it's a fine country, I guess.' The tone of her voice becomes conspiratorial. 'It'll be an even finer one when we get rid of that damned Obama!'

I find myself shocked by this, not quite so much the sentiment as the thematic thrust of the sentence, clearly a revision of that damned nigger! I'm suddenly annoyed by the presence of this idiot, and annoyed with myself for having failed to recognise her as such. It's the assumption that I find aggravating, the assumption of our all being in agreement regarding that damned ni—that damned Obama and our supposed desire to be rid of him.

I glance over at the girl behind the counter, still fiddling with my watch. She is black. She can't really have misread the situation, somehow believing I might know this woman, but she has no way of knowing whether I too wish to be rid of that damned ni—that damned Obama. Then again, maybe she didn't hear; or maybe she too wants rid of that damned ni—that damned Obama; or maybe she doesn't care.

It doesn't make a great deal of difference to me in the sense that I'm not eligible to vote, but generally speaking, I like Obama. For one, he's the first black president of a country which still had widespread racial segregation laws as recent as 1964; so his election seems indicative of something positive to me, regardless of whatever else the man may have done. Of course there are those who would probably describe this as an inverse form of racism, typical of a wet lefty liberal tofu-scoffing PC thug commie apologist like myself, but such persons - at least in my unfortunate experience - also tend to spout crap about white heterosexual males being the last minority which it is still apparently okay to oppress, so their testimony is really worth no more than that of a sophisticated mobile telephone.

I don't follow politics inordinately closely because I find the small print fairly dull and almost always unpleasant, but nevertheless I fail to see why anyone would object strongly to Obama on grounds other than that he's American - if you're from somewhere else and dislike America as an institution - or because he occasionally gives the appearance of favouring regular people over people with more money than they need, in the event of that not being your scene. I expressed this admittedly casual support by sharing a pro-Obama campaign meme on facebook during the last Presidential election. Inevitably an English person I don't actually know responded with a sneering well, what about the tent cities?

I replied with a dismissive and hopefully annoying sure, because I wasn't interested in an argument, and particularly not one fought in the name of point scoring as indicated by an opening salvo equivalent to I suppose you think it's good that tiny babies are being roasted alive? I suppose you think that's a good thing, do you? Perhaps I am indeed an over-privileged and uninformed moron on the grounds that I don't spend twenty-five hours a day quivering with indignation, but the bottom line was that I would prefer to live in a country governed by Obama than a country governed by a man who believes the Earth to be only six-thousand years old, or who is at least popular amongst those who believe the Earth to be only six-thousand years old, and for reasons that really should be obvious. I nevertheless regard the majority of politicians to be essentially corrupt, so it struck me in this case as patronising to assume that my support equated to blind adoration; but of course, that's the internet for you.

In any case, those who dislike Obama probably need to cheer up a little given that there's so many of them. Obama is referred to as the worst president we ever had by some, even as a dictator by those who apparently can't tell the difference between concentration camps, news blackouts, and a politician saying things you don't like whilst raising certain taxes. National Enquirer regularly plasters a haplessly grinning Barack across its front cover, explaining how once again he's been caught having a sneaky peek at someone's tits and the Obama marriage is in ruins, and what we really need to do is to tie weights to his feet and drop him in the sea, and then at last we will be free... free, I tell you... ha ha ha...

It was the same with Tony Blair, I suppose. I don't know anyone who didn't spend the day punching the air when it was announced that he had become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, ending what felt like four-hundred years of Conservative government; but was anyone really under any illusion that he wouldn't ultimately turn out to be just another shiny-faced three-timing insurance salesman? That's what politicians do; and despite his apparently being the most evil man who ever lived, I still think Obama is probably okay in context of the menu as a whole.

I didn't say any of this to the woman in Walmart for the same reason that I didn't bother responding to Mr. what about the tent cities? Happily she had already moved away, chuckling to herself and probably composing some anecdote about the British guy at the store by which to entertain the ranch hands as they tucked into their stew and chitlins and grits and vittles.

I like Obama, personally, I imagined myself saying to the girl behind the counter in an effort to disassociate myself from the woman, but thankfully I had the sense to keep my mouth shut, given that such a defence would only continue the cycle of assuming stupid shit about complete strangers. Hey, great - you know I really love the music of Bob Marley!

She handed back my watch. 'It was the battery. I put in a new one for you.'

I looked. The second hand was moving again.

It seemed like an incredible thing.

The world was set to right.

Texercise

Since jacking in my Royal Mail job in 2009 I've taken to cycling in an effort to avoid turning into a massive sedentary blob sat all day at the computer, scoffing mini-pizzas and burping out incomprehensible stories that no-one will ever read. In Texas, despite all the wide open spaces, this is not so easily done as it was in Coventry. Whilst the roads are wider, and drivers seem generally a little better behaved, their vehicles are often of absurd dimensions in compensation for something or other at which one can only guess. If you run a lawn care business or you work on a ranch and are occasionally required to go after a buffalo that's made its bid for freedom, I can see how you would have use for an enormous truck. If you're just some guy who works in the city and likes barbecue, then the only justification I can see for why you might need one of those General Motors leviathans would be as compensation for a deficit in some other, more trousery department. Whatever the reason, it means that cycling on Texas highways is not so relaxing a pastime as it could be.

The other factor is the sun, because Texas is somewhat more equatorial than the land of my birth. Cycling in England became problematic during those winters when I would throw open the front door to be confronted with a sheer wall of ice, sometimes containing deep frozen cavemen like in a Charles Addams cartoon; plus the four grudging hours of mid-grey daylight during December tended to swivel one's thoughts in the direction of either hibernation or ending it all there and then rather than getting in a few miles on the old penny farthing. Winter in Texas is distinguished as the three days when you turn off the air conditioning and wear a jumper, the unfortunate pay off being that summer is hot; as in really hot. Summer in Texas is not about popping into Currys to buy a fan, or mopping your brow and taking consolation from the knowledge that at least your tomatoes will do well; summer in Texas means staying inside during the day so as to avoid radiation sickness, water catching fire as soon as it comes out of the tap, and rivers of sweat still sluicing down your face at two in the morning. It is fucking hot, which is why we have all those snakes and lizards and cacti. Some days, opening the front door at ten in the morning can be like walking into a pizza oven. I've spent time baking in Mexico City, at one stage even having my entire face peel off more or less as a single sheet in unintentional homage to Xipe Totec, the Corn God who manifests in a mask of human skin; but Mexico City is up in the clouds where the air is noticeably sparse, so the heat is more manageable. The kindest thing one can say of San Antonio in terms of its summertime climate - which in case I didn't quite make it clear may be likened to that of the sunny side of the planet Mercury - is that at least it's not Houston.

Houston gets really hot

To return to the main point, the one thing stood between myself and my ultimate fate as a burger-chugging human sofa cosy grunting my way through all five-hundred plus adventurtastic episodes of Stargate SG1 is probably my bike, which I purchased at Walmart, and which I try to ride every day.

Happily, it seems that San Antonio had anticipated my arrival by  opening up the Tobin Trail, a surfaced greenway following creek, shaded woodland and flood plain by which I can avoid both highways and at least some of the sun. It's an urban work in progress which, once complete will form a continuous loop around the city limits; and so long as I can get going early enough to avoid the heat - which really becomes unbearable around eleven - I'm all set. Weekends excepted, I ride just over thirteen miles a day, always the same thirteen miles - from Eisenhauer Road to the top of the hill just past Wetmore then back again. It's a little repetitive, and will continue to be so at least until the city connects my regular stretch to the southern part of the trail beyond Binz-Engleman. The country lanes around Coventry were perhaps superior in terms of choice, but even with the same daily route, it's difficult to get bored in a land which dishes up something new and unexpected to an almost daily schedule. Herons, eagles, turtles, snakes, vultures, deer, lizards, and an entirely unfamiliar pantheon of colourful songbirds have yet to lose their appeal despite having become familiar, even commonplace.

I've learned that certain turtles, when picked up from the track so as to prevent their getting run over, will empty their bladders as a defence mechanism - and you'd be surprised how much liquid those things contain. I've also learned, thankfully not from experience, that alligator turtles will bite off your fingers given the chance and so are best left to their own devices. The biggest alligator turtle I've encountered was roughly the size of a respectable bull terrier, and I wasn't in any great hurry to airlift him to safety, particularly as I'm fairly sure I actually heard him telling me to piss off. Coral snakes on the other hand are smaller and prettier, with their red and yellow bands, and even knowing that their bite can kill, it's hard to think ill of something with such a cute widdle face and such a retiring disposition; in respect of which, I have come to truly appreciate the homily of terrifying creatures being more scared of you than you are of them. This was impressed upon me once as I skidded around both a corner and the interior surface of my pants coming face to face with a steep grassy bank of twenty or thirty black vultures, a hillside of Uncle Fester size carnivores all considering me with beady black eyes. I just had time to form the understanding that I was about to die when they apparently concluded as one that I was the scariest thing they had ever seen and swept up into the sky. Meeting them up close, and seeing those confused little faces on their disproportionately tiny heads, the experience taught me that even the traditionally unlovable vulture is not lacking a charm of its own.

It isn't even just the spectacular wildlife - there are the plants, also the entire ecosystem of dry limestone riverbeds which vanish beneath eight or nine feet of water after a good afternoon's rainfall, draining over the next few days to leave mud flats popping with millions of tiny frogs.

Since jacking in my Royal Mail job in 2009 and taking up cycling, I've kept track of the full tally of the distance I've travelled. I've just recently gone over 9,000 miles, more than half of those here in the US, back and forth between Rittiman and Wetmore, day after day, month after month.

Texas is hot and often weird, but it's never dull.

'You heard me,' said the turtle. 'Piss off.'

Texas Cow People

Over the course of the last eighteen months I've grown somewhat protective, even defensive regarding my adopted home state. Now that I'm living here, I've become painfully aware of how Texas and its people tend to be viewed by uninformed morons. As we all know, the American Civil War was fought because Lincoln wanted to free all the slaves from evil southern types with their moonshine and their Lynyrd Skynyrd albums on eight track, and that's the only reason, and there were no other factors involved. The north loved freedom and improvised jazz and all that good stuff, and the south has always been as you would expect it to be from reading comic books by award winning Quentin Tarantino karaoke turns like Garth Ennis: barbecues and lynchings mainly.

I'm joking, or at least employing a somewhat acidic brand of sarcasm, but sadly there are quarters where such views are held in earnest. People who've never been here nevertheless feel amply qualified to offer their uninformed opinions on the grounds of having seen a television programme about George Bush, or having met some guy for five minutes back in 1987, or being English and therefore eminently qualified to confront strangers with the error of their peculiar foreign ways, what with England being the fount of all culture and civilisation. Even people from northern states join in the fun, quipping about how much better America would be if we could just get rid of Texas, although being as that sentiment seems most often expressed by residents of New England, it's probably not worth taking too seriously.

Texans, I have found as a generalisation, are among the most pleasant people I've met anywhere in the world with the possible exception of Mexicans and the French. Texans, for the most part, conduct themselves with dignity and good manners without any apparent need to prove anything. When I walk around San Antonio I see faces of all colours, mostly either content or just getting on with it, no white pointy hoods, conspicuously born firearms or burning crosses; none busily making online pronouncements regarding the supposedly unsavoury national character of an entire country based upon the foreign policy of its government; none so repellent or inbred as the milk-souring gargoyles I used to watch braving the shitty English weather, faces twisted by some pathological need to make everyone else as miserable as themselves, skin the colour of blu-tack. Without further expanding this brief disclaimer into an essay on why I prefer Texas to, for example, the country that gave us Simon Cowell, Jeremy Clarkson and the Daily Mail proclaiming Hurrah for the Blackshirts, I'll leave it with the summation that I'd rather live in a fucking cake tin in San Antonio than a luxury apartment in London.

It therefore causes me great pain to write of the Cow People, one aspect by which the state of Texas has somewhat let itself down. Cows are amongst my favourite dairy animals, so I should probably make it clear that I'm not referring to either them or to the esteemed agriculturalists who provide their care, or at least who provide their care up to the point at which they are converted into beefs. Cow People tend to be bright pink, around seven feet tall, and can be seen slowly cruising the aisles of major supermarket outlets in search of meat. Their top cruising speed levels off at about one mile an hour which, because they often visit stores as a bonded pair sometimes with one or two Texas Calf People in tow, and because some of them may also grow up to seven feet in diameter, presents a considerable impediment to the more conspicuously mobile members of the community. Anyone reading this in some part of the world specialising in small people and thus having trouble imagining such a scenario can recreate the experience by attempting to shop whilst having groups of friends slowly propel couches up and down the aisles of the store. The best way to avoid Texas Cow People whilst shopping is to steer clear of sections stocking meat or barbecue supplies, these being where they tend to congregate. Cow People, I am forced to surmise, consider cooking a bit fancy and thus favour the simpler method of setting a big pile of meat on fire.

If inconvenient, this tendency towards obstruction is not so annoying as what happens once the Cow People have purchased their meat and take it out to their truck; because it's always a fucking truck, because just as the universe is essentially recursive with the same forces which spin galaxies into fractal configurations similarly prescribing the subatomic interplay of gluons, muons, and mu-mesons, pointlessly enormous people must go from the place where meat is sold to the place where meat is set on fire by means of a pointlessly enormous vehicle.

Trucks are the most obvious visual clue as to the presence of Texas Cow People, the factor which differentiates Texas from Catford in southeast London, a borough similarly blessed with a puzzlingly massive branch of humanity. I know I've left Texas when I am no longer able to see trucks, because out of every ten vehicles on a San Antonio highway, seven will be trucks the size of cruise liners. Of course, not all of these trucks are driven entirely without  justification. There are trucks favoured by landscape gardeners carting their lawn mowers around, or the few farmers who drive into town to pick up supplies - timber or whatever - but the other six of those seven drivers will be people employed at banks, stores, warehouses, or some guy called Chet who kind of has a job working for his billionaire father, except it isn't paid, but then he doesn't really need the money, and no-one seems to know what the job entails or where he goes when he isn't having one of his many days off. These people need a truck the size of fucking Belgium like I need my feet surgically removed and replaced with wheels. They don't have anything huge requiring transportation, excepting possibly themselves, and no-one in Texas farms elephants to the best of my knowledge, so rounding up escaped Jumbos should not be an issue. Texas has trucks in much the same way as certain parts of south east London have those off-road land cruisers by which yummy mummies drive their single tiny child to private school; and it's annoying.

The vehicles look absurd, Claes Oldenburg versions of the Tonka trucks I played with as a kid, the automotive equivalent of 58" silicon breasts sold via a direct psychological hotline to some guy who hasn't yet noticed that he's no longer six. When I stop at a junction on the bicycle I ride due to being too stupid to have ever got around to learning how to drive, often I find I am unable to turn as desired, not due to oncoming traffic, but due to being unable to assess the state of oncoming traffic, my field of vision being blocked by some overinflated Ford or General Motors balloon toy obstructing my view of half of the entire universe and driven by someone whose favourite television show is a clip of a man falling over to a soundtrack of uproarious laughter.

Texas, I'll be forever grateful for your letting me come to stay, and I can hardly begin to express how glad I am that almost everything I'd heard about you has turned out to be complete drivel; but we really need to do something about these Cow People.