From the Cheese Cave to the End of Days

'My friend Jeremy will be in Dallas,' Bess said. 'We need to go.'

'We need to go to Dallas?'

'Yes. He has a one man show. The cats will be okay for one night and I haven't seen him in ages.'

'He has a one man show?'

'Yes, and it's in Dallas.'

'Despite our having been married for eight years, this is the first time you've ever mentioned anyone called Jeremy.'

'It is?'

'Yes, and that's why I have certain reservations as to the urgency of this proposed visit to Dallas even before we get to your use of the term one man show.'

'We've been friends for ages, since we were at school. I can't believe I've never mentioned him.'

'Well, maybe you have, but I already have a friend called Jeremy and it's not a very common name in my experience so I'm sure I would have noticed your mention of this additional Jeremy.'

'Well, we need to go to Dallas.'

'For a one man show?'

'Yeah. I don't know. It could be awful, but I have to see him. Even if it's really bad, it will still be exciting to go. We can visit Dealey Plaza.'

'Can't I just stay here? That way we won't have to worry about the cats. I hate leaving them on their own overnight. You should go and meet your friend and have fun.'

In the end we reach a compromise because Bess is similarly uncomfortable with the thought of leaving the cats unattended. We're going to set out early in the car, see Jeremy's one man show, then drive back the same day. It will be a long time spent on the highway, but we did it back in 2013 when we drove to Fort Worth to see a baby elephant then recently born at the local zoo. It's a bit of a hike, but we've done it before.

We leave at around nine. By ten we're already passing through Austin, which seems weird. Austin is usually to be found at the conclusion of a long road trip, but the travel time has passed more quickly on this occasion with Austin now marking off just one segment of a greater distance.

Bess explains how she first encountered Jeremy during a school trip to Washington DC. The trip brought together kids from all across the country rather than from any one specific school, and she and Jeremy were in the same hotel. They hit it off immediately and have kept in touch ever since.

The next major conurbation through which we pass following Austin is Temple. I look at the map and deduce that we should be in Dallas shortly after midday. We've been on the road since nine, it's now eleven, and Temple isn't far short of Waco which looks like two thirds of the total distance to me. We've been listening to a CD of a lecture by Howard Zinn entitled Stories Hollywood Never Tells, about political bias in the movie industry. Andy Martin gave me the CD many years ago and I recall having once found it interesting and enlightening. We tend to listen to either spoken word or stand up comedy on our road trips, and Howard Zinn seemed like a good choice as I hadn't heard the thing in a long, long time. Unfortunately, whilst I continue to sympathise with Zinn's general position, he pauses and mutters and doesn't seem to speak well in public, and there are a whole string of movies conveying anti-establishment, anti-war, or otherwise left-leaning messages to refute his theory; which leaves him sounding like your archetypal whining snowflake - as I believe is the current nominative - and this is a realisation which places me in the company of your archetypal whining Trumpanzee, which is awkward. Bess feels the same so we eject the disc.

Approaching Waco, we begin to notice billboards advertising the Cheese Cave.

'The what?' Bess asks, having missed the billboard.

'It's a cave, probably one of the old mine shafts where they used to dig for cheese,' I propose.

'We need to go there.'

Traffic slows as we come into Waco.

'We could just go to the Cheese Cave and tell Jeremy the traffic was too bad,' I suggest.

'I'm tempted.'

We crawl along, idly making an assessment of the city of Waco based on what can be seen from the highway. We already know they have a Cheese Cave. They also seem to have something to do with a mammoth. Inevitably we get onto the subject of David Koresh and whether or not the city has chosen to remember him with a statue, or at least a blue plaque. Realistically we both know that a theme park would be expecting too much.

By now, we're both hungry. We make several attempts to dine at branches of Cracker Barrel, an eating establishment dedicated to the dining requirements of crackers such as ourselves, but it's Father's Day so the parking lots are all crammed and with lines of customers trailing out of the entrance awaiting seating. We settle for Heitmiller Steakhouse, and Bess takes the opportunity to learn more of the Cheese Cave by reading about it through the agency of her phone. Apparently it's a store selling all sorts of cheese, so we definitely need to go there at some point.

Duly fed and watered, we return to the road. Dallas, when we arrive about an hour later, reminds me of Austin. At least the city centre has the same look about it, which I didn't expect. I think of this as being my third trip to this locality, but the two previous visits were actually to Fort Worth, the neighbouring conurbation which I've tended to regard as being simply west Dallas, at least up until now.

Dallas, the TV show, was pretty big when I was a kid growing up in England. Its influence was such as to have impacted upon the language of myself and my peers, specifically in the coining of a verb, to do a Dallas. Holding two slats of a window blind apart with one's fingers whilst peering out at an approaching visitor, perhaps with a look of suspicion forming upon one's face, was doing a Dallas. I seem to recall that Sue Ellen Ewing spent quite a lot of screen time doing a Dallas, and presume that's where it came from. It seems that I must have watched Dallas, and enough so as to negate the need for anyone to have explained the verb to me, but it was a long time ago and all I can otherwise remember are grassy plains, skyscrapers, and big hats. So this is, after all, a new thing for me.

We pass what curiously resembles a British pub, then find ourselves at Theatre Three. Jeremy's one man show will be performed in the basement, in a subsidiary venue wittily named Theatre Too, and we're here with twenty minutes to spare, which seems like good timing. We purchase drinks in special theatrical sippy cups from a goth wearing a Church of Satan pendant, then head downstairs.

Jeremy sees us in the queue - which isn't too surprising given that the queue comprises just Bess and myself - and is overjoyed that we've made it. Introductions are effected, breeze is shot, and I am relieved to realise that he's a nice guy. This is because my wife is disinclined to befriend arseholes.

The show, which is called Keeping Up With the Jorgensons, isn't well attended, just five or six of us for whatever reason, but is nevertheless an exceptional performance of a wonderful piece of writing. Jeremy spends an hour talking us through the events of a road trip taken with his father when he was a kid. It's both hilarious and horrifying, and most impressive is that I somehow forget I'm watching one man playing all of the parts - himself as a kid, his father, grandfather, neighbours and others; all are brought to life in detail so agonisingly plausible that you can almost smell the booze and the foot odour. It's exhausting to watch, but in a good way.

The hour is up. Jeremy comes out to take a bow, seemingly unconcerned by the poor turnout, and Bess and I get back on the road. The woman who sold us our tickets said something about a tornado warning, which is worrying. Back upstairs, we stare from the theatre doors at a Biblical deluge where before there was sun. We were going to take a look at Dealey Plaza, but this changes things; and Jeremy was supposed to be heading off to the airport to catch his flight immediately after the performance, so it probably changes things for him too. We run for the car, having reasoned that it may get worse, and maybe we can get ourselves out of Dallas before it hits.

It takes less than a minute to get to the car but we are both soaked by heavy blobs of rainfall sluicing from the heavens. We drive cautiously around Dallas, back onto the highway. The streets empty as everyone else takes cover. The sky darkens and we hear thunder. Visibility drops and the vehicle in front reduces to red lights in the dark grey haze of noisy water.

Back at Theatre Too, the woman selling tickets showed us the animated weather forecast, horizontal waves moving west across Dallas and Fort Worth. It looked as though we would be okay south of the city, with the storm proposed to hit Waco no sooner than 6.30PM, and it's only just gone four. I try hard to keep from visualising our car sucked up into the sky.

The rain eases a little and the sky brightens, but the roads are still slick with water and the car hydroplanes across the highway from time to time. Bess grips the wheel and drives slowly.

'It looks okay up ahead,' I suggest.

'Yes,' she says, 'once we're clear of the city…'

The sky darkens, thunder cracks, the rain renews its efforts, and this happens over and over for the next hundred miles or so. Sometimes we even see a thin stretch of blue running along the horizon or hit a dry patch of highway allowing us to go a little faster, but then I look away and when I turn back the storm has somehow revived itself. Lightning flashes, our wheels lose traction, and golfball hailstones batter the car, on and off for the next couple of hours, all the way through Waco, and then Temple. At one point a lightning bolt strikes a light pole about fifty feet away, so quick and loud it makes us both jump. The light at the top of the pole seems to explode and it resembles a special effect.

It's after six as we approach Austin, with more and more blue sky somewhere ahead of us. We're hungry so we stop in at a Cracker Barrel, reasonably confident that it will have cleared by the time we've eaten. We eat and the rain is harder than ever as we once again run for the car.

We drive slow, and eventually it no longer feels as though we're driving through the Biblical end of days, and it's after nine by the time we get home. We survived, and next time we'll go looking for that Cheese Cave.

Schot

It was one of those grand houses which people always associate with the south, all columns and verandas - not actually the former residence of a plantation owner, but rather the place where the slaves of the guy in the next mansion along had once lived. On the other hand, it was just the two of them - no servants or anything - so that was something; and they seemed like regular folks as they invited us in. I've spent time in the company of the absurdly rich, but usually as a guest who has paid an entrance fee, or as a manual worker who is being paid to do a job of some description; so ordinarily this might have worried me, but I had other things to think about. I was English and exotic, and these people had no real reason to like me. They might even have seen me as some sort of cuckoo, ousting Byron, their son, from his familial nest.

Thankfully life is never so obvious or predictable.

Schot was in his eighties but he got around okay. He was a little gaunt and moved slowly, and might most generously be described as a man who enjoyed a tipple. He never seemed drunk, but then he never really seemed conspicuously sober either. If he was as sozzled as he probably was, it was an amiable, gentle sort of drunk, a man slowly embalming himself in preparation for immortality.

He'd been ill on many occasions, and never anything casual or which might be set right with aspirin and a spot of bed rest, but each time he came back. We'd all begun to assume he would live forever.

His voice was warm and low, full of creases and character in a way which reminded me of William Burroughs. 'Can I get you something to drink, Lawrence?'

'I'm fine, thanks.'

'Scotch and soda, whiskey, I have some good malts...'

'No honestly. I'm okay.'

'Gin, bourbon, maybe some rum...'

'It's a bit early for me.' I tried not to laugh, then wondered if the comment might be taken as an insult given that I had no idea what time of day Schot might regard as sufficiently civilised for a first drink. 'I'm fine, really.'

'We have beer, or maybe a glass of wine...' He went on through the list, seemingly convinced that my temperance must be an illusion fostered only by his having thus far failed to identify my preferred tipple.

We escaped and made it to the swimming pool at the rear of the house, which was part of the reason why we'd been invited over. We splashed around as Schot and Minnie sat at the side on loungers.

I got out a couple of times, and on each occasion Schot resumed his enquiry, determined to get me that drink just as soon as he'd figured it out what it was.

'Tequila, maybe a liqueur...'

We saw them again from time to time, usually at Byron's house for one of his barbecue nights. I saw them less than did my wife, I suppose being the more remote relative, genetically speaking. It wasn't so much that I had a reason to avoid them, but their world seemed complicated. It was a place I didn't understand.

The last time I saw Schot was in the hospital, at his bedside. He had gone in with pneumonia. Aside from the location and the presence of a few tubes and drips, he seemed the same as ever. We knew he'd be out in a few days.

Not having seen either Schot or Minnie in a couple of months, I felt briefly warmed in their presence. These were people with whom I really didn't have much in common, but it was impossible to dislike either of them. These were, I suppose, real-life oil millionaires, and that's where Dallas and everyone else gets it wrong.

You mean like Trump?, my father chuckled as I tried to describe them over a transatlantic telephone connection.

'Not even slightly,' I told him. 'These people have some class.'

But it's Texas and it's the south so everyone has these ideas, and they're nearly always wrong. I seem to recall Schot having some guy ejected from his home for an off the cuff racist comment; and Barbara Jean, his own late sister, was an out lesbian with a long term partner and not particularly concerned with pretending otherwise; but no-one is ever going to break the box office with tales of the tolerant, liberal south.

The last time I saw Schot was in hospital on the Sunday, and on Wednesday I heard that he had died. Somehow it was unexpected, and it took the wind out of everyone's sails, and all I can really say that's of any use is that I feel privileged to have known the guy, even just briefly.

The Christmas Concert

Having once been described as one of London's top two-thousand guitarists, I experienced an unfamiliar swell of pride the day Junior, now twelve years of age, brought an acoustic guitar home from school.

'He has to practice,' my wife told me. 'It's part of his homework, to practice for fifteen minutes. He'll be playing in the school concert at Christmas.'

The song Junior was required to practice was called How Much Longer Do I Have to Do This? It was an improvised piece performed by slashing away at the strings as hard as possible with a plectrum so as to produce a sound not unlike that heard on a Derek Bailey record, whilst holding down an occasional note with fingers of the other hand. Additionally the piece required that Junior purse his lips causing his two front teeth to protrude, puff out his cheeks, and go cross-eyed whilst playing, maintaining this special comedy face for the duration of the work, excepting pauses during which he would call to Bess how much longer do I have to do this? or how long has it been? or is it fifteen minutes yet?

I've come to dislike the special comedy face because it usually serves as a substitute for the sort of ordinary human interaction one might reasonably expect. It says I'm not going to answer the question or return the greeting but here, check this out - I think you'll agree that it's pretty darn funny. He pulled the special comedy face on my first day of married life, seven in the morning in the kitchen the day after the wedding. 'Good morning,' I said.

He pulled the special comedy face, stood far too close to me and jumped up and down in the certainty of this being hilarious, because at some point someone had told him that it was, and he hasn't listened to any of the less favourable reviews given since.

'Go away,' I suggested.

Bess explained that the avant-garde nature of his guitar recital was probably put on for my benefit, because he is yet to notice that the special comedy face doesn't really work for me. I retired to the room with the computer, the sanctuary in which I keep my mammoth collection of Doom Patrol comics and A.E. van Vogt science-fiction novels. The music from the front room settled into actual chords, hesitantly strummed, but impressive for a kid who had only picked up a guitar about a month before. I was fourteen when Santa first stuffed one into my stocking, and it took me two years to graduate beyond the bass line of Babylon's Burning picked out on just the two lowest strings.

I said as much to my wife. 'You know, he's not bad at all. I just wish he'd take it seriously instead of trying to be the great entertainer all the time.'

The next week or maybe the one after, he forgot to bring the guitar home from school, apparently having become accustomed to the idea that the point of other people is to remember things on your behalf, sort of like when Alfred reminds Master Bruce that it might be a good idea to fill her up next time he takes the Batmobile out for a spin.

Junior practiced on my guitar instead, breaking a string during a particularly energetic performance of How Much Longer Do I Have to Do This? I was displeased. 'I've been playing guitar for thirty-five years now,' I pointed out. 'In all that time, I've probably broken three or four strings. You've been going a month and yet here we are already.'

I bought new strings, dipping into Junior's allowance for funds, and he continued to practice. By December he still remained some way short of Segovia standards, but at least he no longer sounded like he was attempting selections from a Ramleh album. Now it's two Thursdays before Christmas and we're driving to the school. There's nowhere to park so we drop Junior off at the main entrance and head over to the adjacent park, one reputedly frequented by gentlemen who seek sexual liasons with strangers. It's dark, near pitch black due to it being seven in the evening and the absence of street lights, but no-one attempts sexual liasons with us and within minutes we are back at the school. The church - which is part of the same building - seems packed, so we sneak upstairs to the organ loft. No-one else is there and we have a much better view. It feels a little like we've broken in, like we are somewhere we shouldn't be, but there's no-one to chuck us out so we take seats. We sat up here last time I came to the school for one of Junior's concerts, so I suppose it should be okay. If we weren't meant to be up here, the door through which we came most likely would have been locked.

The pews are filling up down below, and there's a large herd of first graders fidgeting away at the front, green and red colours predominant. Everyone has been told to dress festively. Junior accordingly wears a red pullover with some sort of fluffy white arrangement up front and across the shoulders.

'There he is!' I point to the transept where a group of older kids, the sixth graders, stand around looking bored with their acoustic guitars. I notice how in his red and white top our man looks as though he's come as one of the Doom Patrol from this distance, specifically one of the Doom Patrol from when Paul Kupperberg was writing the comic. I quickly realise there's not much point in my sharing the observation with anyone.

I try to work out whether this is the first Christmas concert I've attended at this school, and what seasonal occurrence the previous concert I witnessed had acknowledged, but it's gone. I saw a couple of equivalent concerts at the previous institution, San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys as my wife and I refer to the place these days, and those were pure arseache. They seemed to go on for hours, and more than half of that time was taken up by the oratory of their used-car salesman of a principal clearly very much in love with the sound of his own adjectives. What is the magic of this thing we call San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys? he would rhetorically enquire with Disney brand sincerity before introducing a series of laboured skits.

'What do you want for Christmas, Lester?'

'Well I always wanted to go to sea, but I guess a boat would cost a whole lot of money.'

'You know, maybe we can all go to sea... in a Yellow Submarine!' and into the song, and it would be that for the next couple of hours, fail then cheese, then more fail and more cheese, then yet more fail and yet more cheese - jokes which wouldn't have made the grade on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in, and the millionaires of Alamo Heights equating this with value for money with a degree of faith equivalent to Junior's belief in the special comedy face. So maybe the teachers weren't required to have any sort of formal teaching qualification, but all that filthy lucre must be paying for something good, and hey - they're singing Yellow Submarine! That is sooooooo cute!

Junior has been doing significantly better at this school, and no-one gets a headache when asked to attend events of this kind, so everyone is happy.

The first graders launch into song. The evening is a mixture of the traditional and the slightly cheesy but done with such generous spirit that no-one really minds; so we kick off with All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth, or something of the sort. The only real problem is that the once traditional arrangement of kids singing to the accompaniment of their music teacher at the piano has gone out the stained glass window, so we have the little ones singing to the backing of some karaoke instrumental sourced from a laptop at the side of the stage. It's okay, but the percussion on the instrumental skates a bit too close to drum & bass and is as such difficult to ignore, so the whole is a little weird and tends to overshadow the children's performance. This is a pity because they're probably the most tuneful bunch of nippers I've heard, certainly a great improvement on the assembled atonal fog hornery of my own school days.

After a few more songs, we get Silent Night scored for just kids and piano, which is wonderful except that they've given it a different tune for no good reason I can think of. The point of Christmas is surely, at least in part, tradition and repetition and doing the same thing you did last year and the year before. Silent Night was fine as it was. It didn't need jazzing up or improving.

Then we get bell ringing, both traditional carols and a few of the more Christmassy hits of the sixties, most of the actual music unfortunately coming from a laptop; and I consider that this road will eventually lead to Christmas concerts in which we sit around and listen to a recording of Bing Crosby whilst a child stands on stage and tries to keep time with a tambourine. It somehow suggests a lack of confidence in the children.

Junior shuffles on with his guitar, accompanied by another seven or eight kids with guitars. They all strum as the choir sings, and seemingly in time. Then at last we get a song for which every instrument is being played by a kid stood on the stage, even the percussion. It's the Little Drummer Boy, and it lurches here and there with some kids hanging onto previous bars a bit longer than necessary, but it has so much more feeling than the karaoke numbers. This is what we came to hear.

We leave happy as the concert ends, just an hour after it began, and we take with us all of the good stuff - the sweet, clear voices of the first graders, the enthusiasm of the children, and the pleasing knowledge of our boy having done well, holding it all together without feeling the need to break out the special comedy face. Back in the park, our car is where we left it and no-one has tried to have sex with it in our absence. As we head home, we briefly shudder as we remember the days of San Antonio Guantanamo for Boys, and we are endlessly thankful for all that we have now; so seasons greetings etc.

Tim's Last Moon

Tim's First Moon was a single page comic strip written and drawn by Simon Cox and myself in July, 1984. We'd come to the end of our one year art foundation course at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further Education and I suppose you could say that we were letting off steam. The Tim under discussion was a fellow student and the subject of some mockery. He seemed an oddly conservative figure on a course populated by colourful characters, teenagers making the most of having left school, of being able to dye their hair, wear outrageous clothes, smoke, drink, and do all that stuff you really need to do when you're a teenager. His conversation, which often seemed to be channelling an Alan Bennett monologue, was peppered with references to his mother and to a home life seemingly much like that of Ronnie Corbett's Timothy character in the sitcom Sorry! The issue was, I guess, not specifically that Tim was hilariously square, socially awkward, and conspicuously in the thrall of a seemingly domineering mother, but that he was all of these in conjunction with being loud and sometimes quite pushy. He was an abrasive personality and didn't seem to realise it. He had about him the quality of a manic schoolboy and people found it unsettling.

I liked Tim, or at least I didn't actively dislike him. His artworks were large and weird, huge canvasses covered in scribbled equations and navel-gazing essays on the subject of himself as artist, or his peculiar pastiche of the paintings of Julian Schnabel using paper plates. His work was about art as medium, the art industry, art as a commodity and so on; or so it seemed. Tim's explanations never really made any sense to me. At the time I assumed this to be because these explanations went over my head. I didn't understand his viewpoint although it seemed interesting, not least because it was completely unlike anything else being produced by anyone on the art foundation course. I imagined he stood a reasonable chance of becoming the next Gilbert & George if he could just manage to go five minutes without pissing someone off. The problem was that, I guess, he just wouldn't listen, which pretty much defeated the point of his taking the course. Whatever the tutors suggested apparently failed to get through, and his work remained incomprehensible to more or less everyone but himself.

Tim's First Moon was drawn, I suppose, in response to his manic exhibitionism, his inability to take a hint or to judge any given situation before steaming in, making a fool of himself, and giving everyone the hump. His interest in girls, for example, was expressed in comedic drooling and gurning as he rolled his tongue around in his mouth and made grabbing motions with his hands. My guess is that it was intended to be funny, even disarmingly ridiculous, but it just came off as peculiar. The story of the cartoon strip, such as it was, involved Tim's breakfast bowl of sugar puffs laced with hallucinogenic drugs by fellow students in the hope of broadening his horizons. It concludes with Tim revealed as having three buttocks as he moons the college Principal at a public function. Simon and myself made ourselves howl with laughter as we drew the thing, and then we screen printed a few hundred copies on cheap paper and gave them out to anyone who wanted one.

Tim should have been mortified, but it seemed he loved the attention, which is probably a clue as to whatever his problem was in the first place. We'd taken the piss out of him, gallon after gallon, and with such enthusiasm that I began to feel a great sense of guilt when we started printing off those first copies on the silk screens. Nevertheless Tim seemed to think it was great. I suppose he saw any publicity as good publicity.

As our year of art foundation drew to a close, some of us were preparing for degree courses elsewhere. I myself was headed for Maidstone College of Art in Kent. Tim hadn't been accepted anywhere, although it should be noted that he had applied only to colleges within travelling distance of home, and so he signed up for another year of the art foundation course. For some reason, we exchanged addresses and struck up a correspondence. With hindsight I still have no idea why this happened. It wasn't like we had a great deal in common, and we hadn't really been close friends at college. I felt a certain degree of guilt over Tim's First Moon, disliking the image of myself allied with all those legions arrayed against the poor fucker, hooting with laughter as we pointed at his spots and silly hair, daring him to say a rude word in front of mother almighty. The fact of his purporting to have enjoyed our cruel cartoon only seemed to make it worse.

On the other hand, having started a mail order DIY tape label in order to distribute my own home-made music, I'd passed Tim a couple of cassettes, and he had responded with enthusiasm, which was of course very flattering.

So we corresponded for a couple of years on the subject of something or other. For two years running he failed to be accepted for a fine art degree course at any college within travel distance of his home, and so changed direction, some secretarial course or whatever, business studies - that kind of thing. I regarded his reluctance to move away from home as a little odd, although having myself found the experience somewhat difficult, in some ways I understood, and it was clear that there was no joy to be had in telling him to move out, to get out from under that woman. He was unreceptive to such arguments, and besides it was the same song as had been sung by those who had spent the year taking the piss out of him with such enthusiasm.

Instead he seemed to be concentrating on something called Media Bunker, a name with a logo which appeared to be a huge paintbrush launched from an ICBM silo. He was making plans, writing manifestos, collating photocopied notes in presentation folders. He phoned me and spent an hour raving about a television commercial in which Victor Kiam reported liking Remington razors so much that he'd bought the company, and he raved as though it should be obvious what this had to do with anything.

The trouble was that in the three or four years of Media Bunker, as discussed in both letters and the occasional phone call, I never found out what Media Bunker was actually supposed to be. Was it a building, an art gallery? Was it an agency, as suggested by his contacting and in a few cases pissing off an assortment of local artists? Was it a magazine? What the fuck was it?

I never found out. Neither did I find out quite what the Rock Drill Rockers were supposed to be, beyond the scribbled drawings he sent in the mail - Epstein's Rock Drill, Brancusi's Mademoiselle Pogany and other iconic modernist sculptures playing instruments as backing band for the Art Assassin, which was Tim looking moody in a trench coat wielding a gun shaped like a paintbrush. I had seen a balsa wood maquette of the paintbrush gun, but that hadn't made a lot of sense either. It could have been a proposed installation or performance, a laboured metaphor for something or other, or a ponderous Saturday morning cartoon show.

'Tim was ever so disappointed,' his mother told me when finally I met her. 'He thought you would be moving back here and you could help him with his thing—'

'Media Bunker,' Tim interrupted, pulling a face - disappointment seasoned with acceptance of its inevitability. 'I thought after you finished college we could work on Media Bunker together.'

This was news to me. I was stood at the counter of an antiques stall in a covered market in Stratford-on-Avon. This was Tim's mother's stall and Tim himself now worked here. This was his job. He was, he told people, in the antiques trade. The antiques in question were antiques in the sense of being stuff he and his mother had found in the attic. There wasn't anything quite at the level of faded jigsaw puzzles or boardgames with missing pieces, but tat was nevertheless as good a description as any. To gaze through the glass top of that counter upon the treasures carefully arranged below, each with its own handwritten price tag, was to experience crushing sorrow on behalf of everyone involved. Tim had a job in so much as anyone who ever put on a yard sale has a job for just as long as they're trying to sell that massive telly with the picture showing in just cancer-blue down the left side of the screen.

I had read a lot about Tim's mother in the letters, the matriarch who refused to let him leave home or make his own way, the wicked old witch holding him back. This, he wrote, was the truth of the situation, contrary to the general thrust of the jokes we had told at college. I didn't know what to expect of her.

She was a short, unhappy looking women with long grey hair and a strong Midlands twang. Contrary to my expectations, she seemed sharp-witted, and I found that I quite liked her.

'I wish you'd have a word with this one, Lawrence.' She regarded her son with icy frustration. 'He's bloody never going to leave home at this rate. He'll still be there when I'm pushing up the daisies, mark my words.'

This was a different take on the story, and one that seemed more plausible to me. It had become obvious that Tim lacked natural curiosity, anything you could describe as a sense of adventure. He wasn't really interested in other people, places, or indeed anything much outside himself. The notion that he might have been somehow held back by this small, faintly acidic woman whilst straining at the bit to make that degree interview in Dundee did not ring true.

I'd visited the antique centre having moved from Kent back to Warwickshire, or specifically to Coventry, in 1989. After about a month I came to the realisation that this hadn't been the best idea I'd ever had, and so I put in for a transfer with my job and moved back down south, to London. I'd resisted the drive to move to London which seemed to have swept up so many of my contemporaries like eels to the Sargasso as we finished our degrees. I had told myself I would never live in London, but by 1989 it didn't seem like there was anywhere else left to go.

Tim and I maintained our correspondence on and off as I took to cartooning in earnest, mainly short absurdist efforts which were printed in an assortment of fanzines. He sent me a detailed plot outline in the post, written and drawn in his scrawled hand until the A4 sketchbook was full. It was, he explained, something he had been working on and perhaps I might like to use it in some capacity. The story opened at a graveside, the funeral of our hero's younger sister, killed by drugs. Our man reflects that he never really understood the acid house phenomena, for surely everything that could be said in that genre had already been done by Heaven 17 and the Human League. All he knows is that the drug dealers will pay for the death of his younger sister. Accordingly he refits his car with the best that British engineering has to offer, crafting a mighty chariot by which to hunt down the drug dealers...

I skipped to the end, to a car chase at Heathrow Airport, and struggled to understand why Tim had thought I would be interested in this crap. Even without the fumbling childlike narrative, his understanding of the cultural phenomena of acid house made your average cockwomble Daily Mail journalist seem like Timothy Leary; but sadly I knew that there was no point trying to communicate this

Over time we graduated to tape letters spoken onto cassette, which made for quite nice little art objects and saved the time spent writing out several pages of news and views which would probably be ignored, or else struggling to decipher Tim's handwriting. We spoke on the phone, and ultimately by email, although I had increasingly begun to wonder why I was friends with this person. We had nothing in common. These accounts of his plans and ambitions, such as they were, made no more sense to me than had Media Bunker or any of the other stuff. I felt some pity for him, this unloveable, awkward, eternal manchild, but no man was ever the better for being pitied, as D.H. Lawrence observed in The Plumed Serpent.

This time, he's not getting the new email address, I would tell myself, or the phone number, but somehow he always did, and I would resign myself to further incomprehensible nonsense.

He phoned me at work as I was busy and hardly in the mood for rambling crap. I'd just got my first mobile phone, a crappy but functional Nokia, and so he spent ten minutes telling me about his mobile phone, a BlackBerry or something of the kind with full QWERTY keyboard. 'Everyone calls it the beast,' he snorted down the line from Warwickshire. I tried to imagine a scenario in which passing strangers regarded Tim speaking on his mobile telephone with awe, never before having seen such a wonder. I tried to imagine what Tim would be talking about, or to whom he might be talking if not me. It was seven in the morning and I was pissed off and already knackered, and my imagination was not up to the task.

'Do they really call it the beast?'

'Yes!'

'Wow.'

Royal Mail had introduced changes to working conditions which had made the job extremely difficult, and all in the name of savings, regardless of the detrimental effect upon both quality of service and working conditions. I found this so stressful that I went briefly mad and was obliged to take time off work having been diagnosed with mild clinical depression. I felt, if not literally suicidal, then something in that direction. The one thing which had prevented my employer from forcing me to work in excess of eight hours weekly overtime on top of a back-breaking forty hour week was European Union employment law. Royal Mail wanted to be able to work us for as long as they liked, threatening anyone refusing the overtime with disciplinary action on the grounds of delaying the mail, but thankfully they couldn't because of EU employment law. I explained this to Tim on the phone one evening, having already endured fifty unbroken minutes of his thoughts on the British aerospace industry, then I listened as he delivered his verdict, a stream of aspirational management bullshit pretty much identical to the crap by which my employers had justified the changes. I had the actual experience of the matter, but he knew better because he always did. He effectively told me I had failed to understand that which I was directly experiencing on a daily basis.

When finally I got a word in edgeways, he cut me short.

'Mum's nagging me to get off the phone,' he chortled. 'She's just put out the sticky toffee pudding,' which was followed by ten minutes on the subject of sticky toffee pudding - yum yum yum. I had never heard of sticky toffee pudding, and looked around to see if Mike Leigh was crouched down behind the sofa directing a cameraman.

A couple more years up the line as he settled into another lengthy monologue on the subject of the aviation industry for no reason I fully understood, I set the telephone receiver down on the arm of the sofa and went to make myself a cup of tea. When I returned some ten minutes later, he was still talking, having failed to notice my absence. Eventually he swung around to asking how I had been, how my life was going.

'I have a girlfriend,' I reported. 'Her name is Marian.'

'That's great!,' he chirped in the voice of an overenthusiastic seventies disc jockey. 'Well done, mate!'

It actually wasn't that great, much as I wished it were. Following the initial few weeks of euphoria, Marian had invited me to an intimate gathering with just thirty or forty close friends and together they had attempted to passive-aggressive me into joining their brainwashing therapy cult, an organisation charging several hundred pounds a pop for courses I didn't need to take on account of already having a job and a functioning personality. The relationship had more or less been exposed as bullshit before it had really got started, and I was very upset about this. I spoke without interruption - which I found odd - telling Tim how distressing it was for about twenty minutes.

'She sounds a great little lass!' he chirped in response, sounding like Paul Daniels on speed, and I recalled that he'd never really been too interested in other people. When in dialogue with another person he seems to regard their contribution as time in which to compose whatever he'll say next so as to supplement whatever he said before.

I went to visit Tim for one last time just a few days before I moved to the United States. I hadn't seen him in a while and anticipated at least a couple of questions about the details of my move, some level of curiosity, but no; I sat and listened for more than thirty minutes as he explained his latest big idea, a new kind of science-fiction television show. It would be, he said, like a cross between Doctor Who and Star Trek. He described the build up to the big revelation for about ten minutes, at length coming to, 'and then we close in on the wreckage and we see that the sign reads,' - pause for dramatic effect as he licks his lips - 'United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.'

Why the fuck did I bother?, I wondered.

'I hope you let Lawrence get a word in edgeways,' his wife chided as she emerged from the kitchen twenty or so minutes later. 'Tell me you haven't been bending the poor boy's ear all this time?'

Tim laughed his loud, awkward laugh. 'We've just been having a bit of a natter!' Then he turned to me. 'She does love to make a fuss!'

I will never have to see this person again, I thought to myself.

I moved to the United States and got married, and Tim diminished further to an internet presence, the eternal Prince Philip of my facebook page, ever ready to step in and piss someone off with an ill-informed observation. It was almost a year before he ran out of things to say about the foreign policy of former president George W. Bush, apparently having assumed my Texan wife - who was also using facebook - would respond well to these ill-judged comments, and perhaps might even take the opportunity to personally apologise for her part in all that business with Afghanistan. I made a serious effort to impress upon him just why Bess was no more accountable for Bush's presidency than Tim himself was for Margaret Thatcher's tenure in office. This inspired him to share a lengthy anecdote about the time he met an American at the antiques centre, some fifteen years before. Apparently the tourist in question had been a really smashing chap. I think this anecdote was offered as some sort of testament to Tim being the last person who would make sweeping gestures regarding issues of nationality.

More recently on facebook I posted a link to an article about the criminalisation of persons attempting to feed the homeless here in America. This is typical Republican thinking is what I am thinking, was Tim's less than grammatical verdict on a law which might be characterised as the exact opposite of Republican thinking, the most basic Republican principle being that of less government interference in the lives of its citizenry. The criminalisation of persons attempting to feed the homeless was actually quite typical of the more state-orientated Democrat party, but either way, in lieu of bothering to consider any research beyond repeats of Dallas on UK Gold, Tim had effectively delivered the equivalent of thank God the English mineworkers' unions at least had Margaret Thatcher on their side. This pissed me off because I now have Republican supporting facebook using relatives who are actually very nice people regardless of their voting habits, and it pained me to see them so insulted because every time Tim opens his mouth or sets forefinger to keyboard it's like mad uncle George just stumbled in and - oh fuck - it looks like he's found the sherry again.

Following this, our social networking took a more depressing tone, with Tim still offering comment regardless of whether he actually knew what he's talking about, ever lengthier essays with the usual loose differentiation between their and there, accept and except, and punctuation dispensed more or less at random. His relationship to language and communication had always been at something of an angle in comparison to the rest of us, particularly where words of seven or more letters were involved. Following on from Do Easy, my DIY tape label, I had published comics and fanzines under the banner of Runciter Corporation, as borrowed from Philip K. Dick, or Russinter Corporation as Tim pronounced it. His first girlfriend, who arrived on the scene in 1994, suffered an eating disorder known as bulmia, he told me. This meant that she was bulmic. After a couple of times I stopped bothering to make the correction. Maybe he suffers from some sort of dysexlia, I figured. Now he was going off the deep end, always rhetorically asking so why else do you think that Gene Roddenberry would - then describing something the Star Trek producer had done which you'd never heard of, didn't care about, and couldn't see how the fuck it related to anything. He would make forceful points about things which didn't matter, often exposing his own bewildering cultural isolation in the process, falsely identifying long-running and fairly popular internet memes as jokes originated by The Big Bang Theory, a somewhat laboured American situation comedy. Communication was ever of the sort traditionally associated with ear-trumpets and shouting.

More annoying was his steady progress towards a vein of politics he bewilderingly regarded as centre left, as I first noticed with the sharing of one of those stories in which some hijab clad foreigner insults the Queen - as depicted on the coins comprising her change in a British supermarket - inspiring a passing retired Colonel to deliver the if you don't like it you can fuck off speech to much applause from the assembled own business minding shoppers.

So this really happened, did it? I asked.

Tim explained that even if it didn't happen, it was the principal of the story which mattered. Perhaps not surprisingly he is now an enthusiastic supporter of an English political party which by definition might be seen to epitomise fear of the unfamiliar. I would rather not grant them the oxygen of publicity - or the oxygen of oxygen for that matter - so let's identify them as the Party of Our Pound Sign, POOPS for short.

I have no idea what has made Tim as he is, what psychology informs his way of thinking. I suspect he may have had a difficult upbringing in many respects, or at least one which has left him insecure and perhaps lacking some degree of self-esteem. He has always seemed so fearful of change and unfamiliar circumstances as for this to border on a form of mania; and so he has done very little, so far as I am aware, to broaden either his experience or understanding of the world beyond his own postcode. It sometimes seems not so much as though he mistakes the map for territory, as that he lacks awareness of there being anything besides the map. Some of this would probably account for his forceful overstatements, offering that which he feels he has understood as proud symbols of achievement which define him as the person he feels he would very much like to be, namely a man who speaks with authority. It would probably also account for why he seems to be a sucker for a chap in a nice suit and tie, the uniform of those who embody the sort of success to which he aspires - the self-made man as defined by his financial acumen, the solid, happy guy untroubled by any of that Bohemian nonsense. I know doctors, dentists, and architects, Reeves; proper people, not like yourself, as one of Bob Mortimer's characters used to say.

He went back and forth with the POOPS, at one point horrified to discover what seemed to be their policy regarding disability benefit - for one example - then presumably reconciling himself to the leopard changing its spots, or that it wasn't so bad once you read the small print, or that it was one of many examples of fake POOPS websites set up so as to spread misinformation and make Poopers look like a bunch of raving Nazis. He tried to sell me on immigration reform by invoking my fear of all those Mexicans flooding across the border just south of where I live, having somehow missed the crucial point of being an immigrant myself and quite happily living in a city of 60% Hispanic constitution. He talked about something he termed political correctness taken out of context in relation to the 2012 sex trafficking convictions in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. He would emphasise the great numbers of Muslims, Jews, and other foreigners who had all become loyal Poopers, proving to me once and for all that he really had sat next to one on the bus and had been proud to do so.

His facebook posts and responses began to read like party political broadcasts rather than arguments, reiterations of what may as well have been what some bloke said in a pub for all I could tell. I asked that he desist, so he filed off the serial numbers, making vague but nevertheless unnecessarily lengthy references to fringe parties which had some really interesting things to say. Somehow such obvious hints failed to intrigue me as was presumably intended.

I began to take some pleasure in sharing blog posts and newspaper articles showing POOPS to be an opportunistic party, lacking coherent policies beyond whatever fed into voter insecurity that week. I hoped Tim might either wise up, or else unfollow my facebook feed, but sadly he rose to what he clearly took to be a challenge, composing longer, ever testier defences of the thing which seemed to have given his life some purpose, and as he did so he became ruder and less coherent. My facebook friends responded in kind and were usually met with something in the general vicinity of whatever had been said, rather than any specific dissection of points raised.

It was the same as it had ever been.

He never really understood the acid house phenomena, for surely everything that could be said in that genre had already been done by Heaven 17 and the Human League...

Sticky toffee pudding - yum yum yum.

She sounds a great little lass!

...and then we close in on the wreckage and we see that the sign reads United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.

So why else do you think that Gene Roddenberry would...

This is typical Republican thinking is what I am thinking.

Then on the seventh of January he invited himself to expound upon the POOPS view of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, following my linking to a Robert Reich article about something which wasn't the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and it all went pear-shaped. A number of my more eloquent and informed friends tackled his commentary admirably, and he took increasing quantities of umbrage at their failing to see his point despite all of the details having been explained. He began telling people to grow up, and to suggest that they lacked experience of the issues but rather were something called armchair jockeys. He asked me why I should even care given that I had run away from the nation in question, then suggested I get off my fat arse and return to England and get myself elected. I had a response, asking whether it was now official POOPS policy that those not actively standing for election were not entitled to form an opinion, then suggesting that I might defer to Tim's great wealth of worldly experience and knowledge, but it seemed like it would be better to simply block him from my facebook page. Funnily enough, he beat me to it and defriended me first.

It was for the best. The situation wasn't making either of us any happier, and nor were any lessons being learned beyond don't come between a man and that which gives his life purpose. I still wonder if Tim noticed the irony embedded within any of his protestations before hitting the unfriend button, although given his parting shot, I doubt it.

Firstly, even calling me xenophobic is me a clear disgusting and horrid insult that I cannot help but take personally. That is the problem that all the Far Left seem to suffer from, a love of throwing insults and then when someone throws them back most get all defensive.

It was just over thirty years since Tim's First Moon, and this was his last, or at least the last moon to shine that triumvirate of buttocks across my world, and the last moon to unleash that which squirts forth from those twinned stars of opprobrium and cross-purposes. I wish him the best, and hope he finds something which makes him happy - providing I don't have to hear about it. If not fun, then I suppose it's been interesting, but nothing lasts forever. All this time, I really should have known better. I tried to be the nice guy by crediting someone with more reasoning power than was ever within their grasp, and probably because I liked the idea of myself as the nice guy in contrast to the horrible cunt who drew that cruel cartoon with Simon Cox back in July, 1984; and so I'm pissed off when I realise that the cartoon, cruel as it was, was nevertheless pretty much on target. So I knew it all along, but simply didn't like to admit it. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I subconsciously nominated Tim to be some sort of marker post, a point by which I could measure how far I have travelled from my insular, small town teenage self. Maybe then I have only myself to blame.

Evil Morons with Too Much Money

One evening back in the very early 1980s, Pete and myself were at Graham's house doing whatever it is you do when you're fifteen, but doing it quietly because Graham's parents were downstairs trying to watch something soothing like Terry and June or perhaps Ask the Family. As it was the middle of the week I'm guessing we had convened in order to see one of the various BBC2 music shows whilst our respective parents stayed stubbornly tuned to other channels, and Graham being the only person we knew to live in a household blessed with more than one television set. This magical second television set was a portable which lived on the dressing table in Graham's parents' bedroom, and once Riverside or Something Else or whatever it was we were watching had finished, then came Dallas. None of us were regular viewers of the popular US soap about millionaire Texans, but we found the theme tune entertaining, and so as the titles began, all three of us went at it on the air drums. We each had our own imaginary kit, and we sat in a line at the foot of the bed pounding those notional snares, stamping away at incorporeal foot pedals, giving it some John Bonham. Graham's parents were of course delighted to hear what sounded like an unusually violent rugby match being played just three feet above their heads, and Mr. Pierce quickly came upstairs to congratulate us in person.

It seems peculiar to think that the millionaire Texan, once as remote an animal as any unicorn or talking elephant unwittingly dyed blue whilst playing with his mother's fountain pen, is now a beast which I encounter on an unfortunately regular basis; then again, I suppose it isn't at all peculiar given that no school age child can realistically be expected to know where they will be or what they will be doing by the time they hit forty.

This being said, the second graders at San Antonio Academy for Prestigious Children seem to have a few ideas in that direction. Bess and I had turned up to collect Junior one day last summer when we saw the project work proudly displayed on hall notice boards, our eight year old Texans responding to the question what do you want to be when you grow up? Some wanted to be attorneys, investment lawyers, or simply to take over dad's business as CEO. No-one harboured the desire to be an engine driver or an astronaut or a dinosaur tamer, or if they did I guess they understood such an answer would be more trouble than it was worth, inviting only further questions about how they might have come by such a dangerously liberal attitude.

It was profoundly depressing.

San Antonio Academy for Prestigious Children - as I'm calling it because these people didn't get rich through being nice - is the private school where the dwellers of the Bubble send their offspring in order to set them on the road towards becoming attorneys, lawyers, CEOs, persons of a certain standard. The Bubble is that part of San Antonio falling within the 78209 zip code settled by the conspicuously and unpleasantly wealthy, their colonial style ranch houses distinguished by lawns which remain perfect even when the summer heat soars into the hundreds, each formerly embellished with a tidy little warning which read not keep off the grass as you might anticipate, but no socialism. This was something to do with the election; you know - just in case.

I'm no stranger to the outrageously wealthy, and as a postman in East Dulwich I shot regular breezes with a surprising number of Lords, Ladies, a Baroness, and at least one Lady Asquith, who was lovely and still able to recall D.H. Lawrence dropping around for a cup of tea and a bun back when she was a girl - which was obviously exciting for me, what with my being a big fan of frowning David Herbert. As a rule, these representatives of the aristocracy were mostly pleasant and entirely lacking in ostentation. Regardless of the evils of the English class system, those inhabiting the upper reaches often seem unassuming and likeable, as tends to be the case with people who don't feel they have anything to prove. It's the ones busily screwing their way up the totem pole who are usually the arseholes, and this is as true here in America as it was back in England; except there's no such thing as aristocracy here, much as the Bubble beings might like to believe otherwise, but then these are people who never quite got the subtle distinction between class and just having too much money.

The 09ers, San Antonio's self-proclaimed elite define themselves by zip code; by raising pretentiously-titled children through the agency of nannies; and by sending little Winchester Jnr. IV or whatever the hell he's called to the most expensive school they can find, whereupon he will be guided along his course towards greatness, destiny, excellence and other slightly overused qualitative nouns by a Principal who oozes all the sincerity of a 1970s game-show host but compensates with portentous speeches delivered at school functions. The place costs so much it just has to be some classy shit, right? Plus they have them in those cute little uniforms saying yes sir and no ma'am like toy soldiers, which is somehow more important than the slightly weird statistic of such an establishment not actually requiring its teachers to hold any formal teaching qualification. Anyway, every few months the children assemble to sing seasonal medleys of show tunes prefixed by our edumacational ship's captain waving his hands and invoking Gahd - this being his pronunciation of God - in an implausible show of humility presupposing that the entire institution isn't just a stay-rich-quick scheme. The parents smile and struggle to recognise their own children from photographs supplied by the nanny, and feel duly secure in their status as the cultural elite, the movers and shakers. Those working in the medical profession attend such functions in their scrubs, fresh from performing unfeasibly expensive life-saving and Oscar-nominated operations because as you know, it takes many, many hours to change out of a green overall into civilian clothes, precious hours that could be better spent resurrecting the dead. We're not talking fucking bus drivers here. These are the people who matter.

Except they really don't; they just have too much money which is a different thing altogether, and that which they have taken to signify class - or at least a better standard of person as I recently heard one 09er define his kin without a trace of irony - amounts to face-lifts and surface and having a bigger swimming pool than anyone else. In fact I don't think I've ever seen quite so much surface expressed in a single demographic: cut one of them in half and you'll just find layer after layer of emergency surface held in reserve all the way down to the bottom. As a group, they don't seem to have quite grasped that riches beyond imagination make no difference if you're a selfish, lying, vacuous, lazy, alcoholic, gambling, adulterous, strip-joint patronising parasite with the emotional development of a six-year old and the personality of the turd that just won't be flushed. Neither do they seem to grasp that these unpleasant qualities are difficult to conceal through simple membership of a country club.

These are people who, like Donald Trump, seem to believe that gold-plated taps signify success, and whilst I have no doubt of Trump being a lovely guy, he's really not someone I'd want to hang out with for too long. These are people like Jon Thomas Ford, the 09er convicted of strangling his former girlfriend in 2012. It made national news, but no-one here was too surprised when he was sent down as guilty, and the consensus would seem to have it that he never once considered the possibility of not getting away with it, because that's how it works in the Bubble: money will find a way.

The 09ers, these Ewingistas are heirs to the fundamental mistake of American capitalism that a will equates to a way, that all is fair in business, and that being a ruthless bastard is a sign of character. It's money as more important than people taken to the extreme at which point the people and their money become the same thing regardless of whether one is buying or selling. This, I presume, accounts for no socialism warnings, most likely planted by the hired Mexican gardener as a statement against something the owner probably can't even spell, much less understand. The simple logic runs that those who have worked hard for their money should be entitled to keep as much of it as possible - socialism apparently being a threat to this - which would be fine but for the extremely loose definition of hard work which tends to apply in so many cases, and the basic evil of those who cram their mouths with cake for no reason other than to deny those who have none. Having been a postman for more than two decades, I feel confident of being able to recognise hard work when I see it, and the only ones in the Bubble doing anything of the sort are the Mexicans who tend the lawns and borders.

This is why I have as little to do with the 09ers as possible, although I share their postcode, and Junior has certain familial ties which oblige my wife and I to occasionally grit our teeth and shake a few hands. Many of them may be nice enough people in their own way, but not in any sense that necessarily sets them above any other social stratum; and having few real interests outside matters of wealth and status, they generally aren't that interesting as people, and their instances of generosity tend to be slightly predatory.

Dallas from what little I recall, was presented as a caricature, and had I given the matter serious thought, I probably would have concluded that such people could not be real. Three decades have passed and I now live in the same state as the fictitious Ewings, and I occasionally get invited to pool parties by people who resemble those characters, although maybe not quite so likeable in a few cases - thinking here of a repulsive octogenarian gambling millionaire with a trophy wife more than forty years his junior and their demonic third grade kid on a $200 a week allowance, which is probably another story in itself.

The difference is that now I've seen them with my own eyes, I know that these people aren't real.

The Principal Speaks

What is the magic of this thing we call freedom of speech?

'Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls; it emproudens and nobilizes  my heart that one such as I who is but a humble man with the very great privilege to call himself a tool in the workshop of Our Lord should be so enblessed with the joyous task of welcomizing all of you good folks here today to this, our 126th annual holiday pageant as we raise our voices in song and ask what is the wonder of this thing we call the San Antonio Academy for Prestigious Children.'

The Principal clasps his hands and beams Osmond teeth at the assembly as a mote of Disney™ magic sparkles off the wonder of these things that are his spectacles. He's Carl Sagan but with the precocious offspring of millionaires as his subject rather than the cosmos of which Texas is quite obviously the heart; and he works his audience with the confidence of one who knows that not one bottle of snake oil will be found unsold within the wonder of this thing that is his metaphorical covered wagon by the end of the hour.

'Now it seems like it was only yesterday that I was myself just an eager first grader carrying my Lone Ranger brunchbox from class to board meeting, and today as we participize in this gathermentation of the mightiest, most powerful children that San Antonio hath ever known in the singing of praise for this holiday season, hoping maybe Santa will bring us that game we wanted, maybe those junior stocks and shares, those Forbes magazine movers and shakers action figures, we must pause to give thanks and to substantially donate to this, the wonder of this thing that we call our esteemed institution where the young men of tomorrow's America, statesmen and senators, deck the halls with charming and enchantmented hopes that they too might one day become men of great weight and moment much like ourselves by the bounteous gift of the wonder of this thing we call learning and understandment to be lawyers and award-winning surgeons.'

He smiles, an informal nod to those fathers who, being of such immense importance, persons so critical as to be directly responsible for the fact of the Earth continuing to revolve in the heavens so generously granted by the wonder of this thing we call God - although this being Texas, we pronounce it Gahrd, sort of like John Wayne in The Greatest Story Ever Told - those fathers who have come all this way to hear little Winchester Smorgasbord-Levington IX run through an enthusiastic if not entirely tuneful rendition of 'Pop Goes the Weasel', coming forth direct from the surgery and the business of saving the lives of men of great import, statesmen and senators, brain transplants, rocket surgery and unto all that sort of business - so damn important that they haven't had time to change out of their hospital scrubs and are thus sat upon the bleachers in mighty and ostentatious green, because each and every one of those men may be called away at any minute to prevent the universe from exploding. That's how important they are, let me tell you, these fathers to the future of greatness.

'Well, the boys have been practising hard, learning their instruments,' - he nods to the teacher responsible. She's nineteen years old and came here in the belief that it would be cute to teach grade schoolers about stuff, plus it was kind of boring and stuff sitting around on that ranch with her husband, octogenarian Jedediah Sterling III away in either Vegas or hanging around the oil wells all the time; plus it wasn't like she actually needed any sort of teaching qualification or stuff; so she smiles back, acknowledging the approval of her commander in chief, definitely looking pretty damn hot for his age, not that that's a problem, obviously - 'so I know they have a wonderful selection of songs to perform for you as we celebrate the wonder of this thing we call the holiday season, the most magical time of the year, looking forward to the future as we join together emproudened as one and grateful for those we love as we recall with humilification that true riches are not to be found in our mansions, or the many, many motor vehicles we may each of us have at our disposal, or even our stocks and shares, statesman and the wonder of this thing we call senators...'

Now he's just emitting random adjectives like some sort of human pulsar, enchanted Disney™ castles of wonderment reflected in each pupil, eyes welling up as unto those of a Dickensian orphan afforded the wonderment of his first thanksgiving turkey by a generous and important surgeon who, having just saved the life of a beloved millionaire, now understands the true meaning of Christmas. The audience don't seem to mind. The wives smile as one, parallel evolution - well okay then, parallel intelligent design - drawing them all towards a single ideal, face-lifting them all towards the perfection of the wonder of this thing we call Pamela Ewing from the CBS night time soap opera Dallas running from 1978 to 1987. This is a process known as the Victoria Principle. Ein volk, ein reich, ein gesicht...

'Excellence... achievement... heritage... faith...' He's been speaking for less than a minute and hasn't actually said anything at all, from zero to perfect no content null calorie rhetoric in just under thirty seconds, a montage of words forming an impressionistic effect that roughly serves for meaning. It doesn't really matter what is said so long as it sounds about right, which also seems to be how the school operates, possibly part of some larger push by a culture which appears to be in the process of performing a contentectomy on itself.

This is nothing new to me. It's just surprising to see it happening up close, and from this angle.

How's Life in Texas...

It's different to what I expected, that is to say I knew living here would be a quite different experience to simply visiting, although by the time my great masterplan came into effect (or specifically the great masterplan formulated by my wife and I) my view of Texas had changed considerably in comparison to what it had once been. I knew this due to friends and acquaintances coming out with the sort of rubbish I'd dismissed some years before. Gormless comments, if annoying, can at least serve as pointers by which we mark our own progress.

 

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh, after all, those of my peers subscribing to a view of all Texans as either J.R. Ewing or Daisy Duke grew up with the same distorted image of Texas as myself, and it's only through chance that fate has chosen to set me straight on a few things. In case the previous sentence suggests that English children spent much of the 1970s speculating upon the reality of Texas, and whether or not Bonanza should be regarded as Cinéma vérité, I should probably point out that this was not the case. Although ironically, our sketchy impression of Texas suggested a race of ten-gallon-hat wearing cowpokes who imagined we spent a lot of time thinking about them, their rodeos, and their cactus-strewn landscape.

 

Desperate Dan, although never to my knowledge identified as originating from a specific state, is a long-running children's comic character who may be broadly taken to represent the English child's view of an archetypal Texan. He first appeared in The Dandy in 1937, arguably a wild-west variant upon Popeye (whose national characteristics seem less obvious to us foreigners), sort of like five John Waynes in one, a man who regularly dines on cow pie, uses phone poles for toothpicks, and yet still lives with his Aunt in Cactusville for reasons that don't really interest you that much when you're eight years old. In the event of Dan's escapades (shaving using a meat cleaver and blowtorch and so on) proving too understated for English youth, TV Comic brought us Texas Ted (renowned for the girth of both his cranium and accordingly his milinerial ornamentation, as the legend had it). Texas Ted would brush his teeth with a broom, drain a lake when thirsty, eat uranium for chuckles... you get the picture, and in case you didn't he had some sort of weaselly English sidekick (identified by the bowler hat) to point out the obvious by complaining about anything he considered too big... or some deal like that. Then of course there were Texan Bars and Toffos... sweets (that's "candy" to you lot, or rather to "all y'all") advertised by cartoon Texans in the Desperate Dan mode, lots of cacti on display, wild-west style shoot outs, granted last requests of a packet of Toffos to chew upon whilst the firing squad stand around twiddling their thumbs because, as the slogan had it, a man's gotta chew what a man's gotta chew...

 

Then came Dallas and The Dukes of Hazzard and we amended our image of you... of all y'all (sorry - keep forgetting) to encompass oil barons and good ol' boys, whatever they were; then the BBC cast Joe Don Baker as Darius Jedburgh in an exceptional television serial called Edge of Darkness which prompted my friend Andy to suggest that if one really must be American, then you should at least make the effort to come from Texas.

So, with such a wealth of historical and geographical information, it's probably no great surprise that so many of my English friends should have a lop-sided view of the place in which I have chosen to lay my bowler hat. I try to keep this in mind each time someone asks me about the rodeo, or the cacti, or the snakes, or George Bush, or the UFO abductees, or McDonalds, or kids who've never heard of France, or anything else of vaguely American caste which some underinformed individual has decided to blame on Texas.

So, in answer to any English people reading this, specifically any English people who may have fallen prey to any of the above mythology, the answer is no.... no they don't, they haven't, they aren't likely to, and you're probably thinking of somewhere else.

No-one in Texas really makes balloon animals with Zeppelins; and whilst there may be cacti strewn liberally here and there, it isn't a desert; Texans in my experience seem not only generally lacking in boastful tendencies, or evangelising tendencies, or tendencies necessarily leading to the election of whichever US President you happen to dislike the most, but for a people obliged to put up with 105 degrees Fahrenheit for two months of the year, they're surprisingly amiable.