The Who Bloke

 

There were two doors, both number fourteen. One of them was A and the other was B respectively referring to upstairs and ground floor flats, but it was anyone's guess which was which. Both doors had inset panels of frosted glass so if you pressed your nose up close, you could just about see a flight of stairs behind the door on the right; but without any indication or which was A and which was B, it was anyone's guess. I tended to put the mail for flat A in the door on the right, basing this decision on a hierarchy of the uppermost dwelling being the primary one. Occasionally one of them would get something specifically addressed to the basement flat. After a while I began to remember the names, as I did with almost everyone on Glengarry Road after a year or so, and it got to the point where I no longer even needed an accurate house number. If, for example, I had something addressed to someone with the surname of Burnap supposedly living at number 63, it would go to number 36 without my really having to think about it, because that was where Campbell Burnap lived. Somehow I still retain some of this information twenty years later.

I haven't retained the name of the guy who lived at 14A, or possibly 14B but it may have been Adrian, or at least he looked like an Adrian to me. He resembled a more sensitive version of Phil Mitchell from Eastenders and was obviously gay. I'd been living and working in East Dulwich for about five years and gay people seemed drawn to the area for no obvious reason beyond that it was quiet and mostly civilised, and so I had somehow developed gaydar without really trying. I don't know how I knew, but I almost always did, although the information was never really much use to me. My sexual liasons have historically tended to favour persons with boobs, and jokes with opening lines such as three poufs walk into a bar aren't entirely my thing so I've never needed to check whether the coast was clear before committing myself to knuckleheaded discourse.

That said, at the time I hadn't had sexual liaisons with anyone in possession of boobs for a number of years and, some might argue as a consequence, I had taken to Doctor Who books. There was a new one  every month, and most of them were better than anything which had been on the telly. Doctor Who had been cancelled in 1989 and was still a decade away from returning as Britain's favourite breakfast cereal, so people tended to look at you funny when you mentioned it. I'd been obsessed with the show as a child and then as a teenager, so this may even have been the early onset of a peculiarly specific form of mid-life crisis.

One item of mail regularly received by Adrian - or whatever his name could have been - was a monthly subscription copy of Doctor Who magazine. I'd looked at the thing in WHSmith a couple of times but it was a bit too intensive even for me. Nevertheless, it meant I was well-disposed towards the Who bloke at 14A, or possibly 14B, even before I met him. On the first few occasions when I actually did meet him, my cheery postal good morning was met with only a silent sullen glance, but I persisted on the assumption that he was probably just having a bad day, plus life is too short to harbour resentment against persons you don't actually know. Eventually I caught him at his front door as I stood there with his latest issue of Doctor Who magazine about to go in the letterbox.

'Yes, I've been meaning to have a word with you,' he began somewhat icily, then went into a lengthy complaint about his mail being delivered to the flat upstairs.

'I understand the problem,' I said, 'but I don't think it's me,' launching into an explanation which probably foreshadowed the first paragraph, adding that his complaint tended to be common when I was on holiday and someone else was covering for me, and that whoever that was stood only a 50% chance of getting it right given the absence of anything to indicate which flat was which.

He seemed to understand, and was even a bit embarrassed, so I changed the subject with, I see you're into Doctor Who, which was probably akin to recognising a fellow Freemason in whichever year it was. He smiled for what seemed to be the first time ever, and we compared notes for a minute before he had to be off, being on his way out somewhere.

The next occasion, I got invited in, which was a bit of a shock after the first couple of frosty years and his failure to reciprocate any of my greetings. He was a little older than me but looked significantly older, so I thought, and his flat was much the same as mine. He mentioned a partner of unspecified gender, possibly feeling awkward about it for some reason, and that the partner had died. Additionally, his mother had died more recently. This seemed to explain my impression of him being a less than happy bunny, and I mentioned the unreciprocated greetings, or at least tactfully referred to them by saying, 'yes, you always struck me as having a lot on your mind.'

'Sorry about that,' he said. 'I think I was having a bit of a nervous breakdown for a while there.'

We talked about Who, albeit at crossed purposes. He hadn't read the books, although he'd heard good things about them; and he was quite into conventions and fan gatherings, which didn't really sound like my sort of thing. He'd met Sophie Aldred a couple of times and told me that her screen persona was pretty much her persona in real life. He showed me a fairly large model TARDIS which occupied his bedside table and had a lamp inside, which I found a bit weird. I might have found it weird that he showed me his bedroom, but his flat seemed to be mainly just a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen - much like my own. We seemed to be fairly similar in many respects.

I imagined that this would be the start of a friendship, if not necessarily a beautiful friendship, but from then on he kept himself pretty much to himself, just as before. Our meetings were chance occurrences, albeit significantly more jovial chance occurrences than they had once been. The very last time I saw him, he'd been having a clear out and getting rid of stuff. I handed him his mail and he gave me a DVD, saying, 'Here, you need to see this if you haven't already.'

It was a DVD of the BBC's Edge of Darkness from 1985. I'd never heard of it.

'Then you really need to watch it,' he said. 'It's very good.'

It seemed to be a crime drama and therefore possibly not my sort of thing, but it seemed like a generous act so I took the DVD home and watched it. I moved away from home in 1984 and didn't have a television again until about 1993, which is why I'd never heard of Edge of Darkness. The irony is that I'd moved away from home to take a fine art degree specialising in time based media, specifically film, video and, I suppose, television.

I thought Edge of Darkness was amazing, and so much so that I insisted my friend Andy come over and watch it too, which he did over a couple of afternoons. He also thought it was wonderful, and particularly enjoyed Joe Don Baker's massively entertaining portrayal of a Texan character named Darius Jedburgh - this in spite of Andy's infrequently stated general dislike of American culture.

'Yes,' he grudgingly conceded after we'd just watched Jedburgh terrorise guests at a conference with lumps of plutonium, 'if one really must be an American, then you should at least have the decency to be from Texas.'

I have no idea what became of Adrian, but Who was back on the box by 2005, and was a huge hit but seemed to have lost whatever it was I'd liked about the thing in the first place. Given that I now live in Texas, the rest may add up to some kind of narrative - if not necessarily one which means anything profound - but you may have to put the pieces together yourself.

Science-Fiction for Righties

Perky Girl Assistant finished cleaning the TARDIS dunny and returned the quantum bog brush to its receptacle. The work station set into the nearby roundel bleeped to acknowledge the end of her shift - eight hours, by Gallifreyan standard. Now all that was left to do were her tax returns for the day's labour, but she was still removing her overall as that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor burst in through the door.

'There you are,' he said breathlessly. 'We're needed. I've just received a distress call from Prime Minister Farage! Early twenty-first century, and I believe during White History Month, unless I'm very much mistaken.'

'But my tax returns…' she floundered as the sentence failed to complete itself. 'It's just that I don't want—'

'No time for that,' barked the Doctor eccentrically. 'The game is afoot! There is adventure to be had.'

'What? Seriously?'

'No - I'm joking. You must of course fill in your tax return first. It's only fair. I'm not made of money.' He snapped his fingers in a jovial yet firm manner. 'Step to it, Perky Girl Assistant!'

She quickly went to her quarters and changed into a perkier outfit so as to save time. She switched on the neutrino computer and set to work. She had laboured eight hours at seventy Gallifreyan dollars an hour, making 560GD from which she owed the Doctor 30% in tax, which would be 168GD, leaving her with 392GD. Of this sum she presently owed 290GD in room rental, use of facilities, and time-space tax; so that left her with just over one-hundred. It seemed a little unfair, and yet the figures added up. I'm not running a charity here, the Doctor had told her on a number of occasions, and it was equally true that she enjoyed the full benefit of all that the TARDIS had to offer, and he had overheads of his own to consider. Artron crystals didn't come cheap, and without them that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor would just be some weird cunt stood in an old police box.

***

Later that evening they were sat at the table of the main dining room at 10, Downing Street. There was the Doctor and his assistant, both tucking into their veal fritters, with the Prime Minister and his wife, Gisele Bündchen, facing them. A respectful butler refilled their glasses with wine as the Doctor regaled his host with an account of their most recent adventures.

'You see, the Cyberpersons were using the portal—'

'I'm sorry?' Farage grinned his famous grin. 'Who?'

'Cyberpersons. I know,' chortled that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor. 'Wretched, isn't it?'

They all rolled their eyes.

'You see they were using the portal to reconfigure the ancestral gene pool, so that by the time we arrived, it was standing room only.'

'O que era apenas espaço parado?' Gisele asked in Portuguese.

'This would be the disabled lesbian Muslim theatre workshop?' wondered the Prime Minister darkly.

'I'm afraid so,' confirmed the Doctor answeringly.

'All funded by innocent taxpayers, I don't doubt.'

'Exactly!' The Doctor slammed the palm of his hand upon the burnished oak of the table. 'That's why the planet's economy had been decimated.'

'You couldn't make it up,' said Perky Girl Assistant helpfully, but no-one took any notice, as usual.

She still missed that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the old Doctor. She just couldn't get used to this new, burly figure, supposedly his thirtieth incarnation, or his thirty-first if you included the one he never liked to talk about, the one with a fanny. She had asked him, of course, but he usually ran off into the cloister room, and she could never tell whether he was blushing or angry. All a terrible misunderstanding, he would mutter before descending into a rambling refutation of his cursed Gallifreyan biology, the evils of Socialism, the triumph of a free market economy, and how he had never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever been confused - not even for one second…

Watched with Mother

I watch a lot of television during my three weeks in England, at least more than I watch at home. In Texas, it's usually the mighty Wheel of Fortune followed by King of the Hill as my wife and I eat dinner, then an hour's worth of something or other around nine once the kid has gone to bed - or at least to his room. At present we're working our way through all three series of Better Call Saul; and previously we've serially watched The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Wentworth, Weeds, Orange is the New Black, Fargo, Ugly Betty, and Jersey Shore. However, in England, I'm staying at my mother's house, and it's her telly so I watch whatever she wants to watch. It isn't always the sort of thing I might otherwise choose to view if left to my own devices, but my mother refuses to entertain anything too crappy so it isn't a problem, and in some ways it's educational; and when it isn't educational, we have the mutual pleasure of taking the piss out of it. No-one can deliver a barbed observation quite like my mother. Therefore, for the benefit of future generations, and in rigorously alphabetical order:

Blackadder.
I'm not convinced that Blackadder was quite the greatest comedy series ever made, but series two and three came pretty close. We watched the one with Tom Baker and it still delivers the goods thirty years down the line, against all odds, not least of those odds being the authorial heritage of Ben Elton and Richard Curtis, both of whom have peddled far more than their fair share of smugly unmitigated shite over the years; so I've no idea how that works. Anyway, masterpiece though it may well be, I'm not sure the enduring status of Blackadder quite warranted Blackadder's History Week on Dave or UK Gold or whichever cloyingly nostalgic channel it was. Blackadder's History Week - given the possessive as though actually curated by the fictional Edmund - entailed a run of episodes of Blackadder interspersed with spuriously related documentaries on periods of history referred to in the series, one about trench warfare, one about the wegency and so on. Had someone made a documentary about pie shops, I'm sure they would have scheduled it in honour of the fictional Mrs. Miggins. It was all a bit Doctor Who Discovers Dinosaurs, if anyone remembers that particular attempt at fooling children into learning stuff. If you don't remember, the following paragraph copied from one of the more disturbing corners of virtual fandom almost certainly tells you as much as you really need to know:

An in-universe reference to these books appears in the audio story The Kingmaker. In the story, Doctor Who Discovers was a series of books actually written by the Fourth Doctor during his time working with UNIT. As in the real world, only five books were published, despite more being planned.

Bletchley Circle, The.
The proliferation of English detective shows in the last few years seems a possibly ironic phenomenon, at least in the Alanis Morissette sense, given how many years of the youth of my generation were spent laughing at Americans with all their detective shows; or it could simply be that, Star Trek and Steve Austin excepted, English television companies of the seventies were interested in buying only the detective shows from America; or it could simply be that my mother has become unusually fixated on detectives. Oddly, my wife's mother seems to share a vaguely parallel interest in crime fiction, so maybe there's some kind of quantum entanglement thing at work, particularly given that my wife and I share the same birthday. Anyway, The Bletchley Circle is about four women who spend the duration of the second world war deciphering Nazi code, and who then similarly apply themselves to the decipherment of various crimes once the war is over. It's all faintly ludicrous, but well made and fairly enjoyable - at least based on the first episode.

Doctor Who.
I think I've seen four of these since I gave up watching about five minutes into an episode so poor that it made me feel sorry for Adolf Hitler. I haven't since seen anything which made me wish to resume my viewing on a regular basis, and this one similarly failed to change my mind. Peter Bacardi was very good, and his new assistant seemed acceptable, but there wasn't much of a story - some shite about a spaceship made of water as framework for the usual rapid fire montage of Spielbergisms designed to make you say gosh and to fill your big Manga-style eyes with twinkling sparkles of routine wonderment. It wasn't terrible, but I don't know how anyone can be satisfied with something which seems so generic, obvious, corporate, and eager to please.

'Well, I didn't understand any of that,' my mother muttered darkly once it was over.

Maigret.
Fuck me, I thought to myself, doesn't she ever get tired of detective shows?, and yet once again I had to eat my cynical thoughts, so to speak. Maigret was originally a series of something like four-million novels by French author Georges Simenon, father of that bloke who was in the Clash. The Beeb adapted some of the books for a series back in the sixties, and it's been periodically remade over and over ever since; and this is the most recent version, starring Rowan Atkinson as the pipe-smoking Gallic rozzer. It took me a little while to get over certain incongruities which probably didn't bother anyone else in the universe - namely that Maigret is set in Paris, and is filmed in Paris, and all of the characters are French, and all of the street signs and newspaper headlines are in French, and yet our characters are not only speaking English, but English with a Cockney barrow boy lilt in some cases. I realise that the practicalities of the production impose certain limits in the name of anyone actually bothering to watch the thing, but when you have lines like, strike a light, guv' - I only seen the saucy cow-son workin' Alfie's pie stand dahn the Rue St. Montmartre, with the actor switching between accents mid-sentence, it's difficult to ignore the glue squeezing out of the join. Nevertheless, after an hour or so I was sucked in to the point of being able to overlook such details, so powerful was the atmosphere of the production. Maigret struck me as very refreshing in featuring a softly spoken, thoughtful detective who looks as though he's taking it all personally, particularly after so many years of Danny Dyer types screaming, you're nicked, you muppet! My mum's verdict was that Rowan Atkinson makes for a disappointing Maigret after whoever played his previous incarnation, but then I've never seen it before so it worked for me.

Midsomer Murders.
This one exists at the absolute limit of detective show credibility, beyond which lies the realm of horseshit such as Rosemary & Thyme, crime-solving ice cream truck drivers, and their increasingly desperate ilk. Midsomer Murders works providing you take each episode in isolation, because otherwise you have a picturesque rural community with crime statistics which make New Orleans look like Nutwood, or wherever it was Rupert Bear used to live. Possibly for this reason, whoever wrote this show was nothing if not inventive in finding new avenues down which to ferry a suspicious corpse without it becoming too repetitive and therefore patently absurd; and the prize in this respect probably goes to the episode in which DCI Barnaby investigates some sort of turf war going on amongst rival teams of bell ringers.

I lived at my mother's house for about eighteen months prior to moving to the United States, and have consequently probably seen more or less all of John Nettles' run on Midsomer Murders, which is a lot of episodes; and the one aspect of the show which always annoyed me was not the increasingly preposterous rural body count, but Cully, Barnaby's entirely unnecessary daughter. Even aside from the fact that no-one in the history of the cosmos has ever been named Cully, Barnaby's domestic situation serves as little more than a distraction in the narrative. Cully's role seems limited to listening to her father mumble something about whatever case he's working on, then to notice a mysterious stranger abroad in the village and to accordingly pull the same fucking face of problem-solving intrigue she pulls every other fucking week as though her vapid half-assed suspicions really amount to shit; and it is doubly-galling that this sort of entirely non-crucial plot point usually suffixes scenes of Cully hanging around with the braying upper class pricks she calls her friends - none of which goes any distance towards shedding light upon why the groundsman should have ended his days upside down in a ditch with the handle of a shovel protruding from his back passage.

My mother also loathes Cully, by the way.

Morse Babies.
It's actually called Endeavour, but I found it difficult to keep from thinking of Muppet Babies given that this is the early years of Inspector Morse, as played by one of those David Tennant style young men with the massive Adam's apple and sideburns like the drummer from the Dave Clark Five. I never really warmed to Morse and found myself tiring of unlikely nobby crimes to be solved at the opera house, the Earl's garden party, the place where they print those Gutenberg bibles and so on; and as a kid, it's clear that our boy set off on the very same course of a crime fighting career steered around cello lessons and shops which only sell French cakes, but Endeavour was still very watchable. Of course, given how Endeavour is his actual name, it seems a safe bet that his dinner money never once made it so far as the till in the school canteen, which explains why he's kind of skinny, and which you would think might have toughened him up a bit, but never mind. This episode was something about some member of the landed gentry taking naughty photos, and cello lessons were involved. I think the scarf-wearing varsity dude who was blackmailing the pornographic toff may also have been shagging the man's wife under the pretext of learning to play cello. Anyway, they all got it sorted out in the end, except for cello woman who committed suicide for some reason or other.

Portillo, Michael.
I had to raise an eyebrow at this one, a travelogue following a Conservative party politician I almost certainly once regarded as evil. That said, I can't actually recall the specifics of why I regarded him as evil beyond his membership of an evil political party, and that would be evil in old money, so he'd probably look like fucking Gandhi if you stood him next to Michael Gove, Nigel Farage or any of today's pseudo-parliamentary shitehawks.

'I know,' said my mother, noticing the faces I was pulling. 'I'm as surprised as you are, but there's something about him that's quite likeable. He seems very comfortable in his own skin.'

It struck me as a disconcerting turn of phrase, suggesting that living hides freshly flayed from their unfortunate donors had once been an option; but as usual, she was right. Portillo remains a slightly rubber-faced upper-class goon, but crucially he doesn't appear to give two shits about securing my approval, and neither does his bumbling charm seem to represent a calculated distraction from any other more sinister agenda, as with floppy-haired Boris Johnson. If anything, Portillo has matured into the gay Kenneth Clark with a more pronounced sense of fun, give or take some small change. The travelogue is specifically Michael Portillo making his way across the United States by train, clearly having a whale of a time and barely able to contain his enthusiasm for almost everything he encounters. I'm genuinely surprised at how difficult it is to not like the guy after seeing this show. Who would've fucking thunk it, eh?

Red Dress Discovery Channel Woman.
I'm not even sure what this show could have been, except that it was on either the History Channel or National Geographic or one of those, and that the subject, whatever it was, seemed initially promising. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, a homeopathic percentage of genuinely interesting historical material was padded out with re-enactments and horseshit. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I genuinely believe most viewers are able to get their heads around concepts such as the great plague or witch burnings or even the past being different to the present without a bunch of drama school also-rans hopping about in medieval robes and addressing each other as my liege to a soundtrack of ominous synthesiser music. More annoying still was how much time the cameraman of this particular show - whatever it was - spent on the presenter in the red dress. I'm not sure if she was an actual historian, but the minutes spent lingering upon her looking thoughtful as she opens a large, heavy book seemed unnecessary bordering on ludicrous.

'What the hell is she doing now?' my mother wondered, furrowing her brow as Red Dress Discovery Channel Woman slowly ascended a flight of stairs in an Elizabethan house to no obvious purpose.

Worsley, Lucy.
Bess and I first encountered Lucy Worsley when she presented a documentary series entitled The Secrets of the Six Wives about the various women beheaded or otherwise inconvenienced by Henry VIII. It was fairly interesting, but there was something about the presentation of the documentary which got in the way. Not only did it feature actors dressed in Tudor garb acting out scenarios from the lives of Henry and his unfortunate succession of birds, but many of these scenarios incorporated Lucy herself, our presenter, gurning away in the background in hope of catching our attention; and thus didst the camera zoometh past His Royal Highness to Ms. Worsley, disguised as a serf and taking us, the viewers, into her confidence, whispering, now the thing we have to remember about that man over there is that he was a keen pipe smoker, or similar. At the risk of seeming like a snob, I've watched Kenneth Clark's Civilisation several times over, and not once do I recall seeing him dressed as a rustic farmhand bringing in the turnips as some monk slaves away with his felt-tips over the Book of Kells, before turning to us with a wink and launching into an account of how Christianity ended up in this part of Ireland. That Lucy adopts this approach would be bothersome enough by itself, but the problem is exacerbated by her coming across like an overenthusiastic upper-class schoolgirl anticipating those super scrummy cakes that Nanny Tiggy promised for afternoon tea. Also, it was kind of hard to avoid noticing that she seems to have a speech impediment which makes it difficult for her to pronounce the letter r...

Okay, so it doesn't need to be a problem. Overenthusiastic upper-class schoolgirls who anticipate super scrummy cakes are as much qualified to present historical documentaries as anyone, particularly when they've been so heavily involved in the production of the same; and Lucy quite clearly knows her stuff; and no, enthusiasm isn't a bad thing; and there's nothing funny about a speech impediment...

Nevertheless, she makes for exhausting viewing as she gushes and enthuses and dresses up as yet another serving wench in hope of coaxing us towards an understanding of how working in the royal kitchen was probably a pretty tough gig back in the sixteenth century, because no way would we otherwise have been able to wrap our heads around that one. Furthermore, as my mother and myself take to our separate sofas to engage in postprandial digestion whilst watching something historical, informative, and hopefully not too silly, there she is once again, dressed as Moll Flanders and telling us all about King George and the wegency era. She's back the following evening with something about the wule of the Womanovs in seventeenth century Wussia, leaving us wondering if some commissioning editor at the BBC historical documentary department might not be taking the piss, just a little bit.

Yellowstone.
Nature documentaries have always been a bit of a minefield, and I've more or less stopped watching them since that year when every single fucking one seemed to open with a shot of a baby elephant forlornly prodding its dead mother with a sad little trunk. This offering, a year in the life of a volcano big enough to destroy the planet should it ever go bang, was mercifully low on the actual killing and maiming of critters in the name of a camera crew refusing to interfere with the natural order 'n' shit, but what it lacked in slaughter, it more than made up for with its heavy emphasis on the general concept of doom.

The elk finds brief respite from his hunger in foliage still left uncovered as the snows move in, our narrator assures us, but it won't last; and so it went on. Every single glimmer of hope, each golden moment in the flourishing of new life served only as prefix to reminders of the wolf pack being on its way down from the forest, or that winter's a-comin' and then we'll all be completely fucked, or boy - that ice sure looks thin! Watch out, Mr. Buffalo!

Of course, this kind of thing is still preferable to those wildlife documentaries at the other end of the scale where meerkats cavort as an old man - almost certainly wearing a hand-knitted jumper - chuckles and observes, I guess we all know what it's like when you got yourselves an unruly teenager living at home. Nevertheless, I still say there's a happy medium, and Yellowstone wasn't it. Nature documentaries should be about nature, not about doom, and this had more doom than Doctor Doom playing Doom with the Doom Patrol whilst listening to MF Doom and the World of Shit album by the band Doom on Doom Mountain, as featured in Lord of the Rings - according to Wikipedia.

Stepfatherhood

My marriage came with a free child, which wasn't a problem, but was not a scenario I'd foreseen. I'd just have to do my best and play it by ear, I decided.

It hasn't all been easy, although to be fair neither has it been anything like so difficult as I might have anticipated had I given it more thought. He was seven when Bess and I got married and is now thirteen. Sometimes he's a pain in the arse, other times he's fine - as you might expect, so you just have to get on with it.

Possibly more aggravating was the distant susurrus of expectation from newly acquired relatives for whom Junior was our precious boy. Even before I'd crossed the Atlantic, one opined that I might be a paedophile eager to get my clammy hands on the child; because were I some sort of kiddy-fiddler, that's obviously what I would do - marry an unsuspecting American so I can bag me one of those green cards and get my Jimmy Savile on in the land of the free. Another newly acquired relative took demonstrative issue when I failed to show at some screeching kid-filled event at the local country club, a birthday with our precious boy in attendance. I'd been in America for a week. I was about to get married and I had left behind everything I had known since birth. I was knocked sideways by the intense Texas heat, felt ill and still shell-shocked, and I didn't feel like hanging out with small, screaming children on that one particular occasion so I stayed home.

That man had better get his priorities straightened out, the relative testily informed my wife, apparently so as to showcase the extent of her devotion to our precious boy. These days I get on fine with the woman, but I haven't forgotten. People tend to reveal their true colours before they know you.

I always imagined one major difficulty with being a stepfather would be my apparently replacing an existing father, which I haven't attempted on the grounds that his dad is still very much around, in the picture, and we all get on just fine. The scene where the child slams the door and screams you're not even my real dad is yet to happen. Strangest of all, he seems to think I'm great, which is partially because I'm exotic - coming from England and all that - and because I know about Doctor Who - although I'm doing my best to discourage him on that score - and he appreciates the sense of security I apparently bring. I qualify all of this as strange, because the information derives from conversations with his mother as she brings him back from school. It's taken him a couple of years to get into the habit of communicating directly with me, not because he's rude so much as that he is burdened with a combination of shyness and extraordinarily narrow focus. Bess has pointed out how I'm the one person in his life who doesn't dote upon him, or regard him as our precious boy by sheer dint of familial genetics, or necessarily at all. My favour therefore has some currency and he knows it. When he's rude or he screws up, I'm generally quite happy to tell him so in as much detail as seems necessary, addressing him as I would an adult because I don't do baby-talk; and on some level he responds to this.

Children need boundaries, as they say.

Over the years we've had rough patches, mainly characterised by uneaten food left to go off in his room, toilets full of poo either unflushed, or flushed by a method entailing operation of the handle followed by running away as quickly as possible without checking whether the disturbingly verdant ten-inch floater has held its ground. Other misdemeanours mostly come down to basic manners and continued failure to do something which he has been asked to do over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

'Look, it's not even like we ask you to mow the lawn or take out the trash, or even to do anything at all,' I'll begin in preface to the usual speech about full glasses of tea left perched precariously above electrical sockets. He will stare at me as I state my case, usually with the look of a rabbit caught in headlights, and even as I speak I wonder whether he's taking any of it in or whether it's more like a dog reacting to a harsh tone of voice when it's been caught taking a dump on the rug.

As the years have passed, it seems he has begun to take at least some of it in, and his communication has developed sufficiently for me to be able to tell that he at least doesn't mean to piss me off; which is nice because I like to be able to think well of him, and I don't enjoy pointing out that he's screwed up any more than he enjoys it. These days, we can almost have something that sounds a bit like a conversation, even laughing at each other's jokes, or some of them; and while I doubt I'll ever regard him as our precious boy because I'm just not that much of a walking Hallmark card, I feel protective towards him and I want him to be happy.

Now it's the weekend and Bess and I are taking him to the cinema to see Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. He's read the books and has been gagging to see the big screen adaptation. It's a Tim Burton film, but stepfatherhood is sometimes about making sacrifices, about meeting others half way. Junior has a reputation of talking through films. It's worse when they're on television because he gets to move around, jumping up and down, describing what we've all just seen on the screen with our own eyes.

'It's like,' he yelps, completing the sentence with dramatic gestures so as to illustrate Loki fighting the Incredible Hulk, and we know that this is exactly what it's like because we're still trying to watch the fucking film.

'If you're going to talk through this,' I tell him as we enter the cinema, 'and explain everything that's about to happen or has just happened, could you sit on the other side of your mother and do it quietly?' I ask him.

'Sure,' he says, then barely utters a word for the next couple of hours; and surprisingly I find myself enjoying the film even though it's by Tim Burton.

The boy lets loose in the car on the way home, going into ludicrous and slightly sniffy detail regarding all the changes which have been made during transition from page to screen. He obviously enjoyed the film, but it was different to the books. Much of his communication takes the form of lists prefaced with let me see, then whatever he wants to share reeled off with the verbal equivalent of bullet points, and he's really going to town this time.

I find myself feeling strangely proud, which is almost a first, because not only has he recognised a book as the more authoritative form of a story but, as I realise, he has actually read the thing and taken it in. This has been a bone of minor contention, specifically how much I hear about the kid's supposed love of reading contrasting with my own experience, which is mostly him in his room laying on his back tapping the screen of his iPad with a finger all evening, occasionally calling out to have a bowl of chips conveyed to him. His supposed reading - I have noted with some suspicion - always seems to occur off-screen; but now I'm at last hearing him talk about a book, and in the sort of detail which suggests it's something he actively enjoys rather than being just a chore.

He's been with his father for most of the weekend, during which time I've made a six-foot bookcase with seven shelves for his room. We picked him up from his father's house and took him straight to the cinema, so the bookcase is a surprise.

His mother has asked me to make him a bookcase on and off for the last couple of years, but I've never quite got around to it, partially wanting first to see some evidence that he's capable of putting stuff on a shelf rather than just dropping things on the floor then stepping over them for the next two years; but I've eventually caved in because carpentry is good exercise and what harm can it do? Bess and I have collected what we can from the rubbish tip that is his room, set it all on the shelving, and now we can see the floor.

Junior sits on the bed staring at the book case.

'One thing,' I say.

'Yes?' He sounds nervous.

'It's your room and it's your bookcase, but if for whatever reason I see bits of wood carved out of it because you were bored, I will become unhappy.'

'Okay.'

This is a karaoke version of an exchange from about a year ago. Large plastic cereal containers, which should never have found their way into his room in the first place, had sections of the red plastic tab by which one removes the lid snipped off for no reason at all. Even as vandalism it seemed so weird and pointless that I felt ridiculous having to bring it up.

'Do you think he likes the bookcase?' I ask my wife, because I can't tell. Sometimes the boy is too inscrutable for his own good.

'Oh yes,' she tells me. 'He's very pleased with it.'

It feels like we've turned a corner.

English Telly in Texas

Apparently the BBC and ITV continued to make and broadcast new shows after I left England back in 2011, meaning that when I summon Hulu or Netflix to my massive Texas-sized HD flatscreen gogglebox, looking under categories headed either British Television Shows or Because You Watched Fresh Fields, I find tons of shit that I've never heard of. I sort of imagined the British would stop making new shows once I'd left and probably just stick to either repeats or Only Fools & Horses reimagined with Ant and Dec in the lead roles or something, but no...

So here are the English shows which I've watched since I moved, shows which I've only seen whilst slouched across a Texan sofa, eating tacos, and plucking cactus thorns from my shins. English telly looks very different now that it comes from five-thousand miles away.

Auschwitz: The Nazis & the Final Solution - My wife has always been fascinated by Nazis - although not in the sense of simply exploring controversial ideas and images like the man out of Death in June. In fact, as a general fascination it may even run in the family. I bought her mother a book about psychiatry during the Third Reich for Christmas, a title she said she had wanted. 'Nazis and psychiatrists - my two favourite things,' she chuckled as she opened the present and saw what it was.

'You can't go wrong with Nazis or psychiatrists,' I opined.

'Oh for sure,' she confirmed happily. 'Sometimes I can't decide which I like more.'

Anyway, this one had dramatisations - which always strikes me as a bit Discovery Channel and is something I don't usually like in my documentaries - but for once it worked; and this was a great series, and humongously disturbing, which is as it should be. It's nice to know that the Beeb can still make stuff of this calibre when they put their collective mind to it, assuming it was the Beeb.

Coogan, Steve - I've lost track of what we've watched because my wife fancies him so we've watched everything, some of which has been new to me. The most recent one was Happyish, although admittedly it was an American production presumably resulting from a massive team of writers attempting to turn Coogan into the next Seinfeld without actually understanding what makes him funny. We managed about five episodes but the last of these was so monumentally shite that we've left it at that. Happyish is about an advertising tosspot experiencing a mid-life crisis whilst married to a whiny analyst-seeking woman, in case you're wondering. In one scene we experience his wife's near unendurable suffering as, looking forward to an afternoon's ceramic work in her private craft studio, she is waylaid by a very boring man who won't stop talking, thus keeping her from making a few pots. It really put all the complaining and grousing of those moaning minnies at Auschwitz in perspective.

Detectorists, The - The skinny one from The Office teams up with that lumpy looking bloke who turns up in all the films these days for a comedy about metal detecting, which is mostly funny.

Doctor Who - I think I've seen three of these since I moved and they were all shit. One of them was called The God Complex, which I watched because everyone said oh it's a pity you missed The God Complex because it was by far the best of the season, much better than the rest, but that was shit as well. Doctor Who is unique in this list in being a show I've seen prior to my moving to Texas, but I've made the exception in the hope of upsetting a few people, particularly those whose enjoyment of Doctor Who is somehow ruined just by the simple concept of there being people who regard it as a pile of wank.

Helm's Heavy Entertainment, Nick  - This seems to be an hour-long one-man variety show in which the host invades the personal space of various audience members to comic effect. I've only watched one, and I sort of found it funny, but there was something about the tone I didn't like and I can't quite put my finger on what that might be. It somehow has a touch of the Mumford & Sons about it. It's probably significant that I can't help but regard anyone under the age of forty with a full beard as a complete arsehole.

Impressionists, The - Sometimes one yearns for a more elevated discourse, such as what you get with the arts 'n' shit; and thusly did we watch this four part documentary presented by a man who was such a total cock he could almost have been Robert Elms. The historical and biographical detail of the artists under examination was all very interesting, not least concerning the mighty Camille Pissarro who painted a house to which I delivered mail when I was a postman some hundred years later; but the presenter resembled Cosmo Smallpiece as portrayed by Les Dawson, and he kept playing the ordinary workin' class geezer like what I am card despite clearly being nothing of the sort, and it was all this Monet was the Liam Gallagher of his day crap so as to avoid alienating anyone too stupid to understand unless handed some laddish contemporary comparison every five minutes. It was approximately watchable but our man was no Robert Hughes.

Inbetweeners, The - I see this slagged off left, right and centre, but personally I think it's great. It's a sitcom about four teenagers failing to have sex. It reminds me of the sort of shit people used to talk about at Royal Mail, and as such fills me with a warm glow of nostalgia.

IT Crowd, The - The IT Crowd derives from the same hand that penned Father Ted, and if not quite as good, it's a reasonably close second. I've a feeling this may have been aired whilst I was still living in England but indentured to Marian, which might explain why I wasn't able to watch it. Humour wasn't really her bag. I seriously doubt she would have appreciated The Inbetweeners either.

'Do you think it's a good idea to encourage young boys to rape women?' she probably would have asked me.

Kingdom - I can't remember if his name's supposed to be Dave Kingdom or something, but I expect it's along those lines - as with so many current television productions utilising a single enigmatic word for the title. Dave is played by Stephen Fry and is a crime-fighting lawyer who specialises in gentle, scenic crimes soundtracked by classical music and maybe just a pinch of Sting. There was possibly also a horsey woman in green wellies called either Jocelyn or Margaret. It's okay, I suppose - maybe a bit plummy, which is sort of what I expected.

Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Stewart  - I'm amazed that I'm able to watch this here in Texas given that it's probably tantamount to communism, and I'm really not sure quite how many of my neighbours will be reduced to tears by a relatively esoteric English comedian sneering at Asher D of So Solid Crew. Jeremy Clarkson is unfortunately popular over here, so maybe there's a backlash and Netflix or Hulu or whichever one it is are attempting to cash in. That said, I see Jimmy fucking Carr is also available for my viewing pleasure here in the States, so maybe they just license English stuff because it's English, regardless of quality.

Miranda - This is a show about a woman called Miranda as played by a woman called Miranda. It's a comedy about how she's awkward and is easily embarrassed in certain situations. It's not very funny. I think I saw her live once at some stand-up comedy event. Her routine was mostly focussed on how awkward and embarrassing it was being on stage, and how we probably weren't going to find any of it funny, and we didn't. One of my wife's co-workers thinks Miranda is one of the funniest shows ever made, although to be fair said co-worker isn't actually from Texas.

Misfits - I wish we could go back to writers making the effort to come up with proper titles for what they've written, and could draw a veil across this collective noun thing. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was definitely a better title than Flying Saucers, and Dinosaurs would have been a terrible name for Jurassic Park, and thank God Steinbeck went with Of Mice and Men rather than Thick Losers. Misfits is about a bunch of super-powered ASBO types, and there's a lot of swearing and self-conscious efforts to appear edgy and down with the kids on the street, yeah? I found it difficult to care about this show and only watched two of them.

Moone Boy - This is about a small, rural Irish child and his imaginary friend. It has the potential to be the most twee thing ever broadcast - late period Last of the Summer Wine looking at itself in a mirror - and yet somehow it gets the balance just right and is very, very funny. Amazingly it's written by the bloke who plays the imaginary friend. I had kind of forgotten that written and starring shows don't necessarily have to be shite by definition.

Only Way is Essex, The - I know I've watched at least five minutes of this but I can't remember anything about it. I have a hunch that it might not be Alan Moore's favourite show, although I can't even remember where I got that impression. I have a feeling The Only Way is Essex may even be the English equivalent of Jersey Shore, which means I should probably make the effort to have another look*. Jersey Shore is horrible and yet fascinating.

Peaky Blinders - I watched five minutes of this, waiting for someone to say something, but it was mostly just moody high contrast and high definition shots of nineteenth century squalor with music which sounded like Nick Cave. It was a bit like watching a Nine Inch Nails video, and after five minutes I decided to watch something else. On the other hand, Paul Mercer defriended me on facebook after I posted disparaging comments about this show, so the five minutes weren't entirely wasted.

Plebs - This is a cross between The Inbetweeners and Up Pompeii but missing the crucial ingredients which would have rendered it watchable, namely Frankie Howerd and jokes. I vaguely recall the single episode I watched revolving around misunderstandings relating to women's tits, or something of the sort. It wasn't very good.

Pramface - I think this was sort of like The Inbetweeners but with the humourous content replaced by wry, touching observations about school kids getting knocked up. All I can remember for sure is that it didn't make me laugh.

Primeval - Well, it's no I, Claudius but it has CGI dinosaurs and can be watched without my having to shout oh fuck off and throw things at the screen every few minutes, so that's good enough for me. I think the most recent series was made in conjunction with some sort of US-based nerd channel and was thus a complete waste of time, but then nothing lasts forever. I quite liked the one where they went into the future and encountered weirdly evolved monsters which looked like something from a harrowing Hungarian claymation.

Rev. - This is about a regular Church of England vicar living in Hackney and struggling with the fact of no-one giving a shit about going to church any more. Despite the not particularly promising premise, Rev. was fucking brilliant once it got going. Weirder still was watching this thing and recognising bits of London in the outside shots filmed around where my friend Andy once resided. In one episode there's a block of flats in the background and you can clearly see that it's Fellows Court which I used to visit regularly when Andy lived there. I even knew a bloke who went mad and tried to jump from the roof of Fellows Court whilst believing he could fly. The character of Mick also brought back some happy memories for me.

Spy - Crap dad inadvertently becomes a secret agent in an effort to impress his shit son, or so it is claimed, although I didn't watch enough of this to get to the part where he presumably phones MI5, or however it's supposed to happen. All BBC dramas now look like this one to me - same bit of suburbia with the granite effect work surface and the coffee machine and someone chopping up a kiwi fruit, same comically apologetic father figure taking his kid to football practice with the Arctic Monkeys playing in the background. He's played either by Martin Clunes, that bloke who looks like the blonde one from The Green Wing but isn't him, or the funny one from The Now Show, Outnumbered, and Mock the Week - funny being very much a relative term here, obviously.

Stella - Happily nothing to do with McCartney's jumper-designing kid, but instead a drama with jokes - as the format is known in the telly biz - concerning the trials and tribulations of Ruth Jones as a Welsh cleaning lady. It also features a bloke called Alan who strongly resembles my old boss, one of the few Royal Mail managers I didn't actually hate, so I find that somehow pleasing. I also find Ruth Jones both entertaining and very easy on the eye, so it's nice to discover that I have a whole five series of this thing to get through. Some of them get a bit drippy in places, and I could do without the turdy indie music, but otherwise it's mostly watchable.

Surf-Twat Disappoints Girlfriend's Father - Teenage girl brings digeridoo-playing knob-end back from a festival and her father accurately identifies him as a digeridoo-playing knob-end, with hilarious consequences, or probably just consequences. I think the father was Martin Clunes, but I don't remember what the show was called and there's no way of finding out. Perhaps we will never know.

Wrong Mans, The - This one featured James Cordon and some dude resembling Silvio's right-hand man from Lilyhammer, which was actually why I watched it - because I thought it was him, the ferrety looking chap with the baseball cap and the bumfluff. Anyway the two of them endure a series of improbable scrapes and chuckles derived from having been mistaken for other people. I've never hated James Cordon with quite the same venom as almost everyone else I know, although he can occasionally be irritating, but I thought he was okay in this. It was fairly funny, although the second series was stretching it a bit. It's hardly the greatest show ever broadcast, but it could have been worse, and Alison Steadman's always good.

*: I did and it was horrible.

Worldcon

It's late summer, 2013 and there's going to be a science-fiction convention right here in San Antonio, something called Worldcon which happens every year and is apparently a big deal. I read a lot of science-fiction and I also write science-fiction, but I've never really quite been able to bring myself to think of events of this kind as having anything to do with me. Advertising will typically centre on some person from Babylon 5 being in attendance to sign copies of his autobiography, but that's a television show. I suppose it's science-fiction, technically speaking, but foremost it's a television show. I can't think of a television show I'd watch rather than read a book, and were there one, it probably wouldn't be science-fiction. I vaguely recall having seen two or three episodes of Babylon 5 - one of the good ones, according to its devotees - but it did nothing for me and it seemed to lack a sense of humour.

Apparently I have what is termed an elitist or snooty attitude, meaning I think I'm better than everyone else because my opinions do not reflect those of the majority. All I know is that after the first ten minutes of most television dramas, I'm usually restless and I begin to wonder is this really all it is?; and then my mind wanders to whatever I've been reading of late, meaning I begin to lose track of which character is which and why they just said that to wossisname. It's difficult to avoid a certain sense of superiority when it dawns on you just how easily satisfied so many of your contemporaries appear to be - predicated on their being able to sit through an entire hour of this shit - but then, doesn't everyone regard themselves as superior to those around them? Psychosis aside, is there anyone who genuinely thinks I'm the same as other people, or even I'm much worse than everyone I know?

Still, Roberto will be in town, and he's been making noises about Worldcon, so I figure maybe I should go. It might be interesting and it might even be fun, which probably wouldn't be the case were I to go on my own. When I say Roberto will be in town, I'm referring to San Antonio but I suppose I also mean America because he's Italian. I know Roberto only through an internet connection. He's one of a seemingly dwindling international group of persons who frequent an internet stoop dedicated to the science-fiction author Clifford D. Simak. Simak wrote quietly contemplative and distinctly pastoral science-fiction novels which achieved some popularity throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies, but he seems to have been largely forgotten in an age wherein the term science-fiction has come to mean generically bland CGI splattered noisily across a screen. The appeal of Simak has apparently determined that those still reading his novels tend to be people who, like myself, don't like loud noises and probably come across as kind of boring to those who do.

Of course, no corner of the internet would be complete without a few disagreeable wankers, and we've even had to banish a few ornery varmints from the virtual stoop upon which we Simak readers perch with our pipes discussing how we all preferred the old beige before some dang fool tried to modernise it and only ended up making it worse; and there's Old Bill who seems eternally committed to proving that he loves Simak so much more than the rest of us, who signs his missives from the bluff, as though he's not sat whining at a fucking computer in a house with electricity, gas, and running water. Old Bill took particular issue with my views on Simaks' somewhat disappointing A Choice of Gods of 1972. I had the impression that Old Bill felt I should have consulted him before expressing an opinion, and he referred to things of which I would probably have had a better understanding had I grown up in the bosom of nature like what he did - oblivious to the fact that I lived on a farm for the first decade of my life.

Anyway, Roberto is one of the more communicative members of the group, even though he sometimes claims to struggle with English. We struck up some kind of rapport when he was ordering a framed print from an artist based somewhere in the American south-west. The problem was that the postage to Italy was extortionate, and in any case he didn't really care about the frame. In the end, he bought the print and had it delivered to me in San Antonio. I removed the artwork from the frame, repackaged it in a sturdy cardboard tube, and then mailed it to him from England when I flew back to visit my parents. It was a convoluted process, but he seemed happy and I was glad to be able to help out. He and his wife have been to America before, notably visiting the small town of Millville, Wisconsin in which Clifford D. Simak was born. This time they're visiting my end of the country, so it seems like an idea to meet up, and their holiday coinciding with Worldcon suggests itself as an opportunity of which we should probably take advantage.

Happily the kid is staying with his father this weekend, because since learning of visitors from Italy most of his conversation has been limited to jokes about Mario Brothers and pizza. It's already sufficiently nerve-racking meeting new people without having to worry about Junior breaking into a few verses of Do the Mario, regardless of the potential irony that he is himself vaguely Italian if you go back a couple of generations.

My wife and I pick Roberto and Rosanna up from their hotel, and I suddenly realise that I'm now the guy showing the out-of-towners around the place I live; which is weird because I was still the foreigner when I woke up this morning. I'm in a position equating to authority and I'm not sure I like it.

We go to eat at La Fonda which specialises in a local variation on Mexican food. It's been called Mexican food for people who don't like Mexican food, but that's really just snobbery and doesn't reflect the quality of what they serve. The place is no Blanco Cafe or Bandera Jalisco, but the food is nevertheless decent, and it seems a prudent choice given Roberto's stated suspicion of anything involving volcanically hot chillies.

We eat, trying not to dwell too long on matters of what Simak may have had for breakfast or who we think would have won in a fight between Simak and any other science-fiction author of his generation. We talk about life in Italy, England, and the United States, and how we all came to be here. Roberto's English is heavily accented but excellent, despite the doubts he has expressed in his virtual missives. He is a little older than I am and reminds me of Carl Sagan. He perhaps speaks slowly for fear of not being understood, but his caution gives his words surprising gravity which works well in conjunction with a powerfully dry sense of humour. Rosanna, his wife, speaks no English but Roberto translates, and her Italian sounds sufficiently close to Spanish for Bess and I to follow the general thrust of what she says. My fears were that this initial meeting might seem incredibly awkward, but we've had a wonderful time.

We meet again the next day. It's Saturday afternoon and Worldcon is in full swing, but we've agreed that we don't really care for much of it. We just want to browse for books we haven't read in the dealers' room, so we're going to do that on Sunday morning because it will work out the cheapest in terms of admission. It's Saturday afternoon and we meet in the heart of San Antonio at their hotel. Bess drops me off so I'm on my own with the visitors and another guy, Kevin who has travelled a couple of hundred miles from somewhere in the north-east of the state, a town on the Louisiana border. He's another fan of Simak and he's here for the Worldcon and to meet Roberto and myself. He's young and chatty, and he seems like a nice guy but our meeting under such circumstances makes me feel somehow uncomfortable.

Meeting was once easy. You went to the pub, and beer and ciggies would do the rest, and even if the person or persons you were meeting turned out to be arseholes, you wouldn't mind because - fuck it - it was a night out. Unfortunately though I no longer smoke, and I'm no longer particularly keen on the booze, and in any case they don't really have pubs in America, just bars, which are a different thing entirely. Meeting is no longer something I do so I'm out of practice, and bereft of a common purpose involving alcohol or tobacco, I'm no longer even sure how it's done. Additionally, one version of the story has this as my home town and I'm showing my friends around; but I've only been here two years and I'm still pretty much lost past the end of our road; and Kevin is a genuine American so he's showing us around by default, taking the lead, which I somehow find both annoying and at the same time a great relief.

I know, I feel like saying as Kevin explains something else without having been asked, I live here, and yet I'm aware that it's not like I'm actually bringing anything useful to the table.

We wander through the Alamo, or at least through the church because it requires no admission fee, but the day is baking hot and it's beginning to feel like we're just using up the time for reasons no-one has quite defined. We could talk about Simak as we wander around the city, but I'm feeling increasingly uncomfortable about Rosanna's partially inevitable exclusion from the conversation.

Kevin mentions Jethro Tull for some reason, and I tell him that I also enjoy their music, prompting his thoughts on the same at a level of detail far beyond anything I've ever cared about. I just listen to the records because I like how they sound, and it feels like I'm being lectured. The only note of accord we strike comes when someone mentions Old Bill who writes from the bluff. It seems we are all at least united in considering him a bit of an idiot.

We go for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins for the sake of something to do, but the place has no tables and we end up all ludicrously squatted along the low window-ledge outside the place watching our fellow tourists crowd into the Alamo. It's too hot and it's difficult to talk and ice cream is dripping onto my hand faster than I can lick it from the cone.

For fuck's sake...

Rosanna takes a photograph of the three of us, the Simak dudes. I resemble Sir Les Patterson in a stetson, which irritates me so much as to inspire the realisation that I must take charge and rescue this encounter from itself, this meeting which isn't so much a meeting as a random juxtaposition of people who vaguely know each other. Rosanna's only concern is that she gets to pick up a few artsy-crafty things for the folks back in Italy, so I've decided that's what she's going to do. I know just the place. There's a massive craft market over by Mi Tierra cafe and bakery, and it's a Mexican craft market so they have great stuff there - hand-made and hand-painted and absolutely no tat, and there's really nothing which is ever considered too weird for sale in a Mexican craft market, so they're always great places to look around even if you're not buying.

I am going to lead my people forth across the town of San Antonio unto the Mexican craft market, and they will see that it is good, and Rosanna shall be happy, and everyone wins. So we trek and we trek following Commerce past the hotel where Roberto and Rosanna are staying, and at each corner we stop and I tell them it's only a little further; but eventually we realise that it isn't, and it's ninety in the shade. Roberto thanks me for making the effort, but he and his wife feel the need to get back into the air conditioning of their hotel. Later I realise I had been leading my people east along Commerce, and Mi Tierra is west. I've only been here a couple of years. I don't have much cause to visit the centre of the city.

Next morning, Kevin, Roberto and myself convene at the entrance of Worldcon. We stump up an admission fee and go and buy books. Roberto's face lights up as he encounters a brace of early editions of Simak novels with covers he's never seen. He has a long talk with the dealer working the stall and I get the impression that this might be the highlight of his visit. It makes me happy for him. I pick up a few books for myself, and the three of us talk about what we've read, what we would like to read, who sounds interesting and so on.

'This guy is supposed to be pretty good,' Kevin observes picking up a novel by Mark Hodder, so I get to be the arsehole who had the bloke in the back of his cab, once again.

We marvel at the Lego and eventually leave as the place starts to close, each going his separate way, Kevin back to the north-east, Roberto to the hotel and eventually to Italy.

It ended well.

Nausea

Texas is hot at this time of year, and it's difficult to appreciate quite what that means until you've lived in it. As with anything, just visiting is something different. Back in England, I'd fallen into the habit of spending most of October dreading the approach of winter, followed by several months of freezing wet misery and darkness, and most of that time spent working outdoors in close proximity to the freezing wet misery and darkness. Do I really want to move to a country which won't oblige me to spend six months of each year thinking about topping myself whilst shivering and waiting for my socks to dry? was never a question I had to think about at any great length.

I moved, assuming that it would be the end of weather-induced melancholia for me; but instead the calendar simply swapped around, so now it's July and August which are the toughest months. The heat soars to such extremes that I'm obliged to get all outdoor activity done before midday - shopping, gardening, cycling or whatever - then take shelter inside with the AC turned up full in every room. It isn't quite a symmetrical inversion of how much I once dreaded winter, because it doesn't last so long and I'd rather be too hot than too cold, but it can still be an endurance test, a period of time during which you just have to keep on going until it's done and you can breath again; and it is unfortunately during such times that I tend to notice other reasons to be less than cheerful, and as the days get hotter and the soil turns to dust, it becomes more and more difficult to keep going forward.

I am not an inherently happy individual. I experience happiness but it isn't my natural state of being, because that which makes me happy is by definition fleeting and impermanent, and the world is full of depressing shit, and depressing shit tends to be eternal and enduring.

Rather than happiness, I aspire to contentment, which is simply purpose combined with the absence of depressing shit - either because I don't know about the depressing shit, or because I'm ignoring it for the sake of maintaining my sanity. This usually just means I'm ignoring facebook. Most of the time I maintain a general sense of contentment because on the whole I'm exceptionally lucky in terms of my lot; and certain things season my contentment with happiness: my wife and our home, decent food, the wilderness around San Antonio, books and music and cats...

I'm not even sure how many we have these days.

There are seven cats inside, and an indeterminate number of strays which I also feed in the mornings - five at present. They sit in the yard casting a meaningful gaze at the back door when I get up in the morning, each one waiting to be fed. A couple of them have become so tame that it's difficult to keep myself from thinking of them as our cats, as part of our extended family; although the rest are undeniably feral. They seem pleased to see me, but they keep their distance.

It is August. The heat is punishing, shifting up into three figures on some days. The creek has dried, no water anywhere, and facebook idiocy has left me wishing to sever almost all ties with the rest of the human race - which happens with some frequency - and on top of it all, Mr. Kirby has gone missing.

Mr. Kirby is one of the feral cats, almost family, but not quite.

We have a female cat called Kirby who went missing on the same day that Paul Ebbs - celebrated author of children's drama serials - cracked facebook jokes about teaching cats to swim by placing them in sacks with housebricks before throwing them into a body of water. It transpired that people liking all the stuff he doesn't like on social media - specifically people posting pictures of cats - was quite literally destroying his life, so you can see why he would be angry.

I defriended Paul Ebbs and went out to look for Kirby. She was missing for nearly three weeks, and each time my wife and I went looking we thought we'd found her, but it always turned out to be a male cat with similar markings, one of the local strays. We knew he was a male cat due to his massive furry bollocks, and so we provisionally named him Mr. Kirby for the sake of something to call him. The original Kirby eventually came back.

Mr. Kirby took to lounging around in our back yard, hoovering up the food that our own cats couldn't be bothered to finish. Eventually I started buying food for the outside cats too, because if we're to live in a neighbourhood full of strays, as we do, they may as well be well-fed, relatively healthy strays. Of course, as the sage Paul Ebbs has taught us, not everyone likes cats; but thankfully most of our neighbours do, and Stephen from across the road told me how the street used to have a real problem with rats and mice, which the presence of cats seems to have sorted out. Additionally, the local feline population appears to have stabilised, with all the females having been trapped, neutered, and released by city authorities.

I feel I've got to know Mr. Kirby reasonably well. He flinches a little whenever I stroke him, but he seems otherwise glad to see me. He's an odd-looking cat with a distinctive hooting meow, and sometimes I ask him whether he's a cat or a goose - because I talk to the cats, which is probably inevitable. He's long and skinny, grey with black stripes which turn to spots when he rolls over, suggesting that - like Kirby - he has some Bengal somewhere in his ancestry. He also has certain Siamese characteristics, the slim muscular build and that meow. He's built like a lollipop - a long, thin body with a massive head - and the slant of his eyes makes it seem as though he views us with suspicion or even disdain. Sometimes when I see Mr. Kirby, the words come to me: I don't want that boy in the house again, he looks like a sheep-killing dog, which is supposedly what some person's conservative father said of the youthful William S. Burroughs.

It's been three days since I've seen Mr. Kirby. Ordinarily he's outside the back door waiting to be fed with the rest of them every morning. Cats disappear from time to time, then show up again a week later because that's what cats do, and this is particularly true of strays. Well-meaning people take them in, or they get trapped in someone's garage, or maybe they just go wandering. Sometimes it'll be a road accident, but thankfully that doesn't seem to happen so often as you might expect. Even so, Mr. Kirby seems like an old cat, so I can't help but be concerned.

He comes back on the Monday, but something is wrong with him. He's noticably thin - suggesting the aforementioned garage scenario - and he's hungry, but he isn't eating. He puts his face into the bowl of food but that's all, then moves on to the next bowl of food as I dish it up as though this helping of the exact same thing will be more to his liking. He's not eating, he's not drinking, and his muzzle and front paws are all messed up. I can't tell if it's dried blood or just dirt, like he's had to tunnel his way out from somewhere; and he coughs as though trying to sick something up, and his tongue sticks out even with his mouth closed.

Truthfully, Mr. Kirby seems prone to such injuries. Every few months he'll show up with a crippling limp looking as though he's been in a fight, but he always recovers. He's like the cat equivalent of a retired superhero, old and a bit fucked but he could still kick your ass.

This, on the other hand, is something different. He isn't drinking. He isn't cleaning himself. He sits out in the porch as the August heat climbs and climbs. I wonder if he was hit by a car and broke his jaw, or whether he has some sort of bronchial infection, or - as my wife suggests - a cold. She has known cats to catch their equivalent of a cold and to not eat or drink for days as a result. It could be that he was stung in the mouth, given that we have some genuinely terrifying wasps in Texas. My fear is that he's having problems with his teeth, and something has gone bad and has become infected.

It could be any of these or none of them, and each diagnosis seems to bring some other symptom to disprove it. For a couple of days he doesn't eat or drink so far as we can tell, although clearly he wants to, and so my wife makes plans to get him to the vet. It's not an easy choice because the vet is always expensive, and we can't save every single stray in the neighbourhood, and more than anything we're afraid that the vet will take one look at Mr. Kirby and decide that there isn't much point to keeping this sheep-killing dog of a stray cat alive.

My wife has the cat box, so I find Mr. Kirby and pick him up. I'm not convinced he's had food or water for three days, and his face seems to be swelling up on one side, yet somehow he's still stronger than most humans. I've never picked him up before, so I never realised that he was solid muscle. He doesn't want to go in the cat box, and I can't hold him. It's like I'm in a fight with some bloke in a pub car park. He runs, out the porch door and to the fence. We go after him, but he's through into Frasier's garden leaving me just one last reproachful backwards glance.

Why you do this?

The next day is so hot that water catches fire as it comes from the hose. The air is still and it burns my skin and I feel terrible. Mr. Kirby didn't show when I fed the other cats at the usual time, so it's probably the last we've seen of him. Whatever was wrong didn't seem like something which is just going to right itself, so he's probably crawled off to find somewhere to die. I look around but I can't find him, and I can't see him from over the fence. I don't bother going out today because it's far too hot. At one point I lay on the bed and experience a vision, one of those quirks of memory or thought or something where an image flashes momentarily into the mind's eye, clear as day for a fraction of a second.

I see the front room at the basement flat in Lordship Lane, the place I lived for a decade up until about 2007. It's the front room as I knew it in the early afternoon following a customarily exhausting morning at work. I'm be prone on the sofa, aching and barely able to move with the gas fire on, but the room is still so cold that I can see my breath. The winter sun is blinding through the net curtains, although it has barely risen above the roofs of the houses across the street. My entire existence is saturated with the knowledge that life is exhausting, and that I'm barely getting by, and it will only become more exhausting and more difficult as I go on. This is a horrible thing to remember right now.

In the evening I knock on Frasier's door but there's no answer, so I let myself into his back garden on humanitarian grounds. I have the cat box but I'm expecting I'll probably just find a corpse. Frasier's garden is huge, wild, and strewn with junk, and my search comes with its own soundtrack of pitbulls snarling away in the next yard along. I don't find what I'm looking for. I suppose that's a good thing in so much as that we don't know he's dead for sure.

The next day, Mr. Kirby is back.

He still looks a bit fucked, but he's alive and meowing, even though the meow is more of a croak. I dish out the food but it's business as usual. He sniffs but doesn't eat, but we're just glad he's alive, and tonight we'll get him to the vet if it kills us. Then a few minutes later my wife calls me back to the porch to tell me that he's cleaning himself. I move a provisional bowl of food under his nose and slowly he begins to eat. It isn't much, but it's something. He spends the afternoon lounging in the hot sun, and we decide to postpone the visit to the vet, weighing how difficult he is to catch against the possibility that he definitely seems a little better.

The next day, he looks clean, he's hooting away, and he eats three bowls of food seemingly without pausing for breath. I return to my original theory of Mr. Kirby being more or less indestructible. Whatever was wrong with him - bad as it was - he got over it, just like William S. Burroughs - all those years as a heroin addict and the fucker still lives into his eighties. It occurs to me that maybe Mr. Kirby is William S. Burroughs reincarnated as a cat, which would also explain the look he sometimes gives us. I don't believe in reincarnation, but I expect William S. Burroughs did, which may be the deciding factor.

A couple of days later a storm system over Louisiana sends rain our way, and it pours for days. The creeks fill and the temperature falls to a more manageable level.

Life goes on.

The moment has passed.

Country Club

It will be the kid's thirteenth birthday on Monday, by which point he will be away for a week at some sort of subaquatic summer camp, so he's celebrating now, it being the weekend. We've picked up his friend Tommy, and the two of them will spend the day doing kid stuff, eating pizza, and frequently addressing each other as either dude or bro'. The kid stuff is mostly beyond me, it bearing no resemblance to anything I would have done at that age. It involves iPads, memes, and YouTube celebrities - which are people who post amateur videos of themselves talking about Pokémon cards online. I don't really understand this generation, but it's probably no different to my parents' generation failing to understand mine.

Andrea expressed some concern about the present which Tommy gave our boy for his birthday, hoping it didn't seem too weird or lacking in thought. The present is a stick, one so large you might justifiably refer to it as a staff. Tommy found it on the land at the back of his house, stripped away all the bark, then sanded and treated it with oil; and it will no doubt come in handy should Junior ever encounter a surly giant whilst crossing a mediaeval brook.

We said not to worry. At Christmas the boy asked for a fly swatter and a broom. He asked for a broom presumably because I'd stopped him taking our broom into his room with him on the grounds of it being a broom rather than a toy. I wouldn't have minded had he been using it to sweep some of the crap from his floor, but it was serving as an armature by which to idly hit and swipe at remote objects whilst playing games on his iPad, or possibly just watching complete strangers discuss Pokémon cards. This hitting or rhythmically tapping at things seems to be one of his tics. I put my foot down with the broom when he somehow managed to smash the frosted glass shade of the ceiling light in his room.

'How did it happen?' I asked with near infinite patience.

'I have no clue,' he dutifully reported with typical excess of gravity, apparently having missed the point of that whole story about George Washington and the cherry tree.

I suppose the positive thing to take from all this is that the virtual world of iPads and games and YouTube has left him in a much less fraught relationship with material possessions than most kids of my own generation. I suppose it's a good thing. I have a suspicion that it actually isn't, but I can't quite put my finger on why.

Anyway, it's five in the afternoon, so the Texas heat has slackened off a little and we're taking them swimming. Tommy has a tiny hand-held waterproof camera the size of an asthma inhaler and he is making a short film.

'We're going to the pool,' he announces to his audience from the rear seat of our car.

'We're going to the Country Club,' Junior corrects him, quite unnecessarily seeing as the pool is located at the Country Club and that's why we're going there.

Byron - the boy's father - is a member of the Country Club, and so we are granted access by association. Country Clubs seem to be a relatively common thing over here, generally places in which Americans at the upper end of the economic scale hang out, swim in the pool, play golf, get drunk at the bar, smoke cigars and talk about money. I suspect you probably have to know the right people in order to be nominated for membership, specifically a better class of person - as I've overheard at least one overfinanced plastic surgery addict put it. Accordingly it's mostly us white folks, and I can't quite shake the feeling that any moment I will be rumbled as a Communist and escorted from the premises.

Bess and I find seats in the shade, and the boys dive into the pool. We've signed some book or other, so we have a right to be here, and a waiter asks if we require drinks. We say no, because it will all go on Byron's tab, which somehow doesn't seem entirely fair. Neither of us wish to appear like freeloaders.

We watch the boys and eavesdrop on the conversation of San Antonio's elite, the people from an area unofficially known as the bubble in reference to how little interaction they have with the rest of reality. They talk about money, trucks, and the prestige of certain schools. The funny thing is that these people really do consider themselves an upper echelon, a better class of person; but being from England I have encountered yer actual upper classes, and this bunch are really just regular assholes with far too much money and values based on never having to ask or to apologise for anything. The other funny thing is that they just love me as soon as they hear the accent, presuming we'll have things in common because I grew up in Downton Abbey, and the bubble is really the same kind of deal but with Mexican gardeners. I've also had people asking me if I make my own fish and chips, as though it's some sort of ancestral tradition like the Māoris with their tattoos. So I tend to keep my mouth closed because it's less exhausting.

The boys take it in turns to dive from the diving board, alternating with some other kids, one of whom embellishes each leap with spectacularly ornate somersaults. Our team sticks to diving, swimming, then out of the pool and onto the board again, over and over; until Tommy breaks the pattern to hand Bess his camera.

'Do you think it's okay?'

She casts a dubious look at the tiny slot in which one inserts the SIM card - or whatever that thing is. The cover is open and the camera won't turn off no matter how often the button is depressed. Also it feels quite hot in the hand.

'They're supposed to be waterproof, aren't they?' I ask.

'Yes.'

'Why is it so hot?'

I imagine a battery shorting, overheating, leading to an explosion which removes the Country Club from the map of San Antonio, but logically I know this can't happen. If the thing is waterproof, then it really should be fine.

'Leave it with me,' Bess suggests, and the diving resumes. 'Andrea will go crazy if this thing is broken.'

'How much was it?'

'I don't know - couple of hundred dollars?'

We sigh, because there's nothing to be done. The boys switch to table football at the side of the pool, and we listen to and identify a succession of hits of the eighties - Madonna, the Eurythmics, Haircut 100, and others. They're all English records too, which strikes me as particularly weird, and I wonder if this generation will grow up hating these artists as much as I hated Herman's Hermits and Freddie & the Dreamers. We briefly discuss what cult religion Madonna is currently subscribed to, because we can't remember.

Another half hour passes and we go to Florio's for pizza, and the boys spend the rest of the evening doing kid stuff, eating the aforementioned pizza, and frequently addressing each other as either dude or bro'.

The camera turns out to be fine, and Tommy uploads a minute long edited clip of himself and Junior swimming to YouTube.

We're going to the Country Club, our boy announces, and my wife shudders at how privileged he sounds. The words slide out of his mouth as though setting some drooling serf right about the correct order in which cutlery is to be laid out on a table - not even superior, just delivering a correction from a position of implicit authority.

I shrug, because that's how he always sounds to me. I guess I've just got used to it, and it's not really his fault.