My Own Personal Nelson Muntz

Nelson Muntz is a character from The Simpsons, the bully at Bart's school who graduates to being merely a slightly unpredictable hardnut in later episodes. When I saw my first Simpsons way back in the nineties, I recognised Nelson straight away. I felt as though I knew him. My own Nelson wasn't quite a bully, but I'd certainly found him intimidating.

The school was tiny, Ilmington C of E Junior & Infants on the edge of the Cotswolds. There were seven kids in my class, expanding to nine or ten by the final year. We got to know each other reasonably well, excepting Nelson - as I'll continue to call him - because like I said I found him intimidating, and I really had the impression he worked at it. One day during the later years, our teacher - Mr. Davies - announced that we would be keeping diaries of our daily activities as a writing exercise. None of us were particularly happy with the idea. Nelson was particularly disgruntled, explaining to the rest of us that he resented the proposal that he might be required to keep a record of all the little kids he'd beaten up that week. Even at the age of nine, this struck me as a slightly weird announcement. It must surely have occurred to him that he could simply omit mention of all the little kids he'd beaten up that week, but apparently he really needed to tell us about it.

Boasting aside, he can't have been much of a bully. I never really developed a fear of him as I did with a couple of the older kids; and once we all went to the much larger secondary school, much like his Simpsons namesake, his status was downgraded to that of mere hardnut in relation to some of the genuinely violent psychotics spawned on the farms around Shipston.

Additionally, Nelson was sometimes quite funny, so if we were never quite pals, it was difficult to harbor animosity towards him. He sold me the first two Boomtown Rats albums and one by Public Image Limited when motorbikes and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal lured him away from anything punky, as happened with almost everyone else at our school.

I was never into motorbikes, although I drew the Philadelphia Freaks riding their bikes from the Inferno strip in 2000AD comic. The Philadelphia Freaks were a sports team of horrific cyborgs, and the drawing so impressed my art teacher that it was pinned to the wall in the art class. It also impressed Nelson. He asked if I'd accept a commission to paint horrific cyborgs on the petrol tank of his own motorbike. I said yes. He paid me a tenner, or maybe a fiver, and gave me the drawing of the character he wanted me to paint. He'd taken my art from the wall of the art room and cut out his preferred monster. I wasn't sure how I felt about that, but obviously I wasn't going to say anything.

I spent a weekend painting the thing, using the enamels with which I would paint Airfix kits to fill in the detail on a silhouette of the figure sprayed in gold paint. I don't recall the result as having been anything special, and years later, I popped the question on facebook:

Do you remember I painted the tank of a bike for you, maybe around 1982? Did it ever get put back on the bike and did you ever take a photo? Just wondering because with hindsight I'll bet there's probably some reason why bike custom people don't use little pots of Humbrol enamel or whatever it was that I used.

It turned out that he did remember:

I do and do you what I fucking regret selling it to this day it was brilliant the tank and the bike I mean, do you know never took a picture of it either (sorry) I remember to this day it was black with artisan robots and stuff way ahead of its time the bike was an old villiers Sprite 250 that I had for my 12 Christmas !!!

This came as a relief to me:

I'm just glad it worked. All these years I've imagined you taking it out on the road and the whole thing sort of peeling off before you're back home.

I'd anticipated some vague memory of resentment over my shoddy custom job, thankfully without foundation.

Think back it all brings back a bit of a comedy, the day you gave it back to me Michelle Warren told me I couldn't play with her tits anymore after I got my painted tank back it kind of took my mind of things ..... Oh and the paint job was as good the day you gave it back to me think sold it when I was 17 or so !!!

I remembered Michelle Warren but not her tits, and I suspect it had escaped me that Nelson had ever been granted access to them, so it's probably a good job that he mentioned it or I never would have known; but this exchange came later.

Meanwhile back in the eighties, I left school and had no good reason to think about Nelson; but as I've found, as one progresses along the path of one's existence from one place to the next, those I miss tend to be those I never knew very well, those who provided texture, those who had something but not a good reason for us to keep in touch. So from time to time I wondered what became of Nelson. Eventually, inevitably, facebook provided the answer to this question which I probably should have known not to ask; because we still didn't really have much to say to each other, and then there was the Brexit referendum, upon which Nelson opined:

Sorry Lol you are a better person than that !! We have got a real chance to actually do things right and if I'm being selfish get our own way for once, we as a country have objected to 79 (I think) new EU rules and our objections were ignored every single time, try not to look into this too much I think the vote to exit is nothing more than ....... "Do you know what, I am fed up with being dictated to 100% of the time and ignored if I dare challenge or question" we are quite prepared suffer in the short term to forge a better environment for ourselves. The whole immigration bit is largely a red herring and a convenient label to stir the shit

Despite my being better than something or other, this wasn't a dialogue I could see going anywhere useful, which it accordingly didn't:

Doom and gloom doom and gloom suck it up at least we haven't got shit loads of Brussels rules and regulations to tick off before we tackle it all ..... All you need is some Tommy can do attitude .... Ok let's have a brew then come on you wankers lets get at it !!!

This was followed by some peculiar comment about the spirit of Isambard Kingdom Brunel with Nelson announcing that he was heading outside to build a suspension bridge on the grounds of the possibilities having become endless. I was unable to find the comment when I went back to look for it, so maybe he'd deleted it, having discovered that Brunel was the son of French immigrants.

Anyway, the pattern had been established, this pattern being our social media interaction being limited to politics. The one exception was some comment I'd made about the Sex Pistols which he'd somehow read as a criticism and accordingly jumped to their defense on the grounds of the Pistols at least having been better than all that New Romantic stuff which came after, which was all a bit gay. Otherwise, I might submit all manner of posts to my facebook page, photographs of things I'd painted, myself stood on the surface of the moon, selfies taken while bowling with Prince Philip and the Chuckle Brothers, and never so much as a dickie bird from Nelson, but the moment I mention Jeremy Corbyn, as if by magic...

Sad to say you are wrong Lawrence on the simple premise, once an anarchist gets what they want they simply cease to be an anarchist and morph into something more wildly extreme like Che, Pot, or dare I say Hitler ? Or they swing the other way and conform to line their own pockets !

Corbin typifies for me the very essence of anarchy in attacking the establishment - be careful what you wish for !

The thing I found the most mystifying about this one was the bewildering conflation of Che Guevara with Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler, almost as though he had no fucking idea about who Che Guevara actually was but was simply pulling names out of his ass. Under other circumstances I might have asked did you even go to school, but I quite clearly remember that he did because I was there too.

It didn't get any better when I opined that the Conservative party comprised mostly amoral money-grubbing shitbags who shouldn't, under any circumstances, be re-elected at the end of 2019. My argument was based on the idea that if all of the country's problems were, as fuckwits claimed, the fault of the previous Labour government and the Conservative government had spent its time in office correcting their mistakes, their apparent inability to correct those mistakes despite having had nine years in which to do so would seem to suggest they might not be the right people for the job. Additionally, Conservative solutions to Labour's mistakes had included the extradition to Jamaica of old age pensioners who had arrived in England at the age of just three months, and austerity policies, by which those physically or mentally unable to work were denied benefits just to see if it might inspire them to pull their socks up and get a job, at least in the cases of the ones with legs. As my mother's job is to provide legal advice to such people, I'd met a few of them and therefore had direct experience of their problems being absolutely life threatening and genuine. The argument that they all get given free cellphones and live a life of dole scrounging luxury never sounded like much of an argument to me, but apparently it worked for Nelson.

Anyone remember the lovely note left on the treasury wall from the last government 9 or 10 years ago ? Well it read like this ..... money all gone, good luck !

Life is fab till the moneys all gone...then some poor fucker has to go in and clean up the mess then gets blamed for the shit not of their making !

Just saying

I wanted to argue against this drivel, to suggest that maybe the whole point of government was finding ways of raising money to pay for essential services - because I'm pretty certain government funding isn't based on whatever small change the previous lot dropped down the back of the fucking couch - but I knew I was in essence arguing with the contents of a right-wing opinion column, something which waves a hand to make some general point about those people, then orders another pint. I was wasting my time.

Money greases the wheels, when you run out guess who suffers the most ....go ask any Cuban when Russian turned off the tap ....and its those in over paid jobs top 5 or 10% pay 70 to 80% of the tax in this country ...where the fuck do you think they will do when they get taxed 99p in the pound as they did back in the 70s ?

Yeah great idea let's eat cake and caviar for a week and starve for a month after month after month, because the money,s ran out ...that's really good for the poorest and most in need like those in hospital or unable to work.

Still there will always be a room at Chequers and massive debt owing to those you ought not to have borrowed from.

Still the needy will have free WiFi and a £600 phone to check if their benefits are in their bank account ! ....well until such time the treasury is empty ?

The thesis, as I understood it, seemed to be fuck those dole-scrounging sponge monkeys and will no-one think of the millionaires?, a thesis I can have delivered direct to my earhole by phoning my dad, should the need arise.

I'd tried with Nelson but I should have known better. I didn't really know him at school, and I don't really know him forty years later beyond that he plays a lot of rugby and holds views such as those given above, delivered with the same bullying tone as the one about all the little kids he'd beaten up that week. He was setting me straight whether I liked it or not.

I shuffled him off into a subgroup of facebook friends, one bound by settings which mean they don't see any of my posts or get to comment upon them...

...not because I prefer an echo chamber but because I can already read and if I'd wanted to carry on reading the opinion column of the Sun I probably would have stayed in England. Regurgitating what you heard some bigger boys saying does not constitute a viewpoint, not even when framed in matey terms as though we ever had anything at all to say to each other. I'm sick to the back teeth of those actively working to make the world worse, those who believe anything told them by a nice man in a suit. I'm tired of the xenophobes, the good company men, the good little soldiers, the loyal snitches, the teachers' pets, the police informants, the head boys and girls, the neighbourhood watch award winners, the apple polishers, the people who are only able to elevate themselves by pushing down on someone else, life's Manchester United supporters, kisser's of the royal arse, grateful Ygors, goodly serfs, those who ask can I carry that for you, master?, and anyone who ever described themselves as proud without having actually done anything to be proud of beyond being born in a certain place.

Life has been better since, at least that part of my life involving social media. My curiosity about whatever became of has reduced to almost zero because most of them apparently turned into arseholes, thankfully with a couple of exceptions.

So that's another lesson learned. I probably should have learned it back when he first cut one of the figures out from something it had taken me hours to draw.

Everything is Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said, 'Oooh all right then.'

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

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

I said 'yes, I did!'

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

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

I said, 'You're right there!'

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

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

It was now December, so I tried to explain:

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

She responded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh fuck, I said to myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*: Not actual names.

Stalker

I acquired my first stalker sometime in 1993. She was my first and has thankfully thus far been my only one. I didn't realise she was a stalker at the time, simply assuming her to be a fan of the band for which I played guitar. We were called Academy 23, and we had coagulated around the nucleus of Dave Fanning and Andy Martin, formerly of the Apostles, who had achieved minor infamy with a string of angry but tuneful albums, EPs, and cassette tapes.

Academy 23 were more or less a continuation of the Apostles, renamed after William Burroughs' essay and with a related shift of emphasis informed - so I had the impression - by Andy's desire to distance himself from the anarchopunk circles with which the Apostles had often been associated. We played a couple of gigs, recorded and released a compact disc which I didn't actually like very much, and we were interviewed in a few fanzines. I suppose I should have spotted the peculiarity of Zoe's letter being addressed directly to myself given that my home address had never appeared on any Academy 23 related material. I assume she had found it in one of my own small press comics or fanzines churned out under the banner of Runciter Corporation, yet otherwise having no direct association with Academy 23. She had done her homework.

She gave her name as Zoe Almond, and she wrote from an address in Liverpool. The letter was written in biro on one side of an A4 sheet of lined paper from a notepad. She asked me about Academy 23, about Andy, and how our music related to that of the Apostles. The Apostles had been amongst my absolute favourite bands of the previous decade, and I still rate their music very highly even today, so it was immensely exciting to have been asked to play guitar for what was in essence a continuation of that band. I understood Zoe's devotion because I shared it myself. This appeared to be my very first fan letter, so I wrote back immediately.

The second letter came by the end of the same week, longer and in more detail. Here was someone who really understood what the Apostles had been about. She explained that as a lesbian who had been more or less disowned by her own parents, Andy's music really spoke to her; and it was true that he had a real talent for communicating the frustration of the outsider, the teenage runaway, and the generally dispossessed. This was for me, and I guess many others, what had set the Apostles apart from all those other black and white fold-out sleeve bands. They were about the individual in a society out of balance rather than the then traditional sloganeering against church, state and the multinationals, and the Apostles weren't afraid of pissing people off, even those who bought their records.

Does Andy read Gay News?, Zoe asked.

It seemed like a strange question. I had no idea whether he did or not, but presumed not as he had never mentioned it.

The next letter was four pages, and I began to notice just how much of it seemed concerned with Andy. I also noticed that an oddly confrontational tone had entered her correspondence. I assumed this was simply her being slightly mad - as she admitted herself - which was hardly an unknown factor amongst those who found themselves drawn to the music of the Apostles.

You do realise that I'm not actually Andy's publicity manager, I wrote back; you might be better off asking him yourself, and like an idiot I wrote out the address of his place up in Hackney.

Her response was eight pages long, with some mumbling about how she wasn't exactly in Andy's good books, and with the tone just that little bit snottier than before. Additionally she had sent a cassette of a programme taped from Radio 4, some debate upon an assortment of gay and lesbian issues. She wanted to know what I thought of it all. Most of the letter was taken up with some sort of internal monologue relating to the aforementioned gay and lesbian issues. Being myself neither gay nor lesbian, I wondered what she thought this had to do with me, or more importantly, why I would necessarily have anything either useful or interesting to say on the subject. I didn't mind, but it really began to seem like she was wasting her time.

Unable to contribute anything of real value to our correspondence I sent her a photocopy of a nine-panel comic strip I had drawn entitled The Shockers. The story behind The Shockers was my friend - whom I will discreetly identify as Bingo - having told me of his visit to a very vaguely mutual acquaintance, an artist whom I'll identify as Roulette Gondwanaland so as to avoid granting her any needless publicity. Roulette Gondwanaland lived with her partner, Stegosaurus Dave - and yes that is his real name - and she had not seen Bingo for some time. They knew each other at college. More recently Roulette Gondwanaland had taken to publishing small press comic strips, although they weren't really strips so much as pages of lists, one example being a list of objects of such proportions as to fit comfortably inside her vagina.

Outrageous!

Roulette Gondwanaland had taken to what might loosely be described as a swinging lifestyle, enjoying regular threesomes with Stegosaurus Dave and some other guy who was introduced as Stegosaurus Dave's boyfriend. Sometimes she herself enjoyed homosexual liasons with another female partner, although Stegosaurus Dave was not allowed to join in with this particular juxtaposition of genitalia, because that would have been just wrong. The precise nature of the juxtaposition was revealed when Roulette Gondwanaland took her leave of the meeting with Bingo, explaining, 'I'm going to meet my girlfriend now. I'm going to lick her pussy!'

I vaguely knew Roulette Gondwanaland as a figure around our shared locality, and had found her faintly irritating from afar for quite some time. Her art, and the numerous headachey events set up to promote it combined a smug quality with what looked a lot like a desperate cry for attention, and so I guess her personal life was much the same as her public life. I found it hard to avoid being both irritated and entertained by her existence, and so in The Shockers my pointedly bemused skinhead author surrogate finds himself cornered by characters who insist on regaling him with full explanations of their sexual habits in an apparent effort to inspire shock which they pass off as testimonial to the powerful currency of their own liberated outlook.

The problem with The Shockers is that it could easily be read as a prudish, even borderline homophobic effort, the sort of reactionary crap which might bring a smile to Clarkson's sausagey lips. It looks like gratuitous liberal-baiting, which wasn't really my intention. I included some text which wasn't quite the disclaimer to which it aspired, something about the sort of demonstrative sexuality expressed by persons such as Roulette Gondwanaland being some peculiar kind of fashion statement representing a stereotype, and a fairly insulting stereotype. Part of this came from having gay friends, Andy significantly amongst them, who had come to feel somewhat alienated by a society which tended to characterise them as one of  just a few very limited types; but mainly it was just because Roulette Gondwanaland was inherently full of shit and sorely in need of having the piss taken out of her. I honestly couldn't have cared less about her or anyone else's sexuality, but her overbearing need for the rest of us to know all about it in such pornographic detail, and presumably to have our inner Mary Whitehouses quaking in their boots, demarcated her as being a fucking twat and therefore ripe for satire.

The Shockers maybe wasn't a great cartoon, but then it still makes me laugh. Even now, I still can't quite unscramble what it actually says - whether or not it constitutes my Richard Littlejohn moment - and I had no better idea of how it came across or whether it worked as intended at the time. Andy thought it was hilarious, but then his standard regarding humour seems to work in terms of how much the joke upsets anyone he doesn't like. Zoe Almond of Liverpool had clearly spent a great deal of time mulling over an assortment of gay and lesbian issues, so I sent her a copy hoping her response would be something along the lines of yes, this is spot on or I can definitely see what you're getting at here. Thank you for understanding how difficult it is being gay.

The next letter contained eight ninety-minute tapes of debate upon an assortment of gay and lesbian issues as originally broadcast on Radio 4, and another eight page letter. She was very disappointed that I had not yet returned the first tape she had kindly sent to me - the tape I hadn't actually requested - and she wanted this latest bunch back within the week. Also, she hadn't enjoyed The Shockers at all.

Your pitiful, barely literate cartoon, she explained, has now caused serious damage to the lives of many of my friends, before descending into another lengthy rant I couldn't quite follow eventually concluding in rhetorical and somewhat digressive fashion with questions of just who Andy Martin thinks he is.

I tried to envision how my pitiful, barely literate cartoon could have now caused serious damage to the lives of many of Zoe's friends given that it had never been printed anywhere, existed only as a couple of photocopies, and wasn't actually a billboard or a television broadcast blaming one entire section of society for all the woes of another. I could see how it might piss somebody off, particularly somebody lacking a sense of humour - which was, I suppose, the point - but I couldn't see how it could now cause serious damage to anyone's life. This worried me.

I'd spoken to Andy a couple of times on the phone since the first of Zoe's letters, but each time I had forgotten to mention our newest fan, or to ask whether he read Gay News. This time when he called, I was a little phased by this most recent development.

'Oh God,' he said. 'Is it from an address in Liverpool?'

'Yes, it is,' I confirmed, then recalling Zoe admitting to not exactly being in Andy's good books. 'You know her?'

'Not personally. Listen - whatever you do, don't reply. Stuff everything back in the envelope and mark it name not known and return to sender.'

'Right.'

'You didn't reply, did you?'

I was fairly sure of the fact that I had done so being implicit in what I'd already told him, but maybe he was in shock. 'Well now that you mention it, I sort of did - yes.'

'Oh God.'

'Is it bad?'

'I'm afraid it's very, very bad, Lawrence, but at least you haven't given them my new address, so they probably think I still live in Brougham Road. At least there's that.'

I set him right about this specific misreading of the situation, and when the groaning and gnashing of teeth eventually subsided, he went into detail. Zoe - also known as Zurina - was one of two girls, believed to be sisters, who spent their days winding up members of punk bands with series of fan letters becoming progressively more abusive in tone as the correspondence develops. Apparently they had done the same to members of Blaggers ITA and a few of the other groups who were around at the time; and the consensus was that the Almond sisters were probably psychotic - trolls, in internet terms, but trolls before there was any worldwide web upon which to sail their disharmonious vessels. They had already targeted Pete, our drummer, but without much luck as he had other things to do besides responding to fanmail, or what attempted to pass itself off as fanmail.

I duly stuffed all of Zoe's letters and tapes back into the envelope in which the most recent missive had arrived, sealed it up, and stuck it back in the post marked return to sender. I added a note stating that being a postman I had consulted my manager at work regarding the legality of abusive mail - as indeed I had done - and Royal Mail would be quite happy to prosecute should any more of this shit arrive at my house. Amazingly, it did the trick. I never heard from Zoe Almond ever again.

About a month later, Andy had a mysterious caller, a gruff and unfamiliar female voice with a Liverpudlian accent heard over the speaker system of the entry phone at his tower block. He didn't answer and the caller went away, never to be heard from again. He later admitted that he'd indulged in quite a lot of swearing that afternoon, and had taken my name in vain on several occasions.

I never published The Shockers, and eventually rewrote it as a short science-fiction story, taking greater care to avoid inclusion of any sentiment which could be read as the sort of thing which might invite a rousing here here from passing Daily Mail subscribers. The cartoon strip still makes me laugh, but equally it feels like a guilty and uncomfortable secret. Drawing The Shockers was not really a deed to be proud of, but the time was at least better spent than that of Zoe - or whatever her real name was - waging her cranky, pointless campaigns against people in bands which no fucker has heard of.

The Dark Side of the Moron

KHOU-TV is a Houston television station which hosted this news item on its website dated to the 18th of June, 2014.

WEBSTER, Texas — A Webster man says his apartment complex manager told him his American flag was a threat to the Muslim community, and that he has to take it down. But he's not giving up without a fight.

Stepping onto Duy Tran's balcony in Webster, one thing is clear: 'It means a lot to me,' he said.

He's talking about his American flag that he proudly put up when he moved in just a few days ago. But then an apartment manager at the Lodge on El Dorado told him he had to take it down.

'What really stunned me is that she said it's a threat towards the Muslim community,' said Tran. 'I'm not a threat toward anybody.'

The story can now be found at a number of different internet addresses, posted and posted again weeks and even months after the original report. One might imagine this repetition would run contrary to the function of news, which should surely serve to reflect that which occurs in the present, or at least which has occurred since the last time we either opened up a newspaper or were too lazy to find the remote when the news came on after whatever we were watching on the box; but of course news isn't really the point here.

I came across the saga of Duy Tran and his massive flag the day before my birthday when it turned up on social media, rediscovered by a friend who had previously given me no impression of having gone in for this sort of thing.

Soooo wrong, observed her friend Beryl the Peril in response, although I have omitted the pointless ellipsis of seven or eight dots which originally followed Beryl's offering for no apparent reason. Obviously it wasn't really Beryl the Peril from the English children's comic The Topper who made this observation, but I'm going to pretend that it was for the sake of preserving the anonymity and dignity of those involved.

Your mind on Liberalism, quoth Mickey the Monkey somewhat philosophically. Damn shame.

That's the flag of the country! raged Tiny the World's Biggest Dog, but with more exclamation marks. If Muslims are offended... fuck off out of the country! Grrr - this makes me so angry! Although he rendered fuck as f*ck just in case Nancy and Sluggo were reading, and out was capitalised for emphasis possibly in case any of those America-hating Muslims were reading and thought he might merely be joking around.

Clearly feeling this statement had articulated her innermost thoughts quite well, Beryl the Peril came back with, Thanks Tiny... you said it! and there were those three little dots again because free form poetry is always easier than forming coherent sentences in the language of one's own country innit.

Say what?!! boggled Desert Island Dick, startling Olly the Octopus with the force of his exclamation. I'm with you, Tiny. Muslim is a religion and if the country's flag threatens you, get the fuck out.

At this point I interjected with some of the typically incoherent Osama bin Laden-loving liberal shit that you would expect from a Commie faggot such as myself. My suggestion was entirely ignored by the next contributor to the debate, Splodge, Last of the Goblins who proposed, Yeah - what Tiny said. Go away.

That wasn't the end of the discussion, but I felt I had seen plenty and so withdrew my virtual presence from the thinktank. Regarding Duy Tran's claim that his apartment complex manager told him his American flag was a threat to the Muslim community, and that he has to take it down, the news report had this to say:

We tried to ask a manager if that's exactly what was said, but she just handed us a statement, refused to answer any questions, and called an officer to escort us off the property, before we could press any further.

The statement was then quoted as follows:

While the Lodge on El Dorado admires our resident's patriotism, we must enforce our property rules and guidelines. Such guidelines maintain the aesthetics of our apartment community and provide for the safety of all residents. The apartment community already proudly displays our country's flag in a safe and appropriate manner at the entrances to our community.

Nowhere is it stated that any residents of the apartment complex, Muslim or otherwise, had complained, and neither is there stated any official apartment complex ruling against the display of material which may offend Muslims, which suggests to me that such a ruling probably doesn't exist. Using the amazing powers of my imagination I can envision a scenario in which the manager of an apartment complex probably doesn't want tenants hanging whatever the hell they feel like hanging from the balconies of their dwellings - throw rugs depicting Axl Rose or the logos of football teams for example. Perhaps she therefore decided that exceptions could not be made, not even for the flag. Perhaps she simply didn't like Duy Tran as a person and was winding him up for kicks. Perhaps he's an arsehole who deserves to be wound up regardless of his being head over heels in love with the flag, or perhaps this manager is a woman who simply takes her job far too seriously.

In any case, it hardly matters because the job is done, and a complete non-story about a lady telling a man not to do something has got our sabres a-rattling. No actual Muslims were involved but still who the buggering fuck do they think they are telling us what we can do why I oughta wah wah wah...

A little over a year ago I left my local supermarket and found that somehow I had been charged thirty dollars for a watermelon that should have cost two. A mistake had been made, so I went back, explained the situation, and it was corrected. This event somehow didn't make the news, but then I had been erroneously overcharged by a Mexican lady rather than a person who believes in Muslim - as Desert Island Dick would probably phrase it - and no flag desecration had occurred.

I am depressed by stories of this kind, which aren't really news so much as poking at a nest of morons with a stick in order to get them riled up, either raising wrath against this year's popular hate figure, or just keeping everyone's eye on a ball other than the one which is really being played. I am depressed by stories of this kind because they have all the subtlety of war-era Nazi posters depicting Jews eating Aryan babies, and yet people are still falling for this shit because it's easier than thinking, and it's certainly easier than addressing oneself to real problems. I am depressed by stories of this kind because they are keyed to the primitive pseudobrains of individuals like Frank Silva Roque who, on the 15th of September, 2001 shot Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station attendant in Mesa, Arizona in retaliation for the destruction of the World Trade Centre. Sodhi had not been in any way involved in the destruction of the World Trade Centre but was of the Sikh religion and therefore wore a turban and a beard. One might perhaps cite Roque's low IQ and alleged mental illness as mitigating factors in the killing, but neither low IQ nor mental illness are exclusive to those with a rabid and irrational hatred of anyone different, persons who are into Muslim for example.

My view is that if you can't cope with multicultural society - something which will by definition include a certain quota of brownish people or darker - then maybe you're the one who should consider fucking off; and while we're here, if it were possible to convert irony into rocket fuel, we could probably get to fucking Mars on the strength of certain Americans making declarations about who owns this land and who has a right to be here. Regardless of the morality of whatever is going to happen with Syria, Iraq, ISIS, and everything else, can we at least try not to turn into drooling animals baying out for blood? Isn't that just the sort of thing we were supposed to be against, or was that all just another arbitrary justification we can no longer be bothered to maintain.

How did we get to be this stupid?

Perhaps it's because such an overwhelming majority of the populace of the developed countries are essentially children, or at best, teenagers. We dislike that which is unfamiliar, a category encompassing more or less everything. Someone gives us a taco, and we wrinkle our nose, take a reluctant bite and start crying because it isn't a McDonalds cheeseburger and life is soooo unfair. We are intrinsically pathetic, and we have just enough intelligence to understand this, and so we compensate for our overwhelming inadequacy by making demands in as loud a voice as possible and discussing everything in terms of absolutes because we believe it makes us appear decisive, as though we know what we're talking about. Worse, we take pride in our stupidity, wearing it like a badge as though it's some sort of achievement.

I don't need fancy books to tell me how things work. I studied common sense at the university of life. I am a plain-speaking man.

We watch crap television or films for entertainment, somehow equating this with imagination, having confused it with the same CGI explosions and spacecraft we've seen a thousand times before, and we pretend these things are important just as we did when we were five. If we even read books, we mostly read books that may as well be crap television or films. We are interested only in things which pass the time and provide distraction. We are not interested in anything external to the restricted sphere of our experience. Worse still, never mind those damn liberal know it all thugs tellin' me ah cain't say the word nigger no moh, how about it no longer being permissible to point any of this out just in case some inbred right-wing thickie experiences a sudden dearth of self-esteem? How is that fair?

At the risk of appearing pompous, over the last twenty or so years I've tried, where possible, to broaden the horizons of my own experience, or I've had the horizons of my own experience forcibly broadened by circumstance. I've tried to educate myself, to make myself better if only to stave off the potential horror of reaching fifty and realising that I'm still the same basic boring lump of shit as I was in my twenties. I would say these efforts have worked up to a point, in that I am now at least able to form coherent sentences, and I have a fairly thorough understanding of how little I actually know and how little I have really done. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know, as Einstein said.

The depressing aspect of this is watching morons attempt to form sentences, to pass judgement on subjects which they don't understand, of which they have no experience beyond what they read in a transparently unreliable newspaper or what some bloke said in the pub or on facebook, or which they didn't actually read but they saw the film with Vin Deisel and it like totally ruled LOL.

Wisdom may as well be the courage to admit that you don't know, or just knowing when to shut up. Even this seems to be a difficult lesson to learn, and so many times I again find myself in discussion with someone who believes that actually knowing something is merely a different way of looking at the world, and they never seem to realise that it's basically dog shit coming out of their mouths, as Louis CK expressed it somewhere or other. Half of the time it doesn't even come out of their mouths in the right order.

Oh there we go. Another Obama dick rider defending his boyfriend! Lol your a loser!

If you love your country so much, at least learn how to conjugate one of its principal languages, you thick fuckers; and whilst we're here, there and their are different words with distinct and unlike meanings.

Read a book.

Have a conversation with a person whose views are different to your own.

Spend a few hours a day outside your comfort zone.

Don't be taken in by the bullshit you tell yourself because it's comforting. Stop treating facts as a fucking obstacle to understanding.

Shut up.

Think.

But mainly, just shut up.

Drawings of Buildings

I'm not sure what first compelled me to draw a building, although my current theory is that I required a wider variety of artwork which I could take to my interview for the Art Foundation course at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further Education, not least because whilst my silk screen work and painting was all very imaginative and colourful, I didn't have very much which demonstrated that I could actually draw. Another possibility is that my mother had given me a gentle nudge in that direction in the hope that I would begin to spontaneously generate money and accordingly develop something resembling a work ethic.

Whatever the case, I stretched a sheet of decent quality paper on a large board - a process which I had been taught would keep the paper absolutely flat and free of warping in the event of my adding watercolours - and spent the best part of a relatively sunny day occupying a section of pavement on Church Street, Shipston-on-Stour, just opposite Saint Edmund's Church. I mapped out the block of shops and houses next to the church in pencil, then rendered the detail in black ink with the Rotring pen I'd received a few Christmases before. Finally I added thin washes of colour with gouache paints, defining sky, clouds, brick, tarmac and so on. The result seemed decent, an exercise in perspective if nothing else. It closely resembled that which it depicted, which was the point. It was in part an exercise to see if I could do this sort of thing, and it turned out that I could.

Personally I felt it lacked imagination and was somewhat laborious in that the creative process required me to sit on my arse for four or five hours, but it was nice to know that I was heir to at least some conventional artistic ability; and of course it was all very nice to have pedestrians and other complete strangers pausing to take a look before commenting upon my brilliance every five or ten minutes.

Regrettably one of these pedestrians was Michael Harvey, owner of a local tea room and Shipston's most famous homosexual. Whilst I doubt he could have had much interest in me - an awkwardly hairy teenager half-heartedly shambling towards a sort of industrial jumble sale look - he very much liked my drawing.

'That's really very good, you know,' he drawled, burping and swaying slightly.

'Thank you,' I said, fervently hoping that he would continue on his way before we were seen by anyone I knew.

Being quite clearly full of gin, Michael Harvey seemed to be having some difficulty remaining vertical, and so in brutal contrast to my wishes, sank to his feet, sliding down the wall to take his place at my side. He leaned over a little closer than I liked. 'Just one problem...'

I made a non-committal noise that could stand for curiosity.

'Those ghastly television aerials ...'

I considered my drawing and saw his point. The row of buildings I'd drawn were nineteenth century or possibly earlier, the kind with sash windows, and very typical of the Cotswolds. I had considered omitting all modern features from my drawing, but it felt as though it would be in some way dishonest, and the purpose of the exercise had been technical rather than aesthetic in the strictest sense. Furthermore, given that my favourite aspect of the drawing had been the perspective of a street plunging away towards its vanishing point somewhere over near where Jason Roberts lived, I had quite enjoyed drawing those television aerials.

I muttered something about honesty and realism and painting that which is seen by the human eye, but it probably didn't sound very convincing. In any case, Michael Harvey had fallen asleep, his head lolling onto my shoulder in boozy slumber as he began to gently snore. This was more physical contact than I had enjoyed with another human being in living memory, and I cursed my luck that the other party should be a slightly chunky and very drunk male in his late forties.

Michael Harvey was a local celebrity, or at least the local celebrity who didn't play Frank Spencer's long-suffering wife in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. Michele Dotrice had achieved fame through a phenomenally popular television sitcom, and her dad lived on the Stratford Road. Michael Harvey had achieved fame of a sort through being openly homosexual in a rural Warwickshire town in the early 1980s, or at least he had achieved fame amongst those of us who found his very existence hilarious because we were teenagers and we didn't know any better. Actually we did know better, or we should have done. My favourite band at the time was Soft Cell, and my favourite writer was William Burroughs. This distinguished me from most of the other kids in the town who preferred Queen and Judas Priest, and who generally seemed to regard not being one of those bumboys as a sort of achievement. I always had the impression that my failure to adopt a denim jacket with Status Quo written on the back in biro marked me out as gay and by definition an outsider. Despite being securely heterosexual and entirely aware of the contradictions, my friends and I embraced and repeated the jokes told about Michael Harvey because to do otherwise would be to take his side and share his supposed disgrace. If we were outsiders, we were at least not so far outside as the owner of the local tea rooms whom we impersonated as a limp-wristed hybrid of Larry Grayson and Mr. Humphries from Are You Being Served? without stretching anyone's imagination to breaking point.

One morning, as legend had it, some enormous hairy biker had materialised in the tea rooms demanding cash from the till. Michael Harvey emerged to calm the situation, but only made matters worse.

'I was good enough for you last night,' the hairy and apparently not-actually-heterosexual-like-ourselves biker bellowed with resentful fury, inadvertently supplying the entire town with enough scandal to keep us yapping for a good seven or eight years. We liked the story because it confirmed that Michael Harvey was very, very gay indeed, which for some reason made us all feel better about our small world.

Meanwhile back in Church Street, I coughed and accidentally-on-purpose jabbed Michael Harvey in the side with an elbow, but he was too drunk to be woken. Inevitably, after about five minutes, every knuckle-dragging shithead biker enemy I had ever made at school passed by on the other side of the road in a single group which seemed almost to have been assembled especially for the purpose. As one they regarded me and my new gay friend, then chuckled because it meant that they had been right about me all along. I tried a desperate sheepish smile as though this was something that happened to all of us from time to time - just minding your own business and wham there's a drunken homosexual asleep on top of you.

We've all been there, right guys?

Apparently we hadn't, and I experienced a sudden upsurge of self-loathing. I had seen myself and I hadn't liked it. I couldn't have cared less what Michael Harvey chose to do with either his own penis or those belonging to his close friends, and if anything I kind of admired the fact that he quite clearly didn't give a shit who knew about it. That took some guts in such a small town, the potential Wicker Man theme park in which my family had resided for six or seven years and yet were still regarded as outsiders. Screw these people, I decided. I'd take a thousand Michael Harveys over any one of those inbred Def Leppard-album-owning fucknuts any day of the week.

After another half an hour or so, he woke with a grunt and stumbled wordlessly away to sleep off the rest of the hangover at home. I finished my drawing with a scowl, resenting both the town in which I lived and at least some of its population.

By the summer of 1985 I was far away from Shipston, living at one-hundred and twenty miles distance in the village of Leeds, near Maidstone in Kent. I had just finished the first of three years of a degree course at the local art college, so I suppose you might say my drawing the houses of Church Street had paid off by some tenuous definition. Just before that first year of art college, the most money I'd ever had in either my hand or my junior savings account would have been the fifty pounds I saved with which to buy my sixty watt guitar amplifier - and this figure included a tenner on loan from my mother. Then all at once in September 1984 as I moved away from home, began my course, and discovered both alcohol and cigarettes, Warwickshire County Council and the hardworking taxpayers of the British Isles blessed my bank account with a full grant of at least a thousand pounds. This was more money than I was even able to imagine, and there were a lot of records and albums that I really, really needed, and the train fare back home every other weekend wasn't cheap...

Somehow by the time summer came around I was enormously overdrawn, and I knew that I needed to do something about this before it got out of hand. The job centre offered me a position in a biscuit packing factory, which I turned down on the grounds that it didn't actually seem like it would pay better than the dole which I could claim without really having to do anything. I took a summer job with a furniture restoration business run by one of the local farms, but the pay wasn't great and the work was tough, which in turn drove me back to the drawing board.

People liked drawings of old buildings, I decided, particularly drawings tastefully denuded of their television aerials such as one might see framed and on sale in the windows of twee art galleries in rustic villages. People would pay for that sort of thing, I concluded.

I began with a drawing of the local pub, The Ten Bells, just something to revive whatever skills I had brought to the fore a few years earlier with Michael Harvey burping appreciatively into my ear. The Ten Bells represented a focal point in the village of Leeds - not to be confused with the city of the same name, obviously - and was chosen for both architectural interest and in the hope that I would be observed by as many people as possible. The plan worked in so much as Terry, a regular at the pub, commissioned me to draw a house in the village of Chart Sutton, although I'm not sure whether it was his own house or that of a friend. For this I was paid thirty pounds - a figure I had produced off the top of my head - which seemed decent for a day's work even taking into account the sore arse incurred whilst sat on the ground for five or six hours.

I stepped my operation up a gear, each day setting off by nine to draw a building, weather permitting, wobbling along on my bicycle with a bag full of paints, brushes, water, a thermos flask of coffee,  and with a drawing board tied onto my back with washing line. Each day - I reasoned - I could produce something theoretically picturesque for eventual sale in some small gallery, hopefully bag a few commissions in the process, and then be home by six to stretch a fresh sheet of paper ready for the next morning. It worked in so much as I began to line up commissions here and there, and branched out to draw in the villages of Langley and East Farleigh, but it was also a little repetitive, sometimes frustrating, and harder work than I had anticipated. More frustrating was that I found each village I visited tended to have a saturation point beyond which new commissions became scarce. In East Farleigh I drew a caravan site by the river, then the house of the owner of the caravan site, then the local pub for a mere twenty because I didn't want to say no to the work, and then a moderately stately home inhabited by a reasonably glamorous women of upper class stock. The landlord of The Bull in East Farleigh had brought me a can of lager as I worked, and the upper class woman brought me a glass of wine, kissed me on the cheek and told me that I was wonderful, which was all very exciting; but the commissions had dried up, and I could no longer face starting over again, spending an entire unpaid day developing a sore arse on the chance of some passing stranger liking my work. So I briefly became my own door-to-door salesman, knocking at large old houses which looked as though they might contain the sort of people who would be likely to procure my services. I secured a couple of commissions by this method, but as many people telling me to piss off rendered it a chore, not least because I knew I would have told myself to piss off had I been in their shoes.

Nevertheless I managed to pay off the majority of my overdraft that summer, and college resumed in September bringing with it a new grant cheque which happily swallowed the rest. I ceased with my drawings of buildings, glad to be freed of both the obligation and the risk of haemorrhoids. I briefly returned to the house of the upper class woman with a camera borrowed from college on the flimsy pretext of needing to keep a record of my drawing work, but she was hungover, still married, and therefore unavailable.

I returned to the drawing board a third time following the end of my college degree. I was living in Chatham, unemployed and more overdrawn than ever with a frankly astonishing record collection to show for it, and it seemed there might be some milk left in the cow given my proximity to historic Rochester, arguably the Stratford-on-Avon of the south thanks to Charles Dickens having once stopped off for egg and chips at the Happy Eater on the M2 just outside Walderslade.

I painted the castle, and as I did so, I realised that Rochester was the sort of place which attracted artists like meth addicts to transvestite brothels, so my display of plein air draftsmanship hardly seemed worth a second glance. I returned to appearing pitiful upon the doorsteps of confused strangers, humbly beseeching that they might patronise the trade of a travelling artisan so badly in need of a haircut. The owner of The Gordon hotel viewed me with suspicion, but decided that the reception desk really did need a fancily framed portrait of his establishment, and so I had the job.

This commission was in a sense easier than usual in that Rochester High Street, being pedestrianised, provided seating on which I could sit whilst working on my masterpiece, yet ultimately proving to be as much a pain in the arse as before.

The hotel owner disliked my first drawing and asked that I try again, this time giving greater focus to his establishment, excluding those neighbouring architectural features which I felt had made the picture a little more interesting for the viewer. I began again, and as I came to finish the work with the customary watercolour wash, I found I had once again drawn an audience. There were two of them, and if they weren't quite so drunk as Michael Harvey had been, neither were they anywhere near as attractive as the upper class woman of East Farleigh. They were full of booze, slightly friendlier than I liked, and shared their cans of special brew with the sort of aggressive bonhomie that proved difficult to refuse. They praised my talent, and seemed to be asking questions about where I lived and whether I had any money; but their efforts - whatever it was they were after - seemed obviously devious and feeble, and were easily deflected; although getting them to piss off and leave me alone wasn't quite within my power.

At length I was done and ready to cut the drawing from the board. With relief I realised that my companions would almost certainly be unable to follow me into the hotel given the state they were in. I would be rid of them. I took out my craft knife as they swore and went on and on about how much fucking talent I had, man. I began to cut the picture from the board but, being full of diplomatically consumed special brew, my hand slipped and I sliced diagonally across the paper.

'Oh fuck!'

My companions laughed with the conspiratorial glee of naughty schoolboys who knew for sure that only I would suffer the consequences of their actions.

'You're fucked now, mate! Your beautiful picture and all!'

I ignored them, gathered up the tools of my trade, and went into the hotel with a massive sigh of relief at having escaped their company. I tried my best to appear sober.

'I've done it.' I readied myself for the explanation of how the cut would be invisible once the picture was framed.

'Just leave it.' The owner didn't even look up. He waved a hand, preoccupied with hotel business. I already had the money seeing as he'd paid me the thirty on completion of the earlier, unsatisfactory version. He'd given me the money then because he'd had it to hand and it seemed convenient to do so.

I looked out of the door. The two pissheads were nowhere to be seen. I left, quickly unchained my bike and cycled away.

I have drawn just one more building since then, or more accurately, I painted it. It was October 2007 and I'd moved on from the ink drawings. I had a full time job as a postman with Royal Mail and no longer needed to pay off any overdraft, but it was a full time job that had become increasingly unpleasant over the previous decade, and now we were on strike and I had been looking for a way out. I wanted to see if I could still do it, if I was still able to generate money by my own hand, and so I sat and painted Edward Alleyn House in West Dulwich. In six hours I attracted the interest of one passer-by, a woman to whom I delivered mail who kindly took the time to explain my own strike action to me.

'Of course,' she smiled with obnoxious conviction, 'the postmen only have themselves to blame.'

Friends have told me that the painting is very good, although my stylised rendition of the sky as it appeared has given the composition a Lovecraftian quality, as though something horrible is about to happen within the building.

I guess I took that as a sign.

It was nice to know that I could still turn out a picture if the worst came to the worst, but it was nicer to know that I didn't really have to.