Quiet Words

Graham started at Royal Mail sometime in the nineties. New recruits came and went but if they lasted the first three weeks, they usually stayed for at least another couple of years. Graham immediately made an impression, if not necessarily a great one.

He was about my age, late twenties to early thirties, and cut a peculiarly slight figure. He was small without being either short or seeming necessarily weak. It wasn't that he was feminine, but neither was he particularly masculine. He seemed like a small, slightly fierce Charles Hawtrey without any of the camp. There was a suggestion of upper class heritage, or at least equivalent delicacy. He had short dark hair and pretty eyes, like a male Sinéad O'Connor, and naturally we all assumed he was probably gay. I imagine that being homosexual in a blue collar profession as was ours must be a pretty tough gig, but probably not so tough as people might imagine.

We were postmen, and of course postwomen, predominantly working class. We liked a pint. Many of us were into football, and not actually that many of us were into performance art or tone poetry. Of those of us who were into football, a few were in it mainly for the joy of kicking someone's head in after the game. Some of us read the Sun - but not everyone - and many of those who read the Sun did so in the knowledge of it being mostly complete bollocks. With one or two exceptions, the shit thick, xenophobic generic Sun-reading working class you may have heard about never really existed except in the imagination of a terrified middle class. Everyone at Royal Mail knew somebody who was gay, and mostly we were past caring because we all had our own shit to worry about; and those few suffering from raging homophobia presented a much bigger, weirder target than the actually homosexual. Gay people were easier to get along with and would even joke about uncomfortable particles of sweetcorn trapped beneath the foreskin, just for the sake of getting a reaction.

No-one knew whether or not Graham was gay, but in any case, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he was quiet, and quiet to the point of being rude. He didn't speak to anyone. He didn't engage in small talk. If you asked him a question, he'd answer with three or four clipped words or he wouldn't answer at all, wouldn't even look at you. Most of us took offence at one point or another, but no-one acted on it because he seemed kind of intense and he did his job, which was all anyone could ask. Maybe he was just pathologically shy.

Years passed, and those clipped three word responses gradually blossomed into sentences, even exchanges which, if not exactly friendly, at least suggested there was a human being in there somewhere, just one who tended to keep his mouth shut unless he had something to say. He did his job, and no-one had any reason to complain, excepting one summer morning so hot that he went out on delivery wearing just shoes and a pair of shorts so brief that locals phoned the office to complain that their postman was walking around in just hotpants, and it was weird. Whatever Graham's thing might be, we guessed that being shy wasn't really part of it.

Another year passed and Graham volunteered to be our union rep on the grounds of no-one else wanting the job. To everyone's surprise - now that he had something to say - he revealed himself as erudite, fiercely intelligent, and riotously outspoken. He went to all of the union meetings and made many enemies, not least being Jim Cunningham, our area manager, the individual charged with shuffling in all of the changes to which the union and particularly Graham as our representative, were opposed.

I am hopeful that I never again receive correspondence from you written in the manner of this letter, Cunningham wrote in response to one of Graham's missives. Graham was amused, apparently enjoying sparring with upper management types, most of whom were unfortunately nothing like so sharp or canny as they believed themselves to be. Graham made copies of his exchanges so that we could all enjoy the spectacle of him going full Paxman on the mealy-mouthed tosspot who was doing his level best to make our working conditions that much less bearable in the name of savings.

If a man gets in the habit of dealing out blows, Graham told our common enemy, sooner or later he ought not be too surprised to receive a blow in return!

We were impressed, and I found in Graham someone with whom I was able to have an actual conversation. He remained a private person, disinclined to give away too much about either himself or his upbringing, but he was clearly educated and had read books. We talked a little bit about Mexico as it turned out that he had spent six months in South America, apparently in an effort to find himself although he didn't seem to regard the expedition as a success. He hadn't found whatever it was that he'd been looking for.

We sort of became friends, in so much as that one can become friends with anyone so private. We became close enough to laugh at each other's jokes. I asked about the apparent change in his personality from when he had first arrived at our sorting office.

'I think it would be fair to say that I was having a nervous breakdown at the time,' he told me with a confessional smile.

His parents hadn't wanted him, he told me, and so he had been raised by nuns. This seemed to explain almost everything.

He took an interest in my first attempts to write, notably an article on indigenous Mexican music proposed for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector magazine.

For a start, a mythological figure who disputes the necessity of human sacrifice has as much place in pre-Colombian Mexico as a sped-up Benny Hill comedy chase sequence in the Bible. The very notion is completely inconsistent with indigenous thought of the time. The rest of the tale provides a good example of the Nahua propensity to explain and justify the present as the conclusion of a predestined past, even if that predestination only occurred in retrospect. The fact of the story of Quetzalcoatl disappearing on a raft appearing in no native record until a long time after the events it explained is clear indication that the tale is of interest more as an example of the Nahua attitude to history than as something worthy of consideration as a literal historical occurrence.

I was not accustomed to writing long articles with academic aspirations, but felt I was doing fairly well with this one. My writing style was significantly influenced by the strident and often sarcastic tone of Andy Martin's writing in SMILE magazine and on the covers of various records by the Apostles.

Somewhere on a Pima reservation two families are enjoying a civilised evening meal to the delicate accompaniment of Traditional Songs and Chants of the Millwall Wrecking Crew. Glasses are refilled and a second course approaches as the earthy and mysterious refrain of you're gonna get your fucking heads kicked in rattles the speakers.

Having effected what I considered to be a reasonable impersonation of Andy Martin's tone, I asked Graham to take a look at my most recent draft of the unpublished article. I asked for his feedback but didn't really want it. What I wanted was for him to confirm that my borrowed wit was indeed as sharp as I imagined it to be, perhaps even to join me in laughter as we considered all those unenlightened people quaking in fear as I set them right on a few of their silly assumptions regarding indigenous Mexican music.

He took what I'd written, and then came back with a response, mainly taking issue with the tone I'd adopted, and my tendency to switch between sarcastic funnies and po-faced self-importance. He quoted Cervantes in illustration of his point, and at the time I had no idea who Cervantes was, or even what Graham was trying to say beyond that he had apparently failed to recognise my genius.

You may have made the mistake of thinking that, as an 'expert', you can cry sanctuary, and be exempted from the ordinary rules of successful communication. Or, you may be thinking that, unless your subject is made to look suitably complicated, even gloomy, you won't win the respect of fellow experts.

I was stung, but above all I was embarrassed because I knew on some level that he was absolutely right. I recognised his criticism as both valid and helpful, but couldn't get past the idea that I'd written something which was essentially ridiculous, even if that hadn't been what Graham was suggesting.

Things became uncomfortable between us, and our tenuous friendship seemed to dissolve, vanishing like mist on a warm summer morning. At some point he left the job, and then I left the job, and that was that. He has no internet presence that I am able to trace, because more than anything I want to be able to tell him that he was right, and to apologise for having taken his criticism so personally, and I would at least like to know that he's still alive and is approximately happy, but some stories simply don't have any tidy ending. Clearly this has been one of them.

Fireworks

We're driving along, out in the Texas countryside heading towards Castroville. The sky is absolutely dark, spattered with stars, and as usual I find myself looking for the one which is following us. This is because the Target Books edition of Larry Kettelkamp's Investigating UFOs had a massive impact on me when I was a kid, seven or eight-years old and living on a farm in rural England. Being a kid I was fascinated by anything weird. I'd heard of flying saucers, but Kettelkamp's book was where I first read about their notional occupants, specifically in relation to the notorious case of Betty and Barney Hill. Oddly, the detail of the story which has stayed with me is that of Betty idly gazing from the window of their vehicle as they drove along and noticing how a star appeared to be following them.

So that's what I always think about under such circumstances, and possibly because it's very rare that I'm ever inside a car driving upon a country road after dark. The reason for this is that I've lived in cities since I was roughly twenty, which is fine because I don't like the countryside once the sun has gone down. It reminds me of being a kid, and of all the things I thought were real when I was a kid; and whilst I no longer believe those things to be real, I state this with greater confidence when the sun is shining, or at least when illuminated by the lights of town and city.

We're heading for Castroville because it's New Year's Eve, the last evening of 2018, and we've been invited to celebrate with Margot, one of my wife's co-workers whom I've yet to meet.

There will be fireworks. We were going to bring some to add to the pyrotechnics, but all of the places selling fireworks along our route - because no-one in Texas is allowed to sell fireworks within city limits - are tonight crammed with customers, truck after truck backed up onto the highway.

We drive for forty or fifty minutes, maybe an hour, following smaller and smaller roads until we're on a dirt track. I'm looking for names and numbers upon the mailboxes we occasionally pass because Bess is concentrating on driving.

'What was the name on that one?' she asks.

'It wasn't a name. It was some pro-life thing.'

'Well, that won't be Margot's place but we must be near.'

We're there within a few more minutes. There are lights up ahead, and as we approach I see a house and a barn - nothing else because it's darkness all around. It's now about eight in the evening.

We see people and we park.

Out of the car, I look up and realise I've probably never seen so many stars in my life. The sky looked nothing like this when I was growing up in England.

The people we see are Margot and other members of her family. They're stood around a bonfire. It's cold so we crowd in, watching cinders sail up into the black sky, warming ourselves by an orange glow from within the logs.

My first bonfires were Guy Fawkes night on the farm where I grew up. Being the only two kids on the farm, myself and Alan would get started on the bonfire about half way through October, dragging dead conifers from the spinney at the back of the cottages to a corner of the orchard at the foot of the hill, then stacking them against each other like the bones of a wigwam. I recall the conifers as having been some twenty or thirty feet high, but then I was myself much smaller so they probably weren't much taller than a clothes pole. Guy Fawkes night came and we all gathered around to light fireworks from little cardboard boxes and bake potatoes wrapped in tinfoil in the embers at the foot of the bonfire; and naturally this is what I'm thinking about right now as we stand around in the dark at Margot's place.

I've bought a few cans of Boddingtons so I get started on one. Bess introduces me to Steve and Lupe, both of whom work with her and Margot. Junior runs off to see the critters - cattle, horses and a donkey, amongst other things.

Lupe is not only from Mexico, but once lived in Toluca, a city I've visited many times. She only recently became a US citizen, so we get to talking about her citizenship seeing as it's something I've been considering. The process sounds complicated, with laboriously completed applications prone to disappear for no obvious reason, and without any apparent consequences for the government department that lost them. Maybe this is an example of America having become great again.

I tell her I had a similar, albeit less politically suspicious experience when applying for the visa which allowed me to travel to the United States and get married. It took me many months to fill in the application owing to the level of detail required. Eventually it was done and I sent it to the US Embassy in London from which I subsequently received an interview date. The interview began with an officious woman telling me that I had failed to fill in an application form and would therefore have to do it all over again.

'I actually did fill in an application form,' I said, 'and I posted it to you, so you must have received it.'

'We never received it, so you clearly didn't post it.' She told me this as a fact established by her having stated it.

'Had I not posted it,' I pointed out, 'you wouldn't have received it, and logically you must have received it because otherwise you wouldn't have sent me the letter asking me to come here for an interview.'

Despite the impeccable logic of my defence, I was nevertheless somehow in the wrong and had to fill in the same application form again, right there at the embassy, based on what I could remember of the month it had taken me to fill it all in first time around. This meant I had to take vague guesses at otherwise long forgotten details of employment history and the like.

Lupe sighs at the inevitability of the forces of officialdom which take the piss with a big smile because they know there's nothing you can do, regardless of your having gone through the supposed proper channels. We talk about the government for a little while. We're not very impressed with them.

We meet Kyle, who is already a little drunk. I have an impression of his being in his late twenties, but he tells us that his son is twenty-three. He describes himself as a skater. He and my wife know a few of the same people from high school, but not each other.

'Where you come from?' he asks me as others crowd around to savour the answer.

'England,' I tell them, prompting in response the usual anecdotes about either visits to England or having met some English dude at some point or other.

'No, I don't mind being asked,' I say in response to another question. 'I was asked the same question only today in HEB as it happens, same place I've been shopping since 2011. I guess the cashier never noticed my accent before today.'

This gets a laugh for some reason.

'I'm just going to start telling people I'm from San Antonio,' I add, which gets another, bigger laugh.

Trays of sausage, brisket and tortillas appear, freshly cooked and steaming. We fill our plates as Margot heads off towards a speaker sat in the grass connected to someone's smartphone and blasting out rock music, Smashing Pumpkins and a few things I actually recognise. 'I got me some ELO,' she announces ominously.

Kyle is engaged in an impersonation of what a Japanese gentleman says upon encountering a transgendered individual, a ladyboy by Kyle's terminology. He squints and grimaces causing his upper front teeth to protrude. His hand reaches down to tickle an imaginary penis as he delivers the punchline, four or five syllables which all seem to rhyme, one of them being dong with the hilarity pivoted upon long mispronounced as wrong - because it's an oriental person saying it. The joke, whatever it may be, is rendered incomprehensible by Kyle's delivery. It's difficult to tell where this one came from. Nothing within the conversation up to that point seemed to be heading towards either the Japanese, gender identity issues, or the phonetic disparity between certain languages.

Welcome to 1973, I think to myself, wandering back over to the bonfire as we get started on the fireworks. Margot's husband does the honours, taking fireworks across to the designated patch of ground and setting them off. The rockets are stood upright in the well of a couple of cinder blocks, one on top of the other. The fireworks look military grade, and when they go off, it's the sort of thing I'm used to seeing at huge public firework displays on Blackheath in London. We've come a long way since I was a kid with that dinky little cereal box of Roman candles and Catherine wheels.

Ooh, we all say, then ahh as we watch the sky light up with pops, bangs, and vastly spreading flowers of briefly electric colour.

Kyle jumps through a fountain of cinders flaming up from some giant landlocked sparkler. 'Yeehaw,' he accordingly whoops.

We watch, and then we go into the house to meet Margot's dogs, and other members of her family.

Her mother extends a hand in greeting and launches into a bewildering monologue cribbed from either Dick Van Dyke or one of those bloody awful Austin Powers movies. With hindsight, I'd say it was something along the lines of cups of tea with the jolly old Queen and blinky blonky blimey what weather we are having, but I'm unable to take in any of the specific details and receive only a general impression of cartoon cultural stereotypes. I'm on my third tin of Boddingtons and am approaching refreshed, plus it's difficult to believe that this woman is actually saying this crap in an apparent hope that I will respond, that I will recognise myself somewhere in there amongst the litany of Britface cliches.

I walk away because I don't know how to respond, and maybe because I feel sorry for the woman.

Bess and I pet the dogs, four or five of them including a collie, and also a cat.

'Good choice,' I say, giving Margot the thumbs up as I spot a Devo title amongst the DVDs just behind where the cat is lounging.

'That belongs to my husband,' she smiles. 'He's crazy about them. Myself, I like Cheap Trick…'

Margot's husband has been a peripheral figure at the edge of our gathering. Apparently he isn't much of a people person. I haven't even spoken to him but I already like him more than at least two of those assembled here today.

Everyone is inside, so I go back out, walking across to the still blazing bonfire and into the field beyond. The darkness is such that I can't see my own feet, so I'm treading carefully. I come to a halt as I approach what might be a fence, although it's hard to tell, and I look directly up.

I've honestly never seen so many stars. It's as though someone has taken a spray can to the sky. It's a little cold and absolutely quiet but for the distant buzz of the speaker relaying the hits of Green Day to an audience of no-one. The reason I could never go back to life in the country is that this kind of spectacle is simply too intense, and will never become anything familiar. I prefer illuminated spaces in which everything will occur within certain established parameters.

Out here, I'm right at the edge where lines blur, where stories such as the one related by Betty and Barney Hill don't seem quite so unreasonable. It's too much to take in, although it's beautiful beyond description.

I return to the house, happy to know that we'll be leaving in a few minutes. It's nowhere near midnight, but neither Bess nor myself are particularly bothered about the countdown, the ceremony, or the arbitrary division of one point in time from the next.

It's already 2019 in England.

Desesperación

Once again it's market day. We loaded up the car last night and we're heading out to a spot where we'll set up our canopy, table and a couple of chairs. We will be attempting to sell our stuff to complete strangers - Bess's painted rocks and my canvases. Usually that means it's Saturday and we're heading for Mission Plaza, but today is Friday and we have a pitch at the Desesperación Community Centre*. It's their annual peace market, as it's called, a three day event, Friday to Sunday with a 9AM start; and it's a benefit for the LGBT community. We haven't even got started and somehow it already feels like work, but we're telling ourselves this is simply because it's something different and we've grown so used to the set up at Mission Plaza.

Some people make thousands of dollars over the three days of the festival, we've been told. We usually pull in about forty at the Mission, and that's entirely my wife because no-one can afford my paintings, relatively cheap though they may be. Mission Plaza is on the south side, which isn't really where the money is, but I'm personally not too bothered. People seem happy just to see my paintings and that works for me; but it bothers Bess, which is why we're here at Desesperación, which is fancier and is therefore patronised by overmoneyed Alamo Heights types looking to offset their economic footprint with something cute, ethnic, and preferably hand crafted.

The street is closed off for the market. We park at the Bill Miller barbecue place, which is opposite the Community Center. It's still early and there are only a couple of other vehicles in the parking lot. They surely won't mind and we can move the car elsewhere once we're unloaded. Between us, it takes two trips, fifty yards between the car and the spot which has been reserved in our name, Bess and Lawerence scribbled on the curbstones in chalk, my name spelled with a vestigial e. The first trip is punctuated by some Desesperación official letting us know we'll have to move the car once we've unloaded because Bill Miller is likely to get pissy.

Yes, we know.

The second trip is more complicated. I'm carrying an easel and a case full of paints whilst pulling a wheeled carrier containing Bess's rocks, one of those things with an extending handle. I have eight house bricks piled precariously on top of the wheeled carrier and I'm pulling it along with great care over the uneven pavement so as not to dislodge them. We're on grass at Mission Plaza where everything can be pinned down with stakes so as to prevent it blowing away, but here we're on asphalt so we've picked up a stack of bricks from Lowes with which to weigh everything down.

I'm pulling the wheeled carrier along the pavement at the back of stalls which have already set up and I come to a power line, a thick length of cable duct-taped to the ground. I'm having trouble getting the tiny plastic wheels over the thing. Someone more important than myself, whose time is more precious, dances around me so as to get past, obliging me to manoeuvrer, spilling my house bricks across the pavement. There are eight bricks in total and three of them smash in half.

'Thanks a lot,' I call out to the important person. 'That's great!'

I lift the wheeled carrier over the power line, gather up the bricks and the pieces of bricks, and eventually get to where Bess has already got our canopy set up.

She heads off to move the car.

I bolt things together and unpack more stuff.

We're next to a guy selling bead jewellery similar to the Huichol crafts you see in Mexico. The guy opposite has silver jewellery. To our left is the end of the street where they're setting up a stage and a PA. Ours is the stall nearest to the stage. Somehow I'm having a tough time feeling positive about any of this.

Behind us is the building of the Desesperación Community Centre, some sort of converted warehouse. There are two floors and a number of rooms within, presently all occupied by other traders. Some of them have come from Mexico, places such as Malinalco and Oaxaca, and these are the people who reputedly pull in thousands of dollars over the weekend selling art, crafts, clothing, jewellery, and delivering what they refer to as Aztec Horoscopes - which I'm not touching with a fucking bargepole. I've spent a lot of time up to the eyeballs in the Mexican Tonalpohualli calendar over the years, and I don't like to see it repackaged as a money spinning one size fits all new age nick-nack.

As with Mission Plaza, we don't have to pay for our pitch, but unlike Mission Plaza, Desesperación wants a cut of whatever we make. Bess and myself had our name down for a ten foot street pitch, which means they'll want 35% of our takings at the end of the day, assuming we sell anything. Smaller pitches were available for a lesser percentage, but we needed ten feet for the canopy because we don't want to take chances with the weather. Indoor pitches will be obliged to cough up 40% of their takings.

This was explained to us during the induction which we attended on Tuesday evening. First we had to apply, showing examples of our work because they don't want anything too shit lowering the tone. Having been accepted, we came to the induction hosted by four of the organisers, three young women and an older one, a Matriarch in traditional Oaxacan dress. The young women were like of the kind who, you know, when they talk they're all like ermahgerd this and, you know, ermahgerd that, and they're all like giggling and stuff and like they don't know words and everything they say sounds like a question, which didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence. The Matriarch - whom I shall call Ermintrude for the sake of both convenience and insult - had horrible hair and nasty shoes, although it was Bess who noticed this second detail. She seemed officious and humourless, like an unforgiving school teacher. I hated her upon sight and immediately understood that this was all a terrible idea. She put me in mind of the definition of a false wise man recorded by Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún in the late sixteenth century.

The false wise man, like an ignorant physician, a man without understanding, claims to know about God. He has his own traditions and keeps them secretly. He is a boaster, vanity is his. He makes things complicated; he brags and exaggerates. He is a river, a rocky hill.

Ermintrude immediately struck me as a woman who makes things complicated. The induction rambled on for far longer than seemed necessary on the topic of how it was going to be. Here's what we were going to do. Thanksgiving was coming up so there would be all that leftover food, and maybe we could bring it along to help feed the volunteers. In fact, maybe we could just take a day out to fix tacos for them, and don't worry about making too many, and we should advertise the market on all of our social media platforms. Everything was about what we could do for Desesperación, rules we should observe so as to keep ourselves from getting in the way or becoming a nuisance, how we were to pay the money we owed at the end of each day, how to sign our contracts…

Never trust a hippy, I thought darkly to myself. Anyone who projects their inner serenity with that much emphasis is invariably overcompensating for something, usually their inner Heinrich Himmler.

Yet here we are, because they had us sign a contract, and there has to be an upside to anything with that much small print. Maybe I'll sell a ton of paintings.

I wander around before the crowds start to thicken, checking out the other stalls. It's mostly clothing and jewellery, some animalitos,  muertitos and the like. The art is mostly decent, but nothing I'd want to buy, nor anything which makes me feel uncomfortable about my asking for eighty dollars a canvas - price adjusted so as to account for Desesperación wetting its beak every time we make a sale. One stall has a typically inept painting of the Joker and his girlfriend, Harley Quinn on sale. So much for filtering out those who might lower the tone.

It's ten, and the crowds begin to arrive. A group from the Centro Cultural Aztlan are engaged in a ceremony at the end of the street, four of them in approximately traditional Mexican dress chanting, saluting the four cardinal points, greeting the sun, and asking Ipalnemoani to bless the craft market. They also mention Huitzilopochtli a couple of times, which seems a little incongruous given his famed penchant for human sacrifice on a massive scale. The incense burning in their censer is cedar rather than copal, as it probably should be, and it feels hokey. Next, a Tejano band start up on the stage, effectively drowning out any attempts at conversation we might make. Tejano is a traditional fusion of country, Mexican music, and Bavarian oompah bands with particular emphasis on accordion. In between songs, our accordion player introduces himself as being in some way related to Flaco Jiménez, a local Tejano boy made good who was won awards for his accordion playing in some peculiarly specific capacity like fastest, loudest, or most annoying. I have nothing against Tejano music, but I prefer narcocorrido - a variant which celebrates the deeds of various drug lords - and I'm not crazy about the volume. The band play about a million songs, all of which sound more or less the same to me, and then on comes our compère. She resembles a hybrid of Yoko Ono and a Hispanic version of Toni Arthur who used to present Play School back in the old country. She smiles like it hurts, and it seems as though she's addressing an audience of small children. She screeches and her speech is seasoned with ill-fitting phrases borrowed from rap. She introduces people as being in the house, asks that we give it up for them, and so on. She is exhausting to watch.

Now it seems that Ermintrude is in the house, so we give it up for her. Ermintrude repeats some of what she told us at the induction. The thrust of her speech is that as we approach Christmas, maybe we shouldn't be giving our money to the multinationals who are destroying the Earth, but instead opt to ethically spunk away all that lovely lolly on independent traders, such as those gathered here today. Desesperación raised a million dollars last year, and the city matched that sum with a further million, and now - maybe if we really make an effort - we can raise another million for Desesperación over the coming days. Ermintrude is kind of vague on what this money is for.

'We save buildings,' she explains. 'We campaign for preservation orders. You know, we have many beautiful historic buildings in San Antonio, and that's partially thanks to our campaigning work. Also, last year we fought the city when they wanted to raise taxes to pay for a new pipeline for the water system, although we lost that one.'

Given that San Antonio's water and sewage system is in famously poor shape, I'm not sure how I feel about Ermintrude's apparent attempt to preserve its state of historic disrepair; and a few more taxes to keep us from turning into Flint, Michigan doesn't seem an unreasonable proposition. Furthermore, I realise that in all this time I haven't heard a single fucking word about the LGBT community for whom we are supposedly raising funds. Mostly it's been about our money and how we can help out. At one point I go to take a piss, and pinned to the walls of the rest room are flyers with DONATE in bold letters.

Never trust a hippy.

The Tejano group is followed by a mariachi performance, a band backing an elderly female singer in flamboyant dress who prowls the makeshift stage as though about to drag one of those nice young men off into the bushes. Her voice is unfortunately a shrill screech and far from seductive.

Then there's another elderly woman wearing an unusual amount of makeup and lamenting mislaid love, after which it all blends into an endless conversation stopping racket which has made its home at the end of the street, punctuated only by further announcements of who is now in the house along with requests that we either make some noise or give it up for them.

I've bought my easel, oil paints and a freshly prepared canvas, because I had a feeling this was going to be one fuck of a long day, and it's not even eleven. Seven hours to go. I set to painting the tree on the opposite side of the street, incorporating elements of the revolving sign of the Bill Miller restaurant. Within minutes my view is blocked by people watching the band, but never mind. I do what I can, pushing paint around the canvas until it looks like it's in more or less the right place.

The mariachi performance is followed by Yoko Arthur screeching and telling us who else is in the house, then drawing a few raffle tickets. Each trader was asked to provide an example of their best work to be given away as prizes in the raffle. Bess gave them one of her painted rocks. I didn't give them anything.

The Centro Cultural Aztlan people are back, reborn as a rap group. This time there are two of them along with a woman playing a flute, rapping to a backing track of hip-hop beats. It sounds okay, and they're lyrically pretty tight; but as with the ceremony, it feels too much like an impersonation and not enough like that which it aspires to impersonate. Generic ad libs asking where my people be at? and the like don't really help.

We're right here, I suppose.

Next is a woman named Azul. She sings and plays vihuela, and is backed by an approximation of a mariachi group. She tells us her music draws from the traditions of Veracruz on the Mexican gulf coast. It reminds me of Tarascan music and is happily lacking the oompah of Tejano. It's the best thing we've heard so far by some margin. Of course, I still find something to annoy me - there's a woman sat at the front in a turquoise shirt, late fifties, bit of a spare tire with the face of a librarian. She is lost in music. Her arms sway slowly in the air as she snaps her fingers. Her head is back and her eyes are closed in rapture. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone look quite so smug. She is every social worker I've ever met, and only now do I realise she's been doing the chair dance all fucking morning, just sat there being a spirit demonstrably more free than the rest of us. I never realised there was a female equivalent to the dance famously done by dads at weddings, but now I've seen it with my own eyes.

I paint the tree and Bess sells rocks.

Yoko Arthur returns, now treating us to a full screeching half hour of what seems to be either a one-woman play or performance poetry which outstays its welcome. Her voice swoops up and down as she describes the trauma of childhood jealousy. She wanted the Commodore 64, but they gave her a ballerina doll seeing as how she was a girl and all. Gender stereotyping is a bad scene. Her brother got the computer, but she isn't bitter because she saw the alien. It was in her room one night, like the aliens you always hear about with the bald heads and big eyes and everything. It blinked at her and was definitely real, and that was better than having a Commodore 64.

'Who the fuck is this for?' I ask Bess.

She shrugs and sells another rock to someone.

Yoko Arthur concludes her performance and we give it up for her, and then for another poet who is now in the house. This one seems a little nervous as she takes the microphone and informs us that this is a poem about when she had uterine cancer.

Death sits at a desk and in my uterus, she explains, and I'm so astonished that I jot the phrase down in my notebook. It was actually the doctor who diagnosed her cancer sat at the desk, but that's poetry for you. This poem just keeps on going like a more depressing Energizer Bunny™, becoming bleaker and ever more bereft of light by the minute. It's all we can do to not laugh.

I purchase beer and tacos from upstairs, and the music resumes, more Tejano, more horseshit, and then the world's most efficiently workmanlike blues band. The bass player used to be in Question Mark and the Mysterians who had a massive hit with 96 Tears. This doesn't mean a lot to me because I preferred the Eddie & the Hot Rods version.

I paint.

Bess sells rocks.

The woman in turquoise is still doing her dance, such as it is, arms in the air, fingers snapping, moves requiring nothing which formally acknowledges rhythm.

'Now she is why people voted for Trump,' I tell my wife.

I come back to the painting from time to time. I can't tell if it's any good. Bess swears that it is, but then she usually does. It feels like we've been here for at least a week.

Yoko Arthur introduces yet more people as being in the house.

I paint.

A little girl goes crazy over a small canvas my wife has decorated with a mandala, first asking that my wife sign it, then to have her picture taken with the artist.

'Now that has made it all worth while,' Bess explains happily.

Hours drag past.

My painting begins to look kind of okay.

It gets dark and I still haven't sold a single canvas, not that I'm hugely bothered. I pack up my paints.

'I'm going to take this stuff to the car, okay?'

The car is in the parking lot of San Antonio College, not actually a whole lot further than Bill Miller.

I return and it's twenty to six. Bess starts to pack away her rocks.

'You can't pack away yet.' Ermintrude appears from nowhere to deliver the warning like we're naughty children. 'You have to wait until six.'

'Sure. Whatever.'

We wait until six, and I tell Bess to leave the packing up to me. She has to take our receipts to the office so they can work out how much we owe them, and the queue is already long.

I pack things away. Bess returns after about forty-five minutes. She is strangely quiet as we carry our stuff back to the car.

'Are you okay?' I ask.

'Fine,' she grunts. 'Tired.'

We no longer even need to have the conversation about whether we're coming back tomorrow. We signed contracts stating that we would, but the penalty of breaking the contract is that we won't get invited back next year. Boo hoo.

We drive to a branch of Jim's. We're tired and hungry.

Bess tells me that we took $130 - which was all her rocks. The Desesperación people looked at our receipts and reckoned it was $133, by which point Bess no longer cared enough to argue. They said that we owed them 25% of our takings because we had actually been given an eight foot rather than the full ten foot pitch. Bess said she wasn't bothered and that we'd signed a contract to pay 35%, and in any case she'd already written out a check for $53.20, that being 35% of $133. They said we owed $54 because they had rounded it up. Having stood in a queue for three quarters of an hour, Bess threw a dollar bill at the woman and told her to keep the change.

We eat and we leave a tip.

The knowledge that we won't be returning tomorrow, that we've managed to reclaim our weekend from Ermintrude and the forces of evil is a feeling so wonderful that it has left us almost lost for words.

Never again.

*: Names changed because I've no doubt they have some really mellow and tuned-in lawyer ready to destroy the lives and empty the bank accounts of anyone who might be legally proven responsible for a bad vibe.

Writing on the Wall

We've driven to Austin on the spur of the moment. Bess took the day off for a doctor's appointment and something at the bank additionally requiring my signature, and suddenly we had the whole day free to do with as we chose. So here we are at Austin Graffiti Park because Bess wanted to take a look at the place before they dig it up and move it to some other site out near the airport. It's officially known as the HOPE Outdoor Gallery, with the acronym standing for Helping Other People Everywhere. It was a housing project on the side of a hill, abandoned and ruined leaving only the walls, adopted by local graffiti artists, then made official during some SXSW event or other.

I quite like some graffiti art, although I don't really care whether you call it art or not. I particularly like the stuff I've seen sprayed on the side of Union Pacific railroad carriages which I encounter on an at least weekly basis as I follow the Tobin Trail beneath the bridge at Wetmore. I like what I see sprayed all across the southside of the city, which owes at least as much to the tradition of Mexican muralists as to anything else; and back in 1999 when I first visited Mexico City, I walked into the hotel bar on my very first night and met a couple of guys from the New York based Tats Cru - south of the border for some family wedding - which is probably equivalent to meeting royalty in graffiti terms.

Here in Austin, it's overcast and my enthusiasm probably isn't what it could be. We drove past a guy with a tail and I am now primed to expect idiocy. He looked to be in his late thirties and additionally wore a fedora, which is always a bad sign. His tail was long and bushy, yellow with black stripes, extending down from the seat of his pants almost to the ground. I realise how irrational it may seem to take such a profound dislike to a stranger based solely on their unorthodox appearance, but I'd probably go so far as to say that I actively hate the guy.

We find a place to park, then follow the street back along to the HOPE Outdoor Gallery. It's just a ruined pile of concrete junk set into the hillside, but with every surface a chaotic riot of colour. Empty spray cans and trash are strewn all around, and the place swarms with visitors climbing up and down worn slopes to the higher levels. It resembles the sets you always see in post-apocalyptic wasteland films, and I'm feeling a little underwhelmed. Worse still, the guy with the tail was apparently on his way here. He's set up shop with a marginally less irritating friend. They occupy the small central plaza of the site. They seem to be practicing circus skills with musical accompaniment from a smart phone hooked up to a battery-driven amplifier. I assume it's battery-driven, but maybe someone found a way to generate electricity by harnessing the annoyingness particles given off by useless wankers.

'Shouldn't you be working in a fucking bank or something?' I mutter as I watch the man with the tail juggling some kind of semi-circular dingus. He has the tip of his tail held between his teeth so that it doesn't get tangled up in whatever the fuck he's now started doing with a hula hoop, because having a tail can be such a pain  - always getting caught up in things. I can feel my inner Hank Hill beginning to bristle as I prepare a speech about growing up, responsibility and so on.

'This is why people voted for Trump,' I tell Bess.

'I know,' she sighs.

We climb up one of the banks past giant nopal cacti sprayed lurid dayglo shades which nature never managed. This too annoys me, at least a little. It suggests a lack of respect for the natural world, as does the scree of plastic spray can detritus; but, you know, just so long as cunts get to express their precious creativity...

We pass a couple of young women on their way up the slope. One has short blonde hair, ostentatiously large spectacles, and a wide, unpleasant mouth.

'She's an artist and activist,' I growl quietly, in obscure reference to iO, occasional co-host of MTV's Catfish whose name is differently capitalised so as to challenge the phallocratic orthodoxy of having a normal fucking name like everyone else.

The corner of one wall is sprayed with the words TRUMP 4 LYFE in silver.

'See,' I say. 'I told you!'

We climb back down, then along, and then up the other side. Here and there we can see the remains of some lovingly rendered image sinking beneath a sea of hastily sprayed tags and markers.

'Why would you spray your stupid fucking name over that? How does that add to anything?'

'I know. It's dumb.'

Kids pick spray cans from the ground, shaking them to see if there's any paint left, occasionally adding a name to the chaos, or the Beautiful Chaos as one piece would have it; except it's no longer beautiful. It's just chaos.

Later I will learn that permits were once required, ensuring that only persons with either talent or something worth saying could add to the graffiti park, so what I'm presently seeing is what has happened since whoever looks after the place stopped caring.

It will be demolished anyway, so what does it matter?

Find a spray can and express yourself.

Most have expressed themselves as names. There's a shittily drawn eye in a pyramid submitted by someone who probably believes themself to be a bit of a deep thinker, and most depressing of all are the wonky school logos, Central Catholic and the like. I've never really understood people who enjoyed school but I can accept that they exist and probably had their reasons, but proudly spraying the name of your school on a wall seems like the most retarded thing I've ever heard of. Proud to be a drone, it seems to say, proud to be a component! Check out this awesome barcode I just had tattooed on my forehead.

What else can I tell you? I'm a good company man through and through. Ha ha! Guilty as charged.

I'm a tool. Hear me roar in accordance with accepted community standards. Here's my roaring permit if you need to see it.

'So,' I say to Bess, 'they're going to move all of this to some other place?'

'That's what I was told.'

'I can't see the point. Can you?'

'No.'

'It's not like there's anything special here.'

Later I read that they're moving a token lump of wall for the sake of physical continuity, but this crap will otherwise be bulldozed to make way for some new development.

Yet, the longer we hang around, the more we begin to see the place as it was. Here and there, an image emerges from the Jackson Pollock scrawl. There are lost wildstyle tags in jagged letters six foot high, pink, blue and other strange contrasts of colour, names you have to know to be able to read. There are faces and heads, Snoopy and el Chavo - a child played by an old man in a slightly disturbing Mexican kid's show. There are traces of what you could even call art, now drowning in the free expression of JOSH and Central Catholic and some witless Biblical reference needlessly sprayed across the once relatively proud visage of something that was either an armadillo or a futuristic robot. This is what happens when you give people free reign. Despite the best of intentions, they never have anything to say that's worth saying, and next thing you know - oh dang, look who we just voted for!

We pass a young couple. The boy is long-haired, skinny as a rake, over six foot, and he looks about seventeen at most. He wears a psychedelic top and circular rose-tinted Lennon specs. He's either got himself lost on the way to a costume parade or undercover cops are getting younger and younger. There's a third possibility - that he's just some hopeless twat trying too fucking hard like everyone else here - but I'm not thinking about it because I know that if I do it will annoy me.

Maya Family

The family is having its breakfast. The man is called Uaclahun Ben by the Tzolk'in calendar, that being the day of his birth. It is a fitting name, for ben means reed which refers to rulership, and Uaclahun Ben is ruler of his family. It is morning and he has the face of a bat, by which we mean to say that he is still tired. His family makes much work for him. His wife is called Chikchan. She works at the three hearth stones making her tortillas, filling them with beans and white corn for her family. Her eyes look in different directions as though she had recently noticed some stinging insect settled at the end of her nose, and the distance between the lowest part of that nose and her upper lip is very great. It is like the distance from Chichén to Mayapan. It is a very long way. It would take a man a considerable time to walk from one to the other. Uaclahun Ben and Chikchan eat with Ahal-Togob, the oldest of their children. He was named during a moment of levity, for his name means He Who Causes Unhappiness, and regrettably it almost seems that the Gods have seen fit to ensure that Ahal-Togob is named by way of an instruction. There are other children, but they do not directly feature in our story. Perhaps they are staying with grandparents.

'You must eat your beans and white corn,' Chikchan tells her son. 'You must grow to be big and strong.'

'He does not need to be any bigger,' observes Uaclahun Ben. He shakes his head and sighs. 'Already he is like some tall tree, but for the fact that he does not bear the sort of fruit we can use.'

'I can eat no more of your beans and white corn, mother,' says  Ahal-Togob. 'Later I shall meet with the delightful Itzel. She is very beautiful and pleasant. I therefore wish to make a good impression.'

Suddenly a little fearful, Chikchan turns to her husband. 'Uaclahun Ben, do you recall what I told you?' she says to him. 'Our son will bring the delightful Itzel to visit with us this evening as the sun sets. Tell me that you have not forgotten this arrangement?'

'I have not forgotten this arrangement,' says Uaclahun Ben.

'Now eat your beans and white corn,' the mother again reminds her son.

'I fear I cannot,' says Ahal-Togob, making a face like a frog. 'More beans in my belly will mean that Itzel will not be our only visitor this evening as the sun sets, for I myself shall be visited by Ki'zin the Farter!'

Chikchan makes a face, puckering her mouth as though it were the bottom of some animal. Uaclahun Ben does not react because he has heard it all before.

***

Later that day Uaclahun Ben is about his work at the Temple of Yum Kaax. He is drilling holes in the front teeth of Lord Ix Etz'nab. He rotates a wooden drill by means of a length of twine. The drill is tipped with coarse sand. Lord Ix Etz'nab ceases his moaning and holds up a hand for Uaclahan Ben to stop.

'What is wrong?'

The older, fatter man splutters a little. 'It is rather painful.'

'Yes. That is the point. Were there no pain, such as might be if some person invented a potion to stem all feeling, then the Gods would not recognise that you have made a sacrifice. Do you see?' It seems as though Uaclahun Ben addresses a small child.

'But must it really be quite so painful as it is?'

'When I have drilled holes, I shall inset your teeth with jade fragments. Then the pain will be gone, and we can all get on with our day.'

'But does she really have to do that?'

They both turn to regard Ixchel. She is sat at the feet of Lord Ix Etz'nab. In her hand she has a reed tipped with the teeth of the shark, which she jabs at the Lord's toes.

'What?' she asks, chewing the gum of a certain tree.

'I'm sorry,' Uaclahun Ben says to Lord Ix Etz'nab. 'She is my new assistant. She has just started today.' He turns to address the young woman. 'Yes, what exactly are you doing?'

'Innit right then?'

'I couldn't say because I don't know what you're doing.'

'My dad said it would distract from the pain.'

'One thing it doesn't distract from is your being a pain!' says  Uaclahun Ben. 'This father of yours, this man of wisdom, does he too work in ceremonial dentistry?'

'Naaah, silly,' Ixchel laughs. 'He's a dung collector.'

'Well then, how about this? We agree there's probably not much I can tell him about collecting dung, and he can similarly keep his advice regarding my work to himself. How does that sound?'

'Sorry, I'm sure,' mutters Ixchel, at last ceasing her ministrations upon the feet of Lord Ix Etz'nab. She stands and goes to attend to the painted books.

'One just can't get the staff these days,' says Uaclahun Ben to his patient.

'I will also refrain from advising your father on how to raise simpletons,' Uaclahun Ben says quietly to himself as he resumes his work, although it seems as though he addresses his foolish assistant. 'Patently the gentleman is very well informed in that regard.'

***

Later that evening as the sun is setting, Ahal-Togob brings the delightful Itzel back to meet his family, just as he said he would. Uaclahun Ben immediately recognises the woman because she is none other than Ixchel, his new assistant at the Temple of Yum Kaax. It transpires that she is not very bright and sometimes gets her hieroglyphs mixed up, even those of her own name. That was how this comical misunderstanding came about. Uaclahun Ben pulls a series of faces as a result, and all of these faces suggest that he finds the situation annoying and awkward. Elsewhere there can be heard a short, sad tune of four descending notes blown upon a conch shell.

Barbecue Quest

It's that time of year again. Byron is competing at the Barbecue Cookoff and has bunged us a couple of tickets. We're going along partially because it's his weekend with the kid - Byron's son, my stepson - and there's probably a limit to how much fun Junior can absorb from such an event whilst his father is busily setting lumps of meat on fire, so we're going to pick up the boy and whisk him back to the safety of his room and his games system. The Barbecue Cookoff is ordinarily part of the annual Stock Show & Rodeo, which is nice because it means we get to see the cows; but this year the event has been moved to a different site for some reason, one without much in the way of available parking. The plan is that we park at the AT&T Center, which is where the Barbecue Cookoff has been staged up until now, and we take a shuttle to the new site which is two miles away. The shuttles have been specially laid on. There must be a reason for this new, somewhat laborious arrangement, but neither Bess nor myself can work out what it might be.

This whole thing about parking then taking the shuttle seems like a pain in the ass. Bess looks on the map and notices that the site is about ten minutes walk from the Jack White Park Trailhead, or that's how it looks. The Trailhead is part of a greenway which follows Salado Creek south towards the old Spanish Missions. We've both been along there before, and it makes for a pleasant walk through a largely wooded strip of land away from the noise and traffic of the highway. So that's the box we're ticking.

We park at the Trailhead, oblivious to the fact of an empty parking lot suggesting that no-one else considered this seemingly obvious shortcut. We cross beneath the interstate, then a smaller railway bridge, and we follow the creek. We can hear stadium country in the distance and the smell of barbecue faintly smokes the breeze. Stadium country is country and western without the redeeming features, more X Factor than Hank Williams; but in its favour, it can always be heard at great distance and as such provides useful navigational information to the occasional questing wanderer.

'It can't be much further,' Bess suggests.

Sixty seconds later, we notice that the music now seems to be behind us. We look to the source, to the eastern line of trees, and the possibility occurs to us that we're on the wrong side of the creek. We turn around and head back for the interstate.

'Maybe if we head up that way,' I suggest, pointing.

'That's along the highway,' Bess says. 'We won't get very far.'

We're both looking at the headquarters of the Lucifer lighting company, which is at least on the same side of the creek as the Cookoff. The grounds of the Lucifer lighting company slope down towards the water, and there seems to be a path worn into the grass, so again we head off.

'That always struck me as a funny name for a lighting company,' says Bess. 'Like Beezebub plumbing or Satan parcel delivery.'

'You know Lucifer means light bringer?'

'Really?'

'Actually I'm not sure, but it's something like that. Luce means light in Italian, so…'

'Well, the fallen angel - I guess he was supposed to be pretty hot after all.'

Approaching the railway bridge, the path takes us into a labyrinth of reeds, dried stalks of Arundo donax, an invasive species which can grow up to twenty feet in height and does well in really shitty, contaminated soil. It's one of those things which thrives around industrial estates and places you probably don't want to go, and the earth beneath the bridge is accordingly decorated with flattened beer cans and burnt patches. Forward progress becomes difficult.

'I'm having my doubts about this one.'

'Let's turn back,' Bess sighs. 'I don't feel like getting assaulted today. I suppose at least we tried.'

We return to the car, and grudgingly drive to the AT&T Center where the parking lot is already filling and we have to pay ten dollars on top of the Cookoff ticket price. We follow the crowd on foot, everybody drawn to the point from which the shuttle will depart. Everyone is wearing a Stetson and my head feels suddenly naked. I'm overdue a haircut, that being one sin for which a Stetson usually compensates. I've been meaning to buy a new hat for some time. My current Stetson has had a lot of use and is consequently so old, crappy, and distressed that it could pass for the cover of a Nine Inch Nails record.

The shuttle arrives and we all pile on. It's actually a school bus, the large yellow kind as driven by Otto in The Simpsons. I've never been on one of these buses before, and yet they are universal to the experience of almost everyone I know. The interior is cramped and crappy and it feels as though someone will almost certainly bring either a goat or chickens on board at any moment.

'You must have seen that in Mexico though,' Bess says.

'Not really. The buses seemed a bit scary and confusing. I took coaches out of the city but that was different.'

'No chickens?'

'Mostly businessy types. I caught a Pesero in Tula but there was no-one with a chicken on there. It was a bit freaky because I was just following what everyone else did, and no-one seemed to be paying when they got on, so I sat down and assumed you were supposed to pay when you got off. Then the next few people who got on paid the driver, making me look like an arrogant cunt tourist.'

'What did you do?'

'I paid him when I got off and tried to explain that I was a clueless gringo. He didn't seem to care that much.'

We head off and I think about Mexico, and then crazy school bus drivers described by Henry Rollins in his spoken performances. Thankfully our guy just seems to be doing his job. We take a side road I've never noticed before into what may as well be open country, and yet we're still in the middle of the city because that's how San Antonio works. We are surrounded by scrubby fields of cacti and we pass stables with horses stood around.

Finally we arrive. We get wristbands and find a map posted on an information board, from which we learn that Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em have a concession just a little way further along the main thoroughfare. The place is packed.

Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em is the name of Byron's barbecue team, apparently taken from a song by Ted Nugent. I have no idea when it all got started, but he's always been a good cook. Apparently someone at some point told him he should compete in barbecue competition events, so he did, and in doing so acquired a whole team of helpers, crew, hangers-on, or whatever you want to call them.

'So what do the rest of those guys do?' I ask my wife, because she's telling me the story. 'Do they just hang around and maybe pass him an onion if he needs it?'

'Pretty much,' she tells me. 'Byron does most of the actual cooking. They turn things on the grill while he's doing something else, or they stand around and make sure the beer is drinkable.'

'So it's really Byron who wins the competitions?'

'Yes, but to his credit he's never really been about personal glory in that way.'

It transpires that Byron has a rival team formed from Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em dissidents who felt sidelined by his superior cooking ability, despite his repeated emphasis on everything having been a team effort, even when it wasn't. We're better than this, they apparently cried out. We can barbecue as good as any man, and no more will we stand in the background occasionally handing a tomato to some superstar…

We find the concession and we have wristbands which grant admittance. There's a marquee and a bar. The barbecue trailer is at the back, a huge open-sided thing on wheels with Byron and a couple of others working away. We find Junior in a caravan next to the trailer. He seems glad that we've arrived, but we have to tell him that we're not leaving just yet seeing as we only just got here.  We talk to Byron and Robert and have sodas from the bar. One of the bartenders wears a hat resembling a turd, specifically a furry cartoon turd with a smiley face. It's not that much of a surprise.

Having found our bearings, Bess and I take a walk. There are a couple of stalls selling hats around the corner, including Stetsons. It takes a few tries but I find one which fits my apparently massive head, and it's only twenty dollars. I buy it and feel that the journey has been worth my while. We wander a little further but come perilously close to where some band are still belting out the stadium country by which we forged our earlier path. We head back to the Wack 'Em & Stack 'Em concession.

Just outside the concession I pause to read postcards pinned to a board. They're from little kids, all addressed to Byron and mostly thanking him for buying their cow or pig. I get the impression that in most cases, the cow or pig in question has been hand-reared by the child who wrote the card.

'Did you see this?' I ask Bess.

'Oh yeah,' she says. 'He does a lot for those school 4H clubs.'

'4H?'

'Horticulture, husbandry, and a couple of other Hs.'

'Hogs?'

'No.'

'But it's like agriculture and stuff?'

'Yes.'

I take another look at the postcards. It seems like these kids put a lot of love into raising their animals. 'They know what Byron does, don't they, why he's buying their animals?'

'Oh yes.'

This is one I'm just going to have to keep from thinking about too hard, given that I already know where meat comes from.

Byron appears, jovial as usual. We shoot the breeze for a couple of minutes, wishing him luck with thrashing the dissidents in the upcoming competition. He horses around as is his way, a man truly in his element.

Then we gather up the kid, and head home.

Airport

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It asks to see my green card.

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

I get the same response from a second machine.

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

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

'It's fine,' he tells me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fanfuckingtastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My flight back to Texas runs without incident.

Finally I am back in San Antonio.

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

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

I am home.

The New World

Thursday the 23rd of June, 2011 was my last day in England; not my last ever day in England, although it felt like it might be. On Friday  morning I was up at three for the sake of catching a flight, an undertaking which I found weird with a touch of death sentence to it. There would be no going back. I was moving to America. It was the thing towards which I'd been working for a long time, the thing on which everything had been pinned, and yet on some level I'd never really expected the day to come because I'd been lost in forward motion. I hadn't even been up at three when working for Royal Mail, and the sky was still frozen black. My dad turned up in the car around four. He was driving me to the airport because neither coach nor train would have got me there in time.

The city was silent. It was still cold. I hugged my mother, then kissed her on the cheek and tried not to cry - and we've never been one of those touchy-feely families. It seemed like I would never see her again. I think I noticed a tear in her eye.

I'd been living in my mother's place whilst selling off a load of my accumulated crap and applying for the K1 fiancé visa. The K1 would grant me three months in which to get married and apply for a green card, and now it was happening - an eventuality I had somehow not quite foreseen. It was terrifying, but I kept moving because the  alternative would have been much worse. I told myself it would all make sense at some point in the future, and hopefully the none too distant future.

I was flying from Gatwick, because when I bought the ticket I hadn't considered that it made much difference. I was still thinking of airports in terms of having lived in London, but Gatwick is a shitload further than Heathrow if you're travelling down from the north on the M6. My dad and I talked about whatever we usually talked about as  dawn broke and the motorway began to fill with early traffic, and eventually we were at the airport. I loaded my crap onto a baggage trolley and we wheeled off to the departure lounge. I hugged my dad, which I'm not sure I'd ever done before because, as I say, we've never really been that sort of family; and like a wanker, I started to cry.

He understood. 'That's a proper Burty trait,' he told me, and I remembered him describing how tough it had been working on a farm all those years, getting upset over the deaths of calves and cows.

Then followed about nine hours on a plane, landing at Charlotte, North Carolina for my date with Immigration which, after the previous two years worth of headaches accrued in preparation, took all of half an hour. I handed over my envelope of documents and they took me to a room where I sat with a bored teenager in a uniform with a massive gun. He wasn't so intimidating as the bored teenager in a uniform with a massive gun who had once cadged cigarettes from me in Calixtlahuaca, but it was obvious that we were never going to be friends. It wasn't so much an interview as a conversation with someone who clearly wanted to be somewhere else, following which I was left with four hours to burn. My six o'clock connecting flight was pushed back to seven due to a surfeit of lightning, then to eight because there was something wrong with the aircraft, and then it was cancelled because apparently US Airways only had one plane, which was about what I expected. They'd done it before. My previous visit to America had briefly marooned me in Philadelphia. It was getting to be a habit.

The airline put me up in a hotel and I caught a flight to Houston early next morning. It was that or three further connections which wouldn't arrive in San Antonio until eight on Saturday evening. Bess picked me up from Houston with a two hour drive back to San Antonio. I spent the car journey and most of that first month in something of a daze. A foreign country looks very different to a holiday when it's supposed to be for the rest of your life.

I moved into Bess's apartment, a second floor flat in a place on Sunset Ridge. Sunset Ridge was a subdivision - as they are called - a complex of architecturally similar houses and flats on a hillside behind a large ritzy sign. The buildings were two storeys, stone clad with shallow roofing and a sort of alpine look. The lawns were neat, without fencing, and were tended by someone working from a main office which looked after the affairs of the subdivision. Neither trees nor bushes nor bedding plants were of any kind I recognised, and the Texas heat seemed phenomenal. I felt a little as though I had moved into a J.G. Ballard novel, and I could only wait for familiarity to set in so I could feel normal again.

The flat was a reasonable size, but too small for three of us, the third being the inscrutable kid who was seven and would eventually be my stepson. In my absence, Bess had found a house and we would be moving there in a month or so. Everything was in transition. An email I sent to my mother on Monday the 27th of June concluded:

Sorry about the sombre tone, there have been the inevitable couple of occasions where I've wondered if I haven't made a huge mistake, but I'm sure it will all look very different in a few weeks time.

Beyond such details, all that remains is a blur of images which seem alien even now, six years later: picking up a ton of Lego from the floor, and the child who barely seems to know what to say to me, instead addressing everything to his mother; smoking the last of my tobacco outside on the step of the building as colourful tropical birds hop about in the tree, unaware of how exotic they appear; dive bombed by sparrowhawks at Sunset Ridge's outdoor pool; taking shelter from the crippling heat of midday, inside with the AC up full and the lights off watching the new version of Battlestar Galactica; nothing I quite recognise in the stores and supermarkets, no kebab shop and no Asian-owned corner store; lightning flashing across the city in the evening like in a film, the city as a vista of treetops with the occasional water tower; dishes in the sink and a fridge containing only spray cheese and ice cubes...

It got better and it got easier, but it's still hard to think about those first months even now, because the shock was so profound; and this was immigration willingly undertaken as a matter more closely resembling choice than necessity, so I've been lucky.

It was probably the best decision I ever made.