March for George Floyd

George Floyd was a black man who was murdered by a cop while other cops stood and watched. He wasn't the first and he probably won't be the last, unless some crazy genius comes up with a system for screening new recruits so as to prevent dangerous nutcases joining the police force. Previous black persons murdered by cops have included the guy whose candy bar wrapper reflected the sunlight just like a handgun, the woman who was actually doing nothing in her own home when a cop who had the wrong address broke in and shot her, and millions of others whose personal details may be found on the internet if you want to have a look around. The factor common to these killing has been that the murderee has been either a black person or a person belonging to an easily distinguished ethnic group other than white. One might reasonably expect law enforcement officials to implement certain policy changes so as to reduce the occurrence of cops killing black people, but apparently they're not sure where to start or what to do.

Therefore, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, people have been gathering together in all of the major American cities to march, and today was San Antonio's turn. My wife and I went by mainly to have a look, just to see if anything was happening, but seeing as it was, we decided to stick around. We assembled in Travis Park, a small square close to the city centre, and there were already a lot of people. It seemed that a couple of streets had been closed off, with cops and even members of the National Guard stood around looking vigilant, doing the command presence thing. Everyone was masked, otherwise not much social distancing going on, but then Bexar County seems to have come through the worst of the coronavirus relatively unscathed - at least compared to most places - and it's not like anyone was going out of their way to get cuddly with strangers. There were a few speeches delivered from a stage, mostly obscured by news helicopters circling very much like vultures, and this being a part of the country where vultures regularly circle, the comparison is deliberate. The speeches mostly communicated the general idea that black lives matter, and I think most of us already understood that.

So we set off on a route of a couple of miles, winding through the city towards the police station. Mostly we were young and black or Hispanic - simply reflecting our city's ethnic composition - but plenty white, Asian, middle-aged or even old. I saw one Catholic priest fully robed as though about to perform mass and several Quakers, as identified by their t-shirts, somewhat refuting the protest demographic imagined by those who still maintain that the cops are simply doing their job and that you can't make an omelet without breaking an egg every once in a while. We're supposed to be dangerous bomb-throwing anarchists, looters who wish only to cause chaos, and Antifa footsoldiers, but we're just people who would rather not have our country turn into Germany in the thirties if that's quite all right with the rest of you. In fact a lot of us seem to be angry sixteen-year old girls with green hair, demographically speaking. We're Antifa only in so much as that none of us regard Fascism as having ever been a particularly good idea, and we're therefore against it. It really shouldn't need spelling out, but then we've found ourselves in opposition to people who can't actually manage a whole fucking sentence without invoking freedom as a concept, but only as a weirdly specific meaning of the word which somehow allows for the active suppression of information and the shooting of an occasional black person if it seems like the right thing to do. We're dealing with people who don't abide by logic and who are therefore impervious to whatever argument you might have, because - somewhat ironically - it's all about their feelings.

Having known several such persons, my theory is that at the heart of each one of those rightist fucknuggets we have a slightly dim child, a person who wasn't necessarily bad as a kid, but who may have been occasionally slow on the uptake and will inevitably recall one incident in which someone brighter, perhaps wearing glasses and holding a stack of books, made some unkind - if possibly well observed - remark about that person being a bit of a thick cunt; and everything since has been revenge piled up on a deeply ingrained sense of inadequacy. Anything that upsets a liberal, a brainiac, a speccy four-eyes book reader, anyone failing to show prowess on the sports team, failing to salute the flag with sufficient fervour, anyone a bit weird - anything that upsets these people must therefore be good and worthy of elevation, anything up to and including Adolf Hitler, because we're post-facts and it's all about how you feel. Whatever history books written by the sort of four-eyed weirdo egghead liberal braniacs who have the time to write a history book may say about Adolf Hitler, if you feel that he was a man with some very interesting ideas who simply went about things the wrong way, then who has the right to tell you that you're not allowed to feel that?

This is what we're up against in a country where the President wants to declare Antifa a terrorist organisation, despite it not actually being an organisation in any sense, presumably meaning that the alternative to Antifa, namely the Fa, is now something to be embraced.

We're also up against the mid-afternoon heat. Bess and I hadn't really intended to stay for the duration, so after marching for nearly an hour we head back to the car. The march has been peaceful but for the noise. I've barely noticed the cops, and I haven't seen any violence or vandalism, just lots of people marching and yelling and waving placards. Marches in other cities have given rise to smashed windows and looting here and there, leading to the inevitable social media backlash from persons who seem to have misunderstood the meaning of the word protest, flames doubtless stoked by the sort of reactionary forces who ask will no-one think of the millionaires or corporations or trickle down wealth creators? I personally believe that vandalism and looting provide the enemy - because they are the enemy - with an excuse to shut us down and should be discouraged, but to focus on the same is missing the point.

Today really brings it home that such violent action - at least without serious provocation - really is absolutely unnecessary. I've been on marches before, but never have I seen this many people moving in the same direction, so obviously pissed off, voices raised to deliver a single very clear message. It's a show of strength, which is really all it needs to be right now, because psychologically speaking, it's fucking terrifying. If I were on the other team I'd be quacking my pants; and I suspect they are quacking their pants, hence the virulence of responses given thus far.

My wife and I walk back along the length of the march to our car, and each time we think we've reached the tail, another swarm of protesters appears from around the next corner.

As we drive home through empty streets on the other side of the city, we pass a group of five or six men - all white but for one Hispanic carrying a massive flag, all in combat gear with assault rifles. I don't really care about what may or may not be permitted by state law regarding firearms, no-one walking around in the centre of a city with an assault rifle does so with honourable intentions.

Several hours later, we watch the evening news. The five or six men were apparently part of something which calls itself Freedom Force. There are now about twenty of them stood around the Alamo Cenotaph, having volunteered themselves to protect the defenceless granite edifice with their openly carried guns. Someone spray painted graffiti upon it the day before, something about it being a monument to white supremacy - which is probably a bit of an overreach - but the graffiti was removed and the culprit arrested. Freedom Force have turned up to make sure that it doesn't happen again, apparently believing that the two-hundred strong line of armed cops in riot gear isn't enough in the face of thousands of black teenagers and sixteen-year old girls with green hair; but of course, they're not really protecting anything. Even if they were, doubt is cast by how they're all wearing those cool mirror shades after the sun has gone down, just like the action movie bad asses they clearly wish they could have been in other lives. Can any of them even see the Alamo Cenotaph they claim to be protecting? Either their motives are absolutely genuine and no-one had realised how provocative they would appear as white guys turning up to a black lives matter march with assault rifles - which would mean that they're genuinely a bunch of morons - or there's something else going on here. What a puzzler it is!

Comic book readers may recall that Magneto once led a team of supervillains called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants were eventually incarcerated by the Marvel universe version of the US Government, then pardoned and freed conditional to working for the same government agency as politically dubious super-espionage types, and as such they were renamed Freedom Force, which seems telling.

The protests continue on into the night, some smashed windows, some looting, and a shitload of graffiti - much of which is cleaned or repaired by volunteers from the march the next morning, which isn't as newsworthy for obvious reasons.

Normal service is resumed in San Antonio, at least within the limits of the prevailing state of lockdown, and the rest of the country apparently catches fire.

These are interesting times, I guess you could say.

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.

Funny Foreign Food

Here's what I ate whilst back in England visiting the folks, nothing I've been unable to live without, but food which I've nevertheless appreciated on some level, and have eaten as something like exotic cuisine, despite having grown up with it.

Pork pie. I think it was from Sainsbury's or somewhere of that general type, and it made for a respectable restorative as I wrestled with a jetlag hangover resulting from the previous eighteen hours spent in more or less constant motion. Having failed to find pork pies in Texas, and being reluctant to pay $70 refrigerated postage for something I would ordinarily eat only twice a year, I have learned how to make my own. The process is a bit long-winded but has resulted in the best pork pies I've eaten by a wide margin. The one I ate in England probably wasn't great by comparison, but timing is everything.

Full English breakfast. This was at the City Arms in Earlsdon, Coventry, which is a Weatherspoons pub - fried egg, baked beans, a sausage, bacon, couple of fried slices and black pudding; of which only the fried egg and bacon can be conveniently reproduced back in Texas with any degree of authenticity. I'm not sure what's different about American sausages, but they are different, possibly due to the influence of the mighty German sausage. American bread is also different for no reason I can really pin down, and English baked beans are sweeter. So far as I'm concerned, most of these serve as a vehicle for black pudding, because it would probably be weird just eating solo black pudding, although that's the one thing I really can't do in Texas. There used to be an Argentinian delicatessen which sold something that was a lot like black pudding, but the establishment converted to an exclusive club accessible only to persons in the catering trade, which was a pain in the ass, so no more stateside black pudding for me. I suppose I could try to make it myself, but the recipe seems laborious and messy and would in any case prove prohibitively indulgent when I can't even pay my own wife to consider black pudding as edible. Anyway, the saga of this specific full English breakfast - such as it is - was that, feeling jetlagged, I realised I couldn't be arsed to walk a couple of miles to Carphone Warehouse to buy one of those cheap disposable phones used by crack dealers, so instead opted to stuff my face at the pub, an enterprise which, like that with the pork pie, proved similarly restorative.

Here it is again.

Meringue. I've tried to make them but my meringues are comical, like something from an overambitious school science project. Texas doesn't seem big on meringues either, so it had been at least a year since I ate one. The first was nice but smaller than I remember them being, which struck me as related to those factors which make it appear as though policemen are getting younger and younger. The second meringue was about the size of a football with a swirly orange pattern giving it the appearance of the planet Jupiter. The swirls were due to it being a passion fruit meringue, although you couldn't really taste anything but meringue, not even the cream. This was because it didn't have cream, although clearly needed some for sake of contrast with everything else. I obtained the Jovian meringue from Warren's Bakery in the precinct in Kenilworth, ten foot from a hole in the ground which had once been the local toy shop when I was a kid, and from which I made purchase of a number of Micronaut figures, vehicles and accessories, notably the Crater Cruncher which was a sort of futuristic digger. Although Warren's meringue needed work, his Cornish pastie was pretty great, and the shop proudly sells pies and cakes from beneath an athletic looking sign reading Forever Fit owing to the presence of a gymnasium on the second floor of the building, which is amusing.

Fish and chips. I've always thought fish and chips were a little overrated, but when the moment is right, they're amazing. The Long John Silver restaurant chain here in Texas does fish and chips which are so close to the real thing without being quite the same as to constitute a decent alternative, at least in the sense of methadone being an alternative to heroin; but actual fish and chips served in a chip shop by a fat bloke with a red face takes some beating. All the same, I'm nevertheless left a little weary by the mythologisation of fish and chips as one of the five things Americans understand about being English*.

Two sausage, egg and chips. This was my proverbial daily bread for at least twenty years, and is difficult to recreate in America mainly due to the sausage thing. Not only are we talking about an English sausage, but a caff sausage which I suspect has been prepared using very specific techniques understood only by those in the biz - possibly fried beforehand, then kept at a specific temperature by heated buffet technology. The first two sausage, egg and chips of my trip was consumed in a caff in Bermondsey, which is significant because two sausage, egg and chips was actually invented in Bermondsey - and you can check that on Wikipedia if you don't believe me. As I ate, an elderly diner at an adjacent table congratulated a small boy on his choice of football team with the words, yor a little Gooner, aincha!, so it was the real thing; and it was beautiful, although I somehow propelled some of my egg from off the side of my plate and onto the floor during the excitement. I ate the dish again, or at least a variation on the dish additionally incorporating baked beans, at the Star Cafe in Coventry, which is part of the coach station. This second serving was okay, but the situation obliging one to petition a caterer for sachets of tomato ketchup in the absence of anything squeezy readily available at the tables, was disconcerting. As a city, Coventry has had a troubled history characterised by Hitler's bombs and whatever scrapping compelled the formation of the racially progressive Two Tone record label, so I assume there's still some concern that hooligans might use ketchup dispensers as weapons were they more freely available. Also, the sausages weren't so good as those eaten in London. I propose that this deficit results from the Star Cafe's distance from the two sausage, egg and chips epicentre and their cuisine can as such be likened to the shadow of two sausage, egg and chips cast upon the wall of Plato's cave.

No ketchup dispenser? Thanks a lot, Hitler!

Co-Op sandwich. My dad and I ate Co-Op sandwiches in the absence of pub food, which the White Bear in Shipston-on-Stour didn't seem to feature. I'm pretty sure the George, twenty yards up the road, still did pub food, but it probably would have been served on square plates and involved jus. Therefore we went across the square to the Co-Op, which had been a post office back in our day - as distinct from the Co-Op which had been Fine Fare back in our day - and which is bewilderingly situated at a mere fifty yards distance as you head for the public bogs in the Telegraph Street car park in what is a very small town - not somewhere you might expect to be served by two supermarkets, and definitely not two branches of the same supermarket virtually next door to each other. We had consumed beer, we had shared hilarious anecdotes of inept local law enforcement, and we were hungry, so sandwiches it was. We both chose bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Following purchase, we walked down to the River Stour, just by the Old Mill, and discussed things we could remember when they were all fields. Those were probably the best sandwiches I ever bought from a supermarket chiller cabinet.

The River Stour which my dad and I were able to remember when it was a field.

Doner kebab. I have been confused by the differences between English and American variants of the mighty doner, particularly with the latter being served in something more closely resembling naan bread and without chilli sauce. I suppose, given that I live in San Antonio, the absence of the seemingly crucial chilli sauce is something to do with how everything else I eat is usually drowning in the stuff. The American doner kebab is nice enough, possibly even more authentic for all I know, but I can't see it being much use at two in the morning after forty pints and a homeward bus trip to the wrong part of town with your trousers worn on your head. Somehow I failed to reacquaint myself with the mighty English doner kebab when I was last over that way, so this time I made a point of getting myself down to that kebab place on the Butts, which is an amusingly named street in Coventry rather than a sequence of arses. A crusty looking bloke with tattoos stopped me to ask for a light before I'd made it into the shop. I whipped out a lighter and he said, 'thanks - a fucking human being, at last,' which seemed to contribute to the experience somehow.

'I'm going to enjoy this,' I told the bloke behind the counter. ' I haven't had one in two years,' which led inevitably to a conversation about the state of American kebabs, and why the bread is so weird, and how Disneyland Florida isn't as great as you might think, and why people voted for Donald Trump.

The kebab was good, but not so good as I remembered, so possibly I was specifically thinking of London kebabs; unless it's just that I wasn't sufficiently pissed.

The man we discussed in the kebab shop.

Chinese takeaway. I once loved Chinese takeaways and would order them as a treat for myself on occasions when it seemed like I deserved it, and always sweet and sour pork balls with egg fried rice. Then one day - I would guess late nineties - some sort of paradigm shift occurred within the world of Chinese takeaway, sweeping away all that had been served in those tidy little foil trays and replacing it with something which seemed broader in culinary scope, but just not as nice. Thankfully this development coincided with the advent of Pizza Pan, who delivered, had an outlet on Barry Road, and who got to know me so well that all I had to do was phone up and ask for the usual please, Kristos. Where Chinese takeaway once crunched, it became a sort of warm slurry dominated by the tang of monosodium glutomate, so I moved on. A conversation about Chinese takeaway with my mother somehow resulted in our ordering from Lucky Star - who had popped a delivery menu through her letterbox at some point - despite the thrust of the conversation having been that I'd gone off Chinese takeaway and she'd never liked it in the first place. Anyway, Lucky Star proved to be lucky mostly for those who like their chicken balls to resemble scotch eggs in terms of volume and structure - bland, chewy chicken embedded in a thick mantel of bland, chewy batter. We didn't eat much of it, then pulled off the alleged batter so as to give the chicken to Geoff, next door's cat, who seemed to enjoy it more than we did. A couple of nights later, we tried again. My mother gave me, a fifty-two-year old man, a tenner and sent me to the Chinese at the end of the road. Unfortunately it was closed so I found one called Peking House up the next road along - surprising myself at the fidelity of a vaguely remembered impression of another Chinese takeaway having been somewhere in the vicinity. The food was a little better, and the inch-thick layer of batter at least had a bit of crunch, but Geoff still had most of it in the end.

Geoff, or possibly Geoff's brother.

Biscuits. It's not that you can't get biscuits in America, but choices are often limited as the market is swamped with cookies, which are soft and doughy and are therefore not biscuits. Cookies came about when a Chicago biscuiteer named Herb Cook decided he didn't have time to finish cooking a batch of biscuits because he needed to play a video game and support his local football team while eating a burger, so the cookies - as they came to be known - came out soft, and achieved popularity with those who don't like the distraction of anything crunchy while playing a video game or supporting their local football team while eating a burger. This is a shame because biscuits are fucking great where cookies are truthfully a bit shit, on the whole. Consequently I ate my way through three or four packets of Fox's ginger custard creams during my stay in England.

*: The others being the Royal family, the Beatles, Keeping Up Appearances, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Fighting with Statues

Living in the south, and particularly Texas, it is recommended that one develops a thick skin, at least when engaging with social media. The south had slaves, invented the Klu Klux Klan, and it's mostly been downhill from there if social media is any indication. The civil war was fought because everyone living in the north hated slavery and loved freedom, and those were the only reasons. Dirty deeds done in the north are exceptions to the rule, and anyway there was usually some dude from Texas involved, but anything shitty occurring below the Mason-Dixon is probably occurring just because that's how we are down here. Facebook posts linking news items referring to the south, some retarded government official proposing regulations discriminating against a particular group of people for example, will inevitably be embellished with the comments of millions from somewhere up north who told us so. Can't we just get rid of Texas?, they'll whine, because Texas is the only place in all America where shitty officials get in power and make stupid decisions. Nothing bad ever happens anywhere else, and it's surely only a matter of time before we learn that Donald Trump is actually from Brownsville, because it sure would explain a lot.

This is why when a speaker from an organisation called Sons of Confederate Veterans was invited to talk on a local radio show, I listened to what he had to say. I had no strong opinion regarding the Confederacy, beyond some reservations about those who still wave its flag, but in any case this wasn't really what the guy wanted to talk about. Instead he discussed the north-south divide and the continued demonisation of the latter. He discussed the Civil War and the received wisdom of it being fought purely so as to free the slaves - which may have been an issue, but was at best a side issue. It was more to do with the south seceding from the Union, and this being a problem because the south was where all the money was made, doubtless thanks to slavery, which suddenly deprived the government of a significantly massive source of tax revenue.

This is roughly my understanding, namely that there was no great or noble cause on either side of the line, regardless of the possibility of there having been noble individuals; because that's how war is by definition, a last resort where reason and negotiation have failed. That slavery was ended is obviously a great thing, but we should probably keep in mind how well African-Americans have generally fared in this country since 1863 before anyone starts declaring it their victory.

This isn't to necessarily express either sympathy or solidarity with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, so much as to acknowledge that the existence of such an organisation is understandable in terms of regional identity without needing to be rude about it by suggesting anyone is necessarily a racist. Unfortunately though, the Confederate cause really does seem to attract shitheads. I've encountered one of them on a local bulletin board called Next Door, a forum to which one may sign up in order to converse with others in your neighbourhood. The city council had announced that it would be removing a statue commemorating the Confederate dead from Travis Park in downtown San Antonio, and Biffo the Bear quite naturally had plenty to say about it on Next Door.

Of course, this wasn't the same Biffo the Bear whose adventures endured for fifty-one years in the pages of the English children's comic, the Beano, but that's what I'm calling him in accordance with the level of respect which I feel is his due.

I signed up for Next Door more than a year ago, and became immediately aware of Biffo the Bear. He seemed to have a lot of time on his hands and would comment on almost every thread. Maybe you were moving house and had decided to give away a dresser to anyone able to collect the thing. Biffo the Bear might comment on how it was a nice piece of furniture and how he sure wished he had room for it, and then his attention would turn to the more pressing issues of no good punks, or lousy drivers, or shiftless repairmen. You'd lost your chihuahua and wondered if anyone had seen her, and there was Biffo once again grumbling about Obama coming to take our guns, and how we all needed to keep an eye open, and to keep our guns in good working order because you never know who might be out there, and hell - there could be an ISIS cell right here in our neighbourhood just waiting, waiting…

Biffo the Bear struck me as insane and stupid, and I found his testimony depressing, so I gave up on Next Door. I didn't want to have to think about the existence of people like Biffo the Bear, and how they get to vote and thus influence decisions which affect the rest of us, people with working brains. More recently I found myself drawn back in when another of our neighbours received a particularly vile piece of anonymous hate mail.

 

Attn. Lazy filthy Latin negros From Cuba. Take a little pride in yourselfs and clear up your unkempt dump of a yard. Start by storing that junk boat you smuggled your 'familia' in, in a storage, also chop shop are against the law. I understand stealing cars is the only thing your parents taught you. It's obvious you smoke crack or PCP, so get rid of those ghetto blinds and buy curtains. Fix up your 'casa'. My dog has a better house than you do, but then again my dog is an American, not a uneducated immigrant. If you need help join the neighborhood association, but you have to quit the Bloods or Crips first. If you can't read or write English and probably never will, look at all your 'Primos' in the 'Bronx'. Ask your Mexican neighbours if they could read it in Reggaeton. For your theirs like twenty of them that live next door. Or go library and check out Hooked on Phonics for the Spanish speaking Negroes from Cuba or Dominican Republic. But do something please, you pathetic peasants. Now I know why Trump wants to get rid of you. Better yet we should make you slaves like your cousins.

I've standardised the case - which randomly switches between upper and lower, sometimes half way through a sentence - and I've added punctuation, and anglicised and deleted a couple of words I didn't understand, but that's the general thrust of the argument as set forth by this anonymous individual who identifies only as your wonderful and caring Anglo-Saxon neighbours on Sumner Drive.

The subject of this missive was understandably upset, and so shared it on Next Door in hope of discerning some clue as to its origin. It seemed like the point of the letter was spite, plain and simple. Having walked past on many occasions, I would say that the man's house is fine, as are his blinds, as is his yard, as is the boat he keeps in his driveway. There is nothing to distinguish his house as any different to those of his neighbours, and it's situated at such a distance from Sumner Drive as to call into question why the author of the letter would even give a shit; but this is of course to credit the sender with both locative honestly and motives beyond just racist harassment undertaken for the sake of retarded chuckles.

We talked about it on Next Door, and everyone was horrified. I noticed, after the first hundred or so replies, that Biffo the Bear was yet to weigh in, Biffo who routinely shares his thoughts about the dangers of liberalism and the protection of our second amendment rights on every single thread, even if it's just some guy asking for the number of a decent plumber. It struck me as strange that Biffo, never usually so reticent on the subject of other people's business or how we need to act when we don't like what some neighbour is up to, should have no opinion. I said as much in the thread, which prompted a couple of others to agree that yes, it was fucking weird; which in turn prompted another couple of others to break their silence and point out that Biffo was a lovely Bear and would never have sent that terrible letter, and that we were sounding a little like a lynch mob and should therefore be ashamed of ourselves. More serious still, one of Biffo's defenders informed us that she had made a note of all our names and would be handing the note to her brother-in-law at the first sniff of pitchforks and burning torches.

Her brother-in-law was a cop, she told us. That's how most crimes are solved, see. Usually the officer in charge is handed a revealing note by some close friend or relative, and that's how he knows which heads to bust.

Biffo the Bear returned to the fray a couple of days later, just as I now return to the point. The city council had announced that it would be removing a statue commemorating the Confederate dead from Travis Park in downtown San Antonio, and Biffo the Bear quite naturally had plenty to say about it. His cousin had been down to Travis Park and had told him all about what was going on, and William B. Travis fought at the Battle of the Alamo and was nothing to do with the Civil War, which just goes to show how stupid these uneducated punks are, and it's exactly like when the Taliban blew up those Buddish*1 statues in Afghanistan. ISIS also want to rewrite history and that's why these damn liberals must be fought. Something about Sharia Law, Obama, blah blah blah...

Had Biffo gone down to Travis Park himself - and it's surprising that he didn't considering how much he cares - he would have seen that the statue earmarked for removal simply commemorates the Confederate dead, and was erected in the park named after William B. Travis without actually depicting the man; but never mind. His understanding of the situation at least doesn't seem to be any worse than that of anyone else on his side of the debate. Photos of protesters from both sides of the divide appeared on facebook, not really clashing because there probably weren't enough people there and the cops were present. One image showed kids in mostly black t-shirts, some black lives matter slogans, laid out on the ground in what was obviously a peaceful protest. One of them shows a raised clenched fist, a symbol of which the meaning is so fucking obvious as to require no further clarification.

That fist means Marxism, warned an octogenarian facebook dweller in the comments section next to the photograph, because the beauty of social media is that everyone gets a say, no matter how fucking stupid they are; and someone will read those words and somehow assume that the moron responsible is speaking from an informed position.

'Let's see what's happening down at Travis Park,' I said to my wife. It's Sunday and we have nothing else on, so we go.

The park is pretty small and has been populated by a substantial population of homeless people at intervals between vote-grabbing drives to move them to a place where they can no longer offend the eyes of responsible tax payers such as Biffo the Bear. It's about 98° Fahrenheit and there aren't many people around. We see a small group over near one of the fountains, mostly African-American, so we go over to talk with them. Unfortunately someone has beaten us to it, an older white guy pleading the case for keeping the statues.

We shuffle up behind him to listen in. I'm wearing my favourite shirt, one made from material patterned so as to resemble the state flag. It seemed like a good idea to appear vaguely patriotic, because I'm more worried about being shot by angry, uneducated crackers suffering from patriotism poisoning than I'm worried about being shot by anyone in a black lives matter t-shirt; but now I feel a little self-conscious as the old guy states his case. I hope no-one thinks I've come along to back him up.

There are a couple of white dudes sat at a table about ten foot away. They look like hillbillies. Their accents are impenetrable to me, just noises like someone playing with rubber bands; but they don't sound particularly happy and they glance over at us from time to time. A little further away there's a cop maintaining command presence.

Bess and I listen, and I am at least initially encouraged by the words of the white guy. For him it's about history and identity, and has nothing to do with racism. This much is obvious from the fact that he's talking to these seven young men and women. Finally he runs out of words, and his audience are better able to respond.

'Kanye was stupid for that,' one of them sighs, referring to Kanye West's attempt to take back the Confederate flag in some video or other.

'Same goes for Lil' Jon,' says another shaking his head.

I'm stood next to two young guys in shorts with black t-shirts and dreads. The larger one now dominates the conversation. He speaks well, genial and without any obvious anger, and I find myself chipping in. It's fun, and I'm actually learning something, coming down off that fence; not least because it's so rare that I ever have anything you would call a conversation, certainly not spoken with anyone to whom I'm not directly related in some way.

'This is a park,' he says, 'a public place where you bring your family, your children.' He gestures towards the statue somewhere behind him, and the case for the prosecution is shown to be solid.

The removal of Confederate statues isn't about rewriting history, because the statues weren't about history in the first place. Most of them were raised during a period of elevated white racial insecurity, expressed in reactionary terms such as the revival of the Klan in 1915, D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and even chuckling Edgar Rice Burroughs referring to the KKK as freedom fighters in his pulpy little thrillers. If we're really that bothered about remembering history, statues don't seem to have been much help with this one; but in any case, it isn't about then, it's about right now, and whether we as a multiracial society can move forward if we're still doffing caps to a regime which has come to stand for white supremacy and the slightly sinister reduction of the practice of slavery to something which was simply of its time. It doesn't matter that something like 95% of the population of Texas at the time of the Civil War had no direct involvement in either owning slaves or the practice of slavery. It doesn't matter that there was more to the Civil War than just the issue of slavery, or that the north was hardly a model of progressive thought; because what matters is right now, and that the Confederacy has become a symbol for shitheads across the board.

'Even with all that you said there,' our man continues, 'whatever that flag meant back then, it ain't ever coming back. It ain't ever going to be good again; and we need to start thinking about moving on.'

He's right too.

We talk some more, at least enough to elicit a few smiles once they realise I'm not about to pull on a white hood. The shirt was probably a mistake.

'You from Australia?' asks the guy who reminds me of Idris Elba.

'That's what everyone says,' I sigh, and tell him I'm from London because he probably doesn't want my entire life story; and of course it turns out he has family somewhere in the south-east of England.

We all shake hands and fuck off, going our separate ways. Later I go online to look up soulhop_musik, having seen it written across their t-shirts. It turns out that a couple of the guys we spoke to were rappers, and pretty good ones too, and I'm sort of relieved I didn't know this at the time, thus sparing us all the embarrassment of the fat, old white dude in the Lone Star shirt trying to be down with the kids and talking about which is his favourite UGK album*2.

It can be a shitty old world, but the guys at the park give me hope, and some faith in the idea that the current resurgence of the shithead far-right is its death rattle, a croaking protest at the certainty of the knowledge that it no longer has a role in the world; but I suppose deep down I already knew this on some level. For one thing, the overwhelming response on Next Door was in support of the guy on the receiving end of the hate mail, and not just support but justified and righteous outrage that such a thing could have happened in our neighbourhood. Biffo the Bear was suddenly revealed as a cranky minority voice, just some lonely, paranoid twat making a lot of noise because there's nothing much else going on in his own life, and I suspect that's probably the reason why he chose to say nothing for the first time ever; because he saw himself as he really was, and he understood that maybe the shitheads aren't going to inherit the earth after all.

*1: No idea. Possibly some belief system derived from Buddhism.

*2: Probably either Too Hard to Swallow or Ridin' Dirty. It's hard to say.

2016 from What I Can Remember

2016 has generally been characterised as the year which can fucking fuck the fuck off, at least on facebook. Up until a couple of days ago I remained sympathetic but uncommitted to this verdict because people are dying all the time, it's just that this year they were mostly people we'd all heard of. Then on Saturday the 17th of December I discovered that my friend Robert Dellar had died, which more or less settled it for me. He was fifty-two and had just had his birthday. A few days later, Sophia Pearsun wrote:

I have been speaking with the coroner and our family GP yesterday and today and it has been decided that there needs to be a post-mortem done to determine cause of Robert's death. Robert was anaemic, but other than that all other test results were within healthy ranges.

Robert had been feeling unwell with low energy since about May this year. This got worse around two months ago when Robert also started to be in pain when he lay down. This was sometimes helped by sitting up but occasionally Robert needed to stand to make the pain go away. Robert got very few hours sleep and not more than two to three hours at a time, usually far less. The exception to this was Thursday when he slept all night.

Last Wednesday, Robert had another blood test and it showed that his haemoglobin levels had started to fall again. Robert was told to go to hospital to get a transfusion. On Friday, his fifty-second birthday, we went to the hospital with a letter from our GP. Robert's blood was tested again. Blood oxygen levels were normal. Haemoglobin levels had also risen since Wednesday which resulted in Robert not being eligible for a blood transfusion. Robert was pleased that he didn't need to stay in hospital. We went home and had tea and birthday cake. We spent a pleasant evening in reading, listening to music and watching telly.

When I got up on Saturday morning, Robert was awake and asked me to get him a cup of tea. I made him some, said goodbye and went out at around 10.15. When I got back at approximately 13.45, I opened the front door to find Robert dead on the hallway floor.

It turned out to have been a pulmonary embolism, apparently meaning it would have been quick and without pain. Robert and I were never close as such, but I'd known him a long time and we had collaborated on a cartoon strip called Raffy the Psychiatric Labrador. He was one of the gang therefore yes, 2016 can most certainly fucking fuck the fuck off so far as I'm concerned.

The death of Lemmy of both Motörhead and Hawkwind almost certainly came at the tail end of 2015 but somehow felt like part of the reaper's open season on top pop personalities which later claimed both David Bowie and Prince; but I'm writing from memory here. I've kept a diary going for the duration of 2016, but I can't be bothered to spend six hours going through it all, day by day, so I'm going to work on the assumption that I will have remembered the things which were worth remembering.

David Bowie's death somewhat knocked me sideways. I gave up on him back in 1980 when he decided he'd really just wanted to be Marty Robbins all along, but the internet coaxed me into buying Blackstar out of curiosity, and for the sheer thrill of buying a brand new vinyl album in a record shop. Amazingly it turned out to be a genuinely great vinyl album, which made me feel somewhat guilty at having ignored the man for most of the previous three decades; and then suddenly he was dead, and as stated it knocked me sideways, and specifically it knocked me sideways into the local head shop because it's the only place where I can buy tobacco which isn't completely disgusting. I only smoke when unusually stressed, an indulgence I allow myself mainly because I now seem to be able to give up once I've reached the end of the packet, and I suffer no further cravings. There was almost certainly more to my being stressed than the death of David Bowie, but whatever else was going on I can't remember, so it was probably something to do with Junior's continued aversion to flushing the toilet.

I gave up smoking yet again and then Prince died, which was sad but which concerned me less, and at least didn't drive me back to the snouts. The radio filled with glowing tributes omitting the fact of his work having been mostly unlistenable since Sign o' the Times. My wife and I watched Purple Rain in tribute but it wasn't very good.

My next ciggies as therapy session was inspired by the election of the Annoying Orange. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised what with the way the world has been going. They want to make America great again. Personally I'd rather make America Mexico again, but apparently that's just me.

The United Kingdom had just about voted to leave the European Union way back in March or April or whenever it was, signalling a general return of civilisation to the political right. I had a few predictable arguments on facebook, and one unpredictable one with Harley Richardson who kept on repeating that the English people have spoken, which was also what my dad said and sounded nothing like the headline of a crowd pleasing newspaper which tells you what you want to hear. Apparently the notion that people had voted as they did due to an increasing hatred of those Islams coming over here and claiming our benefits was a tissue of lies forged by the leftie media owned by that notorious Marxist Rupert Murdoch and his Stalin-loving paymasters back in the Kremlin. Harley explained this to me very carefully, or he explained something to me very carefully, but not having attended a grammar school I was unfortunately too stupid to understand. Harley also weighed in on the climate debate, opining something along the lines of how we just don't know because there's no evidence, but sadly I was once again simply too stupid to understand.

Oh well.

Then it happened again in America. Just an hour ago I heard some bloke on the radio explaining how our President-elect had once eliminated contestants on his game show, The Apprentice, on a weekly basis; and when eliminating those contestants, he'd always consulted his two assistants to see what they thought about who he was about to stuff down the business end of his giant allegorical cannon; and a couple of times he'd consulted his own children, that week serving in an advisory capacity on the aforementioned game show, presumably taking a break from the entirely legal destruction of wildlife.

So that was a weight off my mind.

I suppose France will be next to fall to the forces of common sense, and we'll find that the French people have spoken, and soon the whole world will be great again, just like it was in the nineteen-fucking-thirties.

I read sixty-six books this year, although a few of them were comic books. I'm not sure which I liked best. The weirdest one would almost certainly have been something by Robert Moore Williams, who was churning them out up until the mid-seventies but whom I'd never even heard of until this year. The worst would have to be a toss-up between the Disney's Alice Through the Looking Glass novelisation and Simon Messingham's The Indestructible Man. In other media, I also discovered the wonderful music of Young Fathers and Ricardo Villalobos - although to be fair the Ricardo Villalobos album turns out to be over ten years old - and there was a new Pixies album, which was jolly nice. We saw both Lewis Black and Henry Rollins performing live, but not together obviously. I didn't watch much telly, but The Path was pretty great, and my wife and I discovered Jersey Shore. I think I may have watched an episode of Doctor Who with Peter Bacardi but I'm not sure which one it was. It was better than I expected, although on the other hand, whenever I hear something by Coldplay it usually turns out to be better than I expected.

I painted book covers for an Esperanto translation of Clifford Simak's Way Station, a couple of Faction Paradox novels, and something by Simon Bucher-Jones - although that may have been at the end of last year. I drew a couple of episodes of Raffy the Psychiatric Labrador for Robert Dellar's Southwark Mental Health News, and I wrote a fucking ton, some of which may have emerged in published form here and there, although apparently I'm not very good at keeping track of that sort of thing.

This was also the year in which I first entered a synagogue, and Bess and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary, and I renewed contact with Rob Colson and Jeremy Diston - both old friends to whom I had not spoken in a while. I was on the local television news talking about sewerage, and the doctor said I was too fat so I lost some weight. I tried eating boring food but it didn't make the slightest bit of difference, so I added five miles to my daily bike ride and that seemed to do the trick. Bess's car blew up so she bought a new one, and we acquired a new kitten. He's called Jello and he is the same colour as our incoming president - but obviously nicer, which brings us up to eight in total, not counting the strays I feed.

We bought our house.

Dee Dee and her family over the road moved out when her landlord sold the place, which was a shame, but I still see Angela on the tills at HEB and they seem to have settled in fine at their new place.

Also, I found out that the farm on which I lived in rural Warwickshire for the first eleven years of my life is the farm on which Teletubbies was filmed. The Teletubbies set was in the corner of a field in which I use to roam as a kid.

There was probably some other stuff which happened in 2016, but I'm sure that's enough to be going on with.

Children of Abraham I

Byron's invite stated quite clearly that he was expecting guests to make a bit of effort with their costumes this year, and he'd said more or less the same directly to Bess. Last year's Halloween party had been poorly attended due to torrential subtropical rain. I recall about eight of us showing up and I was wearing a sardonic t-shirt purchased from the local supermarket bearing the slogan this is my costume. I like to think that I was playfully questioning the medium of the Halloween party, obliging it to examine itself in a post-structuralist context, but I guess Byron didn't see it that way.

'Fuck it,' I said to myself whilst cycling to McAllister Park on the Wednesday morning. 'Why not?'

I don't really do fancy dress, or parties for that matter; and when I've made an exception I've historically regretted it, or at least spent most of the time wishing I were somewhere else. I once turned up to a costume party thrown by my friend Carl in work clothes. I was a postman at the time so I just wore the uniform, telling anyone who asked that I'd come as Sid James as seen in Carry On Postman, embellishing the conceit with an impersonation of Sid's distinctive laugh; and in case anyone feels inclined to check, no, regrettably there was never any such film as Carry On Postman.

On the other hand - so ran my train of thought on the aforementioned Wednesday morning - being fifty, I'd long since forgotten what the problem had been, so fuck it.

Cycling back from McAllister Park, I stopped to have a look around the local Goodwill, a charity shop large enough to house several fighter jets, should Randolph Air Force Base be having a spring clean. I figured I'd see something ridiculous which I could buy and wear, or which might at least provide inspiration. I saw a few decent looking suit jackets and a large cuddly tiger with such a winning smile that I found it really difficult to leave the store without buying him, but otherwise nothing seemed to suggest itself.

On the other side of the parking lot from HEB - the local supermarket to which I was ultimately headed - I noticed that an ordinarily vacant retail premises had once again been turned into a Halloween store. Once again because this is a yearly occurrence, the retail equivalent of tumbleweed or those fish suddenly born to puddles formed in the desert after rainfall, living just long enough to leave fertilised eggs drying in the mud, ready for next year's wet season. The Halloween store was full of costumes - Abraham Lincoln, Snooki from Jersey Shore, Spiderman; for just fifty dollars or thereabouts I might be instantly transformed into any of these through the magic of flimsy one-shot items of clothing and related accessories secured by elastic. I'd never been in this kind of store, so I found it weird and fascinating. I had no intention of purchasing one of these complete pre-packaged party identities. I was planning to improvise my costume, whatever it was. I just needed inspiration, some prop I could combine with whatever I already had at home.

The prop turned out to be a fake turban and a long grey false beard provided so as to effect transformation into a person of Indian or perhaps Arabic decent, a Muslim, you know - one of those people. Ignoring the obvious alarm bells, I decided I could combine these props with a kaftan and goatskin sandals brought back from Morocco and attend the party as Osama bin Laden. I made my purchase, then picked up a pack of party balloons in HEB along with the usual groceries.

Once home, I inflated one of the balloons and spent a day or two turning it into a bomb by means of papier mâché, acrylic paint, and a length of twine - specifically the kind of bomb wielded by villains in silent cinema or the Spy vs. Spy cartoons in Mad magazine, an ominous black sphere with a fuse and the word bomb painted across it in block capitals.

Next day I picked up an assault rifle from Walmart, a child's toy costing ten dollars. It was bright green and came as part of Kid Connection's Military Action Play Set recommended for ages five and upwards. I think it was supposed to light up and make a noise but the batteries were dead. I stood in the store reading the box.

Kid Connection toys are kid-approved and built for fun. Easy to understand with no complicated instructions, these durable toys keep you and your children happy. Day after day, smile after smile.

It's a fucking gun, I thought, which had obviously also occurred to the good people at Kid Connection:

Warning: This product may be mistaken for an actual firearm by law enforcement officers and others. Altering any state or federal required marking or coloration in order to make products appear more realistic and/or brandishing or displaying the product in public is dangerous and may be a crime.

To be honest, this bright green plastic toy was about as unrealistic a firearm as could be imagined without actually being the inflatable M16 I'd seen in the Halloween store marketed as Tony Montana's weapon of choice from Scarface; and in a country where Andre Burgess was shot by a federal agent whilst brandishing a gun which turned out to be the silver wrapper of a Three Musketeers candy bar, is it really going to make any difference?

The assault rifle came with a tiny plastic hand grenade and a similarly bright green handgun. It lacked any sort of carrying strap so I improvised one from velcro and the detachable strap of a holdall. Next day I noticed a far superior kiddie assault rifle in less lurid colours on sale in HEB for the same price. Aware of how seriously I was beginning to take this project, I didn't buy it.

I told my wife I was going to the party as Osama bin Laden, showing her the novelty turban and beard. She seemed initially shocked, then amused. 'Wouldn't you say that's a bit er...'

'I'm not going to black up, if that's where you think I'm headed.'

'Well, if you're sure.'

I'd considered all of this, wondering what distinguished me from minor royals dressed as Nazi stormtroopers on the cover of the Daily Mail. The point was shock and chuckles, I told myself just as Prince Gingerbollocks had doubtless told himself; but I've known many turbaned gentlemen, some of them Muslim, and I quite like Islam on the whole, in an admittedly wishy-washy liberal sense. I suppose I might potentially piss off the more redneck elements of the party, this being Texas and all - disgruntled fatties I imagined stumbling angrily towards me mumbling something about the twin towers and how I damn well better respect something or other. I suppose I liked this idea. Not to intellectualise a Halloween costume, but the problem with the political climate in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Centre as I see it is that Osama bin Laden is remembered as a cackling mediaeval demon, a silent cinema caricature clutching a comedy bomb and twirling his moustache. He hated us and that's all we need to know. God forbid that we should ever try to understand the situation, or what drives those we term terrorists to do what they do, or that we should recognise a political landscape of any complexity greater than what you'll find in a Batman comic.

So that's what I told myself.

'I wasn't going to bother,' Bess said, 'but now I feel I have to make the effort.'

Saturday arrives and we attend the party as Osama bin Laden with his bomb and his bright green assault rifle, and Mrs. bin Laden by virtue of a burqa my wife has improvised from various scarves. I have my bright green handgun in a shoulder bag along with four bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale.

Junior wears his gas mask, a hooded cloak, and a novelty AC/DC t-shirt featuring not images of the Australian heavy rock band but Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. He tells us that he is Timeshare Man, which is something derived from his own private mythology. About a year ago he took to asking people if they would like to buy a timeshare, because he finds it hilarious for reasons which probably make sense when you're twelve.

'Would you like to know where the timeshare came from?' he asked us one day in tones promising a rare glimpse into the mind of a comedy genius.

'Yes,' we said. 'Please tell us.'

He described his hiding behind some door at school, then asking the next person to open the door whether or not they would like to buy a timeshare. I started to explain that this was simply an account of the first instance of his cracking the supposed joke and as such provided little insight into either its origination or why he considered it funny, but I gave up, recognising my enquiry as pointless. Junior does what he does unburdened by either disingenuous humility or an excess of self-awareness, and it's just how he is. It's not uncommon for his jokes to be supplemented with spoken appendices regarding how funny they were and how well he told them.

I really liked it when I said that.
 
Byron has as usual gone to obsessional lengths to decorate his house with the trappings of Halloween, and no rubbish either. The front room is a clutter of animated skulls, tiny haunted houses dispensing ghoulish noises, portrait paintings which become skeletal at a specific angle. Junior's contribution is the question would you like to buy a timeshare? painted on the door to the bathroom, and now here he is to complete the picture in his gas mask and his cloak and his hood, making hilarious sense mainly to himself. I'd suggest he's come as the general concept of trying too hard, but I don't wish to seem uncharitable given how much pleasure this bewildering timeshare schtick obviously brings him.

It turns out that Roger has come as a pimp - purple suit with zebra pattern trimmings and a huge floppy hat. There's something which makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable about the only black man at the party having dressed as an ethnic stereotype, but maybe that's what he was going for. He mentions something about Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch but it's okay. I get it, and I appreciate that it somehow takes the heat off me. No-one is going to expect either of us to explain ourselves, because it's a Halloween party not a thread on a self-important internet bulletin board.

It's only just gone six, still light, and not many people here, so we make our way out onto the decking and talk to Byron's parents and his brother. Byron's parents, for the sake of reference, may represent the closest I've come to meeting real life Ewings - as seen on the television show Dallas during the days of Ron and Nancy. Their fortune is founded on oil somewhere back in the depths of time, but there the resemblance more or less ends. They're sharp, quick-witted but personable, and despite that they might legitimately regard me as some sort of cuckoo rather than a mere stepfather, they seem to think I'm great. Jay, the brother, has been living in Austin whilst studying for what I understand to be a position in the Episcopalian Church. I ask him how it's been going. His answer seems to take the form of a protest, although I'm not sure against what because I don't quite follow what he's telling me beyond that no, he's not yet doing whatever vicars do full-time.

Bruce and Lori turn up as respectively a demon and an angel, personifying a moral balance which Lori probably jeopardises whilst allowing me to cadge a ciggie. Time has passed and it's dark and we're all gathered under the trellises Byron has built in the rear part of the garden. He's growing grape vines up the supports. He's going to make wine, and in keeping with the ambience I'm on my second bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. It's going to my head because I don't ordinarily drink so much, or even at all. I don't smoke either, but I ask Lori if she can spare one because the moment seems right. I spend a second wondering what the acceptable American for gi's a fag might be, knowing it almost certainly won't be that. I'm unable to recall any scene of Humphrey Bogart helpfully scrounging snouts, so I try could you spare a cigarette, which is a bit like buddy, can you spare a dime?

It works, and thankfully I don't enjoy smoking it anything like as much as I thought I would, which at least means that this isn't me relapsing.

Bruce has turned himself into a demon simply by affixing two small horns to his forehead with adhesive. The horns really suit him, which is weird, although it's probably fitting that he's now telling us about some home brewed alcoholic concoction known by the delightful name of Thunderfuck.

'What's Everclear?' I ask, recognising the brand name from somewhere. 'Is that pure alcohol?'

Turner, who seems to know about these things, nods. My guess came from the context in that we seem to be talking about moonshine, or something like it, relating anecdotal instances of its distillation by agency of Everclear. I assume it's like the bottle of pure alcohol I nicked from the college chemistry department so I could clean the workings of my tape recorder, but it's alcohol brewed from corn and sold for human consumption in all but the nine states which have banned it.

Bruce made a batch of something called Thunderfuck at some point of his college years, and everyone else sat at the table beneath the trellis has a similar story.

I make it through a third Newcastle Brown and realise I'm drunk, or at least more light headed than I've been in years. It's quite a nice feeling, but it also means I'm done for the evening. Thankfully my wife is similarly partied out so we gather up Timeshare Man and head home. The hour, which we anticipate as being around ten or eleven in the evening, is half past eight. I've spent just two-and-a-half hours as Osama bin Laden, and it was a lot of fun.