Another One of Those Days

It's August in Texas and therefore fucking baking, but so far I've just about managed to avoid my annual psychological meltdown arisen from ordinary daily pressures amplified in the heat. I've found that the twenty daily miles I cycle from Monday to Friday helps to keep everything nicely balanced - mentally speaking - and this year I've managed to get out each day before the heat gets too much, although it hasn't been easy. I cycle along a local greenway called the Tobin Trail which runs a circuit around most of the city but for a few places where different stretches are yet to fully connect. I cycle the Tobin Trail because Texas roads are frequented by shitheads in trucks the size of fucking houses who believe that running a cyclist off the side of the road represents a blow struck against the forces of both communism and anyone who ever laughed at your tiny penis.

Sometimes it can be difficult to cycle along the Tobin Trail due to repair work. For example, the end of Holbrook Road has been impassable for at least this last year, possibly two or three. This is due to renovations being made to the city's drainage system. I watched as a massive hole was dug in the road opposite the Black Swan Inn, a hole of volume sufficient to conceal a truck. Reinforced metal sidings were lowered into the hole, then pipes of the kind along which rebels traditionally flee for their lives in dystopian science-fiction movies, and then they filled it all in. About a month later they dug it all up again and repeated the exercise about fifty yards along from the first hole. They're now on their third hole, and it's beginning to look one hell of a lot as though they just can't decide where to bury the fucker.

I lived in London for twenty years and I saw a lot of road works in that time, but I've never seen road works which suggest that someone got the map upside down, necessitating whatever they buried being dug up, then reburied a little further on. It's almost as though fucking idiots are in charge. Some mornings in London I'd walk to the shops, passing workmen just getting started on a hole in the road, and the thing would be all done with tarmac being rolled flat by the time I came back the other way, heading home.

Part of the Tobin Trail runs along Salado Creek, which is dry at this time of year. This stretch comprises nearly a mile of raised wooden walkway named Morningstar Boardwalk. A few months ago I noticed a sag at one part of Morningstar Boardwalk, presumably where the supports had given way underneath. Then last week temporary signs appeared at each end informing us all that Morningstar Boardwalk would be closed for repair from Monday to Friday. The damage really didn't look like five days work to me, but then what do I know?

So it's August in Texas and therefore fucking baking, but I'm doing okay. I'm due to fly back to England in a couple of weeks time but I'm not thinking about it. I don't like flying. I don't really like England that much. I don't like my connecting flights being cancelled, distending the misery and discomfort of long-haul travel to forty-eight hours or more, and my connecting flights tend to be cancelled two out of every three times.

Like I say, I'm not thinking about it.

I deduce that I can exit the trail before I come to Morningstar Boardwalk, head through the subdivision along Astronaut Drive, then out onto the common land following the electricity pylons at the end of Luzon Drive. My theory is that I will be able to get my mountain bike down to Salado Creek from there, then across to rejoin the Tobin Trail at the other end, bypassing Morningstar Boardwalk altogether.

Monday is a bit hairy. The land across which I end up pushing the bike on foot is dry but overgrown with reeds and the like. I go slowly so as to be able to hear rattlesnakes, having seen at least one in this general vicinity. Then I recall I've also seen a wild hog down here, thankfully from the safety of the boardwalk at a distance of several hundred yards. It was too big to make sense. I couldn't tell what I was looking at and was momentarily reminded of interviews with people who claim to have seen Bigfoot. I'm told that wild hogs are to be avoided in the same way that mountain lions are to be avoided.

Nevertheless, I make it to the other side and I'm back on the trail. I can't quite face more of the same when coming back, so I wheel the bike parallel to the boardwalk, half suspecting that the promised workmen won't yet have turned up to effect the proposed repairs and that my detour will have been for nothing. There are a couple of trucks parked as I come to the damaged section. I expect someone to tell me that the boardwalk is closed and that I'm trespassing, but they only look at me and shrug.

I follow the same route on Tuesday, albeit later in the day. I explore the creek along the cracked, dry beds of water courses, eventually finding one which, if longer, seems less hazardous with less places which might conceal a rattlesnake; but it's way too hot so I turn around and head home, making up the usual mileage by doubling back on myself at certain points.

Wednesday is better - across Salado Creek and then back again as planned, although I still have some trouble remembering which dry stream to follow and end up getting lost in the reeds.

Boris Johnson suspends Parliament, and I add it to the other stuff I'm not thinking about right now - the Amazon in flames, the probability that Donald almost certainly will get a second term, everything turning to shit.

My sleep is restless and I dream about getting back somewhere or other, and I'm racing against the Beatles in their moptop incarnation in the matching suits with weird collars. I'm puckering my mouth and giving McCartney the thumbs up, mocking him by singing nursery rhymes. You know that Bah Bah Black Sheep - that's one of your songs, that is…

People I don't know are defending Boris Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament on facebook, proclaiming that he's a guy who gets things done, and I remember how much I'm not looking forward to whichever Sun opinion column my dad will be recycling for my benefit when I return to England in a couple of weeks.

I try to feed the cats as usual. Grace won't come in because Gary terrorises her. I pick Gary up and try to take him inside but he scratches my face, drawing blood. I'm really beginning to tire of his bullshit.

I hit the trail, then Astronaut Drive, then I cross Salado Creek. I'm cycling across rocks and dried mud. The ground is uneven, so I'm in first gear. I notice the bike has slipped into third for no fucking reason as I attempt to scale a particularly annoying mound, so I flip back to first and there's an agonising crunch. Everything stops.

The entire gear array - the derailleur as it's known - has somehow chewed itself up between the chain and the rear wheel, consummating damage first implemented by Ian the arsehole back in November. I dismount, which isn't easy on this ground, and make an inspection. The thing is beyond immediate repair and will need to go into the shop. I'm fucked. I'm about six miles from home and I'm fucked.

I push the bike towards the boardwalk, planning to follow the route I took on Monday. It's still closed off for repairs. The repair team is one fucking bloke sat in his truck, which doubtless explains why the work was estimated at taking a full week. I pass the section of boardwalk currently under reconstruction, at least in a general sense. Unless I'm missing something, the work is such that it should have taken a morning to complete, but maybe it's special wood which only grows on the planet Venus and the one fucking bloke sat in his truck is waiting for the next shipment.

I have 2Pac's posthumous Better Dayz playing on my Discman, and now I turn it off because I'm irritable and it's begun to get on my tits. I've been listening to a lot of 2Pac over the last week, mainly because I've realised that I have all of his CDs and I'm only really familiar with a couple of them; and now I realise that this is because, truthfully, he was a bit of a berk. In the wake of his undoubtedly tragic demise, 2Pac has somehow been held up as the black Noam Chomsky on the grounds of having read a book or two, even if one of those books happened to be Linda Goodman's Star Signs; but if his heart was in the right place, he still had some way to go, and simply repeating wisdom and understanding over and over whilst pulling a wise face is not the same as having depth. This is the man who decided that NIGGA was an acronym for Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished, who insisted on a new, more positive meaning for the word thug, and so Better Dayz is all thug life, thug nature, thug passion, thug this, thug that, and by the time we get to the thug hot water bottle* I've really had enough of this shit

Once past the section under repair, I haul the bike up onto the boardwalk. I call my wife on the phone but she can't get away.

'Never mind,' I say. 'I just needed to vent. I don't mind walking home. It's all exercise.'

A trail steward stops as I reach Ladybird Johnson. 'You doing okay there, buddy?'

'My gears are knackered.' I point to the scrap metal wrapped around my rear axle. There's nothing he can do, and I can't be bothered to have a conversation about either bicycle repair or how I'm from a different country.

'Sorry,' the steward says.

'It's okay.' I tell him. 'It's not your fault.'

My phone pings with text messages. It will be Bess, but I can't be arsed to go through the rigmarole of stopping, finding my glasses, finding some shade then reading a text, whatever it says. I call her back once I reach Los Patios.

'My co-worker says she could pick you up,' she suggests.

'It's okay,' I say. 'It's only another couple of miles.'

I stop and take a look at the derailleur. I manage to unscrew it so that it's at least no longer wrapped around the chain. The chain now hangs loose, but I am able to cycle. Unfortunately I can't go much further than twenty feet without the chain slipping from the cogs and jamming, so I freewheel or walk the rest of the distance. I wonder if I'm sufficiently stressed to resume smoking again.

'You doing okay?' the black dude asks.

I've seen him enough to nod some vague greeting. He's about my age and is usually walking five or six dogs of various shapes and sizes. I can never tell whether they're his dogs or that's just his job.

'Yeah,' I say, and a minute later I notice that I've launched into a barely coherent summary of my life up to this point. I'm waving my arms wildly like Suzanne from Orange is the New Black and have made an embittered reference to the one fucking bloke sat in his truck.

'Well,' says my audience, 'I hope the rest of your day goes better.'

He means it, but you can tell I came across like a crazy person.

I'm less than a mile from home and I guess I feel better, having sobered up on the viscosity of my own mania.

What a fucking day.

*: This stands for Brothers Only Try To Live Excellently, y'all better recognise.

Party Animal

'We're going to a party,' Bess tells me, words which would once have struck terror into my soul. The fear came from the part of the conversation which usually followed, first my objection on the grounds of not enjoying parties, then the customary admonitions of how I need to make an effort to be more social, how I need to make more of an effort to step outside of my comfort zone every once in a while, how I need to make more of an effort to be the person she should have gone out with instead of me. Happily, I married someone who has never played these sort of games, who doesn't engage in that kind of low-level bullying, and who would never make such a suggestion without there being a good reason.

Saturday comes and we pile into the car, then a short drive across town to Laura's place. Laura is in Bess's rock group, specifically an assemblage of women who paint rocks, in case anyone had begun thinking in terms of Judas Priest or the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. They paint rocks and leave them in places to be found by strangers, persons whose day might conceivably be left a little brighter by their having found a painted rock. It's actually a rock painting party.

I find a space in the fridge for my Newcastle brown ale, six bottles. Then it turns out that I'm the only one boozing, so there's no bottle opener. Well-meaning rock artists suggest ways in which I might open a bottle with the kind of inventive enthusiasm you might expect when trying to start a fire on a desert island, then someone realises that a previously mysterious dingus they've been carrying around in their purse is actually a bottle-opener and the day is saved.

We retire to the rock painting room.

I hadn't actually planned to paint rocks but it's not like I have anything else going on, so I take a seat at one of the two tables, sat between my wife and Jennifer's mother-in-law, a lovely woman who moved here from Mexico City and unfortunately doesn't speak much English. Sat opposite are Jennifer and Sandy, Jennifer's mother. The others I haven't met before, but they're all women and there's also a second Jennifer. In total there are about twelve of us, and I'm the only man here, as Joel Grey once sang.

Sandy hands out a few rocks, and we all get to painting. I start on a cartoon octopus, specifically a cartoon octopus with a mustache, bowler hat and smoking a pipe. It will pass the time.

On the wall behind Sandy are three dogs painted on canvas - one seemingly a poodle, another of indeterminate breed, and something like a terrier but without eyes. I guess it was never finished.

I'm using Sandy's pens, a specific type dispensing acrylic paint in liquid form, but they're not really working for me. The table is strewn with communal art supplies so I switch to a brush.

'What's with the dog?' I ask.

Laura explains that she couldn't get the eyes right and left it as it was.

'You could paint a pair of sunglasses on it maybe?'

'Oh! That's an idea.' She considers the proposal. 'How about you paint sunglasses? I think you might be better than me.'

I look at the painting and realise I like it as it is. 'I don't think I could, now that I come to think of it. It would seem wrong.'

'I don't mind.'

'No - I like it as it is. It has some sort of quality er… I just can't stop looking at the thing.'

There is something compelling about the eyeless dog, as though it has special powers and can see into the future.

I finish my octopus and start on Frankenstein's monster, inspired by my recently having been commissioned to produce a sequence of paintings depicting different stages in the career of Boris Karloff. We're mostly yacking away as we paint, because, as I say, I sort of know Sandy and Jennifer, and Jennifer once lived in London so we have that in common.

At no point in my life prior to 2009 did I foresee myself as the only male sat in a room of American women, and I find the realisation pleasing. At the same time I'm usually a little irritated by men who state a preference for the company of women, because it always feels as though they're engaged in some deeply wearying exercise in one-upmanship; but on the other hand it's nice to know that no-one will attempt to engage me in conversation about real ale, motoring, golf, football, sporting activities, science-fiction television shows, or any of the other tedious shit with which so many men fill their bewildering lives.

On the other hand, the women at the next table are all of a certain age with very short hair, and I suddenly have the sensation of finding myself in an episode of Orange is the New Black, the drama set in a women's prison; then I recall that a chapter title in J-Zone's autobiographical Root for the Villain asks Are Men the New Women?

It's time for more beer.

It's Not Always Good to Talk

I'm very glad that you asked me that question...

I'm being interviewed for a podcast called Raconteur Roundtable. The interview lasts about an hour and is conducted over a Skype connection. Most of it is about my science-fiction novel, Against Nature, which was published by Obverse Books back in 2013. The interview is fun but exhausting, and I make the mistake of attempting to respond to certain questions with answers beyond the range of my ability to articulate them. I write a lot but I'm not very sociable and I don't engage in profoundly intellectual conversation on a daily or even yearly basis, which leaves me ill-equipped to discuss certain aspects of my own work. If I were able to tell you that, I should have said, I wouldn't have needed to write it in the first place.

Skype is a programme which facilitates communication between computers in different parts of the world. It makes use of a webcam so that you can see who you're talking to, and the webcam usually has a microphone built into it. My interview is conducted in audio only, but the webcam is nevertheless plugged in so that I can use the microphone, and thus am I able to watch a video image of myself as I speak. I'm sat in front of the Mexican national flag which I have hung over the back of some shelving. I'm going cross-eyed and duck-faced as I scrabble around in my vocabulary and attempt to form sentences. My hand wheels in the air at the side of my tilted head in illustration of something or other and I realise I've somehow turned into Suzanne from Orange is the New Black, and that I sound demented.

The thing is - well it's sort of, you know—what I'm getting at is that I was always looking for something. I mean I used to be into flying saucers and all that sort of rubbish, but I—well, it was like this. I discovered... I suddenly... I was looking for like a total... You know, I was always interested in ancient Egypt. I don't have the words here - what I mean to say...

As we conclude the interview, I tell them that I'm aware of having been unable to form sentences, or indeed to say anything useful, but they insist that I did fine and that they'll be able to edit it down to just the good stuff. I leave it at that.

I'm woken at three in the morning by my telephone beeping so as to alert me to the fact of the battery having run low and that it requires recharging. I've forgotten to switch the phone off because I barely even use the thing. Most of the time I keep it charged just in case my wife has an emergency and needs to reach me.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I swear and scrabble around in the darkness, struggling to unwrap the phone from my pants in the laundry basket at the side of the bed.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I turn the fucking thing off, then lie wide awake for the next few hours. I have David Bowie's Never Get Old stuck in my head and my thoughts are cycling, over and over - what I should have said, how I shouldn't have agreed to the interview in the first place, and how I wish there were a specific individual responsible for the fact of my stupid fucking phone having an alarm which beeps when the battery needs recharging so that I could track him down and smash his kneecaps and elbows with a ball-peen hammer.

I have to get up at seven, so naturally I lie awake, hot and restless and pissed off until approximately ten to seven.

I sleep briefly.

I get up at seven to feed a million cats, then come straight back to bed as my wife gets up and goes to work. I sleep until about ten and have a dream in which I am menaced by Adrian Meredith, an older boy who didn't seem to like me very much when I was at junior school. He's pushing me around. He needs me to do certain things. He wants me to go into a pawn shop and buy back his girlfriend's gold necklace, the one he pawned to them in the first place.

I get up and have a slow, crap day - headachey with a sore throat, so the oak pollen is probably high and it's something like 98° Fahrenheit outside.

In the evening my wife and I eat at Hung Fong on Broadway because the kid is with his dad tonight, and I've found myself unable to venture out onto the surface of Venus so as to visit the supermarket from which I would ordinarily purchase the ingredients for whatever I would have cooked as our evening meal. After Hung Fong we visit Northstar Mall because my wife needs the battery of her iPhone replaced. It charges, but only just, and she's had it about five years. She tried the AT&T store, but that line of enquiry went about as well as we expected it to, so now we're at the Apple Store in the mall. It's like a dining hall designed by IKEA, pine benches and the kind of stools you would expect to find in a pretentious kitchen. The place is packed, but it's hard to tell whether anything is actually happening. Everyone is stood or sat around, pissing about on MacBooks, chatting to staff without any obvious sense of urgency. The staff can be identified by their all being in their early twenties and skinny with beards, excepting the single female. Some of them also have ear gauges, and I expect there's a hat rack laden with fedoras somewhere at the rear of the store, ready for when they all fuck off home at the end of the working day - if we're going to expand the definition of work to such limits as to incorporate this bunch.

We can't tell what we're supposed to do, who we're supposed to see. Each one of the staff is chatting to someone, busy in his own way. There's no queue nor till nor any obvious point of focus to the store, because that would be like sooo predictable. There's a bench at the far end of the store identified as the genius bar by text printed on the wall alongside a symbol resembling an atom with neutrons and protons in orbit, possibly so as to make a slightly mystifying association with Albert Einstein. I am familiar with the Apple corporation's repurposing of the term genius. I have iTunes on my computer, and the genius feature is something which plays my tracks at random. This seems a very loose application of the term to me, something relating to the fetishisation of the mix tape, now that we've rendered cassettes obsolete and decided that they were called mix tapes, which they never were. It's because simply choosing something is now considered a wildly creative act, so when you're putting together your mix tape and you have Madonna's Material Girl followed by something from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, that makes you a genius, yeah?

Even so, I can't tell what they're doing at the genius bar, and it isn't even the sort of bar at which you could buy the beer necessary for some of this arrangement to make sense.

'Maybe we just send out a vibe,' I suggest, 'or maybe if we take our clothes off...'

A young man - I'd guess in his early twenties - with a beard takes my wife's telephone number. It's a little before eight in the evening.

'I'll send you a text when someone is free,' he tells her. 'It shouldn't be much more than three quarters of an hour.'

We leave the store and take the escalator to the upper level, the food court I suppose you would call it. We buy ice cream from Marble Slab - because there's always room for ice cream - and sit and wait for the text summons to come to the iPhone which doesn't always work because of a problem with the battery.

We are summoned as we head back to the store just in case they've sent the message and we failed to receive it on the iPhone which doesn't always work because of a problem with the battery. The time is 8.45PM, and we waste another five minutes back in the store trying to work out who has summoned us. Eventually a young man with a beard identifies himself and shows us to a couple of stools. 'Someone will be with you shortly,' he tells us.

We wait.

I reintroduce the idea of taking our clothes off, but Bess isn't so keen. I move the stool away from the bench so that I can lay on it on my stomach. I stretch my legs out back and spread my arms. 'I'm a plane!' I tell Bess.

This doesn't work either so I try to look like I'm buying something. I take a box from the shelf and pull faces so as to suggest that I'm weighing up the pros and cons of buying a household lighting system which can be controlled from your iPhone. I guess my pantomime isn't very convincing because no-one comes to manage the potential sale. Try as I might, I am unable to impersonate interest in something which no-one sane could ever possibly need in their home.

The store begins to empty. An assistant with an unusually prodigious beard leaves.

'That one must be their king,' I point out, having decided they're like an ant colony. I say it loud in the hope of annoying somebody.

Twenty minutes have passed and a young man finally comes to see what's up with my wife's iPhone. Weirdly, he has no beard and he's kind of chunky.

'It's the battery,' we say.

He takes the iPhone into the back room in order to perform a full diagnostic. 'It's the battery,' he tells us fifteen minutes later.

I think of the phone guy in Earlsdon High Street back in Coventry, England; forever sat there yacking away to his ancient sidekick, always with a fag on the go. It's my phone, you just about manage as he snatches it from your hand, presses a few buttons, pulls a face, rips the back off, replaces something, then chucks it back.

'Call it a tenner, mate.'

We're a long way from Earlsdon High Street, and still some way from a fully operational iPhone. It's booked in, but it will take an hour and a half and my wife will be able to collect it tomorrow around noon.

'An hour and a half?' Bess is sceptical. 'There's a guy on YouTube who does it in twenty minutes.'

'Well there are other jobs we have, cracked screens to be replaced and so on.'

Neither of us can be bothered to point out that these alleged cracked screens are nothing to do with us. We just want to go home.

On the way to the parking lot we pass a Microsoft concession out in the mall. I wonder out loud if they have fights with the Apple colony, like the Bash Street Kids and their rivals in the pages of the Beano.

'Maybe that's where the King went. Maybe someone challenged him to a duel?'

We may never know the answer.

Watched with Mother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mother also loathes Cully, by the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...and Ten Things Which America Does Just Fine

Art. Before anyone starts, I'm not referring to Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko - both of whom are probably more interesting in terms of art history than what they actually painted; and I'm definitely not talking about Andy bloody Warhol. After many years of study I've concluded that fine art should be divided into two main categories, specifically landscape art, and everything which isn't landscape art. Even a century later, the first and foremost of these two categories is still dominated by the work of Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and others of the Hudson River School - if you ask me, which admittedly you didn't, which is why I'm telling you. José María Velasco should probably also be included here on the grounds of his having been the greatest landscape artist of all time. He was Mexican of course, but it's the same continental land mass. Landscape doesn't really get any better than the three aforementioned so far as I'm concerned. Some of that European stuff was okay, but hanging one next to a Bierstadt is like having the Venga Boys open for Led Zeppelin, quite frankly.

I've failed to take any non-landscape based art into account in this argument because it's mostly shite and doesn't matter.

Dangerous Arseholes. Sadly this isn't really a boast, but it cannot be denied that we lead the world in the field of dangerous arseholes, and despite stiff competition from the United Kingdom, Russia and the Islamic State, we've recently leapt ahead quite some way. Many of the world's leading trigger-happy fundamentalist shitheads now regard us with awe and envy, having found themselves suddenly seeming about as dangerous as characters from Harry Potter. I'm not sure why this should be, particularly as we have a constitution which is supposed to prevent the sort of situation in which we now find ourselves. Part of the problem may result from people who've never been under any pressure to grow up or to think adult thoughts. We seem to have a few of those, and once they get into any kind of position of authority, it's always trouble. Whilst I'm sure the Republican party was founded on at least some honourable principles - providing we don't look too hard at how capitalism actually works, and is actually shown to work by the last two centuries of history - it seems very difficult to find a Republican who appears significantly informed by those principles, whatever they are or were. Mostly Republicans just seem to be guys who like money and authority, because authority is the thing which means they get to keep their money. Online Republicans tend to spend a lot of time going on about freedom, freedom from government interference, freedom from taxation, being oneself, being an individual, being a rugged cowboy out on the lonesome trail answering to no man, no how, no siree; and yet in person, send a man in uniform into the room and they can't bend over backwards fast enough to kiss his ass, call him a real American hero, and loudly address him as Sir, Yes Sir! Also, for lovers of freedom, they sure have a lot to say about what the rest of us get up to in the privacy of our own homes. It wouldn't be so bad if there was some kind of organised opposition to this tendency, but instead there's the Democrat party which stands for the same thing whilst feeling a bit guilty about it. Almost all of our dangerous arseholes conform to some quality detailed here, with minor variations being in ratios of gun ownership and fear of anything different to oneself.
 

Healthy Geographical Distance from the Following: Timothy Griffiths, Shaun Robert, Theresa May, David Yeomans, Nigel Farage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeremy Clarkson, James Delingpole, Razorlight, Boris Johnson, James Whitaker, Hugh Grant, Harry Potter, that pair of fucking twats who opened up a café specialising in cornflakes in Hackney or wherever it was, Hamilton Bohannon*, Tony Wakeford, Chris Evans, Steven Moffat, David Gibson, Bob of Bulkington near Coventry, anyone who ever won or was nominated for the Turner Prize, Radiohead, Paul Mercer, Miriam Rahim, Tunstall Asaf, Juliet Prouse, Dennis Landers, Franklin from The Sun, Jimmy Savile, Billie Piper, Richard Callaghan, Supergrass, The One Show, Margaret Thatcher, General Pinochet, Marcus Brigstocke, Dennis Cattell, Marian Galton, Ludwig the mechanical cartoon egg thing from the seventies, Jamie Oliver, James Nesbitt, Stephen Frost, Alexis Petridis, Alexander McCall Smith, Electric Light Orchestra, Hamilton Bohannon*, Hamilton Bohannon*, Hamilton Bohannon*, Matt Smith, Harley Richardson, The Archers, anyone who ever observed that the shipping forecast sounds a bit like poetry...

History. One of my favourite examples of online sneering is the Britsplanation of American history which runs that we don't have any because the country is only two-hundred years old, whilst simultaneously lambasting our supposed assumption of there having been nothing much to speak of before white people turned up. I've always found American history fascinating, particularly all the stuff predating Christopher Colombus colonising a completely different and much smaller landmass whilst simultaneously wiping out the sum total of its indigenous population; and while it would be an exaggeration to suggest that this interest is why I ended up in Texas, it is at least why my gaze was already trained upon this part of the globe. I never found English or European history particularly exciting, and most of it seems to have been heavy metal wrestling mascots fighting over different kinds of mud in the pissing rain, parallel to which Mexico was engaged in building an elegant, philosophically sophisticated, and criminally misunderstood civilisation; and the people here in the northern continental blob were no less worthy of note. The Tuzigoot ruins in Arizona, for example, are at least as impressive as anything built by the Normans, and they were at the northern end of a trade route stretching all the way down into South America without anyone having bothered to invent the wheel, but you know - wurgh wurgh wurgh two-hundred years old wurgh wurgh wurgh Egbert of Wessex Magna Carta boring churches blah blah blah...

Hope. My life in England was often about getting by, making do, holding out and hoping the check would come before the bailiffs as everything became steadily worse, wetter, harder, and an ever more steely shade of battleship grey. English society had become, in my experience, a treadmill designed to keep me alive and generating just enough money to pay for the things which it told me had to be paid. Under circumstances other than those in which I happily find myself, America would probably be the same, but it feels like a country which is at least trying. We have our problems, not least being dangerous arseholes, but it at least feels like this place has the potential for improvement, like it wants the best for its people on some level, even when the actions fail to match the words. It is a land in which we still have possibilities beyond the crushing promise of the future being the present but with more security checkpoints. I thought this was just me until a couple of similarly transplanted online individuals expressed more or less the same sentiment on facebook, and one of them was Wreckless Eric so fuck you.

Kiss. One thing about America is that we do big and stupid really well, as I'm sure even our harshest critics would agree. Of course, it's important to remember that sometimes big and stupid is good - great even, and for evidence of this one need listen no further than the recorded oeuvre of Kiss. Whatever argument you may wish to draw against the excellence of Kiss vanishes as unto dew upon a summer's morn once you actually listen to Kiss. No-one really understands how this works. It just does.

Mexican Food. You really need to be here to appreciate Mexican food, either in Mexico itself or a little way from the border. That stuff you eat in London in some overpriced glass box named Zapata and served by an eighteen-year old wearing luminous orange tights and with the beard of W.G. Grace - it isn't Mexican food. It's probably just salad with a shake of Tabasco sauce, which is something else, and will remain something else regardless of how many traditional Aztec rocker-stamp animals are printed down the margin on the menu. Mexican food isn't about slopping four gallons of sour cream and guacamole over a bag of Doritos. I've seen counter arguments amounting to huh - can't see what's so difficult about chopping up a few tomatoes, but you really have to eat the genuine article to appreciate the difference. I don't even know what informs this difference given that the ingredients are all fairly straightforward, and yet what you eat over here in the Mexican equivalent of a greasy spoon - formica tables, plastic forks, radio tuned to some horrible Tejano station - makes most allegedly Mexican food I've eaten in England seem fussy, ridiculous, overpriced, and most likely prepared by someone who never actually ate Mexican food. You'll just have to trust me on this one. I don't understand it either.

Nature. I grew up on a farm in Warwickshire, in the very bosom of nature, you might say, and I grew up as part of a generation which spent most of its time outside in wellies. I saw rabbits and foxes, but not very often. I don't recall seeing frogs until I moved to London in my late twenties. I never saw a snake, and the only badgers I have ever encountered have been the lifeless two-dimensional kind found at the side of major roads. I've had this sort of conversation with overly defensive English people on a number of occasions. I'll mention the millions of bats I watched swarming from beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin at sunset, and Timothy will be reminded of the bat he once saw at a Happy Eater just outside Daventry and will thus dominate the rest of the conversation with discourse on the same. 'Of course, they're mostly pipistrelle bats around our way,' he'll inform me at pornographic length, apparently having forgotten that I lived in England up until five years ago. 'Pippies, we call them.'

Anyway, I now encounter snakes, turtles, lizards, deer, possums, vultures, wild turkeys, roadrunners, coyotes, stick insects, and raccoons, and half of those on a near daily basis. Some of the snakes are of a kind which could kill me should I be bitten and unable to reach a hospital. I've encountered at least one turtle which could have bitten off my fingers had I got too close; so these days I even know which turtles are safe to pick up and how to do so without having them piss all over me - which they tend to do. I have more nature than I know what to do with. I have nature coming out of my ass, if you'll pardon the expression.

Proximity to Mexico. We're right next to Mexico, and England really isn't. If you don't believe me you can look it up on a map. Here in Texas we're so right next to Mexico that we can drive for about an hour and then look directly at it from across the other side of the river. Of course, this might change if our new President gets to build his wall, despite that it won't make much difference to immigration - if we're going to keep on pretending that that's really a problem for the sake of argument. Personally I'm hoping he'll get confused and build the wall along the top of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, thus making our part of America Mexico again. He can keep California though. I'm not too bothered about that one.

Sunshine. When I say America, I suppose I actually mean Texas - or Mexico Norteño as I like to think of it; and Texas has a lot of sunshine. That half a week of the English August during which it only rains in the morning doesn't really compare.

*: Names withheld because I can't be bothered to argue with the fuckers should any of them ever resurface from the netherworld of perception.

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.

Security

I'm in HEB, my local supermarket. I've just ridden twenty miles so my legs are aching. I've bought chicken stock and now I need milk. I'm near the chiller cabinet when she accosts me.

'Can I help you?'

I lower my camera because I've just taken a photograph. 'No, I'm fine, thanks.'

'You can't take photographs in here.'

I've just taken a photograph so this confuses me. She must realise that I've just taken a photograph. I feel stressed and even a little angry. I press the button on the back of my digital camera so as to fill the tiny screen with the picture I've just taken.

'You want me to delete this now? Is that what you're saying?'

She has no reply but is squinting at me with that face which generally means the hard-drive is rebooting, having crashed at the sound of words spoken in a patently non-Texan accent. As the silence remains I consider that I'm in a fucking supermarket next to eggs and margarine, not furtively snapping some secret experimental Batman plane on a military base; and what the hell is she going to do anyway? I don't press the delete button but instead slip my camera back into its holster on my belt.

'Well, here's the thing,' I say. 'I was in here yesterday, right here,' and I explain how I was ripped off for five dollars by some stranger. She was small with bright blue eyes and reminded me of Pennsatucky from Orange is the New Black. She was animated, fidgety. She jumped up and down as she spoke, although this is almost certainly just how I've remembered the encounter.

A month later I read an online article about a pseudo-hypnotic technique called neuro-linguistic programming in which a speaker partially duplicates the mannerisms of his or her subject and presents conflicting or bewilderingly vague information in order to influence them without their quite realising it. It sounds easy, and it sounds like what happened to me, particularly the references made to Australia presumably being based on my little buddy having falsely assumed that to be my nationality, as is a common mistake around these parts.

In the mean time I'm explaining this to a slightly sun-dried version of Warden Figueroa from Orange is the New Black. She's some sort of store supervisor or manager or something, and I am vaguely aware that I probably sound crazy. I've already tried to explain that I want a photograph of the store for the account I am writing of my being hustled by someone who resembles Pennsatucky from Orange is the New Black. I didn't take a photograph of the woman who ripped me off so I've taken one of where I was stood as it was happening.

'You know how when someone talks so fast that you can't think,' I hear myself struggle to explain, 'well, that's what she was doing.'

'Was this an HEB employee?' Warden Figueroa asks concerned. Either she hasn't been listening, hasn't understood, or doesn't give that much of a shit.

'No. It was just some woman off the street.'

Warden Figueroa visibly relaxes. It wasn't a member of staff so it isn't her problem.

'Do you have security guards here?'

'Yes.' She looks puzzled, maybe worried. She doesn't seem to understand why I'm asking.

'I mean, if that happened again, could I call for a security guard?'

'Well yes, but—'

'Does it happen much in this store?'

'Does what happen?'

'People being ripped off like what happened to me yesterday.'

She doesn't seem to know how to process any of this, and the exchange degrades into noise with me walking off.

'Never mind,' I tell her. 'Don't worry about it.'

I'm no longer even quite sure what has pissed me off, but it's probably the insinuation of my having done something wrong when I was the one who got ripped off for five dollars, coupled with Warden Figueroa's apparent inability to cope with an unfamiliar accent or a conversation about something other than the location of the aisle with all the barbecue sauce.

Never mind.

Next day there I am again, because I stop off at HEB on what is usually a daily basis, thus avoiding the burden of a single massive grocery shopping expedition every weekend. As I enter I immediately see Warden Figueroa berating one of the aged greeters who is usually at his post by the sliding doors.

'Oh fuck,' I mutter under my breath, 'not you again...'

She doesn't seem to notice me, instead concentrating on giving the old guy a hard time about a cheap t-shirt which has fallen from its rack. I already had the impression of the woman as a bit of a dummy granted a modicum of power, someone who takes pleasure in exercising what little power she yields because historically it's been her on the receiving end, the one who is told to pick up the fallen t-shirt. The old guy always says hello to me as I enter the store, but not today because he's been given an order, and so my initial impression of Warden Figueroa seems justified.

I buy cat food, then wander to the end of the aisle to see if they have feed corn. Each morning I've seen people feeding the deer in McAllister Park, and I want to try it for myself. The deer seem very friendly, and it's fun to watch them hoovering up the corn. HEB stocks only cracked corn, which is meant for birds I guess, and I notice Warden Figueroa walk along past the end of my aisle checking something on her clipboard.

She's there yet again as I buy milk, and again as I look for olive oil. What a coincidence.

I place a bag of flour in my basket and exit the aisle, and there she is fiddling with the display at the end of the shelving. HEB is a big store and we're now several hundred yards from the door by which I came in. As an experiment I double back on myself to a shelf marked seasonal goods, which is where they have the Christmas stuff or Halloween candy or whatever, depending on the time of year. Warden Figueroa glances down the aisle towards me as she passes yet again.

Warden Figueroa stands casually discussing something with another employee as I look at the bread; then finally around to fruit and vegetables. I stand by the chili peppers and wait for her to appear, as indeed she does. I stare directly at her to let her know that I'm very much aware of being under suspicion. It's kind of a challenge because I've decided that I don't like her very much. Aside from anything, such ham-fisted surveillance insults my intelligence. She hasn't actually pretended to read a newspaper with two circular holes cut from the front page so she can look through, but we're not finished yet.

I pay up then go out to where I've locked my bike, and there she is again, stood where employees nip outside for a cigarette, pretending to play with her phone.

Fuck you, Warden Figueroa, I think.

I try to work out what the problem could have been, as she presumably saw it. Maybe she expected me to whip out a camera and start filming. Maybe she didn't know what the hell I was going to do, but I had asked about security which had maybe suggested ill intent on my part. Maybe she just thought I was a bit weird and probably up to no good.

I avoid HEB for the next few days because I haven't actually run out of anything, but it hurts. HEB is as much of a social life as I have these days. When I eventually go back I have the confrontation rehearsed. I've shopped in this store for the last five years, almost daily, spending a sum getting on for six hundred dollars a month. I know half of the cashiers by name, and at least two of them are my neighbours; and you, Warden Figueroa, I've never fucking seen you before last week. I don't even know who you are.

It doesn't come to that. I shop unmolested.

I see her again weeks later. I'm crossing the parking lot and she's coming towards me when I hear someone call hello. It's Jennifer, a cashier who somehow resembles a little Mayan princess, and who I used to speak to fairly regularly but haven't seen since Christmas.

'I've been on the counter,' she explains, referring to the place where checks are cashed, or whatever it is they do.

'I thought you'd had enough and packed it in.'

'No,' she says. 'It's nice to see you.'

I glance across to Warden Figueroa and think a triumphant fuck you because now she is the one who doesn't fit in.

Another couple of weeks pass and my last sighting of Warden Figueroa is as she fills bags at the tills. I guess they are short on people. I guess she isn't quite the big shot I imagined she thought herself to be.

She probably just didn't understand my accent.