Richard Littledawkins

As Romana brings me my plate of breakfast sausages and a glass of freshly decanted Irn Bru, I turn my attention to this morning's edition of the Daily Record, the cover of which occupies itself with the matter of the so-called baptism of Princess Charlotte, the new royal baby whose nativity has so engaged our attention these last few weeks and charmed the hearts of a nation. Justin Welby, the self-styled Archbishop of so-called Canterbury opened his address at the St. Mary Magdelene church, Sandringham with the words, 'it seems that different forms of ambition are hard-wired into almost all of us. At a baptism our ambitions are rightly turned into hopes and prayers for the child, today for Princess Charlotte. Everyone wants something for their children. At our best we seek beauty, not necessarily of form, but of life.'

Some of us also seek reason, and stuff what makes some f****** sense, your worship, if you know what I mean; and when I say sense I don't mean wearing a dress just because some imaginary sky goblin has told you to wear a dress like a girl or you will go to hell, some imaginary sky goblin who is about as real as the f****** tooth fairy. Hasn't he heard of reason or logic? What is f****** wrong with the man? What the f*** is he talking about? Hopes and prayers for the child? What? Prayers to some bloke who doesn't f****** exist, fat lot of f****** good that will do. Unless they mean prayers to the absolutely real and living God, except - duh - oh wait a minute! He don't f****** exist either, you soppy f****** f***er! Duuuuh!

* * *

The other day as I was perched at the cusp of my favourite chair awaiting for the advent of Poetry Please, my favourite Radio 4 show providing there's none of that silly God stuff on there like there sometimes is, I happened upon the music of one of the young urban stars of so-called grime which is a kind of music made by the kids from the streets. This particular kid from the street was a young lady named Aretha Franklin and her latest big grime tune, presumably the one presently acquiring the most rewinds in the bashment clubs and that, is called Save A Little Prayer, which is no doubt setting the hit parade on fire even as we speak. Whenever I wake up, sings young Aretha, before I put on my make-up, I save a little prayer for you...

Clown make up, I shouldn't f****** wonder - a big red nose, orange wig and purple crosses for eyes, because if you're saving prayers for someone, then you must be a bit thick, like a real duh-brain. Just as a point of interest, Aretha, precisely where do you save these prayers, and when you have enough of them, can you like spend them on sanctity or some other thing you've just invented which isn't real and is an idea or the way something is and not something physical and made of actual stuff? Do you save them in a special box of dreams or something? A special box you got from Santa Claus, or someone else who isn't really real and whose existence squares poorly with contemporary standards of reason and science? Get a brain, moron! No wonder pop music is so rubbish these days when this is the standard. The Duran Duran one was much better.

* * *

'What be this, Romana?' I roared demandingly as I examined the plastic figurine, a horse of some sort, but bright pink and with big eyes like Marine Boy used to have in that show on the telly, back in the seventies when everything was a bit better. It turned out that it was a talking horse from a show called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Romana bought it for a Christmas present for her young niece, Rowena.

So let me get this f****** straight: it's a pretend horse - just a model, not a real one, which is why it's much smaller, so small in fact that one really has to question whether it would appear as such given that equestrian biology would need to operate by very different means were it scaled down to such diminutive dimensions, and that such a creature would have a much higher metabolism; and a pretend horse which we are supposed to believe can communicate using the English language despite there being no conclusive evidence of same; and a pretend, unreal horse from a show describing friendship as being magic when Friendship is a Simple Matter of Biological Determinism would actually make a lot more sense, but as usual no f***er thought to consult me, the bloke who actually knows about that stuff. Anyway, the most annoying bit is that this mess of unreason wrapped within nonsense should be given to commemorate the birth of a person who wasn't actually born in the first place, so it's all a big f****** waste of time when you think about it. I call bullshit.

* * *

Some Islams were in the news again recently. I can't remember what they done but they probably blew something up or cut someone's head off or something, because it's always something like that from the Religion of so-called Peace.

Yet say anything about it and they call you all sorts of names, which is great providing you're not living in one of those cities in England where the lefties have let them have Sharona Law, because you probably wouldn't be able to hear because they would of chopped your ears off for listening to Aretha Franklin, even though they're all on the same f****** side when you think about it, the stupid c****. did you know that they weren't aloud to show Blue Peter in some supposedly British cities when Richard Bacon was on it in case some Muslims saw it and got offended? That's a true story.

* * *

It has recently come to my attention that a certain national supermarket chain will henceforth no longer be stocking Toffos, the chewy toffee sweets supplied in a cylindrical storage unit of paper and foil. Back in the 1970s when everything was better than it is now and before one was required to seek written permission from Germaine Greer and George Galloway before telling certain kinds of entirely harmless jokes, Toffos were advertised by a cartoon cowboy man who spoke slowly, saying that a man has to chew what a man has to chew whilst being menaced by superstitious and irrational Indian braves.

Never mind snout! Next thing they will be banning alcoholic drink from the boozer just in case some Islams see honest white men drinking after a hard day doing an honest day's work of the kind you find yourself having to do if you're not an immigrant being paid four-hundred pounds a day to claim dole by the leftie irrational religious government, and get offended. You couldn't make it up! They come over here and they all think that when they die they will get to have it off with some girls who've never done it before, but that is an irrational thing to believe. Haven't they heard of science? Why don't they get a dictionary and look up the words logic and reason? They shouldn't believe it just because it says it in some book - I mean the Torah or whatever their one is called - not that there's much difference because they are all the same and they are all irrational - not the dictionary, obviously. Unless it's like the Jesus Dictionary, because there probably is one somewhere. I'll bet it's in America. The Jesus Dictionary would be no good because it would have no logic or reason in it. Just ask a scientist if you don't believe me. You would look up the definition of universe, and it would just say God made it, except he didn't! Silly buggers.

Just Six People

For many years I was certain of it being the power of words which had forged the path by which I and my first ever girlfriend found each other. I initially knew her as the musically gifted and undeniably attractive girlfriend of Jeremy, my oldest friend on the grounds of our having been introduced on my first day at Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants School.

'This is Jeremy,' Mrs. Daglish told me, indicating a small wide-eyed boy with a brightly coloured jumper and tidy hair. 'You can sit next to him.'

A little over a decade later I would be writing long letters to his girlfriend, feeling terrible about the deception, but nevertheless at the mercy of both my own hormones and the fact that she was replying to my correspondence with missives of equal length and enthusiasm. Soon she became my girlfriend, and I spent the duration of the admittedly brief relationship telling myself that it was just one of those things, which I suppose it was. Regardless of the morality of the situation, I took from it the notion of my greatest strength being found in artistic expression, specifically in the written word. I reasoned that the greatest obstacle to my progress with members of the opposite sex was probably my own awkward physical presence, and that my best tactic would be to blind them with wit before they could recognise me for a buffoon and run away.

A few years earlier, some time during the late seventies, a teacher at my secondary school had arranged for an exchange of letters with the pupils of an educational establishment somewhere in Arkansas in the United States. I seem to recall that we had borrowed one of their teachers, a young guy resembling John Voigt with a sandy coloured moustache who smiled a lot. I already enjoyed writing, although my enthusiasm went further than my ability to string together a working sentence, and so I put everything I had into my letter. Given my age, everything I had would almost certainly have included supplementary drawings of men with bulbous noses from which might be suspended either pendulous drips of nasal mucus, cobwebs supporting grinning spiders, or both. Although modesty kept me from mentioning it myself, I was fairly confident of my being a pretty entertaining guy, and so I knew my letter would be a huge hit, a rare comedic treat for those poor, chortle-deprived American kids with their terrible cartoon shows and laughter-free sitcoms like Chico and the Man or Holmes & Yoyo.

A month or so passed, and the replies came back, and unfortunately my confidence had been entirely justified. Those of us who had written each received one reply from an American kid who had seen the makings of a potential transatlantic friendship in our letters, all except for me. I received seven replies. Possibly my audience had appreciated the drawings of men with large snotty noses, but whatever I had done, it had worked. I received letters from American kids telling me how much I'd made them laugh, letters describing things of which I had no understanding - braces worn upon teeth, the music of Kiss, and so on. Some of the letters were even from girls. The sudden flurry of attention was terrifying. I didn't know what to say to any of these kids as I'd already used my best material in the introductory letter, and the only one of the seven to whom I felt I would be able to give a worthwhile reply had described herself as the class clown, which I found off-putting. A true class clown would naturally be identified by the testimony of others, I reasoned. It was unseemly to introduce oneself as a class clown. It was like saying hello, I am hilarious.

I eventually found a pen-pal in the form of Steven Bosworth who had been a classmate up until March, 1978, at which point his family moved to Hong Kong. We wrote back and forth for a few years before his father, being something in the Royal Air Force, brought the family back to Warwickshire. Steven returned to school for the last year or so and, bizarrely, our friendship immediately evaporated, exposed as something recommended for ages eleven and under, having been artificially extended by reduction to pure text, with the occasional illustration of someone with a large nose from which a green felt-tip tsunami of bogies didst gush amusingly forth.

A year or so later I discovered Jeremy's girlfriend, punk rock, and DIY cassette culture - fanzines, and the like; and I began to record my own musique concrète, and to send tapes of it to people I'd never met, who in turn would send their tapes to me. The mailbox on the back of our garden gate was filled daily with letters and rattling jiffy bags full of industrial noise and ranting photocopied anarchism. It was the internet at least a decade before its time, a global network of cranky loners much like myself churning out page after page of random observations and opinions in bright green pen, all to be whisked off to someone in a faraway town, county, or even country with a few stamps slapped on the envelope. I maintained this enterprise for a couple of years, at least into the early nineties, my enthusiasm periodically waxing and waning according to whatever else was out there, who'd had enough and packed it all in upon finding a proper job, and how much I cared about who else would get to hear my tapes or read my self-produced comics.

In the end technology progressed beyond that to which I'd been long accustomed, and my tapes lost what little audience they had acquired as everyone replaced cassette players with desktop publishing and music software - DIY apparently having been redefined as an aesthetic rather than as production achieved in spite of financial limitations. This is why I find it difficult to set aside my cynicism regarding the current revival of the tape cassette as collectible artefact for those who spent most of the nineties sneering at such relics, but I suppose that's just the way the cultural cookie crumbles.

I resisted both computers and the internet for a long time. It wasn't so much that they had nothing to offer, but that I wasn't engaged in anything which either of them would have rendered significantly easier. I was recording music on tape, doing a lot of painting, and a lot of written research towards that painting. Friends pointed out that I might find all sorts of online resources which would aid my research, and although patently true, I barely had sufficient hours in the day to process all the notes taken from my reading as it was, even without bringing in more material. Then in 1997 I began writing music reviews for The Sound Projector magazine, edited and published by my friend Ed Pinsent whom I knew from the days of small press comics. I had somehow inherited a primitive Amstrad computer from Zoe, my then ex-girlfriend's sister, and so I wrote on that for a while, slotting large clunky discs into the drive at one side of the screen. Then when Ed bought a new computer, he very generously gave me his old one. I immediately found it more pleasurable to write and to edit my reviews with the Lotus word processing package that came with the machine. It was tidier than ring binders full of notes scrawled with biros nicked from work, and writing with the Amstrad had felt a little unnatural, those luminous green ASCII characters seeming too far removed from any creative process with which I was familiar.

In September 2005, I found myself involved with Dora the Explorer - or at least that's what I'm calling her for the moment given her being of similar, height and appearance. Dora the Explorer was impressed that I owned a computer, despite the fact that I was apparently the second last person in England to own one, but she was concerned that I had not bothered to hook it up to the internet. I needed to move into the twenty-first century, she informed me - apparently missing the point that of the two of us, I was the one with a computer. I needed to move into the twenty-first century because this would save her having to use the internets at the local library whilst searching for a job which would pay well without requiring that she be out of bed before midday or relinquish more than twenty-eight days of her free time each month.

'Okay,' I said, because it had been a decade since I broke up with the girlfriend whose sister had bequeathed me the Amstrad and my nuts were about to explode, and I could think of no good reason to say no.

Almost immediately I acquired a taste for internet bulletin boards, a form of interaction which initially reminded me of my formative years of cranky letters written in green biro to gentlemen running cassette based organisations with names like Dead Cop Produktions or Sheep Worrying Tapes; except now the interaction was reduced to just banter, no jiffy bags spilling cassettes, home-made badges, or bits of coloured paper onto the living room table.

I began with an archaeological forum, drawn in by the prospect of discussing Mesoamerica with fellow enthusiasts. It was pleasant enough for a while, but I soon tired of a climate of paranoia regarding the Club. The Club were a shadowy body who supposedly suppressed archaeological truths in order to avoid the mammoth costs incurred by a complete rewrite of human history. There was all sorts of stuff the Club didn't want us to know about, but none of it very plausible or particularly interesting, and it was difficult to get much sense out of those who had fallen for the idea. One member of the board had the user name Clubs Stink, which I guess he thought was really showing someone or other. Another accused me of being a Club stooge for suggesting that certain ancient Mexican artefacts had been carved by ancient Mexicans, rather than ancient Africans who had sailed across the Atlantic to produce stone carvings and then returned home leaving no evidence of ever having been there in the first place. He also told me that my viewpoint reminded him of those racists who were unable to ever find it in themselves to credit Africans with anything.

Drifting away, I ended up on a bulletin board maintained by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, initially drawn there by an interest in both science and Dawkins' writing. It turned out that the scientific discussion was often somewhat dry and hardly the sort of thing I was after, but more to my taste was an off-topic section frequented by persons who, like myself, preferred our discourse to feature men with large noses decked with strings of mucus drawn in the margin. Unfortunately it transpired that Richard Dawkins himself was less keen on men with large noses decked with strings of mucus drawn in the margin. Specifically he took exception to the saltier topics of discussion on the one occasion when he managed to get some time away from boffinesque scientific experiments with test tubes to look in on the forum bearing his name. Threads were deleted, expulsions occurred, and three-hundred or so members took their drawings of men with large noses decked with strings of mucus elsewhere, specifically to a bulletin board named Thinking Aloud, or TAF as it was abbreviated; and it was at this point that I began to notice a peculiar phenomenon, specifically how seriously some internet denizens took themselves.

Human rights had been violated, and Richard Dawkins was no better than Adolf Hitler. He had destroyed the precious threads of the forum, just like whoever it was who had destroyed the great library of Alexandria. This was an affront to all right-thinking people utilising side-splitting Douglas Adams quotes as signatures to their posts.

Still, it seemed like these people were generally in a minority, the price one paid for communication with the more entertaining representatives of the online community, and so I generally did my best to ignore them. I spent the next few years posting on a number of different fora, switching from one to another each time it became too exhausting dealing with people who needed so badly to be right about everything. My online presence was, in certain respects, the latest expression of the long letters I had written to the class clowns of Arkansas, Steven Bosworth, Jeremy's girlfriend, and the bloke from Smash the Cistern Tapes. I had been prone to overpowering loneliness before I met Dora the Explorer, and the overpowering loneliness continued during our relationship. I was fairly certain it wasn't supposed to work that way, but there didn't seem to be much I could do about it; and so I continued to savour time spent stood around some virtual water cooler with people I would never meet discussing the worst jobs we'd ever had, loudest air biscuit we'd ever produced, fave band, and the existence or otherwise of God.

For a while I took a mildly evangelical view of internet fora in a general sense, encouraging anyone who would listen to get involved. The bulletin board seemed to occupy roughly the same conceptual space as that in which I'd written all those letters, at least in relation to ordinary social interaction. I would liken TAF or the Hive or the Anorak Zone or wherever I was posting that month to a virtual pub one might enter with a guarantee of having something in common with almost everyone present, or at least more so than would occur in real life. Strolling into a bar, one might strike up conversations with strangers, but possibly not conversations about obscure English children's television shows of the 1960s, for example. Figuratively strolling into the Anorak Zone on the other hand, that was mostly what they talked about.

Unfortunately though, the pub analogy may be further extended to describe an establishment founded by an egomaniac nutcase who populates the lounge bar with his legion of admirers, or at least those he hopes will become his admirers, perhaps viewing him - it nearly always being him in my experience - as a benevolent God graciously presiding over this bounteous electronic playground of zany wit and common sense. This was one problem with the Anorak Zone, the virtual realm of a man who'd once written a book about the children's television show Sapphire & Steel, and who now ran the cult film and TV forum for black people, as the banner had it. This seemed fair enough at the time, although the occasionally proprietorial site owner's frequent arbitrary references to Brixton in south-east London never struck me as quite so amusing as everyone else seemed to find them being as I'd lived there, roughly speaking; and his displeasure with online behaviour which he denounced as lickle white bwoy shit struck a similarly odd chord, as did everyone calling each other mon. It later transpired that these people were largely white, middle-class, and engaged in some extended private joke, digging each other in the virtual ribs and smirking as they commented on each others posts in a phonetic approximation of Jamaican patois. By this point I'd already been banned, but the discovery seemed to explain a lot. It wasn't so much that there was any inherent racism in this peculiar masquerade, although I suppose some of it might well have been considered the forum equivalent of blackface, but I had essentially made my conversational bed amongst a cadre of giggling student tossers, people I would ordinarily have crossed the road to avoid in real life, and I hadn't noticed because I was too busy agreeing that the The Doctor's Wife had been shite.

Virtual communities are fine when one's own life is otherwise so miserable as to require either booze or endless middle-class knob gags to get you through the day without killing yourself, but the internet can be a tough environment which favours the survival and amplification of the most forthright and obnoxious, those who go the furthest in forging for themselves an online persona which they could never reveal to anyone in the real world, because if they did they would end up with broken legs. Realising this, I have reached an understanding of my own bulletin board as virtual pub analogy being completely wrong, because in real life half of the people one might encounter online may not even be capable of normal social interaction, and so you end up with a pub full of basement dwellers who believe in the enforced sterilisation of dunderheads or whatever.

Individuals in groups, particularly groups formed through some artificial agency, tend to vie for attention, for the highest quota of interaction, interaction being the entire point of posting on a message board. The individual who garners the most attention will therefore tend to be the one making the loudest, boldest, funniest, or even most provocative statements; which is fine, but tends to make for a toxic virtual environment for anyone failing to make the distinction between online existence and real life, for anyone with basic manners. This is why such places tend to last about six months before everything collapses under the passive-aggressive weight of bald old men being right about something or other.

There's the problem, specifically the need to be right smuggled in below the conversational radar as open debate or support of some cause, because some people are, so it seems, only able to elevate themselves by pushing down on somebody else. Therefore I've largely given up on bulletin boards - beyond the occasional requirements of flogging some book which no fucker is going to bother buying anyway - because the occasional pearl of wisdom, or even the occasional pearl of entertaining stupidity, really isn't worth all that sand. I'm now down to more or less just facebook, although even this, more easily customised to individual requirements as it is, is far from perfect, because I'm part of the equation, and I like to think the best of people, to give them the benefit of the doubt, and so I still find myself engaged with people whom I should probably ignore, people who communicate from the perspective of the angry, basement-dwelling loners I would never encounter in a physical pub.

When I first moved to San Antonio from England, one particular Anorak Zone bell end took it upon himself to challenge the wisdom of my decision. What the hell are you moving there for? It's in the middle of nowhere. You won't be able to just jump on the Eurostar and pop over to Paris, you know?!

As with all such questions, that one seems to have been born from the presumption that anyone who is not yourself will by definition require your opinion, which will be better-informed because it comes from you. In this case it falsely presumed that visits to Paris by Eurostar must be fairly high on my list of priorities. The online situation hasn't improved much since then, particularly as I've had the gall to live in Texas of all places, a state which for some serves as shorthand for everything that is wrong with the world because nyer nyer nyer Republicans blah blah blah...

People from the United Kingdom tend to do this quite a lot, for some reason assuming they alone have a deeper insight into the issues affecting the rest of the world, regardless of actual experience of those issues - not all people from the United Kingdom, but certainly more than seems to be the case with any other nationality so far as I've noticed. Britannia no longer has an empire, but some of its people still regard themselves as essentially the font of all culture, and of all that is reasonable and correct.

Well, this seems like a good idea to me, but we'd better find some English guy and see what he thinks before we sign anything...

I would say it's a tendency of the political left, except it's probably that I ignore the political right and only have a vague idea of what they're saying most of the time - it so often being something I've already dismissed as either annoying or deeply sinister - so it's most likely just people who need to be right about something, for whatever reason; and, in the immortal words of Toyah Willcox, it's a mystery to me. It's a mystery to me because ever since the days of the green biro, I've reached out to other parts of the world because I'm interested in how other people live their lives, because essentially I like people, even those with terrible taste in music. I've never really held with the essentially misanthropic conviction that everyone who isn't myself must be in some sense stupid and will therefore benefit from my advice regarding their situation. That I hold no such view does not seem to me either an unreasonable or arrogant proposition.

For example, I recently had a disagreement with someone I would otherwise consider a friend over an issue relating directly to the United States and the people who live here. Specifically, he disagreed with me and explained that my routine was getting old, this apparently being my routine of making statements regarding the country in which I have now lived for three years based on the experience of having lived here. He doesn't live here, and disagreed with what I had said, but more than disagreed, he knew that I was wrong and that he was right, so my experience has therefore been either delusional or anomalous in the wider context, as has been that of my wife and everyone we know. He later contacted me by email and explained that it was okay because he hadn't taken offence, fairly typically missing the point that actually I had taken offence.

It happens over and over. Always there will be someone who knows better than you do, because although they haven't been there and it doesn't directly affect them, they've read an article and it stands to reason innit, and because nyer nyer nyer you Americans with your guns, or nyer nyer nyer Texas, or just nyer nyer nyer for its own sake. The internet is a wonderful thing, and a medium through which I have formed some genuine friendships over the years, but life is just too short for the drivel of those for who lack basic manners, and really just need to be right about something, and to view themselves as a crusading force.

Keeping in mind here that my research comprises what I can recall of books read several years ago, what little I can be bothered to look up on Wikipedia, and a general feeling that I'm probably right on some level - humans were primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers up until about twelve-thousand years ago when some bright spark decided that farming was a good idea. Actually it wasn't a good idea, given that agriculture demands of the individual a much greater expenditure of energy in exchange for a more impoverished diet in nutritional terms, but soon everyone was at it and probably for reasons which are adequately explained in Susan Blackmore's excellent The Meme Machine. My point is that the human race has spent 90% of our time on Earth mooching around the plains, eating nuts, berries, and probably the occasional rodent, communicating exclusively with a fairly limited group of family members, and probably not even encountering the concept of other persons in numbers beyond the lower reaches of double figures. We were never designed to have millions of friends strung out on some vast cat's cradle of increasingly tenuous social interactions. Few people really - it seems to me - are able to maintain more than two or three close friendships at a time, and honestly, there probably isn't any good reason for anyone to do so. The more people we know, or at least of whom we know, the greater the chance of our exposure to the sort of tossers who, without the crutch of online interaction, would rightly be friendless fuckfaced trolls sat growling to themselves in some poorly-lit basement far away from the gaze - or at least far away from the facebook likes - of the rest of us.

A world of just six people probably wouldn't be that bad.

That's my opinion.

Stripy

I acquired a more than passing interest in the Nahuatl speaking cultures of Precolombian Mexico sometime around 1994, and by 1996 I had learned enough to realise that this was something I would have to start taking seriously in order to achieve a more thorough understanding. I drew up a contemporary continuation of the Mexican Tonalpohualli calendar, and began to conduct my daily life with some consideration of Nahua Gods and related sacred forces. To be absolutely clear here, I don't mean to imply that I had chosen to believe in something which, one might rightly point out, would seem a little lost in the context of 1990s south-east London; but then nor do I wish to suggest I would ever engage in anything quite so dry and cynical as a mere thought-experiment. A better way of putting it is to perhaps say that I made an effort to regard my environment and the world in general in terms that would have made sense to a fifteenth century Nahua, principally in order to gain a better understanding of Precolombian thought by treating it as something which had existed for a reason, rather than mumbo jumbo to be pinned out on the dissecting table of objectivity.

Whilst I have a lot of time for Richard Dawkins, his general dismissive view of religious systems isn't always either helpful or interesting, often amounting to a set of one-size-fits-all refutations which, whilst perfectly logical and effective for his purposes, amount to what may as well be an attack on traditional Inuit clothing based on how it looks terrible on the catwalk and proves uncomfortable when traversing the Sahara desert.

Anyway, to return to the point, there I was in south-east London at the end of the twentieth century trying to think myself into the world of someone born in Tenochtitlan five-hundred years earlier. In practical terms, this amounted to eating Mexican food, following the calendar already mentioned, keeping an eye out for coincidences, and painting the Gods, characters and concepts upon which I had fixated as though they were real, rather than mere subjects of anthropological study. I say as though they were real, and should probably qualify this by stating that I came to believe that the Gods and spirits of Mexico are real in all senses that matter, by which I mean that as ideas they are real, and the ideas are the most important element. I don't for a second believe in anything that contradicts the established laws of physics, or in disembodied superhuman intelligences sat in judgement upon the more comfortable clouds, but I do think that a helpful religious system is one that provides a useful way of thinking about things, or of seeing the world, and a way that can under certain possibly subjective circumstances be considerable more useful than the rigorously and sometimes puritanically rational. For example, one might dismiss the First Nations view of respecting the Earth as superstitious anthropomorphism, and suggest that sacrificing valuables to the land in hope of an abundant crop is obviously ridiculous. The same land reduced to mere material commodity might just as well be turned into a huge toxic waste dump gratuitously formed into the profile of Margaret Thatcher when seen from above, unless long term ecological consequences are taken into consideration; but humanity doesn't have a particularly good track record where long term consequences are concerned, and therefore the superstitious theological view, for whatever reason, happens to represent a particularly useful way of thinking about the land in question regardless of whether or not the earth is genuinely grateful for all those human hearts buried earlier in some corner of the field.

So with this in mind, I painted pictures and paid attention to my daily calendar, noting with some pleasure those minor coincidences such as the cold, wet, miserable day when my friend Paul came over to record DIY techno on my somewhat coal-fired studio set-up, which turned out to be a day theologically distinguished by the patronage of Tlaloc and Huehuecoyotl, respectively the Mexican Gods of Rain and Dance. That isn't to say that these coincidences necessarily meant anything in the real world, but they were fun all the same.

Along similar lines, I sometimes wondered what my Nagual or companion animal spirit might be, suspecting it was probably a frog as there were always a ton of frogs in the garden who, from what I could tell, seemed to think I was okay. Of course, the idea that I might have an animal spirit, or even that there could really be such a thing, as the Nahua believed and continue to believe, was essentially either ludicrous or at least not to be mistaken for anything belonging to the real world, but still it seemed an appealing idea on some level.

My fascination with Mexico led to my visiting the country first in September 1999, and then again on four more yearly occasions. By the time I met my wife, my gaze was already set firmly upon the Americas, albeit the Americas a little way south of Texas, and so it took about three seconds to decide whether or not I wished to move over here.

We were married in July 2011, and I began the process of settling and acclimatising to a country and environment which, despite all of my preparation, was nevertheless very different to anything I had known before. The heat was phenomenal compared to that which I was used to, the shops were all different, the food was unfamiliar, all of the punk records, science-fiction novels, and Mesoamerican textbooks which had defined my growth into whatever the hell I am today were five-thousand miles away along with all of my friends and family. Additionally, I had never been married before, and neither had I been a parent nor a stepfather, and whilst Junior was lively, imaginative, and essentially likeable, he was often hard work, and - as with many children - very rarely ever so cute or funny as he believed himself to be.

I had made a huge leap entirely on the possibly insane anticipation of it somehow, against all odds, working out. The most sensible thing to do seemed to be to throw myself into work, and so I got started on the garden, or more accurately the back yard - a desiccated football pitch of scorched earth with chain link fence surrounding containing rusting barbecue equipment. Physical labour, as I had already discovered on a number of previous occasions, tends to be more philosophically productive than sitting around thinking about things, and I felt I needed to get my hands into the soil, to symbolically root myself to this corner of Texas and mark out my territory. This was to be my building something upon which I could stand steady, and so I began to work on a lawn.

I dug every square foot of soil which had reduced to grey dust and limestone rocks in the August heat, collecting in the process a mountain of stones by which I eventually marked out the borders of my projected garden. The work was tough, but helped by the fact that every waking minute had become something akin to an adventure in this new and unfamiliar land. Amongst the first of many, many surprises was the discovery of grub worms, fat, white insect larvae about an inch long living under the soil and generally regarded as a menace hereabouts for their voracious consumption of plant roots. I was startled to realise that these insects were larval to a bright orange and largely nocturnal beetle resembling what the Precolombian Nahua had described in Bernardino de Sahagún's sixteenth century Florentine Codex as the pinauiztli beetle.

The pinauiztli beetle is listed specifically as a creature of ill omen, and I had discussed its identification in correspondence with English Mesoamericanist Dr. Eleanor Wake some years earlier. The elusive identity of this insect had been of sufficient mystery and appeal as to make it into at least one draft of my novel, Against Nature; and  having wondered about the creature at some length, it seemed I now had a garden full of the bloody things.

Another resident of the yard was a lizard, specifically a Texas spiny lizard of the species Sceloporus olivaceus whom I had first noticed as a swiftly moving shape out of the corner of my eye. In traditional Nahua terms, the lizard - or cuetzpallin - is a fairly important symbol of plenty and as such stands as one of the twenty pictographic stars of the Tonalpohualli calendar. As with many of these Mesoamerican symbols, the important detail is that which they represent, and so a lizard seems well chosen as an avatar of plenty. As I have seen since living here, lizards come out in their numbers in Spring as the air warms and crops begin to grow; and if this seems too simplistic a parallel, it might also be noted that abundant crops will attract abundant pests, which in turn draw the lizards out of hiding. Agriculture was roughly how I came to meet my own particular little four-legged friend who, as I started to notice, would emerge each day as I began to dig up another patch of yard, and wait for what grub worms I tossed aside. My hope was that they would perish under the punishing heat of the midday sun, but it turned out that I was serving dinner.

Ever since I was a dinosaur-obsessed child I have liked reptiles and amphibians, and when I kept the garden in London, it had been gratifying to read in an issue of New Scientist that, contrary to the received wisdom, the higher cold-blooded animals were entirely capable of both affection and recognising those humans who bought them food or who kept the tank at just the right temperature. This seemed to be borne out by the larger frogs who gathered around the small pond I had made and who, after several weeks of my bringing them whatever worms I had found whilst digging, could no longer be bothered to hop away, but rather sat regarding me, waiting for my exit before pouncing upon whatever I had bought. This peculiar bonding repeated itself now in Texas as the lizard grew accustomed to my presence, becoming a little bolder each day. Of course, it may have been that I was visited by more than one lizard, but it seemed unlikely, for if that was so then they would all have to have been the exact same size, and worked in shifts with never more than one of them turning up at the same time.

I'd never seen lizards in the wild in England, although my friend Lucia told me that some had been seen on her allotment in Forest Hill, thus happily putting the dampers on Lewisham Council's plans to build yet another complex of overpriced luxury rabbit hutches for the benefit of overmoneyed Time Out subscribers and people who care about Damien Hirst. I had seen lizards in Mexico, but never at close range like this, and I was fascinated.

My guy was full grown, and about six inches in length, and he became so accustomed to me that I was almost able to feed him from my hand, as is apparently not uncommon. What astonished me most, aside from his obvious intelligence, was how birdlike his movements seemed, and how adorable I found him. Cold blood is generally painted in at least the school textbooks of my youth as representing the short straw in the metabolism draw, but this, I suggest, is a conclusion that only makes sense if you have no direct experience of reptiles.

I took photographs of my lizard, and told my wife about him. We wondered whether to tell Junior, then going through a slightly unfortunate phase during which he tried to make everything into a pet, worst of these being hermit crabs brought back from the beach at Corpus Christi. Thankfully he's since grown out of it, and has even developed a healthy and prescient degree of concern for animal welfare, but it was touch and go for a while, and my heart would cloud over with dark thoughts each time he ran off into the bushes after some defenceless critter yelling who wants to help me catch it?

'Let's not tell him,' I said. 'I don't think I could stand to come back from the store and find that lizard stuck in a tank in his room for no good reason.'

Bess sighed in concurrence.

'Besides,' I added, fitfully scratching at the rash of my own mild irritation, 'he'll only give it one of those names.'

At least a few years of the boy's development had been characterised by his bestowing bluntly descriptive names on any animal he encountered, followed by testy behaviour when the rest of us failed to fall into line with the identification of Swimmy the fish, Chirpy the bird, Jumpy the rabbit, Fuzzy Larry the hairy caterpillar and so on.

I thought of the lizard, recalling the dominant pattern of the scales on his back. 'Junior would probably call him Stripy.'

I sighed at the idea, but next day as an increasingly rotund Stripy waddled back to where I'd been digging for the day's grub worms, I realised I quite liked the name. It was cute, and I had begun to feel protective towards the little fellow. I had even begun to worry about whether my supply of excavated grub worms represented too generous a cornucopia, whether he might explode; but online research disabused me off this notion.

Eventually many months later, I'd finished the digging, and although I still saw Stripy - or a lizard which was probably Stripy - from time to time, Winter was on the way, and it was clear that we shared similarly dim views of the colder months of the year and were responding accordingly. I'm not saying that I had at last found my Nagual, or my animal spirit in Stripy, but my reclaiming the yard, turning the Earth back into something in which plants would grow, could be argued to have had a ritual purpose, and so it seemed useful, or at least entertaining to believe that I had; and the important detail is that it worked, and this place has become my home.

Today, after two weeks of grey skies and biting wind which could be quite adequately equated to the fourth level of the Mesoamerican underworld - Itzeheyacan or Where the Wind is Like Knives, the air is suddenly and dramatically warm, so warm that, having grown up in England I half expect to hear the steady buzz of bees and a distant lawnmower. Out on the trail, cycling my usual fifteen miles a day, I find that my limbs are much stronger, newly energised by not having to fight against the cold. I've not yet seen the first lizards of spring, signifying the harvest, plenty, cups which runneth over and all that good stuff, but I expect it's only a matter of time before I do.

My Struggle

I'm sceptical as to whether anyone genuinely has much of an idea of what they want to do with their lives at the age of eighteen or thereabouts. I vaguely hoped to achieve renown for weird, unlistenable music, so I signed up for a fine art degree at Maidstone College of Art specialising in Time Based Media, the institution's recently rebranded film, video and sound department. I reasoned that this was a place where I'd be able to continue churning out a shambolic noise, cleverly passing it off as film soundtrack, inevitably become famous and thus not have to worry about getting a day job once the three years were up. It didn't quite work out that way, and with hindsight I realise neither my music nor my efforts in the fields of film and video were particularly remarkable. Significantly though, I met Carl Glover and Charlie Adlard whilst at Maidstone College of Art, and also Glenn Wallis of the groups Whitehouse and Konstruktivists and who wasn't at art college but lived a few miles away in Gillingham. Celebrity watchers might like to know that I also met Mark Hodder and was regularly subjected to cruel but nevertheless accurate observations made by Traci Emin with regard to my hair, at the time modelled on that of Alan Moore, but anyway...

After three years I had a degree but none of the anticipated fame, and I moved to Chatham, it being near to Maidstone and home to a thriving live music scene. During the last year of art college I had played guitar in a band called Total Big with Carl singing and our friend Chris New playing drums. As I moved to the Medway Towns - a Kentish sprawl encompassing Chatham, Rochester, Gillingham and others - Chris moved to Dover so we bought a drum machine and named our duo The Dovers in his honour. We played numerous gigs all over, probably nothing too outrageously musical but fun to watch according to those who turned up.

I was still dabbling in my own noisy music, perhaps with reduced enthusiasm, but was also considering becoming a cartoonist having been faced with the possibility that I might not end up quite so famous as hoped. Inspired by the likes of Robert Crumb and Bill Griffith I began drawing my own strips, some of which showed up in local small press efforts, and one of which got me low paid but regular work drawing a strip for Brian Moore's Head football fanzine - a continuing story which ended up running for maybe seven or eight years. At the same time I began writing strips, or at least attempting to write vaguely mainstream efforts in collaboration with Charlie Adlard who would draw them in somewhat more accomplished form than anything of which I was then capable. Charlie hadn't quite fitted in back at Maidstone. He dressed well, had manners, wore jackets with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, liked Simple Minds, and was above all a conspicuously nice guy. We had hit it off immediately through a mutual interest in comic books and possession of a sense of humour. As a brief creative partnership, we had a few collaborative false starts, but completed a few things which we hawked around the comic conventions hoping to get noticed; but ultimately I lacked the patience and returned to my underground roots, leaving Charlie free to become sickeningly successful with The Walking Dead and others.

After two faintly miserable post-degree years on the dole, the formerly generous English taxpayer began to look at me askance and suggest I find work seeing as I had conspicuously failed to become famous as projected. This was how I ended up as a postman. As a school kid giving up my paper round about five years earlier, I'd vowed that never again would I wake at an ungodly hour in order to tramp the streets shoving stuff through letter boxes, so the irony was difficult to miss, not least because I stayed with Royal Mail for the next twenty-one years. Oddly enough, at the time it turned out to be exactly what I needed. It was money, and it obliged me to hang around with people who neither knew nor cared about Genesis P. Orridge, Carl Andre, or that miserable hat-wearing fucker out of The Mission; people who - much to my surprise - turned out to be one hell of a lot funnier and more interesting than those who did care about Genesis P. Orridge, Carl Andre, and that miserable hat-wearing fucker out of The Mission - even if they did like football and Coronation Street and that. Who would have thought...

After two years living in Chatham, and still lacking fame either as underground cartoonist or guitarist with The Dovers, I'd grown restless, and so transferred my job to Coventry. In Coventry I lived with my dad who had recently moved there from the market town of Shipston-on-Stour where I grew up. Almost immediately I realised this move had been a mistake, so I transferred again to London on the grounds that at least I knew some people living there to whom I wasn't related, notably Carl.

We picked up where we'd left off with The Dovers, and I started working for Royal Mail in Catford, drawing more and more cartoons, self-publishing some of them, and also joining Konstruktivists, the group formed by Glenn Wallis. Perhaps conscious of having fingers in too many pies, I later strategically withdrew from Konstruktivists. It was nice that we had released a few CDs through World Serpent Distribution, but it was difficult being in a group with a guy who lived two or three counties away. Despite intending to concentrate on my own dubiously musical efforts, I somehow got recruited to play guitar and keyboard for Academy 23, the group formed by Andy Martin and Dave Fanning of The Apostles with whom I'd been in correspondence since the early 1980s. Gigs were played, music was recorded and put out on CD and vinyl, until in roughly 1995 I became somehow tired of being me, and of almost everything I'd been trying to do up to that point.

Academy 23 had become UNIT, with added progressive rock time signatures requiring more patience and ability than I could muster; I'd just split with girlfriend number two; the world of small press cartooning had taught me that I actively hated the work of all but a handful of other cartoonists; and the relative success I was beginning to enjoy as a cartoonist for football fanzines was serving only to bring in requests for stuff I had no interest in drawing.

Somehow this coincided with a newly developed fascination with Prehispanic Mexico, specifically the culture generally but wrongly remembered as Aztec. I dropped everything and started reading whatever I could find. I knew myself well, and that I had a history of dabbling, of getting bored and leaving things unfinished; and whilst I wouldn't exactly have called myself a moron, Richard Dawkins' lecture Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder and conversations with Andy Martin had impressed on me that I didn't really know much beyond trivia - Doctor Who, comic books, art history, industrial music, flying saucer lore and so on. I was dissatisfied with myself, realising I had spent many years as the sort of gurgling clueless berk I would have crossed the road to avoid. From this point on, I vowed whilst holding a flaming sword aloft to the blood-drenched heavens, if I do something, I'm going to do it properly or not at all. This is my brag.

With hindsight, it felt as though I'd spent many years in search of something of poorly defined qualities, never really coming close - not exactly purpose, but something of that nature. Mexico, or at least my interest in Mexico seemed of more inherent value than a pile of tatty unexplained mysteries of the mysterious paperbacks or Throbbing Gristle bootleg tapes. Possibly my brain just needed something to work with besides novelty.

Anyway, I got deeper and deeper into Mexica culture - Mexica being what the Aztecs called themselves at the time - to the point of requiring specialist literature because I'd read everything else; and I resumed painting - having dabbled some years earlier but packed it in when I hit a dead end - more or less painting as a point of focus for the whole Mexican thing; I started writing unjustifiably pompous essays on the subject, really just thinking aloud and working out ideas; until it got to the point where it would have been ridiculous to continue without actually having been to Mexico. I'd never before left England, but it had to be done, so in September 1999, I went to stay in Mexico City for a couple of weeks, and I think it sort of changed my life, even if I can't quite say why.

As the twenty-first century got under way, I found myself with all this obscure knowledge of Tlatilco and Zacatenco pottery phases, obscure Goddesses with names like Chiconahui Izcuintli Chantico, and a burning need to do something with it all, to vent the ideas with which the subject had inspired me. The paintings became a hypothetical book, an aspirationally definitive bestiary of the entire pantheon of central Mexican Deities - something which to the best of my knowledge remains yet to be compiled with the level of detail I envision. A decade later I'm still working on this, slowly due to having become sidetracked into writing fiction.

Never before having considered this point, I recently realised that I've been writing fiction for some time, at least so far back as  collaborative efforts with Charlie Adlard and strip cartoons written and drawn for Brian Moore's Head. Excepting Philip K. Dick, D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, and - I suppose - comic books, I had never been a particularly avid reader of fiction - at least not up until about 2008 - but I had read the odd Doctor Who novel; and so ended up trying to write my version, set in fourteenth century Mexico because I was pretty sure that sooner or later someone else would use the same setting and they would most likely get it horribly wrong, so it was an attempt to stake out territory in some sense. Smoking Mirror - as it was called - was rejected, although by this point I had become increasingly disillusioned with the somewhat insular Doctor Who microcosm, much preferring the distantly related Faction Paradox mythos created by Lawrence Miles, and so I forged ahead, doing it all again as a Faction Paradox novel with the benefit of lessons learned. This I finished just as Mad Norwegian press announced they were to discontinue the line of novels instigated by Lawrence Miles, and just as my landlord died.

I had lived in the same place since 1995, just over a decade, a slightly damp but otherwise wonderful basement flat with a garden in East Dulwich, with Bill, my amiable landlord, occupying the upper floors of the house and none too bothered about charging a fortune providing he had a tenant who wasn't an arsehole, which apparently I wasn't, so it all worked out well. This was 2006 and the beginning of a couple of rough years made all the less bearable by my having become romantically involved with a girl who was basically insane. She was related to both Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, and back in about 1985 she had an affair with a member of a well-known weirdy music outfit, a guy I'd been writing to at the time, and still know to this day. The sheer coincidence seemed too big to ignore, and I'd been alone for so long that my cherry had grown back. Also, I'd been living in a bubble of reasonable rent and relative security for ten years, and I now found that I could barely afford to live in London. Initially I moved to a smaller flat costing half of my weekly wage, then when the rent increased, I moved into the smallest room of my girlfriend's house - or rather the house her mother had bought for her.

She didn't work, or at least no more than a few days a week conducting door to door surveys. Everything was the fault of someone else. She had two shelves groaning with self-help books and had been a regular attendee at self-improvement workshops run by an extremely dubious therapy cult, and had thus learned to argue like some bizarre conflation of rottweiler and lawyer. She spent three years telling me where I was going wrong, how I should be running my life, explaining how my reluctance to join her creepy therapy cult constituted a direct assault upon her self-esteem, and for the final ten months taking rent off me. She made it clear that I would soon be asking for her hand in marriage, and that it had better be a decent ring - not some old shit from Peckham market. She was horrible, and I knew I had to escape by whatever method presented itself before the situation became so bad as to redefine suicide as a reasonable option. I did this by finding a place to live - tiny and costing almost two thirds of my weekly wage but better than the alternative - and hiring a bloke with a massive van to get me and all my crap out of there in double-quick time.

Life immediately became better than it had been at any point since 2005 when I returned from my most recent trip to Mexico. My Faction Paradox novel had drawn the interest of a publisher who took up the line in the wake of its initial cancellation, and I began to consider writing more seriously. Also at this point I met Bess, an American woman whom I immediately recognised as the person with whom I was supposed to be all along - not believing in destiny or any of that crap, this is unfortunately the only way I can put it; and years later, now married and settled, my views have not changed in this respect. Anyway, as I met Bess, I had been tiring of London for a long time, and had in addition spent a good few years with one eye cocked in the general direction of Mexico as somewhere I might consider living had things turned out different. Bess being from Texas, one-hundred miles north of the Mexican border, just seemed too good to be true, one of those ridiculous points of synchronicity which seemingly drew us together, or at least had us boggling with disbelief - both having the same birthday being another good one.

It was meant to be, we decided, and so it was.

Twenty-one years with Royal Mail and nineteen in London had been enough for me, so I packed it all in and moved to my mother's place in Coventry, there to write my novel, get some short stories under my belt, and flog one half of all my accumulated crap on eBay so as to pay to ship the other half of it to Texas. Bess and I jumped through all the required legal hoops and after eighteen months I had my green card. I moved to San Antonio and we got married.

It's now eighteen months later. I'm writing daily, even getting paid for it on occasion with more work to come, looking after a house and garden bigger than any in which I've lived before, and married to the woman who really did turn out to be the girl of my dreams - and I'm aware how that sounds but that's just how it is.

All this time, I suspect I've been looking for something, and although I'm still not sure exactly what it is or how to describe it, I believe I've found it. It might be easy to beat myself up with all the if I knew then what I know now, but there really doesn't seem like a whole lot of point. I suppose it's a bit vexing that I'm a fat, old man approaching fifty, but I guess that's just how it goes; and had I not made the journey - to briefly wax Waltonsy - I probably would have ended up in the wrong place. There's a popular line around these parts - not quite a joke, something between a zinger and a bumper sticker: I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here just as soon as I could, and that's probably as good a summary as any for these last 2,792 words.

Steve Parsons

Back in the late seventeenth century prior to the beginning of my career as a fat old man with all sorts of fascinating stories about the good old days when industrial music meant a gentleman in a wig reciting an amusing ode about serial murder whilst his accompanist rummaged around inside a harpsichord, I involved myself with the independent cassette scene. It began with an advert in Sounds music paper, and took me to all sorts of strange and wonderful if not particularly tuneful places. Still at school, every other day would see the letter box bulging anew with tapes, letters, and fanzines from all sorts of people all across the globe, and even the worst of them had more integrity in a single crappy C30 of some bloke moaning about Thatcher than in the entire run of America's Got the X-Factor in Their Eyes; and about half of those envelopes, once open, would invariably loose a pile of flyers for other tapes and fanzines onto my living room carpet, amongst them adverts run off on an old spirit duplicator for Big Banana Productions.

I met Steven Parsons, the man behind Big Banana Productions about a decade later. By then his tape distribution label had simplified to the less conspicuously wacky BBP Productions, and had expanded to the emission of vinyl records. I was playing guitar and keyboards in UNIT with Andy Martin, Dave Fanning, Nathan Coles, and Pete Williams, of whom the first two I initially encountered through that previously mentioned network of people like ourselves making and sending tapes, letters and fanzines to each other. We spent about a week in a studio in Brixton recording a pile of songs which BBP released on 7" vinyl as Richard Dawkins is Together With Us. That record still sounds good to me, and it was a very enjoyable week hanging out with Ian McKay - who had produced Skullflower and Ramleh amongst others; and Steve Parsons, or Gogs as he was known due to the glasses - who was there because he was paying for it; playing pool upstairs in the studio whilst Pete battered his drum kit into fragments; and finding myself ridiculously starstruck by a random encounter with Mark Perry of Alternative TV.

Anyway, I've just heard from Andy that Gogs died on Christmas Eve after the sadly typical lengthy battle with cancer. He wasn't my best buddy, anyone I knew particularly well, or even someone I've actually seen since about 1995, but that doesn't make his passing seem any less sad. He was one of those people who did stuff in an era when it actually required work to do stuff rather than just sitting there clicking on a mouse. He made the world a better place than he found it in some small way, and certainly made mine briefly exciting when the first copies of the UNIT EP turned up.

Rest in peace, matey.

Stealing the Knife and Fork

Sunday 19th September 1999: wondering whether maybe I really should steal the knife and fork.

I first went to Mexico in September 1999. For most of the previous five years I had been nurturing a growing obsession with the country and its history, and had arrived at the point where I just had to go there. A person who can name every aircraft manufactured by Lockheed-Tristar since 1950 in order of suggested tire pressure, yet has never been near an airfield let alone inside a plane, invites mockery, most of which will almost certainly be justified; and so it was with myself. I had begun to form strong opinions on Tlatilco and Zacatenco phase pottery fragments, and thus through the combined power of obsession and the need to maintain some sense of self-respect was I driven to acquire a passport and a plane ticket.

I was thirty-four years old and had never been outside the country of my birth, unless you count Wales; and nor had I ever had any strong desire to visit other lands prior to the whole Mexican thing; which seems peculiar now that I'm living in Texas. In any case, in terms of world travel this was probably the equivalent of flying before you've learned how to walk. I had spent a year or so idly dipping into spoken Spanish without any conspicuous success, and here I was travelling alone to a place on the opposite side of the world where I would almost certainly be kidnapped and bummed, or so just about everyone I knew believed. I lived in South East London and had reasoned that Mexico City would probably be similar in some respects. Whilst I'd probably be useless in a fight, I had done my best to develop invisibility, or at least that level of confidence that allows one to pass through shitty neighbourhoods without drawing too much attention, or looking too much like you're trying to avoid drawing attention.

To leap ahead, Mexico City actually was like South East London in some respects - warmer, with better food, better public transport and a lot more Mexicans - but essentially similar. I didn't have any trouble, but lacking an ability to see into the future, I had no foreknowledge from which to take comfort on the evening of Sunday the nineteenth of September, my last night in England, the night before I popped my international travel cherry. It wasn't that I necessarily anticipated disaster, or anything at all for that matter. I was unable to imagine what the next two weeks would hold. My state of mind was understandably that of someone about to make a huge leap into the unknown because that was what I was going to do.

Kind words of advice and understanding came to me that evening when the phone rang and Theban Dang suggested that once on board the aircraft, I might like to steal the knife and fork.

I knew Theban through Andy, the singer and lyricist for UNIT with whom I played guitar and keyboards. Andy worked for the patients' council of a large East London hospital specialising in care of the mentally unwell, and had met Theban in this capacity.

The story had been that Theban, a young Vietnamese man in his early twenties was apprehended one evening by members of Her Majesty's constabulary, some routine enquiry which went horribly wrong when Theban's poor grasp of the English language was taken for belligerence. Being a formidable practitioner of various martial arts, he supposedly put about eight officers in hospital before they got him into the van, then one thing led to another and he was incorrectly diagnosed as mentally ill and binned up, as they say.

Well, that's the version I heard, and it's true that whilst Theban struck me as being one of a kind, he never seemed like someone who might necessarily require psychiatric care. By the time I met him, his grasp of English had improved sufficient for communication, and certainly it was better than my Vietnamese. I'd gone over to see Andy one day, and Theban was there, sitting around drinking tea and cadging cigarettes.

'Will you please explain human evolution to Theban,' Andy pleaded, apparently having run out of patience. It might seem an unusual request, but I'd been reading a bit of Dawkins here and there, and Andy enjoyed discussing that sort of thing, and had been making admirable but possibly doomed efforts to engage Theban with subjects other than fighting and gambling.

'What do you want to know?'

'People they all come from Africa, right?' Theban had an arresting turn of phrase, a haphazard grammar which worked for him by virtue of a sly smile - which may just have been his face in repose - and a friendly tone which nevertheless suggested that even if he was interested, he wasn't going to lose any sleep over whatever it was you were saying. 'Cavemen and that they all come from Africa?'

I nodded and started to dredge up what I'd read of our supposed origins - Lucy, Australopithecus and so on - without much conviction as I wasn't entirely sure this was what he was after.

Andy gave me a sympathetic look that said he had tried his best.

'That don't make sense.' Theban wandered off towards the kitchen, shaking his head. 'Where Chinky come from?'

This was the first time I'd heard an Asiatic person use the term Chinky. It was sort of horrifying and yet funny. I'd only previously heard it used by inbred rural heavy metal fans in reference to takeaway food.

'How do you mean?' I asked. 'I guess Chinese people came from Africa just like everyone else.'

Theban wasn't convinced. 'Chinky not come from Africa. Where Chinky come from innit?'

Andy shrugged. How do you argue with that?

Months later, on the eve of the first day of the rest of my life, I picked up the telephone wondering which of those people I regarded as friends had called to wish me well and tell me not to drink the water.

'Lawrence. Andy say you going to Mexico innit.'

Bewildered, and unable to mistake the speaker for anyone but Theban, I said that this was true.

'Who you fly with?'

'British Airways. The flight is in the morning at—'

'Listen. When you get on plane they give you nice meal innit. Like chicken.'

I said that I didn't know, never having flown before.

He assured me that there almost certainly would be a meal, then went into detail, describing how I might steal cutlery by slipping it into my pocket while the stewardess wasn't looking. This done, I could then ask for more cutlery, innocently adopting the position of having been overlooked when the meals were handed out.

I tried to digest this information, falling silent for a moment.

Theban took my silence for a lack of confidence in his plan. 'They not find out. It easy innit,' he reassured me. 'Put knife and fork in pocket. Say miss I got no knife and fork and you get another innit. They give you it. They know nothing. Then you get off plane when you land and you got knife and fork. They not find out.'

I could tell he regarded this plan as foolproof.

'I er,' - I didn't even know where to begin. 'Why would I want to steal their knife and fork?'

'No,' he insisted. 'You wait for waitress to go away, then you put them in pocket innit. They not find out.'

The conversation carried on like this for another twenty minutes. Theban wasn't taking no for an answer, and God I wish I'd been able to record it. I explained that I already owned several knives and forks of my own, but he didn't really understand why I wouldn't want more. Eventually, keen to get Theban off the phone so that I might sit down and recover, I said I'd consider stealing the British Airways knife and fork if the opportunity arose.

The next evening I was in Mexico City, an entire new world opened up before me. My first flight was amazing, and I'd spent the whole eight hours with my face pressed up against the porthole like an excitable dog on a long car journey, and with all the euphoria, I somehow forgot to steal the knife and fork. Perhaps ultimately it doesn't really matter whether I stole the British Airways knife and fork so much as that I had considered the endless possibilities, even if  only just for a second.

So This is Christmas...

So observed the world's most poetic man in the opening bar of his 1972 hit 'Merry Christmas (War is Over)'; 'and what have you done?' he continued, pushing his spectacles a little further up the bridge of his nose to regard us with saintly but nonetheless tested patience, doing that thing done by people with scarves and clipboards when they suggest you think it's okay for South African kittens to make the ivory for your bagpipes in some Korean factory on a wage of one pence a year? You think that's good, do you? You're okay with that sort of thing, are you? You probably think if anything those ivory producing South African kittens are overpaid and should work harder, don't you?

This was how it always sounded to me when the song came on the radio where I used to work; and from the end of September onwards it would be played on Capitol Gold roughly every twenty minutes, alternating with 'I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day,' - which I really didn't - 'Wonderful Christmastime', - which as a point of interest was something I simply wasn't having - and Mud's informative 'It'll be Christmas this Christmas'. Three months of this would have been bad enough in itself even without an increasingly heavy workload running up to the reputedly happiest day of year. Thus, living in England as I was, for roughly two decades the true meaning of my Christmas was six weeks of back breaking toil in the freezing cold, leaving for work and returning home in the dark, and with John Lennon repeatedly sneering at me to a daily schedule. It was cheerless and I often found it difficult to get into the spirit of things, if you can imagine that.

Ironically, or at least ironically in the sense understood by Alanis Morissette, my relationship with Lennon began in earnest one mid-seventies Christmas when Santa brought me the Magical Mystery Tour album by Beatles band. I seem to recall the songs of Beatles band being de rigueur incidental music for all sorts of television documentaries prior to about 1976, and have a vague memory of becoming fixated on that weird plinky-plonky piano around that time. As a rustic youth I was fascinated by the album, virtually playing it into a flexidisc, and spending hours copying out drawings from the booklet. Then I blew a big wad of pocket money on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack because the film had been on the box; and then at some point in 1977, embarked upon my first ever record buying spree, two albums in one go - Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; and there it sort of ended.

I wasn't really interested in music by anyone other than Beatles band, or at least nothing I heard on Radio One or Top of the Pops to the point of wanting to buy it; and I'd listen to those four albums over and over, just as my friend Sean and I had once listened to his Wombles album over and over; and I'd look at the vinyl records that might be ordered from my mother's Marshall Ward catalogue and wonder what was meant by Plastic Ono Band, how it figured in Beatles band continuity, and whether I would ever get to hear its undoubtedly amazing music.

Then in 1979 Graham Pierce lent me the first Devo album, and once the initial shock had passed, I realised that everything I'd ever known was false, and that there was more to life than Beatles band.

Many years later, I purchased other Beatles band albums, mainly because that was the only vinyl left in the short lived East Dulwich record store and I was still holding out against CDs; and although Beatles Band for Sale and Help! sounded surprisingly fresh, I'd peaked too soon with their music and had already heard far too much, and regardless of doubtless sterling quality, the magic had all been squeezed out long before. Beatles band being the only group I really could have been said to discover before I turned ten, their appeal was not far removed from that of the Wombles, the Banana Splits, or any other neatly modular gang of primary coloured personalities. They each had their own distinct powers and costumes. You could collect the set, not like with other groups, those Rolling Stones or whoever - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts, but after that who knows? The French guy who married a four-year old girl, the one who looked like Rod Stewart, the window cleaner from those Confessions films...

My mother was never a fan. She grew up in Liverpool during the Merseybeat era, and her best friend at school ended up marrying Paul McCartney's brother. Beatles band were just four teenagers she saw knocking around from time to time. She favoured the classics, maybe some of that Bob Dylan in a pinch. My dad didn't grow up in Liverpool, but in any case always preferred the Rolling Stones, regarding Beatles band in much the same way as everyone regarded Johnny Hates Jazz during the eighties - excepting possibly the  members and immediate family of Johnny Hates Jazz.

By 1980 I was in my fourth year of high school and had got into the habit of listening to the music I still listen to now. I'd heard enough Beatles band to cheerfully embrace the truisms that for all their fine qualities, there was a lot of other stuff I liked more, and Ringo Starr was ironically the only one of them to have enjoyed a solo career involving tunes. The return of John Lennon with Double Fantasy barely registered on my radar, although I recall taping a lengthy interview from the wireless, John and Yoko telling us why they had come out of retirement, dispensing their views upon punk rock and all that other stuff I was listening to, reflections upon shifts in the musical landscape since they last showed heads above the parapet.

The punk rockers, John told us, were nothing new, really just like Beatles band had been back when they used to play Hamburg. 'We could do that if we wanted to,' he said. 'We would find it easy.'

'We could be freakier than the freaks,' Yoko added, and at that point I realised that neither of them were likely to say anything of interest or relevance ever again.

Some months later, John Lennon was shot by Mark Chapman. It was sad, a bit of a moment, but more than anything it only struck me as strange. People died all the time, and here it was happening to someone whose records I had enjoyed. At school, Jason Roberts - the token self-proclaimed free spirit, a kid who probably knew who Jeff Beck was and had even seen some of his films - wore the haunted face later popularised by John Kerry and Eeyored on about how nothing mattered any more. He's dead, Jason told us in a way which made it clear there was only one person to whom he could have been referring. He may also have addressed me as man during this lament.

I exchanged a glance with Graham who had introduced me to Devo and we both shrugged.

As time has passed I have grown increasingly mystified by the posthumous Deification of the Liverpudlian who died for our sins. He was an adequate songwriter and musician, author of the occasional amusing observation, but probably not a great person. I'm sure all those Jewish fag remarks levelled at Brian Epstein were hilarious if you were there and joining in with the jolly thrust of homophobic japery, and none of us reading this were married to Cynthia so who knows - maybe we too would have found it necessary to punch her in the face from time to time?

Can any of us really say how others should run their lives?

John Lennon at least had a few ideas in this direction, asking that we might consider what it would be like to live without possessions, religion, punching women in the face and so on. I can imagine at least two of those things, but I don't think this really justifies Lennon having become a posthumous human motivational poster. He wrote some reasonable songs, and some which were pretty poor, but ultimately he was a musician, and excepting Henry Rollins and members of Devo, musicians are, for the most part, morons. If you're unsure as to the correct way to sit upon a toilet, don't bother asking a musician. That's not what they're for. Their job is to sing their little songs and then piss off so that grown-ups can talk. Pontification delivered by a musician will, nine times out of ten, comprise anecdotes about sexual intercourse, flying saucers, Atlantis, recreational drugs, drivel that will only ever be of interest to other musicians, and about as much use to anyone else as the Richard Dawkins heavy metal album.

John Lennon was a musician in every sense of the word, neither saint, nor a great orator, timeless wit, nor revolutionary; so can we please stop banging on about Beatles band now?

Enough is enough.