The Who Bloke

 

There were two doors, both number fourteen. One of them was A and the other was B respectively referring to upstairs and ground floor flats, but it was anyone's guess which was which. Both doors had inset panels of frosted glass so if you pressed your nose up close, you could just about see a flight of stairs behind the door on the right; but without any indication or which was A and which was B, it was anyone's guess. I tended to put the mail for flat A in the door on the right, basing this decision on a hierarchy of the uppermost dwelling being the primary one. Occasionally one of them would get something specifically addressed to the basement flat. After a while I began to remember the names, as I did with almost everyone on Glengarry Road after a year or so, and it got to the point where I no longer even needed an accurate house number. If, for example, I had something addressed to someone with the surname of Burnap supposedly living at number 63, it would go to number 36 without my really having to think about it, because that was where Campbell Burnap lived. Somehow I still retain some of this information twenty years later.

I haven't retained the name of the guy who lived at 14A, or possibly 14B but it may have been Adrian, or at least he looked like an Adrian to me. He resembled a more sensitive version of Phil Mitchell from Eastenders and was obviously gay. I'd been living and working in East Dulwich for about five years and gay people seemed drawn to the area for no obvious reason beyond that it was quiet and mostly civilised, and so I had somehow developed gaydar without really trying. I don't know how I knew, but I almost always did, although the information was never really much use to me. My sexual liasons have historically tended to favour persons with boobs, and jokes with opening lines such as three poufs walk into a bar aren't entirely my thing so I've never needed to check whether the coast was clear before committing myself to knuckleheaded discourse.

That said, at the time I hadn't had sexual liaisons with anyone in possession of boobs for a number of years and, some might argue as a consequence, I had taken to Doctor Who books. There was a new one  every month, and most of them were better than anything which had been on the telly. Doctor Who had been cancelled in 1989 and was still a decade away from returning as Britain's favourite breakfast cereal, so people tended to look at you funny when you mentioned it. I'd been obsessed with the show as a child and then as a teenager, so this may even have been the early onset of a peculiarly specific form of mid-life crisis.

One item of mail regularly received by Adrian - or whatever his name could have been - was a monthly subscription copy of Doctor Who magazine. I'd looked at the thing in WHSmith a couple of times but it was a bit too intensive even for me. Nevertheless, it meant I was well-disposed towards the Who bloke at 14A, or possibly 14B, even before I met him. On the first few occasions when I actually did meet him, my cheery postal good morning was met with only a silent sullen glance, but I persisted on the assumption that he was probably just having a bad day, plus life is too short to harbour resentment against persons you don't actually know. Eventually I caught him at his front door as I stood there with his latest issue of Doctor Who magazine about to go in the letterbox.

'Yes, I've been meaning to have a word with you,' he began somewhat icily, then went into a lengthy complaint about his mail being delivered to the flat upstairs.

'I understand the problem,' I said, 'but I don't think it's me,' launching into an explanation which probably foreshadowed the first paragraph, adding that his complaint tended to be common when I was on holiday and someone else was covering for me, and that whoever that was stood only a 50% chance of getting it right given the absence of anything to indicate which flat was which.

He seemed to understand, and was even a bit embarrassed, so I changed the subject with, I see you're into Doctor Who, which was probably akin to recognising a fellow Freemason in whichever year it was. He smiled for what seemed to be the first time ever, and we compared notes for a minute before he had to be off, being on his way out somewhere.

The next occasion, I got invited in, which was a bit of a shock after the first couple of frosty years and his failure to reciprocate any of my greetings. He was a little older than me but looked significantly older, so I thought, and his flat was much the same as mine. He mentioned a partner of unspecified gender, possibly feeling awkward about it for some reason, and that the partner had died. Additionally, his mother had died more recently. This seemed to explain my impression of him being a less than happy bunny, and I mentioned the unreciprocated greetings, or at least tactfully referred to them by saying, 'yes, you always struck me as having a lot on your mind.'

'Sorry about that,' he said. 'I think I was having a bit of a nervous breakdown for a while there.'

We talked about Who, albeit at crossed purposes. He hadn't read the books, although he'd heard good things about them; and he was quite into conventions and fan gatherings, which didn't really sound like my sort of thing. He'd met Sophie Aldred a couple of times and told me that her screen persona was pretty much her persona in real life. He showed me a fairly large model TARDIS which occupied his bedside table and had a lamp inside, which I found a bit weird. I might have found it weird that he showed me his bedroom, but his flat seemed to be mainly just a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen - much like my own. We seemed to be fairly similar in many respects.

I imagined that this would be the start of a friendship, if not necessarily a beautiful friendship, but from then on he kept himself pretty much to himself, just as before. Our meetings were chance occurrences, albeit significantly more jovial chance occurrences than they had once been. The very last time I saw him, he'd been having a clear out and getting rid of stuff. I handed him his mail and he gave me a DVD, saying, 'Here, you need to see this if you haven't already.'

It was a DVD of the BBC's Edge of Darkness from 1985. I'd never heard of it.

'Then you really need to watch it,' he said. 'It's very good.'

It seemed to be a crime drama and therefore possibly not my sort of thing, but it seemed like a generous act so I took the DVD home and watched it. I moved away from home in 1984 and didn't have a television again until about 1993, which is why I'd never heard of Edge of Darkness. The irony is that I'd moved away from home to take a fine art degree specialising in time based media, specifically film, video and, I suppose, television.

I thought Edge of Darkness was amazing, and so much so that I insisted my friend Andy come over and watch it too, which he did over a couple of afternoons. He also thought it was wonderful, and particularly enjoyed Joe Don Baker's massively entertaining portrayal of a Texan character named Darius Jedburgh - this in spite of Andy's infrequently stated general dislike of American culture.

'Yes,' he grudgingly conceded after we'd just watched Jedburgh terrorise guests at a conference with lumps of plutonium, 'if one really must be an American, then you should at least have the decency to be from Texas.'

I have no idea what became of Adrian, but Who was back on the box by 2005, and was a huge hit but seemed to have lost whatever it was I'd liked about the thing in the first place. Given that I now live in Texas, the rest may add up to some kind of narrative - if not necessarily one which means anything profound - but you may have to put the pieces together yourself.

Carnival

Jackie has the week off and Karen is covering her walk, which is the one next to mine. Fay is immediately behind, covering Crystal Palace Road because Richard is also away. I hear someone ask where he is.

Juliet's head pops around the corner of the frame. 'He's probably at home having a smash innit,' she reports with mischievous glee.

'Really Juliet,' I say with mock indignation. 'I'm surprised at you.'

'All right then,' she adds, somehow taking my faux outrage as a request for clarification. 'He's at home having a wank!' She does the hand gesture in illustration of her hypothesis.

'Must run in the family,' says Danny without looking around.

'Fuck off,' suggests Fay, who is Juliet's older sister.

'Are you going to the carnival?' Karen asks.

'You must have nearly all of your tea set now, yeah?' Danny continues. 'Just a few weeks to go. You must be excited.'

'Fuck off.'

'Harsh,' says Andre as he walks past, loaded down with parcels.

'Did she just tell you to fuck off?' asks Joel from the frame on the other side of Danny.

'You can fuck off too,' says Fay, directly addressing Andre for some reason.

'Don't say that, Fay,' Andre smiles.

'Fuck off.'

'Just think, your whole tea set might be finished soon. That should make you happy, yeah?'

I asked about the tea set last week. Danny told me that Fay has a subscription to a weekly magazine, one which comes to the sorting office because she lives in the area. It's something to do with the late Princess of Wales, and each issue of the magazine comes with a souvenir item of fake commemorative crockery building up into a sort of Lady Diana tribute tea set with cups, sugar bowl, fancy spoons and so on and so forth. Our amusement derives from this being the very last thing anyone would ever expect of Fay.

'Lady Di would be very disappointed to hear you talking like that, Fay,' says Danny.

'Fuck off.'

'So ladylike!'

She kisses her teeth. 'You better watch I don't cut you.'

'Don't be like that, darling,' says Andre.

'And after I've cut you, I'm going to kidnap your dad and do him up the arse with a strap on,' Fay adds, almost casually as she continues to sort mail into the frame. 'And I'll make your mum watch innit.'

Andre doesn't have an answer to this one and walks off, silent with laughter.

Everybody pauses in their work to look at Fay, impressed. She smiles to herself and basks in our admiration.

'Are you going to the carnival, Fay?' Karen asks again.

'I'm going to have to see. I don't know what him indoors wants to do, you know.'

'Bring him along. Tell him you'll be doing the bogle innit. That might help him make up his mind.'

'That's that dance, isn't it?' I say, because it's one of those things I've been wondering about. 'The bogle, I mean.'

'What dance?' says Karen.

'You know,' I say, and I put my letters down and step back into the walkway. I put my hands on my knees and stick my arse in the air, moving it up and down whilst impersonating a dancehall rhythm with my mouth. 'That dance.'

'Fay, have you seen this?' says Karen.

Fay looks around and chuckles. 'Oh my days.'

'But is that the bogle?' I get back to my letters. They still haven't answered the question.

'You want to come to the carnival with us, Lawrence?' Karen asks.

'I dunno. Sounds a bit lively for me, Notting Hill and all that.'

'You should come with us. You ain't got nothing on this weekend innit.'

'I don't know. It'll be all that bashment stuff.' It occurs to me that I had another question. 'What is bashment anyway?'

'What's bashment?'

'Yeah - I keep hearing that word on the radio, so what is it? Is it just like dancehall and that?'

'He can't go. His misses won't let him innit.' Juliet has turned up out of nowhere.

'Well, I don't know about that,' I say, although I sort of do. I try to imagine herself at the Notting Hill carnival, doing her best to stick to the white bits with the whole food and hand knitted goods while bending over backwards to identify with black people and getting it all wrong because she doesn't actually know any, apart from Nadia. She has it in her head that I have a thing about Nadia, which I suspect is a misinterpretation of my talking to Nadia like she's a human being rather than my black friend.

'I'm going,' says Juliet, and like everything Juliet says, or at least everything Juliet says to me, there's something in there that I don't quite understand - possibly an invitation, an element of amusement although nothing cruel. She has a fierce little face, like a black Minnie the Minx. She's trouble but in an interesting way.

'You can go with us lot,' says Karen.

I bite my lip and keep on sorting the mail, wishing the world was just a little bit different to how it is.

Bishop Street, 1990

The Royal Mail sorting office on Bishop Street in Coventry is the largest building in which I've ever been employed, three or four floors above a huge loading bay full of eighteen-wheelers, expansive canteen up at the top. The blend of exhaust and inner city fog as one enters through the loading bay at 5.30AM, still cold and dark, has an inexplicable tang of diarrhoea. I can never work that one out given that the recipe is logically mostly gases produced by machines and related industrial processes.

The sorting frames are on the first floor, a single vast space occupying the entire length and breadth of the building, with a ceiling so high as to accommodate turbines. It's hard to keep from thinking of it as a factory what with the scale and the rafters, and then the tall expanse of glass at the end, rows of window panes stretching up into the roof like in a place of worship. If architecture has DNA, then there is a lot of Coventry in Bishop Street - that distinctive blend of automotive assembly line and modern cathedral. I first walked in on Monday the 22nd of May, 1989, and immediately knew I'd made a mistake.

The entire city is divided into eight sections, all side by side on the shop floor, like eight individual sorting offices set up inside the same warehouse. My first walk was South-West 10 encompassing Hearsall Lane in Earlsdon up so far as Sovereign Road, amounting to about eight-hundred addresses. The upper limit in Chatham was around five-hundred. After a month or so I've been moved to the North-West at the other end of the shop floor, and kept here just long enough to make a couple of friends, or at least long enough for a few of the postmen in residence to take the piss out of me.

I haven't had my hair cut in over a year, so it's getting quite long. I usually tie it in a pony tail because it gets in the way and I don't want it cut, and because it's the eighties. This means that, so far as my colleagues are concerned, I'm a hippy because it's as easy a way to identify me as any. Adrian Hollands has accordingly given me the nickname Mellow, an acknowledgment of generic hippy demeanour to ironically offset my actual mood and personality, which is anything but mellow and is usually severely pissed off and angry at the unreasonable quota of work piled upon my shoulders on a daily basis. Once I realised there wasn't much point in being additionally pissed off by the nickname, they seemed to accept me and so I've settled in.

Adrian, known as Ade - obviously - is part of a double act with Ian. They're a couple of years older than I am, so mid-twenties, abrim with confidence and funny, but not to the point of being arseholes.

Dennis and Phil are working on the frames behind mine. Dennis is abrasive and best ignored - probably mid-fifties, red-faced and with huge pupils swimming around behind spectacles cut from the bottom of Coke bottles. He always looks outraged about something or other, even when he smiles, which is presumably difficult given that his mouth is naturally down-turned like that of a glum cartoon toad. Aside from the delivery of mail, his main job seems to be laughing at Phil's jokes. I can't really hold it against him because Phil's jokes are usually very funny.

Phil is fat, blonde, red-faced - an example of a type which will eventually be identified as a Gammon. He's abusive, but his abuse is dispensed more or less regardless of whoever is at the receiving end and is simply an extreme method of letting off steam; and we tend to generate a lot of steam in this job. His jokes, to be fair, aren't really jokes as such, but rather are expletives and insults delivered with such shocking force and conviction that amusement seems the only fitting reaction.

'Hot today innit, Phil?' Dennis suggests in conversational spirit. 'I'm sweating here.'

'It's too hot for a WANK!' Phil reports, and you can actually hear the upper case letters of the last word, bold and underlined for emphasis. 'Don't you bristle your moustache at me, Mr. Bhatt!'

This last instruction has the defensive attitude of chair legs abruptly screeching backwards across the floor of a bar. Had there been a piano player, he would have stopped. Mr. Bhatt is our driver, a large pacific man of Indian heritage with a proud moustache. Each morning he silently cruises the aisles between the sorting frames looking for parcels he might take out on the van. This isn't so much altruism as that he doesn't want us chasing him down the road with our larger parcels later on once he's already got started.

'You are agitated, Mr. McCrystal,' Mr. Bhatt observes. 'I think you are unhappy about something.'

'I'm unhappy because I'm doing the work of two fucking blokes, Mr. Bhatt.'

'But you are normally doing the work of two, Mr. McCrystal,' the driver adds thoughtfully. 'That must mean that today you are doing the work of four men!'

This is an example of Mr. Bhatt's sense of humour. It's mostly in the delivery, and he smiles a little as he silently heads off towards the end of the aisle to speak with Guy, our supervisor.

Guy has a fire engine which he fixes up in his spare time and takes to fairs and the like. I guess we all need something.

Ade can be heard delivering comic threats to Tony. He could quite easily have Tony beaten up, or done over, or something. He doesn't care how ridiculous it sounds.

'How are you going to go about that then?' Tony enquires, dismissive and slightly camp, like a fatter Kenneth Williams - forever disappointed and underwhelmed by everything.

'I have my contacts,' Ade reports, matter of fact.

A moment goes by, just a little too long for the baton of repartee to be passed along.

'Yeah!' Mouse blusters in the usual spray of saliva. 'Contact lenses!'

Mouse is younger than I am but looks about forty, balding, a bit greasy with rodent qualities, hence the nickname. Everyone pauses to look at mouse.

'Good 'un, Mouse,' says Ade with a fake grin. 'Good 'un!'

Ian meanwhile effects staccato bursts of insincere laughter. 'Contact lenses - brilliant!'

Mouse goes back to sorting letters while silently working on his material.

'Small business? Small business???!!!' Phil explodes with what sounds like genuine outrage. 'One fucking bloke and a ladder! Small business??? Cunts!'

He's just got to the Enterprise Allowance mail, of which a great quantity has been sent out this morning. He speaks for all of us. He compares notes with Dennis, both muttering, now providing critical commentary on those who dare to receive mail on Phil's route, and what sort of fucking cunts are sending it to them. One particular diatribe gains volume, concluding with fucking pony-tail cunt from fucking London!

'I heard that!' I swivel around to face him.

'Oh - he heard that!' He's already looking at me, right in the eye and laughing, but cruel laughter which somehow makes it funnier. 'You were fucking supposed to hear it!'

I started with Royal Mail in Chatham then transferred, which in Coventry terms broadly makes me some cunt from London. I knew the move back to the Midlands was a mistake even at the time, but felt I was otherwise out of options. I've therefore put in for another transfer. I will start work at Catford sorting office in south-east London on Monday the 6th of August, 1990.

I've already told Phil.

He said, 'I'll give it about three weeks before you end up selling your arse around Piccadilly Circus.'

Be that as it may, I'm going to miss the horrible cunt.

Beano

There were eleven of us, myself included, and we met up at the Crystal Palace Tavern - Kingsley, Andre, Don, Sav, Big Dan, Rodney, Tuns, Steve Mozzella, Alan the manager, and some bloke seemingly known to everyone except myself. He was some mate of Alan the manager, probably a postman from up Mandela Way and unknown to me because I tended to avoid overtime where possible. Eight hours of that shit each day, plus four at weekends was in itself quite sufficient.

It was Saturday afternoon, just enough time for everyone to have had a quick shower and a change of clothes after work. A van had been hired and we were going on a beano to Southend-on-Sea.

I'd customarily avoided this sort of thing in the past, but I was approaching forty and I'd begun to ask myself what was the worst that could happen. I liked a drink and I liked to get drunk, and I'd even begun to enjoy the company of other postmen. Even Tuns, my former enemy, seemed to have got over whatever problem he'd had with me when I started at East Dulwich. We weren't buddies, but at least he was no longer sneering at me from the other side of the sorting office whilst rhetorically asking who the fuck I thought I was because I'd just chuckled at a joke cracked by someone from one of his other inordinately complex mental lists.

On the other hand, Alan the manager was an unalloyed tosser, and unfortunately the reason that Nadim had decided against joining us; although Nadim also had some problem with Rodney, something about the changing rooms after some football match and how Rodney had sprayed Ralgex on his finger and then stuck it up some young kid's arse. It sounded a bit unlikely to me, but it also sounded like the sort of disagreement for which there wouldn't be much to gain from taking sides; and personally I liked Rodney. He was one of the funniest people I'd ever met and had at least never tried to stick a  Ralgexy finger up my arse.

Steve was a bit of a wild card and was usually to be found at the centre of an actual shop floor fist fight at least once a week. I never really understood why as he seemed fairly amiable whenever I spoke to him. My guess is that he lacked the ability to rise above the sort of shite people habitually come out with at work.

I used to drink with the Catford postmen, not all the time because that bunch would drink until they couldn't stand, but mostly they were fun. The Dulwich bunch didn't really socialise in the same way, probably because so few of them actually lived in Dulwich, so the beano seemed to be a means of redressing the balance, or something along those lines, but with the disadvantage of it being fairly difficult to stagger home from Southend-on-Sea once I'd had enough.

Wikipedia thus describes the etymology of the term beano:

A bean-feast was an informal term for a celebratory meal or party, especially an annual summer dinner given by an employer to his or her employees, probably derived from a tradition in the Low Countries at Twelfth Night. By extension, colloquially, it describes any festive occasion with a meal and perhaps an outing. The word, and its shorter form beano, are fairly common in Britain, less known in the United States.

So the comic which brought us Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids is therefore named after a works piss-up.

We piled into the van and set off. I managed to seat myself amongst Kingsley, Don, and Andre, and significantly as far as possible from Alan the manager, but not so far as to be unable to hear him trying hard to balance his efforts to be one of the lads whilst maintaining command presence. Curiously for a black man, he didn't seem to particularly like black people, which looked one hell of a lot as though he was trying to prove something to white managers - see, I don't play favourites, I'm not like them, I'm like you. He routinely pulled Kingsley up about stuff he probably wouldn't have noticed had it been some white dude.

Yet even here, as just a bunch of cunts in a van with not a uniform in sight, the hierarchy remained. Alan haw haw hawed with the overtime boys, the docket bashers, those for whom getting off your tits with the boss was apparently strategic; and the rest of us - the losers and tag-alongs - kept to the back of the van.

It was a couple of hours to Southend, going via the Blackwall Tunnel, with just one stop at an industrial estate somewhere in Essex so that Don and Andre could urinate in broad daylight against a chain link fence.

We hit Southend, the seafront, and straight into a pub, and I immediately realised that this had been a fucking terrible idea. I'd imagined all eleven of us, maybe even Alan, quietly sinking into pleasant alcoholic haze over the next nine or ten hours, sinking into our chairs, talking shite, and all differences reduced to raw material for jokes and comic digs. Instead, Southend was swarming with arseholes all looking to get pissed and laid, or looking for something which might at least be obtained by exerting downward force upon everyone else. It was loud and chaotic, and the reason we had all gone into the pub was for as quick a pint as possible while getting our bearings and working out which arcade we were going to hit first. It was going to be an afternoon of pings and flashing lights, and even the act of getting drunk seemed to have taken lesser priority.

'What the hell are we doing?' I asked in rhetorical spirit.

'I really don't know.' Andre's answer seemed similarly dour, much to my surprise. Everyone else was getting into the swing of it, off to some pub, agreeing to meet later, announcing preferences for such and such an arcade game. Even Kingsley had been absorbed into the beano gestalt, contrary to his ordinarily temperate disposition.

I suddenly knew I absolutely could not spend the next eight or nine hours in the company of these people. It was nothing personal but the fact of being stranded here and obligated to engage in someone else's idea of fun until the van took us back to south-east London around nine in the evening was like some massive concrete block I simply couldn't get around. I'd anticipated some social event, but these people didn't want to talk. They wanted to get pissed and play arcade games. They wanted fun activities.

'Fuck this,' I said, seizing the moment. 'I'm going home.'

Only Don, Kingsley and Andre had heard me. The rest were in different bars or battling illuminated aliens or stuffing burgers into their faces.

'I'll come too,' said Andre, looking slightly ill.

We followed signs for the railway station, making our way against the tide of people piling onto the seafront in search of fun. We passed some goths, not the sort I'd grown up with, but the new generation, the ones who were into Marilyn Manson. They were the first of this batch I'd seen, and this was the first time I felt old.

They looked like children. They wore black clothes so clean and tailored as to seem fresh from the box, ridiculous flared trousers and silver spikes in stupid places. They looked like products, like things which came in sets, as though they had all been designed and marketed according to specific guidelines.

Andre and I took the train back to Liverpool Street, sharing a compartment in silence because he was genuinely ill - something he had eaten before setting off that morning.

I, on the other hand, had no such excuse, just the usual error of judgement.

Quiet Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rap Autopsy in a Diner

I've come to regard the last five years of the twentieth century as my transitional years, for one reason and another. A lot of stuff changed during those five years, or ceased to remain the same, and my listening habits were among those changes. Rock music was no longer doing it where I was concerned, and neither Morrissey nor his legacy said anything to me about my life. I think I may even have had an entire year without music somewhere in there.

I effected a return to the form with classical works, just the odd piece of Beethoven or Strauss here and there, mainly out of curiosity and because I trusted that it wouldn't suddenly adopt a Manchester accent and start walking like a monkey. Somehow this led to R&B, another magisterium comprising the sort of thing I wouldn't ordinarily have enjoyed, or at least understood; and the R&B led directly to rap.

I had a few rap records, but mostly the obvious stuff you would expect a white bloke to own. I'd never fully engaged with rap because it seemed too vast a realm with its own distinct parameters, and my enthusiasm would only ever be a token indulgence - like all those worthy white dudes still insisting that, in their inevitably humble opinion, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is the greatest rap album - because they read it somewhere and it's the only one the fuckers have actually heard all the way through.

In 1995 I suddenly felt I understood rap, really and truly for the first time. I could no longer stand to listen to rock because it sounded like entertainment, and only entertainment, and with anything weirder or more experimental beginning to seem like so much pointless art gallery wank. Everyone I knew at work listened to rap and I acquired a taste for it by a process resembling osmosis, and because it was the only thing which sounded angry enough to get me through a miserable, back-breaking day. Disgruntled black men kept me sane because they understood the shitty end of the stick better than anyone.

It was always exciting when I spotted a new issue of The Source on the racks of the newsagent in East Dulwich Grove. The Source is an American magazine covering rap music, hip-hop, and black culture. I also bought XXL, Rap Pages, Vibe, and Hip Hop Connection. The latter was an English magazine and was, as such, more intelligent, better written, and funnier than its transatlantic equivalents. There was also Murder Dog, the best American magazine by some margin, but it wasn't easy to find and was usually only on sale at Tower Records in central London. The rest ranged from well-meaning but stupid to just plain stupid depending on the issue, but they nevertheless kept me informed and fascinated.

So a new issue of The Source would turn up on the racks of the newsagent in East Dulwich Grove. I'd buy a copy in the morning and save it for after work, heading to Ken's caff up Crystal Palace Road to read about Timbaland, Master P, or the LOX over egg, chips, beans, two sausages and a cup of tea. This was my ritual, a little splash of sunlight in what was usually a shitty, overcast day of hard labour spent hammering square pegs into round holes.

'Usual, sir?' Ken calls as I enter, because I always order the same thing. I nod, grunt, sit, and start on my reading - new albums and usually two or three I'm after, who has done what, names I've been wondering about, always something which seems worth knowing. It's another world, one to which I feel dimly connected by virtue of my less than sunny disposition.

We need such rituals to keep us pinned to the planet.

The Source had its moments, but was never so great as it clearly believed itself to be - a position apparently based on the idea that the magazine was somehow woven into the fabric of the culture it described, that a review awarding the full five mics to a new album in The Source really meant something in the great scheme of things, and that The Source had been down from day one, as we say. The magazine had its place, and there are a lot of albums I picked up specifically because I'd read about them in The Source, including albums which may or may not have kept me approximately sane at one point or another; but, as with the lyrical content of the music upon which it reported, The Source often had a tendency to overplay its own significance. While an artist such as Louisiana's Fiend might justifiably claim to be the baddest motherfucker alive, he does so in the context of his music as a form of expression, and if you listen to enough of his music you'll most likely reach the same conclusion as he did. On the other hand, a magazine adopting this same position as its editorial policy is fucking ridiculous because it's a magazine, exclusively serving to report on the activities of others. The range of its potential for original artistic expression is limited, unless it's actually a fucking novel and not a magazine at all. The Source never quite seemed to grasp this distinction, and has historically regarded its own commentary as an integral strand of the culture it attempts to describe.

Nevertheless, a new issue was always exciting as I scoffed my two sausages, egg, chips and beans, shucking off eight or more hours of mindless, grey slog. I'd finish eating, pay up, then head home with a little more of a swagger in my step than would otherwise have been the case, freshly aligned with something which made all of this bearable.

Twenty-four years later, I'm living in Texas and I spot a copy of The Source on the rack at my local supermarket. I buy it out of a sense of nostalgia and head for Papagayos, my nearest Mexican diner. The sky is uncharacteristically grey and I'm going to read the magazine over breakfast seeing as it's still going. Were I to describe this in a novel, it would be a motif, a pattern which repeats whilst serving as a measure of how much else has changed; and that's what is happening here because life is often very much like a novel.

I no longer carry the weight of a disappointing world on my shoulders, and life has generally turned out pretty decent. This allows me the luxury of looking back, not so much out of nostalgia as curiosity, attempting to reach an understanding of the past. I still listen to rap because much of it communicates certain truisms which apply regardless of the quality of one's life, simply because it's about the quality of society in general; but I no longer read the magazines because most of them have ceased publication, and because in any case I grew bored of them many years ago.

The Source in particular shot itself in the foot when taking the editorial position that a specific white rapper was destroying hip hop. Whilst there may be many good reasons to criticise Eminem, his having committed a casual act of racism on tape back when no-one had heard of the fucker would seem to be reaching somewhat, particularly considering acts which those who live in glass houses should probably try to avoid. The demonisation of Eminem seemed a cynically obvious attempt to generate controversy and, by association, sales, whilst elevating the career of Benzino, a less economically successful rapper with shares in the magazine, or some editorial position, or something of the sort.

I've purchased what is apparently issue 274 of The Source, probably the first since I moved here, and I'm going to read it in the caff just like in the old days. It was there on the magazine rack in the supermarket and I thought, what the fuck, so I sit in Papagayos and wait for my migas plate. Migas is my American equivalent of two sausage, egg, chips, and beans. It's an omelette of chillis, peppers, corn chips and cheese served with refried beans and fried potatoes.

Issue 274 is the Annual Power 30 Issue of The Source, a yearly special which prints a list of who makes the most money in the rap industry. It's a feature I never cared for, and never understood why anyone would. In at number six is the guy who started Spotify, a streaming service. The entire magazine now comprises industry horseshit. Reading it is like being stuck in a room full of suits as they discuss their annual salaries. Imagine an arts publication which examines Picasso purely in terms of how much his paintings fetched at auction.

Interviews with artists I've never heard of explain how much they were signed for, how much money they make, how much their hit song sold, how many downloaded it from bandcamp, and then - every single fucking time - all about how Lil Yachty be keeping it real. Everybody be keeping it real. All they've ever done is keep it real. I don't remember the last time I heard of a rap artist who ain't be keeping it real; and you can tell they be keeping it real because they take the trouble to write it out using the syntax of a person who ain't be too good at the grammar 'n' shit; like diligently replacin' the g with an apostrophe so as to render phrases such as keepin' it real closer to how they might be spoken by some guy from the street, because you ain't want anyone to be thinkin' your ass be all fancy 'n' shit or that you ain't be keepin' it real. I sold my back issues of The Source to a bloke in Croatia through eBay, so I don't know whether the magazine was always this way, or whether it's simply that I'm happier and less fucking stupid than I used to be.

One issue of a magazine which probably wasn't The Source but may as well have been had an interview with Eve, the Ruff Ryders recording artist. The article emphasised her keepin' it real and repeatedly compared her to a pitbull in a skirt. Some journalist had presumably come up with the analogy, and they were going to get their money's worth. The next issue ran a letter praising both Eve and the article. She keepin' it real and she real fly, the reader enthused, adding, she like a pitbull in a skirt, cleverly restating the analogy with the words in the exact same order and everything. It was hard to see why anyone would have bothered writing such a letter, and I personally thought it reflected poorly on both the readership and the editorial standards of the magazine.

So I do my best to find something worth reading in the Annual Power 30 Issue of The Source, but it's like reading a fucking bank statement or something given to you by an insurance salesman. Er'body be keepin' it real and er'body be makin' hella money, and that's all it has to say for itself. The legacy of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, Olaudah Equiano and anyone else who ever had their ass kicked for pointing out that society is rife with certain inequalities is apparently we be getting' paid. In a society of do rights and apple polishers, where individual freedoms are becoming less important than just how hard you saluted, how hard you cheered, the voice of the resistance has become an investment portfolio, and if you play your cards right, you too might one day get a key to the executive washroom, or at least get to eat the slop they feed you in the big house.

I eat my migas, which are delicious, but which have taken a long time coming; and whilst Papagayos used to be a great place to eat, they seem to have fallen behind. I get the impression they're short staffed, and the food is good, but not quite to the standards of Los Dos Laredos or Bandera Jalisco. I skim the magazine, but there's no name with which I am familiar, and nothing I recognise. Subsequent research conducted via the internet yields video clips of rainbow-haired teenagers reading out their bank statements and pulling faces over a pinging noise. Briefly I pause to read about the Yung Miami and JT, collectively known as the City Girls.

Unfortunately, JT has been robbed of all the joy of the #In MyFeelingsChallege due to her incarceration on credit card fraud. She reported to jail on a two-year prison sentence in July, and is scheduled to be released in March 21, 2020.

Miami has been carrying the flame solo and she has been doing a good job keeping their name alive. She launched the #CityGirlsTwerkChallenge where contestants uploaded their best video twerking and the grand prize was $25,000 and a chance to get 'flewed' out to be in the music video with herself and Cardi B. Twerk was the twosome's first entry in the Billboard Hot 100 charts, coming in at 92.

I know they can't all be Angela Davis, but Jesus…

Maybe it was always this way and I simply didn't notice. I suppose the realisation at least means that I'm older, hopefully a little a wiser.

Life During Rainfall

It doesn't seem to rain much in Texas, so when it does rain it seems all the more dramatic. It's been raining for three days solid. There have been breaks during which I've zipped out on the bike and ridden the usual twenty miles. I kept the waterproof jacket and trousers which came with the job at Royal Mail, and they're enough to make the ride bearable under conditions of light to moderate rainfall.

Life has gone on as normal for everyone except the cats. Where most of them go out to attend to cat business during the hours of darkness, they've been stuck inside these past few nights. I am greeted first thing by a front room full of irritable felines, and usually a couple of protest turds strategically laid at the traditional locations. Nibbler is the worst, marching up and down, hissing and swiping at everyone and everything as though a couple of hours in the company of other cats has been too much for him; so I let him out, although it's not like he's going anywhere given that it's still raining.

Our internet connection fizzles out on the third day, just as it always does. Rainfall destroys our internet every time, and I still don't understand why. We jump through the same hoops over and over, and it's always due to some junction box a few blocks away. My theory is that our internet is beamed directly to this junction box, and that the signal is quickly baked into tiny pies by magic pixies so small as to be effectively invisible. The pixies then convey these pies across a small lake the size of a penny, to a receiver. The pies are fed into the receiver, and from that point on the internet comes directly to our house, enabling us to watch Wheel of Fortune without it resembling a Nine Inch Nails video. When it rains, either conditions on the small lake become so treacherous as to prevent the magic pixies crossing, or else causing the pie crusts to dissolve in transit.

Nevertheless, we phone the help desk.

'You need to turn the modem off and then back on again,' the lady suggests.

'Why not?' I say. 'We've already done that three or four times, but maybe the fourth will be the one which effects a magical transformation.'

'She can hear you,' Bess hisses, indicating that she has her smartphone set to speaker.

'I know,' I smile. 'That's why I said it.'

We turn the modem off, and then back on again. We remain without internet, and I imagine losing a limb to a chainsaw, phoning the hospital in agony.

Before I submit the ticket, could you first try walking around the room for me?

Then, did that fix the problem?

They're going to send someone out tomorrow morning. There will be a phone call first thing asking me to confirm that the internet hasn't just grown back of its own accord, and that I still require assistance.

No Wheel of Fortune for us tonight.

We watch a couple of episodes of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation on DVD. It's interesting, but two hours of Kenneth Clark is more than enough for one night, and besides neither Bess nor myself fully agree with his definition of what constitutes civilisation. Also, I'm disappointed at the free pass he's given to certain fucking awful examples of overly sentimental eighteenth century painting, given the opprobrium he heaped upon significantly less offensive works in the previous episode.

I look through cupboards full of DVDs and notice Mamma Mia! 'How about this?' I ask.

'I hate that movie,' Bess tells me.

'I know. We could watch it and take the piss. I've never seen it.'

'Well, I guess…'

We wait for the thing to load.

Her first husband gave my wife the DVD for Christmas, despite her having told him that she had hated the film. He also gave a copy to his friend Karen Eliot* that same Christmas, so it was probably some kind of two for the price of one deal. It later emerged that he'd been knobbing Karen Eliot on the quiet, all of which partially accounts for why he is no longer married to my wife.

We watch about twenty minutes.

It's basically Four Weddings and a Funeral with more exotic locations, all floppy haired Englishmen exclaiming gosh and laying on the self-deprecation with a silver-plated trowel. It's the story of a girl whose father could be any one of four mysterious photogenic men - Colin Firth and Piers Brosnan amongst them - seemingly implying that her mother was pulling a train at the time of conception; and every couple of minutes they all foghorn and bluster through a song by Abba so as to illustrate some point or other.

I've never felt particularly protective of Abba, but I liked them when I was a kid.

'This is awful,' I announce. 'I don't think I can watch any more.'

We switch to Kath & Kim DVDs and I let another cat out, this time Kirby who pads onto the back porch and concludes that yes, it is indeed still fucking raining. She looks back at me.

'I don't know what you think I can do,' I tell her. 'My powers are limited.'

Every time I open the door I hear the white noise of rain and the constant drip as it sluices from the roof into puddles. It's been three days and it's getting a bit much.

Next morning, I'm still at home. I can't ride the bike even though it isn't raining.

The guy turns up at eleven, fiddles around for a while, then concludes that the problem is indeed with the junction box and those magic pixies - or however it works. He's going to call the people who fixed the same problem last time, and the umpteen times before, and they'll get it done just as soon as they can. It should take an hour.

Four hours later, we still have no internet connection.

I walk to the supermarket to pick up some cat food. I've been using my Sony Walkman again, now that I have all of my cassette tapes back. I'm listening to something Andrew taped for me back in the late nineties, a mix of Dinosaur Jr., Tad, Eleventh Dream Day, Pavement - all of those American guitar bands he used to like so much. Andrew died in 2009, and here I am listening to his tape of American music whilst actually in America. Not for the first time, it feels as though I'm in a film, and the sun is out at long last.

*: Name changed so as to protect the not even remotely innocent.

Where I'm From

People notice the accent and ask where I'm from. Some assume I'm Australian. I've never quite settled on an answer, but have recently taken to saying Stratford-upon-Avon. Everyone's heard of Stratford-upon-Avon because of Shakespeare, and that was the nearest large town when I was growing up. Since then I've spent five years in Kent, about three in Coventry, and nearly twenty in south-east London - pacing around the country like I was trying to get out. 

I'm no longer certain of the dates - late nineties and maybe some small change, but no later than 2002. It's seven in the morning at Royal Mail. Some days I'll take the unofficial ten minute grace break, but not today. I have too much work. We have a workload amounting to about nine hours of work which we have to fit into an eight hour day, so breaks tend to go out the window. If this week's acting governor is an arsehole and any mail is left undelivered because someone bothered to take the break to which they're entitled, it could mean an entirely unethical first stage warning for delaying the mail. No-one has the time or energy to argue.

I usually spend the grace break - if I take it - talking to Carmen. She's the woman who runs our canteen. She works for a catering contractor rather than Royal Mail, and has been assigned to our place. We're about the same age, but she's from a Caribbean background. She's coffee coloured with a smile that warms my heart, and - to commit what may well be racial stereotyping - a soft, lilting voice which sounds almost as though she's singing. We are both lost souls of some description. She asks about my possibly ludicrous attempts to write a novel, and I tell her about Lawrence Miles, my favourite author. She says that he sounds interesting. She lives in Plaistow, miles away in East London, and attends a reading group once a week. She's even read some Philip K. Dick. I like her because she seems to like me, and because she's interested in things. There's more to her than tea and toast.

'It's not Philip K. Dick, but it's probably better than Jeffrey Archer,' I joke, having lumbered her with a stack of pages from my cranky novel, printed from my PC last night.

'You shouldn't laugh at him,' she says, not unkindly. 'He's sold a lot of books.'

But today I work through the break to a soundtrack of Jackie swearing in the next bay along from mine, mostly cursing those to whom she delivers mail for either getting too much of it, or for it being mostly junk. I can never tell whether she's genuinely outraged or just passing time. She seems neither happy nor unhappy, just world weary.

Ted passes and jokes, 'Do you know who the father is yet, Jack? Must be one of this lot innit?' He grins and casts his gaze around the sorting office so as to imply that any one of the thirty or so males present could be the father of Jackie's impending child.

'Yeah,' she sighs, playing along. 'I'll probably just name him SE22.' This is the postcode covered by our sorting office.

'Wasn't you was it, Oscar?' Ted now asks me. 'You didn't get our Jack up the duff, did you?'

'Sorry, Ted. Not guilty.'

'It weren't Lawrence,' Jackie confirms. 'I'm sure I would have remembered.'

On the subject of mysteries, I still haven't pinned down why Ted took to calling me Oscar. Some days it seems to be a reference to Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, others it's after Oscar Wilde - which may be an obscure play on words referencing how wild I apparently seem when I'm pissed off.

'I'll have something for you later,' Ted tells me in a more furtive tone, which reminds me that I have Sue's record. I have it in my bag. I take it out and go around to the next aisle of sorting frames.

'Here you go,' I hand it over. It's Blade's The Lion Goes From Strength To Strength, double white vinyl, very rare these days.

'Did you like it?'

'Fantastic - reminds me a bit of Public Enemy. You know, that kind of full on sound, very dense.'

'Yeah - it's good. Did you make a copy?'

'Yes. I'll burn you the CDR tonight if that's all right. It came out really well.'

It was quite a surprise when I found out Sue was into rap in a big way. She used to be one of those teenagers with a hoodie and a spray can forever breaking into train yards, or whatever it is they do. She's tall and skinny, kind of smiley. But for a slight Kentish twang she seems more like someone who has adventures in a children's book than a reformed b-girl.

Eventually I have all of the mail in the sorting frame, so I'm working my way through the redirections. The information is printed on a series of yellow cards kept in clear plastic wallets, one for each address. I work through the cards, pulling mail from the frame to check it isn't addressed to whoever has moved away. In instances where it is addressed to someone who has moved away and has accordingly paid for the service, I take a sticker for the new address from the rear of the plastic wallet and slap it on the envelope, covering the old address. After about twenty minutes I have a stack of thirty or so letters and magazines destined to be forwarded to other parts of the country. I head for the other side of the office, to the outward sorting frame to which we sort mail headed for Scotland, the Midlands, Cornwall and so on.

I encounter Alan, the fake Rasta, as I turn the corner of the frame. He's our acting governor this week and he's an arsehole. I think of him as the fake Rasta after Nadim gave him the name.

'I saw that fake Rasta last week,' Nadim told me. 'I was just walking along, you know.'

'Yeah?'

'He slowed down like he was going to chat shit. He had this big fuckin' smile, man.' Nadim made the noise, sucking air between his two front teeth. 'I looked down and there was this brick just on the road, so I picked it up and looked right at him, like weighing it up in my hand, yeah?'

'Seriously?' I began to laugh, relishing the thought of Alan terrorised by a former employee.

'Yeah, man. He didn't look too happy about that. He wasn't smiling no more, you know what I'm sayin'?'

'What? He drove off?'

'Yeah. He put his foot down, man. I'm tellin' you.'

Anyway, right now I'm headed directly for the outward sorting. There's no other place I could possibly be going given that I'm on this side of the office. I'm holding a big stack of mail in front of me, redirection stickers plainly visible. My purpose is fucking obvious.

'Lawrence,' Alan says.

'Huh?'

He wags a finger as he strides past. 'Don't let me find any redirections on your frame. Take them to the outward sorting otherwise I'll be giving you a first stage warning.'

'Okay.' I think of Nadim stood at the side of the road, screw faced with a brick in his hand. I liked Nadim, but he was given the heave ho, for reasons which seemed unconvincing to just about everyone. Black guys seem to have a tough time in this job, particularly if there's a black manager who feels he needs to prove something. They actively look for failings, pouncing on minor irregularities about which no-one gives a shit if you're white. The white supremacist contingent always chuckle to themselves about the bad attitude of black workers, but it's bullshit. Mostly the supposed bad attitude seems more like a justifiable reluctance to lay back and take it whilst being fucked over by upper management, which is unfortunately how the job works.

Call me Ben Elton, but this is why I generally prefer working with black people. They know when to tell the governor to fuck off. They're attuned to detecting when they're being diddled from above.

I'm on the sorting with Jimmy Axton - whom Carmen calls Jimmy Ackleston, unless I'm thinking of Lucy. It's just the two of us because it's Saturday and we're on late duties. Jim fancies a fag but doesn't want to light up in case Frank, the acting governor, is still hanging around. I first met Frank when he was acting governor at Catford, and vividly recall him locking himself inside his office as Robbie Finley tried to smash the glass with a broom, bellowing, 'Come out and face me, you cunt!' Robbie lost his job but was later briefly eulogised in song, something adapted from a number which had become popular at football matches.

Robbie Finley, he's our mate.
He's our mate. He's our mate.
Robbie Finley, he's our mate.
He smacks governors!

The song transposes both the name and the violent action of the original - smacks governors for kills coppers - and isn't strictly accurate in so much as that Frank remained safe in his office, which I suppose was for the best given that Robbie's objection was not entirely without foundation.

I walk up to the hatch of the PHG cage to see if Frank is hanging around within, as is sometimes the case. He isn't, but Sav is in there with the others. They're watching porn. The woman on the screen wears stockings and is on her back. She has quite a nice arse, and I don't think I've seen this one. I'm sure I would have remembered.

'Blimey, Sav,' I observe.

'Lawrie,' he exclaims, and we both make the established noise of greeting - uuuuuuuh, like a moose.

'Whose video is this?,' I ask. 'Is this one of Ted's?'

Enter Mel.

'What the fuck do you want?'

'Is this your video?, I ask. 'Can I borrow it?'

'I don't know whose it is.'

'Video?' Sav snorts derision. 'This is on the telly!'

'Live & Kicking has changed a lot.'

A brief silence ensues as we all watch appreciatively.

'If I was in charge,' I propose, 'I would make it illegal for women to be not wearing suspenders at all times.'

Mel scowls. 'Say that again?'

'I said it wrong. What I meant was that if I was in charge I would pass a law requiring that they wear stockings and suspenders at all times.'

Sav chuckles. 'What? Men as well?'

'No. For men it would be on a purely voluntary basis.'

'Oh yes?' Sue asks, coming in from the other room, amused by our sudden discomfort. 'What's all this?'

'No, honestly,' I stutter in response to the accusation I've imagined. 'I was looking for Frank and I got distracted.'

I flash a glance at the television set. Someone with lightning reflexes has turned it off. Sav stares from the window as though he has something on his mind. Mel leaves the room shaking his head.

It's Saturday evening, September 2002 but probably not the same Saturday. We're meeting at the Crystal Palace Tavern, but I'm the only one who has turned up. I have a drink with Snowy who is sat in the saloon bar, as is probably usual. He's bigger than ever. He's put on a lot of weight since taking extended leave, and it doesn't look like he's  coming back. It's wonderful to see him and it's been a while. He's one of the funniest people I've met but has had a few setbacks of late what with the death of his dad and his own declining health. He's still a handsome bastard though, even with all those chins which somehow give him an aristocratic appearance, and the full head of snow white hair swept back with a bit of a duck's arse at the front.

We chat shit for a while, how are things back at the sorting office and which useless arseholes have been left in charge, how bad it's getting; but his breathing seems laboured and there's no longer quite such a twinkle in his eye. I get the feeling that this will be the last time I see him, which will eventually turn out to have been unfortunately prescient of me. He's a survivor of better days in the job, of life in general. He will be missed when he's gone.

Paul turns up, and it's just the two of us, which is unfortunate because he can be hard work. He got the boot a few months ago, and now he's full of conspiracy theories about why he was sacked and how he's going to blow the roof off that place using secret cameras and exposés, the results of which will be broadcast on Channel 4. He has delusions of cinematic aptitude, and has been pushing his autobiographical motion picture which is named My Heart is Broken. He talks it well, but only two of us have seen the single videotape which is slowly making its way around the office. Terry's verdict, for one example, was that it was very good, very professional, but he'd expected it to be longer than fifteen minutes. The story of the film is based on Paul's own childhood, which sounds less than idyllic. We all have the promotional postcards he's been giving out featuring a still of the boy who plays Paul as a kid.

'I used to smear myself with my own shit and hide in the cupboard,' he tells me. 'That was so he wouldn't hit me any more.'

'I know,' I say, having heard the story many times. The thing with Paul is that it's impossible to tell how much is made up, and it's frustrating because there's clearly some awful truth in there; plus he's not a bad bloke, just a bit manic.

Carmen arrives at eight, all the way from Plaistow, which is a massive relief. I wonder what it says about her personal life that she's chosen to hang out with us sad sacks on this warm September evening. Unfortunately our combined presence is not enough to get Paul off the subject of himself and how a lot of people are going to be very sorry.

Sue arrives half an hour later with some friend from outside work. The drink was Sue's idea, but never mind. Her friend seems okay, bit shrill, nothing much to say of any great interest seeing as she doesn't know us or any of our colleagues whom we're now busily slagging off behind their backs, but her presence is at least sufficient to dilute Paul's mania.

Kingsley arrives after nine, and that's it. There are just six of us out of the whole office, three of whom either no longer work there or never worked there. Kingsley takes a shine to Sue's friend and somehow transforms into a more slimline Barry White. I hear him asking about her star sign with a big smile, and he's lost to us for the rest of the evening.

We drink, and Paul resumes his ranting and raving, and I think about how Carmen has travelled across London for this.

'I must go,' she sighs, and no-one questions because we all appreciate she has a long trip back. It still seems early.

'I'll walk you to the bus-stop,' I say.

We talk as we stroll down Whateley Road towards Lordship Lane, nothing amazing, just writing and the stuff we talk about on the rare occasions when I take a grace break. She tells me in passing that she once went to North Africa on a roots thing and was surprised to find that Africans came in all shapes, shades, and sizes. She's always interesting.

I know it wouldn't ever work between us, but sometimes it's nice to pretend that it would; and it's nice just to enjoy her company without feeling any sort of pressure to impress or perform.

There's almost a moment when the bus comes. I kiss her on the cheek, and that's that.

I walk up the hill, back to my flat in the basement of a four story house. There doesn't seem to be much point in going back to the pub. I'm lonely, but I'm used to it. I don't recall any other state of being. The financial powers which rule the city are doing their best to gouge me out of my present security, to oblige me to pay more for less, even though I'm already pretty much reduced to a utility because they haven't yet invented a robot which will do it cheaper.

I have my doner kebab and something disgusting borrowed from Ted, and I'm under no illusions about anything.

On the other hand, I'm cautiously settled. If I can just hang on until I eventually die, I'll be happy. I have no-one, and probably never will for reasons I don't yet understand, but that's okay. I no longer have the desire to move on because I'm not sure there's anywhere left to go. One day I'll look back on all of this and see things in a very different light, but for now this is where I am, so this is where I'm from; and it's the closest I will ever come to a definitive answer.

After Five Decades of Christmas...

The earliest Christmas I can remember would have been on the farm in rural Warwickshire, the house heated by just one open fireplace. I came down the stairs, into the front room, and my parents were both sat on the couch awaiting my arrival with a little stack of presents.

'This is Huckleberry,' said my mother by way of introduction to a triangular dog. He was covered in orange felt, with eyes, nose, and freckles picked out in black and white patches of material. He had long flappy ears hung from the apex of his peculiar triangular body and a tail sewn on at the back. I thought he was wonderful. I recall him as being about three or four feet in height, most likely because I was small at the time. He probably wasn't that big, and I may have been as young as four. It's strange to realise I can recall something which probably happened in the sixties, and a time when my parents were still in their twenties.

I understood Christmas as the day of getting free stuff, possibly because, birthdays aside, we didn't get free stuff at other times of year. Childhood as a couple of decades spent happily beneath an avalanche of consumer goods seems to be a more recent development. Of course, I also understood the true meaning of Christmas as it's sometimes known, because I'd been raised to understand that not being an arsehole was a year-round deal, not just an act to be trotted out when you wanted something. I never bought into Father Christmas or the currency of any lists he supposedly kept. I appreciated the ceremony and the build up, everyone generally being a bit less miserable than usual and Slade on the radio. At school we sang carols - none of your happy clappy rubbish, and certainly no having yourself a merry little Christmas or any of that pish - and we made Christmas trees, Santas or snowmen from cones of coloured paper and tinsel like they'd done on Blue Peter, and all in preface to a wonderful day of good food, rampant acquisition, and usually something which you wouldn't ordinarily get to see on the telly. It was a simple, uncomplicated pleasure and served as an axis around which the rest of the year revolved.

The next decade was much the same, only with central heating in a different house and Micronaut toys giving way to albums by David Bowie or the Ramones; then an acoustic guitar and books about art, the great painters of the twentieth century.

The two decades after that saw a steady decline in my enthusiasm for the day of getting free stuff. This was because I had a job. I was a postman. People in England complain that Christmas starts too early, usually about half way through September, which is when its approach is first heralded in the larger department stores. For those delivering mail, it begins earlier, usually around June, that being when we'd be inundated with the first mail order catalogues directed at people spreading their Christmas budget across the second half of the year. The junk mail was horrendous in both its quantity and its banality, as customarily printed in garish colour on the outside of each A4 envelope and targetted at those with the least money to spend. Trudging about in the wind and rain with those same shitty envelopes, day after day, week after week, became really depressing. The most hateful were sent by a company imaginatively named Studio as though to invoke things of great artistic beauty which might come your way if you just kept up the payments. Each year, Studio decorated its envelopes with a different cast of characters designed to coerce you into buying their cheap tat, and worst of all were the Santa Babes, basically Care Bears in Christmassy hats, frolicking and trowelling on the corporate saccharine with the sort of abandon that makes Frozen look like cinéma vérité. The Santa Babes made me feel bad for everyone involved. There was something faintly disgusting about older and probably not that bright people screwed out of their meagre savings by directed application of cartoons from a nursery wall. It reminded me of the old biologists reduced to animals in tiny cages with just a bit of straw, renamed Big Ears and Tigger and fed on slops in Troy Kennedy Martin's harrowing television adaptation of The Old Men at the Zoo.

The Christmas advertising really kicked in at the close of August, and the volume of mail began to build around November, becoming a back-breaking deluge by the end of the month. Overtime would be dished out whether we wanted it or not, and an eight hour day of hard physical labour would stretch to eleven or twelve, leaving for work at five in the morning, getting home hours after sunset, six days a week, sometimes seven for that final week; and working on Christmas Eve, finishing around one or two then spending the rest of the day crammed onto buses and trains slowly crawling across London, making my way to Coventry, to the house of one parent or another when I'd much rather have been home in bed and sleeping through the whole fucking thing.

It was hard to keep up the Christmas spirit after all those Santa Babes, all those weeks of ending each day feeling as though I'd been run over by a truck; and Christmas with the parents felt stranger and stranger as I turned thirty, then forty. Nevertheless, it was nice to see my parents, albeit seperately, and it was nice to just not be at work, and to have someone else serve up a roast dinner; and those are the aspects of Christmas I like.

Now fifty-two, married, and no longer breaking my back for a living, there are still aspects of the whole deal which seem uneccessary and tiresome. We'll spend three hours watching the boy open presents he probably isn't actually that excited to receive, novelties and nick-nacks and crap mostly representing a faintly dippy adult's idea of what a fourteen-year old boy might want, when mostly he just wants non-physical things he can play on one of his games systems; and some of the novelties and nick-nacks will be more the sort of thing you'd give him if he were still about four, but we all smile and no-one says anything because we're just happy to have dispensed with the letter from Santa and the fake bootprints across the carpet using flour to simulate snow. He was getting a bit old for it at least seven years prior to the custom's discontinuation.

Then there'll be the novelty corn holders my wife recieves each year as part of a running joke she no longer entirely gets or remembers, and all that stuff for which we'll say oh you shouldn't have, because we quite literally wish that you hadn't - a set of novelty pint glasses featuring scenes from A Christmas Story and other items which lack any context beyond that of gifthood, all destined for some corner of the garage so we don't have to think about them or feel bad for the rest of our curmudgeonly, ungrateful lives.

We've all agreed to participate in the gift exchange through the agency of Elfster, a website which takes our names, shakes them up, then assigns each of us the person upon whom we will each spend one hundred dollars, selecting presents from their online list. It's not a bad idea, all things considered, although I can't help feel it sucks the spontaneity out of the occasion, reducing it to just acquisition, the model to which I subscribed when I was four and didn't know better.

Christmas is mostly greed and flashing lights, and in Texas it doesn't even come with a guarantee of the parts I recognise. Thanksgiving steals the emphasis from anything I'd identify as Christmas dinner, and without equivalent gastronomic pleasure, it being a plate of mostly soft brown food - turkey served with mashed potato for God's sake - which screams nursing home, at least to me; and then we get to see what Elfster brought us on a day which usually isn't Christmas, because it isn't convenient.

Regardless of all of this, I'll open a few presents on Christmas morning and watch my wife open whatever I've given her. I'll eat some of the pork pie I had to make myself because you can't get it in Texas unless you want to pay $70 for refrigerated postage. The Christmas morning pork pie is either an English tradition, or just something my dad thought up, but I like to keep it going and I make a pretty decent pork pie. Then we'll maybe go for a walk or a drive, and in the evening I'll cook a roast dinner with Christmas pudding and brandy butter to follow - more stuff I had to order online because you can't get it over here.

After fifty-one reiterations of the allegedly happiest day of the year, these basic things are all that I require, and none of the rest matters too much.